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Environment

NPR, “Climate Change Journalist Warns: ‘Mother Nature Is Playing By Different Rules Now”, 24 Oct 2017:

Fresh Air

Author Jeff Goodell says that American cities are under threat from extreme weather, rising sea levels and lax enforcement of environmental regulations. His new book is The Water Will Come.

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross. Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria have shown how extreme weather can destroy towns, cities and islands. My guest Jeff Goodell is the author of a new book about what cities around the world face in a future of rising seas and increasingly intense storms. It’s called “The Water Will Come.” Goodell is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and has covered climate change for 15 years. He’s also written about fossil fuels, including the coal industry and their impact on the environment.

Jeff Goodell, welcome back to FRESH AIR. So Hurricanes Irma, Harvey, Maria - all the climate people say no one event can be attributed with certainty to climate change. But what about the confluence of these three consequential hurricanes?

JEFF GOODELL: Well, I mean, I think that we’re seeing what’s happening as we’re warming up the earth’s climate here. I mean, it’s a very well-established fact that as the ocean temperatures heat up, that is going to increase the intensity of these storms. One of the complicated things about what’s happening in our - as CO2 levels rise in our climate is that no one can predict exactly how these sort of new impacts are going to play out and what kind of consequences we’re going to see.

So you know, these hurricanes, these storms that we’ve seen this season are an indicator that, you know, we’re moving into this sort of new age when the sort of old rules of how our climate works are off the table. And Mother Nature is playing by different rules now.

GROSS: So just to sum up, do you think that these three hurricanes are the result of climate change?

GOODELL: The hurricanes themselves are not the result of climate change. But certainly the additional intensity, the fact that we’ve had a number of Category 5 hurricanes is likely the result of warmer ocean temperatures and higher CO2 levels.

GROSS: So your book opens with a very upsetting description of what Miami might look like by the end of the 21st century. So give it a go for us. Describe what, like - your dystopian fantasy of what Miami will look like as a result of climate change.

GOODELL: Well, I mean, one of the problems with Miami is that it’s very - you know, it’s a very low-lying place. There’s no high ground to run to. And so you know, with only, you know, 5 or 6 feet of sea level rise, which we could certainly see by the end of the century, you know, you’re going to see major parts of the city inundated.

You’re going to see more and more flooding in residential areas. You’re going to see more and more kind of pollution coming out of those flooded areas like we’re seeing in Houston with Harvey - major infrastructure like the airport underwater or not functional, massive losses in real estate investment along the coast, fleeing from low-lying areas inland, which are also going to be flooded out, places like Hialeah and Sweetwater. I think the real thing that you’re going to see that people don’t really think about is just this sort of economic collapse and economic problems that are going to be caused by a plummet in real estate values, which are really important to the Florida economy.

GROSS: What actually is happening in Miami now? You spent some time in Miami Beach, and you saw flooding just caused by high tides. Describe what you saw.

GOODELL: Well, I started this book, you know, shortly after Hurricane Sandy hit New York. And you know, there was nine feet of storm surge that came into New York. And I was talking to some scientists after that, and they said, you know, think about this as a sort of, you know, experiment of what sea level rise will look like. Imagine if you had nine feet that came in and didn’t go away the way it did with Sandy. So then I started thinking about that, and other scientists said, well, if you’re going to really think seriously about this, you need to go to Miami.

So I did. And I happened to be there on king tides, which is the time of - in the fall when the high tides are particularly high. And I started wandering around through Miami Beach on the western side of it in this sort of very wealthy neighborhood, and there was water up to my knees. I mean, there were people kayaking through the streets of Miami Beach on king tide. And it didn’t take a whole lot of thinking to figure out that if you had 2 or 3 feet of sea level rise, much less 6 or 8 feet of sea level rise, this place was in big trouble. And thinking about that and thinking about what the kind of trouble it would be in and the kind of trouble that other coastal cities would be in was really the genesis of the book.

GROSS: What do the people who live there do about those waters that you can kayak in?

GOODELL: Well, since then - this was four years ago, and since then, they’ve, you know, invested $500 million in building - improving the storm drainage, improving - putting in a bunch of pumps. And so some of these areas are - you know, in short term, you know, the flooding has been better. But that’s just a sort of short-term fix. And so what people are doing now is they are, you know, kind of living in a kind of denial.

They are hoping that - you know, a lot of people who live in Miami Beach aren’t there for - they’re not thinking about being there for the next 50 years. They’re thinking about being there for the next five years and how much fun they can have and, you know, how they can enjoy their retirement or their parties on the beach. And there’s not a lot of long-term thinking going on in a place like Miami Beach. And so basically people’s time horizon is the next five years. And will I be OK for the next five years - you know, probably. And so that’s where it’s at. People who think more broadly about it - and there are a number that I know - are selling and moving.

GROSS: What makes Miami Beach so vulnerable?

GOODELL: Well, it’s interesting. Miami Beach is a barrier island not unlike the Outer Banks or Galveston, Texas, or - you know, there’s many barrier islands around on the East Coast and on the Gulf Coast. So that’s one thing. It’s low-lying. Its elevation is 4, 5, 6 feet at max. But the real problem with Miami that makes it different than a lot of other places is that it’s built on this sort of porous limestone. The particular kind of limestone it’s on is full of holes. And so what that means is that you can’t build sea walls in the traditional sense around Miami Beach. In New York and in Boston and of course in the Netherlands, there’s lots of sea walls, and they can be an effective, if problematic, way of keeping water back for a while.

But in Miami, that’s not really possible because of this porous limestone, which means the seawater can just go right underneath a wall and just pop up on the other side. And this has complications not just for kind of protection of the place but also because as that seawater rises and begins to seep underneath, it gets into the freshwater drinking aquifer, which is very shallow in Miami. And so there’s going to be impact. There’s already problems with the salinization of drinking water. So there’s going to be a problem with drinking water in the very near term also.

GROSS: What’s Governor Rick Scott’s position - the Florida governor - on climate change?

GOODELL: Rick Scott is, you know, a pioneering climate denier. Rick Scott has, you know, unofficially kind of prohibited government employees from using the phrase climate change in any kind of government communication. I mean, he’s this sort of prototype for what we’re seeing in the Trump administration with EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and others who are basically just trying to deny that this is a problem.

