The Washington Post National Weekly - March 27, 2016

Politics Rust Belt in spotlight for 2016 4

World Who else should get nukes? 10

Health Think before you eat 16

5 Myths Political spin 23

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THE FIX

The establishment’s new guy BY

C HRIS C ILLIZZA

I

f I told you at the start of the 2016 race that Mitt Romney would vote for Ted Cruz in the Utah caucuses and that Jeb Bush and Lindsey Graham would endorse the presidential campaign of the senator from Texas, you would have laughed. Probably loudly.

Cruz was — and is — hated by the Republican Party establishment, who view him as a grandstander with little interest in any of the niceties of politics. Cruz is the guy who doesn’t play well with others, and who others dislike — a lot — for that unwillingness to go along to get along.

And yet, here we are. All of those things have come to pass with Bush’s endorsement — he called Cruz a “consistent, principled conservative” in a Facebook post Wednesday morning — the latest domino to fall. What is now beyond dispute is that Ted Cruz, the most hated man in Washington Republican circles, is the establishment GOP candidate in the presidential race. As Cruz put it this past week in an appearance on CNN: “If you think about it, in the last 10 days we’ve been endorsed by Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney, Mike Lee and Mark Levin. I mean, you want to talk about a broad coalition [that is] ideologically diverse? That covers the entire spectrum of the Republican Party.”

He’s right. It’s stunning. S-T-U-N-N-I-N-G. If you told me a year ago that Donald Trump would be the front-runner for the Republican nomination, I would have been surprised. Maybe very surprised. But I would have probably been able to see a path for how Trump got there — capitalizing on the anger in the electorate and the strong desire to elect a true outsider. If you told me a year ago that Ted Cruz would be the establishment Republican pick in the race, I wouldn’t have believed you. There was simply no way that I could

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WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES

conceptualize how that might occur. None.

This is what Trump hath wrought. Only in an election in which Trump, someone that many within the GOP establishment believe is dangerous to their party and to the country, has emerged as the favorite would Cruz even be considered as an option for party poobahs.

But, at root, these people are pragmatists.

They understand that only Cruz has won primaries and caucuses outside of his home state (sorry, John Kasich!) and believe that, unlike Trump, Cruz is actually a committed conservative. In a binary choice election, which is what we have (sorry, John Kasich!), if you don't want Candidate A, you get Candidate B. Don't mistake the establishment’s rallying behind Cruz as genuine support for either the man or his ideas. There is a roughly zero percent chance that Bush, for instance, thinks Cruz is a great pick to be the Republican nominee or would be a great president. He doesn’t.

Neither does Romney. And you know Graham doesn’t. The lining-up behind Cruz is solely aimed at trying to stop Trump from getting to

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2016 The Washington Post / Year 2, No. 24

1,237 delegates before the Republican National Convention.

What the establishment hopes will happen then is not that Cruz will become the nominee — remember, they still don’t like him — but that the Texas Republican, having served his purpose by keeping it from Trump, will be replaced by a more palatable alternative like, say, Kasich. Of course, this is the most wishful of thinking because it’s virtually impossible to imagine that the convention delegates will pass over not only the candidate with the most delegates but also the candidate with the second-most delegates in order to pick someone who may win only a single state in the primary and caucus process.

So, there’s that. But between now and the June 7 California vote that ends the primary process, Cruz holds the hopes of the entire establishment in his hands. That’s a sentence I never, ever, ever thought I would write, and it provides further proof that 2016 is the frontrunner right now for the title of weirdest and most unpredictable election ever. n

CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY TELEVISION BOOKS OPINION FIVE MYTHS

4 8 10 12 17 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Michael Garvey learned how to write and perform stand-up at a free class for veterans offered by the Armed Services Arts Partnership.

Photo by MARVIN JOSEPH, The Washington Post.

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POLITICS

An election focused on the Rust Belt

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

A Trump vs. Clinton matchup may change states in play, heighten electorate’s divisions BY

D AN B ALZ

A

prospective general election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton could significantly alter which states are in play this fall and heighten more than in any recent election the racial, class and gender divisions within the national electorate.

After successive campaigns in which President Obama expanded the Democrats’ electoral map options by focusing on fast-growing and increasingly diverse states, a 2016 race between Clinton and

Trump could devolve principally into a pitched battle for the Rust Belt.

With a focus on trade issues and by tapping anti-establishment anger, Trump would seek to energize white working-class Americans, who Republicans believe have been on the sidelines in recent elections in substantial numbers. Trump would also attempt to peel away voters who have backed Democrats, a potentially harder task.

At the same time, Clinton could find Trump a powerful energizing force on her behalf among African Americans and Latinos, which

could help to offset the absence of Obama on the ticket after two elections that drew huge minority turnout. That could put off-limits to Trump some states with large Hispanic populations where Republicans have competed intensely in recent elections.

Although polls give Clinton a solid advantage over Trump in a general election, many Democrats remain wary because of what one party strategist called “the unpredictability of Trump.” As one former member of Obama’s campaign team put it, “I feel like in some ways my brain has to think

Donald Trump walks out to speak during a campaign event in Vienna, Ohio, earlier this month. Trump has drawn significant support among white working-class voters.

differently than it ever has.”

Democrats will assess the landscape in several ways: which states are likely to be in play, which of those are different from past elections, and which voting groups present particular problems. They expect to update their analyses constantly, given how quickly Trump can have an impact on events.

A Washington Post-ABC News poll from earlier this month showed stark divides among those backing Trump and Clinton.

Overall, the former secretary of state led 50 to 41 percent among registered voters. Trump led 49 to

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POLITICS 40 percent among white voters, while Clinton led 73 to 19 percent among non-whites. Trump led by five points among men, and Clinton was up by 21 among women.

Trump led by 24 points among whites without college degrees, while Clinton led by 15 among whites with degrees.

Many Republicans fear that numbers like those could doom the party to defeat in the fall, and they remain hopeful that they can stop Trump in the primaries or at a contested convention. But some Democrats worry that polling data about Trump could provide a false sense of security because voters might be reluctant to acknowledge that they intend to back him.

Party strategists and independent analysts have just begun to explore in-depth the contours of a Trump vs. Clinton election, examining in particular how the strengths and weaknesses of each candidate might affect the preferences of specific voter blocs. More difficult to assess, but no less important, is how a Trump-Clinton contest would affect turnout among those groups.

The main conclusion to date is that a Trump nomination would test theories among some Republicans about the potential strength and power of the white vote to change the electorate and give the GOP the White House. Given what is known, Trump would appear to have no choice but to center his energies on states in the industrial and upper Midwest.

The eventual conclusions of party strategists about Trump’s possible route to victory will affect critical choices for both campaigns as they decide where to invest tens of millions of dollars in resources for television ads, where to deploy their most extensive voter mobilization and get-out-the vote operations, and where the nominees will concentrate their campaign travel in the fall.

The Midwest’s ‘blue wall’ Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the progressive Center for American Progress, said Trump’s only path to victory lies in “a spike of white working-class support. . . . It’s trying to break apart the heartland part of the ‘blue wall,’ with less emphasisontherestofthecountry.”

The “blue wall” is a term coined by journalist Ronald Brownstein of Atlantic Media and refers to the 18 states plus the District of Columbia

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add that such a sweep of the Midwest appears highly unlikely.

Nonetheless, he said that path through the Midwest would hold the keys to victory for Republicans if the New York businessman is their nominee.

MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST

that Democrats have won in the past six elections. Those states add up to 242 electoral votes, giving Democrats a foundation and therefore several combinations of other states to get to 270.

Among the 18 states that have been in Democratic hands since the 1992 election are Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Minnesota. Along with Ohio and Iowa, those heartland states are likely to be the most intensely contested battlegrounds in the country if a Trump-Clinton race materializes.

All those states have higher concentrations of white voters, including larger percentages of older, white working-class voters, than many of the states in fastergrowing areas that Obama looked to in his two campaigns.

“If he drives big turnout increases with white voters, especially with white male voters, that has the potential to change the map,” said a veteran of Obama’s campaigns, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share current analysis of the fall campaign.

Steve Schmidt, a Republican strategist and veteran of past presidential campaigns, said Trump’s overall general election strength is unpredictable at this point, in part because Trump could campaign as a different candidate from the one on display throughout the primaries. But he said that what Trump has shown to date is an ability to surprise his

opponents and offer crosscutting messages to draw support.

No one expects a totally different electoral map in a TrumpClinton campaign, given the hardening of red-blue divisions. Analysts say that nearly all the same states that have been fought over in recent elections will remain potential targets, especially at the start of the general election. Ohio, Florida and probably Virginia, in particular, will be fought over until the very end of the election.

On the other hand, states such as Nevada, New Mexico and possibly Coloradocouldseelesscompetition unless Trump can overcome his extraordinarily high negative ratings within the Hispanic community.

The two pairs of presidential campaigns since the beginning of the 21st century proved to be remarkably static in terms of the number of battleground states and whether they voted Republican or Democratic.

Those campaigns collectively also highlight the shrinking number of truly contested states. In 2000, there were 12 such states decided by fewer than five points.

By 2012, there were just four.

William Frey, a demographer and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said that if Trump were to carry Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and either New Hampshire or Minnesota, he would not need some of the traditional Southern battlegrounds. Frey hastened to

Hillary Clinton talks to voters in Grand Rapids, Mich., this month. She has a sizable backing among minority voters, particularly African Americans.

By the numbers

50% to 41%

Overall, the former secretary of state led 50 to 41 percent among registered voters. Trump led 49 to 40 percent among white voters, while Clinton led 73 to 19 among nonwhites.

Separate wells of support What makes the coming campaign so intriguing is that Trump’s and Clinton’s demographic strengths are near-mirror opposites. He has drawn significant support among white working-class voters during his march toward the Republican nomination, especially white men. Clinton has drawn sizable support among minority voters, particularly African Americans, in her contest against Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

Trump’s strength among men is offset by his weakness among women. Clinton has at times struggled to attract younger women in her battle with Sanders, but few doubt she would have a significant advantage in a general election campaign against Trump.

Similarly, Trump’s support among white voters without college degrees could be offset by the prospect of similarly strong support among whites with college degrees — a growing force in the Democratic coalition.

The focus on white workingclass voters will not negate the key role minority voters could play in the outcome in November.

“I think that energy underneath the wings of the minority community could be as strong as it was for Barack Obama, only this time against Donald Trump,” Frey said.

One Democratic strategist said that on the basis of preliminary analysis of poll data, Trump’s vote share among Hispanics could be lower than Mitt Romney’s 27 percent share in 2012 and that his margin among African Americans could be nearly as low as Romney’s.

A recent Washington Post-Univision poll of Hispanic voters showed Trump currently doing worse than Romney, trailing Clinton in a hypothetical general election by 73 to 16 percent.

Republican Schmidt, however, warned Democrats that Trump could prove more appealing to minority voters, especially African Americans, than they assume.

“He’s an asymmetric threat,” Schmidt said. “He fits into none of the conventions. He has a completely unorthodox style.” n

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POLITICS

‘Little House’ on the Hill?

S TEVE F RIESS Brighton, Mich.

