NSA and Happy Times.....

Happy Thanksgiving from the NSA

 

by Michael Winship

 

Here’s this week’s news from the NSA. Yes, when it comes to international espionage and snooping, in less than a century we’ve gone from a US Secretary of State declaring, “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail” to a former French foreign minister recently telling a radio interviewer, “Everyone is listening to everyone else.”

In other words, we have so much to be thankful for. Weekly, even daily, revelations of National Security Agency prying have become the norm and whistleblower/leaker Edward Snowden has become so well-known he recently was leading TIME Magazine’s readers’ poll for Person of the Year by some 65 points, running far ahead of President Obama, Vladimir Putin, Syria’s Bashar al Assad and Miley Cyrus. (Although as of this writing, Miley suddenly has pulled into the lead. God bless America.)

In a story straight out of James Bond – or Austin Powers – Reuters reports that “British and US intelligence officials say they are worried about a ‘doomsday’ cache of highly classified, heavily encrypted material they believe former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden has stored on a data cloud…

The cache contains documents generated by the NSA and other agencies and includes names of U.S. and allied intelligence personnel, seven current and former U.S. officials and other sources briefed on the matter said… 

US officials and other sources said only a small proportion of the classified material Snowden downloaded during stints as a contract systems administrator for NSA has been made public. Some Obama administration officials have said privately that Snowden downloaded enough material to fuel two more years of news stories. 

“The worst is yet to come,” said one former US official who follows the investigation closely.

Meanwhile, Eric Schmidt, the chairman and former CEO of Google, told CNN earlier this month that he and his fellow executives there were shocked and outraged by news that the NSA had tapped into Google’s fiber optic cables, along with those of several other tech companies and siphoned off huge amounts of data.

This week, Nicole Perlroth and John Markoff of The New York Times confirmed the tapping – the fiber optic cables are the weak link in the Internet privacy chain – and wrote that “recent NSA disclosures make clear that even when Internet giants like Google and Yahoo do not hand over data, the NSA and its intelligence partners can simply gather their data downstream… ”

“Everyone was so focused on the NSA secretly getting access to the front door that there was an assumption they weren’t going behind the companies’ backs and tapping data through the back door, too,” said Kevin Werbach, an associate professor at the Wharton School.

But they were going through the back door and of course, there’s a certain irony to Google’s consternation – they’ve been siphoning the personal information of its millions of users, too, and using it to turn Google into a marketing monolith.

In addition to the agency’s violations of cyberspace and thanks to Snowden, we also now know that for at least six years the NSA has been latching on to the records of every telephone call in America and tapping the phones of the leaders of some 35 other countries, including Germany’s Angela Merkel, the president of Brazil and two presidents of Mexico.

Vehemently protesting this telephone dragnet are three US senators – Ron Wyden of Oregon, Mark Udall of Colorado and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, who write in a Times op-ed, “If government agencies identify a suspected terrorist, they should absolutely go to the relevant phone companies to get that person’s phone records. But this can be done without collecting the records of millions of law-abiding Americans. We recall Benjamin Franklin’s famous admonition that those who would give up essential liberty in the pursuit of temporary safety will lose both and deserve neither.

The usefulness of the bulk collection program has been greatly exaggerated. We have yet to see any proof that it provides real, unique value in protecting national security. In spite of our repeated requests, the N.S.A. has not provided evidence of any instance when the agency used this program to review phone records that could not have been obtained using a regular court order or emergency authorization.

Senator Wyden also makes an appearance in this new New York Times video, “Why Care about the NSA?” which features Daniel Ellsberg, writer David Sirota and digital activism scholar Gabriella Coleman, among others.

Finally, if you seek a respite from Thanksgiving parades and football on TV and want to make the Times video one half of a double feature, there’s also this terrific explanatory animation, “The NSA and surveillance … made simple” from The Guardian which asks the fundamental question, “Does privacy have a future at all, on line?”
Sadly, I think we know the answer.

Our Frail Democracy

Jacob Hacker on Obamacare’s Rocky Rollout and Our Frail Democracy

 

by Joshua Holland

 

Jacob Hacker, director of Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies, is one of the most astute political analysts around. His 2010 book, Winner Take All Politics, co-authored with Berkeley’s Paul Pierson, is one of the best chronicles of how rising economic inequality leads to greater political inequality in a vicious cycle, as those who have amassed vast fortunes use them to buy political clout, which in turn enables them to set the rules of the game in such a way that they can enrich themselves further. The book would become an inspiration for Moyers & Company’s first three episodes.
In 2006, he first teamed up with Pierson to write Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy, which detailed the rightward-lurch of the GOP three years before the advent of the tea party.

Two years later, Hacker proposed a health care reform scheme that would have expanded Medicare while retaining the existing system of employer-based insurance – he basically championed the “public option” before the legislative debate over the Affordable Care Act had begun.

Now, with the bungled rollout of Obamacare leading the evening newscasts and just a week after Senate Democrats changed the filibuster rules to combat unprecedented obstruction in the upper chamber, Moyers & Company caught up with Hacker to get his take on recent events.

Joshua Holland: In Off Center, you detailed how a relatively small group of conservative ideologues were able to push the political center rightward. One of the ways that happened was that they rejected some of the longstanding norms that made our admittedly clunky democracy – with all of its checks and balances and minority vetoes — work, or at least work to a certain degree. Can you connect that to Harry Reid’s decision to finally eliminate the filibuster on judicial nominations and presidential appointments?

Jacob Hacker: I think it’s a very big deal. The fact is, as we wrote in Off Center, our political system has been affected very badly by the highly unequal polarization of the two parties. When we talk about polarization, we often think it’s like a barbell with equal weight on both sides, but in fact the right side is much heavier than the left side and that off center drift has created huge incentives for the conservative side to push the bounds of acceptable political behavior.