And it’s a particular disservice in Florida because Florida is, you know, so obviously at risk. It’s not like he’s the governor of Oklahoma or something where, you know, sea level rise is not going to be a problem. In Florida, it’s a direct risk not only to people’s lives with flooding but also just to the economic future of the state.

GROSS:  So let’s talk about the ice sheets. Many of them are melting, and that’s affecting sea levels, causing them to rise. And that’s affecting climate change and ocean levels. So let’s start with the ice sheets. You say that there’s much more melting in the Arctic than in Antarctica. Why is that?

Shearing glacier, Bradford Littlejohn

GOODELL: Well, a lot of the heat from the warming of the Earth is sort of concentrating itself up in the north in the Arctic right now, and that’s the, you know, fastest melting place on the planet right now. And when we think about sea level rise, you know, there’s a number of factors - the thermal expansion of the ocean, the melting of glaciers on land, you know, land-based glaciers around the world - but it’s really - when it comes down to it, it’s really all about Greenland and Antarctica. Those are the only two sort of big ice cubes on the planet that if they - when they go, that’s big trouble. So what we’ve seen mostly right now is a lot of surface melting up in Greenland, and that’s been a big cause for concern.

We’ve seen - in 2012 there was a record ice melt up there. And, you know, we’re seeing acceleration of the glaciers in Greenland. But ice physics is very complex and, you know, scientists up until recently sort of had this idea that they could calculate how fast a big ice sheet like Greenland can melt and have a good idea of what sea level rise rates might be like in the future. But recently, a lot of attention is being focused in West Antarctica, especially this couple of glaciers there called Thwaites and Pine Island Glacier where the real problem is that you have a warming ocean - the ocean absorbs a lot of the heat of - as the atmosphere warms. And that warming ocean is getting underneath the ice sheets there, and that can cause big problems because you have melting from below.

And one of the things that scientists are figuring out is that you can calculate to a pretty good degree how fast an ice sheet will melt, but calculating how fast it can collapse is a whole a different thing. And some of the ice sheets in West Antarctica are a mile or two high. And if the water gets underneath them and they start to collapse, that could mean very rapid sea level rise.

GROSS: Yeah, why is a collapse so catastrophic?

GOODELL: Well, because you have an ice sheet that’s, you know, a mile or two high. Imagine, you know, everyone - a lot of people have seen pictures of El Capitan. Imagine something like that or twice as high as that of sheer ice melting from below. And the physics of ice structure tells us that a cliff like that of ice can’t stand on its own. So it will collapse, and as it collapses, it falls into the sea, and as it falls into the sea, sea levels rise. And so the risks of this are a really new idea that are only in the last three or four or five years are scientists really beginning to understand. And that’s why when you talk to the best ice scientists in the world you hear a rising alarm in their voice about what we might potentially be facing.

GROSS: You’ve been to Greenland, and you say you actually stood on land that you might have been among the first people to stand on because it wasn’t - it was ice before.

Photo, Earthworld

GOODELL: Yeah, it was a very surreal experience. I was there with a scientist named Jason Box, and we were flying a helicopter over the Jakobshavn Glacier, which is the fastest-moving glacier in the world. And he spotted this bare spot of ice, and he said, we have to land there, we have to land there. So we brought the helicopter down, and we jumped out and, you know, he shouted out new climate land. You know, this is - this patch of Earth has never been - you know, no human has stood here before and it hasn’t been seen - you know, it hasn’t been uncovered in tens of thousands of years. It was very profound because standing there and being on that bare patch of ground and seeing these enormous glaciers all around me, I had just been in Miami Beach, I mean, a few weeks before.

And you really connected, you know, I really connected in a visceral way, you know, what was happening in this faraway, distant place on this bare piece of ground that was being uncovered where I could actually see the ice going away fast with the rising waters in Miami Beach that I had seen and been wading through, you know, a few weeks earlier. And so this sort of connectedness of these places, which is so hard for most of us, including myself, to really grasp, I really felt in a very powerful way at that moment.

GROSS: I’ve seen film images of some of the ice and snow - I guess it’s mostly ice - in the Arctic darkened by soot. Like, why is there soot there?

GOODELL: That’s an interesting question. That’s one of the things that I was up there to look at with the scientist who I traveled up there with, Jason Box, is, you know, we talked about wildfires earlier. As the wildfires in California and other - in Russia and in China and other places burn, that soot gets picked up and carried up into the circulatory patterns in the atmosphere and gets dropped places. And one of the places a lot of it gets dropped is in Greenland and in the Arctic. And it’s really remarkable that even a small amount of darkening of snow has a big impact on how fast it will melt. It’s the same reason why you wear a light-colored shirt on a hot day and you feel a lot hotter if you’re wearing a black shirt. It absorbs the heat.

And in Greenland, where you have these vast ice sheets, if you get even a modest amount of soot on those ice sheets, both from wildfires or from industrial pollution like coal plants, it can really speed up the melting. And one of the things that’s happening as scientists think harder and harder about what’s happening on the ice sheets is they’re understanding that there’s a lot of new factors that they didn’t consider before. Like, you know, 10 years ago, not very many scientists were really thinking about the impact that darker soot would have on the melt rate of the ice sheets in Greenland. But now they know that it’s a significant factor.

And there’s a lot of other factors that they think they have not considered very well that - including the friction on the bottom of the glaciers and the friction on the sides of the canyons as the glaciers move through them, the warming of the ocean on the bottom of the glaciers. There’s just - it’s a - you would think it’s a very sort of simple idea of trying to calculate melt rate of ice, but it’s in fact incredibly complex.

GROSS: Let’s look at Alaska. Alaska’s in a kind of interesting situation in that it’s very dependent on fossil fuel. It raises a lot of money from fossil fuel. And at the same time, temperatures are rising in Alaska because of the whole phenomenon that we’ve been talking about - about how, you know, the Arctic is warming and ice is melting. So what are political leaders in Alaska saying about climate change and the impact it’s having on the state and the connection of that to fossil fuels?

GOODELL: Well, they’re not saying much. I’m actually just back from Alaska. I was just there for a few days. I just got back yesterday. So I’ve - and I talked to a number of politicians there, and, you know, the basic problem in Alaska is that, you know, their economy is dependent upon fossil fuels. Eighty percent or so of the revenues of the state come from oil and gas.