BY

M

elissa Gilbert is being a bit flippant. In her latest role, that of a real-life Democratic candidate for the U.S. House from central Michigan, the veteran TV actress hasfilledhercampaigncofferswith fat checks from a nearly bottomless list of celebrity friends. You can just imagine the attack ad her opponent, first-term Republican Rep. Mike Bishop, could launch: This carpetbagging dilettante and the liberal Hollywood elite want to buy your wholesome Midwestern seat in Congress.

Gilbert, at 51, has a thick skin when it comes to scrutiny — she dated Rob Lowe in the ’80s, sued the National Enquirer in the ’90s, waged a scrappy public battle for control of the Screen Actors Guild in the ’00s — and she doesn’t blink at such questions. She’s “really glad that George Clooney’s been a friend of mine for 30 years,” she says earnestly. And “it’s great that Rosie O’Donnell is taking an interest in the 8th Congressional District in Michigan.” A hint of defensiveness creeps in, though, as she notes that 80 percent of her donors are small- dollar locals and that one of her first big donors was a Republican.

“But,” she sniffs, “you won’t care about him because he’s not famous.”

True, perhaps — but a funny moral high ground for Gilbert to claim. Were it not for her own fame, it’s hard to imagine she could have moved to Michigan from out of state and launched a credible, well-funded congressional bid within two years. Her indelible performances as young Laura Ingalls Wilder in the 1970s TV hit “Little House on the Prairie” are what put her on an unlikely path that could, possibly, bring her to Washington.

The California native relocated to this rural area about an hour west of Detroit in 2013, after marrying her third husband, Timothy Busfield, the Emmy-winning actor best known for “Thirtysomething,” who grew up down the road

NICK HAGEN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

She won hearts as Laura Ingalls Wilder. Now Melissa Gilbert is trying to win votes in Michigan. in East Lansing.

During their courtship, she had fallen in love with Michigan’s scenery and quieter lifestyle, and, meanwhile, her acting career had slowed. Gilbert has spoken out about a paucity of good roles for middle-aged women: Most of her recent projects — a guest spot on NBC’s “The Night Shift,” a recurring part in the first season of ABC’s “Secrets and Lies” — have come about in part because Busfield, too, was involved.

They first rented a 115-year-old Victorian in quaint downtown Howell, population 9,500, where Gilbert got involved in the failed 2014 Michigan gubernatorial campaign of Democrat Mark Schauer, and local people began confiding in Gilbert about their problems, Busfield says.

“People were knocking on our doors and she was taking the time to deal with them,” he recalls. “People were saying, ‘My mom is dying.’

And I would be like, ‘Where are you going?’ and she’d be, ‘I’m going to their house. Their mom wants to meet me.’ I kept seeing somebody who belonged in service. . . .

It seemed natural from there that [people] would come to her and say, ‘Can you represent us, and are you interested in doing it?’ ” Last summer, they moved to a secluded country home (“our own Little House in the Big Woods,” she tweeted) in nearby Brighton, population 7,500, and she announced her candidacy. The state party cleared the field for Gilbert, who faces no competition in the Aug. 2 primary.

“I’m so impressed with her,” says Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), who represented the district in the 1990s and encouraged her to run.

“She’s been involved in a number of different issues around health care and childrenand families,and she’s very, very bright, very astute. She’d be a terrific congresswoman.”

Gilbert faces an uphill climb.

It’s a nominally swingy, heavily gerrymandered district that stretches 100 miles from the state capital of Lansing to the upscale suburbs of Detroit with a mighty plain of farmland in between. It went for George W. Bush twice, then for Barack Obama in 2008 before switching to Mitt Romney

A sampling of Melissa Gilbert’s campaign disclosure: Clay Aiken, $1,000 Alec Baldwin, $1,000 Tom Bergeron, $1,000 Sara Gilbert (her sister), $1,363 Michael Douglas, $3,500 Jennifer Garner, $5,400 Seth Green, $2,000 Arlo Guthrie, $500 Florence Henderson, $550 Jane Kaczmarek, $1,000 Jeffrey Katzenberg, $2,700 Juliette Lewis, $500 Seth MacFarlane, $5,400 Rosie O’Donnell, $5,400 Ken Olin, $1,500 Amy ShermanPalladino, $5,400 Sarah Paulson, $1,000 Matthew Perry, $5,400 Sam Raimi, $1,500 Melissa Rivers, $1,500 Katey Sagal, $500 Sherri Shepherd, $1,050 John Slattery, $2,700 Aaron Sorkin, $1,000 Kiefer Sutherland, $5,400

in 2012, and these voters haven’t sent a Democrat to the House since the 1990s. Her opponent spent years representing the area in the state House and Senate.

Still, on the power of her fame and her prodigious fundraising — her disclosure reads like an issue of Entertainment Weekly — the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee listed “MI-08” as one of its “emerging” new opportunities to flip a seat.

Her main slam on Bishop is his stance on feminist issues such as pay equity and abortion rights, which she supports and Bishop opposes. “His voting record is decidedly anti-women,” she says, reciting his votes to defund Planned Parenthood and against the Paycheck Fairness Act. Stu Sandler, a spokesman for Bishop, retorts that “Gilbert is playing games with procedural votes instead of recognizing [equal pay] is already federal law. This isn’t surprising because she demonstrates a lack of understanding on issues.”

Bishop, meanwhile, returns again and again to Gilbert’s own key vulnerability: Last year she disclosed that she owes the IRS and the state of California nearly $500,000 in back taxes. Although she has arranged payment plans to resolve it, Bishop’s news releases refer to the candidate as “tax delinquent Melissa Gilbert.” The actress blamed her financial troubles on a coincidence of calamities including recession-era investment losses, a costly divorce from actor Bruce Boxleitner, and a broken back that left her unable to work.

As any good politician or actor would, she casts her efforts in the context of a broader narrative, that of the prospect of being elected to Congress at the same time that the country could elect its first female president.

“I would love to be a part of that,” Gilbert says. “My granddaughter is turning 1, and I’d like for her to say, ‘Look at what my granny did. My granny got to be a part of these incredible women and now I can be anything I want.

And get paid the same for the same job. ’ ” n

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Obama’s battle with his instincts BY

G REG J AFFE

T

he terrorist attacks in Brussels on Tuesday pose the worst kind of foreign policy dilemma for President Obama, pitting his instincts that he’s doing all he can to defeat the Islamic State against intense political pressure for him to do more.

Obama has been making the case for months that his strategy to defeat the Islamic State and protect Americans at home is slowly working. White House aides speak repeatedly of the 40 percent of the Islamic State’s territory taken back from the group in Iraq and the 20 percent wrested away in Syria. They cite the impact of more than 11,000 U.S. military airstrikes, which they say have killed more than 10,000 front-line fighters.

More quietly, they strike cautionary notes. “This may be the most complicated conflict of our generation,” said a senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to comment frankly.

The reality — as Obama learned in the aftermath of the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif. — is that impressive battlefield statistics and reasoned calls for restraint mean little in the climate of fear generated by terrorist strikes.

Obama, speaking in Cuba on Tuesday, struck a familiar tone in the immediate aftermath of the Brussels attacks. He projected resolve, insisting that “we can and will defeat those who threaten the safety and security of people all around the world.”

But the brevity of his remarks and his eagerness to pivot quickly back to his prepared speech also made clear that he was determined to keep the threat posed by the terrorist group in perspective.

The fundamental problem for Obama is that he is convinced, on the basis of his experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, that intensifying the fight against the Islamic State with more American troops, more airstrikes and raids would be counterproductive.

The White House and Pentagon

EMMANUEL DUNAND/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

Brussels attack puts president under pressure to weigh measured tactics against climate of fear have studied options that would accelerate the timeline for major attacks designed to clear the Islamic State from its main strongholds of Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq. Such plans could include increasing the number of U.S. combat advisers, pushing them closer to the front lines and loosening combat rules designed to minimize civilian casualties.

But Obama has rejected those options, arguing that if there are no Iraqi or Syrian forces to hold the seized territory and provide humanitarian assistance, the gains will be short-lived, said senior administration officials.

Instead of big military offensives, the president has opted for lower-profile measures such as helping allies of the United States improve intelligence collection and sharing, as the United States did after the 9/11 attacks. Secretary of State John F. Kerry has logged hundreds of hours working with Russians and Iranians to

negotiate a fragile and imperfect cessation of hostilities between the Syrian government and U.S.-backed opposition groups.

The temporary halt to the fighting should allow all the groups in the messy, multi-sided war to focus on fighting the Islamic State instead of one another, said administration officials.

At home, Obama has sought to project determination and restraint, rejecting calls from Republican presidential candidates to lift all limits on the air campaign or bar all Syrian refugees from entering the United States.

After the bloodshed in Brussels, the president’s approach once again came under GOP attack.

“President Obama looks and sounds so ridiculous making his speech in Cuba, especially in the shadows of Brussels,” Republican front-runner Donald Trump tweeted.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) said that the country did not need another

A man receives first aid after a subway car beneath the highrises that house the European Union burst with smoke and flame in a terrorist attack Tuesday.

lecture on “Islamophobia.”

“We need a commander in chief who does everything necessary to defeat the enemy,” he said.

Privately, Obama has worried that a large-scale terrorist attack in Europe or on U.S. soil could force him to plunge American forces into another large and costly war in the Middle East — something he has vowed to avoid.

Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter said in January that the Pentagon was “looking to step up the tempo in Iraq and Syria” and hoped to push the Islamic State out of Raqqa and Mosul before the end of the year.

A major offensive in either of those cities in the near term would require a significant shift in the administration’s strategy, which relies heavily on local partners, and could potentially put some American forces in greater danger.

“Do you take the risk to accelerate the Mosul campaign?” asked Michèle Flournoy, a former senior Pentagon official in the Obama administration and an adviser to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. “That’s a legitimate question.”

Until now, Obama’s instincts have told him to avoid such moves, which he has cast as unnecessary and the beginning of a slide toward a much larger American commitment of forces.

If Obama does not undertake a dramatic change in course, the biggest challenge for him will be finding the right tone to reassure the American people — something he struggled to do after the Paris and San Bernardino attacks.

“Every president has strengths and weaknesses,” Obama said in a recent interview with the Atlantic. “And there is no doubt that there are times where I have not been attentive enough to feelings and emotions and politics in communicating what we’re doing and how we’re doing it.”

The test for Obama is whether he can simultaneously communicate resolve and the need for restraint in Iraq and Syria amid new terrorist attacks and one of the most bitter and divisive political campaigns in recent U.S. history. n

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NATION

These hackers held a town hostage They locked city officials out of files and then sought a ransom paid in bitcoins.

BY M ATT Z APOTOSKY AND E LLEN N AKASHIMA

T

he best that officials in Plainfield, N.J., can tell, the hackers got in when someone was on the Internet researching grants, and soon employees in the mayor’s office were locked out of their own files. City officials scrambled to pull servers offline, but three had been compromised, leaving memos, city newsletters and other documents inaccessible.

The culprits said they would release the files, but only if the city coughed up about 650 euros, paid in bitcoins, Mayor Adrian Mapp said. When the city instead turned to law enforcement, he said, the hackers vanished.

