TBR News April 3, 2017

Apr 03 2017

The Voice of the White House

Washington, D.C. April 3, 2017: “This planet is experiencing growing problems with what is called climate change.

Once verdant areas are turning into deserts while other areas are being flooded.

All the glacial ice in the world is rapidly melting and the sea levels are rising.

Bogus, or bought, scientists are saying that the sea levels are indeed rising and by 2100 they might have risen a whole 2cm!

This is nonsense and they know it.

The current estimates, from legitimate science sources, postulate a 3 meter rise in the ocean levels in 5-10 years (not decades) is the current melt rate continues.

And what causes climate change, or global warming as other like to term it?

No one knows but that does not prevent the loony bloggers from inventing causes as diverse as burning coal to the flatulence of cattle.

More sophisticated bloggers mention ultra violet rays from some distant planet or the suggestion that the world will turn upside down next Tuesday.

No one knows.

One is discovering, on another subject, that the report that Russia interfered with the last presidential election was concocted by the Clinton people and paid for by a multi-billionaire who hates Trump.

The eventual blowback for such things will be entertaining to watch.”

Table of Contents

  • Are We Headed for a Replay of World War I?
  • Hezbollah’s role in Syria and Israel’s dilemma
  • Trump warns US is prepared to act unilaterally on North Korea
  • Blast in St. Petersburg metro station kills 9: authorities
  • WikiLeaks’ Assange asylum winner in Ecuador election
  • Democrats’ Blind Obsession on Russia-gate
  • Don’t get fooled again by bogus links, bots and pure bunk. Here’s how.
  • Huge ‘potentially hazardous’ asteroid hurtling towards Earth
  • Greenland’s ‘land ice melt’ likely to drive up global sea levels
  • The hidden upsides of revenge

 

Are We Headed for a Replay of World War I?

Thanks to Trump, perhaps not.

April 3, 2017

by Justin Raimondo,

AntiWar

Today [Sunday] marks the one-hundredth anniversary of Woodrow Wilson’s message to Congress asking for a declaration of war against the Central Powers. Thus the Great War began – a conflict that destroyed European civilization and set the stage for the rise of Bolshevism, Nazism, and the death of millions in World War II.

Wilson was the embodiment of the dominant ideological theme of the twentieth century: State-worship. In both the foreign and domestic realms, the great “progressive” President represented the twin aspects of statist ideology: war and the centralization of political authority. And his presidency was emblematic of the key link between these two aspects of the progressive ideology, as Murray Rothbard explained in a 1973 interview with Reason magazine. Every war in American history has been the occasion for a great leap forward in the power of the State to interfere in and regulate every aspect of our lives, he said, and a “huge increase in [government] power came out of World War I,” one that set the pattern up to the present day:

“World War I set both the foreign and the domestic policies for the twentieth century. Woodrow Wilson set the entire pattern for foreign policy from 1917 to the present. There is a total continuity between Wilson, Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman, Johnson and Nixon – the same thing all the way down the line.

“Q: You’d include Kennedy in that?

“A: Yes Kennedy, right. I don’t want to miss anybody. Every president has been inspired by Woodrow Wilson. It was reported that Richard Nixon’s first act when he came into the White House was to hang a picture of Woodrow Wilson in front of his desk. The same influence has held on domestic affairs. As a matter of fact if I had to single out – this is one of my favorites pastimes – the biggest SOB in American history in the sense of evil impact – I think Woodrow Wilson is way, way at the head of the list for many reasons. The permanent direction which Woodrow Wilson set for foreign policy included the permanent collective security concept, which means America has some sort of God-given role to push everybody around everywhere and set up little democratic governments all over the world, and to suppress any kind of revolution against the status quo – that means any kind of change in the status quo either domestic or foreign. In the domestic sphere the corollary was the shift from a relatively laissez-faire economy – corrupted as it was by the Civil War subsidies it was still and all a relatively laissez-faire capitalism – a deliberate shift to in essence a so-called corporate state.”

For a comprehensive analysis of how the triumph of progressivism led to the death and destruction of the Great War, read Rothbard’s “World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals.” Rothbard’s point about the perniciousness of the “collective security” concept – the very basis of US foreign policy in the modern era – is more relevant today than ever. Because the victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election has ignited a great debate in the foreign policy community, pitting a platoon of “experts” who uphold the “liberal international order” against the “America first” policy favored by the Trumpians.

Well before Trump arose, the geopolitical picture prefigured the conditions that led to the Great War. The Western victory in the cold war, far from occasioning the abandonment of NATO, motivated the Western powers to expand the alliance to include the former Warsaw Pact nations. The Russians reacted as George Kennan, the author of the anti-Soviet “containment” strategy, predicted they would: with open hostility and an effort to create a buffer zone – Belarus, Ukraine, Hungary, Moldova – between the aggressive West and the Russian heartland. The second cold war was upon us.

This system of rival alliances limns the rivalries that led to the Great War – and the similarities are geographical as well as abstractly geopolitical. The site of this rivalry is in the Balkans, where the Great War broke out when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated by a Serbian ultra-nationalist. Now with the admittance of tiny Montenegro to NATO, we are living in a world where the internal turmoil of that country with a population equal to Albuquerque’s could lead to a confrontation between two nuclear-armed adversaries. Neighboring Ukraine, where a US-sponsored “color revolution” overthrew a pro-Russian government by force, has long been a flashpoint.

The Trump administration came into office vowing to “get along with Russia” – and this is the real issue behind the “Russia-gate” “investigation.” The entire national security bureaucracy, which has a material interest in maintaining our Russophobic foreign policy, reacted like a snake confronted in its lair, lashing out at the President and leaking information from their clandestine surveillance of the President and his advisors.

The entire focus of Trump’s foreign policy – analyzing what is in America’s (alleged) interests, rather than privileging the collective interests of “the West” as if they were identical to our own – is a dire threat to the old Wilsonian internationalist legacy that has dominated US foreign policy in modern times. Trump’s contention that NATO is “obsolete” sent them into paroxysms of fury. And while the Trumpian foreign policy vision, such as it is, doesn’t reject NATO outright, its definition of the “liberal international order” is much narrower than both the progressive internationalists and their neoconservative brethren find acceptable.

Despite considerable opposition from both parties, the Trump administration has already made the first moves to defuse rising tensions with Russia and forestall a 1914-like conflict. Trump has instructed the US military to focus on defeating ISIS rather than overthrowing Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad, reversing US policy under the Obama administration: both Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and UN Ambassador Nikki Haley have made public statements affirming this new stance. Assad, backed by Russia, has been in Washington’s crosshairs since George W. Bush’s presidency: here is yet another flashpoint where conflict with Russia has been avoided.

