Vox - Explainers

This voting reform solves 2 of America’s biggest political problems

2017-04-26T08:20:01-04:00

“Proportional” voting would reduce party polarization and the number of wasted votes.

Back in October, Alec MacGillis penned a provocative New York Times opinion piece titled “Go Midwest, Young Hipster.” The argument was straightforward. Young educated progressives were fleeing their hometowns in places like Iowa and Ohio for thriving cities like San Francisco and New York City — but those moves had profound political consequences. New York and San Francisco are already deep-blue cities in deep-blue states, and so while the well-educated, left-leaning emigres might increase the margin by which a Democratic senator or Congress member might win, they would be unlikely to change the results.

Back in swing-state Iowa or Ohio, however, their votes might actually matter. If enough of them stuck around, they help the Democrats take the House and Senate.

It’s safe to say there will be no hipster invasion of the Midwest. But the question is not going away: Why do we accept an electoral system in which your vote is far more likely to shape Congress if you live in Des Moines than if you live in San Francisco?

The current system is unfair not only because it leaves many citizens on the sidelines in solidly Republican as well as solidly Democratic districts and states, but also because it undermines political accountability and turbocharges polarization.

Polarization is often described in terms of red states and blue states, but it is a significant problem at the Congressional-district level across all the states. It’s also a more complex story than is usually suggested: Gerrymandering, or the partisan redrawing of district lines — a frequent object of complaint on the left —- has undoubtedly helped make some districts more unshakably Republican. (Democrats play the gerrymandering game, too, but they have had less opportunity.)

But gerrymandering probably accounts for less polarization than is often suggested, relative to other important trends, most notably the disappearance of socially liberal Republicans and socially conservative Democrats. They once contributed to many more closely contested and therefore moderation-encouraging congressional elections.

Whatever the causes of polarization, there is a relatively straightforward solution to our current predicament that has been embraced by most advanced industrial democracies: proportional representation. There are many versions of this approach, but they all involve some way of electing multiple people, at once, to represent a region. In a proportional system, parties representing as little as 1 percent of the electorate can gain representation, though the most stable systems usually have a threshold percentage level to prevent truly marginal parties from gaining seats. The regions can be as large as an entire nation — but even when they are smaller they tend to be larger than the 435 tiny US congressional districts, each of which is run according to the “winner take all” principle.

Under a proportional system, if you want to live in a big, liberal city in a liberal state, you don’t give up the chance to make a difference with your vote. There is also very little possibility for consequential gerrymandering in proportional representation systems, since districts tend to be so big that there’s not much to gain from alternative line-drawings.

Perhaps most significantly, proportional representation makes third parties more viable. In the US system, many voters might prefer a third party, in theory, but in a winner-take-all scenario a vote for a third party is a wasted vote, since only the two major parties stand a chance of winning. As a result, most proportional systems have at least three major parties, often more. This produces a wider diversity of perspectives in the representative body, and more potential for bargaining across different issues.

Because more parties are competing for voters; because voters are more likely to feel like their voters matter; and because voters are more likely to have the chance to vote for a candidate they are excited about, proportional representation systems tend to have higher voter turnout.

We’ve gotten used to our winner-take-all approach to elections, but proportional representation needn’t be a pie-in-the-sky idea. A group called FairVote has proposed the Fair Representation Act, which would transform the patchwork of state-level congressional districts into a larger ones — typically with three to five members for each district. Members would be elected through a ranked-voting system —an additional reform that lets voters express their true preference while expressing a secondary preference for someone from among the more viable candidates.

FairVote’s proposal is constitutional — the Constitution offers states quite a bit of leeway in selecting representatives — but it would require national legislation to reverse existing law mandating single-member districts. The proposal has historical precedent, however: It would move us back to the multi-member districts that were once more common. There would still be 435 members of Congress.

How our current voting system fuels bitter political division

To understand why this solution makes sense, let’s look at the existing problem in more depth, exploring why the current single-member winner-take-all system is a key driver of our current polarization.

In the United States, the vast majority of congressional seats are solidly safe for one party or the other. It’s still early, but as of April 21, the Cook Political Report lists only 5 out of 435 congressional races as “tossups,” and puts only an additional 19 races in its next closest category — “leaning” toward one party or the other. In other words, only about one in 20 Americans lives in a place that appears likely to have a competitive House election.

This is not new. Since the 1980s, consistently about three in four incumbents have won with at least 60 percent of the vote. In other words, these races are not even close.

Brookings Institution, Vital Statistics on Congress

Political scientists first began noticing the decline in the competitiveness of congressional elections in the 1970s, At first, they attributed the trend to the ability of incumbents to deter challenges through constituency service, earmarks, campaign fundraising, and other forms of self-promotion. They solidified support in their own party and stole some voters from the other party.

But a new degree of party loyalty also began contributing to the shift. Starting in the 1990s, the share of party identifiers voting for their party’s candidate — a number that had been declining for decades — began to increase. Today, party-line voting for congressional candidates is back around 85 percent.

Brookings Institution, Vital Statistics on Congress

This happened for a few related reasons. For one thing, parties have become more internally homogenous. Starting in the 1970s, as ethnocultural issues — social and identity-related issues — became more central to our politics, socially conservative Southern Democrats and socially liberally Northern Republicans began to switch parties. This reduced the ideological overlap between the two parties in Congress. In turn, lack of overlap gave party leaders even more power to draw sharper distinctions between the two parties by shaping agendas and controlling messaging.

As differences between the two parties hardened, voters became increasingly likely to pick a side and stay with that side, contributing to safer districts and more polarization. Today, as noted, about three in four incumbents win with more than 60 percent of the vote. And they do so almost entirely because of loyal partisan voting.

The hardening of partisan lines has strong geographical implications. That’s because urban areas — and, increasingly, suburban areas — tend to vote Democratic while exurban places tend to vote Republican.

American politics has lots of safe seats — and also ferocious national elections. The two features are related.

The emergence of so many “safe” Congressional seats, a byproduct of the single-seat winner-take-all system, has hugely consequential effects on national politics.

It has spawned a strange duality in American politics. Overwhelmingly, congressional districts and most states are safe for one party or the other. At the same time, in almost every national election the balance of power in Washington is up for grabs.

The result of that state of affairs is that the winning party always sees its majority as threatened; correspondingly, the losing party perpetually views itself as one “wave” election away from unified party government. In a new book, Insecure Majorities: Congress and the Perpetual Campaign, University of Maryland political scientist Frances E. Lee makes a compelling case that this dynamic is a key driver of the partisan polarization in Congress: Both parties are constantly trying to stick it to each other in hopes of winning the next election. Rather than being spread across many competitive districts, the battles are fought in a relative handful of contested seats, with appeals targeting swing voters.

Since partisans of each side are uninterested in compromise, each party’s ability to win depends on casting the other party as too extreme, too terrible, too corrupt, too evil, too un-American — whatever parade of horribles resonates. As a result, “negative partisanship” — partisans hating the other party — is now the most consequential force in American politics.

The past decade has been particularly revealing on this score. In 2009, Democrats held control of the presidency, the Senate, and the House. Republicans decided that their best strategy was to use every possible tool of obstruction, and say as many awful and terrible things about Democrats as they could find a megaphone to say. The plan was to destroy the Democratic Party brand. Politically, it worked. It is now the Republicans who have unified control. Republican voters may not have been enthusiastic about Donald Trump. But to them, Hillary Clinton was far worse.

And Democrats are now where Republicans were in 2009 —- in the minority — facing the same calculus. Since the Republican strategy of pure obstructionism and negation worked, why shouldn’t Democrats use the same strategy?

It’s easy to fall into the “they started it, so now it’s payback time” logic, harder to get out of it. It’s more difficult to take a step back and realize that this escalation is the logical consequence of the zero-sum electoral system we’ve set up.

To see why, look ahead to the likely logic of the 2018 election.

For Democrats to win back the House, they will have to do three things simultaneously in the very limited number of competitive districts they could conceivably win back. They will have to excite their loyal base, convince the few remaining swing voters to support them, and sufficiently demoralize Republican voters that enough of them stay home.

Richard Ellis / AFP / Getty

As polarization increased, a scorched-earth brand of politics began to make strategic sense — one often associated with Newt Gingrich.

Coincidentally, these three things more or less reduce to the same strategy: Make Republicans seem terrible. Raise lots of money to demonize them. Turn Donald Trump into the most evil man in America. And if Republicans are having trouble passing a budget in Congress (or in achieving other legislative goals, even ones some Democrats may be sympathetic with), let them fail spectacularly, and make sure everybody knows it.

Negative campaigning excites core base voters. For them, “Stop The Trump Agenda” is likely to be a great rallying cry.

Meanwhile, swing voters are almost all low-information voters who don’t follow politics very closely. Negative advertising helps them simplify politics into a morality play of good versus evil, which is much easier to grasp than having to understand policy. They’re also probably more likely to vote if they feel their vote matters, so there’s an incentive to persuade them they are voting against a threat to America.

Of course, Republicans will do the exact same thing, hoping to mobilize their own voters by reminding them that a Democratic majority would mean terrible awful things for America.

As a result, we’ll get the same election we’ve grown increasingly numb to: Both parties will descend on the narrow band of swing states and districts, whose citizens’ reward for mattering electorally is that they can’t turn on their televisions or go anywhere without hearing why both the Republican and Democratic candidate are “Wrong for America.”

Meanwhile, in the majority of safe one-party districts and states, members of Congress can simply cruise to victory. And the people voting for them will be voting mostly because of party labels, not anything individual politicians have done or not done (unless it is truly heinous).

FairVote

Maryland’s congressional districts, as they look today.

These politicians’ only worry is the remote chance that they might get primaried, a lingering threat that keeps them from doing anything that would upset their party’s base voters. If they have any ambition in Congress, they will also remain loyal partisans, scoring points and raising money for the “team” so their party can use the money to reach those few swing voters in those few swing districts. There are few rewards for them to depart from party groupthink to work with the other side to broker deals, and lots of punishments should they try.

What about gerrymandering — the cause of much Democratic handwringing, not to mention lawsuits? It’s exaggerated. No doubt, the Republican redistricting following the 2010 census has given Republicans a notable advantage in translating votes into seats. But as long as we have single-member districts, and as long as Democrats concentrate in cities while Republicans live outside of the cities, any attempt to redraw districts to make them competitive would require awkwardly connecting slices of city to far-flung patches of country in ways that look even stranger and uglier than the current gerrymanders. Such redistricting would also break apart many identifiable communities.

All in all, we’ll get yet another turning up of the “negative partisanship” knob. At what point, as with a speaker that can only handle so much volume, will the system blow?

What might a better system look like in practice?

Our system of single-member plurality-winner congressional districts has accelerated polarization, made most voters irrelevant, and ratcheted up negative partisanship. The big mystery is why we put up with it. Almost all advanced industrial democracies do something different. Why should we accept a system that clearly isn’t working?

Maybe it’s just a failure of imagination: better the devil you know. Or perhaps it’s a version of American exceptionalism: If it’s the American way, it must be the best.

FairVote

Under FairVote’s plan, Maryland would have two districts, each with four members.

But let’s say we wanted to move to a proportional representation system. How would this work practically in the United States? Worldwide, there are almost as many different systems of proportional representation as there are democracies, and all kinds of different ways in which votes get translated into seats.

Picture how FairVote’s Fair Representation plan would play out in, for example, New York City. (The group has graphic representations on its website of how its plan could work in every state.) Instead of a dozen congressional districts covering varying parts of New York City and Long Island, FairVote’s plan would yield three larger districts.

The current New York City delegation, Staten Island excepted, is overwhelmingly Democratic, and extremely liberal on social issues. This certainly represents the majority of New York voters’ views, but hardly taps into the city’s political diversity.

Under the FairVote system, New York City might send a few moderate Republicans to Congress, plus a more ideologically diverse group of Democrats — and maybe even a few third-party candidates, who would contribute new perspectives and ideas.

Presumably, most candidates elected under this system would be still be from the two major parties, but there’d be space for third parties to grow and develop. And different types of Republicans and Democrats could run against each other, bringing more diversity to the party. A conservative Democrat might make a run in hopes of grabbing a No. 2 position at the polls, even if she had no chance of coming in first.

A Republican voter could vote for a Republican as a first choice, and an acceptable Democrat as a second choice. Why should New York City Republicans not have someone who represents them, even if they make up only 20 percent of the population.

Yes, such a system would weaken both national parties. But individual factions within both major parties could do better.

Nationally, moderate Republicans could brand themselves separately from Freedom Caucus Republicans, and vice versa, and let voters decide how many of each they wanted to send to Congress. (Today they’d be pitted against each other in primaries in which only one faction could win.) Libertarians could finally be their own party, too, without having to compromise on key issues to join one of the two major parties.

Democrats from the Bernie Sanders–Elizabeth Warren wing of the party could brand themselves separately from Democrats from the Clinton wing of the party, and compete alongside each other, again without cannibalizing each other’s votes.

While it would be better to do this nationally, there’s no reason that states couldn’t get the process going on their own. Indeed, last year, then–Maryland State Sen. Jamie Raskin, now a US House member, introduced a “Potomac Compact” with Virginia to end gerrymandering in both states. The compact was intended to be a demonstration project. Maryland is gerrymandered to help Democrats, Virginia is gerrymandered to help Republicans. Should both states approve proportional representation, the bill would empower state redistricting committees to develop multi-member districts. With its 11 seats, Virginia could have two four-member districts and one three-member district. With eight seats, Maryland could have two four-member districts.

Other states are moving toward reform in piecemeal fashion. Last fall, Maine voters approved ranked choice voting for its state representatives, governor, US representatives, and US senators starting in 2018, though opponents have raised legal challenges.

But how would a national proportional-voting system translate into political behavior in Congress? What would happen if — because of those pesky third (or fourth) parties — no party had a majority? How could Congress function?

It would function just like most democratic legislatures around the world. After the election, parties would form governing coalitions based on how many seats they won. The nice thing about such coalitions is that they can be flexible, and even fluid, depending on the issues, which would create opportunities for different factions in Congress to work out deals on different issues. For example, if there were more factions willing to play ball on health care reform, it’s possible a deal could get worked out. Or if most factions wanted to marginalize extremists, they could do that too.

If this seems unrealistic in the American context, recall that this is sort of how Congress used to work. From the 1930s through the 1980s, both parties were more like loose coalitions of different factions; depending on the issue, different coalitions formed. Notably, key civil rights bills in the 1960s passed with votes from both Democrats and liberal Republicans.

Particularly in the 1970s, when both parties had overlapping coalitions and party leaders were weak by today’s standards, Congress gave committees both the staff resources and autonomy to solve public problems and oversee the executive branch. As a result, Congress was at the height of its institutional power.

But as both parties became more homogeneous, and delegated more power to their leadership in Congress, coalitions became much less fluid, and the committees have atrophied. Congress ceased to be an institution and instead became a partisan battleground, where senators and Congress members were Republicans and Democrats first, and members of Congress second. Everything became campaigning.

Our electoral rules stink. Let’s change them.

Here’s the bottom line. Our single-member, winner-take-all approach to elections might have worked okay during a period of low polarization, when parties were overlapping coalitions, when more places had genuine two-party competition, and when voters were sometimes willing to support candidates from the other party.

But those things are in the past now. Our electoral rules are now gasoline for the current conflagration of partisan polarization. Because the polarization is primarily ethnocultural and therefore geographical, congressional districts and most states are safe for one party or the other. But in almost every national election, the balance of power in Washington is up for grabs.

FairVote

Under the FairVote system, Ohio, too, would be divided into large multimember districts, spanning urban and rural areas.

That means that both parties are always drawn to the siren song of unified party control, at which point they can finally enact their agenda — an end that justifies almost any means. And because of the two-party nature of the competition, Democrats and Republicans each have only one enemy: each other. They win more by tearing each other down than by running on their achievements — and they don’t have to worry some third party will sneak in and steal their voters.

But they are fighting over less and less contested territory, which makes the remaining fights even more bitter and consequential. And it reduces most voters to the status of bystanders.

Sure, committed advocates could physically move to Iowa (or the few other closely contested places) to make their votes count. But it would be far better if the entire nation shifted to an electoral system where everyone’s vote matters, regardless of where they live. To a system in which the incentives did not push political parties into zero-sum trench warfare, but toward compromise and coordination that would solve pressing public problems.

In short: Don’t move to the Midwest, young hipster. Become an advocate for proportional voting. It wouldn’t just be young people, or just Democrats, who would benefit from the reform.

Lee Drutman, a regular contributor to Polyarchy, a Vox blog, is a senior fellow in the political reform program at New America. He is the author of The Business of America is Lobbying: How Corporations Became Politicized and Politics Became Corporate (2015).

The Big Idea is Vox’s home for smart discussion of the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — typically by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at thebigidea@vox.com.

The dark allure of conspiracy theories, explained by a psychologist

2017-04-25T13:10:30-04:00

Believing in them is a coping mechanism to deal with an uncertain world.

Donald Trump touts conspiracy theories more than most presidents in recent history, or perhaps any president ever. Trump has claimed that President Obama wiretapped his phone during the presidential campaign (a charge the FBI denied) and that several million people voted illegally in the election (also: no evidence). In the past, he’s said that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese (it’s not).

But he’s certainly not alone in jumping to conspiracies to explain world events. Often conspiracy theories can be powerful and damaging. After a horrific event — like the 2015 Pulse nightclub shooting or Sandy Hook in 2012 — conspiracy theorists often perpetuate the notion that these events were “false flags,” usually set up by the government to increase support for gun control or some other government goal. To this day, parents of slain Sandy Hook children are charged with making up the whole thing (including the lives of their children), for example.

But why would people believe that these parents (who have suffered incredible loss) are lying? For that matter, why are the people who broadcast these theories — like Alex Jones — so appealing?

To find out, I called up Jan-Willem van Prooijen, a social and organizational psychologist at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam who studies why people believe in conspiracy theories, and what personality and situational factors contribute to those beliefs.

In short, he explains: Belief in conspiracy theories arises from a combination of anxiety, pessimism, and overreliance on using simple answers to explain complicated problems. And because — occasionally — there truly are conspiracies and bad actors trying to manipulate the world to their advantage, belief in these theories persists.

The theories are a tool by which people can feel more in control, and find explanations in a scary and turbulent world. And yet we’re not all equally susceptible to conspiracies. In the interview that follows, van Prooijen explains why some conspiracy theories take off and why some people are more vulnerable to them, and the evolutionary theory underpinning their ubiquity.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Brian Resnick

What is a conspiracy theory?

Jan-Willem van Prooijen

A conspiracy theory is the belief that a group of people — often powerful people — collude in secret in order to make plans that are widely seen as malevolent or evil. That’s the simple definition.

Brian Resnick

What makes these theories so compelling?

Jan-Willem van Prooijen

[They’re] a tool to explain reality. We can’t always know or understand everything that happens to us. When people are uncertain about change — when they lose their jobs, or when a terrorist strike or a natural disaster has occurred — then people have a tendency to want to understand what happened, and also a tendency to assume the worst. It’s a self-protective mechanism people have. This combination of trying to make sense and assuming the worst often leads to conspiracy theories.

They’re particularly likely to flourish in times of collective uncertainty in society. Particularly after high-profile incidents that imply a sudden change in society or a sudden change in reality in a threatening way. Think 9/11, but also think of disease outbreaks [or] long-term threats like an economic crisis or climate change.

Brian Resnick

Is everyone susceptible to believing in conspiracy theories?

Jan-Willem van Prooijen

The tendency to perceive conspiracies is universal. It’s in all of us. But I also think there are individual differences in susceptibility to them. You have to realize not all conspiracy theories are irrational. Sometimes corruption does happen. It’s natural for people to be on their guard for that.

A good predictor of conspiracy theories is actual oppression. Frequently oppressed minority groups in society are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories, and one reason why they do so is because they’re trying to make sense of the actual problems they have. [Conspiracy theories are] a way of trying to understand, trying to make sense of the circumstances one finds themselves in. And the worse these actual circumstances are, the more the need people feel to come up with good explanations and the more likely people are to blame their circumstances on powerful groups.

Brian Resnick

If they’re universal across cultures, does that mean there’s an evolutionary reason to believe in conspiracy theories?

Jan-Willem van Prooijen

Actually, yes. Throughout human history, many people were victimized — and killed — by hostile coalitions. Hence, in an ancestral environment it can have been adaptive to quickly detect possibly hostile coalitions (i.e., conspiracies) before they strike, even when this often implies mistakes (i.e., false accusations of conspiracy formation).

Brian Resnick

What makes one person more susceptible to conspiracy theories than another?

Jan-Willem van Prooijen

There are a few factors that we have identified.

One of them is education level. Conspiracy theories are more likely among people who are [less] educated. But this doesn’t mean that people who are highly educated are immune.

There’s also effects of political ideology. In our research, we find the more radical a person’s politics [both left- and right-wing], the more likely they are to be conspiracy theorists.

Another is collective narcissism [a personality trait where people demand the group they belong to be admired], and people who believe their own nation and group is superior to others.

Brian Resnick

How do people start down the path of becoming a conspiracy theorist? Is there some sort of gateway drug into this world?

Jan-Willem van Prooijen

The best predictor of believing in one conspiracy theory is believing in another. Once they firmly start to believe in one specific conspiracy theory, it opens the door to many others. Because then people start thinking, “Hey, there may be a lot more going on behind the scenes that I don’t know. What else is there?”

It [becomes] a way to look at the world — to see a world full of conspiracies, big powers behind the screens pulling all the strings. And actual conspiracies [like reports of scandal on the news that are indeed real] also feed into it.

I’m not sure if it’s addicting, but it’s perpetuating. The more conspiracy theories you believe in, the more susceptible you'll become to others.

Brian Resnick

I read your recent paper looking into why education makes a person less likely to believe in conspiracy theories. I was interested to learn that the answer isn’t just, “Because smarter people don’t believe in conspiracy theories.” Can you explain the nuance there?

Jan-Willem van Prooijen

The lower educated are less able to think analytically, and therefore they believe in more simplistic theories [and conspiracy theories, while sometimes elaborate, serve to simply explain horrible things in the world]. But that’s not the whole story.

We also find people [who] are high in education experience more feelings of control over their environment, and have more feeling that they can actually change their situation if they proactively approach it. (And people who feel powerless are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories.)

So interventions that are aimed at transforming pessimism into optimism are likely to help.

Brian Resnick

How would that work? Pessimism can be hard to change.

Jan-Willem van Prooijen

There’s no cure that will make everyone an optimist. But I do think there are interventions you could implement. I do not know of a specific intervention; more generally what matters to instill optimism is to provide people with the feeling that they can make a difference and shape the future for the better. This can pertain to people’s own lives, but also to society as a whole. What characterizes pessimism is the feeling that there is a dark future ahead and there is little one can do to avoid it.

Brian Resnick

Alex Jones is a popular conspiracy theorist in the United States. A part of his appeal, I think, is that he’s kind of fun to watch. He rants and raves. You can see the blood boiling in his face.

It’s entertaining. Is that part of the appeal of conspiracy theories? That they are fun to think through?

Jan-Willem van Prooijen

That’s an excellent suggestion. It’s an alternative way at looking at reality, and in a way that can also be entertaining. Just like paranormal beliefs are entertaining. It’s a story. And a good story is fun.

There’s actually now holidays you can book called Conspira-Sea — a cruise ship where you can watch presentations by conspiracy theorists.

But conspiracy theories are not just satisfying. They are also frightening. People who strongly believe in conspiracy theories also have higher levels of anxiety. So they’re not reassuring.

Brian Resnick

Is there any reason to think belief in conspiracy theories will become more common, because of the political environment or because of communication technology? Never before has it been easier to disseminate false information.

Jan-Willem van Prooijen

I’m not sure. In a study by two political scientists from Miami, they analyzed over 100,000 letters sent to the New York Times and Washington Tribune that spanned a time period of 120 years (1890 to 2010). They did not find evidence for more conspiracy theories as society got technologically more advanced. So while I do believe modern technology is likely to have an impact (e.g., information overload, speed of dissemination), I am not sure whether it actually increases conspiracy theories.

Correction: This article originally stated Jan-Willem van Prooijen works at the University of Amsterdam. He works at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

Is Singapore’s “miracle” health care system the answer for America?

2017-04-25T09:20:01-04:00

The Singapore model shows how liberal and conservative ideas can fuse.

When liberals talk about their health care utopia, they have scores of examples to choose from. Some name France’s high-performing multi-payer system (No. 1 on the World Health Organization’s rankings, in case you haven’t heard). Others point to Canada’s single-payer simplicity. The Scandinavian countries all do health care well, and there’s much to recommend Germany’s hybrid approach.

Conservatives really only have one example of a free market health care paradise to point to: Singapore. But oh, what an example it is! In a New York Times column called “Make America Singapore,” Ross Douthat called it “the marvel of the wealthy world.” After the election, Fox News published an op-ed headlined, "Want to ditch ObamaCare? Let's copy Singapore's health care miracle.”

Why are conservatives so taken with Singapore? The American Enterprise Institute’s glowing write-up explains it well:

What’s the reason for Singapore’s success? It’s not government spending. The state, using taxes, funds only about one-fourth of Singapore’s total health costs. Individuals and their employers pay for the rest. In fact, the latest figures show that Singapore’s government spends only $381 (all dollars in this article are U.S.) per capita on health—or one-seventh what the U.S. government spends.

Singapore’s system requires individuals to take responsibility for their own health, and for much of their own spending on medical care.

Here’s what Singapore’s conservative admirers get right: Singapore really is the only truly universal health insurance system in the world based on the idea that patients, not insurers, should bear the costs of routine care.

But Singapore isn’t a free market utopia. Quite the opposite, really. It’s a largely state-run health care system where the government designed the insurance products with a healthy appreciation for free market principles — the kind of policy Milton Friedman might have crafted if he’d been a socialist.

Unlike in America, where the government’s main role is in managing insurance programs, Singapore’s government controls and pays for much of the medical system itself — hospitals are overwhelmingly public, a large portion of doctors work directly for the state, patients can only use their Medisave accounts to purchase preapproved drugs, and the government subsidizes many medical bills directly.

What Singapore shows is that unusual fusions of conservative and liberal ideas in health care really are possible. Singapore is a place where the government acts to keep costs low and then uses those low costs to make a market-driven insurance system possible. One thing you quickly realize when studying their system is it would be a disaster if you tried to impose it in a country with America’s out-of-control medical prices.

That speaks to the more depressing lesson of Singapore. As soon as you begin seriously comparing where they are, and how their system works, to where the US is, and how our system works, it becomes painfully clear how far America is from having the institutions or preconditions for truly radical health care reform.

How Singapore’s health insurance system works

Books could be written on the structure of Singapore’s health care system, and indeed, they have been. Jeremy Lim’s Myth or Magic: The Singapore Healthcare System is particularly excellent, though William Haseltine’s Affordable Excellence: The Singapore Healthcare Story has the advantage of being free. A deep dive here is rewarding, and my summary will necessarily oversimplify.

But the basic structure of Singapore’s insurance system is built around the “three M’s”: Medisave, Medishield, and Medifund. Let’s take them in turn.

Medisave: When conservatives praise Singapore’s health system, they are typically praising the Medisave system. Medisave is a forced savings plan that consumes between 7 and 9.5 percent of a working Singaporean’s wages — think of it like the Social Security payroll tax, if said tax funded a health savings account. Singaporeans then pay for some routine care out of their Medisave accounts.

Conservatives like Medisave because it is built on a deep appreciation for the idea that routine medical care can be treated like any other good, and patients can be pushed to act like consumers when buying it. Which is all true. Medisave distinguishes Singapore’s system from that of the US or Western Europe, where insurers typically cover most of the cost of routine care.

But again, the way Medisave actually works is the government forces you to divert 7 to 9.5 percent of your wages into this account, and then it decides what you can do with those savings — one way Singapore keeps drug prices low, for instance, is it only allows Medisave funds to be used for drugs that the government judges cost-effective (more on this later).

So while Medisave may look like a health savings account, it’s a mandatory health savings account funded by a payroll tax and only usable in certain conditions.

Medishield: Not all medical care is routine care. For the big expenses, Singapore runs Medishield, a nationwide catastrophic insurance program. The premiums are set by your age, and the deductibles are reasonably high — roughly $1,400 in US dollars. Enrollment is automatic, though you can opt out if you choose.

Together, Medishield and Medisave form the core of Singapore’s more market-oriented health insurance system — the idea is you pay routine expenses out of your Medisave account, and if things get bad enough that you hit your deductible, you begin using your Medishield account. This accords with the broader conservative view on health care: Insurance should cover unexpected costs, and for everything else, people should shop around as they do for most other products, and unleash the powers of the market.

But to make that structure work, Singapore relies on a massive amount of government coercion across the entire system. Fully funding your Medisave account is compulsory, not optional. You’re automatically enrolled in Medishield. The government limits the services both programs can purchase and, as we’ll see, often produces or reprices the services both programs purchase.

Medifund: Some Singaporeans fall through the cracks of Medisave and Medishield. For them, there’s Medifund — Singapore’s payer-of-last-resort.

Medifund’s structure is unusual in two ways. First, it’s based on a $3 billion endowment, with the government only able to spend the previous year’s investment income to pay for the needy’s medical bills; dipping into the endowment itself is forbidden. Second, it’s administered with a lot of discretion at the hospital level — so rather than qualifying for Medifund based on income, the way Americans do for Medicaid, hospital boards administer Medifund to the patients they judge needy enough to qualify. This is less restrictive than it might sound — the government says that more than 99 percent of applications are approved.

The big vulnerability of Medifund is that a bad investment year could wipe out the government’s ability to pay — and do so at the moment it was most needed. It’s a testament to Singapore’s economy, and to the government’s fiscal skill, that they’ve not faced this problem yet.

How Singapore’s health care system works

It’s easy, looking at Singapore’s insurance scheme, to see what conservatives find so attractive in the system. While there’s significant coercion, there’s also a real focus on pushing patients to act like consumers, and reserving insurance for unexpected, unusual costs. In addition, Singapore’s safety net — Medifund — is limited in its commitments and administered at the local level.

But all that happens within the context of a government-controlled — and often government-run — medical system.

This is a key difference between Singapore and America. The bulk of the American government’s intervention into the health care system is done through health insurance, and so American analysts often look at Singapore’s insurance system and stop there. But the bulk of the Singapore government’s intervention into the health care system is through the health care system itself.

Take the way the two countries subsidize medical care. In America, insurance is often subsidized — by paying the bills of Medicare or Medicaid enrollees, by giving tax credits to Obamacare enrollees and employer-sponsored health plans. In Singapore, medical treatment itself is subsidized.

More than 80 percent of the hospital beds in Singapore are in public hospitals, and those hospitals are cut into different “wards” with different levels of amenities: A-class wards provide unsubsidized care but have single rooms and air conditioning, while C-class wards are overwhelmingly subsidized but are set up like shared dormitories with common toilets. There are a number of ward levels in between, too, all with a sliding scale of comfort and subsidization. So both A-ward patients and C-ward patients are paying for their own care, but the prices they’re paying are very, very different, because the government is absorbing the direct cost of care in the C-wards.

These subsidies remain a huge part of the country’s overall health spending. In 2009, the 3 M’s only financed 23 percent of total inpatient care; by contrast, government subsidies accounted for 51 percent. (It’s worth noting that government subsidies are a lot less prominent in primary care.)

The government’s subsidies are designed to do more than simply make care affordable — they’re also designed to shape patient and provider decisions and influence pricing. “The policies around what services to subsidize, how much to subsidize, who to subsidize and what providers and patients need to do in exchange for subsidy eligibility, make subsidies one of the most impactful tools in the Ministry of Health’s policy armamentarium,” Lim writes.

Take pharmaceuticals. In 2009, Americans spent $947 per person on drugs. Singaporeans spent merely $389. A major way the Singaporean government holds down drug prices is deciding which drugs are eligible for subsidies and Medisave spending.

The Singaporean Ministry of Health publishes a “standard drug list.” These are drugs the government believes to be “cost-effective and essential.” Drugs on that list are provided at subsidized rates to patients. The government also decides which drugs can be bought with Medisave funds. Drugs that don’t appear on either list may still be available in hospitals, but at prohibitive prices.

Singapore is unusually secretive about how its pharmaceutical decisions are made — Britain’s much-criticized National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, which makes decisions about which drugs will qualify for public funds, is far more transparent. A previous health minister of Singapore says the opacity is to prevent “intense lobbying by pharmaceutical companies” — what they want are pharmaceutical companies selling all drugs at low prices in the hopes of getting onto the standard list. That’s how Singapore uses their subsidies to lower prices not just for the subsidized but for everyone.

Compare all this with America, where Medicare is prohibited, by law, from negotiating down the price of pharmaceuticals, even for its own enrollees!

One lesson of Singapore: everything is easier when costs are lower

According to the World Bank, in 2014 Singapore spent $2,752 per person on health care. America spent $9,403. Given this, it’s worth asking a few questions about what Singapore’s model really has to teach the US.

Are Singaporeans really more exposed to health costs than Americans? The basic argument for the Singaporean system is that Singaporeans, through Medisave and the deductibles in Medishield, pay more of the cost of their care, and so hold costs down. Americans, by contrast, have their care paid for by insurers and employers and the government, and so they have little incentive to act like shoppers and push back on prices. But is that actually true?

I doubt it. The chasm in total spending is the first problem. Health care prices are so much lower in Singapore that Singaporeans would have to pay for three times more of their care to feel as much total expense as Americans do. Given the growing size of deductibles and copays in the US, I doubt that’s true now, if it ever was. (It’s worth noting that, on average, Singaporeans are richer than Americans, so the issue here is not that we have more money to blow on health care.)

According to Singapore’s data, in 2008 cash and Medisave financed a bit less than half of the system’s total costs. Let’s say, generously, that’s $1,200 in annual spending. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the average deductible in employer health plans is now $1,478 — and that’s to say nothing of premiums, copays, etc. And of course, average deductibles outside the employer market are much, much higher.

Singapore’s system is probably better designed in terms of how consumers spend their own money. But the lower overall prices make them much less exposed to health costs than both patients and employers inside the American system — which suggests to me that Americans have at least as much incentive as Singaporeans to try to use their power as consumers to cut costs.

The fact that that hasn’t worked is, I think, a reason to believe we’ve gotten the lesson of Singapore’s health system backward. Singapore heavily regulates both the pricing and provision of medical care to keep costs low (as do all other developed countries) and then, working off that baseline of low costs, has Singaporeans pay out of pocket in order to keep them mindful of how much they’re spending.

In America, conservatives want to apply that strategy in reverse: working off a baseline of extremely high prices, they want to force people to pay out of pocket as a strategy to bring those prices down. That hasn’t worked so far, and my guess is efforts to double down on it — of which the Republican Obamacare alternative is one — will continue to fail.

What would happen if you brought Singapore’s system to the US? Spend a moment imagining a transition to a Singapore-like system in the US, given our prices. With per capita health spending over $9,000, we would need to force people to save far more than Singapore’s paltry 7 to 9.5 percent of monthly wages to build reasonable health savings accounts (remember, children and the elderly don’t earn much, and so need their expenses covered by their family’s savings).

A policy like this would make Obamacare’s individual mandate look gentle. Remember, the mandate doesn’t even apply if you can’t find a comprehensive health insurance plan that costs less than 8 percent of your household income. Here, you’d be forced to save more than 8 percent of household income, and that’s just for the part of the system managing out-of-pocket costs for routine care.

Which is all to say that there are a lot of program designs that are possible when health care is cheap, and very few that are possible when health care is as expensive as it is in the United States. Admirers of Singapore’s system often reverse the causality of their experiment: The Singaporean system is possible because the government keeps costs so low. If prices rose to US levels, their system wouldn’t be possible, as the out-of-pocket costs would lead to revolt.

Oh, and everything else in Singapore is different too

One difficulty with comparing anything in Singapore to anything anywhere else is Singapore is very, very weird.

It’s a city-state of 6 million people that’s only been governing itself since about 1960. Though elections are now considered broadly free in Singapore, power has only ever been held by one party — in part because that party has proven itself perhaps the most successful group of technocrats in human history. Singapore has gone from a poor country in the 1950s to holding the third highest per capita income today.

In part for that reason, trust in the government is extraordinarily high, and the government wields that power aggressively. Singapore’s health outcomes are excellent, but that’s not only because its health system is well-designed. Singapore manages a nanny state beyond anything Americans can imagine, or would permit.

Despite the country’s wealth, only 15 percent of Singaporeans have cars, because the government makes car ownership prohibitively expensive. There’s virtually no illegal drugs or gun crime in Singapore, in part because drug dealers are executed and guns are outlawed. Cigarette and alcohol taxes are enormous by American standards. As Matt Yglesias said in our episode of The Weeds discussing Singapore, “If you imagine America with no guns, less booze, much less drugs, and radically less driving, our public health outcomes would soar.”

There’s much America could learn from Singapore. But the lessons need to be taken in whole. The Singaporean system is unusually good at applying market forces to routine health expenses. But that happens within a context where the government is aggressively managing the supply of health services, the price of treatments, and the broader behavioral environment in which the system operates. Singapore’s health care system relies much more on the government, and much less on the market, than America’s does.

Which is not to say liberals should be confident about adopting Singapore’s model either. America is far from having the kinds of low costs or faith in public institutions needed to replicate Singapore’s “miracle.”

A point that both Lim and Haseltine make in their books is that the Singaporean government has sought to keep control of the health system because leaders’ study of other countries persuaded them that once costs and medical interest groups grew out of control, the government could no longer effectively regulate the system. Quoting a former Singaporean health minister, Haseltine writes, “[I]f the public healthcare system is too small, it becomes the ‘tail that tries to wag the dog.’ Once a private healthcare system becomes the dominant entrenched player, it is very difficult to unwind it — there are many vested interests and many pockets will be hurt.”

In America, the private health care system is the dominant entrenched player. And that makes radical reform, either toward a Singapore-like system or toward any other public-driven system, very, very difficult. There’s much you can imagine designing if we were starting from scratch, but it’s very challenging to design high-performing, clean systems that we could smoothly transition to from here, given how many hospitals and doctors and employers and even patients are dependent on the money flowing through system we have, and would viciously fight efforts to upend it.

The looming government shutdown deadline, explained

2017-04-24T08:57:35-04:00

It’s government shutdown season again.

Congress has until midnight on April 28 to pass a spending bill or the federal government will run out of money and close its doors.

While a government shutdown remains a possibility, it is looking unlikely. Appropriators and congressional staffers worked through recess to reach a deal before lawmakers came back to Washington. At the minimum, it looks like Congress will buy some more time by passing a stopgap funding bill, effectively extending the shutdown deadline.

“We’re hopeful that both chambers will complete their work on the spending bill on time,” a Democratic staffer with the Senate Appropriations Committee said. Another GOP congressional aide put the odds of government shutdown somewhere between 5 and 15 percent.

But in the final week, the White House has signaled a harder line on the shutdown fight to ensure funding for Trump’s campaign promises. That doesn’t change the fact that the politics are difficult. Republicans need Democrats to sign on to a funding bill for it to pass, and if recent indications of a renewed health care push are successful, that will only limit Congress’s negotiating time.

It’s not unusual for Congress to go to the brink of shutdown; it happened as recently as this past December, when Democrats threatened a shutdown if Republicans didn’t pass the Miners Protection Act, which would have guarded former miners’ health care and benefits. But it’s rare they actually don’t make the deadline.

“We always wait until the very end of the deadline,” Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) said at a Politico event in early April, complaining about Congress’s tendency to wait until the last minute. “It’s like a florist being surprised by Valentine’s Day. I don’t get it.”

This time, it seems both sides of the aisle say they don’t want it to get to that point. But there are still some big political fights to be had. Democrats have made it clear they are willing to push a shutdown fight if Republicans try to defund Planned Parenthood or pay for a border wall.

Ultimately, Democrats have power to sway the outcome of the spending bill — more than their minority party status in the House and Senate would suggest. This means the fight to fund the government could escalate when conservatives get wind of just how many concessions the Republican Party may be willing to make.