The computers in Plainfield had been infected with “ransomware” — a type of malware that cybersecurity experts and law enforcement officials say is proliferating across the United States and around the world. The malware gets into people’s computers, often because they click on a link or open an attachment in an email, then encrypts files or otherwise locks users out until they pay for the key.

Officials say that more people are paying — and, consequently, more criminal enterprises are launching ransomware attacks.

In a nine-month period in 2014, the FBI received 1,838 complaints about ransomware, and it estimates that victims lost more than $23.7 million. The next year, the bureau received 2,453 complaints, and victims lost $24.1 million. Researchers discovered this month that even Apple products, typically less penetrable to hackers, are not immune.

“Definitely a growing threat,” said Special Agent Chris Stangl, a section chief in the FBI’s cybersecurity division. “Success breeds more activity.”

The ransom demands are often relatively small — hundreds or thousands of dollars — and the compromised data is important.

But the disruption to a business, especially if it has not backed up the data, can be significant.

KACPER PEMPEL/REUTERS

“Ransomware has been around for a long time, but we’ve never seen a concerted manual effort by hackers to break into a network, hang out for a year, spread to all the machines and then install it everywhere,” said Val Smith, chief executive of Attack Research, a cybersecurity firm. “This is a major shift in effort.”

Mayor Terry Leonard of Ilion, N.Y., said his village paid several hundred dollars to reopen city files in two separate ransomware attacks in early 2014 and have since hired an information technology company to upgrade the entire computer system. The ransomware had locked officials out of critical payroll and utility payment systems, Leonard said.

“We’re going to be state-of-theart, for as good as that is, because the bad guys, as you probably know, are one step ahead of the good guys all the time,” he said.

Police in Melrose, Mass., briefly had to go “old school,” writing reports and keeping a call log, last month after ransomware blocked access to the department’s inhouse records system, said Lt. Mark DeCroteau, the patrol commander. The city, he said, paid a ransom of less than $500 in bit-

coin the next day.

“It was more of a nuisance than anything, to tell you the truth,” he said.

Hackers made off with significantly more money in an attack on a Los Angeles hospital around the same time, forcing officials to pay $17,000 in bitcoin to unlock the electronic medical record system.

Last month, the FBI issued a flash alert that captured the sophistication of the new strains of ransomware that are afflicting entire networks. “The bad guys burrow into a system often months in advance, map out the network, and then deploy the ransomware at what they believe to be the most critical assets of the organization,” said James Pastore, a former federal prosecutor in New York who worked on a ransomware case involving the Eastern European crime ring Blackshades. In that case, the FBI cooperated with authorities in 18 countries to make 90 arrests in May 2014.

To ensure maximum impact, the hackers search for backups in the system and destroy them, said Pastore, who is now a partner handling cyber cases at Debevoise & Plimpton.

Earlier forms of ransomware, such as one particularly nasty version called Cryptolocker, relied on automated software in which an unsuspecting victim chanced on an infected website and picked up the malicious code.

Now, experts say, the hackers are putting time into their targeting, which lets them raise their price.

While hackers have long victimized individuals, Stangl said, they are focusing on more lucrative targets such as businesses and local governments. And they are demanding payment in bitcoins, which are nearly impossible to track, he said.

Researchers at Dell SecureWorks, a cybersecurity firm, said they have investigated three cases in the past three months involving a tech, manufacturing and a transportation company. The ransom demands averaged about $9,000, said security researcher Phil Burdette. In one case, the company paid and the hacker tried to double the price. The “key message,” he said, is that the hackers were in the victims’ systems for two months to two years before they struck. That meant the company had time to detect and prevent the attack.

Stangl said the FBI advises people to back up their data offline, because once a computer is infected, their options are limited. Private security companies can sometimes find keys to unlock encrypted data — especially if hackers reuse them — but that is becoming less common, he said.

Stangl said the FBI does not advise paying ransoms to hackers, because “if they were not successful in receiving those funds, then they go out of business just like any other company would.” But he concedes losing data can be difficult for a company to swallow.

“We don’t like to see payments of ransom, but at the end of the day, it’s a business decision,” he said.

In the case of Plainfield, N.J., Mapp said the city can still function, but some files might be lost forever. City officials, he said, have no way to communicate with the hackers, even if they wanted to. n

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NATION

KLMNO WEEKLY

Our many crumbling classrooms We are not putting nearly enough money into upkeep for schools, a report finds

BY

E MMA B ROWN

T

he nation is spending $46 billion less each year on school construction and maintenance than is necessary to ensure safe and healthy facilities, according to estimates in a new report.

The study, released by a group that advocates for environmentally sound buildings, is meant to draw attention to the condition of buildings that on weekdays house some 56 million students and teachers — more than one-sixth of the U.S. population — but that nevertheless attract little attention in the national debate over education policy and reform.

“We are consistently and persistently underinvesting in our nation’s schools,” said Rachel Gutter of the Center for Green Schools at the U.S. Green Building Council, which co-wrote the report.

“Communities want to resolve these issues, but in many cases the funds simply aren’t there.”

Detroit has made headlines this year for crumbling schools plagued by rats, roaches and mold. But while conditions in the Motor City are particularly deplorable, the average U.S. school is more than 40 years old, and thousands of school buildings nationwide are in need of upgrades, according to the federal government.

Poor communities in far-flung rural places and declining industrial city centers tend to be in a particularly bad situation: School construction budgets rely even more heavily on local dollars than operating budgets. And in many places, spending has not recovered from cuts made during the recession, leaving school districts struggling to patch problems.

In Philadelphia, which has suffered deep budget cuts in recent years, an elementary school was forced to delay its opening last fall after a worker discovered that the building’s foundation was structurally unsound. A boiler exploded at another of the city’s elementary schools in January, seriously injuring an employee.

“These things are happening

DETROIT FEDERATION OF TEACHERS

The ceiling is crumbling in this room at Ron Brown Academy, an elementary school in Detroit. And that city is not alone in the problem.

because too many public officials have turned a blind eye to what’s really going on in schools across Pennsylvania,” state Sen. Vincent Hughes (D) said in a statement, calling on the state legislature to increase its investment in public education. “This is a fool’s errand.”

The federal government contributes about 10 percent to operating budgets but virtually nothing to school construction or renovation. Some states, such as Wyoming and New Mexico, have strong statewide programs for school construction, but a dozen states offer no assistance, which means the cost of school construction falls entirely on local taxpayers.

Among the states that do not contribute to school construction is Michigan, where Detroit has struggled so mightily to maintain healthy and safe buildings. Others are Wisconsin, Indiana, Oregon and Nevada.

“It’s entirely tied to the wealth of the district,” said Mary Filardo, executive director of the 21st Century Schools Fund, a D.C.-based nonprofit and report co-author.

“It’s got inequity built into it.”

Filardo said that there is a growing body of research that shows links between the school environment and a child’s ability to learn, and yet the condition of school buildings remains littlementioned in discussions about closing achievement gaps.

She suggested that the federal government could help push for equitable school facilities by providing funding for construction in high-poverty schools, as it now does for teaching and learning through the Title I program. But that would be politically difficult given the GOP-led Congress and its push to shrink federal spending, she acknowledged.

The last time the federal government attempted to survey the condition of the nation’s school buildings was in 1995. At the time, more than 8 million students attended 15,000 schools with poor air quality; 12 million students attended 21,000 schools in need of new roofs or roof upgrades; 12 millions students attended 23,000 schools with inadequate plumbing.

And the list goes on: The Government Accountability Office estimated that it would cost about $112 billion to ensure that all schools were in good condition.

In the two decades since the GAO made that estimate, the nation has spent an average of $99 billion a year on maintenance, operations and construction, according to the new study.

And that’s far less than the $145 billion that’s needed, according to the study, which suggested a standard — a tweaked version of commercial-building standards — that should be used to estimate the cost of maintaining the nation’s school facilities.

The report calls not only for greater public investment in school facilities but also for an effort to collect and share more information about the condition of school buildings — which account for the second-highest level of public infrastructure spending, after highways.

There is no comprehensive federal data source on school buildings, and the quality and amount of information varies widely at the state level. The inconsistency and scarcity of data on schools has contributed to their neglect, Gutter said: “This is a problem that we’ve just made it so easy for ourselves to ignore.” n

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Nuclear weapons in South Korea?

A NNA F IFIELD Seoul BY

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hat would it take for South Korea to develop nuclear weapons?

It’s a fringe idea that rears its head every now and then here.

But North Korea’s advances in nuclear weapons technology and the frustration over how to deal with Kim Jong Un’s obstinate regime have led a small but growing number of prominent politicians and academics to wonder: Why not us, too?

The idea has influential backers in the Chosun Ilbo, South Korea’s biggest newspaper, and in Chung Mong-joon, a scion of the Hyundai family and a staunch — and wealthy — advocate for South Korea having nuclear weapons.

And they have one main target in mind: China.

“I don’t think that South Korea actually wants nuclear weapons,” said Park Syung-je, chairman of the Asia Strategy Institute in Seoul. “It’s a way of saying to the Chinese that ‘if you don’t cooperate on North Korea, then we’re going to get nuclear weapons of our own.’ ” North Korea increased tensions even more on Wednesday, when it warned that it may launch an “ultra-precision strike” to “scorch” the South Korean president’s office.

While South Korea’s government has been doing all it can to punish North Korea for its latest nuclear and missile tests, there is a limit to how much pain Seoul can inflict. Instead, all eyes are on China, North Korea’s largest trading partner by far and the closest thing it has to an ally.

There is a great deal of frustration here that China is the country that has almost all the leverage over North Korea, especially given the widespread view that Beijing, while angry, will never risk destabilizing its impoverished and nuclear-armed neighbor.

“North Korea’s nuclear weapons capability power is bound to grow, so it is important for South Korea to keep military and power balance between the two Koreas,”

KOREAN CENTRAL NEWS AGENCY VIA REUTERS

A fringe idea gains influential backers who are frustrated by China’s inaction on North Korea said Cheong Seong-chang, a North Korea expert at the Sejong Institute, a think tank, and one of the most prominent advocates of South Korean nuclear weapons.

“China would object to the idea of South Korea becoming a nuclear state, but it is important for us to find a point where the national interests of both countries meet,” Cheong said.

China is already vehemently objecting to talks between Seoul and Washington over the deployment in South Korea of a sophisticated anti-missile system known as THAAD, for Terminal High Altitude Area Defense.

Thanks to its post-Korean War security alliance with the United States, South Korea is protected by the American nuclear umbrella. It declared in a 1991 deal that it would not “manufacture, possess, store, deploy or use nuclear weapons” and is a signatory to several nonproliferation treaties.

But some politicians are openly wondering why South Korea shouldn’t have its own weapons

program.

“We can’t borrow an umbrella from a neighbor every time it rains,” said Won Yoo-cheol, a lawmaker from President Park Geunhye’s ruling Saenuri party and its floor leader in the National Assembly. “It’s time for us to seriously consider an effective and realistic countermeasure for dealing with North Korea’s nuclear capability.”

This could take the shape of asking the United States, which pulled its nuclear weapons out of South Korea in 1992, to bring them back. Or it could entail South Korea developing nuclear weapons of its own, Won said last month.