Furthermore, Tillerson is scheduled to travel to Russia for meetings with Putin and other top officials in what could be the prelude to a comprehensive agreement with Moscow over such contentious issues as Ukraine, nuclear arms, and US sanctions. The meeting will take place some time this month.

Prior to Trump taking office, the US was headed straight for a conflict with Russia. The NATO alliance, moving steadily eastward to the very gates of Moscow, had been conducting a two-pronged war: conducting provocative military “exercises” mimicking a a frontal assault on Russian territory while also launching a propaganda war targeting Russia and its allies for “regime change.” The stage was set for another 1914, in which a single small spark somewhere in the Balkans or Eastern Europe could have set off a global conflagration. And America’s “progressives” were – and are – the main agitators for war.

Indeed, Hillary Clinton – assumed by many to be the next President – campaigned on an explicitly anti-Russian platform, calling for a “military response” to the Kremlin’s alleged “interference” in the 2016 election. In the wake of her defeat, her supporters have continued and escalated these hysterics, calling the unproven assertion that Russia intervened in the election in Trump’s favor an “act of war.”

While the US continues to be bogged down in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, the Trump administration’s greatest achievement may be avoiding a conflict that didn’t happen – a feat they are unlikely to get any credit for, but one that is, nevertheless, notable. The issue of our relations with Russia continues to dominate both the domestic and the international arenas, and there’s a good reason for that. The end of the cold war did not eliminate the prospect of a conflict between these two nuclear-armed powers – indeed, in retrospect, it may have increased the chances of a catastrophic collision. If the Trump administration succeeds in eliminating or lessening this possibility – over the loud protests of the War Party – then that is a cause for celebration.

The victory of the West in the cold war put an end to a world divided between two ideologically opposed superpowers – and inaugurated a new global reality, albeit not the one our ruling elites expected and hoped for. The neoconservatives and their liberal internationalist allies assumed we would inherit a unipolar world, in which the US would predominate, but that hasn’t come to pass. Instead, we live in a multi-polar world, where not only Russia but also China, India, Iran, and others yet to emerge are contending for the advancement of their own interests.

In order to defend our legitimate interests while avoiding unnecessary conflicts, America must return to the foreign policy of the Founders, rejecting entangling alliances, abjuring the export of “democracy,” and pursuing a policy of nonintervention in the internal affairs of other nations. This is the path to peace – all others lead to perpetual war.

This is the lesson of World War I – a war that dragged in multiple combatants due to the system of rival alliances. Let’s hope the Trump administration has learned it – because our warlike “progressives” clearly have not.

Hezbollah’s role in Syria and Israel’s dilemma

April 2, 2017

by John Wright

RT

Most serious analysts credit the role of Hezbollah in the Syrian conflict as having been indispensable in turning the tide of the war in favor of the government in recent years, even though it is a role that has gone largely unrecognized

It is a lack of recognition that begs the question – why? Is it because of a stubborn reluctance in various quarters to regard Hezbollah as anything other than a terrorist organization, one that belongs in the same box as ISIS or Al-Nusra? But then surely such a categorization makes no sense, considering the number of fighters the Lebanese resistance movement has lost in combat against both of those groups.

In his book, The Battle for Syria, Christopher Phillips writes, “Given Hezbollah’s reputation as the most impressive military force in the Arab world, [the group’s involvement in the conflict] sapped rebel morale and boosted the regime. By offering expertise that Assad lacked, such as light infantry and urban warfare expertise, training, or directing military tactics, from 2013 the Party of God [Hezbollah] became a vital component of Assad’s forces and greatly shaped the conflict.”

Phillips is right to cite Hezbollah’s vaunted military reputation. Since being officially established in 1985, in response to Israel’s military occupation of southern Lebanon, the Shia resistance movement has developed into one of Israel’s most fearsome foes. The brief 34-day war they fought in 2006 remains the apogee of this enmity up to now. It ended in what most considered to have been a victory for Hezbollah, creating something approaching a crisis within the Israeli political and military establishment. In fact, the Second Lebanon War, (to give the conflict its official name), changed the calculus of military power in the region from one in which Israel’s military superiority was unquestioned to one in which it was no longer.

The report produced by the commission of inquiry set up by the Israeli government to evaluate the conflict in 2006, the Winograd Commission, was damning in some of its criticisms of the country’s political and military leadership. One of the most revealing of the report’s findings confirmed the extent to which Israel considers its military superiority to be coterminous with its survival.

“Israel cannot survive in this region,” the report states, “and cannot live in it in peace or at least non-war, unless people in Israel itself and in its surroundings believe that Israel has the political and military leadership, military capabilities, and social robustness that will allow her to deter those of its neighbors who wish to harm her, and to prevent them – if necessary through the use of military force – from achieving their goal.”

Since 2006, there has been a consensus that it is only a matter of time before another war breaks out between Hezbollah and Israel. Given Israel’s recent airstrike against Hezbollah in Syria, and the intensification of tensions between them that we have witnessed over the past few weeks, it is a conflict that may arrive sooner rather than later.

In a recent Associated Press story, carried by ABC News, Aron Heller writes, “In the past month alone, Hezbollah’s chief Hassan Nasrallah has […] threatened to strike Israel’s nuclear facilities if Israel were to attack, and Israel has detailed a contingency plan to evacuate up to a quarter-million civilians from border communities to protect them from attacks from Hamas, Hezbollah or other Islamic militant groups.”

The thrust of Heller’s analysis chimes with the numerous airstrikes Israel has carried out in Syria over the course of the conflict. The most recent of those, previously mentioned, is believed to have targeted a Hezbollah weapons convoy close to Palmyra.

It is not hard to discern the dilemma Israel has faced over the course of the conflict in Syria. Its enmity with the only Arab country that remains committed to supporting the Palestinian resistance, and with whom it has a longstanding territorial dispute over the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, provides more than enough motive for Tel Aviv to have relished the prospect of regime change in Damascus. However, the mantra of ‘better the enemy you know’ will also have likewise been prominent in the thinking of Israel’s political and military establishment in its stance on events in Syria.

Despite the decades-long hostile relations between both countries, the Assad government is a known quantity under which, though undoubtedly uneasy, peace has been obtained. The prospects of a government of Salafi-jihadists replacing Assad, one which would likely harbor a desire for an end of days reckoning with the Jewish state across its border, will have been a sobering one.

Israel’s main focus in the region continues to be Iran and Hezbollah, both of which, along with Syria under Bashar Assad, are considered part of an axis of resistance to Washington and its regional allies – Tel Aviv especially. Thus, while it undoubtedly suits Israel to see Hezbollah bleed in Syria, there will also be trepidation over the Shia resistance movement emerging from it even stronger and tougher as a result of the invaluable combat experience it has been afforded. With both Hezbollah and Israel under no illusions when it comes to the near certainty of going to war with one another again, it is why Israel is determined to hit its Lebanese foe in Syria with airstrikes as and when it can.

