Month: October 2018

Here’s the sort of story that should never happen, especially in a country that prides itself on its humanity and openness to newcomers.

In 2013, Army Lt. Col. Patrick Schreiber and his wife put off officially adopting their teenaged daughter, Hyebin, who was born in the Republic of Korea. The reason? He was about to deploy to Afghanistan for a year. When he returned, they put through the paperwork, adopted her, and then started working on her citizenship. But Hyebin had turned 17 in the interim, which is a problem:

The U.S. immigration law cutoff for a foreign-born adopted child to become a naturalized citizen is 16, and on Friday a U.S. District Court in Kansas ruled in favor of U.S. Customs and Immigration Services that there would not be an exception in Hyebin’s case. She is allowed to complete her degree in chemical engineering at the University of Kansas, which she will do next year. Then she must return to Korea, Schreiber said Monday.

Here is Schreiber’s backstory:

Schreiber served in the military for 27 years, meeting his wife Soo Jin while he was serving as a tank company executive officer and in other positions in Korea with 1st Battalion, 72nd Armor Regiment in the late 1990s. Hyebin was Soo Jin’s niece, and when Hyebin’s home life became too difficult, Schreiber and his wife took her in as their own daughter.

During his military career, Schreiber jumped with the 82nd Airborne Division into Panama during Operation Just Cause, served in Desert Shield and Desert Storm, deployed to Iraq from 2005 to 2006 and then again from 2007 to 2008. He was sent to Afghanistan from 2010 to 2011 and then again from 2013 to 2014. He retired in 2015 and still works for DoD as a contractor.

Schreiber and his wife are filing an appeal, but he says that if they lose the case, the whole family will move to Korea. “As I tell my daughter, life isn’t fair,” Schreiber told Military Times, where the above quotes are taken from. “The main thing is to be resilient.”

That sort of stoicism is perhaps to be expected from a career military man, but the situation is nuts. Life being unfair is getting cancer in your teens, or struck by lightning, or something like that. This is a matter of policy which is eminently addressable and fixable, as are so many problems in contemporary America (think of education, drug policy, criminal justice, and other areas where bad outcomes are baked into a system that can be reformed).

Although Donald Trump, his administration, and the Republican Party are openly hostile to legal immigration, one hopes that these particular circumstances might breach the wall around their hearts and cause them to rethink not just this case, but others as well.

Immigration policy in the United States has a long and tendentious history shot through with unapologetic racism, which makes it particularly difficult to discuss with any sense of decorum or even basic reality. Trump was barely five minutes into the announcement that he was seeking the presidency when he launched into a reality-challenged attack on Mexicans, as you may recall. Back in the 1920s, “even some of the people fighting racist immigration and citizenship laws were racist.” Attempting to get around a ban on immigration for Asian Indians, Bhagat Singh Thind argued in front of the Supreme Court that not only was he a “high caste aryan,” but that he was as disgusted by “the aboriginal Indian Mongoloid…as the American regards the Negro” and would never have sex with either (he lost his case, which led to the revocation of citizenship to other Asian Indians).

Ironically, the overtly nativist tone taken by Trump administration members, Republican members of Congress (remember draft-dodging Rep. Steve King of Iowa lamenting that “you can’t restore our civlization with somebody else’s babies”), and anti-immigration activists is making immigration more popular. Gallup finds that that just 12 percent of voters consider “immigration/illegal immigrants” the most important problem facing the country (29 percent say the real problem is “Dissatisfaction with government/Poor leadership.”) In June of this year, the polling service found

A record-high 75% of Americans, including majorities of all party groups, think immigration is a good thing for the U.S.—up slightly from 71% last year. Just 19% of the public considers immigration a bad thing….

Corroborating the data that show Americans believe immigration is good for the country, a separate Gallup trend question shows a record-low number of Americans—29%—saying that immigration into the U.S. should be decreased. A plurality of 39% think immigration into the U.S. should be kept at its present level, while 28% say it should be increased.