In January, an editorial titled “South Koreans Must Discuss Acquiring Nuclear Arms” ran in the conservative Chosun Ilbo.

“The U.S. has passed the buck for taming North Korea to China, and China is doing nothing. Seoul now faces a real need for public discussion of the development of its own nuclear weapons,” the editorial said.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un examines a rocket warhead that North Korea says could be equipped with a nuclear weapon. The country’s rhetoric and actions have led some to say South Korea should have its own nuclear weapons.

Then last month, the newspaper ran a detailed article in which nuclear experts said it could take only 18 months to turn plutonium from South Korea’s nuclear power plants into a workable bomb. “It would take time to construct a large-scale reprocessing facility, but it can be done [at a smaller scale] even now in laboratories,” the paper quoted Kim Seungpyong, a professor of nuclear engineering, as saying.

The weapons advocates have a not-insignificant amount of public support. A Korea Research poll published last month found that 53 percent of respondents supported South Korea either developing its own nuclear weapons or considering doing so. Forty-one percent wanted a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula.

But the idea has not gained traction among senior politicians, and President Park has unequivocally dismissed it, saying that the whole peninsula should be free of nuclear weapons.

David Straub, associate director of the Korea Program at Stanford University’s Asia-Pacific Research Center, said the public discussion seems to be mostly an attempt to get Beijing’s attention.

Still, American officials have long worried about an arms race in northeast Asia.

U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, during a visit to Beijing recently, expressed rare public concern over China’s spent-nuclear-fuel reprocessing plans.

China’s plan for a large-scale plutonium reprocessing facility “certainly isn’t a positive in terms of nonproliferation,” Moniz told the Wall Street Journal.

Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center in Washington, interpreted Moniz’s words as a sign of concern about discussions such as those taking place in South Korea.

“It’s hard to believe that South Korea would ever go first” in developing nuclear weapons, Sokolski said. “But it’s getting tougher and tougher to deflect this idea. I think they’re definitely all looking at each other.” n

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Obama’s visit wins hearts in Cuba N ICK M IROFF Havana BY

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n her apartment a few blocks from the theater where President Obama addressed the Cuban people Tuesday, Marta Limas and her family gathered around the television, opposite a faded shrine to Saint Lazarus, the healer.

The baby was crying. They turned up the volume.

“What a handsome man,” said Limas, 56, as Obama began and quickly settled into a rhythm.

No one had spoken to the Cuban people with this kind of cadence in years. Limas and her family followed his words, rapt, as if listening to a sermon.

Obama called for change. “Yes, change!” the family repeated.

Obama talked the future. “The future!” they said.

Of all the U.S. president’s activities during his groundbreaking visit to Cuba, the speech was his best chance to speak directly to Cubans, both here on the island and abroad.

It wasn’t delivered in public, but it was broadcast in its entirety on Cuban state television, into the homes of many Cubans who, like Limas, talked about this visit as a turning point in their lives.

The family hushed and seemed to hold their breath when Obama’s words directly challenged their leaders, especially as the U.S. president called for democratic elections and urged President Raúl Castro not to “fear the different voices of the Cuban people.” They admired his willingness to acknowledge the shortcomings and imperfections of the U.S. political system and to have confidence in it anyway.

“I wish Fidel was there to hear this,” said Limas, of Cuba’s 89year-old ailing former leader, who wasn’t in the audience at the theater with his 84-year-old brother, the president.

Limas’s husband, Juan Hernandez, 52, disagreed. “No, with Fidel everything would have stayed the same,” he said.

Hernandez, a self-employed taxi driver, noted that he and Obama

NICK MIROFF/THE WASHINGTON POST

A family in Havana is enthralled by a U.S. president’s call for change are nearly the same age. “I grew up indoctrinated in all this Cold War stuff,” he said. “I’m sick of it.”

Watching the family’s response to the U.S. president was somewhat like watching starry-eyed young Obama supporters at a speech during his 2008 campaign, before Americans grew accustomed to hearing him. Limas and her family were not.

ThattheU.S.presidentisAfrican American also made an impression on the Afro-Cuban family.

“He’s a beautiful black man,” said Limas, when her husband stepped out of the room.

The family choked up with emotion at Obama’s words about the pain of family divisions and sense of loss among Cuban exiles. Li-

mas’s first husband, the father of her two children, left for Miami in the 1980 Mariel boat lift and never looked back.

“May 4, 1980, at 6 a.m.,” Limas said. “That man walked right out this door.”

Duley Young, her daughter, 36, and the mother of the baby, grew up without him or his financial support. She earns a meager salary working for the city’s sanitation department. But she said she was sure that better days were ahead for Cuba after Obama’s visit.

“He’s turning everything around,” she said. “He said he isn’t trying to impose himself on the Cuban people.”

As the U.S. president finished, he was soon replaced on state tele-

Juan Hernández and niece Diana Sánchez watch President Obama’s address in their Havana apartment. When pro-government commentators began to criticize the speech, Hernández said, “Turn that off.”

vision by pro-government commentators pointing out that voter turnout in U.S. presidential elections is barely 50 percent. They started picking apart other elements of Obama’s speech. Hernandez wouldn’t have it.

“Turn that off,” he said, waving at the television.

The room went quiet again, and the family lingered for a few minutes, talking about the speech.

Obama’s appeal to young Cubans made a powerful impression on Limas, she said. Maybe it would persuade some of them to stay and not leave.

“I wish this [had] happened earlier,” she said. “Maybe there wouldn’t be so many deaths at sea.” n

Michael Garvey, a Marine Corp veteran, takes his service dog, Liberty, with him everywhere, including to a Comedy Bootcamp class.

MARVIN JOSEPH/THE WASHINGTON POST

Can surviving war be a laughing matter?

BY GLENN DIXON

M

ichael Garvey has about 21/2 minutes of material, and it’s rough. It’s also heartfelt — and angry. He opens with a joke about being from a Catholic family, “raised off fairy tales and bulls---.” After all, his mother needed something to keep all her kids in line.

Garvey’s voice shakes just a touch, but maybe it’s only nerves. It’s his first time in front of his stand-up comedy class filled with fellow vets.

He has taken the stage alone. His service dog, Liberty, is present, but Garvey has left him out of the set he is fleshing out.

Retired from the Marines after just under eight years as a combat engineer that included tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, Garvey has, by his own reckoning, grown into a “distrusting and cynical” adult. He wears a dark red T-shirt reading “Suicide Watch,” with two stick figures on it. One stands on a chair with a noose around his neck. The other sits in profile, staring at the first, a bucket of popcorn on his lap.

Checking his notes, Garvey rattles through a list of holidays, dismantling the seemingly innocuous stories behind them: The Easter Bunny teaches children to take candy from strangers. Thanksgiving and Columbus Day are for “celebrating rape and genocide.” Even the stoner feast day of April 20, which Garvey says you’d figure would be his favorite, is revealed to coincide with Hitler’s birthday.

Then there’s a perfectly clear-eyed take on the Fourth of July. It was his favorite holiday, he says, because as a kid he loved blowing stuff up, an enthusiasm that eased the way to a military career. But he doesn’t see it that way anymore.

Garvey isn’t talking about post-traumatic stress disorder in his set, not yet, but in the room, when he mentions fireworks, it’s understood.

“Now all I can think about is how it’s just a war reenactment up in the sky,” he says. “And I don’t think anyone really understands that, except my nephews, who have the headphones and sit in the corner with me and the dog, enjoying it from the glass, from a distance.”

Nobody laughed at that part.

IT’S A BRAVE AND CURIOUS THING TO PUT yourself onstage and say, The war broke something inside of me, and I don’t know if it will ever be fixed, and then wait for a laugh — and hope somehow that helps you adjust to civilian life. But that’s the idea behind Comedy Bootcamp, a free course for veterans offered by the Armed Services Arts Partnership, a fledgling nonprofit organization. After six weekly classes, Garvey and nine other students will perform five-minute sets of original material at a graduation benefit show in Washington.

On this Sunday, Garvey, a thin, scruffy-bearded 28-year-old, has driven from his home in Annapolis, Md., to Georgetown University in Washington for the third week of the class. The benefit show is a month off. He and the other vets have a long way to go.

Chris Coccia, a comedy pro from outside Philadelphia, is going to help them get there. In a business known for self-destructive types, he’s more apples and CrossFit than hookers and blow. And his material isn’t edgy. He tells jokes about traffic congestion and the rotten service he gets from AT&T. But he knows how to roll with the crowd. Don’t ask them questions. Tell them questions, he advises his students. When you’re skilled enough, no one notices the difference.

Really good stand-up is like magic that way. It’s a sleight of mind so deft that no one suspects they’ve been tricked.

The room has notes for Garvey. Clifton Hoffler, an avuncular man whose own set features the wisecracks of his grandkids, points out that the nephews with the headphones could be introduced a sentence or two earlier.

“I can’t figure out how to make it funny yet,” Garvey says.

“Or even try,” he adds softly.

The room bats around the idea that civilians could use more surprise in their Independence Day celebrations. Sam Pressler, a slim, confident guy who founded ASAP last year as a spinoff of the William and Mary Center for Veterans Engagement, pipes up: “So one year I started to fire mortar shells at my neighbors or continues on next page

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something, like, so they’d understand.”

“Just randomly at night, not on the Fourth of July,” adds Mike King, a big, bald Army Reservist from outside Boston, who also has PTSD. “That other thing [that] was going around,” King continues, “was those guys with the stupid signs, like, ‘A veteran lives here. Don’t set off fireworks.’ And that, like, really pissed me off,” he says.

“Yeah, me too,” Garvey says.

“It’s like, f--- you,” King continues. “Go celebrate Fourth of July. That’s why we went to war, you know?”

Another classmate brings up the stoner-day bit. “I’d play up the weed angle, too,” says Navy vet John Dorling, originally from Sarasota, Fla. “Because I don’t think most people are going to be expecting a veteran who, uh, partakes.”

“It’s prescription, man,” King goofs.

“It started that way,” says Garvey, in all earnestness. “My doctor told me to smoke, and I didn’t believe him. I thought it was a trick, because I was trying to get retirement at the time” and needed to pass a drug test.

But the doctor explained so long as Garvey had a prescription, it was okay. Everyone in class agrees he should use the fine line between therapeutic and recreational pot smoking in the set.

“Do you have to get the generic version?” asks Margot Beausey, a Deloitte consultant who used to be in the Navy and is quick to see comic fodder in practical considerations. “Is your co-pay less than a dime bag?”

Garvey says doctors later suggested he switch to morphine or another narcotic — which he rejected — to treat his chronic pain.

More than four years after he was shot, more than three years after his last surgery, his jangled nerves won’t let him forget it.

“Ooh, I love morphine,” coos Ama Lopez, like a teenager fawning over an idol, breaking everybody up.

“Narcotics Anonymous is across the hall,” quips King, who stopped drinking about six months ago.

“I had it, like, twice, and the doctor asked me, ‘How are you feeling?’ ” Lopez dreamily continues. “The hand of God just rubbed my . . .”

The room explodes, drowning out precisely where the hand of God had paused.