The danger, of course, comes with regard to how these repeated attacks may endanger Russia’s deployment in the country. Indeed, with Russian military forces operating on the same side as Hezbollah in Syria, the danger of Israel’s aggression becoming a catalyst for unintended consequences is ever present.

As the man said, “Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war.”

Trump warns US is prepared to act unilaterally on North Korea

US President Donald Trump said if China will not cooperate in ending North Korea’s nuclear and missile threat, the US will move to do so alone. Trump also took the time to respond to claims he is hostile to the EU.

March 3, 2017

DW

The US president issued the warning in an interview with the “Financial Times” newspaper in which he also declined to outline a specific plan for how the US might challenge North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.

“If China is not going to solve North Korea, we will. That is all I am telling you,” said Trump, who told the interviewers that he is making a conscious choice to limit how much information he divulges when it comes to strategy.

He said he will discuss North Korea with Chinese President Xi Jinping when they will meet for the first time at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort on Thursday and Friday.

“China will either decide to help us with North Korea, or they won’t. And if they do that will be very good for China, and if they don’t it won’t be good for anyone,” said Trump.

Foreign policy appointees in Trump’s administration have made comments echoing his stance regarding China.

Speaking on US political show “This Week,” US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley agreed that China needs to cooperate on handling North Korea.

“They need to put pressure on North Korea. The only country that can stop North Korea is China, and they know that,” said Haley.

US review on North Korea ready

Trump’s national security aides have completed a review of US options to pressure North Korea into curbing its nuclear and missile programs on Sunday, according to a US official.

The review, completed by the National Security Council on Trump’s orders, considers a variety of economic and military measures, but emphasizes new sanctions as well as placing more pressure on China to exert control over Pyongyang.

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said in March that military action against North Korea was an “option on the table”after visiting the demilitarized zone that separates North and South Korea.

North Korea has conducted five nuclear tests, including two in 2016. A recent launch saw three missiles come as close as 300 kilometers (186 miles) from the Japanese coast.

Trump’s deputy national security adviser, K.T. McFarland, said there was a “real possibility” that North Korea could develop a nuclear-armed missile capable of reaching the US by the end of Trump’s four-year term, according to the Financial Times.

China: North Korea’s lone friend

China is North Korea’s only ally, and provides food and other aid to the politically isolated and impoverished nation.

China also previously imported coal from North Korea, but banned imports of the fossil fuel for the rest of 2017 in retaliation for a North Korean missile test in February. Selling coal is an important source of income for Pyongyang.

Despite the ban, US officials have claimed China continues to import North Korean coal through “front companies” in the northeast Chinese city of Dalian. UN Ambassador Haley has urged China to halt the covert imports.

US-China relationship uncertain

Trump has often indicated he will have a combative and distrustful approach to relations with Beijing, although his tone has softened somewhat in recent weeks.

While campaigning, Trump  repeatedly slammed China for “raping” and “killing” the US on trade issues. He has pledged to reduce the US trade deficit with China and threatened import taxes on products from the country.

Before taking office, Trump also drew stern rebukes from Beijing for accepting a congratulatory telephone call from Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen. The phone call appeared to break with the US’ decades-long “One China” policy under which official diplomatic contacts with Taiwan were to be avoided.

Tillerson met with Xi in Beijing in March and said Trump was looking forward to “enhancing understanding” with China. Tillerson said the two countries will work together in addressing North Korea’s nuclear program.

Trump ‘didn’t hear’ Merkel

The paper also took the opportunity to ask the president about his apparent snubbing of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. In an incident that quickly went viral, Trump apparently refused to shake the chancellor’s hand when both journalists and Merkel herself asked him to during a photo op at the White House earlier this month.

“I shook hands about five times and then we were sitting in two seats…and I guess a reporter said ‘shake her hand.’ I didn’t hear it.”

Trump also responded to criticism that because of his apparent friendliness with pro-Brexit campaigners like Nigel Farage, he would be glad to see the EU break down entirely.

“I would have thought when it happened that more would follow,” the president said, referring to last June’s referendum, “but I really think the European Union is getting their act together.”

Blast in St. Petersburg metro station kills 9: authorities

April 3, 2017

by Denis Pinchuk

Reuters

St. Petersburg, Russia-At least nine people were killed and 20 were injured when an explosion tore through a train carriage in the St. Petersburg metro system on Monday, the Russian National Anti-Terrorist Committee said.

Interfax news agency quoted an unnamed source as saying the blast, which occurred when the train was between two stations, was caused by a bomb filled with shrapnel.

President Vladimir Putin, who was in the city for a meeting with Belarus’s leader, said he was considering all possible causes for the blast, including terrorism and was consulting with security services.

Ambulances and fire engines descended on the concrete-and-glass Sennaya Ploshchad metro station. A helicopter hovered overhead as crowds gathered to observe rescue operations.

“I appeal to you citizens of St. Petersburg and guests of our city to be alert, attentive and cautious and to behave in a responsible matter in light of events,” St Petersburg Governor Georgy Poltavchenko said in an address.

An attack on St Petersburg, Russia’s old imperial capital, would have some symbolic force for any militant group, especially Islamic State or Chechen secessionist rebels. Attacks in the past have largely concentrated on Moscow, including an attack on an airport, a theater and in 2010 a metro train.

Video showed injured people lying bleeding on a platform, some being treated by emergency services and fellow passengers. Others ran away from the platform amid clouds of smoke, some screaming or holding their hands to their faces.

A huge hole was blown open in the side of a carriage with metal wreckage strewn across the platform. Passengers were seen hammering at the windows of one closed carriage. Russian TV said many had suffered lacerations from glass shards and metal.

Russia has been the target of attacks by separatist Islamist Chechen militants in past years. Islamic State, which has drawn recruits from the ranks of Chechen rebels, has also threatened attacks across Russia in retaliation for Russian military intervention in Syria.

The Russian air force and special forces have been supporting President Bashar al-Assad in fighting rebel groups and Islamic State fighters now being driven out of their Syrian strongholds.

ALL STATIONS CLOSED

St. Petersburg emergency services at first said that there had been two explosions. But a source in the emergency services later said that there had been only one but that the explosion had occurred in a tunnel between stations.

The blast occurred at 2.40 p.m., well shy of the evening rush hour.

Authorities closed all St. Petersburg metro stations. The Moscow metro said it was taking unspecified additional security measures in case of an attack there.

Russia has been on particular alert against Chechen rebels returning from Syria and wary of any attempts to resume attacks that dogged the country several years ago.

At least 38 people were killed in 2010 when two female suicide bombers detonated bombs on packed Moscow metro trains.

Over 330 people, half of them children, were killed in 2004 when police stormed a school in southern Russia after a hostage taking by Islamist militants. In 2002, 120 hostages were killed when police stormed a Moscow theater to end another hostage-taking.