Donald Trump just might go down in history as the leader who finally, unambiguously made America pro-immigrant. Here’s hoping that turnaround happens in time for Patrick Schrieber, his wife Soo jin, and their daughter Hyebin. What a waste to lose them over an accident of timing.

The 1985 altercation that led New Haven police to question Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, then a 20-year-old junior at Yale, does not sound like much of a bar fight. According to the police report, a 21-year-old complainant said Kavanaugh had thrown ice at him, while one of Kavanaugh’s friends, Chris Dudley, had hurled a glass, injuring his ear. The genesis of the fight is barely intelligible: Apparently Kavanaugh and his friends were staring at the complainant, trying to figure out if he was the lead singer of UB40, which had performed in New Haven that night. The guy told them to cut it out in an unfriendly manner, which annoyed Kavanaugh.

I’m not sure what, if anything, this incident has to do with Kavanaugh’s fitness for the Supreme Court. But attempts to use the story against him have provoked a revealing debate about how common it is for young men to get into bar fights. Broadly speaking, Kavanaugh’s defenders think bar fights are a rite of passage for men, so they are no big deal, while his detractors say most men don’t get into bar fights, so Kavanaugh’s involvement in one reflects on his character. Although I’m inclined toward the latter view, I’ve yet to see any solid data on the question. But it seems likely that men who view bar fights as normal are more apt to start or join them.

“I don’t know one guy, including myself, who wasn’t in a bar fight,” Newsmax TV host John Cardillo remarked on Twitter this week. “Not a single one.” New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, one of the paper’s token conservatives, reported that “I’ve been in two bar fights, though I suppose one was technically a ‘Jumbo Slice fight.'” Fox Business Network correspondent Charles Gasparino bragged that “Ive been in dozens of bar fights (ask the guys I grew up with),” “nearly lost an eye in one,” and “that’s just one of the injuries (I have the scarred stitch marks to prove the rest).” Although Gasparino has “never been black out drunk,” he said, “I have had to defend myself, which I am still perfectly capable of doing.”

These accounts, especially Cardillo’s, are very different from my own experience. I’ve patronized many bars over the years, but I have never been involved in a bar fight (or even witnessed one, as far as I can recall), and I know lots of male drinkers with a similar lack of such experience. For what it’s worth, an online survey that Esquire conducted in 2010 found that 74 percent of the 5,000 or so respondents had never been involved in a bar fight. This was not a random sample, but given the magazine’s audience I assume it was overwhelmingly male. Within this group of men who read Esquire and take the time to fill out online surveys, bar fights were definitely not the norm.

Some people are more temperamentally inclined to violence than others, which may be a good reason for anyone who values peace to avoid drinking with Cardillo, Gasparino, or their friends. But social expectations and beliefs about the relationship between alcohol and violence also can affect how people act when they drink.

In their classic 1969 study Drunken Comportment, the psychologist Craig MacAndrew and the anthropologist Robert Edgerton pointed out that behavior under the influence of alcohol varies between individuals in the same culture, across situations in the same individual, over time in the same individual, across cultures, across situations in the same culture, and over time in the same society. Their most interesting evidence came from cross-cultural comparisons, including societies in North America, South America, Africa, and Asia. They cited examples of tribes where people would get falling-down drunk without any dramatic changes in demeanor and others where people routinely got into bloody fights after drinking. Within the same society, people drinking in a ceremonial context would be peaceful and friendly, while people drinking in a less structured situation would be raucous and violent, even though the amounts consumed were comparable.

Violent tendencies vary from one person to another in every culture and situation. But when you combine aggressive people spoiling for a fight with a context that gives them an excuse, you are asking for trouble.

Texas schools added something new to their curriculums this year: a course on how to go through a police stop.

In 2017, state lawmakers passed the Community Safety Education Act, which requires all high schools to teach a course on police interactions at least once before each student graduates. Schools were provided with a 16-minute video and related course work. The instructional video, which contains the robotic acting and Power Rangers-esque soundtrack some of you may remember from your own school days, is available for viewing below.