“Write it down, write it down, write it down,” Coccia says.

THE THEORY THAT CREATING COMEDY HELPS veterans heal and readjust to civilian life is relatively new and largely untested. There has been some research on it, enough to convince Pressler that it was worth a try. The Comedy Bootcamp is his second. The first was at William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va. At a Veterans of Foreign Wars hall near the college, two of its graduates perform. Neither Melissa Errett nor Isaura Ramirez does a set that dwells on her military experience. Errett’s is largely about the physical indignities of aging: undesirable facial hair, sudden incontinence. “I’m a comedian who just happens to be

PHOTOS BY MARVIN JOSEPH /THE WASHINGTON POST

John Dorling, left, and Michael Garvey, center, listen to Comedy Bootcamp instructor Chris Coccia.

a veteran,” she explains.

Ramirez — who organized the evening’s lineup, called “Left, Right, Laugh” — has a lot of material about being Puerto Rican. She also has a killer joke about how buying hair extensions on some sketchy website makes her sound like a pedophile: “I’ll take an Indian, 14 to 16, and definitely virgin.”

You’d never know it from her set, but she’s 80 percent disabled, with fibromyalgia, depression and anxiety, as well as obsessive-compulsive disorder that didn’t show up until she was in Iraq. There was no single precipitating event.

She learned the mind is poorly equipped for the experience of unrelenting fear. Fifteen months of being in “a constant state of alert” left Ramirez anxious and afraid, often expecting the worst. Low-probability calamities loom large in her imagination: “People are going to break into my house or I’m going to get into a car accident or I’m going to be in some place and a fight is going to break out.”

But in front of a mic she is at ease and in charge. “I don’t know if I am strong enough to be able to joke about some of the things — up there onstage,” she explains. “It’s something I would like to do. I just haven’t done it yet.”

The headliner, Vernard Hines, is more of a believer in comedy’s ability to shepherd you through adversity, so long as you’re willing to talk about what grieves you. Though not a Comedy Bootcamp grad, Hines did a couple of tours in Iraq and spent time in the Green Zone, getting shelled on a regular basis. Coming home took adjusting. “If you’ve got a disability, just know your limitations,” he says. “You know,

people tell you you can do certain things. No, you can’t! Okay? I don’t like stress, I don’t like kids, and I can’t have a gun.”

He also can’t stand it when PTSD is cited as an excuse for reckless behavior: “I’m certified PTSD. Not one time have I ever wanted to jump the White House fence,” he says. “That man had menopause.”

Hines bills himself as the “Laugh Therapist” because “it is a natural rush to be able to talk about my illness and talk about some of the things I’m battling with, instead of keeping them inside. Because every time I go to do comedy, somebody always comes and says, ‘Yo, man, I’m battling that PTSD thing, too.’ Or a family member will be like, ‘I really understand him now.’ That’s my release, like, giving back.”

BY THE LAST DAY OF CLASS, GARVEY HAS grown accustomed to talking about getting shot. He got hit twice, and his body armor caught one of the bullets — on its way out. For someone who spent his days “swinging a metal detector, looking for a bomb,” it was an ironic exit from the battlefield. Then came Germany and morphine, and as his body healed, his mind began to come undone.

“You’re just going about your business, then one day your body says, ‘Hey, I’m bored. Let’s create a chemical imbalance and kick this sh-- up anotch,’”hesays.Hefindstheconditionbaffling.

“It’s like, imagine an abusive husband claiming to have battered women syndrome. Which is hard to wrap your unraveling mind around.”

He talks about his dog now. Everyone has been waiting for this. Since Day 1, Liberty has

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we were. We’re not that person anymore.”

THE THEATER IS INTIMATE AND OLD-FASHIONED,

been a genial presence in the class. He accompanies his master into the room, his vest is unstrapped and he goes free-range, his good vibes available to everyone. It’s easy to see how Liberty, a black labrador retriever, could alleviate the anxiety Garvey feels in public. He is large and warm and sleek. His coat is mesmerizing. You could stare at it for days.

“I don’t want people to think that our dogs are on the same level,” Garvey says. “Mine’s better.”

He scoffs at people who call their pound dogs “rescues,” when he had to get his from a New York prison, where Liberty had been part of a program called Puppies Behind Bars. “I had to tunnel my guy out of max security, like El Chapo Guzmán,” Garvey cracks.

He also does jokes about people who interfere with Liberty while he’s working or misunderstand the dog’s purpose altogether. “What’s the dog’s disability?” is a frequent query. “Did the dog really fight in both of those wars?” asks a woman at Jiffy Lube. Five minutes later, she identifies herself as a psychic and tells Garvey, a high school dropout, that he’ll go on to write books, something he finds unlikely.

The theme running through Garvey’s jokes about his dog, in fact through the jokes of each one of the comics who address PTSD head-on, is that his wartime experience has marked him and set him apart. I ask Garvey if perhaps the seriousness of his injury could be dissuading some of his classmates from talking about their own military experiences.

“Sometimes it seems like people, if they hear something that’s more military-y than what they

have, they don’t want to say it, because it feels inferior,” he explains. He has seen himself have a similar reaction. “When I meet Special Forces people, I take a little step back, too. Like, this guy, he knows it all — what am I going to say?”

This kind of distance is a peculiar thing to be working through via stand-up comedy. Standup is predicated on relatability. Whether you’re Jerry Seinfeld musing on the absurdity of giving someone the finger or Amy Schumer confessing to being New York pretty but Miami ugly, the whole point is to bring the audience along, to make them feel what you feel. Even severe illness isn’t off-limits. When Richard Pryor detailed the insidious allure of freebasing or Tig Notaro marveled at the Job-like trials of receiving a cancer diagnosis hard on the heels of her mother’s death, their audiences made those journeys with them.

The best stand-up is also about selfrevelation. You can’t really hide when you do it.

As Coccia says, there are no fact-checkers in comedy. But that doesn’t mean you’re free to make yourself up out of whole cloth. Your persona is expected to be an extension of who you are. As an authentic stand-up, you make up your best, or at least your funniest, version of yourself. And then you invite the judgment of a crowd of strangers. And you invite them to register their approval through a mechanism that is largely involuntary: laughter.

But the injuries of war open a chasm between the sufferer and everyone around them, even between the sufferer and the self. As Hines observes: “We’re trying to get people to understand us, because they’re used to us being who

The audience laughs as the veterans perform at their Comedy Bootcamp graduation show.

with oak flooring and a proscenium scalloped with butterscotch swags. Half an hour before showtime, Garvey still hasn’t decided whether Liberty will be joining him. He’s concerned the dog could be a distraction. Garvey has on a sweater reading “God Bless America” that looks like Old Glory got run through a shredder then taped back together. One suspects underneath the garishness, the sentiment is genuine. It jibes with the mind-set of a patriotic guy who chafes at authority, who the week before had explained: “I liked the Marine Corps; I never went full-in Marine. I have five Marine Corps tattoos, and that’s the only tattoos I have, but I never took it completely seriously.”

When Garvey steps in front of the lights, Liberty is by his side and proves to be only a slight distraction, with the “Awww”s from the seats more than making up for any restlessness.

Garvey’s jokes are killing: The fine line between medicinal and recreational smoking, Liberty’s canine superiority, El Chapo, the Jiffy Lube psychic with the career advice for “the jarhead pothead who draws pictures on his college essays.”

Garvey has toned up his line about people asking how Liberty was injured. “I don’t understand what kind of a--hole people think that I must be to drag a disabled dog around,” he says.

Afterward, he seems relieved and a little surprised at how quickly the time went, the set streaming past him in a blur until suddenly there he was, safely at the end.

Weeks later, he’s in the den of the Annapolis home he shares with his parents and his wife, Leonora, who recently quit her job as an insurance agent and went back to school for her business degree. She tells me later that she’s “in love” with Comedy Bootcamp, crediting it with giving Garvey the push he needed to pursue something he’d always be interested in.

“I just have trouble making myself happy,” he says. “All my old interests” — bowling, paintball, cards, movies — “don’t interest me anymore.” It’s harder for him to get into the music of 311, a reggae/punk/metal band he had followed religiously since high school.

Later in the week is his first open mic. He’ll bring along a friend from the Marines but nobody from Comedy Bootcamp. He’s worried about how it’ll go.

Garvey has been encouraged in his writing by his professor at a community college, where he’s taking classes.

“I do most of my writing in the morning, because it’s when I’m most miserable,” he explains. “That’s when I come up with the most creative ideas.”

But he hasn’t been performing. “I just need to do it more,” he says. “I’m really nervous about this open mic. . . . I will not have sat through a class for six weeks preparing it.”

He’s unsure of his new material, all of it a work in progress. “I just keep writing. I’m like, I wonder if this’ll work, I wonder if this’ll work, I wonder if this’ll work,” he says. “You gotta say it eventually.” n

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HEALTH

Learning to mind what they eat BY

J ULI F RAGA

A

t Waddell Language Academy, a K-8 school in North Carolina, Monica Mitchell-Giraudo, a French immersion middle school teacher, instructs 19 sixth-graders to gather into a circle.

“Okay, everyone, let’s take a few mindful breaths and think about our gratitude for Amy, who brought us apples for snack today,” Mitchell-Giraudo says. “As you take these breaths, try to tune in to your body. What sensations do you notice?”

“I notice my stomach is already growling,” chuckles Ben. “My mouth is watering,” exclaims David.

Another student follows David and then another until each child has had their turn. After each of her student’s observations, Mitchell-Giraudo rings her Tibetan meditation bell. Each time the children remain still, despite the loud chimes.

Next, she instructs her students to hold and examine the apples. First, they pick up the fruit and roll it between their fingertips. Then, on her suggestion, they bring the apples to their noses, using their sense of smell to savor the flowery scent of their snack before taking the first succulent bites.

“Excellent, class,” MitchellGiraudo says. “Also, as a gentle reminder, before you eat the apple, ask yourself whether or not you’re hungry.” The students nod in recognition. “Remember, you don’t have to eat if your body isn’t giving you a hunger signal,” she says.

These students are learning a practice called “mindful eating,” which focuses on cultivating “present moment awareness” during meal times. Mindful eating invites participants to pay attention to the food in front of them and engage their five senses (sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch) before consuming a single morsel. This mindfulness practice builds the children’s awareness of physical cues like hunger and satiety.

While mindful eating is scientif-

HANS PENNINK/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Schools are teaching students to be more aware of their food to try to prevent eating disorders ically proven to help prevent overeating and obesity, a new psychological study suggests that it may also forestall eating disorders, such as anorexia and bulimia, which affect 30 million people each year and are the deadliest of psychiatric illnesses. Surprisingly, anorexia nervosa is deadlier than major depression, schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. In fact, individuals who suffer from this severe illness are at higher risk of suicide, as well as prone to major health complications, such as cardiac arrest.

For women 15 to 24 years old, anorexia is 12 times more fatal than any other cause of death, according to the National Eating Disorders Association. But only 1 in 10 people with an eating disorder will get treatment, “which makes prevention programs even

more valuable,” it says.