Putin, as prime minister, launched a 1999 campaign to crush a separatist government in the Muslim southern region of Chechnya, and as president continued a hard line in suppressing rebellion.

(Editing by Ralph Boulton)

 WikiLeaks’ Assange asylum winner in Ecuador election

April 2, 2017

usatoday

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will likely be able to remain at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London after voters in Ecuador on Sunday narrowly elected ruling party candidate Lenín Moreno over conservative Guillermo Lasso.

Moreno, the political successor to President Rafael Correa, had said he would allow Assange to stay. Correa in 2012 granted asylum to Assange, who hasn’t left the embassy since.

Moreno won the presidential runoff with 51% of the vote, according to an official quick count by by the National Electoral Council, although Lasso was seeking a recount after three exit polls showed him winning by a comfortable margin. Minutes earlier a separate quick count by a respected local group said the race was a technical tie with a difference of less than 0.6 percentage points separating the two candidates. The group refrained from saying which candidate was leading until the electoral authorities made their pronouncement.

Official results still being counted showed Moreno ahead by two points with 94% of voting acts counted.

A Moreno win likely ensures that Assange will be able to continue the unusual arrangement at the cramped London embassy. Lasso, a former banker, had said that within 30 days of taking office he would evict Assange, but would seek to find him asylum elsewhere.

In a recent interview, Lasso told the Miami Herald that he would work with other governments to house Assange at another embassy. “We will ask Mr. Assange, very politely, to leave our embassy, in absolute compliance with international conventions and protocols,” Lasso said in an email, adding: “we vow to take all the steps necessary so that another embassy will take him in and protect his rights.”

In the five years Assange has been in the embassy, Correa’s administration hasn’t been able to figure out how to move him to Ecuador amid heavy police scrutiny in London. Assange took refuge there while fighting extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted on sexual misconduct allegations. Assange and his legal team fear that the Swedish charges are a ploy to have him extradited to the United States, The Herald reported.

For all of its intrigue, the issue is not a major concern to average Ecuadoran voters, The Washington Post reported. Correa granted asylum to Assange in 2012, viewing him as a fellow “anti-imperialist” who could bolster his efforts to garner leftist support elsewhere in the world.

The arrangement became strained last year when WikiLeaks published hacked Democratic Party emails during the U.S. presidential campaign — Correa temporarily cut off Assange’s Internet access.

Beyond deciding the fate of Assange, the race was seen as one that could further tilt Latin America toward the right.

Heading into Sunday’s election, Moreno, 64, and Lasso, 61, were virtually tied in the polls.

A March 21 poll by firm Cedatos, which accurately predicted the first-round result, put Moreno ahead with 52% for the first time since its runoff surveys began, The Associated Press reported. Yet as many as 16% of voters said they were still undecided. Moreno’s lead was within the poll’s margin of error.

Correa urged voters to support his “Citizens’ Revolution” by electing Moreno, who he said will continue policies to support the poor. But a majority of Ecuadorans said they were eager for change after 10 years of Correa’s iron-fisted rule. Ecuador’s economy is slated to shrink by 2.7% this year as oil prices remain low, and Lasso promised to deliver a well-needed jolt to the nation’s beleaguered economy.

But in the race’s final weeks, Moreno rose in polls as he and Correa cast Lasso as a wealthy, out-of-touch politician who profited from the country’s 1999 banking crisis.

Democrats’ Blind Obsession on Russia-gate

Instead of focusing on President Trump’s poor policies – or fixing their own shortcomings – Democrats obsess over Russia-gate, though the case is flimsy and reeks of McCarthyism

April 1, 2017

by Daniel Lazare

consortium news

Democrats are jubilant now that “Trumpcare” has bit the dust. But they should be careful because Russia-gate, the pseudo-scandal that they’ve latched onto in hopes of driving Donald Trump out of office, is also flashing red. The more they ignore the warning signs, the greater the odds that they’ll go down in flames as well.

Russia-gate, of course, is the story of how the Kremlin allegedly used surreptitious means to hijack the American political process and place a “Siberian candidate” in the White House. It purportedly started five years ago when, according to the famous Christopher Steele dossier, Vladimir Putin foresaw that Donald Trump would become president and set about turning him into a compliant tool of Russian interests.

The Kremlin supposedly threw sweetheart real-estate deals his way (although a lucrative hotel plan never materialized for unexplained reasons) and fed him valuable intelligence about his opponents, all the while blackmailing him with a secret video showing him cavorting with prostitutes at Moscow’s Ritz Carlton.

Then, at the height of last year’s election, Russia was said to have followed up by hacking Democratic National Committee computers and releasing thousands of private emails to WikilLeaks in order to embarrass Hillary Clinton and tip the contest in favor of Trump. This audacious effort succeeded when Trump eked out a victory by virtue of the Electoral College. As a result, Vladimir Putin now controls not one presidential office but two, one in Moscow and the other in Washington, DC.

It’s a cool story about treason, international intrigue and hot babes, but it’s no more convincing than “Birthergate” was seven or eight years ago. Putin would have required superhuman powers to predict that Trump would become president at a time when no one other than “The Simpsons” thought he had a chance. The “golden showers” episode, in which Trump’s female hires supposedly urinated on the same bed that Barack and Michelle Obama used on one of their official Russian visits, is unverified and probably unverifiable as well.

The dossier also contains obvious errors and non-sequiturs, as Consortiumnews’ Robert Parry points out, e.g. placing Trump attorney Michael Cohen at a meeting with a Russian official in Prague, a city that Cohen says he’s never visited, or crediting Putin with stirring up resistance to Obama’s proposed Pacific trade deals when opposition had been building for years on its own. The fact that Steele, an ex-MI6 agent, has been in hiding since January does nothing to enhance his credibility.

But yet another flaw concerns the DNC hack itself. Although everyone from The New York Times to the neo-lib hipsters at Vox accepts the story as gospel, it is in fact gone into a nosedive as a growing army of cyber analysts, Internet sleuths, and other Doubting Thomases probe its most obvious contradictions.

‘Confirmation Bias’

One line of attack concerns the question of “confirmation bias,” the tendency of investigators who are already inclined to blame Russia to zero in only on evidence supporting their point of view. When DNC officials discovered that their computers had been compromised, they did what anyone in such a situation would do: they called their lawyer, in this case a former federal prosecutor and cybercrime specialist named Michael Sussmann.

Sussman, in turn, called an old friend named Shawn Henry, former head of the FBI’s cyber division and now president of an Irvine, California, cyber-security firm known as CrowdStrike. Henry contacted his chief technical officer, Russian-born Dimitri Alperovitch, who sent over a team of investigators. Within the day, the CrowdStrike team concluded that the intruders were Russian government operatives.

