(task) The Military’s Mission to Fight Ebola Might Be Dangerous But it Won’t Be Black Hawk Down - The Daily Beast

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TECH + HEALTH 09.19.14
The Military’s Mission to Fight Ebola Might Be Dangerous But it Won’t Be Black Hawk Down
A glimpse into the dangerous job of U.S. troops going to fight the Ebola outbreak in Africa from a former soldier with experience in military disaster relief operations.
This week, the White House announced its intentions to deploy 3,000 troops and spend about $500 million to combat the worsening Ebola epidemic in Liberia. The news comes amid reports that the suspected infection rate and death toll in that country has nearly doubled in the past month, making it the worst Ebola outbreak in history, with more people killed by the disease than in all other previous cases combined. As American troops get ready to head over, I'd like to offer some insight into what the military’s operation might look like based on my experience deployed on a similar mission.

The upcoming troop deployment will mark the largest single-mission deployment of US forces to Africa since 1992-3’s Operation Restore Hope. In that case the military was sent as part of an international relief operation in Somalia that eventually saw U.S. forces combatting Somali militants in the streets of Mogadishu, a battle famously depicted in the movie Black Hawk Down. Despite misgivings from critics of U.S. foreign policy in Africa, this mission in Liberia is likely to look less like Mogadishu 1993 and more like the U.S. military’s response to the 2010 Haiti earthquake. It may be military-led, but the operation will likely integrate with ongoing efforts from NGOs and the Liberian government.

In 2010-11, I was assigned to the U.S. military task force based in Comayagua, Honduras, that conducted disaster relief and humanitarian assistance missions throughout Central America. We ran medical assistance training missions with local forces on a monthly basis, and our offices contained hundreds of contact cards for each country: NGOs, USAID representatives, local government, host-nation military leaders, and other organizations that played a role in disaster relief.

These medical missions were practice runs for the real thing. If the U.S. ambassador to an affected country made an official request for disaster relief, the process began in earnest: setting up flight routes, identifying landing zones, palletizing equipment, packing aircraft, identifying security forces and staging everyone on the airfield’s flight line. In Liberia’s case, a force of 3,000 troops will likely include many physicians and nurses, additional medical professionals, and equipment used to support hospital operations. It will also include shipping container handlers, logistical professionals, field sanitation personnel—the unlucky and wholly essential troops who deal with the porto-johns and medical waste—and a security force, the service members who guard the doctors and nurses while they work.

Organizations like Doctors Without Borders operate in a similar way, deploying a “hospital in a box” when they hit the ground in a disaster area. Once assembled, relief organizations create a secure area with controlled entry and exit points. They set up an area for patient triage and identification to help them prioritize. That way they can treat the sickest patients immediately but still hand out preventive medical information to the healthy people who invariably show up for the valuable free visit with a doctor. An article in The New York Times gives a detailed rundown of the process. But for all the undeniable good that those facilities in Monrovia have done, they are completely overwhelmed.

For better or worse—and there are vocal arguments against the re-purposing of military forces as aid providers—the U.S. military can scale up relief operations very quickly, in ways other organizations can’t match. After the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln provided purified water from its on-board desalinization plant and delivered more than 2 million pounds of food and over 700,000 pounds of medical supplies.

One obvious difference between the tsunami mission and the upcoming Ebola deployment is the danger of contamination and the risk of exposing troops to the deadly disease. But the military can mitigate the risks simply by virtue of its enormous logistical reach. This operation will likely include offshore medical vessels with quarantine capabilities, as well as standby aircraft that can immediately transport critical cases to facilities in Western Europe or beyond.

For better or worse—and there are vocal arguments against the re-purposing of military forces as aid providers—the U.S. military can scale up relief operations very quickly.
Although similar outbreaks have taken place in neighboring Guinea and Sierra Leone, the U.S. has chosen to focus its resources on Liberia. This decision likely draws from two factors: first, Liberia is faring the worst of all affected nations, and second, Liberia has a significant recent history of military cooperation with the United States.

In fact, it is entirely possible that the Liberian military will handle a large amount of the security requirements in this mission. The DoD has spent over $300 million in the past decade to train and equip Liberia’s armed forces, which it effectively created from scratch (using defense contractors and, later, uniformed advisers) in the aftermath of the 2003 Liberian civil war.

Building on its ongoing military mentorship program with the U.S., in 2006, Liberia was the sole African country to volunteer its soil for the newly created United States Africa Command. Owing to either logistical advantages or geopolitical concerns, the DoD instead opted to base AFRICOM at Kelley Barracks, a small facility in the German state of Baden-Württemberg.

There are serious problems with using the military as a stopgap in emergencies but this type of humanitarian deployment has a precedent in recent decades. It is quite frankly the definition of militarized aid, but the aid is real—and so are the victims who need it.