There’s an arms race quality to it. Once one side has breached a norm, then the other side feels pressured to do so as well. Both sides are playing this game, but the side that’s really pushing the ball down the court, if you will, is the Republican side.

So the filibuster had become, essentially, a de facto rule of 60. Until last week, everything but the budget was essentially subject to a 60-vote threshold and in a body that is already quite malapportioned. And that’s a remarkably anti-majoritarian system.

So we’ve moved in the direction of greater democracy. I think it’s one small step for Democrats, and one giant leap for democracy.

Holland: Half of all the executive branch nominees that have been filibustered in the history of this country have been filibustered under Obama. So those who say that both sides do it are not looking at the historical facts. Both sides don’t do it to an equal degree.

Hacker: Right, absolutely not. And just to clarify that, what I’m saying is that all of the breaches have been by Republicans but Democrats have felt very strong pressure to match that. This happens with campaign finance too, right? Super PACs are essentially a conservative invention, but the Democrats are now feeling a lot of pressure to adopt the same strategy, and you can recognize the unequal polarization of the parties and at the same time recognize that what we’re seeing is a race to the bottom and it’s tearing down our democracy.

Holland: Carl Levin, one of the three Democrats who voted against the so-called nuclear option, warned that Democrats would rue the day when they are back in the minority and are unable to block the most extreme nominees. Is that somewhat of a hollow risk, simply because Republicans have already decided to pursue a maximalist strategy at all times?

Also: is this the beginning of the end of the filibuster for legislation as well? Once you ding that structure, is it inevitable that it will fall?

Hacker: I think in the long term, the filibuster will go down. There are a lot of people, myself included, who would argue that this is just good for our democracy, regardless of which side of the partisan aisle it helps, and that’s a principled position, I think, for a fair number of Democrats. They were willing to accept the risk that they would have these same tactics used against them.
The first thing to go is going to be the ability to filibuster Supreme Court nominees. It’s such a rare event in any case, if a minority party were to try it, it would be gone. And so that’s dead. The next question is whether or not legislation outside the budget — the budget, again, is not subject to the filibuster — would go to majority rule, and I think that would require a very specific set of circumstances.

Holland: I certainly remember with painful clarity good bills being passed in the House, only to die in the Senate during first term. I think they racked up 200 of them, or something like that.

Hacker: Oh yeah, the Senate is where good ideas go to die. There’s this saying that’s attributed to George Washington, but I don’t actually think he said it, that the Senate is like the saucer that will cool the coffee. But I think what we have now is frozen coffee. It’s just become an institution that operates fundamentally differently from how it operated in the past. Younger Americans don’t realize that there was once a time when filibusters were rare and used mostly for things on which a small minority felt intensely, mostly as a way to publicize their opposition.

[The late US Senator from South Carolina] Strom Thurmond, for example, famously waged the longest filibuster to try to stop the Civil Rights Act. So the big change was that it became routine – that happened in the 1980s and accelerated in the ’90s, and now we’re starting to see a move back towards what’s been the historical norm, which is that the Senate is a reasonably majoritarian institution.

Holland: Now, let’s shift focus here a little bit and talk about the other huge political story of the day, which is the maddeningly bad rollout of Obamacare.

Hacker: This has been a huge, huge fiasco, and I think people should recognize that. Those who are supportive of the law, like me, should acknowledge it, but we should also step back and put this into some perspective.

And the two things I would just want to remind people of are first, that this bill is not going to be repealed or seriously amended until Obama is out of office. So it could very well hurt the Democrats substantially in the short- to medium-term, including in the midterm elections, which were looking pretty good for Democrats after the debt ceiling craziness hurt Republicans last month. That, in turn, may do a lot of other things that aren’t good for our republic, but it’s not going to cripple the Affordable Care Act, and so it’s going to have a chance to hit the ground. It’s waddling or crawling now, but it’s going to get a chance to hit the ground with a little bit more speed going forward.

The second is that I can’t think of a law in the post-Reconstruction era that has been as vigorously contested by the other party after passage. So while I do think people should understand that the administration has completely fumbled the ball here, what makes it so dangerous is they’re fumbling the ball while the opposition is closing in on them with a huge bunch of linebackers.

There’s a move underway to try to block enrollment in the law, to discredit it, to defund it, to do anything they can. And if you think about some counterpart periods — for example, you didn’t have massive Democratic attempts to try to block the implementation of the Medicare prescription drug bill passed under Bush, partly because Democrats were favorable towards that.

There were a whole bunch of initiatives that were passed under the Bush administration that had tepid or nonexistent Democratic support and there was nary a whisper about trying to hurt their chances of going into effect. And I think there’s a history of sort of politics stopping when a law is signed. That doesn’t mean people don’t fight it in the courts, and it doesn’t mean that they don’t try to repeal things when they get back in office, but it does mean that taking a law that’s on the books and doing everything within your power to thwart it — I think that’s just been unprecedented in recent memory.

Holland: Especially from a minority. It’s one thing to win an election and say, “We’re going to repeal that thing that we didn’t like.” This is completely different.

Hacker: Oh, absolutely. But let’s not kid ourselves. I mean this rollout is really bad. It’s hurt the perceptions of the law, which were never that great to begin with. The law has always been an abstract symbol rather than a concrete reality in people’s lives, and the longer it takes for it to actually go into effect and start providing help to people, the less chance there is of its image improving in the medium term.

