Originally here.
The New York Times
August 17, 2011
Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue?
By JOHN TIERNEY
Three men doing time in Israeli prisons recently appeared before a parole board consisting of a judge, a criminologist and a social worker. The three prisoners had completed at least two-thirds of their sentences, but the parole board granted freedom to only one of them. Guess which one:
Case 1 (heard at 8:50 a.m.): An Arab Israeli serving a 30-month sentence for fraud.
Case 2 (heard at 3:10 p.m.): A Jewish Israeli serving a 16-month sentence for assault.
Case 3 (heard at 4:25 p.m.): An Arab Israeli serving a 30-month sentence for fraud.
There was a pattern to the parole board’s decisions, but it wasn’t related to the men’s ethnic backgrounds, crimes or sentences. It was all about timing, as researchers discovered by analyzing more than 1,100 decisions over the course of a year. Judges, who would hear the prisoners’ appeals and then get advice from the other members of the board, approved parole in about a third of the cases, but the probability of being paroled fluctuated wildly throughout the day. Prisoners who appeared early in the morning received parole about 70 percent of the time, while those who appeared late in the day were paroled less than 10 percent of the time.
The odds favored the prisoner who appeared at 8:50 a.m. — and he did in fact receive parole. But even though the other Arab Israeli prisoner was serving the same sentence for the same crime — fraud — the odds were against him when he appeared (on a different day) at 4:25 in the afternoon. He was denied parole, as was the Jewish Israeli prisoner at 3:10 p.m, whose sentence was shorter than that of the man who was released. They were just asking for parole at the wrong time of day.
There was nothing malicious or even unusual about the judges’ behavior, which was reported earlier this year by Jonathan Levav of Stanford and Shai Danziger of Ben-Gurion University. The judges’ erratic judgment was due to the occupational hazard of being, as George W. Bush once put it, “the decider.” The mental work of ruling on case after case, whatever the individual merits, wore them down. This sort of decision fatigue can make quarterbacks prone to dubious choices late in the game and C.F.O.’s prone to disastrous dalliances late in the evening. It routinely warps the judgment of everyone, executive and nonexecutive, rich and poor — in fact, it can take a special toll on the poor. Yet few people are even aware of it, and researchers are only beginning to understand why it happens and how to counteract it.
Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket and can’t resist the dealer’s offer to rustproof their new car. No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price. It’s different from ordinary physical fatigue — you’re not consciously aware of being tired — but you’re low on mental energy. The more choices you make throughout the day, the harder each one becomes for your brain, and eventually it looks for shortcuts, usually in either of two very different ways. One shortcut is to become reckless: to act impulsively instead of expending the energy to first think through the consequences. (Sure, tweet that photo! What could go wrong?) The other shortcut is the ultimate energy saver: do nothing. Instead of agonizing over decisions, avoid any choice. Ducking a decision often creates bigger problems in the long run, but for the moment, it eases the mental strain. You start to resist any change, any potentially risky move — like releasing a prisoner who might commit a crime. So the fatigued judge on a parole board takes the easy way out, and the prisoner keeps doing time.
Decision fatigue is the newest discovery involving a phenomenon called ego depletion, a term coined by the social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister in homage to a Freudian hypothesis. Freud speculated that the self, or ego, depended on mental activities involving the transfer of energy. He was vague about the details, though, and quite wrong about some of them (like his idea that artists “sublimate” sexual energy into their work, which would imply that adultery should be especially rare at artists’ colonies). Freud’s energy model of the self was generally ignored until the end of the century, when Baumeister began studying mental discipline in a series of experiments, first at Case Western and then at Florida State University.
These experiments demonstrated that there is a finite store of mental energy for exerting self-control. When people fended off the temptation to scarf down M&M’s or freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies, they were then less able to resist other temptations. When they forced themselves to remain stoic during a tearjerker movie, afterward they gave up more quickly on lab tasks requiring self-discipline, like working on a geometry puzzle or squeezing a hand-grip exerciser. Willpower turned out to be more than a folk concept or a metaphor. It really was a form of mental energy that could be exhausted. The experiments confirmed the 19th-century notion of willpower being like a muscle that was fatigued with use, a force that could be conserved by avoiding temptation. To study the process of ego depletion, researchers concentrated initially on acts involving self-control — the kind of self-discipline popularly associated with willpower, like resisting a bowl of ice cream. They weren’t concerned with routine decision-making, like choosing between chocolate and vanilla, a mental process that they assumed was quite distinct and much less strenuous. Intuitively, the chocolate-vanilla choice didn’t appear to require willpower.
But then a postdoctoral fellow, Jean Twenge, started working at Baumeister’s laboratory right after planning her wedding. As Twenge studied the results of the lab’s ego-depletion experiments, she remembered how exhausted she felt the evening she and her fiancé went through the ritual of registering for gifts. Did they want plain white china or something with a pattern? Which brand of knives? How many towels? What kind of sheets? Precisely how many threads per square inch?
“By the end, you could have talked me into anything,” Twenge told her new colleagues. The symptoms sounded familiar to them too, and gave them an idea. A nearby department store was holding a going-out-of-business sale, so researchers from the lab went off to fill their car trunks with simple products — not exactly wedding-quality gifts, but sufficiently appealing to interest college students. When they came to the lab, the students were told they would get to keep one item at the end of the experiment, but first they had to make a series of choices. Would they prefer a pen or a candle? A vanilla-scented candle or an almond-scented one? A candle or a T-shirt? A black T-shirt or a red T-shirt? A control group, meanwhile — let’s call them the nondeciders — spent an equally long period contemplating all these same products without having to make any choices. They were asked just to give their opinion of each product and report how often they had used such a product in the last six months.
Afterward, all the participants were given one of the classic tests of self-control: holding your hand in ice water for as long as you can. The impulse is to pull your hand out, so self-discipline is needed to keep the hand underwater. The deciders gave up much faster; they lasted 28 seconds, less than half the 67-second average of the nondeciders. Making all those choices had apparently sapped their willpower, and it wasn’t an isolated effect. It was confirmed in other experiments testing students after they went through exercises like choosing courses from the college catalog.
For a real-world test of their theory, the lab’s researchers went into that great modern arena of decision making: the suburban mall. They interviewed shoppers about their experiences in the stores that day and then asked them to solve some simple arithmetic problems. The researchers politely asked them to do as many as possible but said they could quit at any time. Sure enough, the shoppers who had already made the most decisions in the stores gave up the quickest on the math problems. When you shop till you drop, your willpower drops, too.
Any decision, whether it’s what pants to buy or whether to start a war, can be broken down into what psychologists call the Rubicon model of action phases, in honor of the river that separated Italy from the Roman province of Gaul. When Caesar reached it in 49 B.C., on his way home after conquering the Gauls, he knew that a general returning to Rome was forbidden to take his legions across the river with him, lest it be considered an invasion of Rome. Waiting on the Gaul side of the river, he was in the “predecisional phase” as he contemplated the risks and benefits of starting a civil war. Then he stopped calculating and crossed the Rubicon, reaching the “postdecisional phase,” which Caesar defined much more felicitously: “The die is cast.”
The whole process could deplete anyone’s willpower, but which phase of the decision-making process was most fatiguing? To find out, Kathleen Vohs, a former colleague of Baumeister’s now at the University of Minnesota, performed an experiment using the self-service Web site of Dell Computers. One group in the experiment carefully studied the advantages and disadvantages of various features available for a computer — the type of screen, the size of the hard drive, etc. — without actually making a final decision on which ones to choose. A second group was given a list of predetermined specifications and told to configure a computer by going through the laborious, step-by-step process of locating the specified features among the arrays of options and then clicking on the right ones. The purpose of this was to duplicate everything that happens in the postdecisional phase, when the choice is implemented. The third group had to figure out for themselves which features they wanted on their computers and go through the process of choosing them; they didn’t simply ponder options (like the first group) or implement others’ choices (like the second group). They had to cast the die, and that turned out to be the most fatiguing task of all. When self-control was measured, they were the one who were most depleted, by far.