For now, expect the government to buy itself some more time

Congress is on a tight schedule. It has four days with both chambers in session to strike a spending deal — or agree they need more time to strike a deal.

To prevent shutdown, Congress has the option to 1) pass the appropriations bills, likely in an omnibus, which just crams together 11 appropriations bills into one spending package; 2) pass a “continuing resolution,” or CR, which would fund the government at its current levels, basically buying more time to negotiate the actual appropriations bills; or 3) pass a “CRomnibus,” which is combination of the two, extending the deadline on certain more contentious appropriations — like for the Department of Homeland Security — in addition to passing a spending bill on the rest.

Appropriators and their staffers have been reluctant to describe the current state of negotiations. Leadership staffers in both the House and Senate said it’s too early to tell. But for now, it looks like Congress will likely pass a short-term CR to finish negotiating a bigger omnibus bill.

In early April, Meadows said he thought appropriators would be able to agree on a CRomnibus bill, which would allow Congress to avoid the funding fights over the border wall with a CR for the Department of Homeland Security but let spending go through for everything else. Congress did a similar thing in 2014.

Either way, it looks like the government is buying itself some time. And while that’s possibly necessary to avoid shutdown, delaying the shutdown deadline makes the Republican Party’s already full calendar even fuller, distracting lawmakers from tax reform and health care.

Democrats are looking to use their leverage

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has threatened shutdown.

Democrats may not have control of the House or the Senate, but when it comes to appropriating funds for the government, they have a lot of leverage. Because the minority party can block funding in a filibuster, Republicans need Democrats — at least in the Senate — to sign on to their spending agenda.

Unlike President Trump’s Cabinet (and now Supreme Court) nominations, which only needed a simple majority of 51 votes, Republican senators will need 60 votes to end debate on the appropriations bill and get it passed — which means they need to get their party in line plus eight Democrats on their side.

And the Republicans have already been warned; Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and fellow Senate leaders told Republicans that any attempt to pass funding for the border wall or other “poison pills” like defunding Planned Parenthood in the 2017 appropriations bill would be met with unified Democratic resistance — which would result in a shutdown.

“We believe it would be inappropriate to insist on the inclusion of such funding in a must-pass appropriations bill that is needed for the Republican majority in control of the Congress to avert a government shutdown so early in President Trump’s Administration,” the Senate Democratic leadership team wrote in a letter addressed to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on March 13.

The White House has asked for supplemental budget to begin construction on the border wall between the US and Mexico, but Schumer says that’s not going to happen. And Republicans know that unless they want to add a government shutdown to their portfolios, they are going to have to make some concessions.

But in the last week Trump has been throwing around some elbows, saying funding for the wall is a “must” and tweeting that Obamacare is in “serious trouble.” He’s seemingly hinting at a deal that Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney put on the table: An exchange of $1 for the insurance subsidy payments under Obamacare for every $1 given to the border wall.

This isn’t the first time Trump has threatened to withhold Obamacare subsidies to get Democrats to work with him. Clearly, it hasn’t worked yet.

Government funding bills might be one of the last major bipartisan things left in Washington — if only by default

There are a lot things Republicans want to do: hike up defense spending, grant Trump’s border wall supplemental budget, defund Planned Parenthood (although House Speaker Paul Ryan has said that belongs in the health care debate), and cut off subsidies to insurance companies core to Obamacare’s functionality.

The problem is that most of those things will be met with a wall of Democratic opposition. That means Republicans will either have to make peace with a shutdown or make concessions to Democrats. It looks as though they’re leaning toward the latter, which would result in an omnibus bill that’s pretty friendly to Democrats.

Huffington Post’s Matt Fuller put it best: “Conservatives inside and outside Congress may soon rightfully ask: How is this deal any different than a bill Republicans would get if Hillary Clinton were president and Democrats controlled Congress?”

There are some areas of possible agreement, like increases in defense funding and a watered-down compromise on border security, possibly to fund more technology — an area which has more bipartisan support.

It will be near impossible for Republican leadership to sell this to the entirety of its conference — especially once conservatives realize just how much their party has to concede. The irony there is that the more Republican leadership realizes it will lose conservative votes in its own party, the more it will have to rely on Democrats to avoid a shutdown.

The White House was pretty hands-off in the appropriations deal-making process until the final weeks. As with all bills, the final say is with President Donald Trump. He has to decide whether or not he will sign anything short of his campaign demands. Members of his administration have indicated the White House doesn’t want a shutdown either, but it hasn’t stopped them from making a final push.

“We expect a massive increase in military spending. We expect money for border security in this bill,” Chief of Staff Reince Priebus said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “And it ought to be. Because the president won overwhelmingly. And everyone understands the border wall was part of it.”

But with an inactive yet chaotic 100 days of Trump’s presidency coming to a close, adding a federal shutdown doesn’t seem to be a direction Republicans want to take.

Correction: In an editing error a previous version of this story erroneously claimed the government had only shut down twice in history. It has shut down 18 times. We regret the error.

Trump’s nuclear option on Obamacare, explained

2017-04-23T15:07:32-04:00

He might blow up the law — or himself.

Obamacare’s biggest challenge right now has nothing to do with the flailing Republican bid to repeal and replace it. It’s President Trump’s threats to undermine obscure but important payments that help millions of Americans afford their health care.

The Affordable Care Act has aided millions in purchasing private health insurance through billions of dollars of federal spending. Much of that is in the form of tax credits, which reduce the premiums that many people pay every month for their coverage.

A lesser-known piece of the law helps make health care even more affordable for lower-income people: cost-sharing reductions, or CSRs, which help make copays and deductibles cheaper for people who got insurance through Obamacare.

Right now those subsidies are facing a huge threat. Trump can try to cut off those payments, which would disrupt Obamacare’s insurance markets and maybe cause them to collapse entirely. And Trump is threatening to do just that — he could end the federal government’s defense of CSR payments in a lawsuit working its way through federal court.

To counter, Democrats in Congress are now warning that the government could shut down at the end of this month if Trump and Republicans refuse to make the payments. They say they would block any spending bill that doesn’t fund the CSR subsidies.

Trump continues to make veiled threats against the payments. His aides have even said they want Democrats to fund his promised Mexican border wall as part of the spending bill that must pass to prevent the government from shutting down, in exchange for paying the subsidies.

ObamaCare is in serious trouble. The Dems need big money to keep it going - otherwise it dies far sooner than anyone would have thought.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 23, 2017

So Obamacare isn’t out of the woods yet. Even if the law stays on the books, Trump and the Republicans who now control the federal government still have an opportunity to sabotage it or hold it hostage to try to force Democrats to compromise on a new health care plan. The cost-sharing subsidies — an intricate part of the law nonetheless made vulnerable by a legal challenge — gave them that chance.

CSRs reduce health care costs for Americans with lower incomes

Obamacare expanded health coverage for Americans in two major ways. It expanded Medicaid to cover poor adults making no more than 138 percent of the poverty line ($16,000 for an individual). And for people who make more money than that but don’t get health coverage through their jobs, the law created marketplaces where those people could buy insurance. Insurers were required to sell plans to everyone, no matter their medical history, at similar prices, and to cover a range of “essential health benefits.”

But with those changes, it still would have been difficult for many people — both low-income and middle-class — to afford insurance, not to mention the deductibles and copays they’d have to pay to actually see a doctor or fill a prescription. So people buying through the marketplaces also get financial assistance. Federal tax credits help pay monthly premiums for anyone making up to 400 percent of the poverty line ($48,000 for an individual).

People who earn too much for Medicaid but are still low-income — up to 250 percent of the federal poverty line, about $30,000 for one person — also got cost-sharing reductions for their private insurance. The federal government makes those payments to the health insurer to lower the out-of-pocket costs, the deductible and copayments, that those people have to pay for their health care. The less money people make, the more help they receive.

More than half of people who buy individual insurance through Obamacare got this help. About 12 million people bought health insurance through Obamacare’s insurance markets this year, and 7 million of them qualified for CSRs, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

The impact can be dramatic: Somebody who doesn’t qualify for a CSR and buys a typical Obamacare plan could have to pay as much as $3,609 for a deductible before her plan starts to cover her care. But a person who qualifies for the most generous CSR — whose income is at the poverty line or only a little above it — could have to pay only $255 before his coverage kicks in.

Last year, CSR payments cost the federal government $7 billion, which means that, on average, CSRs lowered out-of-pocket costs by about $1,000 for each person.

The goal of Obamacare was to make health coverage and care more affordable. Having an insurance card doesn’t do much good if you can’t actually afford whatever your plan requires you to pay. If you want everybody, no matter their income, to be able to purchase the same plans, you need some extra help for people making less money. CSRs were that extra help. They made the law work for the people buying insurance who would struggle the most to pay for their care.

“You have to protect low-income people not just from high premiums but from high out-of-pocket costs,” Jonathan Gruber, an MIT professor who helped the Obama administration and congressional Democrats as they were designing the law, told me.

There is one wrinkle in the law: Health plans are required to offer people under 250 percent of the poverty line a plan with smaller deductibles and copayments even if the federal government doesn’t give them any money at all. Without the CSR payments, though, that might not be workable for insurers — it would dramatically increase their costs. They would have to offer very generous coverage to those people without receiving any additional financial help from the government, and their likely recourse would be to hike premiums.

So the law also created the CSR payments that the federal government makes to plans, which allows the insurers’ financing to work without premiums skyrocketing.

But House Republicans seized on an apparent legislative flaw to challenge the payments in court — and put the entire program at risk.

A Republican-led lawsuit challenges the CSR payments

Not long after Obamacare’s marketplaces opened for business in 2014, House Republicans filed a lawsuit that argued the cost-sharing reduction payments being made by the Obama administration were illegal.

It was a case that went to the core of the Constitution. The brains behind it, constitutional lawyers David Rivkin and Elizabeth Price Foley, portrayed the stakes this way:

The lawsuit is necessary to protect the Constitution's separation of powers, a core means of protecting individual liberty. Without a judicial check on unbounded executive power to suspend the law, this president and all who follow him will have a powerful new weapon to destroy political accountability and democracy itself.

The Constitution says Congress is responsible for deciding how the federal government’s money will be spent. House Republicans alleged that although Obamacare created the CSR payments, Congress still needed to approve them in a separate spending bill or as part of the bigger spending bills that lawmakers pass periodically to fund the entire government. Because Congress had not done so, the House alleged that the payments being made by the Obama administration starting in 2014 were unconstitutional.

The Obama administration argued that Obamacare had permanently funded the CSR payments and so did not need any additional authority from Congress to make the payments. It also argued that regardless of the facts of the case, the House didn’t actually have the ability to bring a case because it wasn’t harmed by the cost-sharing reduction payments, a legal concept known as “standing.”

Some liberal legal experts said the House’s argument does have some merit. The text of the law did not unambiguously appropriate the CSR payments — and the Obama administration at one point, perhaps in recognition of that, had asked Congress to approve the spending. But others, including the architects of the law, dismissed it as a politically motivated attempt to undercut Obamacare. Many experts also believed that the House didn’t have standing to pursue the case in the first place.

Rosemary Collyer, the judge hearing the case and a Republican appointee, first ruled in September 2015 that the House did in fact have standing to sue the administration over the payments. She sided with the House in May 2016, deciding that the CSR payments could not be made without further congressional approval.

However, she suspended the decision so that the Obama administration could appeal, allowing the payments to continue until the case is fully resolved. The Obama administration appealed the ruling in July 2016 to the US District Court of Appeals in Washington. But litigation moves slowly, and the case didn’t advance much.

Then in November, Donald Trump was elected president — and his government is now responsible for defending Obamacare, a law he has vowed to repeal and predicts will implode. The House asked the appeals court in December to postpone the lawsuit so that they and the newly elected administration could figure out what to do.

Cutting off CSR payments could throw the markets into chaos

The CSR litigation might not have mattered as much if Republicans had coalesced around a health care plan in the early days of Trump’s presidency, as they attempted to do.

But Congress’s failure to pass the American Health Care Act in March brought the issue back into the foreground. This lawsuit gave them another chance to undercut the health care law, even without passing their own bill. Because if Obamacare is here to stay, then the fate of the CSR payments is now an essential question.

So Trump could either choose to continue defending the CSR subsidies, making payments in the interim and keeping the markets stable — or he could decide to drop the suit, stop the payments, and precipitate a market implosion that could leave many vulnerable Americans without health coverage.

If the House prevailed, and the CSR payments were not paid, insurers would still be required to reduce cost sharing, but they would now have to do it without the government’s help. They would have to raise premiums dramatically to make up the lost revenue.

The irony is that if plans do raise premiums, the federal government would be on the hook for much of those costs. The government absorbs premium increases through the tax credits that help people afford coverage. The law is designed to keep premiums manageable for people, so it falls on the government to cover any excess increases. “It’s on the feds anyway,” as MIT’s Gruber told me.

Or, perhaps more likely, plans could drop out of the market altogether. “If I were an insurer, I’d just take my marbles with me and focus on other more profitable lines of business,” Larry Levitt at the Kaiser Family Foundation told me.

Trump officials had been coy in discussing the lawsuit, but top House Republicans had indicated that the payments would continue. A statement from the US Department of Health and Human Services on April 10 seemed to suggest the same.

But then a few days later, Trump hinted in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that he might get rid of the payments — something his administration could do by simply dropping its defense of the lawsuit. That would mean that the lower court’s ruling to stop the payments without congressional approval would stand.

And if the payments stop, yes, lower-income Americans would technically still be eligible for lower-cost plans — but many experts expect insurers would just pull out of the markets. That could lead to more areas with one or no plan available to people, a situation for which there is no remedy and which leaves people in those areas without any coverage.

So Democrats are trying to force Trump’s hand, tying the CSR payments to a must-pass government spending bill.

The federal government will run out of money at the end of April. Republicans usually need some Democrats to vote for their spending bills, because they lose some of their own most conservative members and those bills need 60 votes in the Senate. That gives Democrats some negotiating leverage, even though they are out of power.

In the days after Trump’s threat to stop the CSR payments, CNN and Politico reported that Democrats would demand that funding for the payments be included in the spending bill that must pass in the next few weeks to avoid a government shutdown. An aide to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said the CSR funding should be permanent.

Trump takes Obamacare hostage, but at his own risk

Trump clearly sees the CSR payments as major leverage in the ongoing health care fight.

He told the Wall Street Journal that Democrats should be calling him, begging to work together on a health care plan, lest he drop the CSR lawsuit and let the payments lapse. He even worked behind the scenes to walk back the HHS statement that had suggested the payments would be made.

But based on the available polling and comments from his own party, Trump has seriously misjudged his position.

First and foremost: Americans would overwhelmingly blame Trump and Republicans if something went wrong with Obamacare, according to the best available surveys.

On top of that, some top House Republicans have said that the payments should be made, one way or another. From the New York Times:

Representative Greg Walden, Republican of Oregon, who is the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, said Thursday, “I will do everything I can to make sure that the cost-sharing reduction payments get made.”

“That’s an obligation we have not only to the insurers,” but also to consumers who enrolled in plans under the health care law, Mr. Walden said. “We cannot leave them high and dry.”

Mr. Walden said his preference was for Congress to appropriate the money, about $7 billion a year. That is “the best legal way to do it,” he said.

If congressional Republicans agree to pay the CSR subsidies, that renders the issue being litigated effectively pointless. The payments will be made, Congress will have approved them — there is effectively nothing left to sue over.

The one thing Trump’s threat does do, though, is making insurers nervous. As Sarah Kliff reported recently, health plans are struggling to decide whether to stay in the law’s marketplaces, because they don’t yet know what’s going to happen to the CSR payments. Trump’s rhetoric could help destabilize the markets on its own — though, again, he may end up taking the blame.

So Trump has made his threat to Obamacare, the result of this long history that gave him that opportunity. But he appears to be holding the metaphorical gun to his own head.

The March for Science on Earth Day, explained

2017-04-22T16:20:14-04:00

The Trump administration is cutting science budgets and denying research. Scientists are pushing back.

On Earth Day, April 22, thousands of people descended on the National Mall in Washington, DC, and took to the streets in cities across the globe — in the name of science.

Inspired by the success of the January 21 Women’s March on Washington, the March for Science celebrated the scientific method and advocate for using evidence in decision-makng in all levels of government. Though the event’s website didn’t explicitly mention Trump, it was a protest of his administration’s policies, including his proposal to cut billions in funding for scientific research.

The march drew a lively crowd — and the nerdiest protest signs you can imagine. Here’s what you need to know about it.

What will happen at the March for Science?

On April 22, science-friendly individuals gathered on the National Mall, and in dozens of satellite marches across the United States and even around the globe. The Earth Day Network — the nonprofit that organizes Earth Day events every year — took the lead on programming for the march.

The main event was co-hosted by Questlove (of the Roots and The Tonight Show) and Derek Muller (who runs a popular science YouTube channel). Jon Batiste and Stay Human (the band for Stephen Colbert’s Late Show) served as the house band.

And there were four main attractions.

1) A roster of speakers and science heroes

The main march programming took place on the north side of the Washington Monument, with a main stage facing the South Lawn of the White House.

Around 10 a.m., a series of speakers took the stage. They included:

Bill Nye — you know, the science guy
Mona Hanna-Attisha — a pediatrician who played a crucial role in blowing the whistle on the water crisis in Flint, Michigan
Rush Holt — Former congressman and current CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
Lydia Villa-Komaroff — a biologist who helped discover the process by which bacteria can produce human insulin
Christiana Figueres — one of the key architects of the Paris climate agreement

(You can see a list of speakers here.)

2) A series of “teach-ins”

The march programming puts a strong emphasis on education and helping the demonstrators think about how to get further involved in science activism.

The Earth Day Network set up a series of 20-plus “teach-ins,” with a vibe that was part science fair, part TED talk.

These teach-ins focused on specific topics in science and science communication, and how to move the needle. Sessions included “How to Stop Your Climate Denialist Uncle in His Tracks,” “Protecting Wildlife in an Era of Climate Change,” and one giving marchers tips on how to “protect forests from hungry beetles” and “track threatened wildlife.”

Find more information on the teach-ins here.

3) A march toward the Capitol

At 2 pm, the crowd marched down Constitution Avenue toward the Capitol building (a little over a mile).

4) The nerdiest protest signs imaginable

The marchers didn’t disappoint.

Brian Resnick/Vox

Science marchers and their signs.

Brian Resnick/Vox

Where did the satellite marches take place?

There are 518 official satellite marches in the United States and across the world, from Quezon City in the Philippines to Blantyre, Malawi.

You can search for the satellite marches here. There are marches in all 50 US states. (There will also be a live stream of the DC event.)

Will it be live streamed?

Yes! Right here:

Scientists have more reasons than ever to march against Trump

At the very least, the Science March was a celebration of the scientific method and its ability to inform policy. With Trump in the Oval Office, scientists have been losing seats at the policy-making tables. The hope is that the march will leave an impression: Science matters.

Already Trump is calling for a dramatic reduction in the amount of money the US government spends on scientific research, he’s scaling back efforts at the Environmental Protection Agency to combat climate change, and overall, he seems to disregard or not seek out advice from scientific efforts. He has yet to name a top White House science adviser, and it’s unclear if he ever will. Meanwhile, science skeptics in Congress are emboldened. The House recently passed two bills that (under the guise of transparency) would stifle scientific research and expertise at the EPA.

It’s the gravity of these concerns that helped the March attract support from the scientific mainstream: Major science advocacy groups and publishers, such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union, the Association for Psychological Science, and many others, have endorsed the march and are encouraging their members to attend.

What will the march accomplish?

Scientists have long been active in Washington, putting pressure on Congress and advocating for funding for their work. Groups like the AAAS and AGU do a lot of this work. But the grassroots movement that’s propelling the March for Science is a bit different. It’s like an awakening of “scientist” as a political identity.

At the very least, the event may inspire some of its attendees to go on to greater political action. “Protest is also an opportunity to create what we call ‘collective identity,’” Dana R. Fisher, a sociologist who studies protest movements, said in an interview. “It’s about getting sympathizers, people who agree with the cause, to be activists.”

The marchers may then be more ready to mobilize when or if the administration lashes out against the nation’s scientists. “It’s so important to take the energy and excitement from the march, go back home, and carry it into legislatures offices, and hold them accountable,” says Shaughnessy Naughton, a chemist who runs 314 Action, a political action committee dedicated to getting more people with a science background to run for public office. (Just two days before the march, 314 held an information session for scientists thinking about making the leap into public service.)

There’s also a consequence the scientists have to wrestle with: A March for Science could be self-defeating. If the public gets the impression that scientists are liberal crusaders, it will be a hard mental image to break. (More on that here.) Many scientists have long been hesitant to get into the political fray. And some worry that further activism will make future fights for science funding more difficult and more partisan.

But that concern didn’t stop thousands of scientists and allies from demonstrating. And it could be just the beginning.

Is this the same thing as the People’s Climate March?

No. That’s a separate event taking place the next week, on April 29. It will focus more on climate issues, but it will overlap with the Science March in the sentiment that the Trump administration is not heeding scientific experts’ calls for action on climate change.

Who started the March for Science, and why?

On the day of the Women’s March on Washington, Jonathan Berman, a biology postdoc at the University of Texas Health Science Center, was reading a Reddit thread about an article headlined “All References to Climate Change Have Been Deleted From the White House Website.” One comment caught his eye: “There needs to be a Scientists' March on Washington.”

“The only way to make things happen is to do them,” Berman told me in February. So he purchased the web domain MarchForScience.com, and set up a Facebook and Twitter account. The march will “send the message that we need to have decisions being made based on a thoughtful evaluation of evidence,” he says. And all of a sudden, he had a movement. (Some 521,000 had “liked” the march on Facebook as of Tuesday.)

But the march organizers are also trying to thread a tough needle with their goals: opposing the anti-science policies of the Trump administration, while furthering the message that science is not a partisan issue. (How precisely to thread the needle on these issues — and how strongly to add issues of diversity, identity, and inclusion to the roster of march causes — has been an ongoing debate around the event.)

As the group’s website asserts:

Anti-science agendas and policies have been advanced by politicians on both sides of the aisle, and they harm everyone — without exception. Science should neither serve special interests nor be rejected based on personal convictions. At its core, science is a tool for seeking answers. It can and should influence policy and guide our long-term decision-making.

How many people will show up?

Unclear. The March for Science isn’t releasing any estimates, though there is a lot of interest in the event. In the week after its founding, the Science March received 40,000 emails from people who wanted to volunteer. But thousands — maybe even tens of thousands — showed up.

The French election, explained

2017-04-21T18:20:01-04:00

When French voters go to the polls Sunday to begin picking their next president, the issues on the table are, without exaggeration, the future of Europe and the identity of France itself.

Eleven candidates are currently in the running, but just four have a real chance to move on to a two-person run-off election on May 7. The best-known candidate is far-right leader Marine Le Pen, who has run on a campaign of populism and (mostly) subtle xenophobia. Her main competitor is centrist Emmanuel Macron, a rookie politician seeking elected office for the first time. Then there are the wildcards, far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon and center-right François Fillon.

The candidates couldn't be more different, and nor could their ideas for how to fix a France profoundly uncertain about its future.

France faces 10 percent unemployment, has suffered several high-profile and devastating terror attacks over the past two years (including a fatal shooting Thursday in central Paris), and has an incumbent socialist president, François Hollande, who is so unpopular he declined to run again.

Those three factors have made the election a total crapshoot. It’s meant that Macron, a total upstart from a brand-new party, is polling at the top of the heap, and two populists — one from the far-right and one from the far-left — are drawing raucous crowds and massive support. The true wildcard candidate, bizarrely, is the traditionalist, Fillon, but he was rocked by scandal throughout his campaign.

Le Pen and Mélenchon claim to want to pull France out of the European Union, the euro common currency market, and possibly even NATO. That means this election will have serious consequences for both the future of Europe and the trans-Atlantic alliance.

Ultimately, though, the reason the world is so focused on France right now is this: Le Pen, a far-right populist who has campaigned on closing French borders, banning immigration, leaving the European Union, and cracking down on “Islamic Fundamentalism,” has a real chance of winning power in a major Western European nation.

Here’s what you need to know about the French election, who’s running, and what’s at stake.

The frontrunners

The two most likely candidates to make it to round two are Le Pen, of the National Front, and Macron of En Marche! They are polar opposites.

Marine Le Pen is the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, who founded the party in 1972 and who has been prosecuted several times for minimizing the Holocaust. (He called gas chambers a mere “detail of history.”)

The party was well-known for its racist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic views until the younger Le Pen took over in 2011. She has reshaped the party, dropped her father, and focused on rebranding the National Front as a protector against globalization and defender of French values, including secularism, against Islamist militants and “massive” immigration.

Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

She would like to take France out of the European Union and the euro common currency, leave NATO, and reinstate border controls. She has campaigned on a radical reduction in immigration and, in recent days, has talked of banning all immigrants, at least temporarily. She rails against the “twin totalitarianisms” of globalization and “Islamic fundamentalism.”

She is a right-wing populist, with social welfare ideas that sound like the left, including keeping the workweek short, and lowering the retirement age. For Marine Le Pen, France is for the French.

Europe fears her. She has promised to hold a referendum on leaving the EU much like Britain did. One French official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on behalf of the state, said such a move would be “the end of the EU, and the end of Europe, really.”

Emmanuel Macron, her rival, is the country’s — and the continent’s — last and best hope for a pro-European leader.

A mere 39 years old, Macron is a former banker turned socialist party minister who has never held elected office. His centrist party, En Marche! (which means “Forward!”) is so new it’s sometimes not even referred to as a political party but just a “movement.” He is a globalist who believes in the European Union, the euro, and a relatively free flow of movement at the borders.

Photo by Sylvain Lefevre/Getty Images

“Macron is a very fragile candidate. He's young. He has absolutely no experience,” a senior French official told me.

And yet, the same official added, “It may work because, in a sense, he looks different. He's not a traditional politician. He's a populist also from the center. He’s liberal, he's more European, and, again, he has never been elected. And in our system, it's never seen. In our political system, when you are a candidate it means that you have been around for 30 years.”

“Our election is extremely, totally unusual,” the official added, in an understatement.

The wildcards

Jean-Luc Mélenchon is a far-left populist. He came from behind in a surprise surge in the last days of the election cycle. He too dislikes the European Union and the euro. His policies are so far to the left of the spectrum they make Bernie Sanders look like a right-winger.

A fan of Hugo Chavez, Mélenchon wants to impose a 100 percent tax on those who earn above €400,000 — effectively a salary cap — and channel that money into public spending on things like poverty reduction and job creation. He has proposed making the famously short French workweek even shorter, bringing it from 35 to 32 hours. Like many populists in Europe, he’s deeply skeptical of the European Union and international trade deals, and has even proposed taking France out of NATO and moving closer to Russia.

Photo by Trago/Getty Images

The 69-year-old Mélenchon is a former socialist who left the party in 2008 after having served some 30 years in various ministerial positions. He now heads a new party that is far to the left of the socialists, called France Insoumise — widely translated as “France Unbowed” or “Untamed,” but perhaps more evocatively translated as “Unsubmissive France.” His supporters are called les insoumises, or the unsubmissives.

Francois Fillon, the conservative candidate of the Republican party, was “almost certain to be president — three months ago,” says Philippe Le Corre of the Brookings Institution. And then reports emerged that he allegedly paid his wife and children thousands of euros for jobs they did not do. He promptly dropped precipitously in the polls.

There were calls for him to drop out — he denied the allegations and refused to remove himself from the race. And perhaps he was right not to, because in recent weeks he has popped back up to a neck and neck position with Mélenchon for third place.

Photo by Sylvain Lefevre/Getty Images

“If he makes it to second round that is because, even though he has been tainted by various scandals, he is seen as an experienced statesman,” says Le Corre. “The man has done every job in government. He was prime minister for five years.” He is seen as “qualified and competent.” Quietly, conservatives have returned to support him.

But what’s going to happen?

Already in March, pollsters showed "uncertainty unprecedented in [French] electoral history." And one final peculiarity of this very peculiar election? With one day left, the top four candidates are all within the margin of error. And some 30 percent of French voters have consistently indicated they will simply stay home.

Going into Sunday, Le Pen is just about even with Macron. (She has 22.5 percent to his 23.5 in the latest polls.) While most polls show her losing in round two to whomever the opponent will be, one outlier scenario has a hyper-energized National Front base pulling her to victory by a tiny margin if disaffected voters stay home.

But there’s still a chance that Mélenchon or Fillon could actually edge into the second round. That’s throwing everyone’s predictions off.

Former President Nicolas Sarkozy told the press this week he feared the race could turn out to be a battle between Le Pen and Mélenchon, and that would be a disaster for the country. “France is being watched by the whole world,” he said. “And these two candidacies … are the opposite of what is appropriate in an open, modern country.”

Le Corre, of the Brookings Institution, laid out the stakes in a paper published this past week. “France,” he wrote, “remains an essential pillar of the European Union and of NATO. No German leadership can claim to relaunch the EU without the help of France. This is why the 2017 elections carry so much weight: If the Front National were to win either the presidency or parliamentary elections—the latter being extremely unlikely—this would mean the end of the European Union, which would play in the hands of American critics of the EU, such as senior White House advisers Stephen Bannon and Peter Navarro.”

By Sunday at 2 pm Eastern we should know the results.

This story is part of a Vox collaboration with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting about the upcoming French elections.

The Trump administration’s first step to defund “sanctuary cities” is surprisingly cautious

2017-04-21T13:51:49-04:00

They’re asking a handful of cities and states to obey a federal law...that cities already say they comply with.

On Friday, the Department of Justice sent letters to a handful of jurisdictions that currently receive federal funding for law enforcement, with what seems like an innocuous request: they have 2 months to “provide documentation” proving that they’re in full compliance with a federal law about information-sharing, in order to continue qualifying for federal grants in the coming fiscal year.

But that uncontroversial request — asking cities to prove they obey a law that pretty much all of them say they already obey — is the Trump administration’s attempt to turn up the heat on so-called “sanctuary cities.” And it could lend fuel to a political fight that’s much broader than the jurisdictions who got the letters, or the text of the federal law they’re being asked to obey.

Most cities — and critics — have defined “sanctuaries” as places where local police and jail officials don’t always comply with Immigration and Customs Enforcement requests to hold immigrants in jail (after they’d normally be released) so ICE officers can pick them up.

The Trump administration isn't, so far. The places it’s asked to certify compliance are cities that don’t just fail to help enforce federal law but, the administration has implied, actually violate it — with policies that could prohibit municipal employees from giving any information about immigrants to federal agents.

The threat is substantial: DOJ’s state and local grants include Community-Oriented Policing Services grants, on which many local police departments are heavily reliant. Cities aren’t going down without a fight. (Several cities have already filed a lawsuit against the administration to keep their funding; those cities have limited overlap with the jurisdictions being targeted now.)

What’s not yet clear is whether the Trump administration is being so cautious in defining “sanctuary cities” that they won’t end up doing any actual defunding — or whether this is a setup to argue that cities who don’t do what the federal government wants with immigrants are inherently violating the law. The latter sounds aggressive, but it’s possible the administration might win a court battle — or at least drag it out long enough that cities lose their political appetite for a fight.

The Trump administration isn’t defining “sanctuary cities” the way they’re commonly understood

Debates over “sanctuary cities” have been ongoing for years — including during the debate that unfolded in 2015 after the murder of Kate Steinle in San Francisco, helping propel the fledgling candidacy of long-shot Republican Donald Trump. But the biggest challenge may lie in how the administration defines “sanctuary cities.”

When Attorney General Sessions rolled out his department’s “anti-sanctuary” policy in March, he implied these were the cities his Department of Justice would now start targeting. “Some states and cities have adopted policies designed to frustrate the enforcement of our immigration laws. This includes refusing to detain known felons,” Sessions said. “These policies cannot continue. They make our nation less safe by putting dangerous criminals back on our streets.”

His speech was misleading — not just because of the undertones painting all unauthorized immigrants as dangerous criminals. While the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice are reportedly working on a definition of “sanctuary city” to use in future, Sessions’ DOJ is moving ahead with an interim policy in the meantime — based on a definition of “sanctuary” that isn’t about detention at all.

Under federal law, state and local governments can’t prohibit their employees from sharing information with the federal government (if they so choose) about someone’s immigration status. (They’re allowed to have broad confidentiality policies in place that protect immigration information along with other kinds of personal info.)

In 2016, Republican members of Congress asked the Obama administration’s Justice Department to look into whether cities that got federal grants were violating this law. The memo written by the DOJ’s inspector general in response — which Sessions referred to on Monday — concluded the answer could be yes: that many of America’s biggest cities had policies that, depending on how they were applied, could “restrict cooperation with ICE in all respects.”

In Chicago, for example, an ordinance states that “no agent or agency shall disclose information regarding the citizenship or immigration status of any person unless required to do so by legal process or such disclosure has been authorized in writing by the individual to whom such information pertains.”

It’s not at all clear how many “sanctuary cities” exist under this definition. The DOJ sent letters to nine jurisdictions — including the state of California, the cities of Philadelphia, New Orleans, New York and Chicago (and Cook County, IL, the county associated with Chicago); and the counties associated with Milwaukee, Miami and Las Vegas.

That list is nearly identical to the jurisdictions that the Obama administration looked at in 2016 — which makes sense, since Attorney General Sessions cited the Obama administration report in March when announcing a crackdown on “sanctuary city” funding.

The jurisdictions that the Obama-era DOJ looked at represented 63 percent of active (at the time) DOJ grants through three offices. So in theory, the stakes are high.

But in practice, it’s not clear whether the letter does anything. It just asks the jurisdictions to certify that they’re in compliance with the federal information-sharing law. And those jurisdictions argue that they already do.

The Chicago ordinance (and other similar ordinances) has an exception for “applicable federal law” — a clause local officials point to to argue they’re fully in compliance with the federal information-sharing law.

The Obama administration memo concluded that city employees might, in practice, think they were prohibited from answering any ICE request for information — even when they might want (and be legally authorized) to do so. The Trump administration is certainly hinting that it agrees with that assessment. But nothing is stopping the jurisdictions targeted by the letters from just sending replies in the next two months attesting that they comply with federal law — and using the clauses in their ordinances as the “documentation.”

Then, it’ll be up to the DOJ to decide whether they agree — or whether to challenge the cities’ interpretation.

Photo by the Associated Press

Cities are already suing to keep their funding — but the limited definition of “sanctuary cities” gives the federal government a stronger case

The Supreme Court doesn’t let the federal government tell cities and states which laws to prosecute, and it can’t force them to help enforce federal law. That’s called “commandeering,” and the Supreme Court has ruled it violates the 10th Amendment. This is why President-elect Trump can’t just decree that all police officers in the US have to assist federal immigration agents whenever possible.

If the federal government wants to get states to do something, it has to use funding: making grants to states or cities conditional on certain policies. This is why the legal drinking age is 21 in most states: Thanks to legislation passed in 1984 and pushed by Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the federal government started refusing to give federal highway funds to any state with a lower drinking age.

What the federal government can’t do is place conditions on grants that have nothing to do with the grant’s purpose. (It couldn’t deny Small Business Administration grants, for example, to states that allowed unauthorized immigrants to get driver’s licenses.) Nor can it put conditions on funding to the point of being “coercive” — even if those conditions are relevant to the purpose of the grant. That, too, courts have judged, runs afoul of the 10th Amendment.

This is why the Supreme Court ruled the Medicaid expansion in the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional — it took existing Medicaid funding that states were already receiving, and declared they would stop receiving that money unless they adopted a new, expanded definition for who ought to qualify for the program.

The Medicaid decision was a defeat for progressives when it came down. But in the wake of Trump’s election, many have embraced it — in the belief that Trump’s pledge to defund “sanctuary cities” will also be deemed coercive. Indeed, even before Sessions’s announcement, San Francisco had already filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration to attack the constitutionality of (as yet hypothetical) defunding.

But the Trump Department of Justice might be on much stronger legal footing than the Obama Department of Health and Human Services was. It can argue it’s not putting any new conditions on funding whatsoever — just enforcing existing rules.

As Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies said, according to the inspector general’s memo, “If they are violating federal law, then according to the DOJ rules, they are not eligible for certain DOJ grants.”

This strategy wouldn’t be constitutionally foolproof. (The government would be on much more solid footing, says professor Gabriel Chin of UC Davis, if it replaced existing grants with new ones that had conditions attached — much like Race to the Top grants the Education Department used to pass teacher accountability laws and the adoption of Common Core standards in states — rather than trying to retroactively wedge new conditions into existing funding.) And as we’ve seen in the litigation over the Trump administration’s refugee and visa ban, the judicial branch may be more skeptical of this administration than it has traditionally been of the executive branch.

But even defenders of “sanctuary cities” acknowledged before Trump’s inauguration that a defunding strategy along these lines would be harder to challenge in court. “There is some case law supporting the idea that merely requiring communication is not an impairment of a state’s rights under the 10th Amendment,” says Melissa Keaney of the National Immigration Law Center, which advocates for “sanctuary city”–type policies.

Cities have been defiant. But now the threat of defunding is real.

So far, many local governments are anything but intimidated by the Trump administration’s threats. Dozens of cities that could count as “sanctuaries” have already made it clear that they won’t change their policies even at the risk of losing federal funding.

It’s a way for blue cities to stand up to a suddenly deep-red federal government, and to do so in the name of protecting some of their most vulnerable residents. It doesn’t hurt that because the definition of “sanctuary city” is fuzzy, cities can make it sound like they’re saving their unauthorized immigrant residents from getting turned over to ICE and deported, even if that’s not how it really works.

But cities and agencies that aren’t looking for a big political fight are more cautious. Indeed, the mere threat of defunding has already led one of the targeted jurisdictions — Miami-Dade County — to start complying with federal detainers in February, in the name of turning down the heat from the feds. (This didn’t stop them from getting a DOJ letter Friday.)

Some small towns, like Storm Lake, Iowa, plan to keep protecting their immigrant residents — but avoid the term “sanctuary city.” “We're getting along just fine, we don't need to take on that,” Storm Lake’s city manager told Vice’s Meredith Hoffman.

And local officials who are most directly under threat from federal defunding — police officers — are even more squeamish.

“I don’t think people understand what it would mean to cut off federal assistance,” one California police officer told the Intercept. “I’d lose all my (organized crime task force) funding, my investigative assistance, all the resources we use to go after seriously bad dudes.”

So far, their anxiety hasn’t spilled over to the rest of city governments. But now that the threat of defunding is no longer abstract — even if no jurisdiction has actually lost its grants yet, or been denied requests for new funds — those attitudes could change.

Even cities that respond by challenging defunding in court could lose their appetites over the course of a long and costly legal battle.

And at the end of the day, UC Davis’s Chin says, the federal government could win.

Chin compares the situation to the Solomon Amendment, a statute that prevented universities from getting federal money if they didn’t allow military recruiters access to its campuses (something many schools were loath to do in the era of legalized anti-LGBTQ discrimination in the military). Universities challenged the amendment, but the Supreme Court upheld it — and most schools gave in.

“The cost of noncompliance was too high,” Chin said.

While cities might be willing to fight for the ability to keep both the funding and “sanctuary” policies, if they lose the court case and have to pick one, they might decide they need the former more.

“It’s possible that a cleverly drafted and broadly worded statute could put a lot of state and local funding at risk,” Chin says. “And if that happens, and it was upheld, then I think states and localities would knuckle under.”

That could take years to play out. And it’s going to be harder for the Trump administration to win a legal battle if it doesn’t have backup from Congress in shoring up Sessions’s interpretation of DOJ rules with legislative language. But by choosing the limited definition of “sanctuary,” the Trump administration is picking a fight it could hypothetically win.

Juicero, the $399 internet-connected juicer, explained

2017-04-21T12:00:01-04:00

The internet has had a field day this week making fun of an internet-connected juicer called the Juicero. It was supposed to provide farm-fresh ingredients and save people the hassle of having to buy, clean, and cut up their own fruits and vegetables.

But a Bloomberg investigation revealed that you didn’t actually need the company’s $399 device to squeeze juice out of the company’s $8 bags of fruits and vegetables. Bloomberg interviewed Juicero investors who were dismayed that they’d sunk millions of dollars into an apparently useless gadget.