And so there’s no real way that the state can continue to function by, you know, reducing the drilling and pumping of oil and gas. It’s - they’re just completely dependent upon it. So there is no conversation, basically, about, you know, reducing that. And in fact, they’re talking about expanding it, looking into offshore drilling.

Right now, Congress is, you know, moving towards opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, and nobody there that I talked to in the sort of political establishment is anything but, you know, sort of embracing that. What is beginning to happen, though, is they are beginning to realize that, you know, no matter what they do, they’re going to be feeling impacts. They are feeling impacts.

When I was there with President Obama in 2015, we visited the villages on the - in the Arctic Circle that are already in trouble because of erosion from sea level rise. They’re just going to have to relocate many coastal villages because of - they’re just at risk now because the seas are higher and the storm surges are bigger.

So they’re facing hundreds of millions of dollars in helping people adapt there. So they’re beginning to have this, like, OK-so-how-are-we-going-to-adapt conversation. What are we going to do about this? And they’re beginning to think more about the future in diversifying their economy and trying to encourage kind of what they call this, you know, sort of transition from an oil economy to a salmon economy. That’s a big issue. But basically, it - they’re in a really tough spot because they are really, you know, dependent upon the very fossil fuels that’re doing them in. And it’s a very vicious circle to be caught in.

GROSS: Do you think political leaders are acknowledging, OK, we’re dependent on fossil fuels, but we acknowledge, at the same time, that fossil fuels are helping to lead to climate change, which is having an altering effect on the geography, the landscape, the life of Alaska?

GOODELL: Yeah. I mean, I don’t think that they’re - the political leaders that I’ve talked to up there - it’s very hard to be a denier there in the sort of classic way of say, you know, Florida Governor Rick Scott or EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt because it’s just all around. And the permafrost is melting. It’s just, you know, obvious there.

But the question is, what can you do about it? And it’s a really - for - if you’re, you know, the governor or a senator from Alaska - and I’m not giving them a get-out-of-jail-free card, but, you know, for any politician, you know, keeping the economy going is the No. 1 job. And in Alaska, keeping the economy going for the moment means, you know, oil and gas drilling. And that’s just the fact, and that’s the way it’s going to be in the near term.

The question is, how quickly can they diversify away from that? How quickly can they begin to build another, a new kind of economy based on clean energy? I mean, there’s a lot of engineering ability in Alaska. I mean, look at the pipelines they’ve built. I mean, this is the headquarters of sort of big, you know, brilliant engineering.

And the idea of beginning to, you know, apply some of that to adaptation, to diversifying, to building new kinds of clean energy, you know, is really appealing. And I was, you know, trying to make the pitch to them up there that they can be a real leader in showing how to adapt to these massive changes that’re coming and how to change from a fossil-fuel-dependent economy to something else. I mean, West Virginia’s a classic example of a state that never did make that turn and has been sort of beholden to coal for, you know, 150 years, and it’s just been, you know, devastating for the economy of that state.

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Pence owes his position to doing the dirty bidding of the Koch brother’s interests, starting with lobbying against carbon tax, an initiative that wound up putting oil man Scott Pruitt in charge of EPA - the proverbial fox in charge of the hen house. That’s not the half of Pence’s classic story of right wing corruption.

NPR, “Understanding Mike Pence And His Relationship To Trump: ‘His Public Role Is Fawning”, 18 Oct 2017:

Though President Trump ran as an outsider, New Yorker writer Jane Mayer describes his vice president as “the connective tissue” between Trump and the billionaire donors in the Republican party.

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross. Many of President Trump’s critics are hoping he won’t serve his full term, but what kind of president would Mike Pence make? That’s one of the questions Jane Mayer sets out to answer in her new article about Pence titled “The President Pence Delusion.” It’s published in the current issue of The New Yorker.

She writes about how Pence became an evangelical Christian and how he became a favored candidate of billionaire backers, most especially the Koch brothers. She traces how religion and money shaped his ideology. She investigates how Pence became Trump’s running mate and how much power he has in the White House and how he’s used it.

Mayer is a staff writer for The New Yorker. She’s also the author of the bestseller about the Koch Brothers titled “Dark Money: The Hidden History Of The Billionaires Behind The Rise Of The Radical Right.” Last March in The New Yorker, she profiled another billionaire funder of right-wing causes, Robert Mercer, who she says has become a major force behind the Trump presidency.

Jane Mayer, welcome back to FRESH AIR. So I feel like I don’t see Mike Pence very much, and I often wonder if he’s a power behind the scenes or if he really doesn’t matter that much within the Trump administration. So what’s your impression?

JANE MAYER: Well, it’s really hard to tell. He is - as Joel Goldstein, a specialist in the vice presidency, told me, he calls him the sycophant in chief because when you do see him, he’s usually acting as an emcee to Trump or kind of echoing Trump and praising Trump. So his public role is really fawning. Behind the scenes, though, according to Newt Gingrich, he’s 1 of the 3 people who have the most power in the Trump administration along with the chief of staff, John Kelly, and Trump himself.

GROSS: What are the signs that he’s that powerful?

MAYER: Well, (laughter) that’s a good question - because I think he acts as the connective tissue between the Trump administration and Congress, between the Trump administration and the - kind of the socially conservative base of the party. And most importantly, he is the connector between the Trump administration and the billionaire donors in the Republican Party. He is the guy who does most of the fundraising and outreach to the money.

GROSS: And the money includes the Koch brothers and Robert Mercer.

MAYER: It does. And one of the interesting things to me in writing about Pence is it poses such a juxtaposition between the way that Trump ran, which was as a populist outsider who was attacking the big-money forces in the Republican Party as corrupt and saying that they were puppeteers trying to control the candidates as puppets. And Trump made a huge point of saying, I’m my own man; I’m so rich; no one controls me. Yet as his vice president, he chose Mike Pence. And you could hardly find a candidate in the American political scene who has closer ties to the big donors and particularly the Koch brothers. He’s been sponsored by them for years.

GROSS: So how do the Kochs first start backing Mike Pence?

MAYER: So this was when Pence was in Congress in 2009. He really did the Kochs a big favor. There was legislation pending that might have put a tax on carbon pollution, and it would have been terrible for Koch Industries. And Pence took up the cause and tried to help defeat that legislation and specifically carried around a pledge that the Kochs had created, trying to get people to sign it. And after he was successful in that, the Kochs invited him to come to their secret donor summits. And at that point on, they started showering him in money. So it was - it’s really became a working relationship then. And I hadn’t realized that until recently.