The experiment showed that crossing the Rubicon is more tiring than anything that happens on either bank — more mentally fatiguing than sitting on the Gaul side contemplating your options or marching on Rome once you’ve crossed. As a result, someone without Caesar’s willpower is liable to stay put. To a fatigued judge, denying parole seems like the easier call not only because it preserves the status quo and eliminates the risk of a parolee going on a crime spree but also because it leaves more options open: the judge retains the option of paroling the prisoner at a future date without sacrificing the option of keeping him securely in prison right now. Part of the resistance against making decisions comes from our fear of giving up options. The word “decide” shares an etymological root with “homicide,” the Latin word “caedere,” meaning “to cut down” or “to kill,” and that loss looms especially large when decision fatigue sets in.
Once you’re mentally depleted, you become reluctant to make trade-offs, which involve a particularly advanced and taxing form of decision making. In the rest of the animal kingdom, there aren’t a lot of protracted negotiations between predators and prey. To compromise is a complex human ability and therefore one of the first to decline when willpower is depleted. You become what researchers call a cognitive miser, hoarding your energy. If you’re shopping, you’re liable to look at only one dimension, like price: just give me the cheapest. Or you indulge yourself by looking at quality: I want the very best (an especially easy strategy if someone else is paying). Decision fatigue leaves you vulnerable to marketers who know how to time their sales, as Jonathan Levav, the Stanford professor, demonstrated in experiments involving tailored suits and new cars.
The idea for these experiments also happened to come in the preparations for a wedding, a ritual that seems to be the decision-fatigue equivalent of Hell Week. At his fiancée’s suggestion, Levav visited a tailor to have a bespoke suit made and began going through the choices of fabric, type of lining and style of buttons, lapels, cuffs and so forth.
“By the time I got through the third pile of fabric swatches, I wanted to kill myself,” Levav recalls. “I couldn’t tell the choices apart anymore. After a while my only response to the tailor became ‘What do you recommend?’ I just couldn’t take it.”
Levav ended up not buying any kind of bespoke suit (the $2,000 price made that decision easy enough), but he put the experience to use in a pair of experiments conducted with Mark Heitmann, then at Christian-Albrechts University in Germany; Andreas Herrmann, at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland; and Sheena Iyengar, of Columbia. One involved asking M.B.A. students in Switzerland to choose a bespoke suit; the other was conducted at German car dealerships, where customers ordered options for their new sedans. The car buyers — and these were real customers spending their own money — had to choose, for instance, among 4 styles of gearshift knobs, 13 kinds of wheel rims, 25 configurations of the engine and gearbox and a palette of 56 colors for the interior.
As they started picking features, customers would carefully weigh the choices, but as decision fatigue set in, they would start settling for whatever the default option was. And the more tough choices they encountered early in the process — like going through those 56 colors to choose the precise shade of gray or brown — the quicker people became fatigued and settled for the path of least resistance by taking the default option. By manipulating the order of the car buyers’ choices, the researchers found that the customers would end up settling for different kinds of options, and the average difference totaled more than 1,500 euros per car (about $2,000 at the time). Whether the customers paid a little extra for fancy wheel rims or a lot extra for a more powerful engine depended on when the choice was offered and how much willpower was left in the customer.
Similar results were found in the experiment with custom-made suits: once decision fatigue set in, people tended to settle for the recommended option. When they were confronted early on with the toughest decisions — the ones with the most options, like the 100 fabrics for the suit — they became fatigued more quickly and also reported enjoying the shopping experience less.
Shopping can be especially tiring for the poor, who have to struggle continually with trade-offs. Most of us in America won’t spend a lot of time agonizing over whether we can afford to buy soap, but it can be a depleting choice in rural India. Dean Spears, an economist at Princeton, offered people in 20 villages in Rajasthan in northwestern India the chance to buy a couple of bars of brand-name soap for the equivalent of less than 20 cents. It was a steep discount off the regular price, yet even that sum was a strain for the people in the 10 poorest villages. Whether or not they bought the soap, the act of making the decision left them with less willpower, as measured afterward in a test of how long they could squeeze a hand grip. In the slightly more affluent villages, people’s willpower wasn’t affected significantly. Because they had more money, they didn’t have to spend as much effort weighing the merits of the soap versus, say, food or medicine.
Spears and other researchers argue that this sort of decision fatigue is a major — and hitherto ignored — factor in trapping people in poverty. Because their financial situation forces them to make so many trade-offs, they have less willpower to devote to school, work and other activities that might get them into the middle class. It’s hard to know exactly how important this factor is, but there’s no doubt that willpower is a special problem for poor people. Study after study has shown that low self-control correlates with low income as well as with a host of other problems, including poor achievement in school, divorce, crime, alcoholism and poor health. Lapses in self-control have led to the notion of the “undeserving poor” — epitomized by the image of the welfare mom using food stamps to buy junk food — but Spears urges sympathy for someone who makes decisions all day on a tight budget. In one study, he found that when the poor and the rich go shopping, the poor are much more likely to eat during the shopping trip. This might seem like confirmation of their weak character — after all, they could presumably save money and improve their nutrition by eating meals at home instead of buying ready-to-eat snacks like Cinnabons, which contribute to the higher rate of obesity among the poor. But if a trip to the supermarket induces more decision fatigue in the poor than in the rich — because each purchase requires more mental trade-offs — by the time they reach the cash register, they’ll have less willpower left to resist the Mars bars and Skittles. Not for nothing are these items called impulse purchases.
And this isn’t the only reason that sweet snacks are featured prominently at the cash register, just when shoppers are depleted after all their decisions in the aisles. With their willpower reduced, they’re more likely to yield to any kind of temptation, but they’re especially vulnerable to candy and soda and anything else offering a quick hit of sugar. While supermarkets figured this out a long time ago, only recently did researchers discover why.
The discovery was an accident resulting from a failed experiment at Baumeister’s lab. The researchers set out to test something called the Mardi Gras theory — the notion that you could build up willpower by first indulging yourself in pleasure, the way Mardi Gras feasters do just before the rigors of Lent. In place of a Fat Tuesday breakfast, the chefs in the lab at Florida State whipped up lusciously thick milkshakes for a group of subjects who were resting in between two laboratory tasks requiring willpower. Sure enough, the delicious shakes seemed to strengthen willpower by helping people perform better than expected on the next task. So far, so good. But the experiment also included a control group of people who were fed a tasteless concoction of low-fat dairy glop. It provided them with no pleasure, yet it produced similar improvements in self-control. The Mardi Gras theory looked wrong. Besides tragically removing an excuse for romping down the streets of New Orleans, the result was embarrassing for the researchers. Matthew Gailliot, the graduate student who ran the study, stood looking down at his shoes as he told Baumeister about the fiasco.
Baumeister tried to be optimistic. Maybe the study wasn’t a failure. Something had happened, after all. Even the tasteless glop had done the job, but how? If it wasn’t the pleasure, could it be the calories? At first the idea seemed a bit daft. For decades, psychologists had been studying performance on mental tasks without worrying much about the results being affected by dairy-product consumption. They liked to envision the human mind as a computer, focusing on the way it processed information. In their eagerness to chart the human equivalent of the computer’s chips and circuits, most psychologists neglected one mundane but essential part of the machine: the power supply. The brain, like the rest of the body, derived energy from glucose, the simple sugar manufactured from all kinds of foods. To establish cause and effect, researchers at Baumeister’s lab tried refueling the brain in a series of experiments involving lemonade mixed either with sugar or with a diet sweetener. The sugary lemonade provided a burst of glucose, the effects of which could be observed right away in the lab; the sugarless variety tasted quite similar without providing the same burst of glucose. Again and again, the sugar restored willpower, but the artificial sweetener had no effect. The glucose would at least mitigate the ego depletion and sometimes completely reverse it. The restored willpower improved people’s self-control as well as the quality of their decisions: they resisted irrational bias when making choices, and when asked to make financial decisions, they were more likely to choose the better long-term strategy instead of going for a quick payoff. The ego-depletion effect was even demonstrated with dogs in two studies by Holly Miller and Nathan DeWall at the University of Kentucky. After obeying sit and stay commands for 10 minutes, the dogs performed worse on self-control tests and were also more likely to make the dangerous decision to challenge another dog’s turf. But a dose of glucose restored their willpower.