On Thursday, Juicero CEO Jeff Dunn posted on Medium in defense of his company and its juicing technology.

“Juicero’s mission is to make it dramatically easier and more enjoyable to consume more fresh, raw fruits and vegetables, and that’s a really tough nut to crack,” Dunn wrote.

But critics say that it’s not really a tough nut to crack. In fact, it’s so easy to crack that you can do the job with your bare hands.

The fact that Juicero has managed to raise $120 million to build an over-engineered juicer says a lot about the state of Silicon Valley today. There’s now so much money sloshing around San Francisco’s technology world that even seemingly outlandish ideas can attract lavish funding.

But while it’s easy (and entertaining) to make fun of Juicero and its investors, the company’s fundraising success doesn’t necessarily mean there are larger problems with the way technology startups get funded. Funding a few actually ridiculous startups like Juicero might just be the price we have to pay for seemingly absurd but truly useful companies like Airbnb.

Juicero sells a $399 juicer for $8 bags of fruits and vegetables

A normal juicer requires the customer to buy, clean, and cut up individual fruits and vegetables. Juicero’s juicer, in contrast, only works with pre-made bags of chopped up fruits and vegetables that are also sold by the Juicero company for $5 to $8.

Juicero’s sales pitch is that using a conventional juicer is too much work: preparing the fruit is a hassle, and then you have to clean both the machine and your kitchen afterward. By getting the fruit in a premade bag, you avoid all that mess and hassle.

You can think about it as the juice equivalent of a Keurig coffee machine, which allows people to make a cup of coffee from a pre-made, single-use package of ground beans.

The company has been very successful at raising venture capital. According to Crunchbase, Juicero has hauled in $118.5 million in investment capital and counts the prestigious Silicon Valley firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Google’s venture capital arm among its investors.

It turns out you can just squeeze the Juicero bags by hand

Since its debut last year at the even more ludicrous price of $699, Juicero has served as a handy metaphor for Silicon Valley’s excesses. It’s not clear why anyone would pay $399 for a juicer that only works with proprietary bags of fruits and vegetables. But Juicero really became a punchline this week when a Bloomberg story revealed that you don’t actually need the Juicero juicer to get juice out of the Juicero packs. Squeezing them with your hands works about as well:

After the product hit the market, some investors were surprised to discover a much cheaper alternative: You can squeeze the Juicero bags with your bare hands. Two backers said the final device was bulkier than what was originally pitched and that they were puzzled to find that customers could achieve similar results without it. Bloomberg performed its own press test, pitting a Juicero machine against a reporter’s grip. The experiment found that squeezing the bag yields nearly the same amount of juice just as quickly—and in some cases, faster—than using the device.

Needless to say, the story became a viral hit on social media. Internet users love nothing more than mocking rich people for doing ridiculous things with their money, and this story had that in spades.

Juicero CEO Jeff Dunn, hired last November, addressed the controversy in his Thursday Medium post. And he didn’t really dispute Bloomberg’s core findings. Instead, he used a lot of buzzwords to insist that a $399 juicer that only worked with Juicero’s proprietary bags chopped up fruits and vegetables really was going to revolutionize the juice business.

“Our connected Press itself is critical to delivering a consistent, high quality and food safe product,” Dunn wrote. Dunn touted the safety benefits of a Press that could automatically block the use of tainted bags. And he argued that Juicero users benefit from “consistent pressing of our Produce Packs calibrated by flavor to deliver the best combination of taste and nutrition every time.”

One big question Dunn doesn’t answer is why Juicero doesn’t just ship out bags of juice. After all, Juicero is already acquiring the fruits and vegetables, processing them, and shipping them out to customers. Presumably, Juicero could squeeze the fruits and vegetables in their factory and then ship just the juice to the customer — not only reducing shipping weight but saving the customer the trouble of pressing the juice. Juicero claims that its approach yields the freshest possible juice, but it’s not obvious that fruit pulp stored in a bag actually stays fresh longer than juice stored in a bottle.

On one level, the mockery of Juicero was a bit unfair. After all, it’s possible to make a normal cup of orange juice by squeezing oranges with your bare hands. But people generally don’t do that because it takes several minutes and your arm muscles are going to be sore at the end. The same point applies to the Juicero: You can spend two minutes squeezing a Juicero pack to get juice out of it, but it’s more convenient to stick the pack into the machine, push a button, and come back 2 minutes later for your juice.

What makes the Juicero genuinely ridiculous is how over-engineered it is. If Juicero had built a basic device that just squeezed juice out of a bag, it probably could have cost a lot less than $399.

Juicero want to create a “platform” for delivering juice

Photo Illustration by Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Juicero’s goal wasn’t so much to build a conventional kitchen appliance as to create a technology “platform” for delivering juice to consumers. Juicero wanted to lock customers into buying a steady stream of juice packs from Juicero, and in the future, maybe other food-related products — in much the same way that an Amazon Prime subscription locks customers into buying a steady stream of packages from Amazon. Juicero’s plan for doing this was to add a wifi chip and a QR code reader to the device.

Each Juicero pack has a QR code that’s specific to that particular bag. It indicates exactly where the fruits came from and when they were packaged. Juicero claims that this has health and safety benefits: If a package is past its expiration date, the machine will refuse to process it. Similarly, if there’s ever a safety recall, Juicero can automatically prevent customers from using tainted packs.

The consumer benefits of this extra technology are debatable. People don’t die from drinking juice that’s a day or two past its expiration date. The Juicero Press won’t squeeze a bag unless it has a Juicero QR code on it, and it refuses to operate at all without a wifi connection. A reason for this might be one suggested by Business Insider: “Juicero wanted to learn from mistakes Keurig has made, and one problem Keurig has said that other companies are making pods for its coffee maker and stealing profits.”

Of course, what a company considers “stealing profits,” its customers might just consider healthy competition. Juicero is hardly the first company to deliberately make its product less useful in order to protect a future revenue stream — printer companies have been suing each other over this kind of thing for more than a decade — but this is not the behavior of a company that puts its customers first.

But I suspect the main reason the Juicero is so ludicrously over-engineered was less to do with gouging customers than it was about impressing Wall Street. Because if Juicero’s business plan was merely to sell a conventional juicer and bags of juice, it never would have been able to raise tens of millions of dollars of venture capital.

Venture capital firms in Silicon Valley want to invest in technology platforms that have the potential to become huge, profitable businesses over time. If Evans had said from the outset that his main product was overpriced bags of pureed fruits and vegetables, it would have been a lot more difficult to convince investors that this had the potential to be a multibillion-dollar business.

One venture capitalist said as much to Bloomberg, saying that his firm “wouldn’t have met with [Juicero CEO Doug] Evans if he were hawking bags of juice that didn’t require high-priced hardware.”

Juicero can be seen as part of a larger trend known as the “internet of things,” in which internet-connected devices interact with real-world industries like, in this case, juice. In a widely read 2011 article, the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen predicted that “software would eat the world” — that is, more and more aspects of our lives would be driven by digital innovation.

Many venture capitalists believe that digital technology is on the verge of disrupting a wide variety of industries, and so when an entrepreneur claims they’re using a technology product to disrupt a seemingly random industry like juice, some investors are ready to believe it.

Part of the problem seems to be that the device Juicero ultimately delivered fell short of the goals outlined in Evans’s original pitch to investors.

“In fundraising meetings, Evans promised a revolutionary machine capable of squeezing large chunks of fruits and vegetables, said two people who agreed to invest in the company. Evans secured funding in 2014 by showing 3D-printed renderings of the product without a working prototype,” according to anonymous sources who talked to Bloomberg. Instead, Evans seems to have built a machine that squeezes juice out of fruits and vegetables that have already been processed almost to the point of being purees, leaving little for the device itself to do.

Juicero is silly, but some silly ideas actually work out

Photo by Charley Gallay/Getty Images for Airbnb

Airbnb founders Nathan Blecharczyk, Joe Gebbia, and Brian Chesky.

Silicon Valley has emerged as one of the few bright spots in an economy that has suffered from weak innovation over the past 15 years. The result: a Bay Area investment climate where there are far too many venture capitalists chasing far too few investment opportunities.

And venture capital investments often look crazy at the outset. Companies like Google, Facebook, and Airbnb all faced sustained skepticism in their early years. A lot of people found it hard to imagine that websites for sharing photos with your friends or sharing your couch with strangers could ever become a multibillion-dollar business.

Obviously, the skeptics were wrong in those cases, and these stories — and many others like it — have given venture capitalists an ingrained willingness to make big bets on ideas that sound crazy but might turn out to be hugely lucrative. After all, they think, if a business was obviously a good idea, a bunch of companies would already be doing it.

And as more and more cash has poured into Silicon Valley, investors have become willing to make larger and larger bets on more and more outlandish ideas. Companies that only sound a little bit out there get funding quickly and easily, and venture capitalists still have more clients wanting to invest. So venture capital firms reach deeper into the application pool, giving a second look to pitches that might have been rejected in less flush times.

The result: Often venture capitalists wind up financing a lot of ideas that turn out to be exactly as bad as they sound. And because the media likes to make fun of Silicon Valley, the outlandish examples tend to get an outsized share of the attention. Before Juicero, a favorite poster child for Silicon Valley excess was the rap annotation site Rap Genius, which raised more than $50 million between 2011 and 2014.

But the fact that venture capitalists fund companies like Juicero and Rap Genius doesn’t necessarily demonstrate that there’s something fundamentally wrong with Silicon Valley. There have also been plenty of perfectly plausible technology startup ideas that have turned out to be duds. Those companies aren’t as easily mockable, but the money spent on them is just as wasted. Meanwhile, some truly outlandish business ideas — like Airbnb — turn out to be huge companies that benefit a lot of people. So it’s a good thing that venture capitalists are willing to take a risk on ideas that sound a little wacky, even if many of them don’t pan out in the end.

Trump’s Supreme Court nominee cast his first major vote — to allow an execution

2017-04-21T10:50:01-04:00

Neil Gorsuch moved to allow Arkansas to carry out one of its eight planned executions.

Justice Neil Gorsuch, President Donald Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court, on Thursday cast his first major decision — to allow an execution to move forward.

Gorsuch joined Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito to clear the way for Arkansas to execute Ledell Lee. They didn’t explain their decision.

Lee is one of eight convicted murderers in Arkansas that the state has rushed to kill this month. Although the executions were supposed to begin on Monday, federal and state courts have so far halted the executions up until now.

Arkansas swiftly carried out the execution — the first it’s held since 2005. Lee took 12 minutes to die after drugs were administered, prison officials told reporters.

It’s unclear, at this point, how many or if any of the other executions Arkansas has planned for the month will move forward. Another execution scheduled for last night — of Stacey Johnson — was put on hold by the courts. Two more executions — of Jack Jones and Marcel Williams — are set for next Monday.

A death penalty expert called Arkansas’s original execution schedule “unprecedented.” “No state has ever attempted to execute this many people in such a short period of time,” Robert Dunham, executive director at the policy and research group the Death Penalty Information Center, recently told me.

What’s more disturbing is why Arkansas is in such a rush. It’s not based on a substantive, urgent demand for the executions to take place. Instead, the state is worried that one of the execution drugs it will use in its drug cocktail, midazolam, will expire at the end of the month.

“The state has adopted a reckless execution schedule solely to permit it to carry out these executions by an artificial ‘kill by’ date on which its drugs expire,” Dunham said. “There is no legitimate penological reason, there is no legitimate criminal justice administration reason, to carry out that many executions in this short a time frame.”

The state tried to move forward anyway. But so far, it has only succeeded in carrying out one of four killings scheduled up to Friday.

The rush to push out Arkansas’s executions shows the dwindling status of the death penalty in America: Not only is popular support for the death penalty declining, but the fact that a state is now so worried it might not be able to obtain midazolam should its current batch expire is an indicator of just how difficult it is to get lethal injection drugs today. But as states become more desperate to carry out executions in this environment, it’s possible we’ll see more gruesome plans like those in Arkansas.

Arkansas is trying to execute prisoners before a drug expires

Arkansas’s main concern is that its midazolam will expire at the end of the month.

“One of the three drugs in the lethal injection protocol expires at the end of April,” Hutchinson told NPR. “In order to fulfill my duty as governor, which is to carry out the lawful sentence imposed by a jury, it is necessary to schedule the executions prior to the expiration of that drug.”

Midazolam is used as a sedative in the lethal injection drug cocktail, aiming to put the inmate to sleep as the other drugs that kill him or her are administered. But the state apparently only has enough supply for the rest of April.

One sign of Arkansas’s desperation is how differently these executions are being handled than they were in the past. Hutchinson previously scheduled the eight killings to occur over four months in 2015 and 2016 — suggesting that the state originally felt, before it had to deal with the threat of its drug expiring, that the executions should be carried out over a much longer period of time. But after facing delays due to ongoing legal battles over the executions, Arkansas finally rescheduled them for this year.

Universal Images Group via Getty Images

“There is nothing that has transpired between 2015 and the present that makes it any safer, any more reliable, and any less traumatic to prison personnel to conduct these executions over 11 days as opposed to over the span of four months,” Dunham said.

What’s worse, it’s not clear if midazolam even works for executions. The Supreme Court previously ruled that the drug’s use is constitutional, arguing there wasn’t enough evidence that its use violates Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment. But the drug has a very bad history so far, leading to several high-profile botched executions in 2014:

Dennis McGuire in Ohio took 26 minutes to die after the state used a mixture of hydromorphone and midazolam. McGuire gasped and snorted before he died.
Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma struggled violently and groaned after the state injected a combination of midazolam, vecuronium bromide, and potassium chloride. Officials halted the execution, but Lockett died 43 minutes after the drugs were injected.
Joseph Wood in Arizona took nearly two hours to die after the state used a mixture of hydromorphone and midazolam. Wood, who gasped and gulped before he died, was injected with 15 times the amount of drugs called for in the state’s execution protocol by the time he was pronounced dead.

Some states continue using the drug, however, because it’s the best they’ve been able to get as pharmaceutical companies and regulators have cracked down on the use of different drugs for executions. States didn’t use midazolam at all before until they lost access to sodium thiopental, an anesthetic that previously served midazolam’s purpose (albeit in a much more reliable fashion) in the traditional three-drug lethal injection cocktail.

Execution drugs have become harder and harder to obtain

At the root of these problems is a major conundrum for states across the country: Lethal injection drugs are becoming much more difficult to procure — and there’s simply no adequate legal replacement for states to obtain.

Since around 2010, drug suppliers around the world, including in the US, have refused to provide drugs for lethal injections — out of either opposition to the death penalty or concerns about having their products associated with executions.

This has played out in the Arkansas cases: The medical supplier McKesson contested Arkansas’s planned use of vecuronium bromide, which the company supplied, in the executions — leading one court to briefly put the executions on hold.

But the hurdles to obtaining these drugs precede Arkansas’s execution plans. Hospira was the sole US supplier of sodium thiopental, a drug commonly used in the traditional three-drug cocktail for executions, according to death penalty expert Deborah Denno. But Hospira stopped producing the drug in 2011 — after struggling to obtain active ingredients for its production and fielding legal threats from authorities in Italy, where the death penalty is vehemently opposed.

Some states still managed to import sodium thiopental from overseas sources. But beginning in 2012, the US District Court of the District of Columbia issued several rulings banning imports of the drugs, deciding that the imported supplies didn’t meet US Food and Drug Administration regulations.

David McNew/Getty Images

As the shortage continued, states turned to other European companies for alternative drugs, such as phenobarbital and propofol, that are typically used as sedatives for surgeries. But these companies — under pressure from a European Union export ban, activist organizations like Reprieve, and foreign governments that prohibit the death penalty — over time refused to supply the drugs.

As these companies either stopped supplying drugs or were unable to export to the US, states began to look for new — and untested — ways to execute prisoners. They turned to loosely regulated compounding pharmacies and shady overseas companies that were willing to provide the drugs.

But as governments and the International Academy of Compounding Pharmacists cracked down on the drugs’ imports for executions, even these supplies dwindled.

Yet somehow some states have managed to continue getting these drugs, although often while passing secrecy laws that make it impossible to find out where exactly the drugs are coming from.

“We can’t know how the states are obtaining these drugs,” Dunham explained, “because they have adopted secrecy rules that prevent the public and the drug manufacturers from learning whether these drugs have been properly obtained or obtained in violation of the law or contractual obligations.”

So for all we know, states may still be illegally getting the drugs from overseas companies or compounding pharmacies. And perhaps because it wasn’t willing to resort to these methods, Arkansas is now desperate to use the midazolam it has.

This is one of the reasons the death penalty is on the decline in America. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, the number of executions in 2016 fell to 20, a 25-year low and down from a peak of 98 in 1999. The same year, 30 people were sentenced to death — another record low since the Supreme Court reinstated the use of the death penalty in the 1970s.

But as the death penalty faces these problems, some states will likely grow more desperate to avert the decline of capital punishment. Tennessee, for example, reinstated the possibility of the electric chair, Utah allowed the firing squad again, and Oklahoma permitted nitrogen gas. And in Arkansas, the governor set up an unprecedented execution schedule — just to avoid a product’s expiration date.

Trump wants to cut billions from the NIH. This is what we’ll miss out on if he does.

2017-04-21T10:04:40-04:00

Is spending money at the NIH a good deal? The research is incredibly clear: Yes.

The Trump administration wants to cut billions of dollars from funding biomedical research at the National Institutes of Health. It’s unclear if it will be able to, considering how funding for cancer, diabetes, and other disease research tends to have bipartisan consensus, and many prominent Republicans in Congress are opposing the cuts.

The White House has suggested the size of the agency’s budget — roughly $32 billion in 2016 — is the problem. “Only in Washington do you literally judge the success of something by how much money you throw at the problem, not actually whether it’s solving the problem or coming up with anything,” Sean Spicer, President Trump’s press secretary, said in March, defending the proposed cuts of $6 billion to the 2018 budget. (There’s also talk of slashing $1.2 billion from NIH research grants this year.)

Bu we can judge the success of the NIH by measures other than the amount of money being spent at it. Because for decades scientists have been studying a version of this question: “What does public spending on biomedical research actually buy us?”

A lot, it turns out. So let’s run through some of the evidence. (Many thanks to Matthew Hourihan, R&D budget analysis director at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, who helped compile this research.)

Here’s what money spent at the NIH “buys” us. Spoiler: It’s good stuff.

A neuron (green and white) in an insect brain (blue).

NICHD/N. Gupta / Flickr

The NIH isn’t just a research campus in Bethesda, Maryland. It’s the major funder of biomedical research in universities across the country. Around 80 percent of the NIH budget goes to these grants.

Turns out giving money to some of the nation’s smartest people to answer tough problems in medicine and biology generates some good products and ideas, and stimulates the economy.

1) New patents for drugs, medical devices, and other technologies

In March, Science published a study looking at the impact of NIH grants over a 27-year period.

The main finding: 8.4 percent of all NIH grants go on to generate patents — for new drugs, medical devices, or other medicine-related technologies.

The authors of the Science paper had previously figured out that “a $10 million boost in NIH funding leads to a net increase of 2.3 patents.” They estimate, roughly, that each patent is worth around $11.2 million in 2010 dollars. “A back-of-the-envelope calculation indicate that a $10 million dollar increase in NIH funding would yield $34.7 million in firm market value,” they reported in a recent NBER paper. Not a bad bet.

One single invention can make for a huge advancement in biotechnology. The NIH’s most cited patent since 2000 was for a tiny and incredibly important invention: microscopic valves that allow scientists to create “circuits” of fluid that work kind of like computer chips. According to Battelle, a private research firm, the NIH spent about $500,000 developing these valves. Since then, biotech companies have seized on the invention, creating even smaller versions of chemistry labs that can diagnose diseases like HIV and Ebola (these are sometimes referred to as “lab on a chip” devices). It’s an invention that has spurred a whole new biotech industry and also helps save lives.

2) Those patents then inspire new patents

The Science paper’s secondary finding is perhaps just as important: Grant money also has a carryover effect into the private sector. Around 30 percent of all scientific papers generated by NIH grants are cited by successful patent applications from private firms.

Which means even if a grant isn’t directly generating a patent, it has a good chance of aiding the thinking behind the discovery of another.

And there’s some research that suggests government funding is better at kickstarting this virtuous cycle than private sector funding: NIH-funded patents are cited by future patents at double the rate of those developed by the private sectors, a 2014 Nature Biotechnology paper found.

Furthermore, the Science analysis finds that both “basic” and “applied” research are just as likely to be cited by future patents. (“Basic” research seeks to understand the nuts and bolts of biological processes. It answers questions like: How does the retina work? “Applied” research seeks to generate ideas or products that can be put to use: Can this medical device improve retina functioning?)

That there’s parity between basic and applied research means that generating knowledge for the sake of it is just as valuable as designing direct solutions to problems.

Between 2003 and 2013, every patent generated by an NIH grant was cited, on average, by five future patents, according to Battelle.

Again, this means research dollars spent by the NIH inspire other research institutions and industries to spend money on research and development, generating ideas to change and save lives.

Overall, Battelle calculated that every $100 million spent on NIH research leads to an additional $105.9 million in future research and development in both the public and private sectors.

3) Those patents form the basis of new biotech firms

NIH money lands in research institutions all across the country. In 2014, a report in the journal Research Policy asked: What happens to local economies that see that influx of NIH funds?

Quite simply, where NIH funds flow, new biotechnology firms follow. “A $1 million increase in the average amount of federal R&D funding associates with an increase of 5–58 percent in the number of local biotechnology firm births a few years later,” the authors reported.

In 2013, the Science Coalition, a science advocacy nonprofit, published a report on 100 companies that got their start because of federal research funds. Most of them are pretty small — employing a few or a few dozen people. They produce things like custom strands of DNA for use in genetic engineering, or compounds to make pharmaceuticals more water-soluble.

NIH-funded research has also spurred gigantic new industries. Consider the human genome project, to which genetic testing companies like 23andMe, and the entire genomics industry, owe their existence. The human genome project cost around $3.8 billion. It’s estimated to have generated $796 billion in economic impact.

4) All this research gives us drugs that save lives

In 2011, the New England Journal of Medicine published a report that found public sector funding is more effective at generating new, important drugs than spending in the private sector.

Looking at decades of Food and Drug Administration drug approvals, the researchers found “virtually all the important, innovative vaccines that have been introduced during the past 25 years have been created by PSRIs [public sector research institutions].”

Their definition of PSRI includes “all universities, research hospitals, nonprofit research institutes, and federal laboratories in the United States,” so it’s not just spending by the NIH.

The FDA prioritizes drugs in the approval pipeline based on potential impact. Drugs that began at public research institutions were more than two times more likely to be flagged as high-priority than those that began in the private sector. The analysis found that “46.2 percent of new-drug applications from PSRIs received priority reviews, as compared with 20.0 percent of applications that were based purely on private-sector research, an increase by a factor of 2.3.”

And the public sector is particularly good at creating drugs to cure deadly diseases. Of the 153 approvals of drugs that began at public research institutions, 40 were for the treatment of cancer and 36 tackled infectious diseases, the report found.

Specifically, research also finds that spending at the NIH does spur new drug discoveries. A 2012 study found that a 10 percent increase in the funding for a particular disease “yields about a 4.5 percent increase in novel drugs entering human clinical testing (phase I trials), after a lag of up to 12 years.”

Here’s a famous example: In the 1950s and ’60s, NIH researcher Julius Axelrod’s work showed how neurotransmitters function in the brain, leading to a Nobel Prize. But more importantly, his ideas led to the drugs we now use to treat depression. “All the major SSRIs [selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors] were discovered by pharmaceutical companies with the use of Axelrod’s basic discoveries,” NEJM reports.

The White House’s case to cut funding to the NIH

Paul R. Odgren, PhD, University of Massachusetts Medical School / Flickr

The White House believes spending at the NIH has gotten out of hand.

“About 30 percent of the grant money that goes out is used for indirect expenses, which, as you know, means that that money goes for something other than the research that’s being done,” Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price told reporters, justifying the proposed 18 percent cut to NIH funding for the 2018 budget.

It’s true that the NIH also pays for overhead costs like electricity bills and lab equipment. And yes, there are legitimate concerns that these costs can spiral. Stat News has the best explanation of this argument here. In the piece, reporter Meghana Keshavan explains:

Critics suggest that the system gives universities an incentive to bump up their overhead costs, since the reimbursement rates are negotiated based on their previous year’s spending. So if a school builds a fancy new lab one year, it can claim the need for a higher reimbursement rate the next.

Should universities like Harvard, which have billion-dollar endowments, get federally funded money to keep the lights on?

The Government Accountability Office — which analyzes government policies for inefficiencies — flagged the potential for sprawling overhead costs at the NIH in a 2016 report, urging the institute to establish programs to better investigate potential fraud and abuse.

So there’s some legitimate debate to be had about funding at the NIH. But it’s also clear that the severe, sudden cuts proposed by the Trump administration will have the immediate effect of stifling scientific progress.

For one, science need stable funding. Projects are funded on a multi-year basis. Yet Congress can change the NIH budget every year if it wants. The instability makes it harder to fund multi-year projects.

And already, competition for NIH grants is intense. Funding has basically plateaued over the past decade, while at the same time the cost of research keeps increasing and an ever-growing pool of PhDs is competing for a relatively smaller pile of grant money.

Consider this: In 2000, more than 30 percent of NIH grant applications got approved. Today, it’s closer to 17 percent. It’s not crazy math: The less money there is to go around, the fewer projects get funded. If the Trump cuts go through, it’ll likely mean hundreds fewer research grants.

Congress will decide whether to include the immediate proposed cuts to this year’s budget by the end of April. But enthusiasm so far seems mixed.

When reporters asked Sen. Roy Blunt, a Republican who serves on the Senate’s Appropriations Committee, if the 2017 cuts could happen, he replied, “No. No.” Other Republicans are similarly skeptical, according to the New York Times. Rep. Kevin Yoder, a Republican from Kansas, has said, “I will fight to ensure that these proposed cuts to medical research funding never make it into law.”

But if Congress does vote to cut NIH funding — which could very well happen — who knows what ideas and breakthroughs we’ll miss out on?

4/20: National Weed Day, explained

2017-04-20T13:50:00-04:00

It's 4/20, the day tens of thousands of Americans gather around the country to celebrate a drug that remains illegal in most of the country: marijuana.

April 20 (or 4/20) is cherished by pot smokers around the world as a reason to toke up with friends and massive crowds each year. Major rallies occur across the country, particularly in places like Colorado and California, where marijuana is now legal.

But as support for marijuana legalization grows, the festivities are becoming more mainstream. As a result, marijuana businesses are looking to leverage the holiday to find more ways to sell and market their products. This puts 4/20's current iteration in sharp contrast with the holiday once embraced by a counterculture movement that was largely made up of hippies and others who decried greed, corporate influences, and all things mainstream. And that tells us a lot about how weed is changing in America.

Why is 4/20 National Weed Day? There are a few theories.

There are a few possible explanations for why marijuana enthusiasts' day of celebration landed on April 20, but the real origin remains a bit of a mystery.

Steven Hager, a former editor of the marijuana-focused news outlet High Times, told the New York Times that the holiday came out of a ritual started by a group of high school students in the 1970s. As Hager explained, a group of Californian teenagers ritualistically smoked marijuana every day at 4:20 pm. The ritual spread, and soon 420 became code for smoking marijuana. Eventually 420 was converted into 4/20 for calendar purposes, and the day of celebration was born. (A group of Californians published documents giving this theory legitimacy, but it's unclear if their claims are valid.)

One common belief is that 420 was the California police or penal code for marijuana, but there's no evidence to support those claims.

An enthusiastic marijuana user. (Marc Piscotty/Getty Images News)

Another theory is that there are 420 active chemicals in marijuana, hence an obvious connection between the drug and the number. But there are more than 500 active ingredients in marijuana, and only about 70 or so are cannabinoids unique to the plant, according to the Dutch Association for Legal Cannabis and Its Constituents as Medicine.

A lesser-known possibility comes from the 1939 short story "In the Walls of Eryx" by H.P. Lovecraft and Kenneth Sterling. The story describes "curious mirage-plants" that seemed fairly similar to marijuana and appeared to get the narrator high at, according to his watch, around 4:20. Since the story is from 1939, it's perhaps the earliest written link between marijuana and 420.

Whatever its origins, 4/20 has become a massive holiday for cannabis aficionados.

4/20 is the biggest single-day celebration of marijuana

What 4/20 stands for varies from person to person. Some people just want to get high and have fun. Others see the day as a moment to push for legalization, or celebrate legalization now that more states are adopting it and it has popular opinion behind it.

Back in the 1970s, 4/20 was part of a smaller counterculture movement that embraced marijuana as a symbol to protest against broader systemic problems in the US, like overseas wars and the power of corporations in America. "Marijuana was the way you said you weren't a suit," Keith Humphreys, a drug policy expert at Stanford University, previously told me.

A 4/20 rally. (Joe Amon/Denver Post via Getty Images)

In recent years, marijuana legalization activists have tried to bring a more formal aspect to the celebration, framing it as a moment to push their political agenda. Organizers for the 2014 Denver rally — during the first year marijuana sales were legal in the state — put out a statement comparing the battle for legal marijuana to "the time when Jews fled from slavery in Egypt," a moment commemorated in Passover celebrations. "This year's rally represents the continuing fight for freedom from economic slavery for marginalized members of our community and a rebirth of creative genius that will get us there," they wrote.

Businesses are also trying to take advantage of the holiday. Eddie Miller, CEO of Invest in Cannabis, which seeks to bring investment into the marijuana industry, previously told me that his company was trying to build and sponsor major 4/20 gatherings around the country — similar to what other companies, some of which Miller has been involved with, have done with holidays like St. Patrick's Day.

"Our perspective is 4/20 is a real holiday — no smaller than St. Patrick's Day or Halloween," Miller said. "It's just nobody knows about it yet. And our company is going to let everyone know about it."

Legalization is turning 4/20 into a commercial holiday

Originally 4/20 was a counterculture holiday to protest, at least in part, the social and legal stigmas against marijuana. Marijuana legalization undercuts that purpose: As big businesses and corporations begin growing and selling pot, marijuana will slowly lose its status as a counterculture symbol — and that, Humphreys of Stanford University speculated, could bring the end of the traditional, countercultural 4/20.

"If a corporate marijuana industry adopts 4/20, it would still be a celebrated event, but not with the same countercultural meaning," Humphreys said in an email. "People celebrated Christmas long before it became an occasion for an orgy of gift-buying and materialist consumption, but the meaning of the holiday for most people was different then than it is now."

Companies such as Invest in Cannabis admit they're already leveraging the holiday as another opportunity to promote the industry and its products — much like beer and other alcohol companies now do with St. Patrick's Day.

"The media is covering 4/20 as a consumer interest story," Miller of Invest in Cannabis said. "But some portion of the media is covering 4/20 as a call to arms for the industry — so [in 2015] there are multiple competitive business conferences that are happening in Denver, the [San Francisco] Bay Area, and Las Vegas."

A 4/20 smoke-out in front of the Colorado state capitol. (Joe Amon/Denver Post via Getty Images)

The pot industry has also gotten directly involved in 4/20 events. The Cannabis Cup, for example, has become a major event at Denver's 4/20 rallies, where hundreds of vendors show off their finest marijuana products to more than 40,000 attendees. The event has steadily grown over the years, featuring big concerts from notable musicians like Snoop Dogg, Soja, and 2 Chainz, as well as a wide collection of marijuana businesses as sponsors.

The Cannabis Cup is only one of many events, which also include comedy shows (like Cheech and Chong), marijuana-friendly speed dating, and trade shows for glass pipes and bongs, offering businesses and celebrities various opportunities to push their products and brands.

Some people don't attend the public festivities at all, choosing instead to stay home and enjoy a joint (or more) with their friends. For them, 4/20 likely remains a more casual affair void of big sponsorships and marketing.

But in public, 4/20 is increasingly becoming a commercial holiday.

4/20's shift shows how marijuana legalization will change weed

The shift in 4/20 from a counterculture holiday to a more corporate one shows how legalization is changing marijuana.

To many legalizers, this is a sign of their success. Legalization campaigns often adopt the tagline "regulate marijuana like alcohol." That this is actually happening as the cannabis industry takes a form similar to the alcohol industry is a sign that legalizers are winning.

But to some drug policy experts and legalizers, this is a cause for alarm. The big concern is that a big marijuana industry will, like the tobacco and alcohol industries, irresponsibly market its drug to kids or users who already consume the drug excessively — with little care for public health over the desire for profits.

To this end, many drug policy experts see alcohol as a warning, not something to be admired and followed for other drugs. For decades, big alcohol has successfully lobbied lawmakers to block tax increases and regulations on alcohol, all while marketing its product as fun and sexy in television programs, such as the Super Bowl, that are viewed by millions of Americans, including children. Meanwhile, alcohol is linked to 88,000 deaths each year in the US.

A 4/20 necklace. (Meg Roussos/Getty Images News)

If marijuana companies are able to act like the tobacco and alcohol industries have in the past, there's a good chance that they'll convince more Americans to try or even regularly use marijuana, and some of the heaviest users may use more of the drug. And as these companies increase their profits, they’ll be able to influence lawmakers in a way that could stifle regulations or other policies that curtail cannabis misuse. All of that will likely prove bad for public health.

Now, the situation almost certainly will not be as bad as alcohol, since alcohol is simply more dangerous than marijuana. Pot's risks, for one, tend to be nonfatal or at least much less fatal than alcohol: dependence and overuse, accidents, non-deadly overdoses that lead to mental anguish and anxiety, and, in rare cases, psychotic episodes. Marijuana has never been definitively linked to any serious ailments — not deadly overdoses, lung disease, or schizophrenia. And it's much less likely — around one-tenth so, based on data for fatal car crashes — to cause deadly accidents than alcohol.

Given this, the focus for drug policy experts tends to be the risk of dependence. As Jon Caulkins, a drug policy expert at Carnegie Mellon University, has told me, "At some level, we know that spending more than half of your waking hours intoxicated for years and years on end is not increasing the likelihood that you'll win a Pulitzer Prize or discover the cure for cancer."

But these risks are still risks. Yet as the marijuana industry grows, it's likely that these will be issues that the industry just doesn't care much about — and it will market its product excessively for as much profit as possible, even if it means more public health or safety problems along the way.

Today, 4/20 is an example of this shift in action — showing cannabis's evolution from a counterculture symbol to just another commodity that big companies can make a lot of money from.

The North Korean military threat to America and its allies, explained

2017-04-19T10:20:00-04:00

North Korea doesn’t just have nukes. It also has a ton of artillery and chemical weapons. Yay.

North Korea suffered an embarrassing spectacle over the weekend. Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s leader, ordered a missile launch to celebrate the 105th birthday of his grandfather, the country’s founding president. But the missile blew up almost immediately, ending a fairly impressive military parade through the streets of Pyongyang with the wrong kind of bang.

Still, the simple fact that North Korea continues to develop and test missiles — let alone nuclear weapons — means it will be one of the thorniest and most complex issues confronting President Donald Trump during his time in office. It also may be the most dangerous: A misstep could lead to open conflict with a nuclear-armed dictatorship run by one of the most mercurial leaders on earth.

If the standoff in North Korea becomes something much worse, Trump won't be able to say he wasn’t warned. As the Obama administration handed the White House keys over to the Trump team, the president told his successor that North Korea would be America’s top national security threat. And as predicted, things are headed south, with both Washington and Pyongyang now threatening “preemptive” strikes.

But when leaders like Trump and Obama sound alarm bells about the nebulous-sounding “North Korean threat,” what are they referring to?

First, and most critically, North Korea has nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles that when reliably combined could strike US allies in the region, like South Korea and Japan, where US troops are stationed. Thankfully, it still has some work to do before those nuclear-tipped missiles could reach American territory.

Second, North Korea has a vast array of artillery — that is, large guns usually used in land warfare — that could be used to attack South Korea. It also has a substantial chemical weapons stockpile, as well as elite special operations forces that could prove challenging for South Korea’s own forces to handle.

Finally, if North Korea does decide to use any of those weapons against its enemies, the aftereffects would pose their own significant, worldwide problems.

Let’s dig deeper.

North Korea’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles programs

This is the most obvious threat, but probably the most complicated.

Last year, Kim told other North Korean leaders that his country would conduct a nuclear strike if it was threatened by “invasive hostile forces with nuclear weapons.” It’s a pretty vague intimidation — nothing new when it comes to the North Korean leadership — but the implication is clear: If North Korea feels like its sovereignty or an important national interest is threatened, it will seriously consider using a nuclear weapon to respond.

To do that successfully, North Korea needs two things: a functioning nuclear weapon, and a way to deliver that weapon to a specific location. North Korea has both — but caveats apply.

There is currently no evidence that North Korea can place a nuclear warhead on an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and reliably hit any part of the US mainland or its territories. So when Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, claims Kim “can press a button and hit Chicago,” he’s jumping the gun.

That said, North Korea has the potential to put a nuke on a medium-range missile that could reach South Korea and Japan — two allies that host US military installations. Simply put, if North Korea wanted to strike South Korea and Japan with a nuclear weapon, it could likely do so. Making matters worse, any nuclear strike on those countries would put American troops stationed there directly in harm’s way.

This is partially why the United States has decided to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system in South Korea to defend against certain missile strikes and why America is conducting missile interception tests with Japan.

And the situation is likely to get worse. Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia nonproliferation program at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, told me in an interview that he thinks North Korea will have intermediate- to long-range missiles capable of carrying a nuke to American soil ready for launch in about five years. That will soon put Guam, and potentially Hawaii and other parts of the United States, within North Korea’s nuclear reach.

Let’s just stop for a second to let that sink in: Experts believe that in about five years, North Korea will be able to hit US territory with a nuclear weapon. And they think it can probably already hit Japan, South Korea, and US troops stationed there with a nuke right now.

That is the core of what we mean when we talk about “the North Korean threat.” It’s why this crisis feels so immediate, and why it seems to have been getting more and more frightening as time goes by.

It’s also because North Korea has dramatically ramped up the pace of its missile testing in recent years: In 2017 alone, the country conducted three successful missile tests — count ’em: one, two, three — and suffered two setbacks, including the one over the weekend. That’s on top of the five nuclear tests it’s conducted since October 2006, as the chart from the BBC below shows. The country currently claims to be “primed and ready” to carry out a sixth nuclear test any day now.

BBC

Despite stiff competition, Kim continues to vie for the title of most bombastic and overly confident world leader. He boasts his country can “wipe out Manhattan” if he so orders. He’s also threatened to reduce the United States “to ashes” if it strikes North Korea first. For now, these are laughably melodramatic statements, but if North Korea’s nuclear and missiles programs continue to improve at the same pace, those proclamations will quickly stop seeming like empty boasts.

Many important questions remain. For one, the size of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal is a mystery, although estimates put it somewhere between 10 and 16 weapons.

Second, it’s unclear if Pyongyang has what is known as a “second-strike capability” — that is, if North Korea were struck by a nuke, could it still retaliate with a powerful nuclear strike of its own? The jury is still out, but it is definitely trying to secure that capability. This matters a lot: If it has that ability, the stakes for any country thinking about attacking the North become exponentially higher, because they would then be susceptible to being hit by a North Korean nuke in response. In other words, it makes North Korea more dangerous and therefore gives them more leverage.

Finally, Kim claims he has a hydrogen bomb, a far more powerful type of nuclear weapon than the run-of-the-mill atomic bomb we know he already has. His assertion has not been proven — he more likely has a boosted atom bomb, which uses a radioactive form of hydrogen that makes it more powerful than a normal atom bomb but not nearly as powerful as a true hydrogen bomb. But if he does have a true hydrogen bomb, North Korea’s enemies have an even bigger threat on their hands than previously thought.

Artillery, chemical weapons, and special forces

While the nuclear and missile programs get all the attention, a seriously underappreciated threat comes from North Korea’s arsenal of conventional weapons, including the world’s largest artillery force. A third danger comes from the country’s elite special operations forces that could magnify the impact of a North Korean strike on South Korea.