And I would just say one last thing about this, which is that there’s a fundamental mistake that was made by the administration, which I think is lurking over this. People do understand when somebody says something that turns out not to be true, and the president’s promise that you’d be able to keep the healthcare you have was not a promise that he should have made. There were a lot of good ways you could say, “We are going to do everything within our power to ease disruption without making that promise.” The president and his allies were rightly pointing out that insurers were dropping policies right and left and that there was a ten percentage point decline in the share of people getting health insurance through their employers in the years leading up to the passage of the Affordable Care Act.

So I think the President made an error, and there’s a lot research among political scientists which shows that it’s these simple things like, “Read my lips, no new taxes,” or “I pledge never to raise taxes,” for — the taxpayer pledge that Grover Norquist has everyone sign – those things are just so easy for people to grasp, and the complexity of these policies—and this is a very complex policy—makes people fall back on that. So I’m worried that that’s going to be a bit of an albatross around the Democrats’ neck for a while.

Holland: Let’s talk about complexity a little bit. Since the rise of Clintonism, a lot of liberals have tried to deliver public goods in a way that doesn’t look like it represents “big government” programs. So, for example, we give people child tax credits and tax credits to help with retirement savings and college costs. Suzanne Mettler wrote the great book called The Submerged State, and she pointed out that these kinds of benefits leave people with less appreciation for what the public sector does and an inflated sense of what the market can provide.

Now, you’re one of many people who are sometimes called an “architect of Obamacare.” I should make clear that the Hacker plan was very different in the details, but ultimately, it was similar in terms of the overall structure…

Hacker: Yes, I think that there was broad agreement among those seeking reform that it was not politically feasible, and perhaps not even desirable, to displace many of the existing sources of coverage, but rather to try to build on the current system in a way that would move towards a more integrated, efficient and encompassing system that covered everyone and better controlled costs.

Holland: But let me ask you this: It’s five years later. You’ve watched this thing play out in the real world, and one of Obamacare’s biggest challenges is its inherent complexity…

Hacker: Yes, I used to call it a Rube Goldberg contraption, and I’m a supporter! I guess I would say two things here. The first is this idea that the US relies heavily on the private sector and on indirect means of providing benefits is very true. I actually wrote a book in 2002 about this called The Divided Welfare State.

The point is — and this has been confirmed by really good research by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development – the United States spends as much, if not more than other countries on social benefits. We just do it much more through mandated and induced private sector spending — from private pensions, which now are just basically private investment accounts in the form of 401(k)s — to private health benefits that are subsidized to the tune of $250-$300 billion a year through tax breaks.

This does have really big implications for the politics of social policy in the United States. If you get your benefits primarily through private means, you’re very unlikely to see the ways in which the public sector is involved. I don’t think that’s as true for the Affordable Care Act in its structure, because of course you are getting these benefits, even if they’re private, through these exchanges. But I think it reminds us why it would have been preferable to have the so-called public option which I developed.

The public option, which is the idea of having a public insurance plan alongside the private plans, would have made these systems look at lot like Medicare today. That is, most people are enrolled in a standard public plan, but people can choose private plans that have various features, and about a fifth of Medicare beneficiaries do so.

What we have here is a situation in which the whole thing is dependent on getting all these private plans to participate, as well as regulating them, and we haven’t even gotten to those problems yet, because we can’t get people enrolled.

The other thing is – and I’ve seen no discussion of this — the biggest problem with the Affordable Care Act is that it lacks an effective means of automatically enrolling people. If you think about why Social Security is so effective – and why Medicare is so effective – it’s that essentially everyone is brought into it at a certain point in their lives. Medicare is quasi-voluntary for Part B, but you would have to be crazy not to sign up.

The research shows that if you have an opt-out, rather than opt-in, you get much higher rates of enrollment. That would have solved the big problem that I see, which is that we’re going to have a lot of people falling through the cracks in the early years, and you can’t control costs going forward if there are people moving in and out of the system and you don’t have wide coverage.

Holland: I just wonder if at this point the Republican party has gone so far off center — to use the title of your 2006 book — that maybe it’s time for liberals to return to the kind of unapologetic support for government intervention that marked the New Deal era and the Great Society. Because if a market-based public/private expansion of health coverage that the Heritage Foundation was championing just 20 years ago is going to be greeted with an opposition that calls it a government takeover of healthcare and says it’s the road to socialism anyway, I don’t know that we have that much to gain by loading up the submerged state.

Hacker: Well, yes, exactly. You’re not going to win over today’s Republicans. They’re like Lucy with the football. Every time the Democrats — the Charlie Brown Democrats — run towards the football, they keep moving it to the right.

Al Gore had a joke that the right hand didn’t know what the far right hand was doing, but at this point there is no right hand. It’s all the far right hand. And the handful of Republican moderates who are left are so frightened about tea party challenges that they are hiding out in undisclosed locations and siding with conservative Republicans on virtually everything that matters.

So you’re absolutely right that that’s the fundamental problem. But I don’t think that Democrats and progressives are trying to win over Republicans anymore. They’re trying to win over the American people, and I don’t think we can pretend that there hasn’t been a 30-year attack on government.
The Obamacare rollout does not help. It reinforces some of the biggest misconceptions about government. You know, there are programs like Social Security that everyone understands to be really well managed. And nobody says, “Oh, that military that is defending our nation are a bunch of faceless bureaucrats who don’t know what they’re doing.” The point is that we see government in concrete terms. Abstractly, we hate it, but when we look at specific programs like Social Security, which is the largest domestic program, we love it.