It sounds as logical and objective as obtaining the name of a top-flight medical specialist and then scheduling an appointment. But the resemblance is misleading. For one thing, cyber sleuths are not objective. As even The New York Times admits: “Attribution, as the skill of identifying a cyberattacker is known, is more art than science. It is often impossible to name an attacker with absolute certainty.”

Hence, it’s more like obtaining the name of a faith healer than a physician. For another, this particular group of cyber sleuths seems to have been even less objective than most.

Like any enterprise, CrowdStrike is in the business of convincing potential customers to purchase its services. Hence it had an incentive to blame the email loss on a dark and spooky Kremlin conspiracy rather than something more mundane such as an internal leak.

As an ex-Soviet who emigrated to America as a teenager, moreover, Alperovitch was particularly inclined to blame Russia first. As he once told a reporter: “A lot of people who are born here don’t appreciate the freedoms we have, the opportunities we have, because they’ve never had it any other way. I have.”

The Soviet-born journalist Yasha Levine, who covered the 2008 Russo-Georgian War over the breakaway province of South Ossetia, recalls that the air at the time was thick with charges of Russian government cyber warfare, none of which proved true, and that Alperovitch “was one of the minor online voices supporting the idea that the cyber attacks against Georgia were some kind of Russian plot.”

Since then, Alperovitch has joined forces with the Atlantic Council, a hawkish Washington think tank funded by the U.S. State Department, NATO, Ukrainian exiles, Persian Gulf oil exporters, and U.S. arms manufacturers, all with interests hostile to a sensible and constructive approach to U.S.-Russian relations.

Indeed, the Atlantic Council has been a spark-plug powering the New Cold War with Russia and maintains close ties with Clinton and her supporters. In 2013, it gave her its “distinguished leadership award,” and in 2015 it recruited her to give a major address kicking off its “Latin American women’s leadership initiative.”

The Atlantic Council also chose ex-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, a major Clinton ally, to head a Mideast study group that echoed Clinton’s call for a Syrian “no-fly zone, “a proposal that would almost certainly lead to a direct U.S.-Russian military clash.

So the Russophobic Clinton camp hired Russophobic Dimitri Alperovitch, both linked via the Russophobic Atlantic Council, to find out who hacked the DNC. To absolutely no one’s surprise, they decided that Russia was it.

Sloppy Methodology

But CrowdStrike has come under criticism not only on the grounds of bias but methodology. Critics have noted that the firm’s report on the DNC hack was loaded with weasel words suggesting that Russian intelligence was guilty without quite coming out and saying so. It argued, for instance, that hackers were so sophisticated that they had to be state supported:

“Their tradecraft is superb, operational security second to none, and the extensive usage of ‘living-off-the-land’ techniques enables them to easily bypass many security solutions they encounter. In particular, we identified advanced methods consistent with nation-state level capabilities including deliberate targeting and ‘access management’ tradecraft – both groups were constantly going back into the environment to change out their implants, modify persistent methods, move to new Command & Control channels and perform other tasks to try to stay ahead of being detected. Both adversaries engage in extensive political and economic espionage for the benefit of the government of the Russian Federation and are believed to be closely linked to the Russian government’s powerful and highly capable intelligence services.”

The hackers’ methods are so “consistent with nation-state level capabilities” that they “are believed to be closely linked” to Russian intelligence. But does this mean that they, in fact, connected? The report didn’t say. A few weeks later, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz admitted that proof was lacking when he told Bloomberg News: “We talk about having high confidence, but there’s no absolute in cyber security, and that’s one of the things that makes it so hard.”

An earlier report by a California cyber security firm known as FireEye was equally evasive. In 2014, it declared that the hackers show “evidence of long-standing, focused operations that indicate a government sponsor – specifically a government based in Moscow” – which in turn “suggests that [they] receives direct ongoing financial and other resources from a well-established organization, most likely a nation state government.”

Indicates, suggests, most likely – this was no more than speculation. When a hacker calling himself Guccifer 2.0 released another batch of Democratic Party documents a couple of days later, DirectThreat, yet another cyber-security firm, concluded that the intervention “most likely is a Russian denial and deception (D&D) effort” aimed at throwing investigators off the track.

The reason had to do with telltale traces that Guccifer 2.0 had left behind, specifically a document uploaded in a Russian-language format by someone calling himself “Felix Edmundovich,” an obvious reference to Felix E. Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka, as the Soviet political police were originally known.

For the Kremlin-done-it crowd, this was proof that Russian intelligence was involved. But this led to another objection: if the hackers were so super-sophisticated, how could they be guilty of such an elementary mistake?

Referring to two of Russia’s top intelligence agencies, Jeffrey Carr, a well-known cyber-security expert, was unable to restrain his sarcasm: “OK. Raise your hand if you think that a GRU or FSB officer would add Iron Felix’s name to the metadata of a stolen document before he released it to the world while pretending to be a Romanian hacker. Someone clearly had a wicked sense of humor.”

Sam Biddle, The Intercept’s formidable tech writer, was equally dismissive: “It’s very hard to buy the argument that the Democrats were hacked by one of the most sophisticated, diabolical foreign intelligence services in history, and that we know this because they screwed up over and over again.”

As Gregory Elich noted in an excellent roundup on Counterpunch, disguising the origin of a hack is trivial even for beginners. Referring to half-baked amateurs, James Scott, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology, pokes fun at the very idea of cyber-sleuths claiming to know where one originates:

“It’s common knowledge among even script kiddies that all one needs to do is compromise a system geolocated in Russia (ideally in a government office) and use it as a beachhead for attack so that indicators of compromise lead back to Russia. … Want to add another layer? Compromise a Chinese system, leap-frog onto a hacked Russian machine, and then run the attack from China to Russia to any country on the globe. Want to increase geopolitical tensions, distract the global news cycle, or cause a subtle, but exploitable shift in national positions? Hack a machine in North Korea and use it to hack the aforementioned machine in China, before compromising the Russian system and launching global attacks. This process is so common and simple that’s its virtually ‘Script Kiddie 101’ among malicious cyber upstarts.”

Government Ineptness

After the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper issued a report on Dec. 29 alluding to “malware” used in the DNC attack, Mark Maunder, CEO of Wordfence, Seattle-based makers of a popular computer-security program, joined with a colleague named Rob McMahon to try to track it down. Working through the night, they discovered that the malware was an early version of a publicly available program known as P.A.S. that had been developed in the Ukraine.

This was strange, they recounted, since “one might reasonably expect Russian intelligence operatives to develop their own tools or at least use current malicious tools from outside sources.”

Maunder and McMahon also examined 876 Internet Protocol addresses used by the hackers provided by the Department of Homeland Security and found that the largest number originated in the U.S., followed by Russia, the Netherlands, Germany, France, and China. Some 15 percent were TOR exit notes of unknown origin since they are designed to be anonymous.