South Korea’s capital city, Seoul, is a so-called “megacity” with a whopping 25.6 million residents living in the greater metropolitan area. It also happens to be within direct firing range of thousands of pieces of North Korean artillery already lined up along the border, also known as the demilitarized zone. Around 70 percent of North Korea’s ground forces are within 90 miles of the DMZ, presumably ready to move south at a moment’s notice.

Simulations of a large-scale artillery fight between the North and South produce pretty bleak results. One war game convened by the Atlantic back in 2005 predicted that a North Korean attack would kill 100,000 people in Seoul in the first few days alone. Others put the estimate even higher. A war game mentioned by the National Interest predicted Seoul could “be hit by over half-a-million shells in under an hour.” Those results don’t bode well for one of Washington’s closest allies, or for the tens of millions of people living in Seoul.

And that’s not all. A report from Stratfor, a private intelligence analysis firm, found that a large-scale North Korean artillery attack would likely mean that the northern half of Seoul would get hit the most. Depending on where North Korea placed some of its rocket launchers, southern portions of Seoul — including the Gangnam District of “Gangnam Style” fame — would also be within range.

The Stratfor report further notes than just “a single volley” of North Korean artillery could deliver “over 350 metric tons of explosives” into greater Seoul, “roughly the same amount of ordnance dropped by 11 B-52 bombers.”

As if that were not enough, North Korea has a robust chemical weapons program. South Korea’s Ministry of Defense estimates that its northern neighbor has between 2,500 and 5,000 metric tons of chemical weapons, including sarin and VX nerve agents. (Sarin is thought to be the chemical agent used in the Assad’s regime’s recent attack in Syria, which killed 72 people and left children gasping for breath as they choked on the poisonous gas.)

Should North Korea attack, it might use chemical weapons early on in South Korea’s urban areas to increase the death toll. At the same time, conventional munitions could rain down on the South. After that barrage, North Korea’s 200,000-strong special operations forces should have an easier time arriving via tunnels, mini-submarines, or Russian biplanes. Surely Pyongyang would find a way to employ its growing cyber capabilities, too, because why not?

Granted, North Korea is not expected to win a full-blown war with South Korea, should that come to pass. For one, America has the ability to stop a North Korean missile launch before it even happens with cyber capabilities.

But even if a launch did take place, the THAAD system being deployed in South Korea should be able to take it down. If that missed, Aegis ships in the Pacific could shoot the missile; and if that failed, Patriot batteries could also stop the flight. And if all that failed … well, you know. The bottom line is that there are lot of defenses in place designed to stop North Korean missiles, but nothing is perfect.

North Korea has far more troops than South Korea (1.19 million versus 655,000), but should a conventional fight break out, US and South Korean air power would help balance the scales. But, again, nothing is guaranteed.

Either way, North Korea could cause a lot of damage and harm a lot of countries — and people — as it goes down.

The aftermath of a conflict with North Korea “would be fundamentally disruptive” to the region — and the world

If there is a conflict where North Korea deploys many of its deadly weapons, what happens when the dust settles?

Robert Manning, a Koreas expert at the Atlantic Council, said in an interview that a North Korean attack on South Korea or any other of its neighbors “would be fundamentally disruptive” to the region and the world.

He’s not kidding. Marine Col. Jeff Vandaveer, who spent a year serving in Asia and was a former faculty member at the Marine Command and Staff College, has thought a lot about the potential regional and global effects of a war with North Korea. In an interview, he told me that such a conflict could lead to a big slump in the global economy, cause humanitarian suffering, and pit great powers against one another.

The economic consequences of Japan and/or South Korea, respectively the third and 11th biggest world economies, reeling from a big attack would impact the world’s financial future.

The humanitarian consequences would also be dire, Vandaveer said. Millions of hungry, displaced people would be trapped on a small peninsula during a brutal war. Meanwhile, tensions would rise as great powers like China, Russia, and the United States would likely be drawn further into the fray. That’s already happening, in a way, as Russian and Chinese ships tail America’s carrier strike group in the region. They both call for “restraint” in these tense times between America and North Korea.

Although the prospects of all-out war with North Korea are still pretty slim, Vandaveer’s depressing vision of the immediate aftereffects of a military exchange is the kind of scenario the Trump administration must plan for.

Trump seems to have gained a healthy appreciation of the seriousness and complexity of the North Korea challenge, calling it the “greatest immediate threat” to the United States. Initially, Trump thought China could use its economic and diplomatic influence over North Korea to quickly quell the threat. But after meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago earlier this month, his perspective changed: “After listening for 10 minutes, I realized it’s not so easy,” Trump said, admitting his original solution was too simplistic.

The good news, in other words, is that Trump now has a more realistic sense of the enormity of the North Korea threat. The bad news is that it’s not clear that he has any real idea of what to do about it.

Alex Ward is an associate director of the Atlantic Council's Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security where he works on US foreign policy, national security strategy, and military affairs. You can follow him on Twitter @alexwardb.

How Gudetama, a lazy egg yolk with a butt, became an unstoppable cultural phenomenon

2017-04-18T10:35:07-04:00

Ah, Gudetama! Ah, humanity!

It’s hard to tell at a glance, but Gudetama is an egg yolk with a butt crack. It’s a fictional character of sorts, one with limbs but no fingers or toes. It has a mouth but no obvious teeth. It has thighs but no visible joints, a head but no neck. Its eyes look like sesame seeds. It has no gender.

To the naked eye, it could easily be mistaken for a golden bean, a kernel of corn, or an unappealing drop of honey. But Gudetama isn’t any of those — because that would make too much sense for a success story that, on its surface, shouldn’t make any sense at all.

Gudetama is a relatively recent addition to the Sanrio universe — which, until recent memory, revolved around the tiny-eyed, red-hair-bow-wearing being known as Hello Kitty. It’s also the company’s most popular character in recent memory, even though its blob-like appearance is the antithesis of Sanrio’s historical emphasis on cuteness.

Where Hello Kitty and her compatriots like Keroppi (a frog that looks more like the owner of an old-fashioned ice cream shop than an amphibian) are known for bringing adorable charm to items like lunchboxes, luggage, T-shirts, and toothbrushes and evoking warmth from the coldest of hearts, Gudetama, hatched in 2013, was born into a world it would prefer to avoid.

Gudetama looks like a character someone gave up on, and yet people cannot get enough of it. But Gudetama’s looks are just a fraction of its appeal. Its main attraction is its apathetic personality.

Gudetama can talk (in short sentences), move (more like wiggle), emote (only pain), and breathe (particularly when it sleeps). Though it can do these things and has the potential for more, it would rather not. Each new day is one more chance for Gudetama to experience life on the lowest setting, and its ultimate pleasure is in doing nothing.

Gudetama is Melville’s Bartleby in unfertilized yolk form.

It may seem weird that an idle egg could inspire such widespread affection. But the response stems from a combination of the character’s relatability, its need to be cared for, and the way it challenges us to rethink what we find cute. Gudetama and its popularity are part of a more expansive cultural movement — a reaction to life that’s been punctuated by uncertainty, turbulence, and outrage.

Gudetama’s origin story is about coming in second, and thriving anyway

Since its creation, Gudetama has been a loser.

In 2013, Sanrio held a competition in Japan to come up with a food-based character. Contests like these serve two purposes: to help the company’s designers find a creative spark, and to serve as a trial balloon for potential new characters before Sanrio sinks money into their corresponding merchandise. Fans voted, and Gudetama actually placed second, losing out to a cheerful salmon filet named Kirimichan.

“We actually started to release products based on the salmon filet and its friends,” Dave Marchi, Sanrio’s vice president of marketing and brand management, told me. “Gudetama the lazy egg actually came in second, but we [still] released products based on Gudetama, and they really, really took off. It has really, really expanded and blown up over the last year.”

Sanrio

Kirimichan.

Marchi is being humble.

A glance at the sad pocket of the Sanrio website where Kirimichan and its perpetual smile lives in loneliness shows that there are only two Kirimichan items for sale. Gudetama has 115, including a skateboard, a desk fan, and a talking tissue box cover, in addition to more typical apparel and plushes. Hello Kitty, Sanrio’s flagship character, has 226.

Gudetama-themed merchandise is sold at other stores too, including teenage angst supplier Hot Topic. And as the Wall Street Journal reported in January, “Since the egg’s introduction two years ago, Sanrio has shipped 1,700 variations of Gudetama-themed items in Japan, ranging from socks to soy sauce to suitcases.”

Though Sanrio hasn’t revealed its exact sales figures, Marchi also notes customers who are interested in Gudetama are “definitely skewing a little bit of an older demographic, but I know 7-year-olds who have a Gudetama plush because they think it's a cute, funny blob of an egg.”

Gudetama’s slow-boil win and older fan base make sense when you think about the character. In a contest based strictly on cuteness, Kirimichan wins (just as it did in Sanrio’s 2013 character contest) because that’s all Kirimichan is — a cute, smiling salmon filet and self-proclaimed “star in the sliced food world.”

But Gudetama is much, much more.

The true appeal of Gudetama is its personality

What sets Gudetama apart from the rest of Sanrio’s roster is the personal connection many of its fans feel to the character. You wouldn’t necessarily pick up on this or understand it if someone were just to show you a picture of the egg. The connection comes from videos of Gudetama in which it, well, does nothing. Sanrio created a video series — which you can find on YouTube — of brief vignettes that chronicle Gudetama’s low-effort life. The videos reveal Gudetama’s lack of zeal in ways that images can’t fully grasp.

“I think particularly with Gudetama and the attitude that we see from it, it's a little bit different,” Marchi said. “It's a little bit lazy, it's a little bit melancholy, it's a little Who cares? and has an almost tired, sleepy, lazy, whatever attitude, which can be shared with many people, whether you're a 14-year-old or a 34-year-old or a 50-year-old.”

The name “Gudetama” combines the Japanese phrase “gude gude,” which means lazy, with “tama,” a shortened form of “tamago,” the Japanese word for egg. “Lazy” undersells Gudetama a bit, in the way “rain” undersells “deluge.”

Gudetama is perpetually weary. It’s (Gudetama is not fertilized and has no gender, according to Sanrio) too tired to sneeze, too tired to be consumed, too tired to be fried, and, a lot of times, too tired to literally come out of its shell. It uses strips of bacon as blankets and steaks as pillows. It always talks about going home, but never really elaborates on where that would be.

Life for Gudetama, which mainly consists of lying on a plate, is largely unbearable.

Any effort at all is synonymous with pain. The only thing worse than effort is the effort required to complain about said effort. Gudetama is the Tony Robbins of doing nothing. You can be idle at everything, if you just set your mind to it.

In its unwillingness to do anything, Gudetama has cobbled together a personality from its debilitating inactivity. This unmotivated attitude has earned it a variety of titles, ranging from the “Hello Kitty for millennials” to the much more general “hero,” and humankind has created homages to the character in the form of a café and a themed flight from Tokyo to Taipei.

Gudetama shows how complex Japan’s “kawaii” culture has become, and how basic American cuteness is

To understand Gudetama is to understand that the American concept of cuteness is flat. In America, what you see is essentially what you get.

“Character culture in America and Western culture is still very black and white,” Aya Kakeda, a cartooning expert and faculty member at New York City’s School of Visual Arts, told me. “A villain is a villain, and a hero is a hero. Cute characters are a symbol of sweetness or goodness. You can see it in their appearance. The same with ‘bad’ characters.”

A classic example: most vintage Disney movies. It’s easy to spot the villains because they’re usually ugly (Snow White’s Evil Queen), purposely gross (The Little Mermaid’s Ursula the Sea Witch), and/or draped in shadows and dark colors (The Lion King’s Scar). The “bad guys” in Disney movies, but also in other popular properties Looney Tunes (see: Wile. E. Coyote) and Rainbow Brite (see: Murky Dismal) are meant to be identified as evil, are evil all the time, and are never cute.

Kakeda says this is slowly changing (she cites South Park as an American example of a property that mixes cuteness and gruesomeness), but in Japan there’s more of a gray area, and it’s been building for years. When discussing cuteness in Japan, the catchall phrase is “kawaii,” a term that emerged in the 1970s, according to Sharon Kinsella of the University of Manchester. The basic tenet of kawaii is that it’s a childlike sense of cute.

“Kawaii isn’t just any kind of cute,” Alissa Freedman, a professor of Japanese literature and film at the University of Oregon, told me. “It’s a very vulnerable kind of cute. It’s like, you’re so cute people want to take care of you. It inspires us to care for them.”

Recently, according to Kakeda, the concept of kawaii has become more fragmented, resulting in different subgroups of kawaii.

“For example there is kimo-kawaii [which is sometimes also called gro-kawaii] — kimo means grotesque,” Kakeda told me. “There is something scary and grotesque about [a kimo-kawaii character], but it also carries the same cuteness.”

The American example she cites is Spongebob Squarepants, with his bulging eyes and trypophobia-inducing skin. Kakeda also cites Japanese characters called “Kobito Zukan,” which are like tiny dwarves or gnomes — some, like Gudetama, also have strange butts. This one, as the official Kobitos website tells me, likes to suck the sugar out of peaches:

Kobitos

The kimo-kawaii concept doesn’t just revolve around appearance, Kakeda notes. One of Japan’s more popular kimo-kawaii characters is “Gloomy Bear.” Created by artist Mori Chack, Gloomy Bear looks like it could be friends with Hello Kitty and the rest of the Sanrio universe. But one look at its bloody claws reveals that the character is capable of bloody violence, which it usually directs at a boy named Pitty, its owner:

Gloomy Bear’s juxtaposition of bloodiness and cuteness is what Kakeda is getting at when she describes what’s missing from American character culture, where cute creatures typically aren’t capable of being anything but good and ugly always connotes evilness. It also shows how broad, and alternately how narrow, kawaii can be.

Gudetama exhibits elements of kimo-kawaii. It’s not traditionally cute, and skews more toward Spongebob than Hello Kitty in its appearance. Its attitude isn’t very childlike or happy. Additionally, Gudetama exhibits traits of another subset of kawaii, “yuru-kawaii.”

“Yuru means loose, relaxed, and calm,” Kakeda told me. “This category grew popular because of the stressful life in modern society. People are always searching for something to make them calm and relaxed. In the US, perhaps people search for spa or meditation classes. In Japan, there are Yuru characters who make you calm and relaxed just by looking at them.”

The epitome of yuru-kawaii is a bear known as Rilakkuma, a creation from Sanrio’s rival, the Japanese stationery company San-X. Rilakkuma’s name means “bear in a relaxed mood,” and the character leads a stress-free life. Pictures do not lie:

It took approximately 14 seconds of staring at this cute motherfucker for me to fall in love. My heartbeat slowed. My breathing got deeper. I forgot about the laundry I have to do and the dishes in my sink. I let go of my work-related anxiety. I just imagined myself as the tiny yellow bird, wearing a tiny outfit, hanging out with my two bear pals and just enjoying a cozy life. Staring at this bear made me feel better.

When Kakeda explains the difference between Rilakkuma and Gudetama, she uses the word “negative” to differentiate the two. It’s an apt distinction. Rilakkuma is about the positivity of relaxation. Gudetama isn’t so much about relaxation as about the unbearableness of the world around it. Gudetama, in its golden nakedness, questions the meaning of life.

If idleness is true bliss, Gudetama asks, then isn’t anything more than that painful?

Gudetama is so goddamn popular because of the turmoil that exists all around us

Artistic cuteness, as myriad Japanese artists and academics have theorized, doesn’t just happen in a bubble. Cuteness is a reaction. In Japan, the kawaii culture and concept is often linked to the country’s post-WWII years. The idea is that because of its trauma and defeat, the country leaned into its vulnerability — with vulnerability becoming a crucial element in the basic definition of kawaii.

Sanrio’s Marchi notes that though Gudetama has been popular in Japan since it was first introduced, it’s really begun to find its American audience over the past year or so. That lines up with a period that many Americans believe was one of the worst in recent memory.

In the past 18 months, Americans have witnessed the deaths of pop culture icons, political upheaval, and seismic shifts in the country’s foreign policy. A never-ending news cycle has been punctuated by repeated stories of police brutality, divisive political rhetoric that devolved into bigotry, hate crimes and a focus on white supremacist groups, and mass shootings like the one that took place at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando.

Politically, Americans are more divided than ever, and we’re also more connected than ever, making it nearly impossible to escape the relentlessness of 2016.

And culture has responded to the tumultuous, uncertain state of the world by shining a spotlight on the idea of “self-care.” There’s been a rise in people’s fascination with hygge, the Danish concept of impossible coziness — a kind of intangible umami for the soul derived from fires, blankets, and hot cocoa. In Japan, there’s a burgeoning new concept of Otonamaki, in which grown adults wrap themselves in a tight cloth pouch (they resemble human dumplings) for 20 minutes at a time to relieve stress.

And think about how many cute videos, pictures, and GIFs have been touted as “self-care” of late — as in “21 Heartwarming Dogs That Are Guaranteed To Make Your Day Better,” or “We All Need This Cute Animal 'Tweet-Off' Right Now.” In that context, Gudetama’s popularity makes a lot of sense.

When we share cute pictures of a puppy or kitten with our friends or post them on social media, we’re not only sending out an image of an adorable animal that needs to be cared for; we’re sending the message that we, too, are cute and want to be loved. When we share someone else’s cute animal video, we’re implicitly saying that this video, photo, meme, or GIF made us feel good or better, and suggesting that other people might need it too.

Similarly, feeling an emotional response to Gudetama videos and then sharing them with your friends is a way to say you’re over it, or that you literally just can’t with this world anymore. When every headline you read seems crazier than the last, wanting to escape into Gudetama’s world of breakfast and baseline existence doesn’t seem that weird.

As Freedman puts it, “Curl under your bacon blanket and don’t come out.”

It’s telling that Sanrio’s latest character is more like Gudetama than Hello Kitty

“I definitely see some associations that if someone was pretty much over everything that was going on in 2016, Gudetama would be a fairly relatable character in that aspect,” Sanrio’s Marchi told me. “On the same side, I've also seen in a lot of people if they were not necessarily having a great 2016, they could turn to a character such as Gudetama or even Hello Kitty for that instance and find at least some sort of emotional connection.”

But there’s a gulf of difference between Gudetama and Hello Kitty. Hello Kitty is both more traditionally cute than Gudetama and somewhat emotionless — she doesn’t even have a mouth to smile or frown with. That makes her more of a blank canvas; she can be whatever we want her to be. But many people feel a connection with Gudetama because of its specific personality.

And Sanrio has started to capitalize on this response.

Last year, the company introduced Aggretsuko — the word “aggressive” combined with the proper name Retsuko — to its English-speaking audience. Aggretsuko is a red panda with an office job, complete with annoying co-workers. To blow off steam, she spends her nights drinking and singing death metal at karaoke bars (as seen in the video above).

Aggretsuko is fascinating in that she, according to Freedman, is a gentle parody of the Japanese working woman archetype called the “OL,” or office lady, which popped up in the ’80s. OLs were women employees in “pink collar” or service jobs who were assumed to have a polite, demure personality. Aggretsuko tears down that stereotype, showing us she’s more than just “polite.” Indeed, she’s completely honest about how the arduous the task of putting up with her annoying co-workers can be.

And while Aggretsuko is playing off a docile, nostalgic Japanese figure that many Americans probably aren’t familiar with, her frustration and the crevasse between one’s work self and one’s true self is universal.

Though her personality is nothing like that of Gudetama, Aggretsuko is part of its odd and important legacy. The lazy egg with a butt has changed Sanrio’s concept of cute, as well as people’s response to it.

Cute is more than just a look. It has the power to change us, be the salve to our greatest frustrations and fears, and perhaps show us something in ourselves that we didn’t know we needed — especially if your true self is an egg with a butt and a distaste for life.

What the hell is going on with North Korea, explained

2017-04-17T15:50:02-04:00

It’s been a scary few days on the Korean Peninsula. Here’s what’s happening.

It’s been a scary few days on the Korean Peninsula. In just the past two days, North Korea’s reclusive government has held a massive military parade, flubbed a missile test, and threatened nuclear war with the US.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration, which recently ordered the US Navy to deploy an aircraft carrier strike group to the waters off North Korea, sent Vice President Mike Pence to the North Korean border to warn that Washington’s era of “strategic patience” toward the North had ended — a comment many interpreted as a veiled military threat to Pyongyang.

Hanging over it all were unconfirmed reports in the US media that the White House was considering a preemptive strike on North Korea.

Bellicose rhetoric is pretty standard fare when it comes to North Korea, and doesn’t necessarily mean that armed conflict — let alone nuclear war — is anywhere close to breaking out. What’s new here is that the Trump administration is openly threatening the country in a way that neither the Bush nor Obama administration was willing to do, openly saying that it is prepared to use military force to rein in North Korea’s nuclear program.

Pyongyang has responded in kind, promising to raze US military bases in South Korea, calling them “the strongholds of evil.”

And the fact that all of these events have happened since Wednesday is a stark reminder that it’s North Korea, and not Russia or ISIS, that might actually pose the gravest and most immediate threat to American national security.

Here’s a quick guide to what happened and what it all means.

Rumors of a North Korean nuclear test and a possible US preemptive military strike

On Wednesday evening, reports began circulating that North Korea (formally known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or DPRK for short) was poised to carry out an underground nuclear weapon test.

US gov’t and other sources say #DPRK has apparently placed a nuclear device in a tunnel and it could be detonated Saturday AM #Korea time.
— Steve Herman (@W7VOA) April 12, 2017

Around the same time, reporters on the ground in North Korea — who had been invited by the government to cover an upcoming military parade — started tweeting that they were being rounded up and put on buses to be taken to an undisclosed location.

Journalists in #Pyongyang are getting awaken and into buses apparently, destination? pic.twitter.com/TSzPaAEqVh
— Chris Koseloglou (@chriskose) April 12, 2017

They had previously been told by the regime to expect a “big and important event” to take place that day, and many speculated they were being taken to a nearby nuclear testing site to witness what would be the country’s sixth nuclear test.

Turns out they were being taken to witness the opening of a new street that was completed last month. That’s it. A street. (To be fair, it is a pretty nice street.)

Yet rumors of an impending nuclear test persisted. Then on Thursday, NBC News came out with an anonymously sourced but profoundly unsettling story:

BREAKING: Sources: US prepares for possible preemptive strike if North Korea chooses to test nuclear weapon. https://t.co/qafmDDMqcg
— NBC Nightly News (@NBCNightlyNews) April 13, 2017

The report, which cited unnamed intelligence officials, said the US was “prepared to launch a preemptive strike with conventional weapons against North Korea should officials become convinced that North Korea is about to follow through with a nuclear weapons test.”

This, of course, was a terrifying development: A US military strike against North Korea could prompt that country’s volatile leader, Kim Jong Un, to launch a devastating military strike against South Korea, a staunch US ally defended by American troops stationed there. In other words, this could potentially launch an all-out war with North Korea.

Luckily, it seems the NBC News report was wrong. Multiple other news outlets were unable to confirm that initial report, and defense and intelligence officials aggressively downplayed the possibility of a preemptive strike, calling the report “wildly wrong,” “crazy,” and “extremely dangerous,” according to Fox News’s Jennifer Griffin.

NBC may have gotten the story wrong, but the very fact that the substance of the article seemed plausible was a vivid illustration of how quickly the standoff with North Korea has intensified. The Trump administration’s aggressive rhetoric toward North Korea made a story about what would be an American act of war against the world’s most dangerous and least predictable regime sound like a viable possibility.

And that alone is disturbing.

A military parade, a failed missile test, and (more) threats of nuclear war

AP Photo/Wong Maye-E

North Korean soldiers carry flags and a photo of late leader Kim Il Sung during a military parade on April 15, 2017, in Pyongyang.

On Saturday, North Korea held a huge military parade to celebrate the “Day of the Sun.” It’s one of the biggest, most important annual celebrations for the regime, celebrating the anniversary of the 1912 birth of Kim Il Sung, North Korea’s founder and the current leader’s grandfather.

The spectacle featured tens of thousands of soldiers marching in perfect unison, military aircraft flying in formation, and a dazzling array of military hardware rolling through Pyongyang's main Kim Il Sung Square — including large canisters that analysts said could be carrying new types of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that could one day be capable of hitting the United States.

“This was a promise of future capabilities more than a demonstration of existing missiles,” Joe Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, which tries to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, told the Washington Post. “We do not know if there is actually an ICBM in that canister. But it is certainly coming.”

Though the 33-year-old dictator was in attendance at the parade, Kim didn’t address the crowd himself. One of his close aides did, though, delivering a pugnacious speech aimed directly at the United States.

"If the United States wages reckless provocation against us, our revolutionary power will instantly counter with annihilating strike, and we will respond to full-out war with full-out war and to nuclear war with our style of nuclear strike warfare," Choe Ryong Hae, one of the most powerful officials in the North Korean government, declared.

The chest-pounding threat was somewhat undercut a few hours later when the North Korean military attempted a missile launch — only to see it blow up "almost immediately," according to US military officials. What was intended to be a strong, defiant show of force quickly became an international embarrassment.

Vice President Mike Pence has some harsh words for North Korea

The failed missile launch also came mere hours before Vice President Pence landed in South Korea as part of a 10-day swing through Asia. While there, he made a surprise trip to the heavily fortified border with North Korea — known as the demilitarized zone, or DMZ — and delivered a strong message to Pyongyang.

“Just in the past two weeks, the world witnessed the strength and resolve of our new president in actions taken in Syria and Afghanistan,” he told reporters. “North Korea would do well not to test his resolve or the strength of the armed forces of the United States in this region.”

Echoing an earlier statement from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Pence told CNN that the administration was “going to abandon the failed policy of strategic patience.” This refers to the Obama administration’s approach toward North Korea, which essentially entailed working with international partners to increase pressure on the North Korean regime in the hope that it eventually to choose to give up its nuclear weapons on its own.

A shift in policy — or just a shift in rhetoric?

All of this sounds threatening, and it is certainly a clear rhetorical shift from the last administration. Until recently, though, we haven’t seen much in the way of real, substantive policy changes out of the Trump White House when it comes to North Korea. For instance, Trump has made a big deal out of his attempts to coerce China into taking a bigger role in trying to get North Korea under control.

But while Trump may be going about this more aggressively than has been done in the past — he seems to have offered China some economic concessions if they agree to be tougher on North Korea, for example — this is essentially the same basic policy that the Obama administration pursued with China.

Similarly, the US military announced in early March that it had officially begun the deployment of the THAAD anti-ballistic missile defense system in South Korea.

THAAD, which stands for Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, is designed to detect and then intercept incoming ballistic missiles in their “terminal” phase — that is, when they’re on the way down, not on the way up. It’s a system that’s already deployed in Guam on an “expeditionary” basis, and is now being deployed in South Korea to protect against any incoming missiles from the North.

While that might sound like a pretty aggressive policy move by the Trump administration, the deployment of the THAAD system to South Korea had actually been in the works for months, going back to the Obama administration. And despite it being a highly controversial move that has angered China and even some in South Korea, Trump clearly agreed with his predecessor that deploying THAAD was an important part of the strategy to protect the close US ally from any threat by North Korea.

In other words, until recently, the difference between the Obama administration’s approach to North Korea and the Trump administration’s had largely been a change in the degree of intensity, not a change in actual substance. Trump seemed to be following the same basic policies that the Obama administration did, albeit slightly more aggressively.

That may be changing. On April 9, just days after the last North Korean missile test, the Trump administration announced it was sending the 97,000-ton USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier, along with a guided-missile cruiser and two destroyers, to the waters off the Korean Peninsula.

That kind of military move on the part of the US lends some serious heft to the Trump administration’s forceful public statements. An aircraft carrier heading your way sends a message that no amount of belligerent late-night tweets can.

All of this means that the long-simmering North Korea situation may now be entering a new level of crisis; there’s a new sheriff in town in Washington, and as his recent actions in Syria and Afghanistan seem to be signaling, he’s not afraid to use force to get his message across, consequences be damned. How the unruly North Korean outlaw will ultimately respond remains to be seen.

Courts halt Arkansas’s plan to execute 8 people in 11 days

2017-04-17T10:00:11-04:00

The state is racing to kill these inmates as quickly as possible — all to avoid a drug’s expiration date.

The state of Arkansas is racing to kill eight people as quickly as possible.

This month, Arkansas planned to execute eight convicted murderers in just 11 days. Don Davis and Bruce Ward were to be executed on April 17, Ledell Lee and Stacey Johnson on April 20, Marcel Williams and Jack Jones on April 24, and Kenneth Williams and Jason McGehee on April 27.

But over the past several weeks, multiple court rulings have put the executions on hold. The courts varied in their reasoning, with one court raising issues over a drug used in the executions and another siding with pharmaceutical companies contesting the use of their drug in executions. Two separate rulings gave reprieves to Ward and McGehee as well. The state is appealing at least some of the decisions.

Arkansas hasn’t executed anyone in 12 years. The state’s 11 days of executions would have represented more than 20 percent of its 34 death row inmates.

“This is unprecedented,” Robert Dunham, executive director at the policy and research group the Death Penalty Information Center, told me. “No state has ever attempted to execute this many people in such a short period of time.”

But the rushed schedule creates all sorts of extra problems for the state. For one, it just looks grisly — that the state is moving forward so quickly has already inspired a few articles calling for Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who scheduled the executions, to slow down. It also poses several public safety problems, from increasing the risk that these executions will be botched to the potential risk of trauma for prison personnel who’ll oversee the executions. And it may, as court rulings suggest, violate inmates’ rights to appeal.

Yet the state tried to move forward anyway.

Arkansas is trying to execute prisoners before a drug expires

Arkansas’s main concern is that its midazolam will expire at the end of the month.

Universal Images Group via Getty Images

A close-up of sodium thiopental in a tray.

Dennis McGuire in Ohio took 26 minutes to die after the state used a mixture of hydromorphone and midazolam. McGuire gasped and snorted before he died.
Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma struggled violently and groaned after the state injected a combination of midazolam, vecuronium bromide, and potassium chloride. Officials halted the execution, but Lockett died 43 minutes after the drugs were injected.
Joseph Wood in Arizona took nearly two hours to die after the state used a mixture of hydromorphone and midazolam. Wood, who gasped and gulped before he died, was injected with 15 times the amount of drugs called for in the state’s execution protocol by the time he was pronounced dead.

Now Arkansas’s reliance on midazolam is leading it to try to speed up its execution timeline — and potentially putting inmates and state staff at greater risk of harm.

The quick execution process puts everyone involved at risk

Killing so many prisoners so quickly certainly looks bad. But there are substantive problems with Arkansas’s execution timetable as well — which can affect not just the inmates but prison staff too.

For one, the quick turnaround reduces the inmates’ chances for appeal. Hutchinson scheduled the executions in late February, giving the inmates very little time to prepare their appeals for clemency or any other appeals to courts.

“Under state law, they’re supposed to have 30 days each to prepare their clemency applications and a meaningful opportunity to present witnesses and a meaningful opportunity for the board of wardens to consider the clemency applications before making a recommendation to the government,” Dunham said. “It’s impossible for that to happen given the schedule that was approved by Gov. Hutchinson.”

Still, these death sentences go back decades, going through appeals over the years. And while there’s evidence that at least some of these inmates got inadequate legal representation, the state apparently feels the time for these sentences has come. But a court apparently disagreed, staying at least one of the eight executions because the quick timeline violated an inmate’s rights to seek clemency.

Another problem is that the quick timetable could lead to botched executions. The logic here is simple: If a team is forced to carry out multiple executions in a short time span, it’s more likely to make mistakes.

In fact, the last time a state tried to do two executions in one day with midazolam, it was the horribly botched Lockett execution in Oklahoma. A state report on Lockett’s death subsequently concluded that scheduling executions in such a short time frame created “extra stress” for staff, contributing to the disaster that followed. The report recommended that Oklahoma space out executions by at least seven days.

It’s easy to imagine that a lethal injection is a simple process: You stick a needle in the prisoner, the drugs flow in, and you’re done. But it’s really not that easy.

For example, Dunham said, “In many instances, it [involves] trying to place an IV line in the veins of a prisoner who might’ve been an intravenous drug user and so not have easily accessible veins. It is often a task that would be difficult for trained medical personnel to handle.” And if something does go wrong, properly trained, well-rested staff are more likely to catch problems.

Yet as Dunham noted, it’s not even trained medical personnel handling the executions (as far as we know), but prison staff who may have no experience with a real execution.

Mike Simons/Getty Images

A death chamber in Ohio.

This is on top of the problems already tied to lethal injections, which are more likely to go wrong than other methods of execution. According to Austin Sarat’s book Gruesome Spectacles, while about 3 percent of all executions between 1890 and 2010 were botched, about 7 percent of lethal injections — double the rate for all executions — were. And this was largely before states started to make greater use of midazolam, which is less proven for the death penalty than the previous lethal injection cocktail.

This many executions in such a short time frame could also be traumatic for prison staff, as former prison leaders pointed out in a recent letter to Hutchinson.

“Even under less demanding circumstances, carrying out an execution can take a severe toll on corrections officers’ wellbeing,” they wrote. “For those of us who have participated in or overseen executions, we have directly experienced the psychological challenges of the experience and its aftermath. Others of us have witnessed this same strain in our colleagues.”

Indeed, prison leaders have long warned that even executions carried out properly can lead to problems like depression and post-traumatic stress disorder among prison staff. If an execution goes wrong and the execution staffers have reason to believe they were somehow responsible, the chances of trauma are even higher.

For Dunham, these types of concerns are what make Arkansas’s plans so alarming. It’s not about opposition to the death penalty; it’s about carrying out the death penalty in the best way possible.

“This has got nothing to do with whether you’re for the death penalty or against the death penalty,” he said. “It has everything to do with humanity and whether you want the death penalty, if it’s carried out, to be done so in a way that respects human dignity and that attempts to minimize the risk of harm to everyone involved.”

Execution drugs have become harder and harder to obtain

Since around 2010, drug suppliers around the world, including in the US, have refused to supply drugs for lethal injections — out of either opposition to the death penalty or concerns about having their products associated with executions.

David McNew/Getty Images

But as governments and the International Academy of Compounding Pharmacists cracked down on the drugs’ imports for executions, even these supplies dwindled.

Yet somehow some states have managed to continue getting these drugs, although often while passing secrecy laws that make it impossible to find out where exactly the drugs are coming from.

The referendum that just brought Turkey closer to one-man rule, explained

2017-04-17T09:40:01-04:00

Turkish voters just gave their president frightening amounts of new powers.

ISTANBUL — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has publicly feuded with the US, likened the German government to Nazis, jailed more journalists than any other leader in the world, and arrested tens of thousands of his own people on suspect charges.

Now a slim majority of Turkish voters have just approved constitutional changes designed to make the strongman even stronger.

In a razor-close referendum vote on Sunday, Turks gave Erdoğan considerable new powers while leaving him subject to few, if any, meaningful checks and balances. The results — which could require up to 12 days to fully certify, according to the chief election official — were extraordinarily close, with Erdoğan’s “Yes” camp prevailing with just over 51 percent of the vote. In what could be a harbinger of political instability ahead, the “No” camp prevailed in Turkey’s three biggest population centers, including Istanbul. Opposition leaders have demanded the review of a large number of allegedly problematic ballots.

The referendum, if fully implemented, would change Turkey from a parliamentary democracy into one run by a strong executive president who will absorb all the current functions of the prime minister. The new president will be free from accountability to the country's parliament, will wield broad budgetary powers, and will have complete autonomy to shape the executive branch as he sees fit.

In the new system, Erdoğan will also be poised to exercise significant control over the judiciary — undermining the separation of powers and leaving an incredible concentration of unregulated authority in the president’s hands.

Topping it off, the just-approved amendments allow him to run for additional presidential terms that could extend his stay in power until 2029. At best, Turkey appears set to cement its status as an illiberal democracy, where individual rights will not be guaranteed. At worst, opponents fear, the country’s frightening slide toward authoritarianism has just accelerated.

That’s bad news for Erdoğan’s own people, but also for Washington and the leaders of other countries that until recently held Turkey up as a model of Muslim democracy — and who would welcome steadier behavior from a vital ally in one of the world’s most dangerous and unstable regions.

Now, it seems that Turkey could be indefinitely under the thumb of a thin-skinned leader willing to use his vast powers to crack down on dissent at home and to pick fights with any foreign government perceived to slight him or to challenge his dismal human rights record.

This is not a theoretical concern in Turkey, which holds the dubious distinction of being the world’s leading jailer of journalists, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

It’s not only reporters who have felt his wrath. In the aftermath of a failed coup attempt last summer, Erdoğan summarily dismissed more than 100,000 public sector employees from their jobs for suspected (but unproven) ties to the group allegedly responsible for the coup plotters. Another 47,000 people remain in jail while awaiting trial on coup-related charges; many Western observers believe the arrests were politically motivated.

How did Turkey wind up on the verge of formalizing one-man rule? Much of the answer has to do with that man himself, who inspires fear among his critics but passionate devotion among his supporters.

But another element of the story — familiar to Americans in the age of Donald Trump — has to do with the difficulty of reasoned democratic debate in a world where “alternative facts,” information silos, and conspiracy theories deprive citizens of a common view of reality. Facts have become slippery things over the past decade in Turkey, where the true alignment of political forces has often been difficult to discern, and where fake news is rife.

“The US has one Breitbart,” Soli Özel, a newspaper columnist and professor of political science at Kadir Has University in Istanbul, told me. “Turkey has many.”

A nationalist leader with authoritarian tendencies, the support of a fiercely partisan media, and a willingness to spread conspiracy theories is about to complete a political takeover that would have unimaginable even a few years ago. Sound familiar?

Meet Turkey’s populist, polarizing, and incredibly powerful president

Erdoğan spent months lobbying the public to vote “Yes” in the referendum, blanketing the airwaves and covering Turkey in billboards and giant banners featuring his face alongside simple appeals to patriotism and national unity. He and his allies have defended the system as a democratic upgrade and stressed that the new system will promote national security. “After April 16, Turkey can fight terrorist organizations and powers that support those organizations in a more determined manner,” Erdoğan stated at a pre-referendum rally on Thursday.

His many opponents saw things very differently. To them, Erdoğan was making a naked power grab allowing him to rule supreme. "Turkey is at a junction,” declared opposition party leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu on the evening before the referendum. “Do we want a democratic parliamentary system or do we want a one-man regime?”

At base, the just-adopted constitutional revisions will legalize Erdoğan’s considerable informal power by transferring all authorities now lodged with the prime minister to the president (and eliminating the former position). They will also expand his ability to promulgate laws by decree, insulate him and executive branch appointees from legislative oversight, and increase his ability to pack the judiciary with allies.

While the legislature will not be completely neutralized in constitutional terms, it seems destined to become a rubber stamp for the foreseeable future given control by Erdoğan’s party.

The new system will go into effect in 2019, following national elections that Erdoğan is expected to win. He’ll also continue to wield significant power in the meantime with the cooperation of a compliant prime minister and through the state of emergency measures in place since an attempted coup last summer.

This vote may have changed Turkey forever

Erdoğan, the central actor in Turkish politics since his party swept to power in 2002, has always been distrusted by many members of Turkey’s more established and highly secular middle and upper classes. They worry about his efforts to give Islam a larger role in public life, including supporting laws limiting alcohol sales and making statements urging women to assume traditional roles focused on childbearing and child care. On International Women’s Day in Ankara last summer, for instance, he said pointedly that “a woman is above all a mother.”

A segment of Erdoğan’s critics also felt anxiety at his efforts to roll back the powers of the country’s military, traditionally the guarantor of the country’s secular traditions (and which have mounted three successful coups when they were uncomfortable with the direction of the country).

To his supporters, though, Erdoğan was a defender of their values dedicated to modernizing and opening up the Turkish economy, making the Turkish government more effective and less corrupt, and giving Turkey a place in the EU. In a move dear to its base, Erdoğan’s party also expanded civil liberties for observant Muslims, particularly for women who, under laws intended to uphold a strict interpretation of secularism, were previously banned from wearing headscarves in schools, at universities, or on other state property.