According to eating disorders researchers Michael Levine and Linda Smolak at Kenyon College, “By having children and adolescents participate in prevention programs, such as mindful eating, it can protect them from anorexia, bulimia and binge eating disorder.”

The positive life-affirming feedback from the children who participate in the program is the biggest testament to just how much these newly learned life skills are helping them.

“Mindful eating helps me respect the food that goes into my body,” said Jamie, a middle school student in Mitchell-Giraudo’s class. “I can make better food choices,” she said, “because when I slow down to eat, I can tell which food is filled with fake ingredients

The practice of mindful eating has participants pay attention to the food in front of them using their five senses before consuming anything.

and which foods are organic.”

“Mindful eating teaches children how to connect with their body signals, and learn how to eat intuitively,” said Kelsey Latimer, an eating disorders psychologist at the Center for Pediatric Eating Disorders at Children’s Medical Center in Dallas. “This form of intuitive eating helps us distinguish between physical and emotional hunger and can help curtail overeating and binging.”

While mindful eating has been used in medical settings and eating disorder treatment centers, bringing the practice into the classroom as a preventive tool is a new concept.

“These programs buffer against eating disorder development,” Latimer said, “especially when administered during the late middle-school years. That’s a crucial period because it’s when students have been exposed to social the messages that ‘thin is in’ but most have not yet manifested disordered eating habits to obtain a thinner physique.”

Mitchell-Giraudo, a graduate of the Mindful Schools program, echoes Latimer.

“It’s wonderful to see my students engage in 45 minutes of eating mindfully, especially since they used to scarf down their food in less than 10 minutes,” she said.

“By slowing down, my students have learned how to tell the difference between artificial and authentic flavors,” Mitchell-Giraudo said, “and this knowledge helps them make healthier food choices.”

Penelope says she is grateful that she’s learned these life skills.

“Mindful eating is a great way to eat because it helps you feel good about yourself,” she said. “It’s helped me think about what I put into my body, which helps me grow stronger and do better in sports, too.”

While middle school is the ideal time to introduce programs to prevent eating disorders, high school students can benefit just as much from the practice as those who are younger.

Aggie Giglio Kip, a nutritional counselor at Phillips Academy in

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TELEVISION Andover, Mass., incorporates mindful eating with her students in the dining hall.

The self-serve cafeteria bustles with activity as the students collect their food, flatware and beverages. Once they sit down to eat, Kip encourages them to unplug from other distractions, which means turning off their cellphones and powering down their computers.

“Mealtimes are an opportunity to practice just eating,” she says.

Kip suggests that they “eat without judgment,” refrain from negative body talk and avoid measuring their self-esteem based on the foods they choose to eat. This is important because many of these teenagers struggle with the social and emotional changes of adolescence, including body image dissatisfaction.

For example, when Kip hears students say, “I ate the cookies — I was so bad,” a red-flag sign of negative body talk, she insists that they redefine the experience by using their senses to describe the flavors in the cookie. As an example, if a student feels guilty about eating oatmeal raisin cookies, Kip will ask her to focus and describe the scent and taste of the cinnamon, oatmeal and raisins.

Unfortunately, these kinds of courses are in short supply because many educators and school administrators believe that social and emotional programs are too expensive or time-consuming to implement. At many schools, teachers and school staff are often overwhelmed, overworked and underpaid. To save costs and reduce staffing issues, the schools bring prevention programs and/ or leadership training into the schools like the Body Positive, founded by Connie Sobczak and Elizabeth Scott. The program trains educators and school staff in the principles of mindful and intuitive eating and teaches a series of self-exploration exercises that help them examine their feelings and attitudes about food and weight so that they can relay these messages to their students, too.

Kathy Laughlin, director of counseling at San Domenico High School in San Anselmo, Calif., is a fan of the Body Positive training.

“The risk factors for eating disorders at my school are very high,” she said. “Since we began to incorporate this program, I have not seen as many girls with issues related to body hatred.” n

KLMNO WEEKLY

‘The Simpsons’ predicted a Trump election 16 years ago

Homer went to a Trump rally in a clip last year.

The show had predicted a Trump presidency earlier.

FOX TV

BY

M ICHAEL C AVNA

S

ometimes “The Simpsons” is like a Magic 8-Ball that can seem to hold all the answers. Peer deeply enough into the long odyssey of Homer, say, and a certain warped wisdom can float to the surface.

One example resurfaced early this year, when it was remembered that David Bowie and Alan Rickman, who died within days of each other in January, were both referenced in one scene in a 2013 “Simpsons” episode. And now we have a new example: Sixteen years ago, in an episode titled “Bart to the Future,” the show predicted a Donald Trump presidency.

In the 2000 episode, Lisa becomes the nation’s first “straight female” president, while brother Bart has slacked away his life.

And from the Oval Office, she says, “As you know, we’ve inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump.”

“The story was really about Bart saving Lisa’s presidency,” episode writer Dan Greaney said.

“Lisa has a problem beyond her

ability” — the kind that only Bart can solve.

But how did the series arrive at a President Trump? Greaney explained that the real-estate mogul was just the right comedic fit at the time and noted that they needed a celebrity name that would sound slyly absurdist.

Besides, Greaney said, “He seems like a ‘Simpsons’-esque figure — he fits right in there, in an over-the-top way.

“But now that he’s running for president, I see that in a much darker way,” the Emmy-winning writer-producer continued. “He seemed kind of lovable in the old days, in a blowhard way.”

The Harvard-sprung Greaney makes no great claim of political prescience, noting, “I never would have predicted this campaign.”

Still, with tongue not entirely planted in cheek, Greaney — who also wrote the famed rodeo anthem scene in “Borat” — accepts some of the responsibility for allowing a Trump campaign to flourish.

“I blame us — I blame the culture of comedy,” he said. Greaney posits that the movie “Animal House,” which “mocked the

norms of decent behavior,” helped counterculture viewpoints launch into the American comedic mainstream, thus fostering such establishment-mocking shows as “The Simpsons.” Perhaps all this mockery, he said, somehow gave rise to an “antipolitical establishment” candidate like Trump.

“We seem to have blown it up,” Greaney laughingly said of the old social norm. “No ‘Animal House,’ no Trump.”

So to take the “Simpsons” episode one step further: Since Lisa becomes a historic female president after Trump, does that mean the show was prognosticating a Hillary Clinton presidency?

“Lisa is [age] 8 on the show, and she would have to be at least 35 to be president,” Greaney says.

“So 27 years is time for a lot of other presidents.”

And since that 2000 episode could yet prove prescient, does Greaney believe Trump can win?

“No, I don’t think Trump can win,” the writer said. “But the show is a collective, so our collective mind might have a different answer.” n

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BOOKS

Love wild ducks? Thank FDR. N ON-FICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

D ENNIS D RABELLE

I RIGHTFUL HERITAGE Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Land of America

By Douglas Brinkley Harper.

744 pp. $35

t’s campaign time, 1944.

Franklin D. Roosevelt is running for an unprecedented fourth term because the middle of a worldwide conflict is not a good time to break in a new president. But he’s having trouble staying on message. To him, the threats posed by the German and Japanese war machines are less engaging than policies to ensure healthy forests. At one whistlestop, a voter ribs the president for dwelling more on “trees, soil, and water . . . than [on] the war in Europe and the Pacific. ‘I fear,’ FDR replied, ‘that I must plead guilty to that charge.’ ” Trees, soil and water must have been welcome distractions from global savagery, but as portrayed in “Rightful Heritage,” Douglas Brinkley’s high-spirited and admirably thorough new book on FDR, the 32nd president was a tree-hugger from way back. He was born in New York state, which had fostered a conservation ethic starting in the late 19th century by setting aside large tracts of forest in the Adirondacks and Catskills to be “forever kept as wild.” Nature loomed large for a boy who played along the Hudson River and whose mother had been raised on an estate designed by Andrew Jackson Downing, the country’s first great landscape architect.

Roosevelt was recognized as “a local authority on birds” from a young age and grew up to be a crack sailor and a partisan of wild lands. To a man of such background and tastes, the presidency offered what his distant cousin Theodore Roosevelt would have called a “bully” opportunity.

Franklin left an environmental legacy second to none (albeit overshadowed by other aspects of his presidency).

In support of this thesis, you can list, as Brinkley does, the major landscapes that Roosevelt incorporated into the national park and wildlife refuge systems: the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska, Okefe-

GERRY BROOME/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Jackson Hole in Wyoming is among the lands Franklin D. Roosevelt set aside for preservation as president.

nokee Swamp, the Olympic Mountains, the Great Smokies, Isle Royale in Michigan, Joshua Tree, Capitol Reef in Utah, Jackson Hole, Mammoth Cave, Kings Canyon, the Everglades, Big Bend and the Desert Game Range in Nevada.

You can cite the many reforestation projects undertaken by the young men of the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps. But perhaps the most dramatic evidence has to do with waterfowl. Wild ducks and geese were in a bad way until Roosevelt and his lieutenants went to work. Their efforts led to a doubling of the U.S. waterfowl population between 1934 and 1941. (Some urbanites may find it hard to believe that without those policies, the now-ubiquitous Canada goose might be extinct.)

Brinkley is good at showing how strands of Roosevelt’s life united to shape approaches to preservation that other presidents might have missed. Take an idea to raise money for waterfowl conservation that had been working its way through Congress. It culminated in the Duck Stamp Act of 1934, which requires all waterfowl hunters over 16 to buy, in addition to a state hunting license, a federal stamp,

the proceeds from which go to acquiring wetlands and funding wildlife refuges. As a lifelong philatelist, Roosevelt “loved stamps too much to allow each year’s duck issue to be anything but irresistible.”

Roosevelt was a great believer in bipartisanship, and the director of what was then the Biological Survey in the Agriculture Department (now the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the Interior Department) was Jay Norwood “Ding” Darling, a Republican who, in his previous job as a Pulitzer Prizewinning editorial cartoonist, lampooned the Democratic president repeatedly. At FDR’s request, Darling designed the first duck stamp, featuring “two striking mallards in flight descending on a lake.”

From this literally splashy beginning evolved a much-anticipated annual contest — still being held — in which wildlife artists vie to submit the winning design (and to rake in the income generated by fans who buy reproductions). In addition to excitement and artistry, the program has generated more than $500 million through 2009, which has been used to purchase 5 million acres of waterfowl

habitat.

Brinkley styles “Rightful Heritage” as a sequel to “The Wilderness Warrior,” his account of Theodore Roosevelt’s equally stellar environmental record. In the new book, Brinkley can be superficial when it comes to legal issues — it’s not always clear what authority FDR is drawing on when he takes a pro-environmental stance. And it’s misleading to say, as Brinkley does, that Missouri was “a Confederate state during the Civil War.” Missouri had its share of Confederate sympathizers, but the state never seceded from the Union.

More than any list of projects completed or tally of species saved, Franklin Roosevelt’s legacy as a conservationist may have been a kind of enlightened nostalgia. He wanted Americans to see the value — not so much dollars-and-cents as spiritual — in hanging on to as much unspoiled nature as they possibly could. That, in words spoken by Roosevelt and borrowed for Brinkley’s title, is our “rightful heritage.” n Drabelle, a former contributing editor of Book World, worked at the Interior Department from 1971 to 1977.

