JFK conspiracy theory is debunked in Mexico 57 years after Kennedy assassination

By Gonzalo Soltero 9 hours ago

This man visited the Soviet embassy in Mexico City while Lee Harvey Oswald was in Mexico in 1963. U.S. officials think it may be Oswald.

(Image: © Corbis via Getty Images)

Most conspiracy theories surrounding President John F. Kennedy’s assassination have been disproven. Kennedy was not killed by a gas-powered device triggered by aliens or by actor Woody Harrelson’s dad.

But speculation about Kennedy’s Nov. 22, 1963 murder in Dallas continues, fueled by unreleased classified documents, bizarre ballistics and the claim of assassin Lee Harvey Oswald – who was later killed on live TV while in police custody – that he was “just a patsy.”

Several JFK assassination experts, like the former New York Times investigative reporter Phillip Shenon, see Mexico as the best place to find answers regarding a possible conspiracy and who was behind it.

Just over a month before Kennedy’s killing, Oswald took a bus from Texas to Mexico City. He arrived Friday morning, Sept. 27, 1963 and left very early on Wednesday, Oct. 2, according to American and Mexican intelligence.

Was Oswald a kind of rogue James Bond who went south of the border to consort with communists, Cuban revolutionaries and spies – or just a deranged killer?

I dug into that question while researching my book on conspiracy narratives in Mexico, and I think I found something everybody else missed: a hole in the story of the very man who started a tenacious conspiracy theory about Oswald’s Mexico trip.

Communist Mexico City

Mexico was a Cold War hot spot in the mid-20th century, a haven for Soviet exiles, American leftists fleeing the anti-communist persecution of McCarthyism and sympathizers with Cuba’s Castro regime. Every communist and democratic country had an embassy in Mexico City – the only place in the Western Hemisphere where these enemies coexisted more or less openly.

According to witnesses from the Cuban and Soviet diplomatic missions, Oswald visited their embassies repeatedly on Friday and Saturday. He was desperately seeking visas to those countries, which Americans were then prohibited from visiting.

Told such documents would take months to process, Oswald got in a heated argument with the Cuban consul, Emilio Azcué. Oswald also forced a KGB volleyball match on Saturday morning to be canceled when he brandished a weapon at the Soviet consulate, before bursting into tears and leaving.

Those events are well documented by the CIA, which in the 1960s had ramped up its Mexico operations to monitor communist activity, even hiring 200 Mexican agents to help. The Mexican Secret Service, whose 1960s-era files Mexico has recently begun to declassify, also tracked Oswald on Sept. 27 and Sept. 28, 1963.

Oswald’s whereabouts for the next three-and-a-half days, however, remain unknown.

A conspiracy theory is born

A main conspiracy about Oswald’s undocumented time in Mexico City puts him in contact with dangerous Mexicans on the left side of the Cold War.

This story originated in March 1967, when the American consul in the Mexican coastal city of Tampico, Benjamin Ruyle, was buying drinks for local journalists.

One of them – Óscar Contreras Lartigue, a 28-year-old reporter for El Sol de Tampico – told Ruyle he’d met Oswald in 1963 when he was a law student at Mexico’s National Autonomous University.

Contreras said he’d been in a pro-Castro campus group and that Oswald had begged this group for help getting a Cuban visa. According to Contreras, Oswald spent two days with these National Autonomous University students, then met up with them again a few days later at the Cuban Embassy.

Evidently afraid for his life, Contreras wouldn’t tell Ruyle much more. He said he himself had traveled to Cuba, knew people in the Castro regime and had blown up the statue of a former Mexican president on campus in Mexico City. Contreras feared persecution for his political activities.

Contreras did say this wasn’t the first time he was sharing his story, though. After JFK was shot, Contreras told Ruyle, he’d commented to his editor that he’d recently met Oswald.

The Contreras question

Contreras’ account hinted at suspicious, previously unknown connections between Oswald and communist Cuba made shortly before JFK’s assassination.

His story was, according to a memo later sent from CIA headquarters, “the first solid investigative lead we have on Oswald’s activities in Mexico.” U.S. government officials needed to find out if Contreras was a trustworthy source.

Three months after Ruyle’s happy hour, a CIA official from Mexico City went to Tampico to question Contreras. During the six-hour interrogation, Contreras still refused to go into details, but he did say Oswald never mentioned assassination – only that he said repeatedly he “had to get to Cuba.”

In 1978, a researcher from the U.S. House Select Commission on Assassinations named Dan Hardway went to Mexico to investigate the JFK assassination. He was unable to interview Contreras despite several attempts, but in an influential report warned his account should not be dismissed.

The New York Times reporter Shenon, who interviewed Oscar Contreras for a 2013 book on the JFK assassination, also found Contreras credible. Shenon wrote that Contreras – whom he calls a “prominent journalist” – “went much further” in their interview than he had with the CIA, alleging “far more extensive contacts between Oswald and Cuban agents in Mexico.”

Dan Hardway, who is now a lawyer in West Virginia, still believes Contreras. After reading Shenon’s book, he reiterated in 2015 that Lee Harvey Oswald might have been part of a wider Cuban intelligence web.

Hole in the web

Óscar Contreras died in 2016, so I could not interview him myself.