GROSS: One of the things you say Mike Pence is responsible for is bringing the Kochs and Donald Trump together. The Kochs didn’t support Trump’s candidacy. Charles Koch described the choice between Trump and Hillary as one between cancer or a heart attack. (Laughter) So what did Pence do to bring the Kochs and Trump together?

MAYER: Well, so this is what was interesting to me - is that Pence has been very close with the Kochs, and they have just showered money on his campaigns. And he’s kind of act as a peacemaker between the Kochs and Trump. And but in that process, what interested me most was that I really do think that Trump ran as a different kind of Republican. He ran against the big-donors orthodoxy and kind of libertarian vision of people like the Kochs. He said he was going to deliver something for the little guys and build infrastructure all across the country and use the government in various ways that the Kochs disapprove of.

And what you’ve seen with Pence is that in many ways, Pence has brought in a ton of people who are allied with the Kochs into the government, and he’s brought a lot of their policies in - so whether it’s on environmental issues or tax policy now where the Kochs are working very closely with the Trump White House on the Trump tax plan. And it is a tax plan that the Kochs love, and it’s a tax plan that’s going to help the super-rich according to many nonpartisan analyses and not do very much for the middle class. So you’re beginning to kind of see the government moving in the direction of the Kochs.

GROSS: You say 16 high-ranking officials in the Trump White House have ties to the Koch brothers.

MAYER: Well, and that’s according to a study by a group called the Checks And Balances Program. And you can count them. You can see it online. They’re - that’s in the White House. There are also many, many people who’ve worked for the Kochs in the government at large, in the cabinet, in the other departments. And a tremendous number of people who work with and for Pence have gone in and out of working for the Kochs to the point that you had Politico saying - they quoted a Republican operative saying that the Koch operation really was the shadow campaign for Pence for president.

And chief among them really has been Pence’s former chief of staff, Marc Short, who went - after working for Pence in Congress, he went to run the Koch’s political operation, Freedom Partners. And then when Pence was chosen as vice president on the ticket, Marc Short came back, worked with Pence in the campaign and is now the head of Congressional Liaison in the Trump White House. So the man that actually ran the Koch’s political operation is a key player inside the Trump White House.

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Luke Ford, “Alt Right Jews”, 15 Oct 2017 by Luke Ford

The Z Blog posts:

Anyone who has engaged with Orthodox Jews knows they regard Liberal Jews with a high degree of hostility. They are not as bad as the Hasidim, but they view Reformed Jews as fakers, getting the benefits of being Jewish without the commitment. Their relatively small numbers have made them easy to ignore, but demographics are changing quickly. Orthodox are 10% of American Jews and a full decade younger than the median age of Reformed Jews. They also have many more children per female.

Now, the Orthodox are famously ethnocentric. They also vote for conservative white candidates in elections. When it comes to identity politics, the Orthodox favor it over consensus. They may not be talking about ethno-states and separatism, but their revealed preferences run strongly in that direction. Like the Amish though, their numbers will only grow the old fashioned way. They don’t recruit so they don’t attract a lot of converts. Talk to anyone who has converted and they will tell you it is a long and challenging process.

There’s another division, somewhat related to the Orthodox movement, and that is the Chabad movement. Here’s a Globe story from two years ago and a Forward story from last year for some background. One of the unique things about Chabad is they recruit and do so aggressively. They even recruit gentiles. I’ve had them put the arm on me more than once, even though they know I’m not a Jew. President Trump’s son-in-law and daughter are Chabad. Joel Pollak, the Breitbart big shot, is Chabad. This is not an accident.

As that Globe story makes clear, the Chabad movement is a curious thing. On the one hand, they are Orthodox, which puts them culturally to the right of most people and way to the Right of most Jews. On the other hand, they seem to be following the model of the early Christian church by letting converts ease into the life. Jared Kushner is not growing a beard and wearing all black anytime soon. It’s hard not to think that they are first concerned with growing the movement. They’ll worry about discipline later.

There’s another piece to the puzzle. There are Conservative Jews who make up about 20% of American Jewry. These are the folks you will not only see filtering into the Chabad movement, but also on the fringes of the alt-right. They may or may not consider themselves white, but either way, they are fine with white identity politics. They think multiculturalism is madness. It’s not just madness for Jews, but for everyone. Diversity is a cancer to be avoided. These are folks who would be called Alt-Jew.

The number of Conservative Jews sympathetic to the alt-right is debatable, depending upon how you define the terms. There are quite a few Jews supporting Jared Taylor’s work at American Renaissance. I correspond with maybe half a dozen Conservative Jews who share my politics. They think their numbers are growing as Jews in America come to terms with the failings of liberalism and reformed Judaism. To use a phrase I picked up at AmRen, these are Jews who are religious, if not spiritual.

None of this means that Jews are suddenly going to lift Richard Spencer up and carry him to the throne of the ethno-state. It just means that demographics and shifting politics spare no one. Liberal Jews are old and not particularly fertile. Orthodox Jews are young and extremely fertile. Conservative Jews fall somewhere in between, but probably represent a much more practical alternative for American Jews who wish to remain American and Jewish. In a majority-minority world, everyone is going to have to pick sides.

The Z Man, “Alt-Jew”, 29 Aug 2017:

Someone contacted me the other day saying they were starting a site called Alt-Jew and he wanted to know if I knew any right-wing Jews that would be interested. You never know about these things. It could have been a terrorist organization trying to get some names of people they could terrorize. Anyone can register a website. Well, not anyone, thanks to terrorist groups like the SPLC and ADL. Still, you never can be sure about these things. The Reagan Battalion was an elaborate Soros fraud.

Regardless, it provides a reason to write about a subject that gets zero attention. That is the schism among American Jews, one that is looking a little bit like the divide within the white world. There are a growing number of right-wing Jews, who are wondering if liberal Jews are bad for Jews. It’s not just politically, but culturally and racially. They look around at the demographics in America and see greater out-marriage, lower birth rates and the telltale signs of assimilation and secularization.