Despite this series of findings, brain researchers still had some reservations about the glucose connection. Skeptics pointed out that the brain’s overall use of energy remains about the same regardless of what a person is doing, which doesn’t square easily with the notion of depleted energy affecting willpower. Among the skeptics was Todd Heatherton, who worked with Baumeister early in his career and eventually wound up at Dartmouth, where he became a pioneer of what is called social neuroscience: the study of links between brain processes and social behavior. He believed in ego depletion, but he didn’t see how this neural process could be caused simply by variations in glucose levels. To observe the process — and to see if it could be reversed by glucose — he and his colleagues recruited 45 female dieters and recorded images of their brains as they reacted to pictures of food. Next the dieters watched a comedy video while forcing themselves to suppress their laughter — a standard if cruel way to drain mental energy and induce ego depletion. Then they were again shown pictures of food, and the new round of brain scans revealed the effects of ego depletion: more activity in the nucleus accumbens, the brain’s reward center, and a corresponding decrease in the amygdala, which ordinarily helps control impulses. The food’s appeal registered more strongly while impulse control weakened — not a good combination for anyone on a diet. But suppose people in this ego-depleted state got a quick dose of glucose? What would a scan of their brains reveal?
The results of the experiment were announced in January, during Heatherton’s speech accepting the leadership of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the world’s largest group of social psychologists. In his presidential address at the annual meeting in San Antonio, Heatherton reported that administering glucose completely reversed the brain changes wrought by depletion — a finding, he said, that thoroughly surprised him. Heatherton’s results did much more than provide additional confirmation that glucose is a vital part of willpower; they helped solve the puzzle over how glucose could work without global changes in the brain’s total energy use. Apparently ego depletion causes activity to rise in some parts of the brain and to decline in others. Your brain does not stop working when glucose is low. It stops doing some things and starts doing others. It responds more strongly to immediate rewards and pays less attention to long-term prospects.
The discoveries about glucose help explain why dieting is a uniquely difficult test of self-control — and why even people with phenomenally strong willpower in the rest of their lives can have such a hard time losing weight. They start out the day with virtuous intentions, resisting croissants at breakfast and dessert at lunch, but each act of resistance further lowers their willpower. As their willpower weakens late in the day, they need to replenish it. But to resupply that energy, they need to give the body glucose. They’re trapped in a nutritional catch-22:
1. In order not to eat, a dieter needs willpower.
2. In order to have willpower, a dieter needs to eat.
As the body uses up glucose, it looks for a quick way to replenish the fuel, leading to a craving for sugar. After performing a lab task requiring self-control, people tend to eat more candy but not other kinds of snacks, like salty, fatty potato chips. The mere expectation of having to exert self-control makes people hunger for sweets. A similar effect helps explain why many women yearn for chocolate and other sugary treats just before menstruation: their bodies are seeking a quick replacement as glucose levels fluctuate. A sugar-filled snack or drink will provide a quick improvement in self-control (that’s why it’s convenient to use in experiments), but it’s just a temporary solution. The problem is that what we identify as sugar doesn’t help as much over the course of the day as the steadier supply of glucose we would get from eating proteins and other more nutritious foods.
The benefits of glucose were unmistakable in the study of the Israeli parole board. In midmorning, usually a little before 10:30, the parole board would take a break, and the judges would be served a sandwich and a piece of fruit. The prisoners who appeared just before the break had only about a 20 percent chance of getting parole, but the ones appearing right after had around a 65 percent chance. The odds dropped again as the morning wore on, and prisoners really didn’t want to appear just before lunch: the chance of getting parole at that time was only 10 percent. After lunch it soared up to 60 percent, but only briefly. Remember that Jewish Israeli prisoner who appeared at 3:10 p.m. and was denied parole from his sentence for assault? He had the misfortune of being the sixth case heard after lunch. But another Jewish Israeli prisoner serving the same sentence for the same crime was lucky enough to appear at 1:27 p.m., the first case after lunch, and he was rewarded with parole. It must have seemed to him like a fine example of the justice system at work, but it probably had more to do with the judge’s glucose levels.
It’s simple enough to imagine reforms for the parole board in Israel — like, say, restricting each judge’s shift to half a day, preferably in the morning, interspersed with frequent breaks for food and rest. But it’s not so obvious what to do with the decision fatigue affecting the rest of society. Even if we could all afford to work half-days, we would still end up depleting our willpower all day long, as Baumeister and his colleagues found when they went into the field in Würzburg in central Germany. The psychologists gave preprogrammed BlackBerrys to more than 200 people going about their daily routines for a week. The phones went off at random intervals, prompting the people to report whether they were currently experiencing some sort of desire or had recently felt a desire. The painstaking study, led by Wilhelm Hofmann, then at the University of Würzburg, collected more than 10,000 momentary reports from morning until midnight.
Desire turned out to be the norm, not the exception. Half the people were feeling some desire when their phones went off — to snack, to goof off, to express their true feelings to their bosses — and another quarter said they had felt a desire in the past half-hour. Many of these desires were ones that the men and women were trying to resist, and the more willpower people expended, the more likely they became to yield to the next temptation that came along. When faced with a new desire that produced some I-want-to-but-I-really-shouldn’t sort of inner conflict, they gave in more readily if they had already fended off earlier temptations, particularly if the new temptation came soon after a previously reported one.
The results suggested that people spend between three and four hours a day resisting desire. Put another way, if you tapped four or five people at any random moment of the day, one of them would be using willpower to resist a desire. The most commonly resisted desires in the phone study were the urges to eat and sleep, followed by the urge for leisure, like taking a break from work by doing a puzzle or playing a game instead of writing a memo. Sexual urges were next on the list of most-resisted desires, a little ahead of urges for other kinds of interactions, like checking Facebook. To ward off temptation, people reported using various strategies. The most popular was to look for a distraction or to undertake a new activity, although sometimes they tried suppressing it directly or simply toughing their way through it. Their success was decidedly mixed. They were pretty good at avoiding sleep, sex and the urge to spend money, but not so good at resisting the lure of television or the Web or the general temptation to relax instead of work.
We have no way of knowing how much our ancestors exercised self-control in the days before BlackBerrys and social psychologists, but it seems likely that many of them were under less ego-depleting strain. When there were fewer decisions, there was less decision fatigue. Today we feel overwhelmed because there are so many choices. Your body may have dutifully reported to work on time, but your mind can escape at any instant. A typical computer user looks at more than three dozen Web sites a day and gets fatigued by the continual decision making — whether to keep working on a project, check out TMZ, follow a link to YouTube or buy something on Amazon. You can do enough damage in a 10-minute online shopping spree to wreck your budget for the rest of the year.
The cumulative effect of these temptations and decisions isn’t intuitively obvious. Virtually no one has a gut-level sense of just how tiring it is to decide. Big decisions, small decisions, they all add up. Choosing what to have for breakfast, where to go on vacation, whom to hire, how much to spend — these all deplete willpower, and there’s no telltale symptom of when that willpower is low. It’s not like getting winded or hitting the wall during a marathon. Ego depletion manifests itself not as one feeling but rather as a propensity to experience everything more intensely. When the brain’s regulatory powers weaken, frustrations seem more irritating than usual. Impulses to eat, drink, spend and say stupid things feel more powerful (and alcohol causes self-control to decline further). Like those dogs in the experiment, ego-depleted humans become more likely to get into needless fights over turf. In making decisions, they take illogical shortcuts and tend to favor short-term gains and delayed costs. Like the depleted parole judges, they become inclined to take the safer, easier option even when that option hurts someone else.