So what is it that progressives need to do? I think that there’s got to be some attention to the larger problem of the lack of faith in government, rather than the selling of specific policies. Just go back to what I consider to be that really ill-fated statement of the President. His promise was basically, “Only good things can come of this bill. You will never see your healthcare change for the worse.” Whereas I think there could have been a much stronger, and easier way to explain what was going on, which is to say, “Look, the system is crumbling. Private insurance is much less available than it was 10 years ago. It’s going to be much less available 10 years from now. What we need to do is try to figure out a new, solid foundation for that system, and how we’re going to do it is we’re going to bring a little bit togetherness into the system, right? We’re going to see ourselves as linked together a bit by our shared need for healthcare, or the shared risks that we face.”

And that is what government is about. Government is about doing things that we can’t do alone, and it’s about doing it through a system that we believe is at least partially responsive to the broad will of the American people.

My view is that we will have greater faith in government when we have greater faith in American democracy. So to return full circle to the beginning of our discussion, I think the biggest reason that people are distrustful of their political institutions is they’re feeling that they’re not being well represented. And it’s ironic that both sides of the political spectrum feel that way, but maybe they’re not wrong. I mean, look at the dominance of money in American politics, the extent to which it seems like nothing can get done in Washington. That is something that hurts all Americans. It doesn’t just hurt Democrats. It hurts them more than it hurts Republicans, but it doesn’t just hurt Democrats — it hurts us all, because we are, after all, a great democratic experiment. We are the only country, in my view, that can lead on some of the greatest challenges we face globally, including climate change. But we basically look a bit like a banana republic right now, and until we start to look more like that shining city on the hill that the Puritans spoke about, we’re going to have a hard time getting other people to follow our beacon.

Rambler

Almost two years ago the 100-ft super maxi, Rambler, lost her entire canting keel while competing in the Rolex Fastnet Race. The frightening incident quickly sent the 21-crew members into the ocean where all were eventually rescued. Fast forward two years, the newly named Perpetual Loyal has quietly moved into Sydney Harbor's Rose Bay after a complete and extensive retrofit by Sydney businessman, Anthony Bell. Bell hopes to win the upcoming Rolex Sydney Hobart race, which sets off on December 26.

Bell's determination to win includes hiring some of the best crew, including Bay Area sailing guru Stan Honey and Oracle Team USA's strategist and America's Cup Winner Tom Slingsby. “This will be my first Rolex Sydney Hobart and my first major offshore ocean race," says Slingsby. "I’ve haven’t been sick on a yacht before — only once when I was on a fishing boat offshore — so I’m curious as to how I’ll fair."

Mr. Clean

Longtime Newport Beach, CA Star sailor Jim Buckingham with Austin Sperry may have taken the first Star Winter Series event in perfect Miami breeze this weekend, but devoted SA’er Philip Carlson took the spotlight, the 23-year old Swede taking two bullets on the final day to jump ahead of Augie Diaz/Arnis Baltins for the second-place spot. Fellow 23 year old Finn sailor and Rio 2016 hopeful Luke Lawrence kept it tight with Philip until he blew a block up on Sunday. Carlson said he just kept the boat going, while ‘the German Mr. Clean’ a/k/a superstar Star crew and Weymouth Olympian Frithjof Kleen, made it go fast. Betcha didn’t know there is a German Mr. Kleen… Now that the Star fleet is firmly out of the Olympics, is this the first look at a younger US-based fleet? ”If I am going to pay for my own sailing, this is the Class I will choose every time,” said Carlson.

Battered.......

Just one example of the ravages of the storms that have battered Phuket, Thailand.

Strong winds and waves lashed Thailand's west coast damaging scores of sailboats that were to be raced in next week's Phuket King's Cup Regatta and sunk many more fishing boats and speedboats on Saturday.

The 22 damaged race boats were moored at Khao Khat Bay in Phuket when violent waves pushed them against tide barriers and rocks. The initial damage estimate has been put at 40 million baht. Authorities had difficulty recovering the damaged vessels due to the continued bad weather.
Reporters observed around 100 damaged fishing boats and speedboats of tour companies along the beaches of Phuket on the same day.
Provincial authorities have banned all types of sea vessels from leaving shore, and for their owners to closely monitor the weather forecast from the Meteorological Department.

- See more at: http://www.pattayamail.com/news/scores-of-race-boats-fishing-boats-and-speedboats-wrecked-by-storm-in-phuket-32414#sthash.q5bk012x.dpuf

What science can tell us about our not-so-scientific minds.

7 Reasons Why It's Easier for Humans to Believe in God Than Evolution

By Chris Mooney

Late last week, the Texas Board of Education failed to approve a leading high school biology textbook—whose authors include the Roman Catholic biologist Kenneth Miller of Brown University—because of its treatment of evolution. According to The New York Times, critiques from a textbook reviewer identified as a "Darwin Skeptic" were a principal cause.

Yet even as creationists keep trying to undermine modern science, modern science is beginning to explain creationism scientifically. And it looks like evolution—the scientifically uncontested explanation for the diversity and interrelatedness of life on Earth, emphatically including human life—will be a major part of the story. Our brains are a stunning product of evolution; and yet ironically, they may naturally pre-dispose us against its acceptance.

"I don't think there's any question that a variety of our mental dispositions are ones that discourage us from taking evolutionary theory as seriously as it should be taken," explains Robert N. McCauley, director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture at Emory University and author of the book Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not.

So what can science tell us about our not-so-scientific minds? Here's a list of cognitive traits, thinking styles, and psychological factors identified in recent research that seem to thwart evolution acceptance:

Biological Essentialism. First, we seem to have a deep tendency to think about biology in a way that is "essentialist"—in other words, assuming that each separate kind of animal species has a fundamental, unique nature that unites all members of that species, and that is inviolate. Fish have gills, birds have wings, fish make more fish, birds make more birds, and that's how it all works. Essentialist thinking has been demonstrated in young children. "Little kids as young as my 2 and a half year old granddaughter are quite clear that puppies don't have ponies for mommies and daddies," explains McCauley.