The related course work instructs students to follow various procedures, such as keeping both hands visible and on the steering wheel, and notifying the officer of their intention to reach for a license or insurance documents. The packet also informs students of expected officer conduct. For example, students will be taught that officers should obtain clear consent for a search. Should something go poorly during the stop, or even exceptionally well, students will learn how to file a complaint and leave a compliment.

Intentional or not, the tips in the mandated course resemble a discussion known as “the talk” that occurs between black parents and their children. (A digital media company called Jubilee Media recreated “the talk” here.) The conversation largely covers how to act during police interactions, which includes remaining calm and compliant. And while some brush off the concept, there have been a number of fatal interactions that have caused many to feel the need for such conversations and classes.

In July 2016, for example, the officer-involved shooting death of Philando Castile caused frustration after he was killed while attempting to comply with instructions from a panicked officer. Castile was not only forthcoming about the fact that he legally carried a firearm, he was shot while reaching for his wallet despite the officer’s previous request for his identification. Castile’s death is a reminder that citizens can do everything right and still suffer at the hands of law enforcement.

Prospective parents using the IVF services provided by clinics associated with the Fertility Institutes company can have their embryos screened for genes associated with over 400 hereditary diseases, as well as gender determination and even eye color. Despite the objections of some bioconservatives, it is now generally agreed as a matter of reproductive liberty that it is ethical for parents availing themselves of assisted reproductive technologies to screen for genes that confer higher risk for hereditary diseases, and then select those without the traits for implantation.

Researchers are now developing and deploying screening tests that take into account the interactions of hundreds of genes that increase the risks of disease conditions like aetherosclerosis or diabetes. The Wall Street Journal reports that the company Genomic Prediction has just begun offering its Expanded Pre-Implantation Genomic Testing for just such polygenic disease risks.

Sex selection of embryos with the goal of avoiding sex-linked hereditary diseases is now, for the most part, also ethically uncontroversial. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine notes that there is no ethical consensus with respect to non-medical sex selection. It is, however, noteworthy that a 2017 survey of several hundred American IVF clinics reported that 72.7 percent of the clinics offered sex selection. And among those clinics offering sex selection, 93.6 percent of them reported performing sex selection for family balancing, and 81.2 percent reported performing sex selection for elective purposes (patient preference, regardless of rationale for the request).

One often expressed concern is that pre-implantation sex selection will skew male-female population sex-ratios. Certainly, this effect has been well-documented in some traditional cultures in which techniques such as sex-selected abortions have been used to favor the birth of male children. However, there is very little evidence that such strong preferences for male children exist in many industrialized countries. For example, a 2006 survey of Americans probing their views on sex selection reproductive technologies found that 50 percent wished to have a family with an equal number of boys and girls, seven percent wanted more boys than girls, six percent wanted more girls than boys, five percent wanted only boys, four percent only girls, and 27 percent had no preference.

If using pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) to select embryos to avoid disease and to choose the sex of future children is ethical, what about other characteristics? As an example of what may soon be possible, The Journal cites an ethical conundrum posed by Stephen Hsu, a founder of Genomic Prediction.

An IVF doctor has two healthy, viable embryos and must choose which to implant. One has a hypothetical risk score that indicates the embryo is at high risk for struggling academically in school. The second embryo has a score indicating the future child likely won’t struggle. Do you tell the parents?

“It seems ethically not defensible to withhold the information from the parents,” he says, “and ethically defensible to reveal it to them.”

Hsu is right: Withholding information that might be relevant to a person’s reproductive decisions would be clearly unethical.

Not everyone agrees. For example, Josephine Johnston, director of research at the Hastings Center bioethics think tank, tells the Journal that she recognizes that parenting often comes with “the understandable desire to give your child advantages,” like height, or musical talent. However, allowing parents to select among IVF embryos for such traits, she adds, “can seem awfully close to a eugenic mind-set, where we thought we can sort the worthy and fit from the unworthy and unfit.” In addition, she argues that selecting against gene combinations that increase disease and disability risks, and in favor of those that confer health or psychological benefits, would risk increasing societal prejudice against people who are currently disadvantaged by diseases and disabilities through no fault of their own.

