The Washington Post National Weekly - September 4, 2016

There are 23 craft breweries in Asheville, N.C.

Politics Fear and loathing in 2016 6

Nation South sees rise in craft breweries 8

Features Your dog really does get you 17

5 Myths Mosquitoes 23

for 90,000 residents, the densest concentration in the country.

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY

2,347: Amount of craft breweries in America in 2012, according to the Brewers Association.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2016 . of INcraft COLLABORATION 5,000: Amount breweries by WITH the end

of this year, if trends hold.

A FORTRESS AGAINST FEAR In the rural Pacific Northwest, some are preparing for calamity.

PAGE 12

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SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2016

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THE FIX

The ‘pivot’ is dead C HRIS C ILLIZZA

campaign that Trump isn’t all that interested in doing things differently.

Sure, Trump is now reading off telehis has been an incredible eveprompters at rallies. (He did so for this ning,” Donald Trump told the speech Wednesday night.) And, yes, his visit crowd in Phoenix as he neared with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto the end of his long-awaited imwas surprisingly statesmanlike. But these are migration speech Wednesday night. “We’re moments. And they simply aren’t sustained. going to remember this evening.”

At root, Trump is an entertainer, a showman.

He’s right. But not for the reason he thinks.

He feeds off crowds and Trump’s speech capped a how they react to him. And remarkably frenetic — and when he got up in front of manic — day on the camthat Phoenix crowd paign trail for the RepubliWednesday night, he gave can candidate. them exactly what they He had jetted to Mexico wanted: chunk after chunk earlier in the day to meet of rhetorical red meat that with that country’s presithey cheered lustily for. dent, an appearance that The problem, of course, is had, generally speaking, that there simply aren’t won him plaudits for his seenough voters in Trump’s riousness and evenness of base of support to elect him tone. Talk of the “new” president. (Don’t believe Trump — led by new camme? Look at any swing state paign manager Kellyanne or national poll.) His only Conway — was everywhere. possible path to victory is to But, when Trump stepped grow the number of people to the podium in Phoenix, all — particularly suburban of that talk of a tonal shift whites and Hispanics — disappeared. In the single YURI CORTEZ/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES willing to vote for him. His most important speech of his presidential campaign — Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, left, and Donald Trump met Wednesday. His immigration speech will do the opposite. No one outand with the eyes of the potone then was very different than when he spoke on immigration that night. side of Trump’s base will relitical world on him — spond well to a speech that came across — for Trump delivered an angry affirmation of the no 2.0. Trump, at age 70 and coming off one of all of Trump’s policy proposals — as an angry message that won him the Republican nomithe most successful and surprising primary rant against the other. nation: We are going to build a wall along our campaigns in political history, is not going to So, yes, we will remember Aug. 31 and southern border, and Mexico is going to pay change in any meaningful way. He can change for it. He also repeatedly highlighted the crimhis campaign leadership — as he has now done Trump’s immigration speech — just as he promised the crowd. But it will be rememinal acts done by those in the country illegally twice. His surrogates — led by Conway — can bered primarily for killing off any notion that and insisted it would never happen if he was insist that the “real” Trump is now starting to there is a “new” Trump waiting to be unveiled elected president. come out. But, ultimately, the candidate needs for the stretch run of the 2016 campaign.

The 10-point plan Trump outlined for dealto want to — or be able to — change. And it has There just isn’t. n ing with the country’s immigration problems been clear to anyone paying attention to this BY

“T

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was entirely overshadowed by the snarling and sarcastic way in which he delivered the speech. This was Trump in the heat of battle, surrounded on all sides by doubters and haters and losers — lashing out at all of them by basking in the adulation of his core of supporters.

The day, and, in particular, Trump’s speech, serves as a stark reminder that there is no “new” Trump. There is no pivot, no new leaf,

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. 47

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

4 8 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Chris Walsh of Revolutionary Realty stands in the cellar of an unfinished home for sale in Spirit Lake, Idaho, an area that has been a refuge for preppers. Photograph by MATT MCCLAIN, The Washington Post

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POLITICS

Taking very divergent paths for debate prep Inside the two camps: While Clinton studies up, Trump team stays loose

BY P HILIP R UCKER, R OBERT C OSTA AND A NNE G EARAN

H

illary Clinton is methodically preparing for the presidential debates as a veteran lawyer would approach her biggest trial. She pores over briefing books thick with policy arcana and opposition research. She internalizes tips from the most seasoned debate coaches in her party. And she rehearses, over and over again, to perfect the pacing and substance of her presentation.

Donald Trump is taking a different approach. He summons his informal band of counselors — including former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, talk-radio host Laura Ingraham and ousted Fox News Channel chairman Roger Ailes — to his New Jersey golf course for Sunday chats. Over bacon cheeseburgers, hot dogs and glasses of Coca-Cola, they test out zingers and chew over ways to refine the Republican nominee’s pitch.

Trump’s aides have put together briefing books, not that the candidate is devoting much time to reading them. Trump is not holding any mock debates, proudly boasting that a performer with his talents does not need that sort of prepping. Should Trump submit to traditional rehearsals, some associates are talking about casting Ingraham, an adversarial chronicler of Clinton scandals, to play the Democratic nominee.

“Donald Trump is the unpredictable X-factor and Hillary Clinton is the scripted statist,” said Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s new

campaign manager, in an interview. “I fully understand why Team Clinton feels the need to drown her in briefing books and Hollywood consulting.”

Amid a combative period of campaigning, during which each has flung ferocious accusations, Clinton and Trump are also taking time to warm up for their biggest showdowns. The first of three presidential debates, on Sept. 26, promises to be one of the highest-rated television events of the year, the first opportunity for voters to evaluate the candidates side by side and one of the last moments for either to alter the trajectory of the race.

Clinton’s advisers are confident the debates will showcase her experience, judgment, gravitas and command of policy.

“She feels like it is a proving ground, that this is a job interview,” Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon said. “I think she will approach the debate with a great deal of seriousness and a sense of purpose, and also keenly aware that Donald Trump is capable of anything.”

The forum brings considerable challenges. Clinton must not only parry what her campaign expects will be a stream of insults and innuendo from Trump, but she also must overcome the perception among many voters that she is not trustworthy.

“People think that they have to land zingers and pivot and attack — and that’s true, but ultimately, you want your viewers to come away with a gut feeling that I like this person,” said former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm,

JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES

Hillary Clinton, answering a question at the Democratic primary debate in Brooklyn on April 14, is said to be preparing meticulously for Donald Trump, who will be an unconventional debate opponent.

who co-chairs Clinton’s transition committee.

For Trump, who trails Clinton in nearly all national and battleground-state polls, the debates represent perhaps his best opportunity to change perceptions.