“Good decision making is not a trait of the person, in the sense that it’s always there,” Baumeister says. “It’s a state that fluctuates.” His studies show that people with the best self-control are the ones who structure their lives so as to conserve willpower. They don’t schedule endless back-to-back meetings. They avoid temptations like all-you-can-eat buffets, and they establish habits that eliminate the mental effort of making choices. Instead of deciding every morning whether or not to force themselves to exercise, they set up regular appointments to work out with a friend. Instead of counting on willpower to remain robust all day, they conserve it so that it’s available for emergencies and important decisions.
“Even the wisest people won’t make good choices when they’re not rested and their glucose is low,” Baumeister points out. That’s why the truly wise don’t restructure the company at 4 p.m. They don’t make major commitments during the cocktail hour. And if a decision must be made late in the day, they know not to do it on an empty stomach. “The best decision makers,” Baumeister says, “are the ones who know when not to trust themselves.”
John Tierney (tierneylab@nytimes.com) is a science columnist for The Times. His essay is adapted from a book he wrote with Roy F. Baumeister, “Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength,” which comes out next month.
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Aliens may destroy humanity to protect other civilisations, say scientists
Rising greenhouse emissions could tip off aliens that we are a rapidly expanding threat, warns a report
When they see what a mess we've made of our planet, extraterrestrials may be forced to take drastic action. Photograph: PR
It may not rank as the most compelling reason to curb greenhouse gases, but reducing our emissions might just save humanity from a pre-emptive alien attack, scientists claim.
Watching from afar, extraterrestrial beings might view changes in Earth's atmosphere as symptomatic of a civilisation growing out of control – and take drastic action to keep us from becoming a more serious threat, the researchers explain.
This highly speculative scenario is one of several described by a Nasa-affiliated scientist and colleagues at Pennsylvania State University that, while considered unlikely, they say could play out were humans and alien life to make contact at some point in the future.
Shawn Domagal-Goldman of Nasa's Planetary Science Division and his colleagues compiled a list of plausible outcomes that could unfold in the aftermath of a close encounter, to help humanity "prepare for actual contact".
In their report, Would Contact with Extraterrestrials Benefit or Harm Humanity? A Scenario Analysis, the researchers divide alien contacts into three broad categories: beneficial, neutral or harmful.
Beneficial encounters ranged from the mere detection of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI), for example through the interception of alien broadcasts, to contact with cooperative organisms that help us advance our knowledge and solve global problems such as hunger, poverty and disease.
Another beneficial outcome the authors entertain sees humanity triumph over a more powerful alien aggressor, or even being saved by a second group of ETs. "In these scenarios, humanity benefits not only from the major moral victory of having defeated a daunting rival, but also from the opportunity to reverse-engineer ETI technology," the authors write.
Other kinds of close encounter may be less rewarding and leave much of human society feeling indifferent towards alien life. The extraterrestrials may be too different from us to communicate with usefully. They might invite humanity to join the "Galactic Club" only for the entry requirements to be too bureaucratic and tedious for humans to bother with. They could even become a nuisance, like the stranded, prawn-like creatures that are kept in a refugee camp in the 2009 South African movie, District 9, the report explains.
The most unappealing outcomes would arise if extraterrestrials caused harm to humanity, even if by accident. While aliens may arrive to eat, enslave or attack us, the report adds that people might also suffer from being physically crushed or by contracting diseases carried by the visitors. In especially unfortunate incidents, humanity could be wiped out when a more advanced civilisation accidentally unleashes an unfriendly artificial intelligence, or performs a catastrophic physics experiment that renders a portion of the galaxy uninhabitable.
To bolster humanity's chances of survival, the researchers call for caution in sending signals into space, and in particular warn against broadcasting information about our biological make-up, which could be used to manufacture weapons that target humans. Instead, any contact with ETs should be limited to mathematical discourse "until we have a better idea of the type of ETI we are dealing with."
The authors warn that extraterrestrials may be wary of civilisations that expand very rapidly, as these may be prone to destroy other life as they grow, just as humans have pushed species to extinction on Earth. In the most extreme scenario, aliens might choose to destroy humanity to protect other civilisations.
"A preemptive strike would be particularly likely in the early phases of our expansion because a civilisation may become increasingly difficult to destroy as it continues to expand. Humanity may just now be entering the period in which its rapid civilisational expansion could be detected by an ETI because our expansion is changing the composition of the Earth's atmosphere, via greenhouse gas emissions," the report states.
"Green" aliens might object to the environmental damage humans have caused on Earth and wipe us out to save the planet. "These scenarios give us reason to limit our growth and reduce our impact on global ecosystems. It would be particularly important for us to limit our emissions of greenhouse gases, since atmospheric composition can be observed from other planets," the authors write.
Even if we never make contact with extraterrestrials, the report argues that considering the potential scenarios may help to plot the future path of human civilisation, avoid collapse and achieve long-term survival.
• This article was amended on 19 August 2011. The subhead said the report was "for Nasa". This has been corrected.
End of Exhibit.
Originally here.
Obama spars with Tea Party activistAFPAFP — Mon, Aug 15, 2011 US President Barack Obama went head-to-head with a prominent conservative Tea Party activist, in a microcosm of a political clash that will play out in the 2012 election. Ryan Rhodes, a leader of the group in Iowa, took on Obama during an open-air town hall meeting, which marked a moment of new intensity in the president’s campaign for a second term. Rhodes shouted out that the president’s calls for more civility in politics had little chance of coming to pass after “your vice president is calling people like me, a Tea Party member, a ‘terrorist.’” His question referred to media reports that Vice President Joe Biden made such a remark in a private meeting with House of Representatives Democrats at the height of a debt showdown earlier this month. The clash came as Obama was intent on wrapping up the meeting in the shadow of a red country barn draped with an American flag, as the sun set on a rural corner of Iowa. “I know it’s not going to work, if you stand up, and I asked everybody to raise their hand.. I didn’t see you, I wasn’t avoiding you,” the president said, but later circled back to answer Rhodes’s question. “I absolutely agree that everybody needs to try to tone down the rhetoric,” he said, before going on to detail some of the more explosive charges that conservatives have laid against him. “In fairness, since I have been called a socialist who wasn’t born in this country, who is destroying America and taking away its freedoms because I passed a health care bill, I am all for lowering the rhetoric.” Obama and Rhodes later engaged in an animated conversation as he greeted supporters on a rope line after the event, and the activist later told reporters that he believed that Obama was indeed a socialist. The president was on the first day of a three-state bus tour in which he is sympathizing with Americans dismayed and frustrated by the slow pace of the economic recovery and trying to repair his battered political standing. Rhodes backed winning candidate and Tea Party favorite Representative Michele Bachmann in last weekend’s Iowa Straw poll, and is regarded as a founder of the anti-big government movement in the state. The Tea Party lacks a centralized national leadership but emerged in the 2010 congressional election cycle as a powerful influence on conservative Republican politics, with its message of low taxes and cutting spending. The movement was also seen as a key driver of Republican leadership tactics in a debt showdown with Obama, and some Democrats accused Tea Party activists of holding the country hostage over raising the government’s borrowing limit.
End of Exhibit.
Originally here.
August 13, 2011
White House Debates Fight on Economy
By BINYAMIN APPELBAUM and HELENE COOPER
WASHINGTON — As the economy worsens, President Obama and his senior aides are considering whether to adopt a more combative approach on economic issues, seeking to highlight substantive differences with Republicans in Congress and on the campaign trail rather than continuing to pursue elusive compromises, advisers to the president say.
Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, David Plouffe, and his chief of staff, William M. Daley, want him to maintain a pragmatic strategy of appealing to independent voters by advocating ideas that can pass Congress, even if they may not have much economic impact. These include free trade agreements and improved patent protections for inventors.
But others, including Gene Sperling, Mr. Obama’s chief economic adviser, say public anger over the debt ceiling debate has weakened Republicans and created an opening for bigger ideas like tax incentives for businesses that hire more workers, according to Congressional Democrats who share that view. Democrats are also pushing the White House to help homeowners facing foreclosure.