If essentialism is a default style of thinking, as much research suggests, then that puts evolution at a major disadvantage. Charles Darwin and his many scientific disciples have shown that essentialism is just plain wrong: Given enough time, biological kinds are not fixed but actually change. Species are connected through intermediate types to other species—and all are ultimately related to one another.

Teleological Thinking. Essentialism is just one basic cognitive trait, observed in young children, that seems to hinder evolutionary thinking. Another is "teleology or the tendency to ascribe purposes to things and objects so as to assume they exist to serve some goal.

 

Recent research suggests that 4 and 5 year old children are highly teleological in their thinking, tending to opine, for instance, that clouds are "for raining" and that the purpose of lions is "to go in the zoo." The same tendency has been observed in 7 and 8 year olds who, when asked why "prehistoric rocks are pointy," offered answers like "so that animals could scratch on them when they got itchy" and "so that animals wouldn't sit on them and smash them."

Why do children think like this? One study speculates that this teleological disposition may be a "side [effect] of a socially intelligent mind that is naturally inclined to privilege intentional explanation." In other words, our brains developed for thinking about what people are thinking, and people have intentions and goals. If that's right, the playing field may be naturally tilted toward anti-evolutionist doctrines like "intelligent design," which postulates an intelligent agent (God) as the cause of the diversity of life on Earth, and seeks to uncover evidence of purposeful design in biological organisms.

Overactive Agency Detection. But how do you know the designer is "God"? That too may be the result of a default brain setting.

Another trait, closely related to teleological thinking, is our tendency to treat any number of inanimate objects as if they have minds and intentions. Examples of faulty agency detection, explains University of British Columbia origins of religion scholar Ara Norenzayan, range from seeing "faces in the clouds" to "getting really angry at your computer when it starts to malfunction." People engage in such "anthropomorphizing" all the time; it seems to come naturally. And it's a short step to religion: "When people anthropomorphize gods, they are inferring mental states," says Norenzayan.
There has been much speculation about the evolutionary origin of our anthropomorphizing tendency.

One idea is that our brains developed to rapidly assume that objects in the world are alive and may pose a threat, simply because while wrongly mistaking a rustle of leaves for a bear won't get you killed, failing to detect a bear early (when the leaves rustle) most certainly will. "Supernatural agents are readily conjured up because natural selection has trip-wired cognitive schema for agency detection in the face of uncertainty," write Norenzayan and fellow origin of religion scholar Scott Atran.

Dualism. Yet another apparent feature of our cognitive architecture is the tendency to think that minds (or the "self" and the "soul") are somehow separate from brains. Once again, this inclination has been found in young children, suggesting that it emerges early in human development. "Preschool children will claim that the brain is responsible for some aspects of mental life, typically those involving deliberative mental work, such as solving math problems," write Yale psychologists Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg. "But preschoolers will also claim that the brain is not involved in a host of other activities, such as pretending to be a kangaroo, loving one's brother, or brushing one's teeth."

Dualistic thinking is closely related to belief in phenomena like spirits and ghosts. But in a recent study, it was also the cognitive factor most strongly associated with believing in God. As for evolutionary science? Dualism is pretty clearly implicated in resistance to the idea that human beings could have developed from purely natural processes—for if they did, how could there ever be a soul or self beyond the body, to say nothing of an afterlife?

Inability to Comprehend Vast Time Scales. According to Norenzayan, there's one more basic cognitive factor that prevents us from easily understanding evolution. Evolution occurred due to the accumulation of many small changes over vast time periods—which means that it is unlike anything we've experienced. So even thinking about it isn't very easy. "The only way you can appreciate the process of evolution is in an abstract way," says Norenzayan. "Over millions of years, small changes accumulate, but it's not intuitive. There's nothing in our brain that says that's true. We have to override our incredulity."

Group Morality and Tribalism. All of these cognitive factors seem to make evolution hard to grasp, even as they render religion (or creationist ideas) simpler and more natural to us. But beyond these cognitive factors, there are also emotional reasons why a lot of people don't want to believe in evolution. When we see resistance to its teaching, after all, it is usually because a religious community fears that this body of science will undermine a belief system—in the US, usually fundamentalist Christianity—deemed to serve as the foundation for shared values and understanding. In other words, evolution is resisted because it is perceived as a threat to the group.

So how appropriate that one current scientific theory about religion is that it exists (and, maybe, that it evolved) to bind groups together and keep them cohesive. In his recent book The Righteous Mind, moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that religions provide a shared set of beliefs and practices that, in effect, serve as social glue. "Gods and religions," writes Haidt, "are group-level adaptations for producing cohesiveness and trust." The upside is unity; the downside, Haidt continues, is "groupishness, tribalism, and nationalism." Ideas and beliefs that threaten the group or the beliefs that hold it together—ideas like evolution—are bound to fare badly in this context.

Fear and the Need for Certainty. Finally, there appears to be something about fear and doubt that impels religiosity and dispels acceptance of evolution. "People seem to take more comfort from a stance that says, someone designed the world with good intentions, instead of that the world is just an intention-less, random place," says Norenzayan. "This is especially true when we feel a sense of threat, or a feeling of not being in control."

Indeed, in one amazing study, New Zealanders who had just suffered through a severe earthquake showed stronger religiosity, but only if they had been directly affected by the quake. Other research suggests that making people think about death increases their religiosity and also decreases evolution acceptance. It's not just death: It's also randomness, disorder. In one telling study, research participants who were asked to think of a situation in which they had lacked control and then to "provide three reasons supporting the notion that the future is (un-) controllable," showed a marked decline in their acceptance of evolution, opting instead for an intelligent design-style explanation. (Another study found that anti-evolutionists displayed higher fear sensitivity and a trait called the "need for cognitive closure," which describes a psychological need to find an answer that can resolve uncertainty and dispel doubt.)