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

A chilling time in Victorian England

How jump shots changed the game

F ICTION

N ON-FICTION

T

l

REVIEWED BY

K EITH D ONOHUE

he setting is London, November 1841, the beginning of the reign of Queen Victoria. A gruesome murder has taken place — a body, sliced with a wound to the belly, splayed across an old-fashioned printing press, covered with “blood, terrible and black like ink, everywhere.” Soon, more ink-stained victims show up, and the folks in the streets are beginning to wonder whether the supernatural is afoot.

In her dazzling novel “The Infidel Stain,” M.J. Carter deftly re-creates the squalor of the times, the smells of cesspools and horses, the rundown hovels crowded with too many children, and the gloom rolling in off the Thames. The crowded streets are rife with petty criminals, shiftless hoodlums, poor orphans selling apples and watercress, rag shops, brothels and pornographers.

The newly established police ignore the murder of the unfortunate soul. The local member of Parliament, Lord Allington — who, with his equally pious sister Lady Agnes, watches over the poor — decides to solve the mystery of the garish murder by hiring an inquiry agent, the forerunner of the private detective. He enlists as well the agent’s friend and comrade, a gentleman soldier recently returned from a tour in Afghanistan with the British East India Company.

This means the return of Jeremiah Blake and William Avery.

The team was first introduced in Carter’s previous mystery, “The Strangler Vine,” where they had investigated the roots of the Thuggee crisis in India. Now back in London, the pair play off the conventions of the detective novel in delightful ways.

Blake is the Sherlockian figure, an opium-eater, radical in his sympathies, older and wiser, a master of disguise and deduction, who, like the writer herself, always seems to be a few feet ahead of the unfolding events. The more

naive and conservative Avery, who narrates both novels, is Watsonian, slightly baffled by his friend’s acuity, and a stand-in for the reader scrambling to catch up to the plot’s twists.

Blake and Avery’s investigations take many a dark turn. There may be a connection between the murders and the Chartists, the political movement calling for the right to vote for the common man (and for some factions, women as well). The Chartists are the stepchildren of the Infidels of the title, a commune of radical freethinkers who had been inspired a generation earlier by Thomas Paine and other Enlightenment republicans.

In one particularly affecting scene, one of the Infidels, the very real historical figure named Richard Carlile, who had been a champion for freedom of the press, relates a deathbed story of how their revolution rose and fell.

It is all such fun and so richly detailed that one is drawn down London’s crooked lanes and rookeries without a backward glance.

Though, like the hapless Avery, one might need to consult a map or hire a guide to find one’s way through the maze of streets. Carter has a rather smashing go at balancing the mystery with the history. An American audience might find this corner of Victorian England rather obscure, with its references to the Chartists and the Infidels. But Carter does a remarkable job making London come alive in all its dreadful glory.

Yes, there is an intricate puzzle to solve and two engaging sleuths to lead us to its surprising denouement, but the real strength of the novel is Carter’s deeper inquiry into historical questions that resonate to this day. At its heart, “The Infidel Stain” reckons with the gulf between the classes, between the well-intentioned and the struggling, the haves and have-nots. n Donohue’s most recent novel is “The Boy Who Drew Monsters.”

‘I THE INFIDEL STAIN

By M.J. Carter Putnam. 420 pp. $27

RISE AND FIRE The Origins, Science, and Evolution of the Jump Shot — and How It Transformed Basketball Forever

By Shawn Fury Flatiron.

339 pp. $27.99

l

REVIEWED BY

A RAM G OUDSOUZIAN

think the jump shot is the worst thing that has happened to basketball in 10 years,” griped Bob Cousy, one month before his retirement in 1963. The Boston Celtics guard was not your typical traditionalist — his fancy dribbling and passing violated the principles of every basketball manual ever written. Moreover, he played alongside Bill Sharman and Sam Jones, two of the greatest jump shooters of his time.

Still, Cousy preferred the twohand set shot, which caused fewer mistakes. His complaint revealed the jumper as an emerging innovation, with profound implications for how we play and watch basketball. In “Rise and Fire,” journalist Shawn Fury tells the story of the jump shot, providing an enthusiastic and entertaining (if incomplete) romp through basketball history.

No single person invented the jump shot. In the 1930s, a few sporting rebels around the country experimented with the technique.

During World War II, military service brought together men from different regions, exposing the shot to more players.

By the 1950s, practitioners of the shot were no longer considered pariahs or outliers. NBA basketball was emerging as a major team sport, and jump shooters such as Bob Pettit, Paul Arizin and George Yardley ranked among the league’s top scorers. The rise of 1960s superstars such as Jerry West and Oscar Robertson reflected the jumper’s enduring power, despite Cousy’s grumpy declaration, and the next wave of scorers, from the flashy Pete Maravich to the smooth Bob McAdoo, came of age when the shot was already legitimate. Their high-scoring exploits in the 1970s shaped the game’s style.

Fury dutifully recounts the biographies of professional stars, but he is at his best when unearthing the buried tales of old shooting marvels. He chronicles tragic playground icons whose personal travails waylaid their potential, such as Raymond Lewis from Los Ange-

les and Jack Ryan from New York, and recovers the stories of long-forgotten college gunners from the 1970s, such as Dwight “Bo” Lamar and Travis “The Machine” Grant.

Fury also travels across the hoops hotbed of Indiana, interviewing local icons such as Bobby Plump, who hit the title-winning shot for tiny Milan High School in 1954, which later inspired the film “Hoosiers.” Fury’s journey continues in Iowa, where he recalls the “Game of the Century” — the 1968 girls’ six-on-six state championship, when Jeanette Olson scored 76 points for Everly High School but still lost to Union-Whitten, which was led by Denise Long, who scored 64 points of her own.

The book’s celebratory tone makes it fun, but there are moments when Fury might have placed the evolution of the jump shot into a wider context. Many forces have altered the patterns of basketball. Coaches keep experimenting to exploit opponents’ weaknesses, and rule changes (such as the 24-second shot clock) have adjusted the game’s pacing.

Players, moreover, have innovated in ways beyond the jumper. When dynamic dribblers penetrated into the lane, it opened up space for shooters — and as jump shooters launched from deeper, it created new possibilities for high-flying, rim-shaking dunkers.

Ultimately, “Rise and Fire” is more about jump shooters than it is about jump shots. It traces the shot’s ascendancy through the eyes of the shooters themselves — as an individual pursuit, honed by stubborn and solitary practice.

That perspective explains both the book’s charms and its limitations.

Fury has not provided a bigpicture explanation of the history and nature of basketball. But just like you want a great jump shooter on your team, you want this book on your shelf. n Goudsouzian is the author of “King of the Court: Bill Russell and the Basketball Revolution.”

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

Europe’s dysfunctional approach to security DAVID IGNATIUS writes a twice-a-week foreign affairs column and contributes to the PostPartisan blog.

The value of catastrophic events is that they can help people face up to problems that are otherwise impossible to address. Maybe this will be the case with Tuesday’s horrific attacks in Brussels.

Europe is facing a security threat that’s unprecedented in its modern history, at a time when its common currency, border security and intelligence­sharing are all under severe stress. If Europe were a stock, a pragmatic investor would sell it, despite the sunk cost and sentimental attachment. Without radical restructuring, it’s an enterprise headed for failure.

The European Union needs to reinvent its security system. It needs to break the stovepipes that prevent sharing information, enforcing borders and protecting citizens. In the months before Tuesday’s terrorist attacks in Brussels, “the system was blinking red,” as George Tenet, the former CIA director, famously described the period before Sept. 11, 2001. Yet Belgium (like pre­9/11 America) couldn’t connect the dots.

The jihadist wave rolling back toward Europe is dizzying: U.S. intelligence agencies estimate that more than 38,000 foreign fighters have traveled to Iraq and Syria since 2012. At least 5,000 of them came from Europe, including 1,700 from France, 760 from Britain, 760 from Germany and 470 from Belgium, according to official data collected by the Soufan Group, a security consulting firm. Relative to its population, Belgium spawned the largest number of these fighters.

Belgian authorities couldn’t find Salah Abdeslam, the logistical planner of the November Paris attacks, for more than 120 days — until they finally nabbed him Friday a few blocks from where he grew up in the Arab enclave of Molenbeek. He was hiding in plain sight. But Belgium’s failure was cooked into the system: The jihadists move

stealthily, and the Belgians didn’t collect or share enough of the intelligence that was there.

Authorities had allowed Molenbeek to become a haven — more dangerous to Belgium than even the jihadists’ sanctuaries in Syria, Iraq and Libya.

Americans, who are less exposed to the threat, may smugly imagine they can wall themselves off. But the Islamic State’s rampage is more an American failure than a European one. The United States formed a global coalition to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the Islamic State back in September 2014. This strategy hasn’t worked; the Islamic State’s domain has shrunk in Iraq and Syria but expanded elsewhere.

The failure of the U.S.-led coalition to contain the jihadists has left a fragile Europe exposed to terrorism and social upheaval.

MARTIN MEISSNER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

People in Brussels hold a banner that reads “I am Brussels” and mourn the victims of Tuesday’s attacks at an airport and a metro station.

President Obama hopes that history will affirm his prudent policy, but this view is surely harder to maintain after the Paris and Brussels attacks.

How could the United States and Europe develop a more effective strategy to combat the Islamic State? It would begin with truly shared intelligence and military command. After the shock of Pearl Harbor, the top leadership of the United States and Britain gathered in Washington in December 1941 for the “Arcadia Conference.”

Though remembered for the personal bond between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, its greatest achievement was a unified command that swept aside petty jealousies within the U.S. and British militaries and between the two nations. Once this alliance was struck, eventual victory was inevitable, as Churchill said.

The obstacles to success against the Islamic State are similar. The intelligence services of European nations vary in competence and aggressiveness.

Experts say that Britain and France have strong spy agencies; Germany’s is competent but afraid to level with its public; the rest are relatively weak, and there is no Europe-wide spy

agency.

Europe wants more “product” from America’s intelligence Leviathan, but less collection.

Americans and Europeans sometimes act as though they’re on different teams. This was the path to Brussels.

“There’s a general recognition among intelligence professionals that the services have to cooperate more, and that the U.S. should take the lead in bringing them together,” argues Michael Allen, former staff director of the House Intelligence Committee.

Intelligence strategies that worked against al-Qaeda may not succeed with this adversary.

The Islamic State leaves few digital signals. More “human intelligence” — real spies daring to penetrate the enemy camp — is essential, however risky.

Another answer may be the application of “machine learning” to big data sets to yield essential leads: Who’s likely to be recruited? What are the likely targets? What’s the best way to disrupt potential adversaries?

European intelligence services must combine forces with the United States and with each other. The West needs a new Arcadia Conference to build a partnership to contain the Islamic State as it plots the next Brussels-style attacks. n

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Obama’s Cuba visit helps freedom EUGENE ROBINSON writes a twice-a-week column on politics and culture, contributes to the PostPartisan blog, and hosts a weekly online chat with readers.

The historic visit of a sitting U.S. president to Havana — which should have come a half-century sooner — will almost surely hasten the day when Cubans are free from the Castro government’s suffocating repression.