Anyone who has engaged with Orthodox Jews knows they regard Liberal Jews with a high degree of hostility. They are not as bad as the Hasidim, but they view Reformed Jews as fakers, getting the benefits of being Jewish without the commitment. Their relatively small numbers have made them easy to ignore, but demographics are changing quickly. Orthodox are 10% of American Jews and a full decade younger than the median age of Reformed Jews. They also have many more children per female.

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Ending the Iran deal has been the veritable raison d’être for the Trump Presidency. Trump refers to an “international community” whose opinion on the matter he will take under consideration. The “international community”, i.e., YKW and other right wingers.

Way to go Alt-Right! Along with Donald, you sure know how to make a deal.

Donald Trump: Given the regime’s murderous past and present, we should not take lightly its sinister vision for the future. As I have said many times, The Iran Deal was one of the worst and most one sided transactions The United States has ever entered into. The Iranian regime has committed multiple violations of the agreement, for example, on two separate occasions they have exceeded the limit of 130 metric tonnes of heavy water; until recently, the Iranian regime has also failed to meet our expectations in its operation of advanced centrifuges. The Iranian regime has also intimidated international inspectors into not using the full inspection authorities that the agreement calls for; Iranian officials and military leaders have repeatedly claimed they will not allow inspectors onto military sites even thought the international community suspects some of those sites were part of Iran’s clandestine nuclear weapons program. Importantly, Iran is not living up to the spirit of the deal. So today, in recognition of the increasing menace posed by Iran and after extensive consultations with our allies, I am announcing a new strategy to address the full range of Iran’s destructive actions. First, we will work with our allies to counter the regime’s destabilizing activity and support for terrorist proxies in the region. Based on the factual record I have put forward, I am announcing today that we cannot and will not make this certification.

What about Saudi, Donald? He cites Iran’s backing of terrorists; this, coming from a man who just a few months back lavished Saudi - Saudi - with a 110 billion dollar arms deal. 

Related Story: 11 September Attacks: 28 Pages Declassified.

Related Story: What Saudi Arabia’s royal reshuffle means for the world.

The Hill, “Trump makes his move on Iran nuke deal”, 13 Oct 2017:

President Trump declared Friday that the Iran nuclear deal is no longer in the national security interest of the United States, but stopped short of withdrawing from the Obama-era pact.

“I am announcing today that we cannot and will not make this certification,” Trump said during a speech at the White House.

“We will not continue down a path whose predictable conclusion is more violence, more terror and the very real threat of Iran’s nuclear breakout,” he continued.

The president said that Iran “has committed multiple violations of the agreement” and accused Tehran of “not living up to the spirit of the deal.”

Trump ticked off a list of problems with the deal and laid out a new, tougher strategy to confront “the rogue regime” over a series of other “hostile actions” unrelated to its nuclear program.

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Paul Weston, an ex-Muslim and Anne Marie Waters -

More indication that Jews are favoring objectivist arguments against “the left” and using the Alt-Right and Lite to that end.

Stefan Molijew, er eaux (19:25): Again, I’m sort of paraphrasing from my perspective, which is that if you have a free market then the most intelligent will generally gather the most resources, become the wealthiest and therefore have the most children. And this is exactly how Jewish intelligence, particularly in language skills, verbal intelligence, has advanced so significantly; the most intelligent Jews had the most children and then you get a whole bunch of Ashkenazi Jews, you get a bunch of very intelligent Jews, I mean this is just how it works, this is evolution.

(49:00) I have a question for the media, how many Jewish experts does it take to overturn the hearsay of one non-Jew. Is it five Jewish experts versus one non-Jew, is it ten…I’m just curious what the ratio is because that seems pretty anti-Semitic to me. ..how many Jews do you have to stack up to overturn the hearsay of one non-Jew? if it’s more than one, you might be an anti-Semite.

NPR, “Tensions Rise Between Tillerson And Trump As The Threat Of War In N. Korea Looms”, 10 Oct 2017:

New Yorker writer Dexter Filkins describes Sec. of State Tillerson as frustrated amidst very scary negotiations with N. Korea and without sufficient support and staff - most Republicans with wherewithal have been purged from Trump’s administration. While Filkins describes General Mattis as a very well read, interesting and thoughtful man who prefers negotiation to his profession of war - which, in the case of war with North Korea, “would bring the worst casualties and the worst bloodshed that any of us have ever known in our lifetimes.”

New Yorker writer Dexter Filkins says Sec. of State Rex Tillerson is a diplomat in an administration that doesn’t value diplomacy: “Rex is a sober, steady guy, and the president is anything but that.”

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross. Ever since NBC reported last week that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had called President Trump a moron, speculation has increased about whether Tillerson will last much longer in the job. My guest Dexter Filkins has a new article in The New Yorker titled “Rex Tillerson At The Breaking Point.” Filkins started researching the article months ago. It’s about the tensions between Trump and Tillerson, Tillerson’s legacy at Exxon, where he became CEO in 2006, his strategies today in dealing with North Korea and Iran and how he’s presiding over a State Department in which most key positions remain unfilled.

One of the things we’re going to focus on is North Korea and the possibility of the escalating rhetoric actually leading to a war. Filkins’s previous article for The New Yorker was about Secretary of Defense General James Mattis, who Filkins first met when he was reporting on the war in Iraq. Filkins covered the war for The New York Times. He’s now a staff writer at The New Yorker covering foreign affairs.

Dexter Filkins, welcome back to FRESH AIR. Can we just start by acknowledging that the secretary of state you’ve just written about may not be the secretary of state much longer, which means your piece may’ve been written at exactly the right or exactly the wrong time (laughter)?

DEXTER FILKINS: Yeah, yeah, well, it’s great if you’re a journalist to have, you know, perfect timing. And in this case, I had perfect timing. I started working on that piece a long time ago, not knowing that all of this was going to come to a head. But I think he’s - you know, he’s still in the job as we speak. And I think he’s pretty frustrated. But that is a chaotic administration on any day of the week. And so who knows what tomorrow will bring?

GROSS: What are you hearing about the relationship between Tillerson and Trump?

FILKINS: Well, it’s funny. I’m the - initially, when I started talking to people, and the people around him say, it’s great. You know, they talk all the time. They talk several times a day. Trump calls him, you know, middle of the night, whenever he wants. And I think that’s true. But I - you know, there’s an anecdote, which many of your listeners will have heard by now, which is, Tillerson was apparently in a meeting after one of - he was complaining about one of Trump’s speeches. And he called him a moron, and there was a - you know, there was another word attached to the word moron, which I won’t repeat.