But in my investigation, a minute detail of his biography grabbed my attention – an apparently overlooked contradiction that could undermine his entire story.

In Contreras’ telling, he fled the National Autonomous University campus and moved to Tampico around 1964. Yet Contreras also allegedly told his “editor” about his encounter with Oswald after the 1963 Kennedy assassination.

College newspapers aren’t common in Mexico, and Contreras was a law student. So how could he have had an editor in 1963?

I thought his hometown paper, El Sol de Tampico, might hold the answer. Digging through its archives, I found that the newspaper ran a Sunday gossip column in the early 1960s called “Crisol,” or “melting pot.”

Óscar Contreras became the reporter for “Crisol” on June 6, 1963, and continued writing the gossip column in September and October that year.

While Lee Harvey Oswald was in Mexico City, Contreras was 300 miles away in Tampico. In flamboyant prose, faded back issues of the local paper show, he chronicled the sumptuous wedding receptions, quinceañeras and yacht excursions of Tampico’s high society.

Three dark days

I believe the Sol de Tampico archives discredit Contereras’ account.

A political correspondent may live far from where his newspaper is published. But for a gossip columnist, that would be dereliction of duty.

This revelation plunges Oswald’s fall 1963 trip to Mexico back into the dark.

There are other conspiracy theories, including that Oswald had a Mexican mistress who took him to a party of communists and spies.

But it’s more likely Mexico holds no hidden clues to JFK’s assassination.

Conspiracy theories offer assurances of depth and closure, a promise that the biggest enigma of the 20th century is solvable. But from what we know about what Oswald did and didn’t do in Mexico City, he was a volatile, disorganized loner who couldn’t even handle travel logistics.

JFK’s assassination is a cold case. And in Mexico, only exhausted leads remain.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook and Twitter. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.

Solar power stations in space could be

 the answer to our energy needs

By Amanda Jane Hughes, Stefanie Soldini 

Artist's conceptions of a solar power satellite, dubbed

 the Integrated Symmetrical Concentrator SPS concept.
(Image: © NASA)


It sounds like science fiction: giant solar power stations floating in space that beam down enormous amounts of energy to Earth. And for a long time, the concept – first developed by the Russian scientist, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, in the 1920s – was mainly an inspiration for writers.


A century later, however, scientists are making huge strides in turning the concept into reality. The European Space Agency has realised the potential of these efforts and is now looking to fund such projects, predicting that the first industrial resource we will get from space is “beamed power”.

Climate change is the greatest challenge of our time, so there’s a lot at stake. From rising global temperatures to shifting weather patterns, the impacts of climate change are already being felt around the globe. Overcoming this challenge will require radical changes to how we generate and consume energy.

Renewable energy technologies have developed drastically in recent years, with improved efficiency and lower cost. But one major barrier to their uptake is the fact that they don’t provide a constant supply of energy. Wind and solar farms only produce energy when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining – but we need electricity around the clock, every day. Ultimately, we need a way to store energy on a large scale before we can make the switch to renewable sources.

Benefits of space

A possible way around this would be to generate solar energy in space. There are many advantages to this. A space-based solar power station could orbit to face the Sun 24 hours a day. The Earth’s atmosphere also absorbs and reflects some of the Sun’s light, so solar cells above the atmosphere will receive more sunlight and produce more energy.


But one of the key challenges to overcome is how to assemble, launch and deploy such large structures. A single solar power station may have to be as much as 10 kilometres squared in area – equivalent to 1,400 football pitches. Using lightweight materials will also be critical, as the biggest expense will be the cost of launching the station into space on a rocket.

One proposed solution is to develop a swarm of thousands of smaller satellites that will come together and configure to form a single, large solar generator. In 2017, researchers at the California Institute of Technology outlined designs for a modular power station, consisting of thousands of ultralight solar cell tiles. They also demonstrated a prototype tile weighing just 280 grams per square metre, similar to the weight of card.

Recently, developments in manufacturing, such as 3D printing, are also being looked at for this application. At the University of Liverpool, we are exploring new manufacturing techniques for printing ultralight solar cells on to solar sails. A solar sail is a foldable, lightweight and highly reflective membrane capable of harnessing the effect of the Sun’s radiation pressure to propel a spacecraft forward without fuel. We are exploring how to embed solar cells on solar sail structures to create large, fuel-free solar power stations.

These methods would enable us to construct the power stations in space. Indeed, it could one day be possible to manufacture and deploy units in space from the International Space Station or the future lunar gateway station that will orbit the Moon. Such devices could in fact help provide power on the Moon.

The possibilities don’t end there. While we are currently reliant on materials from Earth to build power stations, scientists are also considering using resources from space for manufacturing, such as materials found on the Moon.

Another major challenge will be getting the power transmitted back to Earth. The plan is to convert electricity from the solar cells into energy waves and use electromagnetic fields to transfer them down to an antenna on the Earth’s surface. The antenna would then convert the waves back into electricity. Researchers led by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency have already developed designs and demonstrated an orbiter system which should be able to do this.