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POLITICS 09.19.14
The Right’s War on Neil deGrasse Tyson
The Cosmos host is widely despised by conservatives. Do they have a point, or are their complaints just anti-intellectualism run amok?
Celebrity astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has long been a despised figure among conservatives—and now the right is accusing him of being a “fabulist” and making up quotes.

The conservative website The Federalist ran a story last week saying Tyson had used a nonexistent newspaper headline and a fake quote from a member of Congress in a presentation. Tyson had been trying to argue that journalists and politicians don’t understand data.

In another post, the website’s Sean Davis pointed out inconsistencies in a story that Tyson has told at varying points about jury duty. A third post by Davis then took apart an anecdote Tyson told about George W. Bush, showing it to be false.

“The more I dug into it, the more I found a history of fabrication—to make points that he didn’t need fabrication to make,” Davis told The Daily Beast. “As someone who writes and publishes for a living, I take exception to people who go out and make money based on fabrication.”

Conservatives were quick to jump on the charges: websites like Twitchy and FrontPage Mag soon joined the anti-Tyson charge. Meanwhile, PJ Media’s Ed Driscoll found that Tyson repeated a myth about NASA developing a million-dollar space pen while the Soviets used a pencil.

Tyson hasn’t directly responded to the charges of inaccuracy, and his agent had no comment for this story. Aubrey Miller, a spokeswoman with the Hayden Planetarium, of which Tyson is the head, pointed to a short post he made in the comments section of The Federalist’s original story.

“[T]one and flavor and context and intent are all key elements to any message I convey—all missing to anyone who was not present at the time,” he wrote.

But why do conservatives dislike Tyson so much to begin with?

The answers thus far have been unsatisfying. Amanda Marcotte, a Beast contributor, blamed the right’s “anti-intellectual paranoia” in a story for Alternet, while a piece in the L.A. Times blamed political ignorance. One progressive blog said racism was to blame.

Charles C.W. Cooke laid out the right-wing case against Tyson this year in the conservative movement’s flagship magazine, the National Review. It was a takedown of nerds—not of intelligence or wonkiness itself, but of the condescension of modern nerd-dom, and the bandwagon nerds who like Tyson not primarily because they like science, but because they like the intellectual superiority they think liking Tyson signifies.

Perhaps the philosophical difference between left and right on the nature of knowledge is key to understanding the disdain for Tyson.

“It is to me the kind of attention Sarah Palin and Ron Paul receives. Neil deGrasse Tyson attracts the same sort of attention—you just can’t criticize him.”
“Conservatives tend to take the view that you can’t plan too much for a society, you can’t know enough to make central planning worthwhile. That’s not a great concern on the left,” Cooke told the Beast. “The conflation of science and politics is a generally left-wing phenomenon, because the left thinks you can answer these questions and make plans from the center, which the right doesn’t.”

Cooke, himself an atheist, said that Tyson had also come to represent among the right the “annoying” Bill Maher-style atheists who frequent Internet posting hubs like Reddit.

“I’m just irritated by that movement,” Cooke said. “It’s divisive. There’s a tendency among the Reddit atheists of the world to consider everyone who isn’t of their particular political or religious views … as being somehow dumb.”

Daniel Greenfield, who wrote a critical piece on Tyson in Frontpage Mag, said he didn’t so much dislike the scientist as much as what he has come to represent.

“People on the right have the sense that there’s something cultish about [Tyson], that his popularity is based on the image of being seen to like him,” said Greenfield. “It’s supposed to be about the ideas, when you have this kind of hero worship, people are refusing to discuss the merits of [The Federalist’s report]. It becomes unreasoning, which is the opposite of science.”

The Internet reaction to The Federalist’s articles has been deeply negative, senior editor Mollie Hemingway said, and overwhelmingly dismissive of its conclusions.

“The reaction that Sean Davis has been gotten… it’s cult-like. It is to me the kind of attention Sarah Palin and Ron Paul receives. Neil deGrasse Tyson attracts the same sort of attention—you just can’t criticize him,” Cooke said.

The conservative blogosphere’s latest allegations aren’t deeply damning, and certainly don’t discredit a lifetime’s worth of work in science and education. But Tyson hasn’t been eager to discuss the topic or correct his mistakes.

The fact that the casual anecdotes he makes are frequently wrong, Davis said, is disconcerting—especially coming from a man whose work is based on facts and evidence.

“I think it’s more indicting that he’s making stuff up to prove minor, tangential things,” Davis said.

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THE NEW ALPHAS 08.26.14
The 'Mayor of the Internet' Fights the Good Fight
Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian is all over the place, working across technology, politics, and business. But the more he gets involved in, the better it is for all of us.

Alexis Ohanian’s mind is in a thousand places.