But I think - you know, I think he’s frustrated. I think it’s difficult for - you know, Rex Tillerson is, I think - he’s a pretty sober and a pretty steady guy. And of course, the president is anything but that. And I think Tillerson in particular has been trying very hard in places like North Korea, where we have a - you know, a terrible crisis on our hands, to make a diplomatic solution to try to avert war. I think, you know, the possibility of war with North Korea right now is very real. And so he - you know, he flies out to China to try to make a deal and - to try to make a diplomatic deal to stave off war. And the president makes fun of him. And he undercuts him - Rex, you’re wasting your time. And I - you know, he’s the secretary of state of the United States. It’s - I think he’s pretty frustrated with that, that he feels like he can’t do his job.

GROSS: One official told you, the only reason why Tillerson has stayed this long is loyalty to the country.

FILKINS: Yeah, you know, he’s an Eagle Scout. And there’s a lot of Eagle Scouts in the president’s cabinet, and there’s a lot of generals around him. And somebody said to me, the only people left around the president are generals and Boy Scouts. And they’re hanging in there out of - not because they like it or not because they’re, you know, pleased to go into work every day but because they feel a responsibility to the country.

GROSS: What have you heard about the so-called suicide pact - that if Tillerson is let loose, then Secretary of Defense Mattis and Secretary of the Treasury Mnuchin would leave as well? They would just - they would walk.

FILKINS: Well, I heard that. I - you know, Washington is - it’s such a chatterbox. And when you go down there, you know, it’s just an echo chamber, and everybody’s, like, gossiping. It’s hard to know what’s true. I do know that Tillerson and Mattis talk a lot, and they have a lot of respect for each other. And I think that they - you know, they talk a lot because it’s - they both deal with foreign affairs. And, you know, one is the carrot, and the other is the stick. And they’re trying to coordinate a lot. So they talk a lot. And so it wouldn’t surprise me if that were the case.

GROSS: Is Tillerson much of a carrot? Is he holding out many carrots?

FILKINS: Well, I think the carrot’s getting smaller. I mean - and I think that’s the concern. And the hammer or the stick is getting bigger. And so if you look at their respective budgets, the Office of Management and Budget, which has drawn up the proposed budget for 2018 - for next year - which is what they’re fighting about right now - they would cut the State Department’s budget by 30 percent. And that’s about - the State Department is - the budget’s about - right now about $55 billion a year. And they are proposing - at the same time that they’re cutting the State Department by 30 percent, they’re proposing a $50 billion increase for the Pentagon. So they’re - the proposal on the table right now is to increase spending on defense as much as, or nearly as much as, the entire budget for the State Department.

And so if you stand back and think about that, what does that mean for American foreign policy? You know, you’ve got the guns over here, and you’ve got the diplomats over here. And they are cutting the resources for the diplomats, and they’re giving more resources to the guys with guns. And so I think that’s what’s disturbing to a lot of people right now - that the balance is changing.

GROSS: But Tillerson seems to be one of the people leading the charge in dismantling the State Department. I mean, you write that there are, like, 48 ambassadorships that are vacant. Twenty-one out of 23 assistant secretary positions are vacant or occupied by provisional employees because Congress hasn’t confirmed appointees to the position. How much of this is intentional on Rex Tillerson’s part?

FILKINS: Well, I - that there - I think there’s two answers to that question. The first is - to answer your question - he has his marching orders, and it’s to cut the budget and to cut the number of people - cut the number of diplomats working for the United States. And he’s doing that. He’s doing that, and he’s - or he’s trying to do it. And, you know, Congress is actually pushing back. Remarkably, even the Republicans in Congress are saying, look, this is crazy. This is too much. These cuts are too deep. You know, we have to have a diplomatic presence abroad.

And at the same time, I think that Tillerson is having a very, very difficult time - very difficult time - filling jobs and filling - you know, typically at the State Department, you have the secretary of state, and then he’s surrounded by assistant secretaries of state. And there’s 25 of them or so. And what’s happened, in this case, is because so many Republican - let’s say senior Republicans who - with deep experience on foreign policy - so many of them during the campaign publicly spoke against the Trump candidacy or signed letters, which were, you know, published in newspapers, et cetera, saying, Donald Trump is not fit to be president.

And so the whole Republican bench that you would call on to bring in to a new Republican administration, they’re essentially blackballed. And if you go down those lists, that’s a really long list. It’s most of the real brain power in the Republican foreign policy establishment. So the result is, Tillerson can’t get anybody to work for him.

GROSS: Let’s talk about North Korea. I mean, President Trump has said, we could totally destroy North Korea. North Korea has vowed to develop a nuclear missile capable of hitting the U.S. and warned it can conduct a hydrogen bomb test over the Pacific. No ambassador to South Korea has been confirmed yet. Trump also warned recently that this is the calm before the storm. And nobody’s really sure what he means by that, and he’s declined to clarify. It’s kind of like, you’ll see.

So - and the president tweeted, presidents and their administrations have been talking to North Korea for 25 years. Agreements made and massive amounts of money paid hasn’t worked. Agreements violated before the ink was dry, making fools of U.S. negotiators - sorry, but only one thing will work.

And I think it’s kind of implied what that one thing is. But we don’t really know for sure what he means. So what’s your sense of how close we’re getting to an actual nuclear war with North Korea?

FILKINS: Well, I don’t know if it’d be a nuclear war, but it would be - it’d be a very terrible war. I remember Secretary Mattis - I was on his plane earlier this year. And he said if - and he’s really sober about this. And he said, if there is a war with North Korea, it will bring the worst casualties and the worst bloodshed that any of us have ever known in our lifetimes. You know, that’s pretty strong stuff. And I think the - I think here’s where we are.

The Trump administration has decided, I think - it’s pretty clear - that the prospect of North Korea getting a workable ICBM with a nuclear warhead is worse than the prospect of war. So, I mean - and I spoke to people inside the administration who told me that. They said, we will not allow them to have a working ICBM. It’s not going to happen. And we will go to war if we have to. So short of that, what can you do? You can make a deal.