There is still a lot of work to be done in this field, but the aim is that solar power stations in space will become a reality in the coming decades. Researchers in China have designed a system called Omega, which they aim to have operational by 2050. This system should be capable of supplying 2GW of power into Earth’s grid at peak performance, which is a huge amount. To produce that much power with solar panels on Earth, you would need more than six million of them.

Smaller solar power satellites, like those designed to power lunar rovers, could be operational even sooner.

Across the globe, the scientific community is committing time and effort to the development of solar power stations in space. Our hope is that they could one day be a vital tool in our fight against climate change.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook and Twitter. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.

When an elephant eats a leaf in the Congo, many things will follow.

Publishing a paper on how elephants contribute to fight climate generated a series of unique, instructive, and meaningful events.

Fabio Berzaghi

Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow, LSCE - IPSL - CEA

Published Nov 20, 2020

 Read the paper

Last year we published a paper on the “elephant effect”, as I like to call it inspired by the famous “butterfly effect”. Put simply, forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis) contribute to increase the carbon stored in African tropical forests by 7% , which is equivalent to roughly 3 billion tons of carbon. This corresponds to multiple years of CO2 emissions of most medium and large countries, in other words, it’s a significant amount of carbon that is maintained stored in forests thanks to elephants. Elephants do so by reducing the number of small plants in the forest which triggers changes in forest structure and competition for light and water among plants. These changes result is larger trees storing more carbon as hardwood trees become more common, hardwood species store more carbon per volume than other type of trees.

What followed the article was a series of events that were difficult to imagine with implications that go beyond just myself or my research.

First came the press. Things started to ramp up quickly already before the article came online. My inbox was full of questions and requests for interviews and it was overwhelming to think how to convey my message to the general public. On a funny note, the timing was not ideal as I was camping in some remote areas in Western Australia where if you’re lucky the closest cell phone tower is 100-200 kilometers away, I am not exaggerating! So I tried to be near some sort of civilization when I had an interview. Due to the time difference, while my travel-mates were sleeping in the tent, I would be outside climbing nearby hills and dunes in search for good reception.

Hunting for a decent cellphone signal on the dunes

It was a gratifying to see other people interested and excited about our research. But mostly, I hoped that press coverage in many different languages and countries would bring attention to the plight of forest elephants which have gone through a huge population loss. Among many interesting articles my personal highlights appeared in The New York Times and The Conversation written by Ahimsa Campos-Arceiz an elephant expert whose articles were a staple of my PhD.

A collage of some the newspaper articles around the world

Other positive events would follow. I was invited as a speaker at a conference on the Asian elephant to help raise conservation funds and another at the European Commission on the importance of megafauna as a nature-based solution to fight climate change. I was also very pleased when people at the World Wildlife Foundation told me that my research would be useful for their conservation program in central Africa. Sam Illingworth, a Senior Lecturer in Science Communication who writes science poems wrote a nice poem titled Our Elephant Graveyard.

Our article acted as a catalyst for a collaboration with Ralph Chami, Assistant Director at the International Monetary Fund. Ralph and I, along with two other economists, evaluated the carbon service provided by elephants. It was an interesting experience to approach conservation from a different perspective and quite inspiring to see how passionate Ralph and his colleagues are about the preservation of nature. Ralph managed to convince the IMF to publish our work on the IMF online magazine, which apparently is a big deal for such a nature-based subject, and we also produced a podcast. We calculated that the carbon services provided by one elephant over its lifetime are worth $1.75 million, which is hundred times more than just the value of a dead elephant killed for its ivory.

Info-graphic on the evaluation of forest elephant carbon service

The most exciting outcome is that the government of Gabon has asked for a detailed evaluation of the carbon service provided by elephants in one of their national parks. Gabon plans to protect elephants and expand their population with funding received from the carbon market created to offset emissions in exchange for the elephant carbon service. Other organizations and institutions have also shown interest to apply this framework not just on elephants but also to other species and ecosystems. If this pilot implementation is successful others will follow bringing benefits to Nature and local communities.

What started as something small became a lot more, just like for the butterfly, if an elephant eats a leaf in the Congo…

Fabio Berzaghi

Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow, LSCE - IPSL - CEA

I study how animal-plant interactions shape ecosystems, and the influence of these interactions on climate. I work across disciplines such as ecology, zoology, and environmental sciences and am particularly interested in large terrestrial herbivores. I use eco-physiological models, field and remote sensing data to examine animals-plants-atmosphere connections across time and space, and the implications for ecosystem services, conservation, and policy

Revolución Coffee’s owner sues over state’s $62 million fund for Black Oregonians; judge rejects separate motion to shut down fund

Updated Nov 21, 2020; Posted Nov 20, 2020


Maria Garcia, left, hosted a Don't Shoot Portland press conference in 2017 at Revolución Coffee downtown, with Teressa Raiford (center). Garcia, who is Mexican-American, is suing for access to a state relief fund for Black Oregonians. (Raiford and Don't Shoot PDX are not parties to the litigation.) Mike Zacchino/The Oregonian LC- Staff

By Mike Rogoway | The Oregonian/OregonLive

The Mexican-American owner of a prominent downtown Portland coffee shop filed a complaint in federal court Friday, arguing that the state’s unique, $62 million coronavirus relief fund for Black Oregonians unconstitutionally discriminates against her.