The co-founder of Reddit, one of the Internet’s most ubiquitous websites, has expanded his focus in recent years to political protests, assisting startup companies, and fighting for unrestricted access to information.

Ohanian and his friend Steve Huffman founded Reddit, the wildly popular social news and community website, in 2005. Fresh out of college, Ohanian spent tireless nights perfecting the site, which relies on community moderators to post and filter content.

Shortly thereafter, Ohanian founded Breadpig, a site that assists creators with crowdfunding, sponsorships, and business strategy. Then came Hipmunk, a travel search website, for which Ohanian is now an adviser. And if launching those online ventures were not enough, the restless 31-year-old now works with infamous startup venture firm Y Combinator. He serves as an ambassador, meeting with applicants to the program as well as young entrepreneurial founders.

The innovation Ohanian sees in new entrepreneurs seems to excite him most. Having just returned from Y Combinator’s Demo Days, during which a batch of startups are able to present their businesses and products, Ohanian emphasizes the importance social media plays in delivering viable ideas to the masses. And one of those tools in this new arsenal is, in fact, Reddit.

“I think the biggest thing is that a lot of these founders—this is now dating myself, Reddit’s going to be 9 years old—a lot of these founders, they tend to be in their early to mid-20s, they grew up using it,” the Brooklynite says from a noisy airport, slightly chuckling as he discusses this proverbial passing of the torch. One of his favorite recent projects is Beacon, a crowdfunded journalism project that has raised over $4,000 to send independent journalists to report in Ferguson, Missouri.

“Unlike some its predecessors, it’s based around ongoing or recurring revenue for journalism,” Ohanian says of Beacon, which he recently backed. “It’s less about individual projects and more about sustaining long-term investigative journalism. A bunch of us were able to chip in and were able to get—I think within a day and a half—a journalist down to Ferguson. It’s such an exciting time because we’ve seen technology change the way we do reporting.”

“This is a long-term war,” Ohanian says. “But I see it as lots of small victories. Getting 1.1 million people to comment on the FCC decision with regard to broadband—that’s a win.”
He’s careful to make the distinction between journalism and reporting, as Ohanian believes that smartphone technology has provided a level playing field to report information as it happens. But simultaneously, as indicated by his support for Beacon, journalism is still incredibly valuable to him.

Ohanian’s passion extends to political activism too, as he remains one of the most ardent supporters of a free and open Internet. In 2011, Ohanian voiced his dissent against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and helped lead a grassroots movement that blocked the bill from becoming law. But for him, the fight for a free Internet is far from over.

“It is going to be ongoing, that is for sure. This not going to end anytime soon. This is a long-term war,” Ohanian says. “But I see it as lots of small victories. Getting 1.1 million people to comment on the FCC decision with regard to broadband—that’s a win.”

Ohanian, like many fighting for net neutrality, wants to see the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) reclassify Internet Service Providers (ISPs) as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934. This would help keep these ISPs from choosing which content providers get to use a so-called “Internet fast lane” to provide consumers with desired information in a process called paid prioritization. Simply put, it helps even the playing field for everyone using the Internet. Because of Ohanian’s success as an online innovator, he desperately wants a thorough democratization of information and content for those following in his footsteps.

Perhaps the one topic where Ohanian is not hesitant to showcase biases is sports. He loves the Brooklyn Nets, the NBA franchise that recently moved from New Jersey, and the NFL’s Washington Redskins. Ohanian credits this peculiar combo to his upbringing in Maryland and his dad’s interest in the team from the nation’s capital.

“My dad is really into football, so he indoctrinated me as a kid,” Ohanian says. “Then I moved back to Brooklyn, and decided ‘You know what, I guess they got a new basketball team from Jersey, I might as well support both.’” He hopes that the Nets can retain some young players to build the franchise for the future, and he can’t wait to boo LeBron James when the Cleveland Cavaliers come to the borough and play.

Ohanian’s mind flits from topic to topic with childlike wonderment and glee, waxing poetic on basketball lineups and dishing specifics on political protections for Internet usage. He is, admittedly, a bit ADD about his areas of interest, his brain working almost like the Internet does, leaping from page to page with the simplest click. It’s for that very reason that Ohanian doesn’t know what’s next for him. But he’s totally cool with that.

“My crystal ball is not good enough to actually tell me what is going to be the particular thing and I’m pretty agnostic. If it involves technology and it seems cool and I love the founders, I’m probably going to get excited by it,” Ohanian says.

And for those founders, he has a little bit of advice: “Make something people want.”