Such is the research, and it's important to point out a few caveats. First, this doesn't mean science and religion are fundamentally incompatible. The conflict may run very deep indeed, but nevertheless, some individuals can and do find a way to retain their religious beliefs and also accept evolution—including the aforementioned biology textbook author Kenneth Miller of Brown University, a Catholic.

Second, while there are many reasons to think that the traits above comprise a core part of who we are, it doesn't automatically follow that religion is the direct result of evolution by natural selection. It is also possible that religion arises as a byproduct of more basic traits that were, in turn, selected for because they conferred greater fitness (such as agency detection). This "byproduct" view is defended by Steven Pinker here.

In any event, the evidence is clear that both our cognitive architecture, and also our emotional dispositions, make it difficult or unnatural for many people to accept evolution. "Natural selection is like quantum physics...we might intellectually grasp it, with considerable effort, but it will never feel right to us," writes the Yale psychologist Paul Bloom. Often, people express surprise that in an age so suffused with science, science causes so much angst and resistance.

Perhaps more surprising would be if it didn't.

Americans back Iran deal

Americans back Iran deal by 2-to-1 margin: Reuters/Ipsos poll

By Matt Spetalnick

Americans back a newly brokered nuclear deal with Iran by a 2-to-1 margin and are very wary of the United States resorting to military action against Tehran even if the historic diplomatic effort falls through, a Reuters/Ipsos poll showed on Tuesday.

The findings were rare good news in the polls for President Barack Obama, whose approval ratings have dropped in recent weeks because of the botched rollout of his signature healthcare reform law.
According to the Reuters/Ipsos survey, 44 percent of Americans support the interim deal reached between Iran and six world powers in Geneva last weekend, and 22 percent oppose it.

While indicating little trust among Americans toward Iranian intentions, the survey also underscored a strong desire to avoid new U.S. military entanglements after long, costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Even if the Iran deal fails, 49 percent want the United States to then increase sanctions and 31 percent think it should launch further diplomacy. But only 20 percent want U.S. military force to be used against Iran.

The survey's results suggest that a U.S. public weary of war could help bolster Obama's push to keep Congress from approving new sanctions that would complicate the next round of negotiations for a final agreement with Iran.

"This absolutely speaks to war fatigue, where the American appetite for intervention - anywhere - is extremely low," Ipsos pollster Julia Clark said. "It could provide some support with Congress for the arguments being made by the administration."

Tehran accepted temporary restrictions on its nuclear program in exchange for limited relief from tough economic sanctions under the Geneva deal, which the White House sees as a "first step" toward ensuring that Iran cannot develop an atomic bomb.

Obama and his aides are casting the Iran deal as the best alternative to a new Middle East conflict as they push back against skeptical lawmakers and close U.S. ally Israel who accuse Washington of giving up too much for too little.

A number of lawmakers, especially Republicans, have insisted they will try to enact stiffer new sanctions, which the Obama administration says would poison the negotiating atmosphere during the six months allotted to achieve a long-term accord.

But signs of significant public support for the Iran deal could give some of Obama's own pro-Israel Democrats, who may fear being branded as inadequately supportive of the Jewish state in the 2014 U.S. congressional elections, political cover to stick with the president.

Reflecting deep suspicions over Iran's sincerity after more than three decades of estrangement between the two countries, the poll shows that 63 percent of Americans believe Tehran's nuclear program is intended to develop a bomb - although Iran says the project is only for civilian purposes.
Despite that, 65 percent of those polled agreed that the United States "should not become involved in any military action in the Middle East unless America is directly threatened." Only 21 percent disagreed with the statement.

There was every indication, however, that American public support for Israel remained high despite Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's denunciation of the Iran deal as a "historic mistake" and new strains in U.S.-Israeli relations.

Fifty percent supported the notion that the United States "should use its military power to defend Israel against threats to its security, no matter where they come from." Thirty-one percent disagreed.
Even as the poll showed a moderately favorable response to Obama's attempt at rapprochement with Iran, the diplomatic breakthrough did not appear to have offered any immediate political boost at home to the embattled president. Foreign affairs rarely trump domestic matters in terms of presidential popularity.

"This might have an effect on some of the political dialogue," Clark said. "But I don't think it's a game-changer that's going to reverse the tide from the president's current pretty negative approval ratings."

A separate Reuters/Ipsos tracking poll on Tuesday showed Obama's approval rating languishing at 38 percent, with 56 percent disapproving of the way he is handling his job. He spent the past three days on a swing through Western states trying to recover lost ground over his flawed healthcare rollout.

The final outcome of Obama's Iran engagement strategy remains uncertain, but success would mean a big legacy-shaping achievement that might help to polish what is widely perceived to be a less than stellar foreign policy record.

But if the talks break down and Iran dashes to build an atomic bomb before the West can stop it, Obama could go into the history books as the president whose naivete allowed the Islamic Republic to go nuclear.

The precision of Reuters/Ipsos online polls is measured using a credibility interval. In this case, the poll - which was conducted from Sunday through Tuesday with 591 respondents - has a credibility interval of plus or minus 4.9 percentage points.

Dark Money

Obama seeks limits on tax-exempt groups

By Ben Goad and Bernie Becker

The Obama administration on Tuesday moved to rein in the “dark money” groups that have spent millions of dollars in political campaigns without disclosing their donors.

In draft guidance to be issued by Treasury and the IRS, the administration proposes new standards for tax-exempt groups like the Karl Rove-linked Crossroads GPS and Organizing for Action, the offshoot of President Obama’s own campaign apparatus.