Separately, a federal court rejected an earlier request in a different case for a preliminary injunction to shut down the fund. In that case, a white logging company owner from John Day argued the fund illegally discriminated against him, too.

U.S. Judge Karin Immergut ruled Friday night that the plaintiff in that original case had failed to show “a presumption of irreparable harm.”

That means the fund can continue distributing money to Black Oregonians while that case works its way through the courts – quite possibly through the end of the year, when Oregon’s share of federal relief money expires and the fund’s allocations would presumably be complete.

Oregon lawmakers created the Cares Fund last summer in an effort to rectify historic discrimination and Black Oregonians’ lack of access to other coronavirus relief programs. The state tapped $62 million in federal aid to finance the initiative; that money expires at the end of the year.

The Cares Fund had approved $37 million in payments by early November. It had paid out $27 million to more than 7,000 Black Oregonians and about 400 Black-owned businesses and nonprofits.

Maria Garcia owns Revolución Coffee, near Portland State University. Her shop closed for three months last spring when the pandemic hit Oregon, according to Friday’s court filing, reopened in the summer but closed again in August. In her complaint, Garcia says she would qualify for aid from the new Oregon Cares Fund if she were Black.

“Due to COVID-19, my Mexican, woman-owned business lost customers, lost its employees, and almost lost its lease. But I have been fighting hard to survive,” Garcia said Friday in a statement provided by her attorneys. “It’s not fair that the state would deny access to relief solely because of my race.”

Garcia is being represented by the Center for Individual Rights, a nonprofit that seeks to challenge “excessive government regulation, unconstitutional state action, and other entanglements characteristic of the modern state.” A lawyer for the center said it will seek an injunction against the Oregon fund.

When the Oregon Legislature’s Emergency Board approved the Cares Fund for Black Oregonians in July, some Republican lawmakers questioned why it excluded Latinos, Native Americans and other groups that had also suffered historic discrimination. And the legislative counsel’s office warned that earmarking funds for one race might be unconstitutional.

That’s just what lawyers for Great Northern Resources argued before U.S. District Court on Friday. They called the Cares Fund “a patently illegal program” that fails the test for equal protection in the U.S. Constitution. Great Northern’s suit is being funded by the Project on Fair Representation, which challenges “government distinctions and preferences made on the basis of race and ethnicity.”

Defendants in that first case, which include the Oregon Department of Administrative Services and a nonprofit group called The Contingent that is administering the fund, maintained the fund is designed to rectify ongoing discrimination.

The state received $1.39 billion in federal coronavirus relief funds but relatively little of that has been allocated to Black Oregonians, defense attorneys asserted. Federal relief funds were funneled through the Small Business Administration, for example, which loans very little money to Black-owned businesses.

“The Black community was being discriminated against in the distribution of $1.39 billion,” said Amanda Gamblin, an attorney for The Contingent. She said the Cares Fund seeks to remedy that imbalance.

The Contingent proposed setting aside $200,000 to cover Great Northern’s potential award, should it prevail in court. But the logging company’s attorneys said the judge should block the fund from continuing to distribute money based on race because of potential harm to other businesses.

On Friday night, Judge Immergut ruled “Plaintiff has not demonstrated…damages will not fully compensate plaintiff for its injury, necessitating an injunction.”

So the court accepted the $200,000 deposit and Immergut said she will consider the broader case “in due course.”


-- Mike Rogoway

How TV paved America’s road to Trump

“A brand mascot that jumped off the cereal box”: TV critic James Poniewozik explains the multimedia character Trump created.

By Sean Illing@seanillingsean.illing@vox.com

Updated Nov 21, 2020

President Donald Trump, seen through a camera eyepiece, speaks at the 2019 House Republican Conference Retreat Dinner in Baltimore on September 12, 2019. Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images


Donald Trump is the show we can’t turn off, the car crash we can’t look away from, the news cycle we can’t escape.

There are just too many reasons why we got here to distill into a single explanation. But certainly one reason for Trump’s ascendance is television. It’s not quite right to say that TV made Trump president, but it is fair to say that TV created the conditions that made Trump’s presidency possible.

This, at least, is the thesis of James Poniewozik’s new book Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America. Poniewozik is a TV critic for the New York Times, and his book is an attempt to explain how Trump turned himself into the protagonist of his own TV show and then pulled all of us into it. It’s also about what TV has done to our political culture and why Trump is the logical fulfillment of all the media trends of the last two decades or so.

According to Poniewozik, Trump is fundamentally a creature of TV. His whole public persona was shaped by TV and he cleverly used the medium, with shows like The Apprentice, to propel his political career. He also knew exactly what TV media craves — spectacle, drama, and outrage — and capitalized on it throughout his presidential campaign.

“Donald Trump is not a person,” Poniewozik writes, “he’s a character that wrote itself, a brand mascot that jumped off the cereal box and entered the world.” And, of course, he’s now entered the White House.

I spoke to Poniewozik last year about how the road to Trump was paved by TV and how the way we cover and think about politics has been fundamentally transformed by the medium.

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Sean Illing

Many people think of television as an instrument for covering politics rather than a medium that transforms it. But you suggest that that’s wrong and that TV has imposed its own ideology on politics.