The outsider candidate needs to convince voters he is up for the job. Known for an unpredictable and, at times, erratic temperament, Trump must prove that he can be a steady commander in chief, with an understanding of the issues. And after more than a year of making damaging comments about women and minorities, he will try to use the big debate stage to show that he would be an inclusive president.

“You’re going to see a very natural and normal guy — someone who is comfortable with who he is, not someone who’s highly scripted or nervous,” Giuliani said. “The real risk is when a guy tries to be something other than what he is.”

The first debate, at Hofstra University just outside New York City, will be rife with personal drama.

Clinton and Trump are two of the most prominent personalities in a city filled with them.

During the Republican primary, Trump bragged about taking on Clinton and has eagerly anticipated debating her since even before entering the race, according to his associates.

“Not only does he want 100 million viewers, he wants to be a showstopper at the Roman Colosseum, the main event at WrestleMania,” said Sam Nunberg, a former adviser who helped the billionaire chart his White House run. “He’s going to love this, eat it up and take her on. For Hillary to go in and think she’ll be professional and wonky, or give a long lecture, that’ll play against her.”

Political campaigns often play the expectations game, and Clinton’s aides are trying to raise the bar for Trump. They insist that his years on reality television and his pugnacity and agility in the Republican primary debates make him a fearsome adversary.

“We are fully expecting to have our hands full,” Fallon said. “It was his television personality that carried the day and made him a success at the [primary] debates.

What normally would make for low expectations in terms of a lack of substance and not sort of exuding that commander in chief demeanor has actually been turned on its head.”

The debates are run by the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates, which long ago picked the dates and locations: The second is Oct. 9 at Washington University in St. Louis and the third is Oct. 19 at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas.

The commission also hosts one

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POLITICS

CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES

vice-presidential debate, Oct. 4 at Longwood University in Farmville, Va. To participate, the commission requires that candidates average at least 15 percent in national polls, a threshold neither Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson nor Green Party nominee Jill Stein yet meets.

The commission dictates the format and selects the moderators, who are expected to be named soon after Labor Day. Traditionally, the first debate is on domestic policy, the second is a town hall with audience questions and the third is on foreign policy, with the debates divided by subject into 15-minute sections.

So far, only Clinton has officially agreed to appear. Trump has vowed to negotiate for more favorable terms, saying in a recent interview with The Washington Post that he would try to influence the selection of moderators: “I’d want to have a fair moderator.”

The campaigns are allotted no official input, although the commission historically has accommodated some requests, such as whether candidates sit around a table or stand behind lecterns.

One potential hiccup: Each debate runs for 90 minutes, with no breaks. In the primary debates, Trump and Clinton both took advantage of frequent commercial breaks to use the restroom or

collect their thoughts.

Trump had been represented with the debate commission by campaign chairman Paul Manafort, but he recently resigned under pressure. Giuliani has stepped into that role, along with campaign lawyer Donald F. McGahn.

Unlike Clinton, Trump has no official debate team. His strategy is being shaped by an assortment of advisers, family members and friends, some of whom Trump gathered last month at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., to strategize with him as he read printouts of news articles and monitored television news.

Present were Conway and newly hired campaign chief executive Stephen Bannon, as well as communications adviser Jason Miller.

They were joined by Ailes and Giuliani, both longtime friends of Trump’s; Ingraham, who is close to Conway and admired by Trump for her cutting Clinton commentary; and Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, according to people familiar with the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the talks were private.

They said Ailes shared war stories from campaigns past and insights into the more cinematic elements of politics. The former Fox chief, who is engulfed in a sexual-harassment scandal, has

Trump, center, beat a Republican primary field that included Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, left, and former Florida governor Jeb Bush.

Trump’s preparations to debate Clinton are said to be fairly relaxed.

The presidential debates Sept. 26 Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y. Oct. 9 Washington University in St. Louis Oct. 19 University of Nevada in Las Vegas

been in regular touch with Trump by phone, dispensing advice about television advertisements, speech lines and Clinton attacks.

Conway said of Trump: “He’s an unconventional candidate, so debate prep in the classic sense doesn’t apply to him. That applies to the accoutrements that are usually associated with getting ready for debates: contrived gestures, lecterns, a group of consultants in belted khakis holed up in a cabin, the Socratic method of peppering questions. That’s not him.”

Retired Army generals Michael Flynn and Joseph “Keith” Kellogg have been tutoring Trump on national security, and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who chairs Trump’s transition project, helps in a variety of areas. Campaign policy adviser Stephen Miller has been assembling Trump’s briefing materials.

So far, Trump has been heavily influenced by flame-throwing Clinton critics, but campaign officials are considering inviting more mainstream Republicans to join the discussions, such as military figures and members of Congress, believing Trump would benefit from a diversity of perspectives.

Brett O’Donnell, regarded as one of the GOP’s best debate coaches, said that when Manafort was still chairman of the Trump campaign, he asked whether O’Donnell would assist their candidate, but those talks quickly dissolved. O’Donnell said Trump should be preparing rigorously.

“He thinks he won all the primary debates,” O’Donnell said.

“But he picked his spots, beat up on a candidate and then evaporated for a while and stayed out of the substance. He’s not going to be able to hide like that with just the two of them on stage. . . . He can’t just name-call her and have a wrestling match for 90 minutes.”

Republican lawyer Benjamin Ginsberg, a veteran presidential debate adviser, said: “There ain’t no lifelines. You can’t ask an adviser what they think, you can’t read off a prompter, and you have to talk far more in-depth about any given subject than you had to in any primary debate.”

Facing off against a female candidate is an additional dimension. Communications experts said Trump risks appearing like a bully, noting that one of Trump’s worst moments in the primary

KLMNO WEEKLY

debates was when Carly Fiorina shamed him for his comments about her looks.

“Odds are any name-calling backfires,” said David Brock, who runs a conglomeration of proClinton super PACs. “Any false insinuation that Hillary is old and frail will be countered right on stage with her presence, which conveys the opposite.”

Clinton’s debate negotiations are led by operative Ronald Klain, who is so steeped in presidential debates that he teaches a course on the subject at Georgetown University, and Washington lawyer Karen Dunn. The two prepare briefing materials and run the practice sessions. Longtime policy adviser Jake Sullivan helps run the sessions as an adviser without portfolio. Veteran Clinton lawyer Robert Barnett, media advisers Mandy Grunwald and Jim Margolis, campaign chairman John Podesta, strategist Joel Benenson, and communications director Jennifer Palmieri often attend or weigh in.

Clinton aides have not revealed who is standing in for Trump, and they said it is possible that multiple people could play the role.

Clinton has built considerable downtime into her calendar recently, but her aides refused to detail her debate-related activities. Fallon said only: “She does her homework.”