“This proposed guidance is a first critical step toward creating clear-cut definitions of political activity by tax-exempt social welfare organizations,” said Mark Mazur, Treasury’s assistant secretary for tax policy.

The move springs directly from the controversy over IRS targeting of Tea Party groups, which began after compliance officers singled out political groups seeking tax-exempt status for extra scrutiny.
Democrats and watchdog groups say the targeting practices were fueled by the hazy rules surrounding the political nonprofits, which are known as 501(c)(4)s.

Current law says that 501(c)(4) groups must exclusively engage in social welfare, but Treasury regulations say social welfare must be the organizations’ primary purpose. The IRS put many of the groups through extended vetting to determine whether they met Treasury’s standard.

The guidance, if adopted, would make clear that the promotion of social welfare — the stated purpose of so-called 501(c)(4) groups — does not include “candidate-related political activity.” At the same time, the administration is asking for input on how much social welfare work a group must engage in to qualify for 501(c)(4) status.

That could have major ramifications for the political nonprofits, which critics argue are being set up solely to hide from public scrutiny.

Under the proposed rules, groups with the exemption couldn't count political advertisements, participating in "get-out-the-vote" or voter registration drives or holding events involving candidates as "social welfare" work.
Acting IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel said the new draft guidance, to be published later Tuesday in the Federal Register, is intended to clear up ambiguity in the law.

“This is part of ongoing efforts within the IRS that are improving our work in the tax-exempt area,” Werfel said in a statement. “Once final, this proposed guidance will continue moving us forward and provide clarity for this important segment of exempt organizations.”

But groups with Tea Party links — like the American Center for Law and Justice — panned the rules as a diversion, and accused the Obama administration of starting "a new front in its war against political dissent."

“This is a feeble attempt by the Obama administration to justify its own wrong-doing with the IRS targeting of conservative and Tea Party groups,” said Jay Sekulow, ACLJ’s chief counsel.
“Instead of holding those responsible for the unlawful targeting scheme accountable for their actions, the Obama administration is determined to further limit the free speech of Americans by attempting to change constitutional practices that are decades old.”

Top Republicans on Capitol Hill accused the Obama administration of a rush to judgment, and of preempting congressional investigations into IRS targeting.

“Before rushing forward with new rules, especially ones that appear to make it harder to engage in public debate, I would hope Treasury would let all the facts come out first — something they could achieve by fully cooperating with Congress in the investigation,” House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) said.

Sen. Orrin Hatch (Utah), the top Republican on the Finance Committee, chided the administration for releasing the new guidance before a bipartisan Senate investigation into the targeting of Tea Party groups came to a close.

Aides say that investigation, which Hatch and Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) had hoped to release this year, could instead come out in early 2014.
Baucus, meanwhile, praised the administration proposals, saying they strike the right balance on a tricky issue.

“We need to ensure clear standards and equal footing for the treatment of tax exempt social welfare organizations. Today’s action by the IRS is an important step towards that goal,” Baucus said.


In a nod to the likely opposition to the rules, administration officials said they would be listening to concerns about the proposals, raising the possibility of a drawn-out process.
“We are committed to getting this right before issuing final guidance that may affect a broad group of organizations,” Mazur said. “It will take time to work through the regulatory process and carefully consider all public feedback as we strive to ensure that the standards for tax-exemption are clear and can be applied consistently.”
Democracy 21, a campaign finance watchdog, praised Treasury’s move, but said it remains to be seen whether the regulations will end the "misuse" of tax laws to hide donors.

“We urge the Treasury Department and IRS to seize this opportunity to end the scandalous practice of groups abusing the tax laws to hide from the American people campaign finance information to which they are entitled,” said Democracy 21 President Fred Wertheimer.

Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration pressed the department and the IRS to issue more guidance on 501(c)(4) groups in May as it outlined the targeting of Tea Party groups.

Werfel, who took over the IRS after the controversy broke, has suggested the current rules played a role in the controversy, while stressing the agency’s behavior was inexcusable.

The current rules “created considerable confusion for both the public and the IRS in making appropriate 501(c)(4) determinations,” the IRS said in an internal review released in June.

Walmart Exec Leads Shadowy Smear Campaign

Former Walmart Exec Leads Shadowy Smear Campaign Against Black Friday Activists

 

ByLee Fang

As activists continue to organize demonstrations at McDonalds, Walmart and other low-wage firms, big protests are planned against retailers for mistreating their workers this Black Friday. In response, union-busting consultants are ramping up efforts to marginalize them.

Last night—Worker Center Watch, a new website dedicated to attacking labor-affiliated activist groups like OUR Walmart, Restaurant Opportunities Center, and Fast Food Forward—began sponsoring advertisements on Twitter to promote smears against the protests planned for Black Friday. In one video sponsored by the group, activists demanding a living wage and better working conditions for workers are portrayed as lazy “professional protesters” who “haven’t bothered to get jobs themselves.”

Worker Center Watch has no information its website about its sponsors. Yet the group attacks labor activists and community labor groups for lacking transparency. “Hiding behind these non-profits, unions mask their true motivations, circumvent operational requirements and skirt reporting and disclosure obligations,” says Worker Center Watch, referring to labor-supported worker centers like OUR Walmart.

TheNation.com has discovered that Worker Center Watch was registered by the former head lobbyist for Walmart. Parquet Public Affairs, a Florida-based government relations and crisis management firm for retailers and fast food companies, registered the Worker Center Watch website.