James Poniewozik

I decided to write this book because the guy from The Apprentice got elected president of the United States. I really felt that a lot of the public discussion didn’t take that seriously enough — it was a kind of joke. But it’s insane that that happened and we need to understand how it was possible in the first place.

As a TV critic, I wanted to know, why this guy? Why wasn’t it Tom Cotton or Ted Cruz or some other conservative firebrand who rode this wave to the White House? Why is it somebody who was made by television and essentially made himself out of television? Why was Trump uniquely capable of being able to translate that skill set into this sort of success?

Sean Illing

Well, let’s try to answer that. The premise of your book isn’t that television made Trump president, but you do argue that Trump’s presidency is only possible because of TV. Why is that?

James Poniewozik

Well, there are a couple elements to that. One is that Donald Trump’s career has been primarily a media career. And I’m not just talking about The Apprentice but going all the way back to his tabloid exploits and talk show appearances in the ’80s. If Trump were just a businessman, he’d be a nonentity. He’s only “Donald Trump” because of television.

The other part, and I want to be emphatically clear about this because people like to oversimplify things by saying TV makes people dumb or brainwashes gullible people. I think it’s more complicated than that. Television is the nervous system of our culture. It’s our principal means of gaining information and disseminating it and communicating to one another. And it’s the arena, for decades and decades now, through which politics has taken place.

I write about the media theorist Neil Postman in the book because one of his great insights is that television as a visual media promotes a different kind of discourse than text does. It’s a visual medium, thus it appeals more to emotion. So that lends itself to a kind of argument and rhetorical combat in which Trump has thrived his entire life. His whole media persona is built on conflict. He’s the guy who “wins” and that meshes perfectly with television, especially reality television culture.

Sean Illing

How exactly did TV prepare us for candidate Trump, for the idea of Trump as president?

James Poniewozik

The evolution of the 24-hour cable news format is a big part of the story. The business model of, say, Fox News is to excite and agitate the audience all the time, to give people a reason to tune in even when there isn’t news going on.

But over time that model promulgates the idea that the way politics are argued on TV, the buttons that it presses, the way people dunk on each other — that’s not just a means toward political ends, but it becomes the action of politics itself. And a huge part of Trump’s appeal is that he absolutely embodies this form of politics, or this approach to politics. He creates emotions and conflicts in media format and people saw it and thought, “Oh yeah, this is what politics looks like.”

Sean Illing

What’s so interesting about Trump is that, as you put it, he’s achieved a perfect symbiosis with television. He isn’t on television — he is television. How does that help us understand Trump the political actor?

James Poniewozik

Trump thinks like television. His stock-in-trade is the non-sequitur argument and the provocation. Going back to Postman, he talked about the rhetorical mode of TV news as being “now this.” “Now this” is like the TV anchor’s segue from one topic to an entirely unrelated topic. And Neil Postman, again, was writing in the ’80s. He didn’t even write about cable television. CNN had barely been founded.

But the cable new era is “now this” on steroids. It’s just this, this, this, this, this. And that’s Trump’s mindset and style of speaking. The lashing out, the careening from one subject to another, the seemingly random fights on social media — that’s all television gold.

He’s just incredibly attuned to the dynamics of our reality TV culture, and he’s fully meshed it with politics.

Sean Illing

I want to ask you about professional wrestling, something you write about in the book. The thing wrestling does so well is walk that line between fake and real — it plays with that blurriness. Non-wrestling fans miss this when they talk about the “realness” of wrestling. The realness of the performance is secondary to the feelings it elicits in the audience. And this, to me, is a perfect way to understand the dynamic between Trump and his supporters.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

James Poniewozik

Yeah, I write a lot about this in the book. There’s a concept in wrestling called “kayfabe,” which is basically the pretense that the conflicts in the ring are actually real. The wrestlers who fight each other actually hate each other. The backstories are really going on. And in the very early days of pro wrestling, people bought that.

Over time, say by the 1980s when Donald Trump was hosting Wrestlemanias at his casinos, that relationship between fans and the story became more sophisticated. People might believe it’s scripted, but it’s still kind of real. Maybe these things are staged, but maybe the emotions the wrestlers have are real. You could buy into it at whatever level you wanted to.

I think this is basically how a lot of people view Trumpian politics. It’s not so much about being taken in or thinking he’s totally honest, it’s about this guy who’s fighting for your side. And even if there’s this level of bullshit and artifice, it’s only because he’s a clever trickster. And besides, what’s most important is how he makes his voters feel.

Politics has become mostly affective anyway. It’s about the delivery of emotions. It’s about liberal tears. All those feelings are what it’s about, not getting some actual deliverable like a bill passed or whatever. For somebody who follows politics through talk radio and Fox News, that’s the end of politics.

“IF TRUMP WERE JUST A BUSINESSMAN, HE’D BE A NON-ENTITY. HE’S ONLY ‘DONALD TRUMP’ BECAUSE OF TELEVISION.”

Sean Illing

Do you see Trump’s election as some kind of cultural rubicon-crossing moment? We’ve had actor-presidents before, and plenty of politicians are essentially performance artists, but Trump really is something ... different.

Where do we go from here?