Even if the ideas cannot pass Congress, they say, the president would gain a campaign issue by pushing for them.
“The president’s team puts a premium on being above the partisan fray, which is usually the right strategy,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, the No. 3 Democrat in the Senate. “But on this issue, when he knows what the right thing to do is, and when a rather small group on one side is blocking any progress, you have to be willing to call that group out if you want to get anything done.”
Dan Pfeiffer, the White House director of communications, said that there was no internal debate. “The president’s first priority is to work with Republicans and Democrats to grow the economy, create jobs and reduce the deficit, but if the Republican House continues its ‘my way or the highway’ approach, he will make sure the public knows who is standing in the way and why.”
The issue is being framed by the 2012 election. Administration officials, frustrated by the intransigence of House Republicans, have increasingly concluded that the best thing Mr. Obama can do for the economy may be winning a second term, with a mandate to advance his ideas on deficit reduction, entitlement changes, housing policy and other issues.
Mr. Obama plans to spend time this weekend considering his options, advisers said. The White House expects to unveil new job-creation proposals in early September.
The ailing economy, barely growing at the same pace as the population, has swept all other political issues to the sidelines. Twenty-five million Americans could not find full-time jobs last month. Millions of families cannot afford to live in their homes. And the contentious debate over raising the federal debt ceiling — which Mr. Obama achieved only after striking a compromise with Republicans that included a plan for at least $2.1 trillion in spending cuts over 10 years — has further shaken economic confidence.
Republicans contend that the Obama administration has mismanaged the nation’s recovery from the 2008 financial crisis. Mr. Obama’s political advisers are struggling to define a response, aware that their prospects may rest on persuading voters that the results of the first term matter less than the contrast between their vision for the next four years and the alternative economic ideas offered by Republicans.
So far, most signs point to a continuation of the nonconfrontational approach — better to do something than nothing — that has defined this administration. Mr. Obama and his aides are skeptical that voters will reward bold proposals if those ideas do not pass Congress. It is their judgment that moderate voters want tangible results rather than speeches.
“If you’re talking about a stunt, I don’t think a stunt is what the American people are looking for,” the White House press secretary, Jay Carney, told reporters on Wednesday. “They’re looking for leadership, and they’re looking for a focus on economic growth and job creation.”
A wide range of economists say the administration should call for a new round of stimulus spending, as prescribed by mainstream economic theory, to create jobs and promote growth. It is clear that the House would never pass such a plan.
But Christina Romer, who stepped down last year as the chairwoman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, said Mr. Obama should fight for short-term spending in combination with long-term deficit reduction.
“Playing it safe is not going to cut it,” said Ms. Romer, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. “Not proposing anything bold and not trying to do something to definitively deal with our problems would mean that we’re going to have another year and a half like the last year and a half — and then it’s awfully hard to get re-elected.”
But there is little support for such an approach inside the administration. A series of departures has left few economists among Mr. Obama’s senior advisers. Several of his political advisers are skeptical about the merits of stimulus spending, and they are certain about the politics: voters do not like it.
Mr. Plouffe and Mr. Daley share the view that a focus on deficit reduction is an economic and political imperative, according to people who have spoken with them. Voters believe that paying down the debt will help the economy, and the White House agrees, although it wants to avoid cutting too much spending while the economy remains weak.
As part of this appeal to centrist voters, the president intends to continue his push for a so-called grand bargain on deficit reduction — a deal with Republicans to make even larger spending cuts, including to the social safety net, in exchange for some revenue increases — despite the strong opposition of Congressional Democrats who want to use the issue to draw contrasts with Republicans.
Administration officials say that their focus is on a number of smaller programs that could benefit the economy, a theme Mr. Obama has emphasized in his recent speeches.
“We know there are things Congress can do, right now, to get more money back in your pockets, get this economy growing faster and get our friends and neighbors back to work,” Mr. Obama said on Saturday in his weekly address.
On Aug. 5, in a move that went virtually unnoticed amid the clamor over a rating agency’s downgrading of United States debt, the administration announced a new jobs program for veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Mr. Obama called it a “reverse boot camp,” intended to retrain veterans for civilian jobs. Part of the program would include a “returning hero tax credit” for companies that hire unemployed disabled veterans.
The administration may also merge the Department of Commerce, the Office of the United States Trade Representative and some economic divisions at the State Department into a new agency, administration officials said. Possible names include the Department of Jobs or the Department of Competitiveness.
This focus on the little things is painful for many Democrats who see big problems, but there is growing acceptance that there may be no alternative to waiting for the next election.
“I’m as frustrated as everybody else on the planet both with where we are and with the response,” said Sarah Rosen Wartell of the Center for American Progress. “But I was reflecting on how difficult a hand they were dealt and how limited the options are.”
“If the other side has demonstrated an unwillingness to be a party to a compromise,” she added, “then you’ve got to lay out your vision as clearly as possible and make your case for it to the public.”
End of Exhibit.
Originally here.
Obama plays patriotism card
By: Julie Mason and Glenn Thrush
August 11, 2011 03:34 PM EDT
Chicago, we have a campaign theme for 2012: “Put country ahead of party.”
On Thursday, an impassioned President Barack Obama hit Republicans on their patriotism — saying he shares Americans’ disgust with Washington — and bluntly accused opponents of putting partisan and ideological interests above the economic well-being of the nation.
“The only thing preventing these bills from being passed is the refusal of some folks in Congress to put country ahead of party,” Obama told an enthusiastic audience at a green-technology battery plant in Michigan, referring to his proposals to extend unemployment insurance and the payroll tax credit.
“There are some in Congress right now who would rather see their opponents lose than see America win. And that has to stop,” he added. “It’s got to stop. We’re supposed to all be on the same team. Especially when we’re going through tough times.”
He implored both parties — with an implied emphasis on the tea party wing of the GOP — to “find a way to put country ahead of party.”
In case reporters missed the message, White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer quickly jotted, “Key element from today’s remarks — Put Country before Party” on his official Twitter account.
If turnabout is fair political play, here was an especially delicious example for liberals: Democrats have long accused Republicans of unfairly playing the patriotism card to pressure them to support President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq.
Republicans, in ways overt and implicit, have consistently questioned the president’s red-white-and-blueness, from his affinity for international coalition-building, to his refusal during the campaign to don an Old Glory lapel pin (he wears one now) to the long-simmering debate over his Hawaii birth certificate.
Obama’s continued support for combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan actually puts him to the right of public opinion, and it’s a measure of his confidence that he’d even try to use patriotism against Republicans.
Still, the emerging message diverges from Obama’s past rhetoric. In the 2008 campaign, he pushed back against questions about his own patriotism, delivering a speech lamenting, “the question of who is or is not a patriot all too often poisons our political debate.”
The GOP wasted little time in blasting Obama’s new slogan, in part because it was so close to John McCain’s 2008 campaign theme, “Putting America First,” and its companion slogan and political action committee, “Country First,” which were ridiculed by Obama’s supporters three years ago.
Obama in his Michigan speech used the word “country” 11 times.
“Nice, now Obama is challenging people’s love of country,” said Joe Pounder, research director with the Republican National Committee.
House Speaker John Boehner accused Obama of “grandstanding” and repeated calls for a presidential plan to create jobs that doesn’t run up the deficit.
“President Obama likes to talk about being ‘the adult in the room’ — but there’s nothing ‘adult’ about political grandstanding,” Boehner said.
Obama’s indirect reference to tea party Republicans in Congress marked his strongest denunciation yet of their influence in policymaking.
It was a point he made repeatedly in the speech at Johnson Controls, Inc., in Holland, Mich., lamenting “how frustrated folks are with the constant bickering and the unwillingness to compromise, and the desire to score points even if it’s at the expense of our country.”
The president’s rhetorical shift follows polls showing Americans increasingly disgusted with politics in Washington — and comes ahead of polling that could measure the political damage done to Obama by the recent downgrade in the nation’s credit rating.