And so the plan - and I think this is what Tillerson has been working very hard on - is to squeeze the North Koreans. And there’s basically one way to squeeze the North Koreans, and that’s to squeeze China - to squeeze the North Koreans, and that it - because the Chinese economy is kind of - it’s the main - it’s the only lever, really, to pressure the North Koreans. And so the Chinese have been very reluctant to do that. They’re - for a lot of reasons - I mean, the main one is, they don’t want to have the North Korean state collapse on their borders. They’re terrified of that. They don’t want North Korea to have a nuclear weapon, I don’t think, any more than we do.

But so that’s the challenge right now, but I think it’s also the one means that the White House sees to make a deal is working with China. And that’s what Tillerson has been trying to do. So he’s been, you know, flying to China. He’s made several trips out there, and he’s pushing them. We have channels open to the North Korean leadership. And so, you know, to get back to President Trump, so the - so at the same time that, you know, the diplomats were trying to make a deal to stave off war, the president is sending out these tweets saying, I’m going to - you know, I’m going to annihilate North Korea, et cetera. And I don’t think there’s any calculation involved in that. I think the - you know, the president is just, you know, firing.

GROSS: OK, well, let’s take a short break here. If you’re just joining us, my guest is Dexter Filkins, a New Yorker staff writer who covers foreign affairs. His new piece is called “Rex Tillerson At The Breaking Point.” We’ll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. And if you’re just joining us, my guest is Dexter Filkins, who is a staff writer at The New Yorker and covers foreign affairs. His new piece is about the secretary of state. It’s called “Rex Tillerson At The Breaking Point.”

Rex Tillerson told you - because you had a chance to speak with him - that he told China that if China and the U.S. don’t solve this - if he and his counterpart don’t solve this - these two guys - meaning Kim Jong Un and President Trump - these two guys get to fight, and we will fight.

FILKINS: Yeah. Yeah, it’s pretty scary.

GROSS: Did he elaborate on that for you? Like, what…

FILKINS: Well, yeah, a little bit. I mean, he essentially meant, look, the way this is - the way diplomacy works and works best is if it’s backed up by a threat of force. So when I walk in the room and I sit down with the Chinese, I say, look, you and I can make a deal, and we can, like, sign it on paper. And if we don’t, if diplomacy fails, there’s going to be a war. And nobody wants a war, so let’s do the deal. And I think, you know, that sounds right. Theoretically, that’s - and it sounds right. It’s just terrifying.

GROSS: Well, it - there seems to really be a game of brinksmanship being played right now.

FILKINS: Yes.

GROSS: And when you say you were told - and I forget who told you this - that if we go to war with North Korea, there will be more casualties than - what? - than…

FILKINS: Any of us know - have seen in our lifetimes. And that was Secretary Mattis.

GROSS: Oh, right. And I can - and he’s…

FILKINS: And you know…

GROSS: He (laughter)...

FILKINS: He’s seen a lot of war, you know? I mean…

GROSS: He’s seen a lot of war, right. So do you have any idea what kind of war he’s envisioning if we do go to war with North Korea? And I hate to even utter those words.

FILKINS: Yeah, God forbid. I think there’s a lot of different options. And, I mean, I’ve had some discussions about what those options are. I think they’re all terrible. I think that the easy scenario to imagine - I mean, it’s a terrible scenario - is the moment the United States strikes North Korea, say. And we’re speaking only theoretically here. The North Koreans have at their disposal thousands of artillery rounds that are within striking range of Seoul. And I think, you know, metropolitan Seoul has how many people - 20 million people. And so you can imagine.

So if the leadership of North Korea is, you know, still alive and if every piece of its army is still functioning - any piece of its army’s - is still functioning after that initial exchange, then they will fire everything they have at Seoul. And I think that’s - you know, that’s what’s got everybody’s attention. The prospect of that is terrifying because the bloodshed would be immense.

GROSS: OK.

FILKINS: And, you know, the numbers that you see are just - they’re terrifying. I mean, it’s, you know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of casualties.

GROSS: I’m wondering if you feel any echoes of the eve of the Iraq War right now when President Bush and Saddam Hussein were threatened - threatening each other when President Bush decided to move forward not exactly unilaterally, but not really with the backing of the U.N. either. You know, we had some allies, but it wasn’t the full force of the U.N. Do - you covered the Iraq War. You covered it right from the start. So are you feeling any similarities now?

FILKINS: Well, the - I think the difference is, in Iraq, it was basically the United States. I mean, we’d - you know, Great Britain came along, but - and the United States was utterly determined to take down Saddam, you know? Come what may, we’re going to do it. And so there was this kind of, like, heedlessness involved. You know, we’re - we are going to do this. And the whole world was kind of freaking out.

It’s different in North Korea. I mean, I do feel like I have a - whenever I sit down and talk to somebody in Washington about - who knows the North Korean situation, I get these butterflies in my stomach because it feels like these are two - you know, North Korea and the United States, they’re both people who are - at the moment who are not willing to compromise. And that means, if that doesn’t - if they don’t reach a compromise, we’re going to go to war. And I think the prospect of war is very, very real.

And so in that sense, I’m feeling, like, pretty nervous about it. But I think that in - the difference between now and, say, in Iraq in 2003 was that I think the whole world is pretty worried about North Korea. You know, it’s a kind of crazy, unpredictable regime. And I think that the whole world is united in wanting to stop North Korea from acquiring an ICBM.

So to get back to what I had said earlier, I think the Trump administration - I spoke to somebody about this at some length - said that we - the reason why we cannot allow North Korea to acquire an ICBM is, think of the consequences. They would - they might use one. Oh, they’ll start threatening Japan. They’ll start threatening South Korea. They’ll threaten the United States. They - it will probably prompt, or could prompt, the Japanese to reversing, you know, decades of being a - having a very, very small defense force. They may have to go nuclear. So it could destabilize the whole region.

You - there’s no evidence that North Koreans would ever think twice about selling their nuclear technology to another country. So all of those things are terrifying as well. And so what the Trump administration has concluded is that this - or that scenario that I just painted - we cannot allow that, and we will not allow that under any circumstances.

GROSS: So if there is a war with North Korea, as it’s possible there will be, is there any scenario that you’ve heard in which the U.S. uses a nuclear weapon against North Korea?