Clinton is most comfortable when she is hyper-prepared, but some of her friends have suggested she study less, arguing that memorizing policy minutiae is less important than extemporaneously shadowboxing Trump, according to two Democrats who have known the candidate for years.

Clinton has countered that her marathon prep sessions last fall for her 11-hour testimony before a congressional panel on the attacks in Benghazi, Libya — going over lines of questioning from multiple angles, testing how lawmakers might try to trip her up — paid dividends.

Clinton’s allies said it is essential that she be ready to stymie any attempt by Trump to come across as sober and serious.

“The man has the thinnest skin that we’ve ever seen, so getting a reaction out of him and pulling the now well-known Trump personality out will be important,” said strategist Stephanie Cutter, a veteran of President Obama’s campaigns. n

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POLITICS

A NNE G EARAN Brookfield, Wis. BY

F

or a small group of undecided voters here, the presidential choices this year are bleak: Democrat Hillary Clinton is a “liar” with a lifetime of political skulduggery and a ruthless agenda for power, while Republican Donald Trump is your “drunk uncle” who can’t be trusted to listen even to the good advice he’s paying for.

Describing the election as a cesspool, 12 swing voters participating in a late August focus group in this battleground state were deeply negative about both candidates, starkly describing their choice this year as one between a candidate they loathe (Clinton) and one they fear (Trump).

Clinton was described as untrustworthy even by people who are leaning toward voting for her.

Although 11 of the 12 predicted she will win, the ambivalence or outright distaste for the Democratic candidate was a dominant and recurring theme in a twohour discussion in this Milwaukee suburb.

Trump was described as a bully, an egomaniac, a lion in the zoo, proud of his luxuriant mane. Even among those leaning toward voting for him, more than one participant criticized his lack of a filter — and more than one questioned the value of his boardroom experience.

“I’m choosing what I feel is the lesser of two evils,” said Dara Schneider, a 47-year-old recruiter and Clinton supporter who, like most others answering questions posed by pollster Peter D. Hart, rues her choices this year.

All of the participants had voted for both a Democrat and Republican for president some time over the past 16 years. They were invited to participate in the recent focus group as part of an ongoing examination of swing voters this year conducted by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.

Both candidates have serious flaws, said Sheri LaValley, a 51year-old compliance analyst who voted for President Obama.

“Hillary with her emails, I just don’t trust her. Trump, the way he acts. Every day you turn on the TV, and I just shake my head,” LaValley said. “I think he would be an

A ‘liar’ vs. your ‘drunk uncle’ ISTOCKPHOTO

awesome candidate if he could get his personality under control.”

Few of the participants described themselves as proud to back either candidate.

“Both have baggage, but I think Hillary has less,” said Daniel Waffenschmidt, 61, a retired restaurant owner.

Asked to rate Clinton on competence, the participants mostly gave her six and above on a scale of 10. On trustworthiness, the group scored her no higher than six, with several ratings of one or two.

David Locher gave Clinton a two.

“I feel like she’s a career politician. That takes with it a certain amount of doing what you have to do to survive,” said the 34-year-old bus transportation supervisor, who voted for Democrat John F. Kerry in 2004 but backed Republicans in 2008 and 2012.

Clinton’s potential to make history as the first woman to become president of the United States was unimportant to all but her strongest backer in the group, a 44year-old preschool teacher.

“We tell our daughters they can be anything they choose to be in

the United States,” Timothy Jones said. “This shows we mean it.”

Jones, the lone African American in the group, voted for Obama twice and also for George W. Bush twice.

The group returned several times to the issue of Clinton’s use of a private email server for her government work as secretary of state, and to the general issue of whether she can be trusted.

“Liar” was the most common word selected by participants asked to give a one-word assessment.

“She’s a smart woman with a lot of experience,” but there are too many questions about Clinton’s priorities, said Beth Gramling, 50, a payroll analyst whose recent voting history matched Jones’s.

“You can’t trust her. The trust to know between right and wrong, and integrity. I don’t think that she has that, and it’s a shame.”

Older women, a bedrock of Clinton’s support nationally, were among her harshest critics in this group.

Barbara Kass, 62, questioned Clinton’s motives in staying with her husband, former president Bill Clinton, after he humiliated

As one focus group sees it, both potential presidents are deeply flawed

her by having an affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

“What are you thinking?” Kass said, incredulous. “From that point on, I say, ‘I see your agenda, and it’s to have some political power,’ ” said Kass, a retired airline employee turned tour guide.

Trump’s soft support in solidly Republican towns and suburbs outside Milwaukee was evident among the voters ranging from 27 to 63 and including a mix of self-identified Republicans, Democrats and independents.

Steve Watson, a 35-year-old retail operations manager who was among the firmest Trump supporters, still described himself as “apprehensive.”

“We know Donald Trump has good intentions, that he can fix the country,” Watson said. “But he has to understand that this isn’t a boardroom. Everything he says as a candidate for the American presidency is taken and it can be construed a thousand different ways.”

Participants called the business executive reckless, inexperienced and mouthy, a potential threat to U.S. stature and influence abroad.

Nearly all condemned statements Trump has made about a Mexican American judge and a Muslim mother whose son, a U.S. soldier, died in Iraq.

Trump’s ratings on competence ranged from one to eight, as did his ratings on trust. He was described as an iconoclast who wants to work outside a broken political system and try something different. His tough line on immigration was popular with several participants, as was his anti-terrorism stance.

Trump hires smart or experienced advisers but then ignores them, said Mike Naunheim, a 27year-old software engineer who voted for Republican Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) in 2008 and Obama in 2012. “I don’t trust someone who doesn’t listen to his advisers.”

Locher gave Trump an eight rating for trust, or maybe for truth in advertising.

“He’s a bully and a loud-mouth, but at least you know that’s what he is,” Locher said. “I’m not saying I like it or agree with it, but what you see is what you get.”

Kass said Trump miscalculated by calling Clinton a “bigot” recently.

The discussion took place as

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POLITICS Trump has sought to soften some of his rough edges as a candidate.

Trump also is making a direct appeal to black and Hispanic voters, arguing that historical support for Democrats has not helped those demographic groups.

Domestic concerns far outweighed international issues as priorities for the group this year, although several mentioned the threat of the Islamic State and homegrown terrorism.

When the group was asked to rate how things are going for the country on a scale of minus-10 to plus-10, the lowest rating was a minus-six, and the highest was a plus-five. Eight of the 12 people predicted that conditions for the country will worsen.

Four of the participants said they are seriously considering voting for a third-party candidate.

The group was drawn from across the racially divided Milwaukee area, but the discussion touched only briefly on the city’s recent racial unrest.