His voice rising, Obama said the downgrade was avoidable — but for the entrenched Washington gridlock that results from putting politics ahead of the best interests of the country.
“It didn’t happen because we don’t have the capacity to pay our bills, it happened because Washington doesn’t have the capacity to come together and get things done,” Obama said. “It was a self-inflicted wound.”
“It’s why people are frustrated,” he said. “Maybe you hear in my voice, it’s why I’m frustrated.”
“There is nothing wrong with our country. There is something wrong with our politics,” Obama said.
Obama is under increasing pressure to deal with joblessness and the economy — the top concerns for voters. The recent debate over the debt ceiling, he said, highlights the difficulty in getting Congress to act.
The president said he is resisting calls to summon Congress back to Washington to work on deficit reduction because “the last thing we need is Congress spending more time arguing in Washington, D.C.”
Obama’s visit to Michigan is part of the administration’s effort to refocus on jobs, and particularly green jobs. Johnson Controls won a $300 million grant from the stimulus program that is expected to create 150 new jobs. The company manufactures batteries for hybrid and electric cars.
Jabbing a finger, Obama urged his audience to contact Congress in support of his proposals to extend the payroll tax cut, pass a road construction bill and finalize trade agreements.
“You’ve got to tell them you’ve had enough of the theatrics, you’ve had enough of the politics, stop sending out press releases, start passing some bills that we all know will help our economy improve right now,” Obama said. “That’s what they need to do, they’ve got to hear from you.”
Republicans, however, are highlighting high unemployment in Michigan, a key state for Obama’s reelection efforts. Joblessness in the state is 10.5 percent — higher than the national rate of 9.1 percent.
Robert Schostak, chairman of the Michigan Republican Party, said the state has lost 50,000 jobs since Obama became president.
“The bottom line of the visit to Holland, Michigan today: It’s more failed policies, more bad ideas,” Schostak said on a conference call previewing the president’s visit. “We need to be focused on what Michigan families need … and hold this administration accountable at the ballot box next November.”
End of exhibit.
Originally here:
Past Time for a New Agenda
President Obama tried on Monday to restore the plunging confidence of investors, insisting the United States remains a triple-A country whatever Standard & Poor’s might think. It didn’t work with the stock markets, which sank again, and it did nothing to reassure the most important shareholders: ordinary Americans living from one paycheck to another, worried about their jobs or wondering how they will replace the one they lost.
Anyone hungering for a robust vision to invigorate the economy and increase employment is still hungry.
No one was surprised that the president felt wounded by S.& P.’s downgrade of the nation’s credit rating. In the defective logic of the Republican machine, that was Mr. Obama’s fault because it occurred on his watch. (That’s a breathtaking bit of hypocrisy, by the way, from the party that fabricated the debt-ceiling crisis.) The downgrade is a blow to American prestige and credibility. It had to be one reason Wall Street had its worst day since the crisis in 2008, although stagnating growth was hurting the markets before the downgrade.
The credit decision put a price tag on the agenda of dysfunction that Republicans brought to Washington, in which unnecessary crises are created to achieve their goals of shrinking government and bringing down Mr. Obama. When one of the two political parties announces its willingness to let the nation default, S&P essentially said, those who lend it money can no longer trust it to act rationally. Whatever flaws may exist in S& P’s arithmetic, that scolding is one that lawmakers richly deserve.
But having spent far too long haggling over the margins of the Republican agenda to reduce the deficit with only spending cuts, the president needs to move to a very different set of priorities. He should start making the case that it is foolish to focus the nation’s attention solely on debt, where the Republicans want it, and instead shift every available resource toward jobs.
If he becomes passionate about the government’s ability to think creatively about a turnaround, he might just inspire a few Americans — some of them lawmakers — to join with him. If he stays locked into the arid agenda of the Republicans, the economy will remain as dormant as his speech on Monday, which is just where his rivals hope it will be in November 2012.
The three proposals he mentioned were useful but only as a start. Increased investment in infrastructure, renewing the payroll tax cut and extending jobless benefits are vital to prevent further backsliding. Inaction on the payroll tax and unemployment benefits could cost nearly a full percentage point in growth next year.
Where, though, is the broader vision? Mr. Obama said nothing about direct job creation. He did not mention that unemployment among high school graduates under 25 is averaging 21.5 percent. He said nothing about more help for homeowners who are under water, though easier refinancing rules would help many borrowers at little cost to taxpayers. He could vigorously support the Senate bill to reduce taxes on businesses by forgiving loans to states that replenish their unemployment funds.
Defeatists may say that it is impossible to consider programs like these at a time when Republicans will find a way to kill any worthy idea from the White House, especially those that might require some short-term spending. But the shackles forged by Republican lawmakers can only be broken with the power of good ideas.
If Mr. Obama is worried about his reputation as a spender, he can remind the public that he just agreed to a huge package of cuts lasting a decade. He is now free to move past that deal, to outline much bolder plans for a turnaround. Then he could defy Republicans — with their crabbed vision of government’s role — to stand in his way.
End of Exhibit.
Originally here.
JUNE 1, 2011, 2:42 PM
Weiner Can’t Rule Out That Twitter Photo Is of Him
By RAYMOND HERNANDEZ
VideoTimesCast | Twitter Trouble
Congressman Anthony Weiner finds that his sharp voice on Twitter can cut two ways.
• Watch Video » Representative Anthony D. Weiner said on Wednesday that he could not be sure whether he was the subject in a lewd photo sent from his Twitter account that shows a man in his underpants from the waist down.
But Mr. Weiner, who has been under pressure for days to answer questions about the controversy, reiterated that he had not sent the photo from his Twitter account.
“This was a circumstance where someone committed a prank on the Internet,” Mr. Weiner, a Democrat from Queens, said in an interview with Luke Russert of MSNBC. “I didn’t send” that picture out. Mr. Weiner added, however, that he could not “say with certitude” if he was the person in the photo. In an interview broadcast later on CNN, Wolf Blitzer asked the congressman “if he had ever taken a picture like this of himself?”
“There are – I have photographs,” Mr. Weiner replied. “I don’t know what photographs are out there in the world of me. I don’t know what things have been manipulated and doctored.”
Mr. Weiner’s comments came a day after he lashed out at reporters who were pressing him to answer questions about the controversy, which was sparked when a Twitter message from his account to one of his followers on Twitter — a college student in Washington State — linked to a lewd photo.
Initially, Mr. Weiner said his account had been hacked; his spokesman later said that the congressman had hired a lawyer to “explore the proper next steps.”
He refused to elaborate on Tuesday when confronted by reporters about whether he had sent the picture and why he had not yet asked law enforcement to investigate.
J. Scott Applewhite/Associated PressRepresentative Anthony Weiner walked to his office on Wednesday for a vote on Capitol Hill.
At the beginning of the weekend, Mr. Weiner’s Twitter-related photo-sharing account sent a sexually suggestive photo of a man from the waist down, wearing only boxer briefs, to Gennette Cordova, a student at Whatcom Community College in Bellingham, Wash. Mr. Weiner’s office said his account had been hacked, and the congressman quickly took the photo down.
His office issued a statement Sunday reiterating that the Twitter post was not from Mr. Weiner, saying, “Anthony’s accounts were obviously hacked,” and Ms. Cordova also dismissed the Twitter post in a response she wrote for The Daily News, stating: “There have never been any inappropriate exchanges between Anthony Weiner and myself, including the tweet/picture in question.”
The story, however, did not fade away.
On Monday, Mr. Weiner’s spokesman, Dave Arnold, said: “We’ve retained counsel to explore the proper next steps and to advise us on what civil or criminal actions should be taken. This was a prank. We are loath to treat it as more, but we are relying on professional advice.”
Even as Mr. Weiner tried to put the incident behind him, more questions arose, and a media frenzy swelled around his seeming reluctance to answer them. Mr. Weiner and his office refused to explain why he’d sought legal help, rather than going to the F.B.I. or the police. And, until recently, he refused to comment on whether the lewd picture was, in fact, of him.