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Nico Hines
09.19.14
The Political Fallout From Scotland's "No" Vote
Nico Hines joins Ronan Farrow Daily to discuss the long-term political implications of Scotland's independence vote, and their decision to stay in the U.K.
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Christopher Furlong/Getty

Nico Hines
WORLD NEWS 09.18.14
Scotland Says Resounding ‘No’ to Independence
Record numbers of Scottish voters shot down an audacious bid to break their 300-year union with the United Kingdom.
EDINBURGH, Scotland — The silent majority of Scots hailing from the Highlands, the islands, and the industrial heartlands rose up in record numbers on Thursday to put an end to the brash and noisy campaign for Scottish independence.

To walk through virtually any Scottish town this week was to be confronted by an apparently unassailable army of people voting Yes to an independent Scotland. Clad in kilts, blue-and-white T-shirts and flags, they out-shouted and, in some cases, shouted down their opponents.

When opinion polls suggested the No campaign had the upper hand in the referendum, the Scottish National Party insisted that the pollsters had failed to identify the coming grassroots revolution. Inside the voting booths this week, there was a very different revolution underway. The record turnout of 84 percent, over 90 percent in some districts, was made up of people who chose actions over words. Gordon Brown, the former prime minister, had foretold of this awakening during the greatest speech of his life, which was delivered on the eve of the poll. "Hold your head high,” he said. “The silent majority is no longer silent.”

Brown’s hometown of Fife was the district that officially delivered a heavy victory for the No campaign that was announced soon after 6 a.m. local time Friday. By then, the Yes campaigners had largely fallen silent themselves.

Outside the Scottish parliament building in Edinburgh, where thousands had hoped to celebrate independence, a predawn drizzle was falling on the remaining 100 or so Yes campaigners who gave a stirring rendition of the national anthem accompanied by the mournful wail of the bagpipes.

The piper, Chris Davidson, insisted that the fight would go until contemporary Scots could emulate Robert the Bruce and William Wallace by ending the political union with England. “There will always be independence,” he said. “There was a No vote today, but one day there will be a Yes vote.”

Like the Republicans who were convinced the 2012 opinion polls were “skewed” in favor of Obama, great swaths of Scottish independence campaigners were certain they were headed for victory no matter what the pollsters had said.
Four hundred miles south, David Cameron was breathing a sigh of relief and preparing to make his own speech on the steps of No. 10 Downing Street. In a desperate last-ditch concession to tempt the Scots into rejecting independence, the prime minister had offered a package of additional powers that would be granted to the Scottish parliament in the next year.

The unexpected 10-point margin of victory, by 55 to 45, will allow Cameron’s critics, mostly in his own party, to claim that he was fooled into giving up sovereignty for no reason. Having committed to allow the Scots greater control of tax and spending, Cameron had little choice but to offer greater devolved powers to the rest of the U.K.

In the act of saving the union, the prime minister has been forced to completely redraft it.

On the international stage, Cameron’s new domestic problems will attract little attention. More importantly, he has frustrated other separatists and those who would foment separatist movements, like China and Russia.

"Now the debate has been settled for a generation. No dispute, no re-runs," Cameron said.

The dream of an independent Scotland, which had looked impossible just two and half years ago, will slip back into the realm of historians and fantasists for decades.

During a dramatic late surge, there was a moment when separation looked a likely scenario. Indeed, to members of the Yes campaign in the final days, victory was a foregone conclusion. Like the Republicans who were convinced that the 2012 opinion polls were “skewed” in favor of President Obama, great swaths of Scottish independence campaigners were certain they were headed for victory no matter what the pollsters had said.

Polling day followed the same pattern as much of the campaign, Scotland’s town squares were filled with enthusiastic Yes voters, chanting and cheering. In Glasgow, as many as 10 Yes badges, T-shirts and posters were on show for every piece of No merchandise.

RELATED: Scotland Votes on Independence (PHOTOS)

Luke MacGregor/Reuters
Some No supporters admitted that they were nervous to be seen questioning Scotland’s ability to govern itself. For certain sections of the independence movement, their opponents were little more than traitors.

In George Square in Glasgow city center, at least two furious confrontations had erupted before lunch. In the end, Scotland’s biggest city voted for independence but turnout was not high enough to make up the shortfall across the rest of the country.

Speaking once the majority of the results were in, Alex Salmond, the First Minister, was still trying to claim that the size of his vote might confer some kind of legitimacy upon the Scottish National Party.

"I think all of us in this campaign will say that 45 percent, that 1.6 million votes, is a substantial vote for Scottish independence and the future of this country,” he said, before raising the specter of another referendum. “Scotland has by a majority decided not, at this stage, to become an independent country.”

Some of his supporters seemed to take the news with more grace. Dylan McDonald, 17, whose face was painted blue and white, said the nation had spoken. “A lot of people are fearful of what would have happened and I can respect that—they have concerns about their families and job security,” he said.

He shrugged his shoulders, which were cloaked in a large Scottish flag, and headed back to the pub.
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