“The IP addresses that DHS provided may have been used for an attack by a state actor like Russia,” Maunder and McMahon concluded. “But they don’t appear to provide any association with Russia. They are probably used by a wide range of other malicious actors….”

In other words, proof is nowhere to be found. The only certainty about the DNC hack is that certainty is unwarranted. CrowdStrike’s credibility meanwhile took a major hit after it published a report in December claiming that Russia had used the same malware to hack an Android app that Ukrainian artillery units used to target Russian-backed separatists, a feat that enabled separatists to turn tables on the Ukrainians by pinpointing their location instead.

As a result, CrowdStrike wrote, “Ukrainian artillery forces have lost over 50 percent of their weapons in the two years of conflict and over 80 percent of D-30 howitzers, the highest percentage of loss of any other artillery pieces in Ukraine’s arsenal.”

Unfortunately, the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies complained that the company had misused its data in coming up with such figures while the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense said that the hacking and resultant combat losses had never occurred at all. Yaroslav Sherstyuk, the Ukrainian military officer who developed the Android app, called the CrowdStrike report “delusional” in an angry Facebook post.

So when CrowdStrike’s findings were put to the test, they failed. Skepticism is therefore in order no less than during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq when the intelligence community lined up solidly behind reports that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction Iraq – and Clapper, at the time head of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, said that the Iraqi dictator had “unquestionably” spirited them over the Syrian border when no WMDs were found.

Democrats certainly have much to criticize. They could go after Trump for sabotaging the fight against global warming, for cutting everything from the National Endowment for the Humanities to the National Institute of Health to add more money to the Pentagon’s budget, for unleashing violence on immigrants, or for escalating U.S. military intervention in the Middle East. Instead, they’ve seized on Trump’s call for a rapprochement with Russia, one of the few semi-sensible things he said on the campaign trail. And the Democrats have made it the centerpiece of a hate-Putin campaign straight out of Orwell.

But if the story of a Kremlin hack of the DNC goes, then precious little of Russia-gate will remain beyond a dubious memo and a few innocuous meetings with the Russian ambassador. The more the Democrats push this latest Washington pseudo-scandal, the more they risk joining the GOP on the political trash heap. Trump could well end up as the last man standing amid the rubble.

Don’t get fooled again by bogus links, bots and pure bunk. Here’s how.

April 2, 2017

by Margaret Sullivan

The Washington Post

Roger Daltrey of the Who sang it with a full-throated scream in 1971: “We don’t get fooled again!”

And yet, we still do. Oh, do we ever.

Remember this one from the presidential campaign? The “news story” that spread the lie that Pope Francis had endorsed Donald Trump for president? It was shared more than a million times. Or recall the faked report that the leader of the Islamic State was urging American Muslims to vote for Hillary Clinton.

With the proliferation of hoaxes, conspiracy theories, doctored photos and lies that look like news, it’s inevitable: We’re all chumps sometimes.

For those who are tired of it, along comes the first International Fact-Checking Day — which arrived, appropriately, on Sunday, just after April Fools’ Day.

Think of it as a global counterpunch on behalf of truth.

“It’s not about being killjoys, shaking a finger at everyone, so we’re trying to do it with a sense of fun,” said Alexios Mantzarlis, the 28-year-old director of the International Fact-Checking Network, based at the Poynter Institute in Florida.

“We really wanted to get the public involved in doing the type of fact-checking that journalists do,” said Jane Elizabeth, senior manager at Virginia-based American Press Institute, a partner in the effort.

Among the offerings is a trivia quiz designed for pub-goers.

And there’s a fact-checking lesson plan that, at last count, would expose more than 20,000 students worldwide to the notion of debunking a fake story. It’s available in English and 11 languages, including Russian, French and Spanish, with more to come.

“There is a generation of digital natives who nevertheless are quite digitally naive,” Mantzarlis notes.

Maybe most useful of all: Six “how-to” guides from fact-checking pros around the world.

Combine those with The Washington Post’s guide, published last fall, and you’ll be much better-armed for the endless fight ahead.

Here’s a sampling of the experts’ advice:

Read beyond the headline before sharing. It sounds almost too basic, but huge numbers of people never get past the headline before sending it to others. If they did, they might find out just how dubious its claims are, or at least have cause to wonder. The Post’s Glenn Kessler cites research saying that 59 percent of links shared on social media have never actually been clicked.

Research the name of the supposed news site. As Claire Wardle of First Draft, a nonprofit organization devoted to trust and credibility issues, writes in her “How to Spot a Fake News Site in 10 Steps”: Such sites “often have names that sound realistic, but have already been flagged by other watchdogs as fictitious. By searching for the name, you might find that someone has already discovered that that page is not worth your time.” (A notorious example is the other ABC News, which is decidedly not the major broadcast network.)

Read the story comments. Jack Werner, a Swedish journalist and founder of a fact-checking organization, writes: “Often, some unbearable know-it-all (like myself) will have questioned the story before you and done some research. This tends to show up in the comments, so dig around.”

On Twitter, look at the number of the source’s previous posts. Aimee Rinehart, also of First Draft, observes: “A social media handle with fewer than 100 posts may be a lurker — someone who only reads posts and does not engage with others — or it might be a new account created in response to a trending news story. Conversely, if the handle has more than 100,000 posts, it could be a bot handle that posts hundreds of links to hyperbolic news stories every hour.” And, of course, look for a “verified” icon, too.

Vary your news diet. Expose yourself to points of view other than your own. And, as Kessler puts it: “Social science research indicates that people are most receptive to information that confirms their own beliefs. So people must constantly challenge themselves and remain skeptical of claims and assertions made by politicians and interest groups, especially if it sounds too good to be true.”

Look for “about” or “contact us” information. If it doesn’t exist on the originating site, or looks suspicious in any way, that’s a danger sign.

Observe other markers of established news sites. Wardle urges skepticism if a site doesn’t have: 1) A date stamp that tells you when the story was published. 2) A byline, which allows you to check on what else the journalist has written. 3) Hyperlinked sources. Wardle: “If there are none, you should be wary because journalists often include links to previous reporting.” If there are links, see where they go.

Of course, most news consumers who aren’t journalists themselves may not have the time or inclination for most of these measures.

In that case, something even simpler may suffice: Read widely, and with skepticism, and share a whole lot less. Every day of the year.

Huge ‘potentially hazardous’ asteroid hurtling towards Earth

April 3, 2017

RT

A huge 1km-wide asteroid is hurtling towards Earth, prompting astronomers to label it “potentially hazardous”. But don’t pack for Mars just yet – the giant space rock, ‘2014 JO25’, is expected to pass by our planet safely.