FILKINS: Yes. Yes, I’ve had that conversation. It’s terrifying. I mean, it’s just not even something that you want to think about. But I will tell you about a conversation I had with a very senior person. He said, the problem, if the North Koreans, say, are 2 inches away from acquiring the capability - you know, a workable nuclear-armed ICBM - and we need to stop that, how do we do that? We kill the leadership, basically. We take out the whole leadership - Kim Jong Un, everyone around him.

Now, how do you do that? Because, you know, do we know where they are? Are they all scattered? And that’s where the nuclear weapon came in in the conversation that I had. So in other words, you decapitate the regime, and maybe you can avert the kind of horrible consequences that we’ve talked about with the North Koreans raining artillery shells down on greater Seoul. But that’s pretty terrifying. I think that option has been discussed. I think it’s on the table. That’s what was related to me. But, I mean, it’s pretty terrifying.

GROSS: How do you use a nuclear weapon to decapitate the regime?

FILKINS: God if I know. I don’t know. I mean, because - I don’t know. I mean, I think that the idea, at least in the discussion that I had, was that that would be the only way that you could guarantee that you would basically obliterate the leadership, wherever it was. The problem with that, obviously, is that you’re going to end up obliterating a lot of other things as well. And so I - you know, you - there’s no such thing as a surgical nuclear strike.

And so I think if - you know, if nuclear weapons came into play here, the consequences would be horrifying. And I don’t - you know, I don’t - this is what - I think this is what keeps people awake at nights. I mean, everybody’s thinking about these options, and there are no good options. They’re all bad - all of them. But the nuclear one, of course, is conceivably the worst.

GROSS: My guest is Dexter Filkins. His new article “Rex Tillerson At The Breaking Point” is in the current issue of The New Yorker. We’ll talk more after a break. And our jazz critic, Kevin Whitehead, will have an appreciation of pianist and composer, Thelonious Monk, who was born 100 years ago today. I’m Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross, back with Dexter Filkins, a staff writer for The New Yorker who covers foreign affairs. His new article is titled “Rex Tillerson At The Breaking Point: Will Donald Trump Let The Secretary Of State Do His Job?” Filkins covered the war in Iraq for The New York Times and is the author of the book, “The Forever War,” which won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction.

After having written this piece about Rex Tillerson, for which you interviewed a lot of people in the State Department, and my impression is maybe some people in defense as well, people in the administration - what did you leave knowing that you didn’t know before, in terms of the larger story of where we’re going with North Korea and Iran?

FILKINS: Well, I think the most - you know, I’ve worked all around the globe, and I’ve been to, like, a zillion American embassies around the world. And, you know, they’re all kind of the same. You, you know, show your passport, and you go inside. And you meet the diplomats, and they’re all very competent. And they speak the language, and they know the history and the politics. And you kind of take it for granted.

You know, we have a really good State Department, and the embassies are filled with competent people. But you take it for granted. Like, what do they do in there? I think what I learned is that the world that we live in is governed by a very large kind of architecture of economic and political arrangements that have been, you know, whether by treaties or agreements - that have been kind of written, and orchestrated and erected since the second - the end of the Second World War.

And basically, if you go back to - I quoted Truman’s - President Truman’s secretary of state in my piece, Dean Acheson. If you go back that far, to the 19 - late ‘40s and early ‘50s, you know, Acheson says, we inherited a world that was in chaos and in ruins, and we wanted to, at - you know, at any cost, we wanted to avert another world war. And how can we do this? And so they came up with, you know, everything - all these institutions that we know today - The United Nations, NATO, you know, the European Union. And not - you know, this stuff was very ad hoc and, kind of - you know, this institution got formed in 1948 and the next one in 1950. And they kind of evolved over time.

But that - today, we’ve inherited this kind of vast architecture of arrangements, and relationships and treaties, and so that everything from bandwidth - computer bandwidth - to the number of bluefin tuna that you can take out of the water every year - just the number of things which are negotiated, and written down, and codified in treaties and which are managed every day by our diplomats because there’s disputes going on all the time and these arrangements have to be changed and altered - this is the world that we live in. And this is, you know, the world that we have - and, you know, for all of its problems.

But it’s - and I think the thing that is troubling is - and the thing it - which is worrying and which I think everybody needs to kind of think about is, if we - are we dismantling this? Is that what Secretary Tillerson and President Trump are doing when they say, we want to cut the budget of the State Department by 30 percent? If - I asked Secretary Tillerson, and he said no, that’s not what we want to do. But when you see what’s happening to our diplomatic corps and you see what’s the - what the budget cuts are potentially doing and the people who are leaving, the amount of expertise which is leaving, it’s scary. It’s scary.

READ MORE...

The Mainichi, “Reports: Google uncovers ads by Russian operatives”, 9 Oct 2017:

NEW YORK (AP)—Russian operatives likely spent tens of thousands of dollars on ads across Google products, including YouTube and Google search, according to reports.

Accounts connected with the Russian government spent $4,700 on search and display ads, while another $53,000 was spent on ads with political material that were purchased from Russian territory, from Russian internet addresses, or with Russian currency, The New York Times reported . The Times cited an unnamed person familiar with the ongoing inquiry by the search giant.

The Washington Post earlier reported that the technology behemoth uncovered the Russian-backed disinformation campaign as it considers whether to testify before Congress next month, also citing anonymous sources familiar with the investigation. Social media companies Facebook and Twitter have already agreed to testify.

The reports said the company discovered the Russian presence by analyzing information shared by Twitter and Facebook, as well its own research and tips from outside researchers.

In a statement, Google said it has a “set of strict ads policies including limits on political ad targeting and prohibitions on targeting based on race and religion.”

“We are taking a deeper look to investigate attempts to abuse our systems, working with researchers and other companies, and will provide assistance to ongoing inquiries,” the statement continued.

Facebook recently shared about 3,000 Russian-backed ads with Congress.

The lack of turn out from Milwaukee voters is suspicious.

U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin directed a disinformation campaign aimed at helping Donald Trump win the presidential election.

“Conservative” talk-show hosts Charilie Sykes and John Ziegler talk about their disillusionment with Trump and his supporters; how his campaign was facilitated by the influx of conspiratorial and other fringe right influences, particularly when the Drudge Report started linking to and thus mainstreaming and “normalizing” Alex Jones.

Active Measures is suspected of having had a significant impact on the Milwaukee area of Wisconsin in terms of voter turn out.