James Poniewozik

People often say, “Well, isn’t this like Ronald Reagan? He was an actor, too.” But it’s crucial to make a distinction here, beyond pointing out that Reagan was governor of California before being elected president.

Reagan was a movie actor, and a movie actor’s job is to cultivate empathy, to imagine yourself in the place of other people, to imagine the inner lives of other people. Trump is a reality TV performer and that means his job is to be an exaggerated version of himself, to play up the most polarizing, attention-getting aspects of himself. That’s what wins in the world of reality TV. It’s an anti-empathy kind of performance.

And this really is a significant distinction between someone like Trump and Reagan. We’re much more in a reality TV world now, and our politics reflects that.

Sean Illing

Is there any going back, or are we stuck with reality TV presidents?

James Poniewozik

I don’t think so. Trump’s election was significant in that it proved you could become president even if your only qualification was mastery of the media. But it’s still just one way of becoming president, not the only way of becoming president.

There might be a reaction against this, and maybe we get a string of more boring or conventional candidates. But there’s no doubt that Trump won’t be the last reality TV president. There will be others like him — that’s just our reality now. Maybe the next one will be a Fox News host or something like that, someone with a built-in connection to a party’s political base who knows how to deliver what they want.

But we have to remember that Trump isn’t some alien monster who landed from another planet and transformed the environment. He was uniquely situated to take advantage of politics in this heavily mediated environment. The fragmentation of media, the polarization of political discussion, the rise of Fox News, the emergence of social media — all of this paved the way.

The atmosphere that produced Trump will survive Trump, and we’re just stuck with that.

This interview was originally published on November 7, 2019.

VOX

I handled holiday orders at a grocery store.

Trust me: The holidays are miserable.

Please, make the season less awful for service workers by staying home this year.

By Dylan Morrison Nov 21, 2020

Working at a grocery store during the holiday season is a glimpse at the profound misery this time inspires. ArtMarie/Getty Images

If you’ve ever worked in retail, you already know what I’m about to tell you: Around the end of October, a sense of horror begins to build that has nothing to do with Halloween. As the days grow shorter and the wind grows colder, coworkers begin to whisper to each other, “Are you ready?” The piped-in music changes, the decor shifts, everyone — regardless of their place in the corporate hierarchy — takes on the grim affect of people bracing themselves for the worst: The holidays are coming.

I’m not sure what it is about the holidays that makes so many people behave so horribly. Maybe it’s the pressure to make the day perfect, or the stress of dealing with one’s family. At this point, I’d be unsurprised to learn that Christmas music activates some kind of dormant aggression impulse.

This year’s holiday season promises to be even more intense for service workers, particularly those in the grocery industry. As the Covid-19 pandemic rages on, people are more stressed than ever and are experiencing fewer moments of kindness and joy to temper their worst impulses. It’s one reason why this year, as someone who has worked through every holiday season for essentially a decade, I urge everyone to stay at home. You might think of the holidays as a wonderful time, a time when people come together and celebrate love, happiness, and joy. But I know the truth. The holidays get ugly.

Two years ago, I was plucked from my position in the deli department of a high-end grocery retailer to be part of the small team that managed our store’s holiday orders. A year later, having proven myself capable of keeping my head no matter how absurd the customer behavior became, I was put in charge of the program. Both years, I worked impossibly hard from the first week of November until Christmas Day, answering questions, taking orders, solving problems, and encountering countless people who, in a sort of holiday-driven derangement, had utterly forgotten how to behave in front of others.

I have been screamed at over pumpkin pies and Yule logs; I have watched grown men weep over the size of their rib roasts; I have been cussed out by a woman who believed her fresh raw turkey, still in its clearly labeled package, was a large chicken with which I was trying to trick her. I have seen people come to blows over the last box of turkey-shaped butter, and witnessed a breakup started by the simple question, “Green beans or green bean casserole?” I have had to explain to at least four separate people that the reason their turkey didn’t taste good is because they put it in the oven without taking the plastic wrapping off.

My favorite holiday story, the one I used to tell at parties in the days when parties were still safe to attend, is this one: Three days before Thanksgiving, a woman came in and demanded to place an order for Thanksgiving Day. I explained to her that we were past the cut-off point for ordering, but she insisted that she needed accommodation and couldn’t possibly pull off a proper meal in three days’ time. I took pity on her, moved some things around, and forced through an order for a pre-cooked dinner for six. “Can I pick the food up hot on Thanksgiving?” she asked, and I explained, as patiently as I could, that we were filling more than 1,000 orders and just didn’t have the facilities to allow for any food to be picked up hot. It clearly wasn’t her dream scenario, but we agreed that her husband would come pick up her order, cold, two days before the holiday.

On Thanksgiving Day, two days after her husband picked up her order, she called me. In a voice so loud I had to hold the phone an inch away from my ear, she screamed, “My food is cold!” I’m not sure how she imagined the food would be hot when she removed it from her own refrigerator, but she yelled at me for 10 more minutes before eventually hanging up on me.

Perhaps I should have suggested she share the holidays with another customer who hated the thought of properly reheating his already cooked food: the man who wanted instructions for how to reheat a precooked prime rib in his microwave. When I, carefully, informed him that microwaving his prime rib (a cut of meat for which he paid more than $100) would never yield any positive results, he demanded, “So what am I supposed to do, turn on my oven?”