According to NASA the encounter on April 19 will be the closest the asteroid comes to Earth in 400 years, and no projected future encounters will be as close for at least another 480 years.

However, another fly-by is expected in 2091 and the space rock also makes regular close approaches to Mercury and Venus.

An asteroid of this size won’t have as close an encounter with Earth for more than 10 years. “The next known flyby by an object with a comparable or larger diameter will occur when 800-meter-diameter asteroid ‘1999 AN10’ approaches within one lunar distance in August 2027,” NASA said.

The asteroid was discovered by the Mt. Lemmon Survey in May 2014. Astronomers describe it as a “bright object” and believe it will be among the best targets for radar observations this year.

‘2014 JO25’ has been designated as a potentially hazardous asteroid (PHA) by the Minor Planet Center. PHA’s are asteroids larger than 100 meters that can come closer to Earth than 7,495,839km (about 4,658,000 miles), which is equal to 19.5 ‘Lunar distances’.

Despite 2014 JO25’s designation as a PHA, projections predict it will pass by Earth at a safe distance of about 1.8 million km (4.57 lunar distances).

Two other big asteroids, ‘2003 BD44’ and ‘1999 CU3’, which are both nearly 2km wide, will also pass by our planet shortly, however they won’t come as close as 2014.

Astrowatch report 1,781 PHAs were detected on Sunday, however – happily – none of them is on a projected collision course with Earth

Greenland’s ‘land ice melt’ likely to drive up global sea levels

Surface melting of the Greenland ice sheet will add more to global sea levels than the island’s glaciers

by Alex Kirby

Climate News Network

Greenland’s contribution to sea-level rise between now and 2200 is likely to be relatively modest, scientists say. But they couple this with a warning against complacency over the possible consequences of even a fairly small rise.

They say the Greenland ice sheet is expected to increase its contribution to higher sea levels over the next two centuries. But there will be significant changes in the way the island loses ice as glaciers retreat.

Their findings, published in the Journal of Glaciology (Sensitivity of Greenland ice sheet projections to model formulations, by Dr Heiko Goelzer et al), suggest that ice melting from the land surface will be the dominant way of raising sea levels. Outlet glaciers, which form an ice shelf once they reach the sea and then discharge into it, are expected to play a smaller part.

The Greenland ice sheet contains enough ice to cause global sea levels to rise by more than seven metres, if it were ever to melt completely.

Changes in its total mass happen mainly because of fluctuations in melting and snowfall on its surface, and changes to the number of icebergs released from the glaciers.

Glaciers’ smaller role

Researchers from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel,, funded by Ice2sea, a European Union project, wanted to know how both surface melting and iceberg formation will evolve and affect one another.

They used a computer model which projects future ice sheet evolution with high accuracy, and found a way to generalise earlier projections about just four of Greenland’s outlet glaciers.

This let them apply the earlier findings to all calving glaciers around the Greenland ice sheet. Their results indicate a total sea-level contribution from the sheet for an average warming scenario after 100 and 200 years of 7 and 21 cm respectively.

But the balance between the two processes, melting and calving, will change considerably, so that icebergs may account for only between 6% and 18% of the total sea-level contribution after 200 years.

This matters, because variations in outlet glacier dynamics have often been suspected of being able to cause very large contributions to sea-level rise.

The glaciers will be less important in future because of their retreat back onto land, and because strongly increasing surface melting, caused by global warming, will remove ice before it can reach the sea edge.

“Sea-level rise is not about the waves chasing us up the beach. It’s about those storm and flood return periods”

Ice2sea coordinator Professor David Vaughan, of the British Antarctic Survey, said: “This scenario is no reason to be complacent. The reason the significance of calving glaciers reduces compared to surface melting is that so much ice will be lost in coming decades that many glaciers currently sitting in fjords will retreat inland to where they are no longer affected by warming seas around Greenland.”

Professor Vaughan told the Climate News Network: “The numbers we’ve come up with are roughly comparable to those the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change presented in its 2007 report.

“Other researchers have suggested much higher possibilities, based on projections of past changes. The big step forward here is that our work is tied to a specific, rigorous approach to modelling.

“But we can’t afford complacency. Peripheral glaciers – those not directly connected to the ice sheet – and thermal expansion of sea water could easily add up to global sea-level rise of 50 cms by 2100.

“What’s important there is not so much the rise itself, but the way it alters the return period of big storms and floods.

“If you had a 50 cm rise in the Thames estuary, downstream from London, then a storm you’d normally expect once in a thousand years could arrive every century. A rise in sea level to nearer a metre would mean you could expect that 1,000-year storm once every ten years.

“Sea-level rise is not about the waves chasing us up the beach. It’s about those storm and flood return periods. And what could happen to the Thames is the same story for many European coastlines.”

The hidden upsides of revenge

Revenge serves a very useful purpose – even the idea of seeking it gives us pleasure. Why is this?

April 3, 2017

by Melissa Hogenboom

BBC News

A tale of revenge is always bittersweet. Take the sack of Troy, as depicted in Homer’s epic poem The Iliad. When Paris steals away Helen, her husband King Menelaus cannot bear the injustice and seeks to attack her seducer. He brings an entire army to Troy, waging a lengthy war that kills thousands.

The theme of revenge spirals through the entire narrative. When Achilles’ best friend and cousin Patroklus is killed, he too seeks a reckless and bloody revenge.

Revenge has been part of human behaviour for almost as long as we have existed on Earth. Literature has used it throughout history, from Greek tragedies such as Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy – where Orestes wants to murder his mother to avenge his father – to Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Many of us have no doubt imagined vengeance against those who have wronged us, or even lashed out at them. In the moment, it can certainly feel cathartic to do so. But what motivates us to seek revenge in the first place? Researchers are gradually getting some answers, and they are finding that revenge has some unexpected upsides.

Revenge is a powerful emotional trigger that mobilises people into action. “It’s this very pervasive experience in human lives, people from every society understand the idea of getting angry and wanting to hurt someone who has harmed you,” says evolutionary psychologist Michael McCullough, of the University of Miami, who has spent over a decade studying revenge and forgiveness.

It drives crime – up to 20% of homicides and 60% of school shootings are linked to revenge, studies show. And it shapes politics too. Donald Trump’s presidential victory, for instance, came as a result of “revenge of working-class whites… who felt abandoned by a rapidly globalising economy,” according to an article in the Washington Post. The same sentiment is echoed by many other outlets.

While the topic of aggression is well-studied – its triggers include alcohol, being insulted and narcissistic personality traits – revenge is lesser understood. It is not easy to untangle from violent behaviour, making it a difficult topic to study. David Chester of Virginia Commonwealth University was initially studying aggression but quickly realised that there is often a lot more going on before a violent interaction. He refers to the emotions involved as the “psychological middlemen” –  the thoughts and feelings that come between a provocation and an aggressive outcome. “I was curious, how do you take something like [receiving] an insult and how do you go from that to an aggressive response.” The key, he believes, lies in the desire to retaliate. “So by the nature of trying to understand aggression I started studying revenge.”