Under Erdoğan’s leadership, Turkey’s Kurdish minority — which accounts for roughly 20 percent of the population — gained expanded cultural rights and more freedom to use their own language. Erdoğan also initiated peace talks with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a secessionist group whose bloody insurgency has killed more than 40,000 people since 1984. Erdoğan managed to secure a ceasefire that held from 2013 to 2015.

Along the way, Erdoğan moved to reduce the political role of the military, designated by Turkey’s founding constitution as a “guardian” of republican values — a duty used as justification for coups in 1960, 1971, and 1980 and for a range of more subtle military interventions.

Liberal Turks who had long felt the military had too much power initially supported those moves, but Erdoğan began to alienate them with attempts to accumulate more power himself, including through legal proposals for an executive presidency. That project went nowhere for years, until parliamentary approval earlier this year set up the referendum that has now given him the kind of power he has wanted for so long.

Liberal flight from Erdoğan — and even criticism from within his party — reached new heights in 2013, when he responded harshly and with force to a national wave of demonstrations that began with a sit-in defending Istanbul’s Gezi Park from destruction to build a shopping center and ended with criminal charges against 255 people. Riot police actions injured an estimated 8,000 people and killed four, including a teenage boy hit in the head with a tear-gas canister whose death sparked ongoing outrage and resentment.

On the evening of July 15, 2016, a faction within the military launched an attempted coup against Erdoğan, whom they unsuccessfully tried snatch from a seaside villa. Coup leaders bombed the Turkish parliament and engaged in gunfights with pro-government forces on the streets of Istanbul and Ankara. By the next morning, the poorly organized takeover attempt had collapsed — in large part due to Erdoğan’s success in rallying massive popular resistance by his followers through FaceTime.

A brief moment of national unity followed, but this quickly vanished in an aggressive hunt for followers of Fethullah Gülen, a Pennsylvania-based Turkish cleric that Erdoğan accuses of masterminding the coup. Erdoğan has demanded that the US extradite the cleric back home, a step Washington has refused to take because of the unconvincing nature of the evidence that Turkey has presented on Gülen’s coup involvement.

Back home, Erdoğan has used the coup to rapidly consolidate power and eliminate his real and perceived enemies. As of April 2, when the latest official figures were released, more than 113,000 people had been at least temporarily detained in connection with the coup plot, and more than 20,000 police officers, military personnel, judges, and prosecutors were in custody. Many thousands more teachers and other state employees have lost their jobs on the basis of alleged Gülenist ties.

The post-coup crackdown also led to the arrests of member of the press and intelligentsia, including a veteran newspaper columnist and a best-selling novelist, accused of Gülenist links. The leaders of the party representing Turkish Kurds, meanwhile, have been jailed since November on charges of involvement with the PKK. University professors who signed a petition calling for a renewed peace process with the PKK are reportedly under investigation, and many have been dismissed from their jobs.

More broadly, many Turks speak of a tense post-coup atmosphere characterized by self-censorship and a sense that any conversations conducted in the open are subject to state surveillance.

It was in this climate of repression, paranoia, and confusion that Erdoğan renewed his controversial bid to shift Turkey from its parliamentary roots to a system where he stands to wield nearly unfettered power. And it’s in this atmosphere that he’s now gained it.

Never underestimate the power of government propaganda

I’ve seen many of those changes firsthand. I've been traveling to Turkey on at least an annual basis since 2004, first as a tourist, then to conduct PhD research on the role of the military in Turkish politics. My tenure as a Turkey-watcher has coincided with the Erdoğan era. From one visit to another, I see the changes over which he has presided: the massive increase in women wearing headscarves, the expansion in prosperity, and — in the wake of last summer's coup -- both the absence of soldiers where I'm accustomed to seeing them and the disappearance of familiar newspapers that have run afoul of the government.

Erdoğan’s staying power and his success in the referendum appear to owe much to his ability to use conspiracy theories as a motivating force, painting repression and the search for power as defenses against sinister forces. And if his followers buy into the notion of secret forces arrayed against their leader and the nation, this may stem from the fact that some of his previous conspiracy theories seem to have emerged as at least partly true.

The leading example concerns the Gülen movement. Once allied with Erdoğan and his party, Gülenists in the police force and judicial services are suspected of leaking recordings of phone calls between Erdoğan and his son that imply his receipt of, and attempts to conceal, large sums of money, the recordings surfaced in the midst of an investigation into government associates’ receipt of bribes to rig state tenders, suggesting Erdoğan’s involvement in the scheme.

Erdoğan claimed that recordings were false creations of enemies who were targeting him as part of a sinister bid to take over the state.

Any doubts about such claims were largely erased by the July coup, where even many Erdoğan critics rallied around the president. Claims of Fethullah Gülen’s personal involvement in the coup and Erdoğan’s designation of the Gülenist movement as a terrorist organization face continued skepticism and resistance from the governments of the US, UK, and Germany, but the narrative of Gülenist responsibility is now well entrenched and widely accepted in Turkey.

That, in turn, played an important role in the referendum campaign, with Erdoğan claiming that the executive presidency will enable him to better fight terrorism, from both the Gülenists and others.

Erdoğan spun other conspiracy theories in the lead-up to the referendum. These include suggestions that the “No” campaign amounts to a front for an alliance composed of the Gülen movement, Kurdish separatist terrorists, and hostile European governments, all tacitly united by a desire to weaken Turkey. In the latter days of the campaign he alleged that the leader of the “No” campaign had secretive contact with the July 2016 coup leaders on the night of the attempted takeover — an unsubstantiated charge vehemently rejected by the target.

The propaganda worked.

“Regardless of their actual views on the constitutional changes, Erdoğan's supporters feel the need to support him after the coup,” Berkay Mandıracı, an Istanbul-based analyst at the International Crisis Group, noted in an interview. “Many of them probably sincerely believe that in strengthening him, they will be strengthening Turkey against the kinds of external and internal threats, some real and some perceived, that the president has constantly emphasized during his efforts to mobilize them."

Now what?

Erdoğan won’t technically gain his new powers until after simultaneous presidential and legislative elections scheduled for November 2019. Growing speculation, however, suggests that he may prefer to move this election forward in order to take on his new powers at an earlier date. Assuming he wins, which seems likely but is far from guaranteed, how will he use his long-sought executive presidential role?

Optimists hope that having gotten what he has long desired, Erdoğan will abandon the confrontational style of recent years to make an at least partial return to his earlier reformist self. A softening of his rhetoric in recent referendum campaign addresses to Kurdish audiences has hinted that he is open to restarting stalled peace talks with the PKK. Ankara-based political commentator Özgür Ünlühısarcıklı has predicted a possible post-election “charm-offensive” in Europe.

But other recent promises, such as one to reinstate the death penalty, removed from the Turkish law code to conform to EU standards, appear to cut the other way.

Foreign governments are just as curious about his future course of action. The Trump administration is waiting to see whether Erdoğan will change course in Syria, where Turkey has mixed attacks on ISIS with attacks on US-supported Kurdish militias also fighting the terrorist group. European governments are waiting to see if he’ll stop calling their leaders Nazis. Israel is waiting to see if Erdoğan will abandon his lacerating public criticism and rebuild the longstanding military ties between the two countries.

It may take years to have answers to those questions, and few things are ever certain in Turkey. But if Recep Tayyip Erdoğan gets his way, he will be the one making all the major decisions for this country well into the future.

Why we pretend to know things, explained by a cognitive scientist

2017-04-16T10:25:00-04:00

New research explains why we pretend to know more than we do.

Why do people pretend to know things? Why does confidence so often scale with ignorance? Steven Sloman, a professor of cognitive science at Brown University, has some compelling answers to these questions.

“We're biased to preserve our sense of rightness,” he told me, “and we have to be.”

The author of The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone, Sloman’s research focuses on judgment, decision-making, and reasoning. He’s especially interested in what’s called “the illusion of explanatory depth.” This is how cognitive scientists refer to our tendency to overestimate our understanding of how the world works.

We do this, Sloman says, because of our reliance on other minds.

“The decisions we make, the attitudes we form, the judgments we make, depend very much on what other people are thinking,” he said.

If the people around us are wrong about something, there’s a good chance we will be too. Proximity to truth compounds in the same way.

In this interview, Sloman and I talk about the problem of unjustified belief. I ask him about the political implications of his research, and if he thinks the rise of “fake news” and “alternative facts” has amplified our cognitive biases.

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Sean Illing

How do people form opinions?

Steven Sloman

I really do believe that our attitudes are shaped much more by our social groups than they are by facts on the ground. We are not great reasoners. Most people don't like to think at all, or like to think as little as possible. And by most, I mean roughly 70 percent of the population. Even the rest seem to devote a lot of their resources to justifying beliefs that they want to hold, as opposed to forming credible beliefs based only on fact.

Think about if you were to utter a fact that contradicted the opinions of the majority of those in your social group. You pay a price for that. If I said I voted for Trump, most of my academic colleagues would think I'm crazy. They wouldn't want to talk to me. That's how social pressure influences our epistemological commitments, and it often does it in imperceptible ways.

Sean Illing

This is another way of saying that we live in a community of knowledge.

Steven Sloman

That's right. I believe every thought we have depends on thoughts that other people are having. When I cross the street, my actions depend on the thoughts that are going through the mind of the driver's head. If I get on the bus, the success of my endeavor depends on the thoughts that are going on in the bus driver's head.

When I express an attitude about immigration, what am I really doing? What do I really know about immigration? I live in a very limited universe, and so I have to depend on the beliefs and knowledge of other people. I know what I’ve read; I know what I’ve heard from experts. I don’t have any direct experience of the immigration problem; I haven’t visited the border and studied it myself.

In that sense, the decisions we make, the attitudes we form, the judgments we make, depend very much on what other people are thinking.

Sean Illing

There are some obvious dangers here, right?

Steven Sloman

One danger is that if I think I understand because the people around me think they understand, and the people around me all think they understand because the people around them all think they understand, then it turns out we can all have this strong sense of understanding even though no one really has any idea what they're talking about.

Sean Illing

I’m trying to think about all of this in terms of our political circumstances. Most of us don’t understand as much as we think, and yet we’re all cocksure about a range of issues. So when we are arguing about politics, what are we really arguing about? Is it about getting it right or is it about preserving our sense of rightness?

Steven Sloman

I'm not sure there's a sharp distinction between wanting to get it right and wanting to preserve our sense of rightness. In the political domain, like most domains in which we don't just hear or see what's true, we rely on social consensus. So argument is about trying to convince others while we're trying to convince ourselves. Getting it right essentially means we're convinced.

Of course, we're biased to preserve our sense of rightness, but we have to be. If we weren't, we'd be starting again each time we approached an issue; our previous arguments would be for naught.

Nevertheless, people differ on this. Everyone has a compulsion to be right, meaning that they want the people around them to think they're right, and this is easily achieved by mouthing the things that the people around you say. And people who are more capable tend to be better at finding ways to interpret new facts in line with their community's preconceptions.

But some people do try to rise above the crowd: to verify claims independently, to give fair hearing to others' claims, and to follow the data where it actually leads. In fact, many people are trained to do that: scientists, judges, forensic investigators, physicians, etc. That doesn't mean they always do (and they don't always), just that they're supposed to try.

I like to live in communities that put a premium on getting things right even when they fly in the face of social norms. This means living with constant tension, but it's worth it.

Sean Illing

This phenomenon, the “illusion of explanatory depth,” applies equally to people on the left and the right. This isn’t a partisan problem; it’s a human problem.

Steven Sloman

That's exactly right, and our data shows this clearly.

Sean Illing

How do you collect that data? What sorts of experiments have you done to tease out these tendencies?

Steven Sloman

I run experiments in my lab and over the internet. We try to find representative groups of Americans and ask them questions, mostly hypothetical questions. In the case of the illusion with political policies, we ask people to rate their attitude and their understanding of a policy, then ask them to explain the policy (what it is and how it would lead to specific consequences), and then they rate their own understanding and their attitude again. We find that the attempt to explain reduces their sense of understanding and also makes their attitude less extreme, on average.

Sean Illing

Is it necessarily a bad thing that we rely on other people for much of our knowledge? Is this just a response to our bandwidth problem? There’s only so much we can know and learn for ourselves, so it seems we have little choice but to function as we do.

Steven Sloman

I think it's necessary. We have no choice. There's no way one head can master everything, so we have to depend on other people. This is a perfectly rational response to our condition. However, we don't have to live in an illusion. If we don't understand, we don't have to think that we understand. But I get that some people have to believe that they understand in order to get through life.

The problem is that too often our beliefs support ideas or policies that are totally unjustified.

Sean Illing

This is where we careen into troubling territory for me. Ignorance and confidence is a lethal cocktail. When someone's confidence scales with their ignorance, there's really no way to engage them.

Steven Sloman

That's absolutely right. This is a very dangerous kind of hubris. And our president is really example number one of this. But we have to think about the community that made this administration possible. As much as I hate hearing Trump lie, I get even crazier when I see that 44 percent of the American population put more faith in his words than in the mainstream media.

That's what makes me crazy, because that's what gives him his power.

[Author’s note: the latest Quinnipiac Poll indicates that 37 percent of Americans trust Trump more than the media.]

Sean Illing

Well this is why the preponderance of "fake news" and "alternative facts" is so pernicious.

Steven Sloman

Absolutely. I worry about this on the right and, as you suggested, I worry about this on the left as well.

Sean Illing

Is there any evidence to suggest that we’re getting better at reasoning? Are we gradually overcoming our cognitive biases?

Steven Sloman

My reaction to this is so different than it would've been eight months ago.

Sean Illing

I’m guessing you think the internet and our balkanized media landscape has made things worse.

Steven Sloman

It's very clear that we're even more in a bubble than we ever were. I've been shocked by how little I know about half the American population. I just can't get my head around the way they think at all. And that hasn't changed. Even though I make an effort, it's still the case that everyone around me sees things the way I do, and I'm sure nearly everyone in Grand Rapids, Michigan, sees things differently. But I don't talk to those people.

The internet is clearly making it worse in the sense that we can reach out and form these online communities of fellow believers. And the fact that our news is getting individualized makes it much worse. So, even if I want to understand what the other side sees, Google is constantly feeding me the things I want to see.

And that's bad for all of us.

Sean Illing

So do you have any thoughts in terms of practical solutions to this? How can we cultivate more self-awareness and less biased reasoning? How can we seek out wiser communities of knowledge?

Steven Sloman

People who are more reflective are less susceptible to the illusion. There are some simple questions you can use to measure reflectivity. They tend to have this form: How many animals of each kind did Moses load onto the ark? Most people say two, but more reflective people say zero. (It was Noah, not Moses who built the ark.)

The trick is to not only come to a conclusion, but to verify that conclusion. There are many communities that encourage verification (e.g., scientific, forensic, medical, judicial communities). You just need one person to say, "are you sure?" and for everyone else to care about the justification. There's no reason that every community could not adopt these kinds of norms. The problem of course is that there's a strong compulsion to make people feel good by telling them what they want to hear, and for everyone to agree. That's largely what gives us a sense of identity. There's a strong tension here.

My colleagues and I are studying whether one way to open up discourse is to try to change the nature of conversation from a focus on what people value to one about actual consequences. When you talk about actual consequences, you're forced into the weeds of what's actually happening, which is a diversion from our normal focus on our feelings and what's going on in our heads.

MOAB, the largest non-nuclear bomb ever used by the US military, explained

2017-04-14T10:59:19-04:00

The US military has just dropped a big bomb in Afghanistan.

The GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast, also called the “mother of all bombs” or MOAB for short, is the largest non-nuclear bomb ever used by the US military on the battlefield. The 11-ton weapon was first tested in 2003 but had never been used in combat prior to Thursday — when a US MC-130 aircraft dropped one on what it claims was a network of ISIS tunnels. 36 ISIS fighters were killed, according to the Afghan government, and the US military has not found any evidence of civilian casualties.

The obvious question, following such a high-profile show of strength, is what this means. Does this mean ISIS is a bigger threat in Afghanistan than we previously thought? Is this President Trump just following through on his campaign promise to “bomb the shit out of ISIS”? Is the Trump administration trying to send a signal to countries like North Korea and Iran that it means business?

According to experts on weapons and foreign policy, it seems this was a military decision, not a political one, based on the realities on the ground in Afghanistan right now. There’s no reason to assume this was something out of the ordinary, even though the bomb was bigger than ones typically used by the US military.

For one thing, a general, not the president, appears to have made the call to use the bomb — Gen. John Nicholson, commander of US forces in Afghanistan, specifically. For another, the nature of ISIS’s presence in Afghanistan means that it actually kind of does make sense to use this bomb. Finally, Trump himself suggested it was not intended to send any kind of message.

“I don’t know if it this sends a message; it doesn’t make any difference if it does or does not,” Trump told reporters on Thursday. “This was another very, very successful mission.”

The speculation, in short, was way over the top.

“There is so little trust ... in the Trump administration to make basic tactical decisions that everyone sort of assumes something crazy and weird is going on,” says Rob Farley, a professor at the University of Kentucky who studies the Air Force. “But I’d suggest not jumping to conclusions about what this particular weapon means.”

The more important questions here are the standard ones you should ask after any US airstrike. Did the strike accomplish its objectives? Are the initial reports that there were no civilian casualties correct? Were the appropriate precautions taken to minimize the risks of the strike? Was the strike proportional to the threat, and did the value of the military target justify the risk of killing innocents?

The fact that these questions remain unanswered, however, is normal at this point — they usually take a while to fully investigate, and we just heard about the bomb. But just because a larger-than-normal bomb was used here doesn’t mean there’s necessarily anything out of the ordinary.

Why the US military would use a MOAB

(USAF/Getty Images)

A smoke cloud created by a MOAB.

The MOAB is not only powerful but also extremely large in a physical sense. It’s so big that it can’t be delivered by a normal bomber; you need to put it in a cargo plane like the MC-130 in order to get it to a target. Cargo planes are easier to hit with anti-aircraft missiles than bombers, which means the MOAB is inherently somewhat riskier to use than smaller bombs.

The MOAB is designed to destroy a lot of targets on the surface — unlike the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP), the only US conventional bomb that’s larger than the MOAB (and one that has yet to be used in combat). The MOP is designed to destroy hardened tunnels and bunkers, whereas the MOAB is designed to destroy buildings and things just below the surface, like caves.

“The blast radius goes up to a mile,” Farley explains. “That does not mean everything within a mile dies — it means that everything within a mile has a potential to be affected. Structures that are a mile off, or three-quarters of a mile off, may not be destroyed based on how strong they are.”

These two facts of the MOAB — that it’s delivered by a cargo plane and that it destroys stuff on the surface — explain why it’s not used very commonly by the US military. Since the weapon was made ready for use in 2003, the US has fought a lot of missions in densely populated urban areas and/or specifically targeting smaller enemy troop deployments.

Those aren’t optimal situations for MOAB use because of the danger of collateral damage, and the added risk created by dropping it from a cargo plane means the US military rarely has a need to use it.

“It’s a weapon that has a narrow target set,” an Air Force official told me. “It’s primarily intended for soft to medium surface targets — targets like a cave and canyon environment.”

The area hit in Afghanistan appears to be one of the few targets that fit this profile.

The bomb site was in Achin District, a heavily agricultural area near the Pakistani border. Achin is also a hub of activity for ISIS-Khorasan — the name ISIS uses for its Afghanistan branch (Khorasan is a historical name jihadists often use for Afghanistan). If the US military is right — and we don’t know that it is — then a significant group of ISIS fighters were holed up in a large network of caves and tunnels in a relatively remote part of Afghanistan. It’s the rare case where using a MOAB makes sense.

As the group suffers mounting losses, Gen. Nicholson said in a statement emailed to press, it has begun to use things like bunkers and tunnels “to thicken their defense.” "This is the right munition to reduce these obstacles and maintain the momentum of our offensive,” Nicholson said.

This means less than you think

(Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

It’s easy to fixate on the use of such a huge bomb. But the truth of the matter is that the use of the MOAB means virtually nothing significant outside of the immediate area where the bomb was dropped. The mere use of a large bomb, in and of itself, is not strategically significant. There’s no evidence so far that the MOAB was used for any reason other than that it made sense to use it against this specific ISIS target.

It may be tempting to see this as evidence that the US is increasingly worried about ISIS’s influence in the country. But the truth appears to be closer to the opposite: ISIS’s forces have dropped by about 75 percent since their peak in late 2015, and the group has lost significant territory since then.

“By NATO's own estimates, it's something like 800 fighters countrywide, a big drop over past year,” Colin Cookman, an Afghanistan expert at the United States Institute of Peace, tweeted.

Nor does this bombing, in and of itself, augur a larger US intervention in that country.

“[It] means they are going after ISIS, otherwise nothing,” Barnett Rubin, a professor at Columbia University who studies Afghanistan, told me when I asked what he thought of the strike.

It has even less significance elsewhere. After the bomb was used, speculation turned almost immediately to the idea that President Trump was trying to intimidate American enemies. The Daily Mirror tabloid called it a “terrifying message to North Korea and other countries muscle-flexing against the US.”

But everything the US government has said so far suggests that the bomb was dropped for specific tactical reasons in Afghanistan, nothing more. Nor, experts say, does it really make sense as a way of threatening those countries.

“If you think about what a target profile might look like in either Iran or North Korea — both of those countries have air defense systems,” Farley says. “This is a weapon dropped from a C-130, which is not a stealthy aircraft and not really a combat aircraft at all. This is not a weapon you can drop on someone who has an active defense of the target — fighters or any kind of surface-to-air missile.”

Some overexcited coverage has even compared this bomb to a nuclear weapon, which nuclear experts think is completely absurd.

“Don't be fooled by the claim circulating in some quarters that the explosive yield of the MOAB rivals that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima,” Kingston Reif, director for disarmament and threat reduction policy at the Arms Control Association, tells me. “The reported yield of the MOAB is approximately 11 tons. The Hiroshima bomb was approximately 15 KILOtons."

The breathless speculation and obsession over this bomb, which you’re seeing on both social media and cable news, needs to stop. This isn’t a toy or some kind of geopolitical game — it’s a weapon that just killed actual humans.

The questions we should be asking aren’t the kinds of things you would ask in a game of Risk. They are the ones we should always be asking of our military: Who was actually killed in the attack? Did they absolutely have to be killed? And was this the best way to go about doing that?

This is a bombing raid like all other US bombing raids, just with a somewhat novel device. We should focus on the deadly nature of the bombing raid itself — and not the technological wonder.

The White House power struggle between Steve Bannon and the “globalists,” explained

2017-04-14T08:10:00-04:00

This battle cuts to the core of the contradictions around Trump’s character and his presidency.

For weeks, White House chief strategist Steve Bannon has been locked in combat with another faction of administration officials — and both Bannon’s job and the future of the Trump administration may be at stake.

Bannon’s rivals, led by senior White House adviser and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner and former Goldman Sachs president Gary Cohn — and with the crucial backing of President Trump’s daughter Ivanka — are an informal group of aides that has been pushing for the administration to take a more establishment-friendly turn. Which means less of Steve Bannon, the bomb-throwing outsider.

This faction is sometimes called the “New York moderates” or “centrists,” though in many respects they often seem to agree with the Republican establishment. But their internal critics disparagingly refer to them with the epithets “globalists” or — as the Washington Post’s Philip Rucker and Robert Costa reported last month — even “Democrats.” (Cohn is a registered Democrat, and Kushner comes from a Democratic family.)

Bannon’s allies in particular have reacted to the rising influence of this faction with dismay. They’ve been so enthusiastic about Trump because he promised to break with the corporate, financial, and political establishments on issues like immigration, trade, and US involvement abroad.

But on more and more issues, the establishment seems to be emerging triumphant. Trump announced Wednesday that he wouldn’t name China a currency manipulator, and clearly affirmed his commitment to NATO. The previous week, he ordered a missile attack on Syria to enforce an international norm against chemical weapons use. Plus, a spate of leaks suggests Bannon is falling out of favor and his job could be at risk.

Overall, this is a battle that cuts to the core of the contradictions around Donald Trump’s character, his campaign, and his presidency.

In one sense, Trump came to the presidency as an outsider to the political establishment, who won the enthusiasm of many Republican voters by challenging the bipartisan consensus on immigration and trade, and by promising to stand up to “corporations” and “elites” who he said had “rigged” the system against average Americans.

Yet all along, Trump was of course a very rich New York real estate mogul who did business across the world and was closely tied to a web of business, financial, and political elites. It is true that he disagreed with the elite consensus on some topics and long seemed to feel insecure about his place among them, but he indisputably had a place among them.

Now, as he’s struggling to govern the nation, Trump has quickly been forced to realize that it’s much easier to say on the campaign trail that you’ll make sweeping change than to actually bring it about — and that it’s much easier to have the establishment on your side than to be constantly attacking it.

1) What is a globalist?

Photo Maps4media via Getty

The term “globalist” is almost exclusively used by people who are criticizing or condemning “globalists.” But what they are essentially complaining about is a bipartisan consensus among the lion’s share of US corporate, financial, and political elites that has long existed on three major topics:

That the US should be very engaged abroad, including in international institutions and agreements
That trade agreements are generally good for the US and should be expanded further
That immigration is generally good for the US

The critics of this consensus say that in all three areas, the policies generally preferred by US elites in both parties have put the well-being of foreigners above Americans. (Conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones go further, saying they’re part of a fiendish plot to undermine US sovereignty in hopes of establishing a global government.)

Of course, not everyone who thinks immigration and trade are generally good and who want the US to play a leadership role abroad are part of some nefarious “elite” cabal — far from it. Such ideas in fact tend to poll quite well among the general public. And people sympathetic to these ideas argue that they benefit Americans, not just foreigners.

Still, it is true that educated and wealthy Americans are particularly likely to hold these beliefs, and that dissenters from this consensus have tended to be relegated to the fringes of the US political scene — until Donald Trump.

In both his primary and general election campaigns, Trump proclaimed that elite policies on foreign intervention, trade, and immigration had been disastrous for ordinary Americans, and he used the slogan “America First” to signal his commitment to nationalism over globalism. And he won. Those who styled themselves as critics of globalism were overjoyed and tremendously excited about what they could accomplish now that an apparent ally was in power.

2) Who is supposedly a globalist?

Again, few people would actually proclaim themselves to be “globalists” — this is an epithet used by their critics.

But the Bannonites essentially use the term to disparage anyone in politics who’s less hardline on immigration restrictionism and protectionism than they are.

That means both the Democratic establishment and the Republican establishment — the Bush family, the Clinton family, and Barack Obama are all deemed globalists. And one Breitbart article from last October proclaimed that House Speaker Paul Ryan has “a progressive, globalist worldview, which is at odds with Trump’s ‘America first’ approach.” (The author, Julia Hahn, now works in the White House for Bannon.)

Most bankers, executives of multinational corporations, pre-Trump political leaders and donors in both parties, think tank staffers, intellectuals, and members of the media, all generally concentrated in cities, usually get the label too.

If you’re noticing an uncomfortable set of stereotypes there, you’re not alone. Last year, Yochi Dreazen explained how this sort of rhetoric has long been used for anti-Semitic purposes:

Jews have long been accused of controlling the global financial system. Jews have long been accused of controlling the media. And Jews have long been accused of being disloyal citizens secretly working to maneuver governments to pursue disastrous policies solely for their own benefit.

Here too, two of the top Trump aides being deemed untrustworthy globalists — Gary Cohn and Jared Kushner — are Jewish.

Still, this isn’t entirely about anti-Semitic conspiracy-mongering. There are real underlying policy differences at play here. The Bannonites want to drastically shake up the US status quo on trade, immigration, and international involvement, and the establishment, well ... doesn’t.

3) Who are Trump’s “New York” advisers?

MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty

Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.

The rising “New York” faction in the Trump administration generally has four main names associated with it: Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Gary Cohn, and Dina Powell.

Jared Kushner: The 36-year-old is a real estate heir who took over his father’s multibillion-dollar development company in 2008. He also bought and ran the New York Observer. Most importantly, however, he married Ivanka Trump in 2009, making him a member of the Trump family.

When Donald Trump ran for president, Kushner made himself indispensable, and was often said to be the true campaign manager. Importantly, Trump allies he clashed with, like original campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and Trump’s initial transition chief, Chris Christie, both fell out of favor after tensions with Kushner arose. Ominously, Kushner is now said to be clashing with Bannon.

On paper, Kushner is below Priebus and Bannon in the White House pecking order (he’s a “senior adviser”), and in practice, he has seemed to have less influence than either of them on the administration’s strategy so far. Due to early stumbles by both, though, the dissatisfied president has increasingly turned to Kushner in recent weeks.

Still, it is not really clear what Kushner, who has no background in politics or public policy, actually believes or what he wants the president to do, besides remaining on the good side of the business community.

Ivanka Trump: The 35-year old first daughter will, of course, always have the president’s ear, and last month she became an official White House staffer too. She is often said, in leaks to media outlets, to be counseling her father to shy away from controversy and adopt more mainstream policies — particularly on social issues like women’s rights or LGBTQ rights. However, through the campaign and the controversial early days of the administration, it sure didn’t seem that the president was listening to her all that much.

Gary Cohn: Cohn joined the administration after spending two and a half decades at Goldman Sachs, where he was president and COO (the No. 2 position at the company). A longtime donor to Democrats, he suddenly shifted his political giving to the Republican Party in 2009, when Democrats were pushing the Dodd-Frank law to more stringently regulate the banking industry.

Cohn did not publicly support Trump during the campaign, but Kushner invited him in to meet with the president-elect during the transition, and Cohn apparently really wowed him — after a few more meetings, he was named National Economic Council director, making him the top economic policy staffer in the White House. Since Trump had fulminated against bankers and promised restrictive trade policies on the campaign trail, the appointment of Cohn, a consummate insider, was viewed as a major concession to the economic and business elite.

Now, the NEC director has often played second fiddle to the Treasury secretary, since the position has much less formal authority and fewer resources. However, it makes up for that somewhat with its added closeness to the president — Cohn is the staffer primarily charged with briefing Trump on the economy, and with presenting recommendations from different agencies on contested policy topics.

And in an administration where personal proximity to Trump is viewed as crucial, Cohn appears to have parlayed this gig — and a good relationship with Kushner — into significant influence. By February, profiles from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal portrayed him as the leading administration voice on economic policy.

Another element to his influence is that Trump appears to deeply respect Cohn for his wealth and success. During his recent interview with the Times, Trump responded to a question about tax reform by singling out Cohn (who was in the room). “This man was the president of Goldman Sachs,” Trump marveled. “I mean, he was, like, the president of Goldman Sachs.” Another Times report contained this amusing anecdote:

One of the only other people whom Mr. Trump views as a peer is his top economic adviser, Gary Cohn. ... In a recent meeting in the Oval Office, Mr. Cohn was speaking when Mr. Trump interrupted him. “Let me finish,’’ Mr. Cohn interjected, according to a person with knowledge of the interaction.

Mr. Trump, unaccustomed to ceding the floor, let him make his point.

Dina Powell: Finally, there’s Dina Habib Powell, a close Ivanka ally who also has stronger Republican Party credentials and deeper government experience than the others said to be in this faction — she’s worked in Congress, for the Republican National Committee, for George W. Bush’s White House (including as personnel director) and then in the State Department (where she focused on public diplomacy for the Middle East). But for the past decade, she has worked at Goldman Sachs, heading the firm’s philanthropic foundation.

Powell’s entree into the administration came via Ivanka Trump, whom she began advising during the transition. Overall, Powell seems to be a fantastic networker in corporate, finance, and political circles. Politico’s Annie Karni has chronicled how Ivanka has lately been relying on Powell’s “Rolodex” and “vast, Davos-style network” to put her in contact with big names in the corporate and finance worlds.

On January 12, the president-elect announced that Powell would get a White House job as senior counselor for economic initiatives, saying she would focus on “entrepreneurship, small business growth, and the global economic empowerment of women.” Her rank, “assistant to the president,” was one generally given to the top level of White House staffers, but it wasn’t clear exactly how she’d fit into the economic team’s policymaking structure.

But an unexpected opportunity soon appeared for Powell on the foreign policy team. After National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was fired, his replacement, H.R. McMaster, wanted to bring in his own people. The problem was that, given the Washington foreign policy establishment’s antipathy to Trump during the campaign, several of Trump’s top foreign policy appointees have so far publicly struggled to find deputies who are both qualified and trusted by the White House.

McMaster arrived at the clever solution of asking Powell, who was already trusted by the president’s daughter, to take a top NSC job as “Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategy” — effectively allying himself with the Jared/Ivanka faction of the administration, rather than trying to bring in an outsider with no backing from any internal faction.

4) What do the New York advisers want?

NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty

National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn.

Kushner, Ivanka Trump, and Cohn all have only weak ties to the Republican Party, which has provided the opportunity for Bannon’s allies to attack them as “globalist” outsiders whom good Republicans shouldn’t trust.

But on many topics — especially the ones they seem to be winning internal fights over — their policy preferences seem to be totally in line with the Republican Party’s pro-business and interventionist establishment.

It’s difficult to say which policies, exactly, the New Yorkers want, but overall they seem to like tax cuts (including for rich people), to prefer generally corporate- and business-friendly policies, and to want fewer regulations (especially on the finance industry).

Meanwhile, they don’t want a major shake-up of the global trading system, and they want the US to reaffirm its commitment to NATO and international institutions generally.

More broadly, they seem not to want Trump to do extremely controversial, unpopular, and disruptive things. All of the above is pretty uncontroversial among mainstream Republican elites, and probably in line with what Priebus and Vice President Mike Pence would prefer to see too.

Now, as urban New Yorkers who seem to have liberal views on social issues and environmentalism, there are also accounts of Kushner, Ivanka, and Cohn arguing internally against measures intended to roll back abortion rights or LGBTQ rights, or in favor of attempting to address climate change.

If this is true, though, they don’t appear to be having much success so far. Trump just signed a bill that will let states target Planned Parenthood funding, he instructed his Environmental Protection Agency administrator to dismantle Obama’s climate rules, and he seems to be giving movement conservatives what they want on judicial appointments, a crucial topic for them.

5) Why is the Bannon wing clashing with the New York wing?

Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty

Steve Bannon.

Well, one reason for the feud is that Bannon himself appears to be on the outs — Trump himself recently publicly rebuked him. Meanwhile, Kushner and the New York advisers appear to be on the rise. And Bannon and Kushner have reportedly butted heads personally.

There are also stylistic differences. Bannon is provocative and loves to cause controversy. When he ran Breitbart, he used “honey badger don’t give a shit” as a staff motto. This attitude proved useful during the campaign, but now that Trump is in office, the New York Times’s Peter Baker, Maggie Haberman, and Glenn Thrush report that Kushner “has said privately that he fears that Mr. Bannon plays to the president’s worst impulses.”

More broadly, Bannon’s allies style themselves as trying to ensure Trump fulfills his campaign promises — Bannon displays a whiteboard in his office where many promises are listed. But they also hope to use the president to implement their own agenda of dismantling “globalist” policies. (Not long before he joined the campaign, Bannon told Vanity Fair’s Ken Stern that Trump was “a blunt instrument for us,” adding, “I don’t know whether he really gets it or not.”)

So naturally, the Bannonites view the rising influence of any group of advisers that’s not on board with this agenda as a threat. According to multiple reports, some of Cohn’s detractors in the administration refer to him as “Globalist Gary.” And Jonathan Swan of Axios has reported that some Bannon allies refer to Cohn in text messages simply with the “globe” emoji.

Per White House source: In text messages between Bannon allies the shorthand for Gary Cohn is either just or CTC (Carbon Tax Cohn.) https://t.co/wxPwPW0rqP
— Jonathan Swan (@jonathanvswan) April 8, 2017

Even more juicily, the Daily Beast’s Asawin Suebsaeng claims Bannon has been using a far more offensive term to describe Kushner:

One official said Bannon has lately complained about Kushner trying to “shiv him and push him out the door” and likened him to a fifth column in the White House. “[Steve] recently vented to us about Jared being a ‘globalist’ and a ‘cuck’…He actually said ‘cuck,’ as in “cuckservative,’” the administration official told The Daily Beast.

Still, it’s worth considering that while it is indeed true that this rising group of advisers are from New York and have weaker Republican ties than most past GOP White House aides, they don’t appear to have changed Trump administration policy in any significant way that the GOP establishment wouldn’t also support — at least not yet.

That poses the possibility that this focus on “New York” and “Democrats” is a red herring of sorts from Bannon’s allies, who are merely trying to sling mud at their own internal rivals by drumming up hysteria about them among other Republicans.

6) Who is winning?

When the Washington Post’s Philip Rucker and Robert Costa reported on the New York advisers back on March 18, it was possible for an anonymous internal rival to brag to the paper that the group was marginalized. “Show me one New York win,” this adviser said.

That’s no longer possible. Trump has fully committed to NATO, said he won’t in fact declare China a currency manipulator, attacked Syria to enforce an international norm against chemical weapons use, kicked Bannon off the National Security Council, and even rebuked Bannon in public.

On trade especially, the “nationalists” have been just smoked. As Matt Yglesias has written, Trump has delivered almost nothing on his trade agenda apart from dropping the Trans-Pacific Partnership — something Hillary Clinton had pledged to do as well. This is in large part due to opposition from advisers like Cohn, who have argued that the nationalists’ preferred policies would lead to a destructive trade war. By March, a Financial Times report portrayed Cohn as having mostly marginalized Peter Navarro, the most anti-trade White House official.

Importantly, immigration is a different story. The administration is engaged in an effort to dramatically ramp up detentions and deportations of unauthorized immigrants. It’s still defending the travel ban in court. And as the Daily Beast’s Betsy Woodruff reminds us, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, one of the most hardline immigration hawks, remains in place at the Department of Justice, where he has a great deal of power.

Overall, the real reason the New York advisers are rising in influence is because the other administration factions have repeatedly fallen on their faces. Priebus and the GOP establishment spearheaded the failed health reform effort, while Bannon’s “nationalists” botched Trump’s travel order. More broadly, they’re the two people who’ve been in charge of the administration. The result of their leadership is Trump’s record-low approval ratings for a new president, with no major accomplishments to speak of.

So if Trump is looking for someone to blame, Priebus and Bannon are the obvious culprits. And the New Yorkers may seem like an appealing alternative — both because they genuinely seem more competent than the bunglers currently in charge and because they hold the promise of a new and different approach. (Even if their approach is in many ways similar to what the GOP establishment would want, it certainly has the advantage of being less difficult than something like the “deconstruction of the administrative state.”)

The oh-so-slight problem is, of course, that Trump repeatedly promised to do a lot of what the Bannonites wanted during the campaign. Generally, he portrayed the US as a desiccated hellscape that needed his firm leadership and dramatic change to be fixed. The apparent new agenda of “general continuity, with measured deregulation and tax cuts” seems a poor fit for Trump’s political base. It may, however, be a better fit for the Trump family’s brand rehabilitation strategy.

Canada is moving to legalize marijuana — and it may violate international drug law to do it

2017-04-13T12:36:54-04:00

Canada's move to legalize marijuana is big not just for Canada. It could impact global — and US — drug policy.

Canada wants to legalize marijuana — and it may be willing to break international law to do it.

On Thursday, the ruling Liberal Party in the Canadian Parliament introduced a bill that would legalize marijuana for recreational purposes. It would be the first developed country in the world to fully legalize pot since the international war on drugs began in the 1970s.

The bill will set the minimum age for purchasing marijuana at 18, although provinces could raise the age within their borders. The federal government will handle licensing producers, while provincial governments will manage distribution and retail sales. And Canadians will be allowed to grow up to four marijuana plants per household and possess up to 30 grams per person. For the most part, the bill follows the recommendations made by a recent federal task force on marijuana legalization — although the bill could change as it works its way through Parliament.

None of this should seem too shocking in the US, where already eight states have legalized marijuana for recreational use and 28 have allowed cannabis for medicinal purposes. What sets Canada apart, though, is it’s doing this as a country. Currently, Uruguay is the only nation in the world that legally allows marijuana for recreational purposes.