President Obama’s whirlwind trip is the culmination of his common-sense revamping of U.S. policy toward Cuba. One outdated, counterproductive relic of the Cold War remains — the economic embargo forbidding most business ties with the island nation — and the Republican-controlled Congress won’t even consider repealing it.

But Obama, using his executive powers, has been able to reestablish full diplomatic relations, practically eliminate travel restrictions and substantially weaken the embargo’s grip.

All of which is long overdue.

The United States first began to squeeze the Castro government, with the hope of forcing regime change, in 1960. It should be a rule of thumb that if a policy is an utter failure for more than 50 years, it’s time to try something else.

I say this as someone with no illusions about President Raúl Castro, the spectral but stillpowerful Fidel Castro or the authoritarian system they created and wish to perpetuate.

Hours before Obama’s arrival Sunday, police and security

agents roughly arrested and hauled away members of the Ladies in White dissident group as they conducted their weekly protest march; this time, U.S. network news crews happened to be on hand to witness the ritualized crackdown.

I wrote a book about Cuba, and each time I went to the island for research I gained more respect and admiration for the Cuban people — and more contempt for the regime that so cynically and capriciously smothers their dreams. Those 10 trips convinced me, however, that the U.S. policy of prohibiting economic and social contact between Americans and Cubans was, to the Castro brothers, the gift that kept on giving.

I saw how the “menace” of an aggressive, threatening neighbor

to the north was used as a justification for repression. We’d love to have freedom of the press, freedom of association and freedom of assembly, the government would say, but how can we leave our beloved nation so open, and so vulnerable, when the greatest superpower on Earth is trying to destroy our heroic revolution?

Most of the Cubans I met were not fooled by such doublespeak.

But they did have a nationalistic love for their country, and their nation was, indeed, under economic siege.

There are those who argue that Obama could have won more concessions from the Castro regime in exchange for improved relations. But this view ignores the fact that our posture of unmitigated hostility toward Cuba did more harm to U.S. interests than good. Relaxing travel restrictions for U.S. citizens can only help flood the island with American ideas and values. Permitting such an influx could be the biggest risk the Castro brothers have taken since they led a ragtag band of guerrillas into the Sierra Maestra Mountains to make a revolution.

Why would they now take this gamble? Because they have no choice. The Castro regime survived the collapse of the

Soviet Union — and the end of huge annual subsidies from the Eastern Bloc — but the Cuban economy sank into depression.

Copious quantities of Venezuelan oil, provided by strongman Hugo Chávez (who was Fidel Castro’s protege), provided a respite. But now Chávez is gone, Venezuela is an economic ruin and Cuba has no choice but to monetize the resource it has in greatest abundance, human capital. From the Castros’ point of view, better relations with the United States must now seem unavoidable.

It is possible that Raúl Castro, who has promised to resign in 2018, will seek to move the country toward the Chinese model: a free-market economic system overseen by an authoritarian one-party government. Would this fully satisfy those who want to see a free Cuba? No. Would it be a tremendous improvement over the poverty and oppression Cubans suffer today? Absolutely.

Fidel Castro will be 90 in August; Raúl is just five years younger. At some point in the not-too-distant future, we will see whether Castroism can survive without a living Castro.

Anyone who wants U.S. policymakers to have influence when that question arises should applaud Obama’s initiatives. n

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OPINIONS

BY WASSERMAN FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE

When low-level offenders go free CHARIS E. KUBRIN, CARROLL SERON AND JOAN PETERSILIA Charis E. Kubrin and Carroll Seron are professors of criminology, law and society in the School of Social Ecology at the University of California at Irvine. Joan Petersilia is a professor at Stanford Law School.

In an era of bitter partisanship, politicians and pundits across the ideological spectrum seem to agree on one thing: Our prison system is broken. With less than 5 percent of the world’s population yet nearly 25 percent of the world’s prison inmates, the United States spends too much money locking up too many people for too long.

Some fear that reducing sentences for nonviolent crimes and letting low-level offenders back on the streets — key components of prison reform — could produce a new and devastating crime wave. Such dire predictions were common in 2011 when California embarked on a massive experiment in prison downsizing.

But five years later, California’s experience offers powerful evidence that no such crime wave is likely to occur.

In 2011, the Supreme Court ruled that California’s wildly overcrowded prisons were tantamount to cruel and unusual punishment and ordered the state to reduce its prison population by some 33,000 people in two years.

In response, the state enacted the controversial California Public Safety Realignment law, known in legislative shorthand as AB 109.

With a budget of more than $1 billion annually, “realignment” gave each of the state’s 58 counties responsibility for supervising a sizable class of offenders — the “triple nons,” or non-serious, nonviolent, non-sex offenders — formerly housed in state prisons.

Each county received unprecedented flexibility and authority to manage this population as it saw fit.

Recently, we brought together a group of social scientists to do a systematic, comprehensive assessment of California’s prison downsizing experiment. The results, published this month in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, show that California’s decision to cede authority over low-level offenders to its counties has been, for the most part, remarkably effective public policy and an extraordinarily rich case study in governance.

There has been great variation in how counties have dealt with their newfound authority. Some have decided essentially to

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY SHENEMAN

continue with the status quo, placing offenders into local jails.

Other counties have experimented with innovative reforms such as new reentry and rehabilitation programs to ease the transition of convicts back into the community.

To answer questions about the relationship between prison reform and crime rates, we not only compared statewide crime rates before and after the downsizing but also examined what happened in counties that favored innovative approaches vs. those that emphasized oldfashioned enforcement.

Clearly, our most important finding is that realignment has had only a very small effect on crime in California.

Violent crime rates in the state have barely budged. We’ve seen no appreciable uptick in assaults, rapes and murders that can be connected to the prisoners who were released under realignment.

This makes a lot of sense when you think about it; by and large, these offenders were eligible for release because of the nonviolent nature of their crimes.

On the other hand, a small uptick in property crime can be attributed to downsizing, with the largest increase occurring for auto theft. So is this an argument against realignment and against

prison reform more broadly?

We think not. The cost to society of a slight increase in property crime must be weighed against the cost of incarceration. Take the example of auto theft. Our data suggest that one year served in prison instead of at large as a result of realignment prevents 1.2 auto thefts per year and saves $11,783 in crime-related costs plus harm to the victims and their families. On the other hand, keeping someone behind bars for a year costs California $51,889. In purely monetary terms — without considering, say, the substantial economic and social hardship that imprisonment can create for prisoners’ children and other relatives — incarcerating someone for a year in the hope of preventing an auto theft is like spending $450 to repair a $100 vacuum cleaner.

Turning to the question of which counties’ strategies were most successful, we have another important early finding: Counties that invested in offender reentry in the aftermath of realignment had better performance in terms of recidivism than counties that focused resources on enforcement.

As other states and the federal government contemplate their own proposals for prison downsizing, they should take a close look at what these California counties are doing right. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Political spin BY

D AVID G REENBERG

The left and the right don’t agree on much today. But it’s easy to find a consensus that an excess of spin is ruining politics. Spin — the de­ liberate crafting of words and images for political effect — is every­ where, from the scripted laugh lines that candidates trot out in de­ bates, to the artful circumlocutions of press secretaries, to the slick ads and viral videos that flicker across our screens.

Unpacking these common misperceptions might help us to see more clearly the role that spin plays in our politics — and to think of it as something that should be neither feared nor lamented.

1

Spin is new to our times.

We do encounter spin everywhere, because there are a lot more media outlets today, many featuring politicians and their supporters pleading their cases. But politics has always involved spin. Ancient Greek orators practiced rhetoric to craft arguments, sometimes deceptively, that aroused emotions and persuaded the populace.

American politicians, too, have always availed themselves of what was once called publicity or propaganda. Theodore Roosevelt was the first modern master, devising all kinds of methods to get the news written the way he wanted (such as cultivating the Washington press corps and traveling around the country to push legislation). Woodrow Wilson created the first wartime propaganda agency, Calvin Coolidge staged photo-ops, Herbert Hoover produced an elaborate campaign film, Dwight Eisenhower employed a White House TV coach — every president for the past century has used sophisticated forms of spin.

2

Political consultants are geniuses with immense power over elections.

From the start, the public relations experts who counseled politicians claimed unique insight into the human mind. In the 1920s, Edward Bernays, dubbed the father of spin — partly

because of his PR on his own behalf — extolled the knowledge and skills shared by “invisible governors” who secretly shaped public preferences. Later, the first full-time political consultants, Californians Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter, were deemed to have perfected a fool-proof “pushbutton technique.”

But Bernays gave lots of pedestrian advice; Whitaker and Baxter mostly took on clients who were already shoo-ins; and even modern “geniuses” such as Karl Rove, David Axelrod and James Carville have all run losing campaigns. When honing a message, consultants are relying on art, not science (losing campaigns have top-drawer advisers, too). In a 1986 debunking of consultants’ prowess, the New Republic quoted one guru’s secret: “You get on the back of a good horse and hold on.”

3

Polls routinely tell politicians what positions to adopt.

It’s true that candidates might play down or change positions if polling suggests it would help their prospects. But mostly, politicians use information from polls to figure out how to explain positions they already hold. In “Politicians Don’t Pander,” a recent classic of political science, Robert Shapiro and Lawrence Jacobs show how the Clinton administration polled on healthcare reform only after the plan was

SPACES IMAGES/GETTY IMAGES/BLEND IMAGES

finished to determine how to pitch it to the public. George W. Bush pursued privatizing Social Security even though it was unpopular because he believed in it. His White House polled to find the most attractive phrases (such as “retirement security,” “choice” and “savings”) with which to sell it.

4

Political spin dupes the public.

Politicians, of course, sometimes stretch the truth. But that doesn’t mean we all credulously buy their claims.

Social science research shows that the public has a great capacity to resist spin. Scholars now recognize the phenomena of “selective exposure,” the tendency to seek out agreeable news; “selective perception,” placing trust in agreeable information while blocking out disagreeable information; and “motivated reasoning,” using logic to reach desired conclusions. We may worry that politicians will convince us of falsehoods, but the reality today is closer to the opposite: We’re so cocooned in our own ideological bubbles that it’s hard to convince anyone of anything.

5

What we really want is a candidate who doesn’t spin.

Many pundits this year use this theory to explain the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.

When we look closely, we see that completely “authentic” politicians don’t really exist.

Displays of candor and spontaneity are frequently the product of planning and practice.

In 1948, Harry Truman drew raves for his speech at the Democratic convention, which he delivered in an extemporaneous style instead of from a script.

Truman had been rehearsing in a studio with the Democrats’ broadcast coach, Leonard Reinsch. Four years later, Eisenhower won plaudits for a speech in which he declared that his “prepared remarks are thrown out the window.” That stunt was a gimmick, and his busy hive of speechwriters continued to furnish him remarks thereafter.

Despite the appearance of untutored directness, Trump and Sanders also put thought and calculation into their public images, each employing consultants and talking points.

Candidates carefully craft their words and images. It’s simply the nature of politics. n Greenberg is a professor of history at Rutgers University and the author of “Republic of Spin.”

SUNDAY, MARCH 27, 2016

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