Asked to name one piece of recent “good news,” Naunheim cited a woman “handing out cookies” as a sign of goodwill around the neighborhood where a 23year-old black suspect was shot during a police chase.

The focus group took place in Waukesha County amid a suburban landscape of malls and office parks. The median household income is about $75,000 in overwhelmingly white and heavily Republican Brookfield.

Trump campaigned Aug. 16 in similarly white West Bend, about 30 miles to the north, where he referred to the Milwaukee shooting and pledged to restore “law and order.”

Wisconsin is in a loose grouping of swing states this year — less competitive than battleground Ohio, Florida and Michigan but important for Trump if he is to piece together a winning map through the South and industrial Midwest.

In the latest statewide polling, Marquette University Law School found Clinton ahead by 15 percentage points, 52 percent to 37 percent, in a survey of likely voters conducted the first week of August.

Statewide, 19 percent said they are undecided or won’t vote for either major party candidate, Marquette pollster Charles Franklin said. n

WEEKLY

At end of presidency, Obama seeks stamp on environment J ULIET E ILPERIN Honolulu BY

O

n Thursday, President Obama landed at Midway Atoll, a sliver of land in the North Pacific so removed from other human development that it feels like the edge of the universe. For more than two years, he had been hoping to visit a place like this, even though his former senior counselor John D. Podesta told him America’s most pristine marine reserves are “the middle of nowhere.”

But here, surrounded by the ocean and a population of seabirds so vast that it dictates when planes can fly certain times of year, Obama celebrated his most dramatic action yet to safeguard the planet against climate change.

The president used the Midway visit to tout his decision late last month to expand the Papahanaumokukea Marine National Monument to more than half a million square miles, making it the largest ecological preserve on Earth.

Teeming with life — from the more than 1 million albatrosses that flock there every year to the endangered Hawaiian monk seals that haul themselves on land to pup — the monument area contains some of the world’s most undisturbed habitats. Obama noted on Wednesday how conservation and climate change “are inextricably linked.”

“This is an area twice the size of Texas that’s going to be protected, and it allows us to save and study the fragile ecosystem threatened by climate change,” he told a group of Pacific island leaders and conservationists gathered at the University of Hawaii’s East-West Center.

“These animals, and these creatures, are surviving at the edge,” said Aulani Wilhelm, who served as the monument’s superintendent for eight years and is now vice president of Conservation International’s Oceans Center. “You see these animals in huge massive volumes. Then you realize how

Expansion to 582,578 sq. miles

Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument currently 139,800 sq. miles

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Midway

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c i f i c

Pearl and Hermes Atoll

Kure Atoll

Lisianski

Laysan

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Gardner Pinnacles French Frigate Shoals

D.C. U.S.

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Size comparison

H A W A I I Nihoa

Necker

Kauai Oahu Maui Honolulu Hawaii

500 MILES

LARIS KARKLIS/THE WASHINGTON POST

they’re really on the brink, when you see the small patches of lands they’re dependent on for survival.”

With less than half a year left in office, Obama may have fully entered the grand-gesture phase of his presidency — the time when outgoing presidents seek to broker last-minute peace deals, finalize regulations and deliver sweeping farewell addresses.

Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), who helped design the boundaries of the monument in consultation with the White House, said the fact that Obama hails from Hawaii helped inform the president’s approach to the issue.

“The sense here is that there’s an emotional connection to the islands, and to the ocean in particular,” Schatz said As they search for opportunities to do something both big and feasible, the Antiquities Act of 1906 often emerges as one of the boldest ways for commanders in chief to act.

Teddy Roosevelt designated the Grand Canyon a national monument shortly before leaving office.

Bill Clinton used his last appearance in the East Room on Jan. 17, 2001, to designate two monuments in Montana along the trail William Clark and Meriwether Lewis explored two centuries before, and to posthumously pro-

mote Clark to captain, a rank Lewis had promised he would attain, while making Sacagawea, the legendary Shoshone woman who was crucial to the Lewis and Clark expedition, and the explorers’ slave, York, sergeants in the U.S. Army.

James L. Connaughton, who headed the White House Council on Environmental Quality under George W. Bush and played a key role in convincing his boss to designate the area in the Northern Hawaiian islands as a national monument a decade ago, said it is the expanse of the environment that makes it special.

“It’s the scale,” Connaughton said. “It’s the drama; it’s the biodiversity that just carries an overwhelming appeal.”

On Thursday, Obama fulfilled one of his second-term goals.

When he expanded the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument in 2014, he told Podesta, then a White House senior adviser, that he wanted to see the protected islands, atolls and reefs for himself.

It was then that Podesta pointed out that they were in “the middle of nowhere.”

Still, Podesta recalled in an interview Tuesday: “He wanted to go there, and now, lo and behold.” n

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NATION

Breweries can finally tap into South

BY J IM T ANKERSLEY Asheville, N.C.

I

n the beginning, Walt Dickinson was just a rainwatercollection-system salesman who couldn’t find a decent beer in his home state and decided to start making his own at home.

“It was a wasteland,” he says of North Carolina and surrounding states. “There was no good IPA in the Southeast.”

The reason the region wasn’t producing hoppy, piney, West Coast-style India pale ales, the type that dominate craft sales around the country? Stifling government regulation. Century-old laws made it nearly impossible to start a craft brewery across the South and MidAtlantic. And when lawmakers began to repeal those laws, starting with North Carolina in 2005, Dickinson and other enterprising brewers took advantage.

Dickinson and his brother, Luke, rounded up capital — $3 million within six months — from family friends and in late 2012 started Wicked Weed, a purveyor of IPAs, sour ales and other malted varieties that is now the fastest-growing homegrown brewery in Asheville. The Asheville area has at least 23 craft breweries and 90,000 residents, the densest concentration in the United States. North Carolina’s microbrew production has increased 600 percent, to 675,000 barrels in 2015, just in four years.

Similar stories are playing out in Virginia and South Carolina — opening a market for local entrepreneurs and, at a much larger scale, big craft players from the Western states where government hurdles were never a problem.

The arrival of California brewery Sierra Nevada, which opened outside Asheville in 2014, and Colorado’s New Belgium, which started offering tours last week, opens a final geographic frontier for one of the rare American industries where small business is booming.

Their mammoth production facilities cement Asheville’s status as a power-player in the craft world — but also give their homegrown brewers some big new neighbors

JACOB BIBA FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Relaxed regulations have opened the market for local entrepreneurs and big craft players to worry about.

The proliferation of craft brewing on the East Coast is a case study in how government regulation can block entrepreneurship for decades — and leave entire regions playing catch-up when it is finally relaxed.