This is an important distinction from state-by-state legalization because Canada, like the US, is part of international drug treaties that explicitly ban legalizing marijuana. And although activists have been pushing to change these treaties for years, they have failed so far — and that means Canada will be, in effect, in violation of international law when it moves to legalize. (The US argues it’s still in accordance with the treaties because, even though the federal government allows marijuana legalization to continue at the state level by taking a hands-off approach, federal law still technically prohibits cannabis.)

Still, the move is, according to advocates of legalization, long overdue. When Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s party was elected in 2015, one of the main promises he ran on was to legalize marijuana. But the process of actually beginning to legalize stalled as the government waited on the task force report on legalization, and finally put a bill together based on the recommendations.

“We will legalize, regulate, and restrict access to marijuana,” Trudeau’s Liberal Party declared on its campaign website. “Canada’s current system of marijuana prohibition does not work. It does not prevent young people from using marijuana and too many Canadians end up with criminal records for possessing small amounts of the drug.”

The bill, of course, is not law just yet. It will need Parliament’s approval — which may require wrangling some changes to get — to become law. But the bill’s chances seem good: Liberals control a majority of the House of Commons, and on legalization they’re backed by the even more liberal New Democratic Party. Conservatives ran in opposition to legal pot, but at this point they are a fairly small minority in the Canadian government. Still, the bill may face some hurdles in the independent Senate, a legislative body that traditionally is more ceremonial in function but is recently doing more to assert its authority.

In moving forward, the Canadian government is now walking a fine line: It is hoping to legalize marijuana to clamp down on the black market for cannabis and provide a safe outlet of cannabis for adults, but it’s risking making pot more accessible to kids and people with drug use disorders. It is taking a bold step against outdated international drug laws, but it could upset countries like Russia, China, and even the US that have historically adopted a stricter view of the treaties. And while Canadian lawmakers may feel marijuana legalization is right for their country, there’s a risk that legal Canadian pot will spill over to the US — perhaps causing tensions with Canada’s neighbor and one of its closest allies.

Whether Canada is successful in its legalization attempts will depend on how it strikes a balance between these concerns. And depending on how it pulls all of this off, it may provide a model to other countries interested in legalization — including the US.

Legalization is a balancing act

The argument for full legalization is really about striking the right balance for drug policy.

On one hand, marijuana prohibition has a lot of costs. In Canada, tens of thousands of people are arrested for marijuana offenses each year, ripping communities and families apart as people are thrown in jail or prison and gain criminal records. Enforcement of these laws also costs money, while legalizing and taxing marijuana could bring in extra revenues — although typically not that much, based on Colorado’s experience, where marijuana taxes make up less than 1 percent of the general budget.

And the black market for marijuana fuels violence around the world — not only can it lead to conflicts and violence within Canada, but the money from illegally produced and sold pot often goes back to drug cartels that then use that money to carry out brutal violence, including murders, beheadings, kidnappings, and torture.

Better access to marijuana could also reduce the use of deadly opioids. The research shows that marijuana is promising for treating chronic pain, something that opioids are often prescribed for (even though there’s no good evidence opioids can actually treat chronic pain, while there’s evidence they can in fact make pain worse). Since marijuana doesn’t carry the risk of deadly overdose and opioids do, replacing some opioid use for pain with pot use could save lives. Studies show that states with medical marijuana laws suffer fewer opioid deaths than they otherwise would.

Still, since Canada already has medical marijuana, it’s possible full legalization won’t have much of an impact when it comes to opioid use.

Legalization carries risks too. It could lead to more use and misuse by making pot cheaper and more available. Mark Kleiman, a drug policy expert at New York University’s Marron Institute estimates that in the long term a legal marijuana joint will cost no more to make than, say, a tea bag — since both products come from plants that are fairly easy to grow. And it would also be available to anyone (of legal age) in retail outlets after legalization — meaning it would no longer require a shady or secretive meeting with a drug dealer. Those are benefits for responsible marijuana users, to be sure, but easier access could also be a risk for those who aren’t responsible.

Shutterstock

And although marijuana isn’t very dangerous compared to some drugs, it does carry some risks: dependence and overuse, accidents, non-deadly overdoses that lead to mental anguish and anxiety, and, in rare cases, psychotic episodes. Still, it’s never been definitively linked to any serious ailments — not deadly overdoses, lung disease, or schizophrenia. And it’s much less likely — around one-tenth so, based on data for fatal car crashes — to cause deadly accidents than alcohol, which is legal.

Among the risks, drug policy experts emphasize the risk of dependence. As Jon Caulkins, a drug policy expert at Carnegie Mellon University, has told me, “At some level, we know that spending more than half of your waking hours intoxicated for years and years on end is not increasing the likelihood that you’ll win a Pulitzer Prize or discover the cure for cancer.”

Another concern is the research on marijuana is still fairly weak. For years, there have been strict regulatory hurdles to marijuana research in the US due to prohibition, and that’s inhibited major studies on the drug’s long-term benefits and risks. It’s possible that with more study, new risks will surface — especially since legal marijuana markets may lead to more potent forms of the drug, which could carry unique problems.

“We’re still learning a lot about the health consequences,” Beau Kilmer, a drug policy expert at RAND, told me. “The bulk of the research that gets quoted in marijuana legalization debates is based on people who smoked relatively low-potency marijuana in the ’80s and ’90s. So we still have a lot to learn.”

To this end, legalization in Canada may help us better understand pot — by giving us another source of legal marijuana to study.

Despite the noted risks, drug policy experts generally agree that marijuana is relatively safe compared to other drugs, including legal substances like tobacco and alcohol.

Legalization is about balancing all of these concerns. It’s not necessarily about formally embracing pot use, but saying that perhaps the cons of keeping cannabis illegal simply outweigh the cons of making it legal. Striking that balance will be Canada’s big goal as it moves forward with its legalization bill.

Canada is following a different legalization track than the US

Canada is working on striking this balance in a very different way than the states that have legalized so far in the US. Primarily, it seems to be emphasizing public health far more than states in America have.

So far in the US, the eight states that have legalized pot have done so with a model similar to alcohol. Basically, they’re setting their systems up to allow a for-profit pot industry to flourish, similar to the alcohol industry.

Drug policy experts, however, often point to the alcohol industry as a warning, not something to be admired and followed for other drugs. For decades, big alcohol has successfully lobbied lawmakers to block tax increases and regulations on alcohol, all while marketing its product as fun and sexy in television programs, such as the Super Bowl, that are viewed by millions of Americans, including children. Meanwhile, alcohol is linked to 88,000 deaths each year in the US.

If marijuana companies are able to act like the tobacco and alcohol industries have in the past, there's a good chance that they’ll convince more Americans to try or even regularly use marijuana, and some of the heaviest users may use more of the drug. And as these companies increase their profits, they’ll be able to influence lawmakers in a way that could stifle regulations or other policies that curtail cannabis misuse. All of that will likely prove bad for public health (although likely not as bad as alcohol, since alcohol is simply more dangerous).

There are policies that can curtail this, some of which Canada’s plan will allow.

Chris Hondros/Getty Images

For example, Canada’s measure restricts marketing and advertising. In the US, this is generally not possible because the First Amendment protects commercial free speech. (Tobacco marketing is only prohibited due to a massive legal settlement.) But in Canada, the restrictions could stop marijuana companies from marketing their product in a way that targets, say, children or people who already heavily use cannabis.

“It’s a no-brainer,” Caulkins said. For public health purposes, “every serious researcher around the world thinks it’s a very good idea to restrict advertising of tobacco, alcohol, any dependence-inducing substance.”

Canada’s bill also lets provinces entirely handle the distribution and sales of marijuana — up to letting provincial governments directly manage and staff all pot stores by themselves. Again, in the US, this is currently not possible: Since marijuana is illegal at the federal level, asking state employees to run marijuana shops would effectively force them to violate federal law. But since Canada is legalizing marijuana nationwide in one go, it can do this.

The promise with government-run marijuana shops is that they could be better for public health. In short, government agencies that run shops are generally going to be more mindful of public health and safety, while private companies running shops are only going to be interested in maximizing sales even if that means making prices very low or selling to minors and people with drug use disorders. Previous research found that states that maintained a government-operated monopoly for alcohol kept prices higher, reduced youth access, and reduced overall levels of use — all benefits to public health.

Again, this is about balancing the risks and benefits of legalization: Maybe legalization is the better approach on net compared to prohibition, but that doesn’t mean that for-profit, private companies have to be the ones to sell the drug.

This isn’t important just to Canada. If Canada shows that these policies — and the many other quirks that will make it different to the US — are the right approach to legalization, it could provide a legalization model to the rest of the world that’s very different from what America has done so far.

A big hurdle for Canada: international drug treaties

If one thing holds up Canada’s plans, it may be international law.

From the 1960s through the 1980s, much of the world, including the US and Canada, signed on to three major international drug policy treaties: the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961, the Convention on Psychotropic Drugs of 1971, and the UN Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances of 1988. Combined, the treaties require participants to limit and even prohibit the possession, use, trade, and distribution of drugs outside of medical and scientific purposes, and work together to stop international drug trafficking.

There is some debate about whether these treaties stop countries from decriminalizing marijuana — when criminal penalties are repealed but civil ones remain in place — and legalizing medical marijuana. But one thing the treaties are absolutely clear on is that illicit drugs aren’t to be allowed for recreational use and certainly not for recreational sales. Yet that’s exactly what the Liberal Party is now working to allow.

Canada’s decision to legalize pot would be the most high-profile rebuke of the international treaties since they were signed — since Canada is a relatively large developed country, and it’s fairly active in the international arena.

In theory, Canada could face diplomatic backlash if it legalizes pot. But who would lead that effort? The US has been the de facto enforcer of international drug treaties over the years. But it likely wouldn’t tempt an important ally, and trying to criticize Canada for legalization would only expose America’s hypocrisy for letting eight states legalize.

Jeff Vinnick/Getty Images

One possible issue could be marijuana flowing from across the border from Canada. The experts I talked to argued there might not be too much of this, given that the US has its own legal supplies for pot from the states that have legalized for recreational and medicinal purposes. But if the US sees a risk in Canadian pot smuggling and reacts, it’s not totally out of the realm of possibility that someone like President Donald Trump would try to crack down at the border — and maybe cause problems with a huge trade partner.

“Given the importance to Canada of US-Canadian trade, they’re not going to want to do anything that leads the US to thicken the border,” Kleiman of the Marron Institute told me.

There’s one way Canada could get around the treaty problem. In the early 2010s, Bolivia moved to allow coca leaf chewing, which was banned from the treaties. To get around this, the country effectively withdrew from the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, then it rejoined with a “reservation” allowing the use of coca leaves within its own borders. The move could have been blocked by one-third of the parties to the treaty — which would amount to more than 60 nations — but only 15 joined in opposition.

Canada could use a similar process — of withdrawing then rejoining with a reservation for legal pot — to meet its treaty obligations.

Canada could also follow Uruguay, which has essentially refused to acknowledge that legalization violates the treaties (even though it clearly does). Despite warnings from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, no one has taken significant action against Uruguay for its decision.

Seth McConnell/Denver Post via Getty Images

As for the US, it claims accordance of the drug treaties, despite eight states’ move to legalize marijuana, with a clever argument: It’s true that eight states have legalized pot, but the federal government still considers marijuana illegal, so the nation is still technically in line, even if a few states are not. Canada could not try this route if it legalizes nationwide.

“A lot of people are going to be paying attention to how the United States reacts — or does not react — to what Canada does,” Kilmer said. “I think that could actually have implications in other countries.”

If Canada pulls this off, it could provide a model for other countries to relax their drug laws — and particularly their marijuana laws — without violating international treaty obligations or, at the very least, without getting punished for disobeying the treaties.

Such a move would come at a very crucial time in international drug policy: After the UN’s special session on drugs in 2016, drug policy reformers are putting more and more pressure to reform the global drug control regime. Canadian legalization could give these reformers an opening by showing that if the treaties aren’t changed, they will soon be effectively meaningless as countries move ahead with their own reforms anyway — even if it puts them in violation of international drug law. And that could open up the rest of the world to legalizing pot.

It’s not just, then, that Canada is changing its own drug laws. Canada’s steps — from its rebuke of international drug treaties to how it will regulate cannabis — could affect the future of marijuana policy worldwide.

Rahm Emanuel’s plan to push Chicago teens to go to college, explained

2017-04-12T12:10:01-04:00

Chicago Public Schools has a new requirement for its 435,000 students: To graduate, they must prove they have a post-graduation plan. That means a college acceptance letter, a job offer, military orders, or enrollment in a job training program.

The idea of making students go through an extra hurdle to graduate sparked some criticism in the press when it was first reported last week, especially because Chicago schools already have a lower-than-average graduation rate. Some critics worried that the new requirement would hold back students who are already struggling to pass their classes.

Janice Jackson, chief education officer of Chicago Public Schools and one of the plan’s architects, says she doesn’t think it will keep anyone back. She notes that other requirements they added in the past — community service hours and taking the ACT college readiness exams — didn't lower graduation rates. And she says school leaders want to make sure that students at all schools are getting the same level of college guidance. “Sometimes you have to make things mandatory,” she says.

By doing so, the district is trying a bold, somewhat extreme move to prepare students to survive in a new economy; an economy that needs workers who have more skills than they get in high school.

A high school diploma is really not enough anymore

The reasoning behind the new requirement is logical. Earning a good living with only a high school diploma is more difficult now than ever. Fifty years ago, high school graduates could easily raise a family and live comfortable, middle-class lives. A common scenario looked like this: An 18-year-old boy graduated from high school and got a job at the local auto factory, assembling car parts. By the time he turned 25, he was already earning the national median salary and could think about starting a family.

Pew Research Center

“Those days are long gone,” says Anthony Carnevale, director of the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University. Now Americans typically don’t gain financial independence until around age 32, he says, which is when they tend to start earning the national median salary (in 2015, that was $56,516 per household). And the earnings gap between college graduates and high school graduates is widening.

The main reason for this shift is simple. Machines now do a lot of the easier factory work that people used to do, so the factory jobs that are left require a higher level of skill that you just can’t get from a high school education. On top of that, the American economy has been moving away from production and manufacturing toward more service-based industries. Health care technicians and air conditioning technicians are today’s equivalent of the comfortable, middle-class factory jobs, but they require a special training certificate.

According to Carnevale’s research, by 2020, 65 percent of all jobs in the economy will require postsecondary education and training beyond high school. In the early 1970s, only about 28 percent of workers had that.

So how do you prepare students to make a living in the modern economy? Carnevale says public schools can try three things: show students how to enroll in postsecondary education, bribe them to do it, or force them to do it.

Chicago chose the last option.

Students who are expected to go to college are more likely to go

Jackson, the head of Chicago’s schools, and Mayor Rahm Emanuel crafted the new rule after researchers began studying why so many city youths weren't going to college, even when they had good grades. The district is made up mostly of low-income students who would be the first in their families to attend college, according to the report.

About 10 years ago, sociologists at the University of Chicago interviewed and tracked 105 students from three different high schools and identified the two main steps that threw them off: finding the right college, and then enrolling in it. Of the students surveyed, only about half of those who wanted to go to college actually applied and enrolled in one. And only 76 percent of students who had the test scores and grades to attend a four-year college actually applied.

It turns out that the teens couldn’t navigate the process on their own. This passage says everything: “Across all our analyses, the single most consistent predictor of whether students took steps toward college enrollment was whether their teachers reported that their high school had a strong college climate, that is, they ... pushed students to go to college, worked to ensure that students would be prepared, and were involved in supporting students in completing their college applications.”

Applying for financial aid ahead of time also changed a student’s chances of going to college. Students who completed a federal aid application by graduation and were accepted into a four-year college were more than 50 percent more likely to enroll than those who had not. This was the case even after researchers controlled for differences in students’ qualifications, family background, neighborhood characteristics, and support from teachers, counselors, and parents.

Researchers concluded that simply improving students’ grades is not enough to get them into college unless schools “provide a better structure and support for students in the college search, planning, and application process.” The report also urged the Chicago school district to give students more support in figuring out how to pay for college.

Chicago wants to force students to plan ahead

Jackson believes the new graduation requirement will push schools to create a college-going culture. If they don’t, then students won’t graduate, and nobody wants that. “It will definitely require extra work with students who need more motivation,” she said.

Some critics have questioned whether Chicago has the authority to force students to apply to college (or find another alternative) at all. But the district had previously added other graduation requirements, such as demanding that students take the ACT, without legal challenges. And the state Board of Education allows districts some flexibility. The point, district officials say, is to force students to plan ahead.

“In schools with high levels of support, every child was already walking out with a postsecondary plan,” Jackson said. “There are schools where we need to push a little bit more.”

But if the focus is on getting students into college, why is an offer for a minimum-wage job acceptable under the new requirement?

Jackson says that guidance counselors are going to show students how much money they could make if they picked another route.

“When they sit down and go through this process, they’re going to be presented with different options showing the earning power of a high school graduate compared with a college graduate,” she says. “Information is power.”

To get enough well-trained counselors to help out students, the mayor is trying to raise $1 million from private companies. Chicago high schools currently have about one counselor for every 360 students, according to a spokesperson for the school district, and a few nonprofit groups also provide guidance to students in schools.

Carnevale, of the Center on Education and the Workforce, says shifting the responsibility onto the students has benefits and drawbacks. “When you raise standards, we know that a certain share of the population will rise to the standard and another group of kids will fall even further behind,” he said. “This is survival of the fittest.”

Why flying in America keeps getting more miserable, explained

2017-04-12T08:30:01-04:00

The 40-year rise and fall of airline competition.

After what amounts to a decades-long series of disasters, the American aviation industry is finally in a good place. Overcapacity and fare wars have been eliminated, redundant staff is gone, and with the economy improving, people are buying plane tickets again.

Which is exactly how United Airlines found itself dragging an unwilling customer off an overbooked flight to Louisville, Kentucky, incurring a massive PR fiasco and reminding us that the industry is likely to bounce forever between exploitative and unprofitable.

This particular case resonated with the public because it was unusual and egregious — a sumptuous blend of a moderately rare edge case doused with a hefty dose of poor judgment.

But it also resonated because it felt, in many ways, not so unusual. Anyone who flies regularly has experienced the endless indignities of modern air travel — the security theater, the cramped seats, the delays, the missed flights, and all the rest. Making it particularly egregious is the reality that the crucial ingredient of consumer choice seems to be missing. Most of us have at one time or another sworn to ourselves that we will “never” again fly on one airline or another, only to discover that there are very few airlines one can switch to and that they all seem dismal in their own way.

The airline industry, unfortunately, suffers from some serious business model flaws — most notably very high fixed costs in the form of buying and maintaining aircraft, and the problem that a half-empty flight is almost as expensive to operate as a full one.

Most of us fondly remember a time in the not-so-distant past when the United States had many more airlines and much more vigorous competition between them. This was a true blessing for consumers, but it was genuinely unworkable economically — the consumer bounty was based on investors, bondholders, and unionized workers losing money.

So we’re now shifting into an uncomfortable era of consolidation, diminished competition, higher prices, more profits, and fewer choices. And even if choice were revived by future policymakers, experience suggests that travelers will choose lower prices over higher quality, leaving air travel a perennially frustrating experience.

United suffered the downside of efficiency

The practice of “overbooking” flights — selling more tickets than there are seats available — strikes almost everyone as mildly outrageous whenever it results in someone getting bumped.

The economic case for it is, however, fairly ironclad. It’s simply not that uncommon for a ticketed passenger to not show up for a flight due to illness or some external change of plans. Customers also value the opportunity to reschedule flights for less than the full price of buying a brand new ticket. Meanwhile, the profit-maximizing strategy for first-class seats is generally to price them so high that they don’t sell out, and then offer a few lucky passengers free upgrades — immediately freeing up space in apparently overbooked economy cabins — as a privilege of their advanced frequent flier status.

An airline could, of course, refuse to overbook as a matter of policy. This would result in flying planes that were substantially less full, on average, without meaningfully reducing operating costs. Ticket prices would need to be higher as a result. No airline has seen this as a winning strategy in the marketplace, and regulators haven’t tried to impose it on them.

The United flight in question turns out not to have been overbooked, merely full, but United realized it needed to move some crew to Louisville to operate subsequent flights. As aviation blogger Gary Leff writes, “If the employees didn’t get to Louisville, a whole plane load of passengers were going to be ‘bumped’ when that flight was canceled, and likely other passengers on other flights using that aircraft would have their own important travel plans screwed up as well.”

In principle, of course, the crew could have simply made the four-hour drive, but airline personnel generally have unions and collective bargaining agreements that mandate minimum standards of treatment for crew members who need to be shuffled around.

Kicking a few passengers off a full plane to move crew to Louisville is, for better or for worse, what an efficiently run airline looks like. They didn’t have tons of spare crew members hanging around in a small airport like Louisville just ready to fill in at a moment’s notice. And they didn’t have tons of unsold seats on flights the crew members could take. The needs of the many customers who would otherwise have been stranded in Kentucky outweighed the needs of the few who were kicked off the flight to Chicago. The system, in a sense, was working as designed.

The shocking video images of a noncompliant customer being forcibly dragged off a plane, his head injured and his face bloodied, reflected some longstanding problems with the Chicago police, but it also represented a collision between the logic of optimal management of airline resources and the needs of actual human beings.

The rise and fall of deregulation

Fifty years ago, air travel was very different.

Most European countries featured a dominant, state-owned airline that provided air travel for a fee as a kind of public utility, like a city bus system or the postal service or modern-day Amtrak in the United States.

America took a different route, relying on privately owned airlines but heavily regulating interstate travel via an agency known as the Civil Aeronautics Board. The board regulated which airlines were allowed to fly which routes and what fares they could set — in theory, ensuring that private for-profit companies served the public interest. In part, this consisted of forcing airlines to provide cross-subsidies. An airline would get access to a lucrative route, but would also have to agree to serve a less economically viable one on an unprofitable basis.

These were the grand old days of air travel, when people dressed for flights and service was lavish.

Fares were also very high — about double what you’ll pay today on a per-mile basis.

Mark Perry

For constitutional reasons, the Civil Aeronautics Board’s regulatory authority was limited to interstate air travel. Most important air routes cross state lines, but there are some key exceptions, including Los Angeles to San Francisco and many point-to-point routes in Texas.

Airlines flying these unregulated skies generally offered much lower fares. Texas, in particular, came to be home to a low-cost airline, Southwest, that exclusively flew nonregulated flights and offered much lower fares than mainstream airlines. It didn’t escape the notice of residents of big Northeastern cities that a Boston-Washington flight was much more expensive than an unregulated one from LA to San Francisco.

In the late 1970s, the Carter administration — strongly backed by frequent critic Ted Kennedy, with then-staffer Stephen Breyer leading the charge — acted to rescind fare regulation nationwide and open up the spigots of competition.

That created a spurt of airline startups and quasi-startups in the 1980s, most of which went bust quickly, as well as the demise of two important legacy carriers, Pan-Am and Eastern, who couldn’t make it in the more competitive new environment.

By the 1990s, there were seven transcontinental legacy carriers: US Air, Continental, TWA, Northwest, American, United, and Delta. These big seven competed with smaller regional carriers such as Hawaiian, Alaska Air Lines, and Midwest Express, along with low-cost upstarts like AirTran and the ever-growing Southwest.

The ’90s were the global high-water mark for deregulatory impulses in general, and paired with generally cheap world oil prices and a generally strong US dollar, they were certainly a high point for airline deregulation as a success story.

Deregulation had successfully unleashed the forces of competition on the industry, leading to lower fares and more consumer choice. It hadn’t been a painless process, as the tumultuous ’80s involved some spectacular bankruptcies, and the arrangements were in some ways worse for the airlines’ unionized workers. But there were more routes flown and more planes in the sky, and more Americans were able to travel than ever before.

The problem that emerged after the turn of the millennium was that this level of air service was only sustainable in the middle of an economic boom.

Airlines were losing tons of money

The 9/11 terrorist attacks, the small recession following the dot-com bust, the high commodity prices of the mid-aughts, and the large economic downturn of 2008 pushed the airline industry into a wave of financial losses.

As of 2013 or so, the post-9/11 losses were so bad that they had wiped out more than 100 percent of all profits incurred by all US-based airlines in history. Over the past couple of years, a return to strong profitability has finally reversed the losses, but exploring them is critical to understanding why the present situation is so unsatisfactory.

Airlines for America data

One basic dilemma of the industry is that it’s difficult for a big airline to respond in a smooth way to a decline in demand. The cost of flying a plane from Cincinnati to Phoenix is largely driven by the distance between the cities and the fuel and staffing costs associated with a plane of any given size.

If demand for travel on one route drops while demand on some other route is increasing, you can optimize by switching a smaller plane to the less popular route and deploying a bigger plane to the more popular one. But if demand is falling across the network, you can’t just shrink all your planes by 5 or 10 percent. You need to either go whole hog and cancel entire routes — which will cause your revenue to fall even further — or inefficiently fly a bunch of half-empty planes.

If one particular airline faced a downturn, it could at least sell some of its idled planes to raise capital. But if all airlines are facing a downturn, then there’s nobody to sell to. So even your idled planes are costing you money, since they need to be stored and maintained somewhere.

The only realistic solutions involve taking on debts to cover losses while keeping some semblance of your route network intact, and pressuring unions for givebacks to management. Both tactics tend to encourage airlines to declare bankruptcy, either to get out of old debts or to wriggle out of old obligations to workers, and so the 21st century has been a boom time for airline bankruptcies.

The bankruptcies themselves have driven waves of consolidation. A bankrupt airline needs new investors to revive itself, and the investors who are willing to pay the highest price are generally other existing airlines, which talk themselves into the idea that combining route networks will create a new whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Consolidation has worked to increase profits

The consolidation shakeout unfolded over several years but has left the United States, in practice, with radically fewer airlines. TWA was the first to fall in late 2001, having done bankruptcy reorganizations twice already in the ’90s and calling it quits shortly after 9/11 to be bought by American. Northwest was absorbed into Delta. US Air was bought by a financially healthy low-cost upstart called America West, which then adopted the US Air name.

American Airlines was then bought out of bankruptcy by the new US Air, which promptly rebranded itself American. Midwest went bankrupt and was absorbed by Frontier. Southwest continued its steady growth, including by an acquisition of the then-bankrupt AirTran.

The result is a new paradigm in which these big four airlines control more than 80 percent of the American passenger market, with the remaining 20 percent balkanized across a bunch of smaller carriers.

Some of this consolidation was undoubtedly necessary and even appropriate. Antitrust authorities can’t force private businesses to run unprofitable airlines indefinitely just because that’s convenient for consumers. And at times, the merger of two smaller airlines into a single larger one is good for competition because it builds a larger route network that can compete more effectively with the big players.

America West’s takeover of US Air, for example, decreased the number of independently owned players in the industry but increased the number of companies offering comprehensive nationwide service. The result, for many people looking to reach a wide range of destinations, was in practice more choice rather than less.

But as Justin Elliott has detailed for ProPublica, the final merger that brought the number of big carriers down from five to four — between American and US Air in 2015— was intensely controversial among professional regulators, and appears to have gotten through in a storm of lobbying and political pressure.

Proponents note that American was bankrupt at the time and had no other bidders — without a merger, it arguably wouldn’t exist at all. Skeptics note that T-Mobile and AT&T offered similar arguments to the Obama administration when they wanted to merge. But when that deal was rejected, T-Mobile’s owners turned out to have been bluffing, and an independent T-Mobile actually unleashed a wave of competition and innovation around the industry.

Either way, the consolidated airline industry is working essentially as planned. Ongoing economic recovery has meant higher fares and more crowded planes, leading to fat margins. The industry will still almost certainly take big losses the next time there’s a recession, but it will be operating with a financial cushion rather than a debt overhang, and the current paradigm offers a clear road map for a return to profitability whenever the economy recovers.

By the same token, if consumers feel they are paying more to ride on more crowded airplanes with steadily devalued rewards programs, they are not mistaken — that’s what an oligopolistic industry with limited competition will get you.

People don’t want to pay for quality

The collapse of the dream of the ’90s has led rather inevitably to a backlash and, at times, even a nostalgia for the old pre-deregulation days of the Civil Aeronautics Board.

The beating up of this airline passenger due to @United's mismanagement should be dedicated to Alfred Kahn. https://t.co/8rjARSqaXT
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) April 10, 2017

But while the on-board beatdown is a golden rhetorical opportunity for anyone trying to make any point about the airline industry, it truly doesn’t fit the facts.

Despite “deregulation,” the airline industry is, in fact, highly regulated by the Federal Aviation Administration, especially with regard to matters related to bumping of passengers. Authorities could, and probably should, increase the compensation owed to involuntarily bumped passengers and avoid some of the specific dynamics that gave rise to this incident. The conduct of the Chicago Police Department, meanwhile, is both deeply troubling and part of a much larger pattern of excessive force and other issues exhaustively explored in a recent Justice Department inquiry.

Meanwhile, as proponents of re-regulation ought to know, the old system was aimed not at encouraging competition but at preventing it. The idea was to discourage damaging price wars on popular routes, ensuring that airlines would earn fat surpluses on them in exchange for operating money-losing routes to other cities.

While the consumer facing side of airlines is relatable, the far worse part is how deregulation killed cities. https://t.co/GuLiyMGYS3
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) April 10, 2017

There’s a reasonable argument to be had about whether people flying from Houston to Phoenix should pay higher fares in order to subsidize people flying from Cleveland to St. Louis. Doing a complicated series of opaque cross-subsidies that increase costs to some consumers without explicit taxes or direct assistance to the poor would be a very American way of trying to address a social problem.

But a subsidy mechanism is not a free lunch — it’s simply a way of shifting around who pays. By the same token, the good old days in the 1980s and ’90s of high competition and falling fares weren’t a free lunch either — passengers were enjoying a collective subsidy from overly optimistic investors and lenders.

In the long run, for air travel to be better, passengers would have to pay for it. And decades’ worth of evidence suggests we prefer cheap and safe to pleasant. Policy aimed at reviving aviation competition would likely do exactly what past rounds of pro-competition aviation policy have done — lower prices while making the consumer experience worse.

The triumph of no-frills aviation

The big, overarching theme of the past four decades of the aviation industry is the triumph of the low-cost carrier. America’s biggest domestic airline is Southwest, the original low-cost airline. The biggest airline overall is American, which seems like a continuation of a venerable legacy brand but in reality is the result of a successful rebranding of America West, the earliest and most successful low-cost startup of the deregulatory age.

In response to competitive pressures, United and Delta have steadily moved in the direction of low-cost practices — squeezing more seats into economy class and disaggregating the basic air travel bundle so that in exchange for a cheaper fare, you get nickel-and-dimed on various fees.

And as industry consolidation has gained steam, the most important upstart challenger to the big four is Spirit Airlines, which offers rock-bottom prices and generally gets poor marks for quality. In theory, it should be possible for a new entrant to the aviation industry to come in at the high end, offering a superior product to customers who are willing to pay for it. But efforts to compete this way — from MGM Grand Airlines and the Trump Shuttle in the 1980s to Virgin America in our time — have consistently failed.

Beyond the behavior of the police, a critically important issue outside the scope of aviation policy, the United disaster basically touches on a series of travel frustrations related to redundancy.

A pleasant airline to fly on would routinely have empty seats on its planes so nobody would have to get bumped and it would be easy to reschedule. Flights would be frequent, so if you did need to miss a flight, you could take a later one without huge problems. Spare aircraft would be sufficiently abundant that mechanical problems wouldn’t lead to huge delays or cascading series of missed connections. And staff would be abundant enough that the inevitable vagaries of illness, traffic jams, and bad weather wouldn’t force airlines to hurriedly shift employees from one airport to another.

Airlines clearly could build that kind of redundancy into their systems. Indeed, the logistics of doing so would be fairly trivial compared with the enormous technical challenges involved in safely moving hundreds of passengers at high speeds through the air while serving them hot coffee and listening to their complaints about the bad wifi.

But to do so would cost money. Less overselling of seats and more padding of schedules for crew and equipment would ultimate translate to higher fares. That’s a price we pretty clearly could bear as a society if we chose to, but as consumers we have collectively and repeatedly chosen not to. Instead, wherever competition has reared its head in the industry, the mass market has aimed for low prices above all else, followed by a vigorous culture of collective complaining when something goes wrong.

America's gun problem, explained

2017-04-11T09:30:00-04:00

The public and research support gun control. Here's how it could help — and why it doesn't pass.

By the time the hail of bullets had ended, an 8-year-old was hit — fatally wounded, left to die at a hospital within a few hours.

This would be the result of yet another mass shooting in America. On Monday, a gunman walked into North Park Elementary School in San Bernardino, California. While apparently aiming for a teacher, two students were hit by his gunfire. In the end, the gunman, teacher, and an 8-year-old student were dead, and a 9-year-old student was wounded.

The shooting quickly led to calls for more gun control. Americans have heard these types of calls before: After every mass shooting, the debate over guns and gun violence sparks up once again. Maybe some bills get introduced. Critics respond with concerns that the government is trying to take away their guns. The debate stalls. So even as America continues experiencing levels of gun violence unrivaled in the rest of the developed world, nothing happens — no laws are passed by Congress, nothing significant is done to try to prevent the next horror.

It has become an American routine for the aftermath of a gun violence to play out this way.

So why is it that for all the outrage and mourning with every mass shooting, nothing seems to change? To understand that, it's important to grasp not just the stunning statistics about gun ownership and gun violence in the United States, but America's very unique relationship with guns — unlike that of any other developed country — and how it plays out in our politics to ensure, seemingly against all odds, that our culture and laws continue to drive the routine gun violence that marks American life.

1) America's gun problem is completely unique

No other developed country in the world has anywhere near the same rate of gun violence as America. The US has nearly six times the gun homicide rate as Canada, more than seven times as Sweden, and nearly 16 times as Germany, according to UN data compiled by the Guardian. (These gun deaths are a big reason America has a much higher overall homicide rate, which includes non-gun deaths, than other developed nations.)

Javier Zarracina/Vox

To understand why that is, there's another important statistic: The US has by far the highest number of privately owned guns in the world. Estimated in 2007, the number of civilian-owned firearms in the US was 88.8 guns per 100 people, meaning there was almost one privately owned gun per American and more than one per American adult. The world's second-ranked country was Yemen, a quasi-failed state torn by civil war, where there were 54.8 guns per 100 people.

Max Fisher/Washington Post

Another way of looking at that: Americans make up about 4.43 percent of the world's population, yet own roughly 42 percent of all the world's privately held firearms.

That does not, however, mean that every American adult actually owns guns. In fact, gun ownership is concentrated among a minority of the US population — as surveys from the Pew Research Center and General Social Survey suggest.

Pew Research Center

These three basic facts demonstrate America's unique gun culture. There is a very strong correlation between gun ownership and gun violence — a relationship that researchers argue is at least partly causal. And American gun ownership is beyond anything else in the world. At the same time, these guns are concentrated among a passionate minority, who are typically the loudest critics against any form of gun control and who scare legislators into voting against such measures.

2) More guns mean more gun deaths. Period.

The research on this is overwhelmingly clear. No matter how you look at the data, more guns mean more gun deaths.

This is apparent when you look at state-by-state data within the United States, as this chart from Mother Jones demonstrates:

Mother Jones

And it's clear when you look at the data across developed nations, as this other chart by Tewksbury Lab shows:

Tewksbury Lab

Opponents of gun control tend to point to other factors to explain America's unusual gun violence: mental illness, for example. Jonathan Metzl, a mental health expert at Vanderbilt University, told me that this is just not the case. People with mental illnesses are more likely to be victims, not perpetrators, of violence. And while it's true that an extraordinary amount of mass shooters (up to 60 percent) have some kind of psychiatric or psychological symptoms, Metzl points out that other factors are much better predictors of gun violence in general: alcohol and drug misuse, poverty, history of violence, and, yes, access to guns.

Another argument you sometimes hear is that these shootings would happen less frequently if even more people had guns, thus enabling them to defend themselves from the shooting.

But, again, the data shows this is simply not true. High gun ownership rates do not reduce gun deaths, but rather tend to coincide with increases in gun deaths. While a few people in some cases may use a gun to successfully defend themselves or others, the proliferation of guns appears to cause far more violence than it prevents.

Multiple simulations have also demonstrated that most people, if placed in an active shooter situation while armed, will not be able to stop the situation, and may in fact do little more than get themselves killed in the process.

This video, from ABC News, shows one such simulation, in which people repeatedly fail to shoot an active shooter before they're shot:

The relationship between gun ownership rates and gun violence rates is well established. Reviews of the evidence compiled by the Harvard School of Public Health's Injury Control Research Center have consistently found that when controlling for variables such as socioeconomic factors and other crime, places with more guns have more gun deaths.

"Within the United States, a wide array of empirical evidence indicates that more guns in a community leads to more homicide," David Hemenway, the Injury Control Research Center's director, wrote in Private Guns, Public Health.

Experts widely believe this is the consequence of America's relaxed laws and culture surrounding guns: Making more guns more accessible means more guns, and more guns mean more deaths. Researchers have found this is true not just with homicides, but also with suicides, domestic violence, and even violence against police. To deal with those problems, America will have to not only make guns less accessible, but likely reduce the number of guns in the US as well.

The research also speaks to this point: A 2016 review of 130 studies in 10 countries, published in Epidemiologic Reviews, found that new legal restrictions on owning and purchasing guns tended to be followed by a drop in gun violence — a strong indicator that restricting access to guns can save lives.

Guns are not the only factor that contribute to violence. (Other factors include, for example, poverty, urbanization, and alcohol consumption.) But when researchers control for other confounding variables, they have found time and time again that America's high levels of gun ownership are a major reason the US is so much worse in terms of gun violence than its developed peers.

"A series of specific comparisons of the death rates from property crime and assault in New York City and London show how enormous differences in death risk can be explained even while general patterns are similar," UC Berkeley's Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins wrote in a breakthrough analysis in 1999. "A preference for crimes of personal force and the willingness and ability to use guns in robbery make similar levels of property crime 54 times as deadly in New York City as in London."

But even with the outrage over gun massacres, the sense that enough is enough, and the clear evidence that the problem is America's high gun ownership rates, there hasn't been significant legislation to help solve the problem.

3) Americans tend to support measures to restrict guns, but that doesn't translate into laws

If you ask Americans how they feel about specific gun control measures, they will often say that they support them. According to Pew Research Center surveys, most people in the US support background checks, bans on assault-style weapons, bans on high-capacity ammunition clips, bans on online sales of ammunition, and a federal database to track gun sales.

Pew Research Center

So why don't these measures ever get turned into law? That's because they run into another political issue: Americans, increasingly, tend to support the abstract idea of the right to own guns.

Pew Research Center

This is part of how gun control opponents are able to kill even legislation that would introduce the most popular measures, such as background checks that include private sales (which have 85 percent support, according to Pew): They're able to portray the law as contrary to the right to own guns, and galvanize a backlash against it.

This kind of problem isn't unique to guns. For example, although many Americans say they don't like Obamacare, most of them do in fact like the specific policies in the health care law. The problem is these specific policies have been masked by rhetoric about a "government takeover of health care" and "death panels." Since most Americans don't have time to verify these claims, especially when they involve a massive bill with lots of moving parts, enough end up believing in the catchphrases and scary arguments to stop the legislation from moving forward.

Of course, it's also the case that some Americans simply oppose any gun control laws. And while this group is generally outnumbered by those who support gun control, the opponents tend to be much more passionate about the issue than the supporters — and they're backed by a very powerful political lobby.

4) The gun lobby as we know it is relatively recent but enormously powerful

The single most powerful political organization when it comes to guns is, undoubtedly, the National Rifle Association (NRA). The NRA has an enormous stranglehold over conservative politics in America, and that development is more recent than you might think.

The NRA was, for much of its early history, more of a sporting club than a serious political force against gun control, and even supported some gun restrictions. In 1934, NRA president Karl Frederick was quoted as saying, "I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses."

A 1977 revolt within the organization changed everything. As crime rose in the 1960s and '70s, calls for more gun control grew as well. NRA members worried new restrictions on guns would keep coming after the historic 1968 law — eventually ending, they feared, with the government's seizure of all firearms in America. So members mobilized, installing a hard-liner known as Harlon Carter in the leadership, forever changing the NRA into the gun lobby we know today.