The firm is led by Joseph Kefauver, formerly the president of public affairs for Walmart and government relations director for Darden Restaurants. Throughout the year, Parquet executives have toured the country, giving lectures to business groups on how to combat the rise of what has been called “alt-labor.” At a presentation in October for the National Retail Federation, a trade group for companies like Nordstrom and Nike, Kefauver’s presentation listed protections against wage theft, a good minimum wage and mandated paid time off as the type of legislative demands influenced by the worker center protesters.

The presentation offered questions for the group, including: “How Aggressive Can We Be?” and “How do We Challenge the Social Justice Narrative?”

It seems retailers are now experimenting with how aggressive they can be. Today, Parquet’s Worker Center Watch posted a link to a Breitbart News story featuring a video allegedly obtained by someone who infiltrated an Occupy activist group planning to demonstrate against Walmart.

The alarm at how quickly the new organizing model has taken off has sparked anxiety among business executives. Littler Mendelson, a law firm that helps companies defeat labor unions, released a report outlining the challenge for corporate executives. The US Chamber of Commerce, a dark-money group that counts Walmart and McDonalds as members, produced a similar study last week.
Corporations fear that the new wave of activism could have a multiplier effect that goes way beyond better pay and benefits for their workers.

In a webinar hosted this month for business executives seeking a “union-free workplace,” Nancy Jowske explained that the alt-labor model could heavily influence millennials and their perceptions of labor unions. “One of the things to consider about what’s going there with SEIU’s Fight for 15 and all of this is the millennial generation,” said Jowske, a former SEIU organizer turned union-buster, “they are getting a steady diet of pro-union from every possible direction." She added, "this is also a generation that is very class-conscious” and explained that the current alt-labor protests could incite future organizing drives. Jowske also cited a recent In These Times piece to argue that worker centers can be portrayed as “union front groups,” and warned that the alt-labor organizing model could have a long-term impact. For instance, the organizing model appears to help unions and community groups forge close ties that could be later used to deploy activists for political campaigns, workplace NLRB elections and other left-wing causes.

Religious liberty for all corporations?

Religious liberty is for people, not corporations

By Elizabeth B. Wydra

Once again, Obamacare has made its way back before the Supreme Court.

The high court decided Tuesday to review two challenges by for-profit corporations and their religious owners over comprehensive contraception coverage required by the Affordable Care Act. And if the justices follow more than 200 years of constitutional law and history on what it means to enjoy the free exercise of religion in America, the court should yet again hand a victory to the act.

It had little choice but to agree to hear the cases this term.

Using unprecedented legal reasoning, three federal circuit courts of appeals have ruled that secular, for-profit business corporations and/or the individuals who own them have a valid claim that the mandate to provide no-cost, FDA-approved contraception in their employer-sponsored health plan violates their asserted right to the free exercise of religion.

Two other federal circuit courts of appeals have rejected these claims; the Supreme Court frequently steps in to resolve such disagreements among the federal courts of appeals.

Unless the Supreme Court reverses these radical decisions, the consequences could reach far beyond the Affordable Care Act, making this particular roadblock for Obamacare more problematic in the long term than the well-publicized problems associated with the health exchange website's rollout.

 

By accepting the religious free-exercise claims, these three federal courts have turned first principles of religious freedom, as well as fundamental tenets of corporate law, on their head.

From the nation's founding until today, the Constitution's protection of religious liberty has been seen as a personal right, inextricably linked to the human capacity to express devotion to a God and act on the basis of reason and conscience.

Business corporations, quite properly, have never shared in this fundamental constitutional tradition for the obvious reason that a business corporation lacks the basic human capacities -- reason, dignity and conscience -- at the core of the right to free exercise of religion. Obviously not "persons" in the usual sense of the word, these corporations are also not religious organizations, which have historically received some constitutional protection and are, in fact, given exemptions from the contraception mandate.

These businesses do not hire employees on the basis of their religion and their employees are not required to share the religious beliefs personally held by the corporation's owners. In all of American history, secular, for-profit corporations have never been understood to "exercise" religion -- have you ever seen Exxon Mobil in the pew next to you at church? -- and have never been protected by the right to free exercise.

To be sure, the devout individual business owners behind the corporations in these challenges have their own personal rights to exercise their religion, but those rights have nothing to do with Obamacare's contraception coverage requirement. Why? Because federal law does not require the individuals who own the company to personally provide health care coverage or to satisfy any other legal obligation of the corporation. The law places requirements only on the corporate entity.

To conflate the corporations in these cases with their owners violates basic principles of corporate law.

When business owners create a corporation as the means of carrying out their business, they create a distinct legal entity with rights, obligations, privileges and liabilities that are different from the individuals who set up the corporation. This generally works to the benefit of the individual owners, which is why people choose to incorporate in the first place. And it means that certain rights specific to individuals do not carry over to the corporate form.

For example, the Supreme Court has held that an individual acting in his personal capacity has the right to "plead the Fifth" and refuse to turn over documents that could incriminate him, but that same individual acting in his official capacity as a corporate owner has no such right against self-incrimination. Like the right to the free exercise of religion, the right against self-incrimination has always been understood to be a personal right of freedom and conscience that artificial corporate entities simply do not share.

A business owner simply does not have the right to move back and forth freely between individual and corporate status to obtain all the advantages and avoid any of the disadvantages of the respective forms.

Whether you have cheered the misfortunes Obamacare has suffered over the past month or bemoaned them, the distortion of basic principles of corporate law and free exercise jurisprudence by the three federal courts that have endorsed the corporate challenges to the ACA's contraception mandate should be troubling.

The Supreme Court, as always, will have the final say.

If the justices follow more than 200 years of constitutional law and history, not to mention basic principles of corporate law, the court should hand another victory to Obamacare.

I'm sure the administration -- and more importantly, the women and their families who risk losing important health benefits to which they are legally entitled -- would welcome the win.