New business creation is slowing across the country and in most industries, but not in the world of beer. The industry is dominated by a few big players, led by the soonto-be-merged SAB Miller and Anheuser-Busch InBev. But smaller competitors, peddling wide varieties of stronger and more flavorful beer, are popping up everywhere to steal market share.

There were 2,347 craft breweries in the United States in 2012, according to the Brewers Association, a trade group, and they combined for 12 percent of the country’s beer sales in dollar terms. The sales share grew to 21 percent in 2015. By year’s end, if trends hold, there will be 5,000 craft breweries nationwide.

Four Western states house more than a quarter of those breweries: California, Washington, Oregon and Colorado, which have long been havens for the hoppy India pale ales that form the liquid foundation of the craft industry. The Midwest and Northeast also boast strong craft scenes.

The Mid-Atlantic is finally on its way. From 2005 to 2012, North Carolina lawmakers steadily repealed laws — Bible Belt leftovers from the end of Prohibition nearly a century earlier — that had stifled brewers from making and selling craft beer.

They lifted restrictions on how much alcohol a beer could include by volume, which had effectively banned many of the most popular craft styles. They began allowing larger craft breweries to sell their products on site, opening the way for small-volume brew houses.

And they made it easier for some smaller breweries to distribute beer to stores and bars.

Until the restrictions were lifted,

Walt Dickinson was disappointed he couldn’t find an IPA that he liked in his home state of North Carolina, so he started Wicked Weed Brewing in Asheville in 2012.

it took enormous quantities of money and patience to start a brewery in the state. Oscar Wong had both, which was why he had no competition when he began selling beer from an Asheville basement two decades ago. He had plenty of critics, though. They wrote the local newspaper regularly, complaining that he was doing the Devil’s work with his pale ale.

Wong had sold an engineering business in his 40s and was bored in retirement. He hired a brewmaster and was content to build Highland Brewing slowly, from a few converted dairy tanks in 1994 to a leafy campus with its own bottling plant today. He brewed Scottish ale that was low enough in alcohol content to avoid violating state law, and he waited eight years to finally turn a profit.

Sierra Nevada and New Belgium had no such problems in California and Colorado. They grew into two of the largest craft brewers in the nation, expanded their reach to the East Coast and looked for ways to ease their path to customers there.

This summer, New Belgium is ramping up production in its new 500,000-barrel facility that looms like a massive motorcycle (which the building is meant to evoke) parked along the French Broad River at the south end of downtown Asheville. Its brew tanks are cooking up batches of Fat Tire, New Belgium’s signature amber ale, and Ranger, its IPA. Brewing on the East Coast saves money for the Californians and the Coloradans, and it adds freshness to brews they would otherwise be shipping across the country. “Beer is heavy,” said Brendan Beers, New Belgium’s business support manager in Asheville.

“The closer you can get your production facility to the end customer, the better.”

Before construction began, New Belgium officials met with wary local brewers. They assured them that they weren’t trying to invade the Asheville craft scene — they were selling to the whole East Coast. Sierra Nevada officials say they told the locals that they would choose a different North

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2016

9

NATION Carolina location if there were objections to them moving to the outskirts of Asheville. Then they invited every brewer in town to an all-expenses-paid week of “beer camp” at their Northern California headquarters.

Many local brewers say the arrival of the Western craft giants has attracted more customers to their taprooms. They also say they can’t imagine trying to grow large enough, fast enough, to challenge them for East Coast craft supremacy.

“Why would I fight a battle with companies that are so well established with such a good product?” said Walt Dickinson, the Wicked Weed founder. “That’s not what we’re trying to be.”

A week after the Dickinsons announced plans for Wicked Weed, Sierra Nevada said it was coming to town. “I knew it was going to be great for us,” Walt Dickinson said, “bringing in more beer tourists.”

He was right. Wicked Weed has doubled its production every year and now is up to 22,000 barrels annually. Its main brewery and restaurant is packed in the afternoons and evenings.

None of that would have been possible under North Carolina’s old blue laws, Dickinson said. As similar laws fall around the South, in states such as Georgia and Tennessee, breweries like Wicked Weed could see growth opportunities — although the West Coast brewers will probably see more.

Policy changes in Virginia have unleashed a wave of homegrown breweries, but they have also attracted big new facilities from San Diego’s Stone Brewing (in Richmond) and Oregon’s Deschutes Brewery (in Roanoke).

“It’s a first-mover advantage” for the Western brewers, said Bart Watson, the chief economist for the Brewers Association. “The window on being a truly national craft brewery has essentially closed already.”

For North Carolina pioneer Wong, who distributes to several states but has no national ambitions, the arrival of the Western giants in his back yard means more traffic to his brewery but also more competition for tap handles and more pressure to drop his six-pack prices.

“I would have preferred that they weren’t here,” Wong said.

“But what it has forced us to do is up our game.” n

KLMNO WEEKLY

Rival birdwatchers break U.S. record — and race on K ARIN B RULLIARD

other pursuits, he is a writer, and he says his publisher put him up to it; the result was a book titled any a record was broken “Boobies, Peckers & Tits: One this summer. Here’s one Man’s Naked Perspective.” (Shockthat didn’t win a gold ingly, the effort resulted in no armedal or much fanfare: rest record.) This year, Danielson It was for extreme birdwatching — said, the stars aligned for a more and two people surpassed it. traditional Big Year. He’d sold his Just over halfway through the emergency-room-staffing compayear, a man named John Weigel ny, his family situation allowed it, spotted a Buller’s shearwater in and he was turning 50.

California on July 16, making him Weigel, an American by the holder of the record for birth, moved in 1981 to Ausmost bird species seen in tralia, where he owns the North America in a calendar Australian Reptile Park. He year: 750. But two days later, said he was turned onto Olaf Danielson of South Dabirding a decade ago, and kota saw his 750th bird of he’s since done two Big Years 2016, a red-faced cormorant in Australia, where his 2014 in Alaska. Now the men are record of 770 species still in a fierce competition — stands. Now he’s doing the such that exists in this norNorth American version to mally genteel pastime — to draw attention and funds to see how high the record can his side project, Devil Ark, a go in a year when strange El conservation breeding proNiño weather patterns, as JOHN WEIGEL gram for Tasmanian devils well as some recent taxothat is partnered with Globnomic splits that “created” These red knots (the smaller birds) helped al Wildlife Conservation. more species to spot, may John Weigel break a birdwatching record.

These days, both Weigel have made their oddball adand Danielson are wandering venture feasible. free time and a lot of money. By the around St. Lawrence, an island in This quest is referred to as a end of July, Danielson had spent North American “Big Year,” and nearly $70,000, flown 124,800 the middle of the Bering Sea that is part of Alaska but closer to Siberia. the goal is to see as many as you miles on 129 flights, driven 33,934 So are lots of other hardcore birdcan of the almost 1,000 species on miles, spent 192 hours looking for ers, because remote Alaskan isthe American Birding Associabirds at sea, walked 273 miles and lands are places where strong tion’s list for the continental Unitvisited 35 states and provinces. winds can blow birds that breed in ed States and Canada in a year. (It He’d also slept 12 nights in cars.