Still more frustrating were the people who placed enormous orders and simply abandoned them, fully paid, at our store. An order of four sushi trays was left to languish on Thanksgiving Day; at Christmas, a customer sent me straight to voicemail when I called to inquire as to why he had not come to get the five pounds of shrimp cocktail he’d purchased weeks before. (I’m grateful to that one — the shrimp were delicious.)

Then there were the emotionally fragile customers who were clearly going through it back at home. My booth was set up where we usually kept the cheapest wine we sold and, that season, no fewer than five people came by and burst into tears when they saw that I was there instead. One poor guy came in on Thanksgiving and told me that his wife had a baby last week and that she and her sister had a fight that had been brewing for 10 years and now he and she were uninvited from dinner. “She’s crying. A lot. Please ... I need a turkey.” (I managed to find him one.)

But the holidays are going to be different for many of us this year. As Covid-19 cases climb across the nation, the pandemic has recast our traditions of gathering with family as deadly, dangerous events that are best avoided. I know how much that hurts, especially in such a difficult time. We all want a little normalcy. We all want a little joy.

But there is one group of people for whom the holidays are always, always terrible: service workers. Every year, we see the worst of humanity. Every year, we are treated as though we are worthless, as though we are less than people. We work on Thanksgiving, on Christmas, on New Year’s Eve and Day, getting screamed at and belittled while you make fond memories of family togetherness and love. Despite our unfairly low pay, our terrible or nonexistent health insurance, and our desire to be with our own families, we paste on a smile, take your abuse, and help you anyway, because that is our job, and we don’t have any other choice.

I am no longer working at the grocery store where I put in so much of my time and effort (I am high-risk for Covid-19 and decided against it this year). But my friends who are on the front lines of the holiday rush say things have been impossibly difficult this year. People are still ordering holiday dinners, although this year, the hot item is the smallest possible turkey rather than the large ones folks used to fight over in years gone by. The cognitive dissonance those workers are experiencing — being taken to task over the size of a turkey while worrying if their exposure to the public means they won’t live to see another holiday season — sounds unbearable.

Stay home for the holidays this year. It’s not only the right thing to do for your own safety, the safety of your family, and the safety of every American; it’s also the only way to protect the service workers who have suffered many terrible holiday seasons and will inevitably suffer many more. And if you find yourself out and about, then please: Be kind to every service worker you meet, wherever you meet them. As hard as this year’s holiday season has been for you, it has almost certainly been even worse for them. They’ve likely been working day in and day out at constant risk of exposure, unable to afford to take time off, absorbing the frustration and aggression of customers who are struggling, too.

Working on the holiday order team in years past wasn’t all bad. I still think fondly of Elizabeth, a regular customer of mine, who, a few days before Christmas, slipped me a $25 gift card and thanked me for all my hard work. I also helped a new grandfather last year, a warm and wonderful man who was trying to make an early Thanksgiving work as his daughter, son-in-law, and newly born grandson would be out of state on the actual holiday. I was able to pull together a full dinner for him well before the bulk of our Thanksgiving food was set to arrive, and a few days later, he came back into the store just to thank me and show me photos of the wonderful holiday they’d been able to pull together with my help. Moments like that almost made the horror stories feel worth it — that is, until the screaming inevitably started back up.

So give service workers the gift of kindness — or really, just decency — this holiday season. I promise you it will come as a welcome surprise.

Dylan Morrison is a writer based in Cleveland, Ohio. His work focuses primarily on trans rights, food, and being kind to service workers. He is also the author of the novel Juniper Lane (2016). You can find him on Twitter at @dylan_thyme.

Natural disasters are increasing. The world’s poorest are left to fend for themselves.

Help is available, but it’s not getting to those who need it most.

By Jariel Arvin@jarielarvin Nov 20, 2020

Members of the Red Cross help evacuate people living near the Bambito River in Panama on November 5. Due to the heavy rains caused by Hurricane Eta, the river flooded causing landslides. Luis Acosta/AFP via Getty Images

More than 100 disasters — many of which were climate- and weather-related — have affected more than 50 million people around the world since March, when the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic. And though the money needed to protect against these disasters in the countries at risk exists, it’s not getting to those who need it most.

Those are the key findings of a new report from the Geneva-based International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) released Tuesday. In it, the authors make clear that while global attention has been focused on the coronavirus pandemic — for good reason — the climate crisis and the resulting disasters facing communities around the world are just as catastrophic.

“UNFORTUNATELY, THERE IS NO VACCINE FOR CLIMATE CHANGE”

“It’s a very, very serious crisis the world is facing currently,” IFRC Secretary General Jagan Chapagain said of the Covid-19 pandemic, speaking at a virtual news conference on November 17. But he noted that while there is some good news regarding the possibility of a vaccine for Covid-19, “unfortunately, there is no vaccine for climate change.”

A member of the Red Cross wades through a flooded street due to the heavy rains caused by Hurricane Eta in Guatemala City, on November 5. Johan Ordonez/AFP via Getty Images

The IFRC report, titled “World Disasters Report 2020: Come Heat or High Water,” uses what’s known as “extreme event attribution” to show that over the past 10 years, climate- and weather-related disasters such as storms, floods, and heat waves have impacted 1.7 billion people. Over that same period, an additional 410,000 lives were lost, the majority of which were in lower- or middle-income countries.