This foundation story is crucial for understanding why the NRA is near-categorically opposed to the regulation of private firearms. It fears that popular and seemingly common-sense regulations, such as banning assault-style weapons or even a federal database of gun purchases, are not really about saving lives but are in fact a potential first step toward ending all private gun ownership in America, which the NRA views — wrongly, in the minds of some legal experts — as a violation of the Second Amendment of the US Constitution.

So any time there's an attempt to impose new forms of gun control, the NRA rallies gun owners and other opponents of gun control to kill these bills. These gun owners make up a minority of the population: anywhere from around 30 to around 40 percent of households, depending on which survey one uses. But that population is a large and active enough constituency, particularly within the Republican base, to make many legislators fear that a poor grade from the NRA will end their careers.

As a result, conservative media and politicians take the NRA's support — especially the coveted A-to-F ratings the organization gives out — very seriously. Politicians will go to sometimes absurd length to show their support for gun rights. In 2015, for example, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) starred in a video, from IJ Review, in which he cooked bacon with — this is not a joke — a machine gun.

Although several campaigns have popped up over the years to try to counteract the NRA, none have come close to capturing the kind of influential hold that the organization has. Some of the groups — such as StopTheNRA.com, in part funded by Democratic donor Ken Lerer — didn't even last a few years.

Kristin Goss, author of The Gun Debate: What Everyone Needs to Know, previously told me this might be changing. She argued that newer gun control groups like Everytown for Gun Safety and Americans for Responsible Solutions are much more organized, are better funded, and have more grassroots support than gun control groups have had in her 20 years covering this issue. As a result, Democrats at the state and federal levels seem much more willing to discuss gun control.

But supporters of gun control face a huge obstacle: far more passionate opponents. As Republican strategist Grover Norquist said in 2000, "The question is intensity versus preference. You can always get a certain percentage to say they are in favor of some gun controls. But are they going to vote on their 'control' position?" Probably not, Norquist suggested, "but for that 4-5 percent who care about guns, they will vote on this."

What's behind that passion? Goss, who's also a political scientist at Duke University, suggested that it's a sense of tangible loss — gun owners feel like the government is going to take their guns and rights. In comparison, gun control advocates are motivated by more abstract notions of reducing gun violence — although, Goss noted, the victims of mass shootings and their families have begun putting a face on these policies by engaging more actively in advocacy work, which could make the gun control movement feel more relatable.

There is an exception at the state level, where legislatures have passed laws imposing (and relaxing) restrictions on guns. In the past few years, for instance, Washington state and Oregon passed laws ensuring all guns have to go through background checks, including those sold between individuals. "There's a lot more going on than Congress," Goss said. "In blue states, gun laws are getting stricter. And in red states, in some cases, the gun laws are getting looser."

But state laws aren't enough. Since people can simply cross state lines to purchase guns, the weaker federal standards make it easy for someone to simply travel to a state with looser gun laws to obtain a firearm and ship it another state. This is such a common occurrence that the gun shipment route from the South, where gun laws are fairly loose, to New York, where gun laws are strict, has earned the name "the Iron Pipeline." But it also happens all across the country, from New York to Chicago to California. Only a federal law could address this issue — by setting a floor on how loose gun laws can be in every state. And until such a federal law is passed, there will always be a massive loophole to any state gun control law.

Yet the NRA's influence and its army of supporters push many of America's legislators, particularly at the federal level and red states, away from gun control measures — even though some countries that passed these policies have seen a lot of success with them.

5) Other developed countries have had huge successes with gun control

In 1996, a 28-year-old man walked into a cafe in Port Arthur, Australia, ate lunch, pulled a semi-automatic rifle out of his bag, and opened fire on the crowd, killing 35 people and wounding 23 more. It was the worst mass shooting in Australia's history.

Australian lawmakers responded with new legislation that, among other provisions, banned certain types of firearms, such as automatic and semi-automatic rifles and shotguns. The Australian government confiscated 650,000 of these guns through a gun buyback program, in which it purchased firearms from gun owners. It established a registry of all guns owned in the country and required a permit for all new firearm purchases. (This is much further than bills typically proposed in the US, which almost never make a serious attempt to immediately reduce the number of guns in the country.)

The result: Australia's firearm homicide rate dropped by about 42 percent in the seven years after the law passed, and its firearm suicide rate fell by 57 percent, according to one review of the evidence by Harvard researchers.

It's difficult to know for sure how much of the drop in homicides and suicides was caused specifically by the gun buyback program. Australia's gun deaths, for one, were already declining before the law passed. But researchers David Hemenway and Mary Vriniotis argue that the gun buyback program very likely played a role: "First, the drop in firearm deaths was largest among the type of firearms most affected by the buyback. Second, firearm deaths in states with higher buyback rates per capita fell proportionately more than in states with lower buyback rates."

One study of the program, by Australian researchers, found that buying back 3,500 guns per 100,000 people correlated with up to a 50 percent drop in firearm homicides, and a 74 percent drop in gun suicides. As Vox's Dylan Matthews noted, the drop in homicides wasn't statistically significant. But the drop in suicides most definitely was — and the results are striking.

Javier Zarracina/Vox

One other fact, noted by Hemenway and Vriniotis in 2011: "While 13 gun massacres (the killing of 4 or more people at one time) occurred in Australia in the 18 years before the [Australia gun control law], resulting in more than one hundred deaths, in the 14 following years (and up to the present), there were no gun massacres."

6) Although they get a lot of focus, mass shootings are a small portion of all gun violence

Depending on which definition of mass shooting one uses, there are anywhere from a dozen to a few hundred mass shootings in the US each year. These events are, it goes without saying, devastating tragedies for the nation and, primarily, the victims and their families.

Yet other, less-covered kinds of gun violence kill far more Americans than even these mass shootings. Under the broadest definition of mass shooting, these incidents killed about 500 Americans in 2013. That represents just a fraction of total gun homicides: more than 11,200 that year. And firearm suicides killed even more: nearly 21,200 Americans.

Preventing suicides isn't something we typically include in discussions of gun control, but other countries' experiences show it can save lives. In Israel, where military service is mandatory for much of the population, policymakers realized that an alarming number of soldiers killed themselves when they went home over the weekend. So Israeli officials, as part of their solution, decided to try forcing the soldiers to keep their guns at the base when they went home. It worked: A study from Israeli researchers found that suicides among Israeli soldiers dropped by 40 percent.

So while politicians often lean on mass shootings to call for gun control, the problem goes far beyond those incidents. Though it's hard to fault them for trying; mass shootings, after all, force Americans to confront the toll of our gun laws and gun culture.

But it seems that we as a nation just aren't willing to look, or else don't sufficiently mind what we see, when these events occur. Even the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut — in which a gunman killed 20 young children, six school personnel, and himself — catalyzed no significant change at the federal level and most states. Since then, there have been, by some estimates, more than 1,300 mass shootings. And there is every reason to believe there will be more to come.

The affair and cover-up that just landed Alabama's governor in jail, explained

2017-04-10T18:10:52-04:00

A scandal involving an extramarital affair with a key staffer and an alleged cover-up by law enforcement led Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley to resign Monday after briefly being booked into jail.

The scandal has been a slow-moving train wreck for Bentley, a Republican who surprised the state’s political establishment by winning his party’s nomination in 2010 and then easily won election and reelection in a deeply conservative state.

But beginning during Bentley’s second term, an affair with a key staffer, Rebekah Mason, and the collapse of his marriage led to a steady drip-drip-drip of embarrassing revelations culminating in his likely resignation. And Bentley’s refusal to take one for the team and simply step down created a mounting series of journalistic and legal inquiries that brought more details to light.

We now know, for example, that Bentley mistakenly sent a text to his wife, Dianne Bentley, reading, “I love you Rebekah,” along with an emoji of a red rose. And we know that due to his lack of technical savvy, his text exchanges, made with a state-provided iPhone, also appeared on a state-provided iPad he’d given to his wife as a gift.

In a more closely contested partisan environment, it’s possible that Bentley would have been pushed out much faster to avoid giving the gift of scandal to the Democratic opposition. It’s also possible that he would have been able to rally GOP support behind him, arguing that the whole thing is a fundamentally personal matter that is being ginned up into a scandal by his opponents.

But with Alabama under rock-solid GOP control, the scandal has instead moved forward on a years-long slow burn with rumors of an affair and then evidence of the affair — and of attendant financial improprieties and subsequent abuses of power — coming out over a period of years.

Monday, with the Alabama House of Representatives finally poised to vote on articles of impeachment, Bentley bowed to the inevitable, resigning as part of a plea deal that also included pleading guilty to two misdemeanors, a suspended sentence, and community service. Lieutenant Governor Kay Ivey will assume Bentley’s office.

Massey has sentenced the gov and accepted the terms. It's done. Your gov has been convicted. #alpolitics
— Josh Moon (@Josh_Moon) April 10, 2017

It all started with a good old-fashioned sex scandal

Back in fall 2015, Dianne Bentley, the governor’s wife, filed for divorce after 50 years of marriage. That was a tip-off to Alabama reporters that there might be fire behind the smoke of rumors of an affair between Robert Bentley and Rebekah Mason, who had worked for Bentley since his first gubernatorial campaign.

Inside the state government, though, at least some people had been aware of a scandal for some time. Back in August 2014, Stan Stabler of the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency saw a text message from Mason on Bentley's cellphone. Stabler notified his then-boss, Ray Lewis, of the sexual nature of the text message, and three days later, Lewis went to Paul Collier, then the head of the state law enforcement agency, with the information.

Lewis also had an audio recording. The tape, whose contents have since become public, was originally made by Bentley’s wife, and makes the existence of an affair perfectly clear: “When I stand behind you, and I put my arms around you,” Bentley says on the tape, “and I put my hands on your breasts, and I put my hands (unintelligible) and just pull you real close. I love that, too.”

Collier then told Bentley what he knew, recounting later, “I told Governor Bentley there was no need to try and explain it for anything other than it was. It was very obvious that it was sexual in nature.”

According to Collier, he warned Bentley that using state resources to facilitate an affair could turn an embarrassing family matter into a legal problem, so he should make sure to keep his business and personal lives separate. “I told Governor Bentley that I loved him like a father and that there was nothing I wouldn’t do for him, except lie to a grand jury.”

In March 2016, as Bentley’s legal and political problems were mounting, he fired Collier, citing financial improprieties in his department, in an ultimately failed effort to beat back the swirling tide of scandal.

Bentley’s legal problems stem from Mason’s work

What makes the Bentley matter more than a sex scandal is the nature of Mason’s work as a key aide to the governor, which made it essentially inevitable that state resources would end up being used to facilitate both the affair and the subsequent cover-up.

Mason joined Bentley’s first gubernatorial campaign back in 2010 when Bentley was a member of the state House of Representatives. She’d competed in the 1990 Miss Alabama pageant and started working in local broadcast television news after graduating college in 1993. She and her husband also ran a local marketing and advertising firm, from which she jumped to Bentley’s campaign when he was an underdog in the GOP primary. After his victory, she moved to his gubernatorial staff and took up a position as one of his key aides.

Bentley cruised to reelection in 2014 — a great year for Republicans nationally — and by his second term, Mason was reportedly referred to as the “de facto governor” of the state, blamed by many Republicans in the state legislature for pushing Bentley toward more moderate positions on taxes and what they felt was a general lack of fealty to caucus priorities.

Given Mason’s roles in state government, Bentley’s campaigns, and his love life, it was almost inevitable that both public and campaign funds would wind up being intermingled with the governor’s personal situation. And indeed, the Alabama Ethics Commission says that its inquiry into the matter “found probable cause to believe that Governor Robert Bentley committed violations of both the Alabama Ethics Act and the Fair Campaign Practices Act.”

Bentley compounded problems with his abuse of power

But the really outrageous part of this saga isn’t the sex scandal — it’s the abuses of power Bentley allegedly committed in order to cover up his infidelity.

Last week, a special investigator hired by the state legislature to consider impeachment charges against Bentley released his 131-page report on the matter. It concluded that Bentley “directed law enforcement to advance his personal interests and, in a process characterized by increasing obsession and paranoia, subjected career law enforcement officers to tasks intended to protect his reputation.”

Bentley’s wife had longstanding suspicions of an affair between Bentley and Mason, and collaborated with her chief of staff, Heather Hannah, to secretly record Bentley and Mason on the phone. Her goal was to puncture the web of denial around Bentley personally and force him to acknowledge the truth to his family. But as the impeachment report states, “Governor Bentley became obsessed with the existence of the tapes and a desire to prevent them from becoming public.”

This led to efforts to intimidate Hannah (she says he told her, “You will never work in the State of Alabama again if you tell anyone about this,” and, on a later occasion, that she ought to “watch herself”) into silence.

Bentley also used Wendell Ray Lewis, chief of the state’s Dignitary Protection Unit, to try to help him cover up the affair, asking Lewis to chastise women staffers in the governor’s office for gossiping about it, directing him to break up with Mason on his behalf, ordering him to travel to Tuscaloosa to convince Bentley’s son to turn over the tapes, and then marginalizing Lewis after he attempted to intervene to block the use of state resources to further the affair and the cover-up.

Bentley also ordered Collier, the state’s chief law enforcement officer, “to research criminal law and to be prepared to arrest Heather Hannah” as well as “to travel to Greenville to question Director of Scheduling Linda Adams about whether she knew about the recordings.”

The scandal has dragged on forever

The basic contours of the scandal have been known for some time. Bentley had an inappropriate affair with a staff member, lied about it, used state law enforcement personnel to cover up the affair, and even fired the state’s chief law enforcement officer for his reluctance to go along with it. The political fundamentals have also been clear — Bentley clashed with Alabama Republicans on policy matters, offended and embarrassed a culturally conservative state, and had no real defenders in state politics.

Impeachment proceedings nonetheless moved very slowly, because though the Alabama Constitution does make provision for impeachment, it doesn’t spell out the details of the process. No previous governor has ever been impeached.

Bentley didn’t cooperate with the legislature’s investigation, and has consistently maintained that, whatever you think of all this, he did nothing that was actually illegal. The state’s attorney general, meanwhile, tried to slow down the process last fall shortly before Donald Trump’s election victory. Jeff Sessions’s elevation to the Cabinet opened up a Senate vacancy that Bentley swiftly filled with the attorney general in question.

But long before Bentley resigned on Monday, his situation was clearly impossible. His party’s leaders in both houses of legislature have called on him to step down, and the impeachment process is essentially a political one rather than a legal one. Nobody regards Bentley as an indispensable man in Alabama politics, and he had no realistic chance of beating removal proceedings in the legislature.

In the end, he pled guilty in exchange for not being prosecuted for any felonies — a deal that included, as one provision, an agreement to never again seek public office.

Why it’s so hard to prosecute a hate crime

2017-04-10T08:00:01-04:00

Hate crime laws may not stop hateful acts. But they’re still important.

“Trump will deport you.” “Your days are numbered.” “You know my new president says we can kill all you faggots now.”

These are the kinds of comments that have permeated media reports over the past few months, as Donald Trump’s election and rise to the presidency — through his own racist, Islamophobic, and anti-immigrant rhetoric — have seemingly given rise to a new wave of hate in America.

These few comments are just the tip of the iceberg. In the month after Trump was elected, there were more than 860 reports of hate attacks to the Southern Poverty Law Center — including school teachers making Islamophobic comments, students telling Latino peers that Trump will deport them, and outright physical violence that was seemingly motivated by racism.

On an even worse scale, there have been reports of mosques being burned, violent attacks against Indians, and a drive-by shooting at the Tulsa, Oklahoma, headquarters for the LGBTQ organization Oklahomans for Equality. Not all of these attacks have been verified as acts motivated by bigotry, but they’re certainly a cause for alarm.

And much of this has occurred even after Trump asked people to “stop it” during a 60 Minutes interview that aired on November 14.

As someone whose last name is Lopez, I’ve certainly received a lot of messages since Trump’s campaign and election suggesting that I’m going to be deported. I can’t tell you if this is an actual increase in hateful messages — as a journalist, I tend to get a lot of nonsense in my inbox, regardless of who’s in the White House — but it’s something I feel like I see more of now.

Nonetheless, these acts have led a lot of people to wonder: Which of these acts are hate crimes? Can police and prosecutors do anything to stop the hateful acts? Do hate crime laws even have a real impact on levels of bigotry in America?

I reached out to experts on hate crimes with these questions. The short answer to all of them: It’s complicated.

While some hate acts may rise to the level of hate crimes, investigators would initially need to demonstrate that, first, the act is a crime and, second, that it was motivated by hate — a tricky thing to prove, since no one can read a criminal’s mind.

Discerning whether hate crime laws are actually effective against bigotry depends on how you define success. If you define success as hate crime laws actually deterring hate crimes, then they probably aren’t successful by that standard — since no good research shows they’re an effective deterrent. But if you define success as hate crime laws providing resources for marginalized communities so they can feel protected and accepted, then there’s a strong argument, experts said, that they’re successful.

But again, it’s complicated. So let’s break it down.

What makes a hateful act into a hate crime

The first big question is whether your state actually has a hate crime law. While the federal government has a hate crime law that bans crimes based on race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability, some places don’t have such laws at the state level. That presents a major challenge: While the federal government will take on some of these cases, it doesn’t have the resources to enforce its law against all hate crimes nationwide — so a gap in state laws means some hate crimes will go unpunished.

If a state does have a hate crime law or federal law enforcement gets involved in a case, the important thing here is that someone must commit an actual crime to be charged with a hate crime. That crime can then be elevated to a hate crime if there’s enough evidence to suggest that the motive for the act was hate. But if no crime was committed in the course of someone doing something hateful, it’s a hateful act, but not a hate crime.

“It could be an act of trespassing or vandalism. It could be a violent crime, like rape or murder,” Jack Levin, an expert on hate crimes at Northeastern University, told me. “But when the motive involves targeting someone because of a difference, then it becomes a hate crime.”

An example: A man walks into a lesbian bar and attacks one of the women there. This attack would be considered assault and battery, maybe even attempted murder, under the law.

But would it be a hate crime? For a prosecutor and police officers, there would be several factors to consider before going after the perpetrator on hate crime charges: Did the attacker yell anti-gay or sexist slurs, or otherwise say anything explicitly anti-gay or sexist? Does the attacker have a history, perhaps on social media or in other writings, of homophobia or sexism? Did the attacker purposely target a lesbian bar, or was the location irrelevant to his actions?

Investigators would piece all of this together, building up evidence to decide if there’s enough to meet standards of proof for a hate crime charge and conviction. There’s no hard rule here, and whether something is deemed a hate crime can vary from officer to officer, prosecutor to prosecutor, judge to judge, or jury to jury. But generally, once there’s a certain threshold of evidence that the attack was motivated by hate, an otherwise run-of-the-mill crime can become a hate crime.

Daniel Munoz/Getty Images

Now, if a man walked by a lesbian bar and simply yelled anti-gay slurs but didn’t attack anyone, that wouldn’t qualify as a hate crime. His speech, as reprehensible as it may be, would be protected by the Constitution. Until he commits an actual crime, his act can’t be additionally prosecuted as a hate crime.

The idea, essentially, is to take extraordinary steps against crimes that can go much further than harming individual victims. “If someone assaults me because they want my money, it’s going to affect me, it’s going to affect my wife, it’s going to affect my family,” Toni Bisconti, a University of Akron professor who studies hate crimes, told me. “But if someone assaults me because they know I’m gay, then all of a sudden it’s going to affect people that don’t even know me. They have no idea who I am. I’m just the conduit to gay people [in that situation].”

The focus on motives in these cases can get into some legally and philosophically murky territory: Does focusing so much on what’s in a criminal’s mind allow the government to regulate a person’s free speech and expression?

Bisconti acknowledged that such a concern has some merit. Although she said she probably comes down in support of hate crime laws, she acknowledged, “I’m not sure it’s right to legislate someone’s brain.”

Jeannine Bell, a scholar on hate crimes at Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law, took a different view, arguing that it’s not really about a person’s speech or ideas but the person’s actions. “It’s not just that you dislike people of my background. You’re entirely free to dislike people of my background. It’s not that you tell me that you don’t like me. Again, entirely free to do that,” Bell said. “It’s that you selected me for some sort of criminal action because of my background.”

Whatever one’s view on this debate, the central focus of hate crimes — what elevates them above other crimes — is the criminal’s motive.

Hate crimes are very difficult to prosecute — and track

Targeting someone’s motive makes it very difficult to actually prosecute hate crimes. After all, many criminals are not going to be dumb enough to blurt out their exact motives in the course of committing a crime.

“The problem is not all hate-mongers are stupid,” Levin said. “They may not let you know that they hate the members of a particular group. They may realize that they’re better off not voicing a racial slur or [putting] racist graffiti on a sidewalk or wall of a building.”

For investigators, this is always going to make it difficult to definitively prove that an act is a hate crime. So while they might be able to land a conviction for, say, assault in the example of a man attacking a lesbian bar, they may not be able to get convictions for a hate crime.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Beyond prosecutions, this also explains why hate crime reporting is so poor: When you can’t charge or convict someone for a hate crime, it’s going to be hard to report it as a hate crime in official police statistics.

Consider the available statistics: Over the past two decades, the FBI reported between 6,000 and 10,000 hate crimes each year in the US. But when the US Bureau of Justice Statistics surveyed large segments of the population between 2007 and 2011 to try to gauge the real number of hate crimes, it concluded that there are nearly 260,000 such crimes annually.

So the FBI, although it’s supposed to be our most reliable source of current nationwide crime data, is potentially undercounting hate crimes by a magnitude of more than 40. Yet short of the BJS doing another in-depth survey and analysis on this issue, the FBI provides the best national data we have for more recent years.

This makes it difficult to know for certain if the number of hateful acts we have seen since Trump campaigned and was elected actually represent an increase in the total number of hate crimes. The hate crime experts I talked to said they think there’s probably been an uptick given Trump’s rhetoric and support from white supremacists, but it’s impossible to say for sure without hard data.

Hate crime laws probably don’t deter crime, but they can still be valuable

Of course, none of this matters much if hate crime laws are ineffective. So I posed a question to experts: Do hate crime laws actually deter hateful acts?

Every hate crime expert I spoke to agreed that hate crime laws probably don’t deter any crimes. And they said there’s no good research settling this question one way or the other.

“I don’t think that perpetrators think about whether they’re going to commit a hate crime, look to see whether there’s a law that can be punished, and then don’t commit the hate crime when they learn it could be punished,” Bell said. “That doesn’t make sense to me.”

But to my surprise, experts said that it doesn’t matter if hate crime laws actually deter crime.

For one, hate crime laws do more than just enhance criminal penalties for committing otherwise typical criminal acts. They often devote funds to police departments — so they can, for example, set up an LGBTQ liaison who works closely with the community to ensure they feel safe. They also label these acts as a very specific kind of vile crime, encouraging law enforcement to take the issue more seriously.

“By making it a hate crime, you call attention to it in the minds of police [and] in the minds of prosecutors,” Bell said. She said, for instance, that most hate crimes are low-level — the kinds of crimes that police and prosecutors may not pay attention to. But once these low-level acts are defined as hate crimes, then they get attention.

Shutterstock

Bisconti agreed: “Hate crime legislation allowed groups that don’t feel safe with police officers to come forward, and for police officers to understand that this really is a group that’s targeted.”

More broadly, hate crime laws also send societal signals against hate. Hate crimes are, experts said, message crimes against certain groups of people. Hate crime laws act as a counter-message to that bigotry.

“Hate crime laws have important symbolic meaning,” Levin said. “Hate crimes are message crimes — that is, they send a message not only to the primary victim but to every member of this group.” He added, “That’s the kind of message that has to be counteracted. And I think hate crime laws do that. They send a message to two groups: They send it to the perpetrator, informing him that our community will not tolerate his intolerance. And then at the same time, they send a message to potential victims that they are welcome in our community.”

In fact, to the extent that hate crime laws increase prison sentences, some of the experts I spoke to didn’t see much of the value in the enhanced penalties.

Levin, for one, cited the empirical evidence against expanding prison sentences. The research suggests that severity of punishment doesn’t do much to prevent crime. As the National Institute of Justice concluded in 2016, “Research shows clearly that the chance of being caught is a vastly more effective deterrent than even draconian punishment. … Research has found evidence that prison can exacerbate, not reduce, recidivism. Prisons themselves may be schools for learning to commit crimes.”

In other words, more certainty of punishment can deter crime, while more severity — through longer prison sentences — can actually make crime worse.

Generally, though, experts said that hate crimes serve a purpose even if they don’t do much to actually deter crime — by giving marginalized communities resources to fight back and sending a message to criminals that bigotry isn’t accepted.

And in the aftermath of Trump’s election, some communities are perhaps finding those protections, however limited, more necessary.

The outrage over Marvel’s alleged diversity blaming, explained

2017-04-08T11:40:05-04:00

People are incensed that Marvel blamed poor sales on diversity. But it’s complicated.

Marvel, the comic book juggernaut known for bringing many iconic superheroes to life, is still figuring out how not to look like a villain.

Over the weekend, part of an interview with Marvel vice president David Gabriel made the rounds, in which Gabriel inelegantly and inadvertently suggested that poor sales reflected readers’ disinterest in comic books featuring nonwhite and female superheroes.

“What we heard was that people didn’t want any more diversity,” Gabriel said in the interview with ICv2. “I don’t know that that’s really true, but that’s what we saw in sales.”

Bleeding Cool’s aggregation of the interview — “Marvel’s David Gabriel On Sales Slump: People ‘Didn’t Want Any More Diversity,’ ‘Didn’t Want Female Characters’” — went viral, and other sites quickly picked up the story. “Marvel VP of Sales Blames Women and Diversity for Sales Slump,” io9 wrote. The Verge reminded Marvel, “Of course your comics are political, Marvel,” while Nerdist asserted, “Marvel is wrong about diversity killing its comics.”

Marvel and Gabriel quickly issued a statement clarifying his response, but that was about as useful as an umbrella in a hurricane. The genie was out of the bottle.

The rapid response to Gabriel’s words isn’t just about one quote from one interview, though. Marvel’s push for representation and diversity, both on the page and behind it, has been a years-long initiative. Gabriel’s response, and the reaction to it, represents a flare-up of long-simmering issues on both the business and artistic sides of the industry, issues that boil down to one complicated question: What is the value of comics diversity, and how do we measure that value?

The context of Gabriel’s interview is really, really important

It’s important to acknowledge that Gabriel’s conversation with ICv2 wasn’t just some random interview; it was part of Marvel’s summit with comic book retailers. In the first part of the three-part report, two retailers who spoke up asserted that diversity hurt sales. Marvel executives, including Gabriel, were present for those remarks.

“I don't want you guys doing that stuff,” one retailer said, explaining the political content in some of Marvel’s comics. “I want you to entertain. That’s the job. One of my customers even said the other day he wants to get stories and doesn’t mind a message, but he doesn't want to be beaten over the head with these things.”

Another added:

When you talk about the Academy Awards, and how [inclusion and diversity] was a prime topic, I look at the cold, hard reality, and I'm in business. A lot of those movies, or other things in other media, aren't really big money makers. For me, I care more about whether I'm going to sell it or not.

But there were also retailers who pushed against these statements, saying that sales for comics involving nonwhite heroes, like Miles Morales and Ms. Marvel, were doing well and that diversity was needed. Marvel editor-in-chief Axel Alonso also talked about the beauty of diversity.

But what Gabriel reiterated, and what everyone focused on, was a sentiment from the retailers who came to their own conclusions about why they thought their sales were low.

In order to fully understand why Gabriel echoed these sentiments, you need a basic understanding of how important comic book retailers are in the industry. The business side of comic books is still figuring out how to adapt to an age when we consume art a lot differently than we did five, 10, or 15 years ago. But where television shows and music have figured out new ways to measure consumption (through streaming, DVR recordings, etc.), the comic book industry is still wedded in large part to retailers, even though you can get comic books digitally or via a subscription service.

Without getting into too much esoteric detail, retailers and publishers still abide by a system that’s based on orders from independent owners — and that system is part of what’s informing the views of the retailers who spoke out against Marvel’s diverse titles, as well as Gabriel’s response.

Writer and comic book creator Kelly Sue DeConnick outlined the importance of preordering books on her Tumblr, but it basically comes down to comic book shops having limited space, not being able to return stock, and making the savviest orders. Comic book shop owners don’t want to spend their budget on books no one wants to buy, so they tend to go with the safe bets — like A-list comic books featuring well-known heroes. Preorders, which customers can arrange through comic book shops, also represent a confirmed sale for the retailer.

Publishers like Marvel, in turn, base their sales numbers off these retailer orders — every order is considered a sale, since retailers don’t return unsold comic books. This is what makes customer preorders so important, especially for newer books and books from less well-known creators: They signal to retailers and publishers that there’s interest in the book.

This system has helped create a market that’s really difficult to break into or change, because its whims are dictated by a specific set of fans who go into the shop and buy individual floppy issues. Moreover, these sales are made three months in advance, sometimes with just bare-bones information about the book (title, author, artist, cover), meaning the sales also favor established writers and artists and legacy titles over creators just getting onto the scene. These sales also reflect the taste of regular customers versus expanding audiences.

It’s a system that skews toward the status quo, instead of toward breaking new ground.

Gabriel’s gaffe was a public relations nightmare for Marvel’s diversity initiative

When Gabriel spoke about the relationship between diversity and sales, he was speaking about sales and feedback from retailers, not necessarily offering a personal opinion. He’s very clear in his response (the passage that’s gotten a lot of attention) that he’s talking about retailers, and what he heard them saying about how diversity hurts.

But things get stickier when Gabriel seems to take the retailer feedback and apply what sounds like a company perspective to it:

ICv2: Now the million-dollar question. Why did those tastes change?

I don't know if that's a question for me. I think that's a better question for retailers who are seeing all publishers. What we heard was that people didn't want any more diversity. They didn't want female characters out there. That's what we heard, whether we believe that or not. I don't know that that's really true, but that's what we saw in sales.

We saw the sales of any character that was diverse, any character that was new, our female characters, anything that was not a core Marvel character, people were turning their nose up against. That was difficult for us because we had a lot of fresh, new, exciting ideas that we were trying to get out and nothing new really worked.

It was the old things coming back in that time period, three books in particular, Spider-Man Renew Your Vows, that had Spider-Man and Mary Jane married, that worked. The Venom book worked and the Thanos book worked. You can take what you want out of who might be enjoying those three books, but it is definitely a specific type of comic book reader, comic book collector that really liked those three series.

Saying that diversity, female superheroes, and nonwhite superheroes are the reason sales are down — essentially what those retailers claimed — without questioning it or challenging it isn’t a good look for a Marvel representative. What’s worse is that Gabriel reiterated a vocal dissent from some retailers and seemed to apply it to the whole market.

That’s why Marvel decided to clarify his answer with a statement in which it tried to make clear that it heard from retailers championing the company’s diverse books at the summit too, but unfortunately only talked about the negative aspect:

Discussed candidly by some of the retailers at the summit, we heard that some were not happy with the false abandonment of the core Marvel heroes and, contrary to what some said about characters “not working,” the sticking factor and popularity for a majority of these new titles and characters like Squirrel Girl, Ms. Marvel, The Mighty Thor, Spider-Gwen, Miles Morales, and Moon Girl, continue to prove that our fans and retailers ARE excited about these new heroes. And let me be clear, our new heroes are not going anywhere! We are proud and excited to keep introducing unique characters that reflect new voices and new experiences into the Marvel Universe and pair them with our iconic heroes.

We have also been hearing from stores that welcome and champion our new characters and titles and want more! They've invigorated their own customer base and helped them grow their stores because of it. So we're getting both sides of the story and the only upcoming change we're making is to ensure we don't lose focus of our core heroes.

The damage was done. Though Marvel tried to bring clarity to the issue, a lot of people were alarmed by Gabriel’s initial words.

For fans who want diversity in Marvel’s books, Gabriel was at best missing the point, and at worst signaling that Marvel saw diversity as a failed marketing experiment.

Annnnd here comes that "Black ppl? Women? We DID diversity. Now, back to NORMAL." transition I warned you about. https://t.co/NHK6cwgFQT
— Iron Spike (@Iron_Spike) March 31, 2017

This alarm is understandable: Characterizing diversity as a trend that kills comics is a slippery slope, and not a fair assessment. There have been A-List comic books that feature marquee characters such as Tony Stark/Iron Man that bumble into mediocrity. There are also a lot of bad books featuring white male characters that live on the bottom of the comic book ecosystem, but retailers don’t up and tell Marvel to stop making white male characters because their books don’t sell:

straight white dude characters spun off from your hyper mega popular character who had a movie that did big numbers and they selling GARBAGE
— Colin Spacetwinks (@spacetwinks) March 31, 2017

As the retailers and Gabriel point out, Marvel didn’t have the strongest 2016. It’s also true that Marvel has recently focused on diverse heroes. But to connect the two and think the latter begets the former without taking into account any other factors asserts causation with correlation.

There are other metrics by which to measure a comic book’s success. But they’re harder to quantify.

The most important thing to keep in mind is that retail sales are only one metric by which to determine the success or failure of certain comic books.

What those miffed retailers failed to mention is that, according to Comic Book Resources’ analysis, The Mighty Thor, Marvel’s comic with a female Thor, is a top seller, as is Ta-Nehisi Coates and Brian Stelfreeze’s Black Panther.

Many people also buy their comic books in collected volumes (trade paperbacks) and/or digitally, and the digital market has been growing. According to a 2015 report from the digital retailer Comixology, comic books featuring female leads dominate in digital sales. In a 2014 interview with Marvel’s Sana Amanat, Amanat said that Ms. Marvel was the company’s top digital seller. There are also comic books like Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur that do well online, in trades, and in the Scholastic arena but don’t have stellar retail sales.

What gets tricky is that companies like Marvel aren’t usually very open about releasing digital numbers. On top of that, retail sales are the biggest driver of which comic books get green lights and which ones get canceled — even when an audience doesn’t really know a book exists (because of a lack of marketing or the lack of stock on shelves), or because they don’t know the ordering and preordering system.

There’s also the harder-to-quantify matter of prestige, and the nonmonetary value it brings to a title. To that point, the Hugos, which award the year’s best science fiction and fantasy works, released their nominations on Tuesday. Three Marvel comic books were honored — Black Panther and Ms. Marvel were two of them.

G. Willow Wilson, the writer of Ms. Marvel, wrote about Gabriel’s interview on her personal site, directly addressing the idea of the two different markets and how the industry needs to adapt. “The direct market [the retailer/comic book shop market] and the book market have diverged. Never the twain shall meet. We need to accept this and move on, and market accordingly,” she wrote.

But aside from the numbers, there’s another conversation happening here about the deeper meaning of Marvel’s commitment to diversity.

The real value of comics diversity

I haven’t always been a fan of Marvel’s editorial choices. The past couple of years, I’ve found myself dropping some Marvel books in reaction to prices going up, the company’s relentless crossover events, and a weird editorial decision that left one of my favorite characters, Emma Frost, missing from a lot of the action after Marvel’s giant Secret Wars event. I’m also puzzled as to why some of the company’s best books (Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vision, Unstoppable Wasp, etc.) don’t receive the marketing push other titles do. Beyond me, there’s been a vocal pushback against some of Marvel’s editorial decisions, like its Captain America-is-a-Hydra-agent reveal.

That said, when it comes to what Gabriel was trying to say and what he ended up saying, he deserves a genuine shake. Undercutting his argument or cherry-picking his words doesn’t achieve anything. If we’re looking for a serious discussion about diversity and sales in the industry, his statement about their sales potential should be taken seriously.

There needs to be an honest conversation about balancing the sales potential of diverse comic books and the value of said books. Marvel has to look at the books it’s publishing — taking into account everything from the artists creating them to how they’re being marketed — and consider how, or if, they’re getting to the audiences that want to read them.

And when there are statements that directly blame diversity for a slump, the company should (and probably will, considering this nightmare of a news cycle) really think about all the other factors at play before giving it credence.

It’s a two-way street too.

The way the comic book industry records sales and fan interest isn’t going to change overnight. There’s an opportunity here for audiences to consider how they support good books. Getting annoyed with retailers is the easy part. Figuring out how to support good writers —especially nonwhite and female writers who are just breaking into the industry — and the good books they write is more difficult.

@KerBob97 @GerryDuggan @nickspencer Zero dollars. I paid for postcards, Carol Corps membership cards & dogtags out of my own pocket.
— Kelly Sue DeConnick (@kellysue) April 1, 2017

Grant Morrison, a comic book writer who worked for Marvel and DC, wrote in his 2011 book Supergods that comic books and superheroes have the power to be as influential in shaping a person’s morality as religion. It’s something that’s stuck with me, partly because Chris Claremont’s X-Men run was hugely influential in my view of humanity, empathy, and kindness.

Morrison’s observation is pertinent here for how it encapsulates how we look at superhero comic books. They’re stories about morality, justice, humanity, and the good in people. They’re pieces of art.

They’re also products.

Marvel is connected to the morals of the art it creates in a way other artistic pursuits aren’t. There’s an implicit expectation that the company pumping out these lessons about life and justice should be as good as the stories it’s creating. It would be a death knell for the company if its culture and its product became diametrically opposed.

The appeal for diversity in comics comes from the expectation that a company that’s built on stories about finding the good in one another, about brilliance in the overlooked, about finding heroes where you least expect them and standing up for what’s right, should be exhibiting those values in real life. Even when some people in the business say otherwise.

Google's epic legal battle with Uber over self-driving technology, explained

2017-04-08T11:00:02-04:00

Uber and Google are locked in a legal battle that could have huge implications for the future of the self-driving car industry. If Uber loses its lawsuit, it could cost the company millions and set back Uber’s self-driving car effort by months — months Uber probably can’t afford to lose.

The lawsuit started when Waymo, Google’s self-driving car unit, alleged that Uber is using sensors based on stolen Waymo designs and asked the courts to block Uber from using the designs.

Uber fired back in a legal brief on Friday, denying that its sensors were based on Waymo’s technology and accusing Waymo of trying to tie up a legitimate competitor with frivolous litigation.

It’s not uncommon for the invention of an important new technology to be followed by legal battles over rights to that technology. Apple, for example, fought a years-long legal battle with Samsung, Motorola, HTC, and other makers of Android-based phones in the early years of the smartphone industry. Apple won some money from these lawsuits, but strategically speaking, they ended in a draw. Apple’s competitors were able to continue churning out Android-based smartphones, and Android ended up controlling a large majority of the global smartphone market.

In contrast, there’s a real possibility that Waymo could beat Uber decisively in court. “This is an extraordinary case,” said William Alsup, the California federal judge who is overseeing the case, on Wednesday. His take on Google’s evidence: “I’ve never seen a record this strong in 42 years.”

If the court orders Uber not to use technology similar to Waymo’s, it could set back Uber’s self-driving car project by many months. And Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has said his company will be in big trouble if another company beats it to market with self-driving technology.

“If we are not tied for first, then the entity that's in first then rolls out a ride-sharing network that is far cheaper or far higher-quality than Uber's, then Uber is no longer a thing,” Kalanick said in a 2016 interview.

Uber hoped that hiring some of Waymo’s top engineers would help it catch up to Waymo. But if Waymo proves that this was really a ploy to copy its technology, the move could backfire spectacularly.

The lawsuit focuses on a brilliant engineer who left Google for Uber

Ryan Somma

Ghostrider, Anthony Levandowski’s self-driving motorcycle.

The central figure in the legal drama is Anthony Levandowski, a brilliant engineer and the driving force behind the business deal that ultimately led to Waymo’s lawsuit. Levandowski quit his job at Google (now Waymo) in early 2016 and immediately started a new company called Otto. Just a few months later, in May 2016, the company unveiled a prototype of its self-driving truck technology. In August, Otto was acquired by Uber for around $700 million — a massive payout for a company that had existed for less than a year.

Waymo now claims that the reason Levandowski was able to get the new self-driving truck technology working so quickly is that key elements of the design were stolen from Waymo. According to Waymo, Levandowski downloaded 14,000 confidential documents from the Waymo network in the days before he left his old employer. And Waymo believes he illegally relied on those documents to guide the development of Otto’s own technology.