Siberia but migrate at this time of was fictionalized in the 2011 box Weigel said he hadn’t tracked year to Asia. They’re “vagrants” — office flop “The Big Year.”) From miles traveled nor dollars spent, birds that aren’t typically North 1998 to 2013, the record was 748 though he said his bid has been American. But if spotted on Alasbird species. A man named Neil “hideously expensive.” kan soil? Another check on the Big Hayward broke that with 749 in “I’ve had to go from West Coast Year list.

2013. Now Weigel, 60, and Danielto East Coast and back again in Neither man acknowledged son, 50, are crisscrossing the conti24-hour periods, and then back feeling like they’re in a cutthroat nent to push into the upper 700s — again, no worries,” Weigel said. competition with one another, but not many people who don’t “All I know is American Airlines though neither expressed an inclifrequent birding websites would loves me.” nation to pull back. Danielson, for know that.

Big Year hopefuls must also poshis part, said his Big Year experi“I was tired, and I’m not sure sess what many might consider a ence has been heartening. Previwhat you’re supposed to do,” Danseriously geeky drive to see lots ously, he explained, he found other ielson said of his non-celebration and lots of birds. That’s not totally birders rude and egotistical. upon seeing his 750th species on unusual among birders, but it’s “People I have never met before July 18. “I guess you want to enjoy fair to say Danielson and Weigel have taken me into their house the moment, but it’s hard when have rare levels of the birding and brought me breakfast out in you’re alone.” burn. the woods,” he said. “My entire And being alone is a big part of a Danielson, for example, tallied attitude about the birding world Big Year. Seeing the birds often 594 North American species in has changed 180 degrees.” n happens in a group, because hard2013, and he did it naked. Among

BY

M

core birders descend on spots where websites report rare bird sightings. But getting to them — because winning means checking off hard-to-find birds — takes an exhausting amount of time alone on airplanes and in cars.

What else does a Big Year take?

A good eye for birds and a good ear for their calls, because you can check off a species just by hearing it. It also takes stamina, loads of

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WORLD

A rare victory for U.S. diplomacy N ICK M IROFF Havana BY

I

n an era of frustrating, if not failed, U.S. policy interventions abroad, the Colombian peace deal announced last month offers the possibility of a rare victory for American diplomacy.

It would be a validation of Plan Colombia, the U.S. counternarcotics and security-aid package that has sent roughly $10 billion to Bogota since 2000, tipping the government’s fight against the Marxist FARC insurgents. The accord finalized Aug. 24 would convert the rebels from one of the world’s most powerful drug-trafficking groups to a legal political party with a sworn commitment to ending both the 52-year war and its narcotics trade.

More broadly, the deal would be a bookend to the long, bloody history of armed insurgency in Latin America, affirming democracy as the only viable political system in the region.

The agreement was forged in Cuba, of all places, the site of Fidel Castro’s leftist revolution, which was imitated by so many others.

“This is a transformational moment for our hemisphere,” Bernard Aronson, the U.S. envoy to the peace talks, said in an interview. “It is a final repudiation of political violence as a means of changing governments.”

Or at least that is the way it’s supposed to go.

The fate of the deal rests with Colombian voters, who will go to the polls Oct. 2 to approve or reject it. The accords are unquestionably more popular abroad — backed by Pope Francis, President Obama and seemingly every leader in Latin America — than they are in Colombia, where opinion surveys are mixed.

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos’s single-minded, six-year pursuit of a deal with FARC — or the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia — has left him politically exhausted and weak in the polls. His archrival, popular former president Álvaro Uribe, is leading a “no” campaign under the banner “Paz sí, pero no así,” (Peace yes, but not like this).

Santos has told Colombians

IVAN VALENCIA/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

Peace in Colombia would validate American intervention in region now embracing democracy that the deal is a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. Its failure would be such a thorough repudiation of Santos that few can imagine how he might recover before his term expires in 2018.

His final push will be big, and his peace deal seems to have the weight of history behind it, coming in the afterglow of Obama’s historic Cuba trip in March to “bury” the Cold War once and for all in the hemisphere.

On Wednesday, a JetBlue flight from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., landed in Santa Clara, the Cuban city where the remains of revolutionary icon Ernesto “Che” Guevara rest in a mausoleum. It is the first commercial route between the United States and the communist island in more than 50 years.

Radical leftism is fading across Latin America. In Colombia’s neighbor Venezuela, the petroleum-backed “Bolivarian” revolution led by late president Hugo Chávez has broken down since his 2013 death and the crash of global oil prices. Today, U.S. diplomats

worry more about Venezuela’s descent into chaos than the regional spread of its socialist, “antiimperialist” message. A proAmerican technocrat, Mauricio Macri, recently won the presidency in Argentina, replacing a leftist leader. Peru’s presidential election in June was won by a former World Bank economist.

Now comes the test of whether Colombians are ready to accept former guerrilla “terrorists” as a political movement with representatives in Congress.

A rejection of the peace accord by voters also would be a failure for the Obama administration, which has given Santos vociferous support and ample aid. The cornerstone of the relationship, Plan Colombia, is widely credited with helping the government turn the tide against FARC. When Plan Colombia was launched in the late 1990s, the country had one of the world’s highest homicide rates and FARC’s guerrilla armies had grown to nearly 20,000 troops,

Top, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, center, holds a copy of the peace agreement with FARC, the guerillas led by Ricardo Palmera, above, who is serving a 60-year term in a U.S. prison in Colorado. The fate of the deal rests with voters, who will go to the polls Oct. 2.

controlling as much as a third of Colombian territory. With U.S. military hardware, training and other assistance, the Colombian government reduced the rebels’ ranks by more than half, driving them into the country’s most remote corners, particularly during Uribe’s 2002-2010 presidency.

The U.S. government has encouraged the peace negotiations, and Washington backed off efforts to extradite FARC commanders facing criminal charges in the United States in the interest of helping the talks succeed.

Under the terms of the accords, FARC commanders whose long rap sheets include murder, kidnapping, drug trafficking and other charges can avoid prison if they confess to their crimes through a truth-andreconciliation process and make amends to victims. The Colombian government has agreed not to extradite them.

But that would not absolve them of pending indictments in U.S. federal courts for drug trafficking, kidnapping and other crimes. In effect, this means that FARC commanders with Interpol warrants may not be able to leave Colombia without fear of arrest, even after fulfilling the terms of the peace accords, said a senior U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the issue remains sensitive.