Extreme event attribution is an emerging scientific field that has allowed scientists to study how human-induced climate change is connected to extreme weather events. As Vox’s Umair Irfan explains, in this field, “scientists construct models to evaluate the counterfactual of what would have happened in a certain event without climate change and compare it to observed results.”

And they have found that although global warming caused by fossil fuel emissions does not directly cause hurricanes or droughts, it is magnifying the risks and frequency of such events.

The authors of the IFRC report found that such catastrophes have been rising in number since the 1960s — and that a sharp increase of 35 percent has been recorded since the 1990s. The proportion of all disasters that can be attributed to climate change has also grown, from 76 percent in the 2000s to 83 percent in the 2010s.

Making matters worse, the report found that the world’s most vulnerable people aren’t getting the financial assistance they need to withstand such disasters, even though the funds they require exist.

The report’s authors argue that the speed at which governments and banks worldwide have developed economic stimulus packages is proof that funds can be assembled rapidly to meet existential threats. And they want to see governments mirror that energy when it comes to addressing the climate emergency.

A recent study, for instance, found that the money pledged globally for pandemic recovery thus far has surpassed $12 trillion. According to the IFRC, the stimulus model created during the pandemic would be a good model for governments to generate the $50 billion needed each year over the next 10 years to help 50 developing nations adjust to the worst impacts of climate change.

But they also warn that any money raised in the future can’t be distributed as aid has been to date: The report found that when it comes to receiving funding, the countries most vulnerable to the effects of climate change are being left behind.
Why the countries most in need of climate change aid money aren’t getting it

Of the 20 countries considered most vulnerable to climate change and associated disasters, the IFRC found that none were in the top 20 countries receiving funding.

In climate science, vulnerability generally describes the likelihood that a country will experience negative impacts from storms and other extreme weather events. A community’s or country’s vulnerability can be measured in the long or short term, but it basically involves sensitivity to harm like natural disasters and the ability to adapt, or cope through processes like evacuation plans.

It’s also an issue of social protection. If homes are damaged, do people have funding available to make repairs? Do people have savings? Or do they need to rely on selling livestock and then have no means to make a living?

Somalia was ranked as the most vulnerable country in the IFRC’s report due to high levels of food insecurity and drought, but it only ranked 71st in per-person funding disbursements. None of the countries with the five highest disbursements had high or very high vulnerability scores, suggesting that more can be done to reach those most in need.

The main reason money isn’t flowing to where it is most needed is that, as IFRC’s senior analyst of humanitarian policy and project coordinator Kirsten Hagon told me, there is no framework for giving climate-related aid to countries that are seen as being unable to manage large influxes of capital.

People affected by floods receive aid in Khartoum, Sudan, distributed by the Turkish Red Crescent, part of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), on September 20, 2020. Turkish Red Crescent/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Donor countries give aid mostly to governments. This means that to receive assistance, countries must have governments able and willing to meet criteria set by donors, such as putting forth funding proposals and showing financial capability. People living in some of the most affected countries often do not have governments that can meet these criteria, making it difficult for them to be eligible to get international help.

The result, as Hagon told me, is that “the vast majority [of donor countries] think they will invest in safe countries and someone else will in the ones that are trickier and nobody does. And so you see examples like the Central African Republic where nothing’s being invested there.”
Although the outlook for disaster preparedness looks bleak, there are ways to save lives

According to the report, a few things can be done immediately to help people prepare for the increasing frequency of extreme events and prevent the loss of lives.

One of the biggest is to focus on disaster preparedness plans at the local, rather than national, level — ensuring that communities have individually tailored plans that include designated signals to communicate when it is time to evacuate and transportation to shelters that can keep them safe.

Because, as Hagon told me, “without those basic things that have to happen at the community level, that have to be designed with and by the community, then you’re not going to save lives.”

Peter Maurer, left, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, examines renovations at an outpatient clinic damaged after a shelling attack in Ukraine, on November 6. Valentin Sprinchak/TASS via Getty Images

Donors must also work together to identify which countries are being left behind and then find a way to fill the gaps. They should also consider more flexible criteria that different countries can meet and be able to apply for funding.

The IFRC has also called on organizations and governments to examine their own practices — and says it will begin with itself, in order to make sure its work is “climate smart,” taking climate change impacts like warmer temperatures and sea level rise into account when doing its work.

“WE HAVE TO SCALE UP ALL OF THE THINGS WE ALREADY KNOW, BUT WE HAVE TO TAKE THEM TO ANOTHER LEVEL BECAUSE THIS IS A CRISIS LIKE NONE THAT’S EVER REALLY FACED HUMANITY BEFORE”

The coronavirus pandemic has shown how international solidarity can actually work to address global crises and how massive amounts of money can be generated to save lives and invest in solutions. Now, climate experts hope a similar effort can be applied in a global mission to save lives and prevent deaths from climate-related disasters in the most vulnerable communities.

“We have to scale up all of the things that we already know, but we have to take them to another level because this is a crisis like none that’s ever really faced humanity before,” Hagon said.