Levandowski isn’t well-known to the public, but in the industry it has long been obvious that he was a rising star. A 2003 profile of him as a 23-year-old UC Berkeley graduate student reported that he was already working to raise $600,000 for a startup.

In 2004, the military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which brought you the internet, announced a competition to build a self-driving car that could make it across the desert. Levandowski organized a team to enter the competition, but for an extra challenge the team built a self-driving motorcycle instead of a car. They didn’t win — in fact, no one’s vehicle completed the course that year — but it was the start of Levandowski’s involvement in the self-driving vehicle industry.

Levandowski went on to found a startup called 510 Systems with some Berkeley colleagues. It started out selling camera technology to Google for collecting Street View images. Levandowski joined Google to work on its mapping technology in 2007, but continued working closely with his 510 Systems colleagues on Google-related projects. Finally, in 2011 Google acquired 510 Systems, and its engineers became early members of Google’s self-driving car project.

This early history may explain Levandowski’s casual attitude about working on side projects at the same time he was on Google’s payroll. Waymo now claims that in 2012, unbeknownst to Google, Levandowski took a stake in another startup called Odin Wave (for reasons that aren’t clear, it’s also went by “Tyto Lidar” in some documents) that was founded by one of his teammates from the DARPA Grand Challenge days. “Lidar” refers to a key sensor technology that allows a self-driving car to form a 3D picture of its surroundings.

Waymo says that in 2013, it heard from a third-party vendor that Odin Wave had submitted an order to build a custom lidar sensor that was suspiciously similar to Google’s own design. When confronted in 2013, Waymo says, Levandowski denied having an ownership interest in the company.

The next year, Google considered buying Odin Wave and asked Levandowski to evaluate the possibility. Waymo now says that Levandowski never disclosed a relationship to the company even as he was advising Google about whether to buy it.

In summer 2015, Waymo alleges in a court filing, Levandowski started talking to Uber — months before he officially left Waymo to found Otto. Pierre-Yves Droz, a 510 Systems co-founder who is now a senior Waymo engineer, stated in the filing that Levandowski spent months trying to recruit engineers on his Waymo team to join his startup, and that he expected from the outset to sell the company to Uber.

Droz wrote that over dinner in the summer of 2015, Levandowski “told me that it would be nice to create a new self-driving car startup and that Uber would be interested in buying the team responsible for the LiDAR we were developing at Google.”

Of course, there’s nothing illegal about an experienced engineer leaving one company to work at another one. And especially in California, where the courts don’t enforce noncompete agreements, there’s nothing illegal about an engineer putting the skills and knowledge he’d developed at one job to use for a new employer.

But Google’s new Waymo division believes Levandowski crossed the line by actively recruiting employees for his new venture while he was still on Waymo’s payroll, and by taking confidential documents with him when he left Waymo.

Uber says it’s done nothing wrong

Photo by Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick.

Uber responded to Waymo’s accusations in a Friday court filing. “Both of Waymo’s central premises — that former Waymo employees brought thousands of confidential Waymo documents to Uber to build a copycat lidar and that Uber’s lidar closely mimics Waymo’s single-lens design — are demonstrably false,” the company writes.

Uber says it has strict policies in place to ensure that employees don’t bring confidential information with them when they join Uber from another technology company. And it says those safeguards worked: A search of Uber’s network and the laptops of key employees did not turn up copies of the documents Waymo says were stolen by Levandowski.

However, this argument has a big, important caveat: Uber was unable to search Levandowski’s personal computers because he had gotten his own lawyer and invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

“Uber finds itself in a complicated situation” due to Levandowski’s lack of cooperation, the ride-hailing company admitted in its legal filing.

Uber also argues that its lidar technology can’t have been copied from Waymo’s because there were significant differences between them. Lidar works by bouncing a laser off nearby objects and capturing it when it bounces back. One of Waymo’s key innovations was to use the same lens for both sending and receiving these laser pulses, significantly reducing the complexity and cost of the lidar system.

Waymo accused Uber of copying this innovation, but Uber says that’s wrong. Uber says it began developing its own lidar in early 2015 and that it uses two lenses for transmitting laser pulses and two more for receiving them. Uber says that’s one of several key differences that demonstrates that its technology isn’t derived from Waymo’s.

Uber’s reply is packed full of other technical details that the company says demonstrate that its lidar is not based on Waymo’s technology. However, most of these details are redacted in the public version of the document.

The document also leaves a big unanswered question: Why did Uber pay around $700 million for Otto if it wasn’t trying to get its hands on key Waymo technologies? It’s possible, of course, that Uber was just optimistic about Otto’s self-driving truck business. Or perhaps Uber felt the Waymo veterans’ general knowledge about self-driving car technology — knowledge not protected by trade secret laws — was worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

But we can expect Waymo to press this point as the litigation continues. While Levandowski has a right to invoke the Fifth Amendment and refuse to testify, Waymo will be able to portray this as a sign that Levandowski did, in fact, break the law as he was leaving Waymo. And it will look for “smoking gun” evidence proving that Levandowski and his colleagues illegally incorporated elements of Waymo’s technology into Uber’s own lidar sensors.

Disclosure: My brother works at Google.

The war in Syria, explained

2017-04-08T08:00:02-04:00

How Syria’s civil war became America’s problem.

On the face of it, President Trump’s decision to attack Syria doesn’t make a lot of sense. Launching 59 missiles at a single airbase, as Trump did, is not going to seriously change the outcome of a years-long civil war. So what’s the point of doing it at all?

Understanding the answer to that question, and really anything the United States does and does not do in Syria, requires understanding the real nature of the country’s horrific civil war. At its heart, it is a conflict between a regime that represents a minority of its citizens and the majority who want it gone. But over time, it has spiraled into an immensely complicated international war, with some of America’s most significant enemies and closest partners on various different sides.

“It has been one of the hardest issues that I’ve faced as president,” President Barack Obama said in a December 2016 press conference. “Syria is the most complex, complicated issue I have ever had to deal with," then-CIA Director John Brennan said during a discussion at the Brookings Institution last year.

Getting involved in this war in any serious way is immensely complicated and risky, which is why the Obama administration largely avoided doing so, and why it never struck Assad directly. Trump’s strike tried to thread the needle by punishing the Assad regime specifically for its use of chemical weapons without getting dragged into the broader conflict.

What follows is a guide to the core dynamics at work in Syria: how the civil war began, how it evolved, when US foes like Russia got involved, what two American presidents have been willing to do — and what happens next.

How Syria’s civil war began — and why America cares so much

(John Cantlie/Getty Images)

Protesters burn images of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad at a protest on April 9, 2012.

When Syrians rose up as part of the wave of Arab Spring protests against Middle East dictators in 2011, Assad quickly decided to emulate his father, Hafez, and try to tamp down the protests through the use of force. The goal was to turn the broad-based protest movement from a political struggle — which Assad’s unpopular regime was bound to lose — into a military one, where his control of the army meant he might be able to kill his way to victory.

"It was very much a strategic decision that the regime made, to militarize the conflict right away," Glenn Robinson, an associate professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, told me in an interview. "I think in their mind, and correctly, if this becomes a political battle where populations matter, the regime probably only has support of a third of the country. ... If this becomes a political contestation, the opposition has the numbers."

The grim way of implementing this plan, slaughtering protestors en masse until they were forced to pick up arms in self-defense, got Assad the war he wanted. In July 2011, defectors from Assad’s regime formed an organized militia called the Free Syrian Army to protect protesters and strike back at Assad. By January 2012, the Syrian uprising had devolved into a full-blown civil war pitting the FSA and other assorted rebel groups against Assad and his supporters.

The strategic stakes of this war, both for the Middle East as a region and for the United States, are enormous — for three main reasons.

The first is Iran. Syria's alliance with Tehran dates back to 1980 and is critical to Iran’s regional ambitions. It uses Syria to convey weapons and other goods to its proxy militias and allies, most notably Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. In return, Assad's regime gets military and political assistance from Tehran.

Iranian leaders saw the revolt against Assad as a threat not just to him but also to them. In 2012, Iran responded by sending in Hezbollah to fight on Assad's side, an intervention that played an important role in Assad’s campaign against the rebels.

At the same time, though, Iran’s backing made Assad into a target for some of America’s closest partners in the region. Since the Iraq War, and maybe earlier, the oil-rich Sunni Arab states along the Persian Gulf — particularly Saudi Arabia, the largest and strongest — had been embroiled in a sort of cold war with Iran, a Shiite theocracy. Both sides wish to steer the political course of the Middle East, and see the other as a fundamental threat to their security.

So when Assad began to teeter, the Gulf states saw an opportunity to unseat one of Iran's principal allies and started sending arms to the Syrian rebels. In March 2013, the Arab League voted to give its members explicit permission to arm the Syrian opposition. In May of that year, the Financial Times reported that Qatar alone had given $3 billion in aid to the rebels. In just one shipment in 2015, Saudi Arabia provided rebels with 500 deadly TOW anti-tank missiles.

The Syrian conflict thus became more than just a civil war: It became a proxy fight between Iran and America’s Gulf allies, whose outcome was of vital significance for both sides.

It also quickly became a proxy standoff between Washington and Moscow.

Russia’s ties to Syria go all the way back to the Cold War: According to one scholar, the Soviets "essentially built" the modern Syrian military in the 1960s. Continued support for the Assad government gave the USSR its most reliable ally and proxy in the Middle East.

Today, Syria remains one of Russia's few reliable allies outside of the former Soviet republics, a vestige of Moscow's former superpower status and a final military toehold in the Middle East. Russia maintains a valuable naval base today at Tartus, on Syria's Mediterranean coast, and has sold a number of surplus weapons to Assad. Between 2006 and 2010, 48 percent of Syrian arms imports came from Russia. Assad’s defeat, then, would have been a major strategic blow to Vladimir Putin’s regime — which has ambitions of restoring Russia’s Cold War status as a great power with global influence.

“This matters to [the Russians] ... more than it would if they had another 10 [allies to spare],” says Doug Ollivant, who oversaw Iraq policy at the National Security Council from 2008 to 2009 and is now a managing partner at Mantid International.

As a result, Russia has been backing Assad since the war began. In 2011 alone, Russia vetoed a UN Security Council resolution condemning Assad’s crackdown on protesters, and sold nearly $1 billion in arms to Assad’s regime.

Putin’s support for Assad has steadily escalated, with Moscow selling Assad advanced air defense systems and refurbished MI-25 attack helicopters. By September 2015, Russia was a direct participant in the war. Russian warplanes and helicopters are hitting Assad’s enemies from the air, and Moscow has artillery pieces bombarding rebels and special forces embedded with Syrian troops. Some estimates place the number of Russian soldiers in Syria today at around 10,000.

The third and final issue is terrorism. Since practically the beginning of the conflict, al-Qaeda had been sending forces into Syria, seeing a chaotic civil war as a great environment for them to use as a safe haven and a place to get recruits. By mid-2012, the Syrian al-Qaeda franchise, Jabhat al-Nusra, had allied with some relatively moderate rebels — and established themselves as one of the most effective anti-Assad fighting forces. Qatar in particular showered Nusra with cash in an effort to quickly topple Assad.

Put those three things together — Iran, Russia, and terrorism — and you get a sense of why first Obama and now Trump have to varying degrees felt the need to involve America in a brutal and seemingly intractable conflict.

The US policy under Obama: (mostly) non-intervention

(Kevin Dietsch/Pool/Getty Images)

Obama was president during the bulk of the Syrian civil war, and his legacy as commander in chief will be shaped in part by what he chose to do there — and what he chose to avoid.

One of those things was to refuse to endorse any kind of large-scale effort aimed at toppling Assad — repeatedly overruling members of his administration, like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and CIA Director David Petraeus, who wanted to provide more advanced weaponry to the rebels. Parallel CIA and Pentagon efforts to recruit, train, and arm Syrian rebels did little to shape the course of the conflict; in 2015, the Defense Department had to concede that its $250 million effort had trained a grand total of 60 fighters (that’s more than $4 million per trainee).

Perhaps the defining moment came on August 21, 2013, when Assad's forces launched sarin gas — a horrifying and deadly chemical weapon — into the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, killing up to 1,423 people. Most of the dead were civilians.

Prior to the attack, President Obama had declared chemical weapons use to be a "red line": If Assad used them, it would trigger an American military response. But after Ghouta, Obama didn't seem to want to follow through. He submitted a plan for punitive airstrikes in Syria to Congress, where lawmakers from both parties signaled that it was likely to fail.

Russia offered Obama a way out of his self-made dilemma. It brokered a deal with Assad where he would agree to give up his chemical weapons and submit to international inspections if the United States agreed not to attack Assad.

The Obama team accepted this as a lifeline. As they saw it, the critical issue was never the Syrian civil war, which the president had decided was too risky to intervene in. Rather, it was the use of chemical weapons — a particularly heinous act prohibited by international law. If the threat of American military force got Assad to back down from chemical use, that would make chemical weapons use less likely in Syria and in other conflicts without putting American troops in harm’s way or risking a wider conflagration.

“I’m very proud of this moment,” Obama told the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg. ““The overwhelming weight of conventional wisdom and the machinery of our national-security apparatus had gone fairly far. The perception was that my credibility was at stake, that America’s credibility was at stake. And so for me to press the pause button at that moment, I knew, would cost me politically [but] I believe ultimately it was the right decision to make.”

Critics, by contrast, saw it as a cop-out. They argued that if Obama wouldn’t intervene after drawing a “red line” about chemical use, Assad and his allies would see it as proof that the US would never intervene for any reason. This, according to some experts, is the key reason Russia decided to escalate so dramatically in 2015: They came to believe that Obama wasn’t as invested in trying to push out Assad as they were in trying to keep him in power, which means the US would largely give them a free hand. In essence, Obama’s attempt to deter chemical weapons use destroyed his ability to deter Russian intervention.

“It is precisely when Obama went for the chemical weapons deal over strikes in 2013 that Moscow understood it had escalation dominance in Syria,” Emile Hokayem, a Syria expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, wrote in April.

This is a debatable point, to be sure. But there is no question that Obama left office with a civil war that had already killed at least 470,000 Syrians grinding along with no end in sight.

Wait, wasn’t the US bombing Syria before Trump?

(Keith Brown/U.S. Air Force/Getty Images)

A US F-16 in Iraq.

There was one major exception to Obama’s hands-off policy in Syria: the war on ISIS. But it was carefully limited, in ways that show why Trump’s strike was such a major shift.

After the militant group swept across northern Iraq in June 2014, and came to control a swath of territory in Syria and Iraq roughly the size of Great Britain, the scale of the terrorist threat became impossible to deny. This, together with the videotaped beheadings of two American journalists, prompted Obama to declare a plan to "degrade and ultimately destroy" ISIS on September 10.

The linchpin of the plan was a series of American airstrikes, both in Syria and in Iraq, supporting forces on the ground that were fighting ISIS. In Iraq, that meant the official Iraqi army as well as tribal leaders and Shia militias. But it wasn’t clear, initially, who that would be in Syria.

Most rebel groups were preoccupied fighting Assad, and had no ability to really refocus on the Islamic State. The same was true, in reverse, for Assad; he had long maintained a sort of de facto ceasefire with ISIS so he could focus on fighting the moderate rebels whom he saw as a bigger threat.

The US ended up settling on fighters from the Kurdish ethnic group, based in northern Syria near the Turkish border, as their key allies. These Kurds were mostly uninvolved in the main civil war, as their chief objective was carving out a Kurdish state in majority-Kurdish areas rather than toppling Assad’s regime in Damascus. Moreover, ISIS had invaded their territory, and was besieging a Kurdish city named Kobane at the time of the US intervention.

So the thousands of missions flown by American warplanes, and hundreds of US special forces deployed to Syria, were supposed to accomplish two things: cut ISIS’s supply lines between Syria and Iraq, and back Kurdish forces in their fight against ISIS.

On this metric, they’ve more or less succeeded. American airstrikes helped break the siege of Kobane and allowed Kurdish forces to launch a counteroffensive that swept over ISIS’s holdings in north central Syria. Today, a joint Kurdish-Arab military group called the Syrian Democratic Forces is camped out within miles of ISIS’s capital city, Raqqa — and are preparing to attack the city itself, with major backing from US troops.

But note the delicacy of this strategy when it came to the main conflict in Syria.

The United States was fanatical about limiting the scope of this counter-ISIS campaign — in particular, making sure it never became a counter-Assad campaign. When the Pentagon sent weapons to some Syrian rebels whom they wanted to fight ISIS, it made them promise not to use those weapons against Assad. (The tiny number of rebels who took the US up on this weak offer were swiftly slaughtered by al-Qaeda forces.)

This only intensified after the Russian intervention began in September 2015. US and Russian forces developed a procedure for flying in the same airspace, called deconfliction, designed to ensure that there was no accidental US bombing of Russians or Assad forces. US and Russian planes managed to fly near each other, for well over a year, with no major incident — even as Russian planes were on their way to drop bombs on Syrian civilians.

This made crystal clear to both the Russians and the Syrians that the United States had no interest in intervening in their war on the rebels. They developed a sense of impunity — enabling atrocities like Tuesday’s chemical attack.

Why Trump’s strike is a major, but limited, escalation

(Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

There was little reason to believe that Trump would treat Assad and Russia more harshly than Obama did. During the red line debate in 2013, he tweeted repeatedly and angrily against a strike, warning Obama to back down.

“AGAIN, TO OUR VERY FOOLISH LEADER, DO NOT ATTACK SYRIA,” he tweeted at the time (all caps his). “IF YOU DO MANY VERY BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN & FROM THAT FIGHT THE U.S. GETS NOTHING!”

During the presidential campaign, Trump even suggested that Assad’s rule was better for Syria than the alternatives. “We don't know who the rebels are,” he said in an October presidential debate. “If they ever did overthrow Assad ... you may very well end up with worse than Assad.”

Trump did not return to his “partner with Russia” policy after taking office. But he did shift the US’s Syria policy, at least rhetorically, with several administration officials suggesting the US would accept Assad staying in power. (Obama wasn’t doing anything substantive to oust Assad but was at least rhetorically committed to his departure.)

The April 4 gas attack profoundly changed that calculus.

First, Trump seemed genuinely angry and horrified by the photos and videos of children killed in the chemical weapons strike, and wanted something done about it.

This isn’t as much of a surprise as it might seem: Trump has always been more of an instinctive hawk than was genuinely believed. Back in March 2011, when Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi was killing his own people in the early stages of the country’s civil war, Trump released a video calling on then-President Obama to “stop this guy” and “save these lives.”

Thomas Wright, a scholar at the Brookings Institution who has spent the past several months studying Trump’s foreign policy doctrine, thinks a similar kind of emotional reaction might be at work here.

“There [have been] very few iconic images of brutality from the Syrian civil war,” he says. “A picture of a lot of children gassed is pretty horrific for anyone to see.”

The second factor here is the nature of the attack itself.

The goal of the 2013 deal Obama made with Syria wasn’t just to eliminate Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile (a goal at which it clearly failed). It was to show that chemical weapons were somehow different from normal weapons, more unacceptable. The agreement was supposed to show that rogue actors like Assad have two choices: either agree to stop using chemical weapons or face some kind of punishment.

Since 2013, this had more or less worked: Assad had not used a nerve agent prohibited by the Chemical Weapons Convention (though he has used chlorine gas, a chemical weapon that isn’t explicitly banned).

What’s known as the “norm” against chemical weapons use — the idea that chemical weapons were, like nuclear and biological weapons, a special kind of evil to be prohibited even in vicious wars — had been upheld, seemingly backstopped by US threat of force.

Tuesday’s attack made clear that Assad was prepared to break that norm at will, something certainly not lost on Defense Secretary Mattis or National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster. They know how serious a violation of the norms around chemical weapons this attack is and how important it is to limit the use of such of weapons. They have likely told the president this, and informed him that American credibility is on the line.

“This is a kind of flagrant flouting of that agreement. ... It’s physical proof that they’ve duped the international community,” Michael Hanna, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation who follows the Syria conflict, says. “It is different than other kinds of war crimes committed by the regime, and ... that view is clearly going to be relayed to him by his close advisers.”

This appears to be the main reason Trump struck Syria. His goal wasn’t to intervene in any of the broader and more complicated dynamics of the war — to stop the civil war or weaken Iran. Rather, it’s a pinpoint, one-off strike designed to tell Assad that chemical weapon use will be punished. As Trump put it in his address Thursday night:

Tonight, I ordered a targeted military strike on the airfield in Syria from where the chemical attack was launched. It is in the vital national security interest of the United States to prevent and deter the spread of chemical weapons.

By going out of his way to emphasize that this US strike targeted the exact airbase from where the chemical attack was launched, Trump is making it clear that the strike was designed as a specific punishment for the recent chemical attack — and not a broader effort aimed at striking Assad until he stops bombing civilians or leaves power.

Meanwhile, the rebels are in trouble. The city of Aleppo, a major rebel stronghold, fell to Assad in December 2016. While he may not be on the verge of defeating the rebels outright, it’s clear that they’re in no position to topple him. Trump’s limited strike won’t change that: The damage was so contained, in fact, that Syrian warplanes were already flying missions out of the sole airbase Trump targeted by Friday afternoon.

There are two main questions going forward. First, will Trump’s strikes successfully deter Assad from using chemical weapons again — and they don’t, how will Trump respond? Second, could this limited initial attack quickly escalate into something far larger, with Trump potentially being pressured into trying to not just constrain Assad but push him out of power?

We don’t know the answers to these questions yet. But they will play a significant role in determining America’s role in Syria — and, possibly, the future course of the Syrian civil war itself.

Does Trump need congressional approval to strike Syria? The debate, explained.

2017-04-07T14:40:01-04:00

It’s often easier, Congress has found, to just let the president do what he wants.

President Trump’s decision to bomb a Syrian airfield in response to a deadly chemical weapons attack has inspired a more bipartisan response from Congress than anything else the president has done in his 11 weeks in office.

From House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to former Democratic vice presidential nominee Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA), from Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) to Senate Armed Services Committee Chair John McCain (R-AZ), huge swaths of lawmakers from both parties agree: What Syria’s Bashar al-Assad did was terrible, but if Trump wants to commit the US military to doing more to fight him, he ought to go to Congress for approval.

He ought to get, they argue, a new Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF): formal endorsement from Congress of the US’s involvement in military “hostilities” against a particular enemy or set of enemies.

It remains to be seen, of course, whether the Trump administration will actually listen — the administration hasn’t clearly said whether it plans to take broader military action against Assad, let alone whether it will seek congressional authorization if it does. And if the Trump administration does try to go it alone, it’s unclear whether Congress will care enough to assert its authority over the executive branch.

The past 20 years — stretching back even before the “war on terror” began in 2001 — suggest it won’t.

It would be perfectly normal for the Trump administration to argue it doesn’t need Congress’s approval to go after Assad. It would court a fight over when and why the executive branch can get America’s military involved in operations overseas without input from Congress — but that fight has been going on for decades. Indeed, the Obama administration made legal arguments for justifiable unilateral force that could be interpreted to validate what Trump did on Thursday night.

If Congress really wanted to, it could stop the slow creep of executive war power by forcing Trump to ask, explicitly, for approval to go after Assad. Or it could issue a strong endorsement of an intervention that could turn out to be politically popular.

Both of those are things an AUMF can do. But it can’t do both of them at once. Getting Congress to agree on an AUMF will require the members who want to expand presidential war powers, and the members who want to curtail them — a split that doesn’t break evenly along party lines — to come together on a single plan and then put their names to it with a vote.

It’s often easier, Congress has found, to just let the executive do what it wants.

Why presidents need Congress to authorize military force — at least in theory

”It is a remarkable fact about the US Constitution,” Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith wrote Friday morning at the blog Lawfare, “that 228 years after its creation, we still don’t know what limits, if any, it imposes on unilateral presidential uses of military force.”

Article II of the Constitution says that the president is the commander in chief of the armed forces — which means he’s responsible for directing them into battle. But Article I of the Constitution gives Congress, and Congress alone, the authority to declare war — and to appropriate funds to the Defense Department to wage it.

Photo12/UIG via Getty

Woodrow Wilson asks Congress to declare war on Germany during World War I.

There’s no bright line about when something counts as a war that Congress must approve, and when it’s simply a military action the president can direct. (All of this is separate from the question of whether a given military operation is legal under international law — which is also a valid question about Trump’s strikes against Assad.)

For most of American history, this wasn’t a problem. ”From 1789 to 1950, Presidents came to Congress either for a declaration of war or statutory authority whenever they decided it was necessary to take the country from a state of peace to a state of war,” Constitution Project scholar Louis Fisher told Ryan Goodman of the law blog Just Security on Thursday night.

“In doing so, they complied with the Framers’ clear intent that the decision to use offensive force against another country must reside solely in Congress,” he said.

President Harry Truman broke that precedent. While we call the Korean War a “war” today, Truman never bothered to get a declaration of war from Congress — he just sent US troops to aid American-aligned South Korea against communist North Korea on his own. That set a Cold War precedent. The Johnson administration got congressional approval (via the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution) to escalate the war in Vietnam; the resolution was repealed in 1971, at which point the war it had written a “blank check” for had killed tens of thousands of American soldiers.

By the time Congress discovered that Nixon had conducted a secret bombing campaign in Cambodia, they got sufficiently fed up.

CORBIS via Getty

Too little, too late.

In 1973, Congress passed the War Powers Act, an attempt to clarify where the executive’s “commander in chief” powers ended and Congress’ “declare war” power began. The War Powers Act required the president to notify Congress when he got the US involved in “hostilities” — and then set a 60- to 90-day clock for Congress to approve that action, by passing an authorization of use of military force, or for the president to withdraw from the conflict. It also allowed Congress to pass a concurrent resolution that would force the executive branch to withdraw from any conflict it hasn’t already approved.

But the War Powers Act didn’t resolve the debate. It just shifted it — from what counted as a “war” to what counted as “hostilities.”

Some hawks (including some presidential administrations) have argued that the War Powers Act is itself unconstitutional, because being commander in chief gives the president unlimited authority to carry out military action. More often, though, presidents have just skirted the issue.

The only president to officially file a report that triggered the 60- to 90-day clock, according to the Library of Congress, was Gerald Ford. President Reagan went into Lebanon while telling Congress but without formally reporting on it, and into El Salvador without notifying Congress at all; President Bush argued that he didn’t need congressional approval to go into Kuwait, because the US was acting in support of a United Nations resolution. President Clinton told Congress when he went into Bosnia and Kosovo but never triggered the 60-day countdown — and while some members of Congress were upset by the move, it wasn’t enough to pass a resolution forcing the president to withdraw.

Then 9/11 happened — changing the debate from “when can a president take action without authorization?” to “just how far does one authorization stretch?”

2001: one AUMF, more than three dozen military actions

On September 18, 2001 — in the post-9/11 rush to “do something” that also brought America the Patriot Act and the Department of Homeland Security — Congress passed an authorization of military force that allowed the president to:

use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.

The 2001 AUMF justified the war in Afghanistan, since al-Qaeda was the organization that had planned the 9/11 attacks and the Afghan Taliban had “harbored” al-Qaeda. (Congress passed a separate AUMF, in 2002, to authorize the war to oust Saddam Hussein in Iraq.) But it opened the door to other conflicts as well — and didn’t set a time limit for how long the authorization would stand.

Harry Hamburg/NY Daily News via Getty

By the time President George W. Bush delivered this joint address to Congress laying out the fight against al-Qaeda, Congress had already given him authority to take action against the organization or anyone who supported it.

So the executive branch has just kept using it. By May 2016, according to a Congressional Research Service report, “the current authorization [had] been used to justify unclassified military action 37 times in 14 countries since 2001” — 18 times by President George W. Bush, and 19 times by President Barack Obama.

Some of these interventions were limited — like a 2004 effort in Georgia — while others, like efforts to combat terrorists in Somalia and neighboring countries, have stretched on for years on end.

To many members of Congress, in both parties, that’s started to seem a little ridiculous.

For one thing, the AUMF is now 15 years old. But more importantly, the AUMF didn’t authorize action against any terrorist groups — it authorized action against the group (al-Qaeda) that attacked the US in 2001, and its affiliates. And the war on terror is no longer primarily a war on al-Qaeda, and hasn’t been for a long time. Al-Qaeda has lost power and prestige; other groups, like ISIS (which has its roots in al-Qaeda but is distinctly its own group), have gained it.

When President Obama launched a first round of US strikes against ISIS in 2014, experts were notably skeptical that a 2001 authorization could justify action against a group that didn’t exist in 2001: “it is an application of the AUMF that the legislature did not contemplate and could not have actually envisioned in September 2001, because Congress naturally did not foresee any such amoeba-like splitting of the enemy,” Georgetown law professor Marty Lederman wrote at the time.

Some members of Congress in both parties had been interested in limiting the scope of the 2001 AUMF for a while. In 2013, a proposal to stop funding for any AUMF-authorized activities after 2014 (led by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), now the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee) failed in the Republican House. Many Democrats supported efforts to limit the AUMF, as did libertarian Republicans like Rand Paul and anti-Obama conservatives like Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX); on the other side of the aisle, some moderate Democrats resisted the idea of limiting Obama’s authority.

Then Obama did something so unusual that congressional Democrats didn’t understand it (and were kind of mad about it) at the time: He asked Congress, in February 2015, to pass a new AUMF specifically to authorize the fight against ISIS, even though he argued he didn’t actually need one. In other words, he asked Congress to limit the power he had already been given.

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

As Vox’s Matt Yglesias explained at the time, this was in part because Obama anticipated the US would have a more hawkish president in 2017 (though he surely didn’t anticipate it would be Donald Trump), and wanted to make sure that president had clearer authority about when he or she could send US troops and bombs abroad.

But in 2015, Congress had a hard time agreeing on anything, and certainly an authorization to use force the president was already employing. So the 2001 AUMF still stands.

But even the 2001 AUMF can only stretch so far.

Trump didn’t go after Bashar al-Assad because his government was harboring terrorist groups that were responsible for 9/11. And no one is arguing that he is. (In fact, Assad claims he’s prosecuting a civil war in Syria to fight terrorist groups like ISIS.)

“The constitutional legality of last night’s strike against Syrian military forces in response to chemical weapon attack earlier this week,” Harvard Law’s Goldsmith wrote on Friday morning, “can only be justified by Article II” — by the commander in chief’s inherent powers — not by an existing congressional authority.

In other words, Trump doesn’t need to use the 2001 AUMF. He can justify what he did on Thursday night by arguing he doesn’t need any AUMF at all.

Why Obama thought he wouldn’t need an AUMF to go after Assad for chemical weapons

After all, a presidential administration already decided that it could take action against the Assad regime for using chemical weapons, without needing Congress to weigh in. That was in 2013, and the administration was Barack Obama’s.

When presidents have sidestepped the War Powers Act in the past, they haven’t (usually) just asserted that they can do whatever they want. Instead, they’ve laid out specific standards for when something counts as “hostilities” that merit congressional approval — and then argued that whatever they’re doing at the time doesn’t meet that standard. (Georgetown law professor Lederman has a post at Just Security that goes into more depth about the various arguments presidents have used to justify unilateral action.)

As those arguments have built on each other from president to president, they’ve erected something like a consistent framework. Basically, presidents before Trump argued they didn’t need authorization if:

What they were doing was obviously in the US’s “national interest,” and
The military action was strictly limited in time and scope (in other words, it wasn’t big enough to count as a real war, or even real hostilities)

That two-pronged test is how the US justified involvement in the (technically, but only nominally, NATO-led) war in Libya in 2011, another fight against a sovereign nation that wasn’t justified on terrorism grounds. (There’s substantial disagreement about whether the Obama administration was right to go into Libya without an AUMF, and the procedure by which Obama decided the Libya war was legal was a little suspect.)

And in 2013, when it was discovered that Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons against Syrian civilians in violation of international law — crossing President Obama’s famous “red line” — the administration weighed whether that test applied to a potential strike against Assad as well.

Bill Clark/Getty

A protester in 2013.

It decided that it did: that protecting an international norm against the use of chemical weapons, among other things, was an important national interest. But it decided, just like it later would in 2015, to ask Congress for approval anyway — because the administration knew it would be setting a precedent by not getting an AUMF, and that was a precedent it didn’t want to set. As Clinton administration official Walter Dellinger told the New York Times at the time, “[W]hen the president is going beyond where any previous president has gone, it seems appropriate to determine whether Congress concurs.”

The whole thing turned out to be moot when Russia persuaded Assad to give up his chemical weapons in exchange for the US backing away from using military force (something it’s now tragically clear that Assad didn’t fully do). Now, in 2017, President Trump has decided to do what President Obama did not.

The Trump administration hasn’t put out any explicit legal justification for the strike, or even clarified whether it plans to seek an authorization of military force against Assad.

Still, you can already see Trump laying the groundwork for an argument that Thursday night’s strikes satisfied Obama’s two-part test — and therefore no AUMF is needed. His statement Thursday night cited norms against chemical weapons, and the Syrian civil war’s role in shaping the global refugee crisis and regional instability, as problems for the US “national interest.” He also stressed that Thursday’s strikes were limited and surgical.

But while the Obama administration thought that argument might be valid against Assad, they didn’t want to unilaterally assert that it was — and so they wanted to seek congressional approval anyway. To do otherwise, Lederman wrote at the time, would be “an unprecedented basis for unilateral executive action, and it would open up a whole new category of uses of force that Presidents might order without congressional approval, even where such actions could have profound, longstanding consequences.”

If Trump decides to use Obama’s rationale to act unilaterally where Obama didn’t, that might be the door he’d be opening.

Even if Congress says it wants to do something, it can’t agree on what should be done

The fact that powerful lawmakers from both parties are saying they want a new AUMF is noteworthy — after all, even before the strikes against Assad, there was some interest in updating the 2001 AUMF (something Defense Secretary James Mattis appears to support). But it doesn’t mean anything will actually happen.

This isn’t just because Congress has trouble getting anything done these days. It’s because the reasons some members of Congress want a new AUMF are diametrically opposed to each other.

For one thing, many Republican hawks don’t believe a new AUMF is needed — or that the War Powers Act is even constitutional. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said Friday that he’d be interested in looking over an AUMF on Syria “if the president feels he needs one” — implying that the decision about whether the executive branch had the power to get further involved in Syria was entirely up to the executive branch.

McConnell’s lackadaisical attitude reflects what happened in 2011, when President Obama went into Libya without asking for congressional approval. Just before the 90-day window — the maximum for congressional authorization — was set to expire, House Speaker John Boehner sent the Obama administration a letter asking if they felt the Libya war didn’t need an AUMF, or if the Obama administration’s lack of notification meant they thought the War Powers Act was unconstitutional (an opinion Boehner himself held).

The administration replied the next week, finally explaining its reasoning for why the Libya war didn’t need an AUMF (the two-pronged test of “national interest” and limited scope).

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee continued to question the need for an AUMF in Libya, and called in State Department official Harold Koh to defend the administration’s reasoning. But ultimately, there wasn’t enough opposition to Obama’s actions in Libya to take congressional action. (A handful of members of Congress tried to sue the Obama administration for violating the War Powers Act — something that also got tried when President Clinton went into Kosovo — but both attempts were thrown out of court.)

Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images

How much does he really care, though?

It’s possible that members of Congress might be more inclined to push back against Trump in 2017 than they were against Obama in 2011. But “do we need an AUMF” is only the first question. The second question is what the AUMF ought to do.

Some members of Congress, mostly Democrats — but also Republicans like Rand Paul — want an AUMF so that there are clear limits on the president’s authority in any given conflict. Many of them opposed President Obama’s attempt to pass an ISIS AUMF in 2015 because it didn’t fully rescind the old, stretched-out 2001 AUMF.

But some Republicans want a new AUMF to make it clear that the president has very broad powers; they opposed the 2015 AUMF because they didn’t like Obama’s attempts to limit the power of his office, and they’re hardly more likely to support limits on presidential power now that the president is a Republican.

This is the dynamic that’s kept the efforts to reform the 2001 AUMF in limbo. And it applies just as much to the question of a new AUMF against Assad. Is an AUMF needed so that the president, legally speaking, has the tools he needs? Or is it needed so that he isn’t allowed to use all the military tools he has?

Because many members of Congress believe the president doesn’t need a new AUMF, they have little incentive to agree to pass one that they think would limit his powers. And even members who don’t feel strongly on the issue would have to be talked into an on-the-record endorsement of military action that could potentially erupt into full-blown war.

That prospect isn’t appealing when the alternative is to just allow President Trump to do what he wants in Syria, using the most aggressive interpretations of already aggressive arguments made by his predecessors to set a new standard for unilateral actions that are war in all but name.

Vox - Explainers

This voting reform solves 2 of America’s biggest political problems

How our current voting system fuels bitter political division

American politics has lots of safe seats — and also ferocious national elections. The two features are related.

What might a better system look like in practice?

Our electoral rules stink. Let’s change them.

The dark allure of conspiracy theories, explained by a psychologist

Brian Resnick

Jan-Willem van Prooijen

Brian Resnick

Jan-Willem van Prooijen

Brian Resnick

Jan-Willem van Prooijen

Brian Resnick

Jan-Willem van Prooijen

Brian Resnick

Jan-Willem van Prooijen

Brian Resnick

Jan-Willem van Prooijen

Brian Resnick

Jan-Willem van Prooijen

Brian Resnick

Jan-Willem van Prooijen

Jan-Willem van Prooijen

Brian Resnick

Jan-Willem van Prooijen

Is Singapore’s “miracle” health care system the answer for America?

How Singapore’s health insurance system works

How Singapore’s health care system works

One lesson of Singapore: everything is easier when costs are lower

Oh, and everything else in Singapore is different too

Further reading:

The looming government shutdown deadline, explained

For now, expect the government to buy itself some more time

Democrats are looking to use their leverage

Government funding bills might be one of the last major bipartisan things left in Washington — if only by default

Trump’s nuclear option on Obamacare, explained

CSRs reduce health care costs for Americans with lower incomes

A Republican-led lawsuit challenges the CSR payments

Cutting off CSR payments could throw the markets into chaos

Trump takes Obamacare hostage, but at his own risk

The March for Science on Earth Day, explained

What will happen at the March for Science?

Where did the satellite marches take place?

Will it be live streamed?

Scientists have more reasons than ever to march against Trump

What will the march accomplish?

Is this the same thing as the People’s Climate March?

Who started the March for Science, and why?

How many people will show up?

The French election, explained

The frontrunners

The wildcards

But what’s going to happen?

The Trump administration’s first step to defund “sanctuary cities” is surprisingly cautious

The Trump administration isn’t defining “sanctuary cities” the way they’re commonly understood

Cities are already suing to keep their funding — but the limited definition of “sanctuary cities” gives the federal government a stronger case

Cities have been defiant. But now the threat of defunding is real.

Juicero, the $399 internet-connected juicer, explained

Juicero sells a $399 juicer for $8 bags of fruits and vegetables

It turns out you can just squeeze the Juicero bags by hand

Juicero want to create a “platform” for delivering juice

Juicero is silly, but some silly ideas actually work out

Trump’s Supreme Court nominee cast his first major vote — to allow an execution

Arkansas is trying to execute prisoners before a drug expires

Execution drugs have become harder and harder to obtain

Trump wants to cut billions from the NIH. This is what we’ll miss out on if he does.

Here’s what money spent at the NIH “buys” us. Spoiler: It’s good stuff.

The White House’s case to cut funding to the NIH

4/20: National Weed Day, explained

Why is 4/20 National Weed Day? There are a few theories.

4/20 is the biggest single-day celebration of marijuana

Legalization is turning 4/20 into a commercial holiday

4/20's shift shows how marijuana legalization will change weed

The North Korean military threat to America and its allies, explained

North Korea’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles programs

Artillery, chemical weapons, and special forces

The aftermath of a conflict with North Korea “would be fundamentally disruptive” to the region — and the world

How Gudetama, a lazy egg yolk with a butt, became an unstoppable cultural phenomenon

Gudetama’s origin story is about coming in second, and thriving anyway