The official also categorically ruled out the possibility of a pardon for high-ranking FARC leader Ricardo Palmera, known as Simón Trinidad, who is serving a 60-year term at a maximum-security federal prison in Colorado for his role in the kidnapping of three U.S. government contractors in 2003.

Perhaps the peace deal’s biggest selling point to ordinary Colombians is the possibility that it will kick the economy into overdrive, by opening conflict zones to new investment and infrastructure projects. But whether that will occur is uncertain.

Obama is seeking to boost aid to Colombia for next year from $300 million to nearly $500 million, with funds for removing land mines, replacing illegal crops and other rural development projects. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

Lebanese town is a model for power H UGH N AYLOR Zahleh, Lebanon BY

S

omething remarkable is happening in this Lebanese farming town. Roads are no longer dark at night, and water is pumped to homes without interruption.

There’s electricity here in Zahleh, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

And if you don’t think that’s a big deal, ask residents of just about any other town in this tiny country. They endure daily outages that can last 18 hours, so they pay exorbitant fees to opportunistic owners of private electricity generators to get enough power.

In fact, millions of people across the Middle East are dealing with worsening power cuts. The issue fed the frustrations behind the Arab Spring revolts of 2011 and presents a daunting challenge for the region’s growing populations, including in war-torn countries such as Yemen and Iraq.

But in Zahleh, a town of about 150,000 in Lebanon’s scenic Bekaa Valley, residents overcame energy woes with political will and creativity, offering the rest of the region possible lessons on how to obtain reliable and affordable electricity.

“What’s happened in Zahleh and its environs is a huge achievement, and it gives hope that our experience with 24-hour electricity could be replicated far beyond,” said Elie Marouni, a member of parliament from the town.

Last year, officials at Zahleh’s power company braved death threats from the town’s generator owners (referred to by residents as “the Mafia”) as they built a power plant that services the town and surrounding municipalities.

Most residents backed construction of the area’s sole power plant, which cut the generator operators out of the market and nearly halved monthly energy bills.

“It’s a miracle!” said Elias Akiki, a 75-year-old owner of a souvenir shop in Zahleh. “We were suffocating before all this.”

Lebanon’s power cuts started during the civil-war years, from

HUGH NAYLOR/THE WASHINGTON POST

Electricity outages plague millions in Arab world.

These residents decided they’d had enough.

1975 to 1990. And they still bedevil most of the 4 million citizens of this Mediterranean country.

Lights and televisions abruptly shut off multiple times a day. In some areas, the outages prevent municipalities from pumping water to homes and businesses.

Backup generators offer only limited amounts of energy. When they kick in, people can use an appliance or two at their homes and businesses, but any more risks overloading the circuits.

The reasons for Lebanon’s outages are complex.

More than a million Syrians fled their civil war for refuge here, badly straining electricity supplies.

The Lebanese tend to blame their dysfunctional government.

Squabbling politicians have failed to agree on a new president for more than two years, leaving the key post vacant during that time.

They have struggled with even

seemingly minor things such as trash collection in Beirut, the capital. And the quarreling partly explains why no new power plants have been built since the 1990s, apart from Zahleh’s, and why existing facilities produce just over half of the electricity the country needs.

Corruption plays a major role, said Marwan Iskander, a Lebanese economist. Patronage from powerful figures has allowed many subscribers to the national electricity network to get away with not paying their bills.

“I even know one former parliamentarian who literally owes millions of dollars in unpaid electricity bills,” Iskander said.

The outages in Zahleh worsened in recent years, sometimes lasting an entire day.

The town’s old power plant was destroyed during the civil war. So the local power company, Electricité de Zahléh (EDZ), contracted a British firm to build and help op-

Assaad Nakad, center, chairman of a local power company in Lebanon that provides roundthe-clock electricity, tours a power plant that he recently had built for his home town of Zahleh.

Government officials pressured Nakad to stop the project, but he said he fought them off by invoking a law from the 1920s.

erate a 60-megawatt plant, which went online in March 2015.

Until then, EDZ had only acted as a distributor of electricity, which it received from the state power firm.

“I got tired — we all got tired — of promises by the government that there would be 24/7 electricity. It just never happened, so we decided to act,” said EDZ’s chief executive, Assaad Nakad.

Government officials pressured Nakad to stop the project, but he said he fought them off by invoking a law from the 1920s that gives EDZ the right to generate and distribute its own electricity.

Officials from the electricity ministry and state power firm did not respond to questions by phone and text message about the issue.

Nakad’s family received anonymous death threats during the plant’s construction, and unidentified assailants shot several of EDZ’s transformers. A group of men who supplied the town’s private generators with fuel stormed into his office with an ultimatum, Nakad said.

“They said they’d kill me if I built the plant,” he said. “These men had a lot to lose.”

The town’s mayor, Assaad Zougheib, said the three dozen or so generator owners would regularly dismiss requests to lower their fees. And some of them became extravagantly wealthy, residents said.

“My uncle owned several generators,” said Charbel Boieny, who runs a candy shop in Zahleh. “He owns six villas.”

Around the time of the plant’s construction, residents said they faced intimidation from the generator owners. One sent cronies to the home of Wassim Teenny and told him that he couldn’t unhook from the neighborhood generator.

“They also demanded that we give them extra money, but everyone in the neighborhood refused to do what they told us,” said Teenny, 27, who works at a paint company.

Fast forward to the present day, and Zahleh’s new power plant is supplying constant electricity to an estimated 250,000 people in the area. n

PHOTOS BY MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

D

on and Jonna Bradway recently cashed out of the stock market and invested in gold and silver. They have stockpiled food and ammunition in the event of a total economic collapse or some other calamity commonly known around here as “The End of the World As We Know It” or “SHTF” — the day something hits the fan.

BY KEVIN SULLIVAN in Hayden, Idaho

Don and Jonna Bradway moved to Idaho from California and have stockpiled food and ammunition. Northern Idaho and the surrounding area has been a refuge for people looking for an isolated place to prepare themselves for a potential collapse of society.

Opposite page, a replica of the Statue of Liberty is seen jutting into Lake Pend Oreille in Sandpoint, Idaho.

The Bradways fled California, a state they said is run by “leftists and non-Constitutionalists and anti-freedom people,” and settled on several wooded acres of north Idaho five years ago. They live among like-minded conservative neighbors, host Monday night Bible study around their fire pit, hike in the mountains and fish from their boat. They melt lead to make their own bullets for sport shooting and hunting — or to defend themselves against marauders in a world-ending cataclysm.

“I’m not paranoid, I’m really not,” said Bradway, 68, a cheerful Army veteran with a bushy handlebar mustache who favors Hawaiian shirts. “But we’re prepared. Anybody who knows us knows that Don and Jonna are prepared if and when it hits the fan.”