Allowing parents using IVF to test for and choose gene combinations that have a greater chance of endowing their prospective children with benefits like health and academic success is not ethically comparable to the state-mandated eugenics programs that involuntarily sterilized some 60,000 citizens in the United States (not to mention the Nazi horrors). In fact, legally forcing them to forego such testing is an exercise of state-mandated eugenics, since the government is deciding for parents what sorts of offspring they will be allowed to have.

But what about allowing parents to choose among IVF embryos for such apparently incidental genetic traits like eye color? The Journal cites a couple who availed themselves of such testing offered by a Fertility Institute clinic. The testing indicated that in a group of five of their embryos, one would be likely to have blue eyes.* The couple pointed out that testing for eye color is just one more thing once they’ve already started looking at an embryo to rule out diseases. As it happens, the couple has decided to start their family the old-fashioned way, allowing the random combination of their genes to determine their offspring’s eye color. In any case, if the screening technology is safe and effective, there is no compelling ethical reason to limit this exercise of reproductive liberty.

*Aesthetically speaking green, hazel and brown eyes are superior, but some of my best friends dauntlessly endure the burden of blue eyes.

The Transportation Security Administration’s Instagram page is a nightmarish mash-up of national security state propaganda and bad dad jokes. The fact that the TSA has captured more social media awards than it has terrorists says something about what the agency is actually good at.

Sometimes the account serves up a truly maddening cocktail of earnest obedience to nonsensical rules while simultaneously demonstrating just how silly those rules are. That’s what happened Wednesday when the TSA Instagram account posted a picture of six bullet-shaped whiskey stones agents had confiscated from an unlucky traveler at Idaho’s Lewiston-Nez Perce County Airport:

As the post explains, whiskey stones are steel objects that can be used instead of ice to chill drinks, and they’re very useful if you don’t like watered down whiskey. They are also, of course, not weapons—not even when shaped like bullets.

If you read through the awful puns and ignore the ridiculousness of the TSA admitting that it did not, in fact, make the skies any safer by stealing someone’s whiskey stones, the post eventually gets around to explaining why the whiskey stones were seized.

As you might expect, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

The TSA doesn’t allow bullets and other ammunition in carry-on bags, of course. Even that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, because bullets can’t do much on their own—but, given the TSA’s awful track record at keeping guns and other weapons from getting through security checkpoints, maybe they’re just operating as if a gun might be on the plane.

The story of the seized whiskey stones takes a turn for the absurd when the TSA explains that empty shell casings with the primer removed or discharged—in other words, bullet-shaped objects that cannot be fired—are, in fact, allowed in carry-on bags.

What’s the fundamental difference between an empty shotgun shell and these whiskey stones? One will keep your drink cold, and the other won’t—but that distinction should not matter to the TSA. What matters is that neither can be fired out of a gun.

This is a little thing, of course, compared to some of the bigger issues facing the TSA. But, like the fact that many TSA employees hate their jobs, and the agency’s efforts to make itself the center of attention on anniversaries of 9/11, it’s a little thing that points to bigger problems. Nearly two decades after it was created, the TSA is not the last line of defense against terrorism. It’s a bloated, wasteful bureaucracy that treats innocent Americans like criminals and then shares those stories for laughs on social media. It kills bunnies, gropes grandmothers, detains kids, and still can’t find actual weapons being smuggled onto planes.

The nonsensical explanation for the confiscated whiskey stones is perfectly in keeping with the TSA’s legacy. It’s telling that when United Airlines told passengers returning from last year’s San Diego Comic Con that comic books were banned from checked bags, lots of people thought it was true. It wasn’t; the airline had misunderstood a confusing TSA directive.

To recap: It’s fine to carry ammunition that cannot be fired in your checked bag—but it’s illegal to carry whiskey stones (which, of course, cannot be fired) shaped like ammunition. Otherwise the terrorists win.