Twitter, which does not comment on individual user accounts for privacy reasons, refused to confirm if his account had been hacked.
Mr. Weiner is a known technophile, and prior to this incident, had harnessed Twitter for political gain, using the social-media platform as yet another outlet for his combative, in-your-face and frequently funny persona.
He has more than 51,000 followers on Twitter — some of whom began following as news of the incident spread — and he also follows 198 people. Though many of those he follows are celebrities or political in nature, he also follows are a fair amount of ordinary folks, including Ms. Cordova.
In May, he sent out a post to Twitter thanking the people who followed him, and asking if they’d like for him to follow them back. “Use #WeinerYes,” he wrote.
Here is an excerpt of a transcript of Mr. Russert’s interview with Mr. Weiner provided by MSNBC:
RUSSERT: The picture that went over Twitter to Gennette Cordova from your account, is that you?
REP. WEINER: Let’s keep in mind what happened here. I was pranked, I was hacked, I was punked whatever it is — someone sent out a picture. I’m an easy name to make fun of, and I think that’s what happened there. It’s a terrible thing that this poor woman got dragged into it. She says she knows nothing about it, and I obviously don’t know anything about it. I didn’t send the picture.
RUSSERT: That’s not a picture of you?
REP. WEINER: You know, I can’t say with certitude. My system was hacked. Pictures can be manipulated, pictures can be dropped in and inserted. One of the reasons that I’ve asked a firm that includes an Internet security arm is to take a look into what the heck happened here to make sure it doesn’t happen again. But let’s kind of keep in mind why this is so silly. You know, someone committed a prank on me. Someone somehow got access to my Twitter account, and right away put up a picture that made fun of the name Weiner and that’s what happened.
RUSSERT: But Congressman, you would remember if you were to take a photograph of yourself like that.
WEINER: Well you know one of the reasons we’ve asked an Internet security firm to come in is to see if something was manipulated, maybe something was dropped in. We don’t know for sure what happened here. But let’s try to take a step back. This is a circumstance where someone committed a prank on the Internet. Where someone spoofed me, made fun of me, whatever. We are taking taking it seriously in as much as we want to make sure that it doesn’t happen again, but this story has become a little bit out of control, to the point where people are asking me and asking people who follow me on Twitter, personal questions, people are asking me what other things are on your database?
RUSSERT: Well fair enough, but you will not flat out say that that photograph is not you?
REP. WEINER: Here’s what I will say — I will say that we are trying to figure out exactly what happened — whether a photograph was manipulated that was found on my account. Whether something was dropped into my account, whether a photograph was partially in my account.
Second story, originally here.
June 7, 2011
A Twitter Group Warned About Weiner
By JENNIFER PRESTON
Three months before Representative Anthony D. Weiner sent a photo from his Twitter account to a 21-year-old Washington State college student named Gennette Cordova, a small group of determined, self-described conservatives was warning young women on Twitter, including Ms. Cordova, to be wary of him.
Calling themselves the #bornfreecrew on Twitter, members of the group closely monitored those whom Mr. Weiner was following, taking it upon themselves to contact young women they believed to be “schoolgirls,” and urging them publicly to stay away from him, according to an analysis of posts on Twitter’s public stream.
By early May, members of the group were also speculating that Mr. Weiner would be caught in a sex scandal. The leader, a man who identified himself on Twitter as Dan Wolfe and used the handle @PatriotUSA76, is the same Twitter user who discovered the photograph that Mr. Weiner took of himself and sent to Ms. Cordova. He shared it with his followers and the conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart, who made it public the next day.
As Democrats and Republicans embrace Twitter and other social media tools as a way to interact with their constituents and woo voters, many have discovered a downside to online communication: cyberstalkers, who track and criticize their every move.
But even by the standards of modern politics, Dan Wolfe and other members of the #bornfreecrew watched Mr. Weiner’s account with particular ferocity, and a sharp focus on his interactions with women. In several instances the congressman dropped his online contact with women after they were identified by the crew, suggesting that Mr. Weiner might have been aware of its actions.
There were at least two female high school students among the 191 people Mr. Weiner followed. There is no evidence that he engaged in private discussions with them, and he has said that to his knowledge he has not had any online sexual communications with under-age women.
Mr. Wolfe, whose account vanished from Twitter last Friday, has been one of the more mysterious characters in the congressman’s saga, refusing to reveal his real name even to the other members of the #bornfreecrew. He joined Twitter on Jan. 6 and began posting multiple messages criticizing both Mr. Weiner and his wife, Huma Abedin, a top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
By March, Mr. Wolfe had more than 1,000 followers and was actively befriending fellow conservatives. Group members joined him in scrutinizing those whom Mr. Weiner was following and their Twitter profiles, and commenting if the person he followed was a young woman.
On April 14, for example, Mr. Wolfe tweeted, “Weiner’s new follow is a high school girl. LMAO! Freak!”
Michael Stack, 39, of New Jersey, who describes himself on his Twitter profile as a “Republican who believes in the principles that made this country great,” said he befriended Mr. Wolfe on Twitter (they never met in person or spoke on the phone). “Soon, Dan told me Weiner was following a bunch of girls,” Mr. Stack said. “I thought it was kind of weird.”
Mr. Stack said that Mr. Wolfe had told him in a private message that Mr. Weiner had been following a porn star who was later identified as Ginger Lee. “He tweeted about it and then the porn star was gone,” Mr. Stack said. “He was paying attention,” he said, referring to Mr. Weiner.
On May 5, Mr. Wolfe told him that he had a friend who knew Matt Drudge who had said that a scandal involving a member of Congress was coming soon. The same day that Meagan Broussard, 26, of Texas, said that she had received an e-mail from Mr. Weiner with a photo she had asked him to take, while holding up a white piece of paper that said “me.”
At 6:35 p.m., Mr. Stack, using his Twitter handle, @goatsred, posted: “Rumor ... a ‘bigtime’ Congressman caught with mistress. There are pix and a top 5 right-wing blogger has them. @RepWeiner is it you?”
Throughout May, Mr. Wolfe and other members contacted other young women Mr. Weiner was following, including a 16-year-old from California who started a campaign on Twitter to get the congressman to be her prom date.
The next day, Mr. Stack, posting on Twitter, sent her a message saying in part, “if you’re a minor and he’s following you, well, seems a little creepy if not in ny,” copying @RepWeiner on the post. The next day, on May 18, the girl posted: “Well @RepWeiner unfollowed me.” Michael Madden, 52, a retired Philadelphia firefighter and member of the group, said he had joined Mr. Wolfe in warning young women about Mr. Weiner.
“It seems now that Dan may have had an agenda all along,” he said. “We don’t know yet what it is. But he never said to me, ‘I’m going to get this guy.’ What he said is that it was not right.”
Jack Begg, Alain Delaquérière and Barbara Gray contributed reporting.
Originally here.
June 17, 2011
Fake Identities Were Used on Twitter in Effort to Get Information on Weiner
By JENNIFER PRESTON
At least three months before the revelation that former Representative Anthony D. Weiner was sending lewd messages and photos to women online, a small group of self-described conservatives was monitoring his exchanges with women on Twitter. Now there is evidence that one or more people created two false identities on Twitter in order to collect information to use against him.
A Twitter user employing a fake name posed as a 16-year-old California high school girl in May and tried to get Mr. Weiner to be her prom date, according to people with knowledge of the communications and a review of documents. The person behind another Twitter account created under a fake name claimed to be her classmate and offered to provide the group with incriminating evidence about Mr. Weiner.
Mr. Weiner, who resigned on Thursday after admitting he had sent explicit photos and messages to multiple women on social media sites, had already been the subject of intense focus on Twitter by the conservative group, which calls itself the #bornfreecrew.
One Twitter user the group observed seeking to interact with Mr. Weiner was called “Nikki Reid.” She started an online campaign to get Mr. Weiner to be her prom date at Hollywood High School in May, using the account @starchild111. Within days after Mr. Weiner started following her, a Twitter user, also using a fake name, Marianela Alicea, and pretending to be Nikki Reid’s classmate, contacted a member of the #bornfreecrew and said she had information about Mr. Weiner, but never provided any.