He set out to uncover more about what causes it. First he, along with his colleague Nathan DeWall of the University of Kentucky, discovered that a person who is insulted or socially rejected feels an emotional pain. The area in the brain associated with pain was most active in participants who went on to react with an aggressive response after feeling rejected. “It’s tapping into an ancient evolved tendency to respond to threats and harm with aggressive retaliation,” says Chester.

In a follow-up study he was surprised to find that emotional pain was intricately yoked with pleasure. That is, while rejection initially feels painful, it can quickly be masked by pleasure when presented with the opportunity to get revenge – it even activates the brain’s known reward circuit, the nucleus accumbens. People who are provoked behave aggressively precisely because it can be “hedonically rewarding”, Chester found. Revenge it seems really can be sweet.

The link between aggression and pleasure itself is not new. The “father of psychology” Sigmund Freud was well aware that it could feel cathartic to behave aggressively, but the idea that revenge provides its own special form of pleasure has only become apparent recently.

To understand this further, Chester and DeWall set up a series of experiments, published in the March 2017 journal of Personality and Social Psychology, where the participants were made to feel rejected by being purposely left out of a computerised ball tossing game. All participants were then allowed to put pins in a virtual voodoo doll. Those in the rejected camp stabbed their doll with significantly more pins. This rejection test was first done remotely online and later replicated with different participants brought into the lab. In the lab version, rather than a voodoo doll, participants acted out their “revenge” by blasting a prolonged, unpleasantly loud noise to their opponents (who were computers, not real people, which the participants were not aware of). Again, those that felt most rejected subjected their rivals to longer noise blasts.

Lastly, to understand the role of emotion in the desire to seek revenge, Chester and DeWall gave participants what they believed was a mood-inhibiting drug (it was in fact only a harmless vitamin tablet). Still, the placebo effect was so strong that the participants who took the “drug” didn’t bother to retaliate against the people who rejected them – whereas those that were not given the placebo acted far more aggressively. The placebo group, it seems, did not seek revenge because they believed they would feel no pleasure from doing so.

Taking these results together the team came to a startling conclusion. Not only can revenge give people pleasure, but people seek it precisely because of the anticipation it will do so. “It’s about the experience of regulating emotions,” says Chester. And it worked. After having the opportunity to get revenge, the rejected individuals scored the same on mood tests as those who had not been rejected.

This finding, however, does need to be taken with a necessary pinch of salt. There are currently no long-term follow up studies on how revenge feels days or weeks after the act. Preliminary – as yet unpublished results – show that revenge-seekers only get a momentary feeling of pleasure, Chester found. “Just like a lot of things, it feels good in the moment. That begins a cycle and it starts to look like an addiction… then afterwards you feel worse than when you started,” he explains.

And that might help explain why those who seek the high of revenge fail to anticipate disastrous personal consequences. The footballer Zinedine Zidane, for instance, will forever be remembered for head-butting Marco Matterazzi in the 2006 World Cup. Along a similar vein, Richard Nixon is well-known for his list of foes, the goal being to “screw his political enemies”. Some of his dirty tricks later led to his forced resignation.

The question then becomes, why has this seemingly destructive behaviour persisted in our evolution if it can cause us so much trouble?

The answer is that far from an evolutionary mistake, revenge serves a very useful purpose. Michael McCullough puts it this way: although people might say seeking revenge “is really bad for you” – that it might ruin your relationships, for example – the fact that it exists at all is a very good thing. Its main goal is to work as deterrent, which in turn has clear advantages for our survival. Consider prison or gang culture, where if you meddle with the wrong person, revenge attacks are a sure consequence. “If you have a reputation for someone who is going to seek retribution, people are not going to mess with you or take advantage,” says Chester. In Leonardo DiCaprio’s Oscar-winning performance in The Revenant, so powerful is his desire for revenge that it keeps him alive. With broken bones and open wounds, he drags himself through a hostile and dangerous terrain to avenge his son’s killer.

Even the threat of revenge might deter an attack, says McCullough. “The individual who responds to that harm is going to do better than the individual who takes the slap on the cheek and lets the bad guy have his way.” Just like hunger, he considers it a primal urge that needs to be itched. Only then can the avenger move on “because that goal has been fulfilled”, in a similar way that we only stop feeling hungry after we have satiated our appetite.

So if a main purpose of revenge is about deterring harm, it is a very good thing indeed. That is not to say, says McCullough, that we should encourage people to indulge in seeking revenge. “We can both appreciate what it’s for, understand it’s not the product of afflicted minds, and also have an interest in helping people curtail their desire for revenge,” he says.

It might also be comforting to know that not everyone acts out on their desire to seek revenge. One 2006 study found that men get more pleasure from the idea of revenge. Male participants were found to have more activity in the reward circuit of the brain than women when they saw cheating opponents receive an electric shock. In another 2008 study, Ozlem Ayduk of the University of California, Berkeley and colleagues, found that those with specific personality types were more likely to act violently after rejection. She found that certain individuals had higher levels of “rejection sensitivity” – who were more likely to expect rejection based on past experiences.

These individuals were also found to be more neurotic and to show anxiety and depression. “They have this tendency to see rejection even where it doesn’t exist. Rejection is an existential threat, so that expectation [of rejection] actually prepares – both mentally and physiologically – the person to defend themselves,” says Ayduk. Retaliatory aggression for these individuals was therefore a “knee-jerk” reaction to feeling rejected.

It is important to note that not everyone who has the “rejection sensitive profile” has violent tendencies. Some deal with their feelings of rejection in other ways, such as self-harm. “Somehow this makes people feel that they are in control of something. Aggression is only one of the responses,” says Ayduk.

As well as that, those who are more prone to retaliatory aggression can learn ways to overcome their outbursts, in a similar way that an addict can learn to control his or her urges with various psychological tactics. When Chester and DeWall peered into individuals’ brains during one of their revenge studies, they found that those who were able to restrain themselves from acting out showed brain activation in the lateral pre-frontal cortex, an area known to be important for reasoning and inhibiting impulsive actions. “So we’re not doomed to succumb to our revengeful impulses. We have evolved this very sophisticated pre-frontal cortex that can inhibit impulsive behaviour and guide it to more social outcomes. There is hope whether we’re aware of it or not.”

So next time you are plotting revenge against someone who has wronged you, know that the anticipation of revenge may feel good in the moment, but don’t expect these hidden “upsides” to last for long. Rather, understand that this feeling is there for a very good reason, and it could well have protected many of your ancient ancestors from being taken advantage of.

 

 

 

 

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