But there is no evidence that either girl exists. There is no Nikki Reid or Marianela Alicea enrolled at Hollywood High School. In response to requests from a reporter from the blog Mediaite, a woman claiming to be Nikki Reid’s mother provided documentation to substantiate her identity and her daughter’s identity. But records show the street address the woman provided does not list anyone named Reid as an occupant. State officials in California have confirmed that the driver’s license this woman provided to Mediaite was false, as well.
It remains unclear who is behind the fake Twitter accounts, why anyone was trying to pretend to be a 16-year-old high school girl looking for Mr. Weiner to be her prom date or why the user contacted members of the #bornfreecrew. As an increasing number of politicians and elected officials use social media tools to engage with constituents and deliver their message, the prospect of people not using their real identities presents potential pitfalls and opportunity for political opponents to play dirty tricks.
The @starchild111 Twitter account, which was deleted two weeks ago, was created in September. There were very few posts on the account until March, when the fictional Nikki Reid began posting comments about admiring Mr. Weiner, including:
“Tweeps my progressive idol @RepWeiner is following me. Today is the best day ever!”
“Today also marks day one of my campaign to get @RepWeiner to be my prom date.”
“Will you be my prom date @RepWeiner.”
“Everyone please please follow @RepWeiner and tell him to be my prom date.”
The Twitter user also sought to interact with at least three other women Mr. Weiner was communicating within the weeks and months before he sent a sexually suggestive photo to a Washington state college student. The women included Gennette Cordova, 21, the college student; Ginger Lee, 24, a former pornographic film actress from Tennessee who exchanged over 100 e-mails with the congressman; and a Delaware high school student, 17, whose family said she exchanged five private messages with Mr. Weiner that did not include indecent or explicit material.
In an interview, Ms. Cordova said she was contacted on Twitter by “Nikki Reid,” who said she admired one of her posts and then began exchanging private messages with her almost every day for three or four weeks starting May 5. “There was something weird about it,” Ms. Cordova said. At the beginning of their exchanges, Ms. Cordova said, there was no mention of Mr. Weiner. Then the user began to ask her for advice saying, “I’m a fan girl too,” and “How did you get him to follow you?”
When Ms. Cordova saw that Mr. Weiner was following “Nikki Reid,” she said, she expressed her suspicions about the girl’s identity to him in a private message and he stopped following the account.
Mike Stack, 39, of New Jersey, a member of the #bornfreecrew on Twitter, said that when he saw that “Nikki Reid” began her campaign to get Mr. Weiner to take her to the prom, he sent her a message that said he thought it was “creepy” that Mr. Weiner was following a minor. He said he had no reason to believe that the account was not genuine.
A few days later, Mr. Stack said, he was approached by the Twitter user who said that she was Nikki Reid’s friend and that she had “incriminating evidence” against Mr. Weiner regarding private messages with her friend. But Mr. Stack said that she never presented any evidence to him and that the user of the account stopped communicating with him and eventually vanished.
Then, in what seems to be an elaborate ruse, the Twitter user claiming to be Nikki Reid and then a woman claiming to be her mother contacted Tommy Christopher, a correspondent for Mediaite, the media blog. After first communicating online, Mr. Christopher said, the woman dismissed claims of incriminating evidence against Mr. Weiner and accused members of the #bornfreecrew of harassing her daughter and her daughter’s friend. The woman also made a statement, which offered a forceful defense of Mr. Weiner.
She repeated this by phone to Mr. Christopher, who insisted the woman provide documentation confirming her identity. The woman faxed over a copy of a California driver’s license with her name, Patricia Reid, at a Los Angeles address, as well as school identification for the girls. But it turns out that the driver’s license and the school identification were fake, according to California state officials and school district officials.
Ms. Cordova said that as she looked back on their exchanges, she saw other signs of a fraud. For example, “Nikki Reid” did not have a Facebook account, like most girls her age. And she made references to “The O.C.,” the television show (featuring the young Hollywood actress Nikki Reed) that was popular among teenagers but ended in 2007.
“There is no way this girl is in high school,” Ms. Cordova said. “No way.”
End of Exhibit.
Originally here.
May 10, 2011
Bin Laden Sons Say U.S. Broke International Law
By SCOTT SHANE
WASHINGTON — The adult sons of Osama bin Laden have lashed out at President Obama in their first public reaction to their father’s death, accusing the United States of violating its basic legal principles by killing an unarmed man, shooting his family members and disposing of his body in the sea.
The statement, provided to The New York Times on Tuesday, said the family was asking why Bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda, “was not arrested and tried in a court of law so that truth is revealed to the people of the world.”
Citing the trials of Saddam Hussein, the former Iraqi leader, and Slobodan Milosevic, theformer Serbian leader, the statement questioned “the propriety of such assassination where not only international law has been blatantly violated,” but the principles of presumption of innocence and the right to a fair trial were ignored.
“We maintain that arbitrary killing is not a solution to political problems,” the statement said, adding that “justice must be seen to be done.”
The statement, prepared at the direction of Omar bin Laden, who had publicly denounced his father’s terrorism, was provided to The Times by Jean Sasson, an American author who helped the younger Mr. Bin Laden write a 2009 memoir, “Growing Up bin Laden.” A shorter, slightly different statement was posted on jihadist Web sites.
Omar bin Laden, 30, lived with his father in Afghanistan until 1999, when he left with his mother, Najwa bin Laden, who co-wrote the memoir. In the book and other public statements, the younger Mr. bin Laden had denounced violence of all kinds, a stance he repeated in the sons’ statement.
“We want to remind the world that Omar bin Laden, the fourth-born son of our father, always disagreed with our father regarding any violence and always sent messages to our father, that he must change his ways and that no civilians should be attacked under any circumstances,” the statement said. ”Despite the difficulty of publicly disagreeing with our father, he never hesitated to condemn any violent attacks made by anyone, and expressed sorrow for the victims of any and all attacks.”
Condemning the shooting of one of the Qaeda leader’s wives during the assault on May 2 in Abbottabad, Pakistan, the statement added, “As he condemned our father, we now condemn the president of the United States for ordering the execution of unarmed men and women.”
In explaining the killing of Bin Laden, Obama administration officials have cited the principle of national self-defense in international law, noting that Bin Laden had declared war on the United States, killed thousands of Americans and vowed to kill more.
The sons’ statement called on the government of Pakistan to hand over to family members the three wives and a number of children now believed to be in Pakistani custody and asked for a United Nations investigation of the circumstances of their father’s death.
None of Osama bin Laden’s sons other than Omar, who lives in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, were named in the statement; Ms. Sasson said she believed it was approved by three other adult sons who have not lived with their father for many years. Before Osama bin Laden fled Afghanistan in 2001, he had at least 11 sons, one of whom was killed in the assault last week, and nine daughters, by Ms. Sasson’s count.
In addition to the statement, Ms. Sasson shared notes on what Omar bin Laden, who declined to be interviewed directly, had told her by telephone in recent days. The notes describe Mr. Bin Laden’s struggle, as he came of age, to understand and eventually reject his father’s embrace of religious violence.
Mr. Bin Laden told Ms. Sasson that the death of his father “has affected this family in much the same way as many other families” that experience such a loss. But he also described a childhood of “upheavals and relocations” that, she said, “caused his mother and siblings great upset and danger.”
Mr. Bin Laden said that by the age of 18, after Al Qaeda had plotted the bombings of twoAmerican Embassies in East Africa and two years before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, he had concluded “that the course of action his father was taking was not for him, irrespective of what his father’s wishes were,” Ms. Sasson said.
Eventually he asked his father’s permission to leave Afghanistan with his mother and younger siblings. He told Ms. Sasson that he “thanks Allah that his father granted his permission for this departure, otherwise the grief the family faces could be even greater.”
End of Exhibit.