The Bradways are among the vanguard moving to an area of the Pacific Northwest known as the American Redoubt, a term coined in 2011 by survivalist author and blogger James Wesley, Rawles (the comma is deliberate) to describe a settlement of the God-fearing in a lightly populated territory that includes Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and the eastern parts of Washington and Oregon.

Those migrating to the Redoubt are some of the most motivated members of what is known as the prepper movement, which advocates readiness and self-reliance in man-made or natural disasters that could create instability for years. It’s scenario-planning that is gaining adherents and becoming mainstream in what Redoubt preppers described as an era of fear and uncertainty.

They are anxious about recent terrorist attacks from Paris to San Bernardino, Calif., to Orlando; pandemics such as Ebola in West Africa; potential nuclear attacks from increasingly provocative countries such as North Korea or Iran; and the growing political, economic and racial polarization in the United States that

has deepened during the 2016 presidential election.

Nationally, dozens of online prepper suppliers report an increase in sales of items from water purifiers to hand-cranked radios to solarpowered washing machines. Harvest Right, a Utah company that invented a $3,000 portable freeze dryer to preserve food, has seen sales grow from about 80 a month two years ago to more than 900 a month now, said spokesman Stephanie Barlow.

Clyde Scott, owner of Rising S Bunkers, said pre-made, blast-proof underground steel bunkers are in big demand, including his most popular model, which sleeps six to eight people and sells for up to $150,000.

“Anybody with a peanut-sized brain,” he said, can see that the U.S. economy is in perilous shape because of the national debt, the decline of American manufacturing and the size of the welfare rolls.

Some people worry about hurricanes, earthquakes or forest fires. Others fear a nuclear attack or solar flare that creates an electromagnetic pulse that knocks out the nation’s electric grid and all computers, sending the country into darkness and chaos — perhaps forever.

“The list is long; the concerns are many,” said Glenn Martin, who lives in north Idaho and runs Prepper Broadcasting Network, an online radio station. “Imagine a societal collapse and trying to buy a loaf of bread in Los Angeles or New York and stores are closed down.”

Martin’s programming emphasizes gardening, farming and how-to shows about sustainable living more than “doom and gloom,” he said, and his audience has grown from 50,000 listeners a month two years ago to about 250,000 a month now.

Online interest in prepper and American Redoubt websites is increasing. Tools that continues on next page

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from previous page

measure online readership show that monthly search traffic to Rawles’s SurvivalBlog.com has doubled since 2011; an estimate from SimilarWeb, a Web analytics firm, shows that the site had about 862,000 total visits last month.

Rawles’s guidebook, “How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It,” and his postapocalyptic survival novel, “Patriots,” have sold about 350,000 copies, according to Nielsen BookScan. They are among hundreds of available survivalist books.

I

n response to all the uncertainty, more and more preppers are not simply stocking up at home. They are moving their homes — to the Redoubt, a seldom-used term for stronghold or fortress.

It is impossible to know exactly how many people have come over the past few years, but newcomers, real estate agents, local officials and others said it was in the hundreds, or perhaps even a few thousand, across all five states.

Here, they live in a pristine place of abundant water and fertile soil, far from urban crime, free from most natural disasters and populated predominantly by conservative, mostly Christian people with a live-and-let-live ethos and local governments with a light regulatory touch and friendly gun laws.

The locals regard the newest transplants as benign if odd, several said in interviews.

“The mainstream folks kind of roll their eyes,” said state Sen. Shawn Keough, a 20-year veteran Republican legislator who represents north Idaho.

Many drawn to the Redoubt are former police officers, firefighters and military members. Most said they would vote for Donald Trump as the “lesser of two evils,” and they said Hillary Clinton would make an already bloated and ineffective government even bigger.

“I don’t want to be one of the guys waiting for help,” said Patrick Devine, 54, a former paramedic in Los Angeles who moved two years ago at a friend’s urging.

Devine said he had firsthand knowledge of chaos and government failure, earned from working numerous shootings and earthquakes, particularly in Haiti in 2010.

“I can’t stop it. But I can prepare myself to the best of my ability for anything that does come and be helpful to other people,” said Devine, who works at a local gun range and wears a 9mm pistol on his hip.

“I love this place,” said Chris Walsh, as he buzzed low over sparkling Lake Coeur d’Alene in his mustard-colored Beechcraft Bonanza airplane.

A Detroit native, Walsh, 53, runs Revolutionary Realty, which specializes in selling real estate to those moving to the American Redoubt. He said he has sold hundreds of properties in the last five years.

He lives off the grid in a house high on a hill overlooking a lake, producing his own electricity from 100 solar panels. But he is also a few miles from restaurants and shopping in Coeur

MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

The ‘American Redoubt’ Some members of survivalist groups are moving to parts of five sparsely populated Northwestern states.

CANADA

Seattle

Spokane

Coeur d’Alene

WASHINGTON

MONTANA

Portland

Billings

90

OREGON

Boise

CALIFORNIA 0

250

M

IDAHO

NEVADA

WYOMING

80

UTAH

Salt Lake City

COLORADO

Denver

MILES

Source: survivalblog.com, National Atlas

DARLA CAMERON/THE WASHINGTON POST

d’Alene, a popular tourist destination.

Walsh said most of the prepper properties he sells generally have key features: at least two sources of water, solar panels or another alternative energy source, ample secure storage space for a few years’ worth of supplies, and a defensible location away from main roads and city centers.

Such amenities don’t come cheap; the average property sells for between $250,000 and $550,000, he said, but some go for more than $2 million. Walsh said a basic solar array can cost around $15,000, while more elaborate

systems can cost 10 times that.

Walsh said most of his clients regard moving to safer territory as a prudent step against a reasonable fear. But just as important, he said, they get to live a simpler life in a safe, beautiful place.

“What they are doing when they come here is relearning things that their great-great-greatgrandfathers and mothers already knew,” Walsh said. “What’s going on here is a pioneering spirit.”

Todd Savage is a retired Marine who moved to north Idaho from San Francisco and opened American Redoubt Realty. “You have Geico; I have an AR-15,” he said.

uch of the Redoubt migration is motivated by fears that President Obama — and his potential successor, Hillary Clinton — want to scrap the Second Amendment, as part of what transplants see as a dangerous and anti-constitutionalist movement toward government that is too intrusive and hostile to personal liberties.

“This is a bastion of freedom,” said Todd Savage, 45, a retired Marine who moved to north Idaho from “the urban crime-scape” of San Francisco and opened American Redoubt Realty after meeting Rawles a few years ago.

“The bottom line is that our clients are tired of living around folks that have no moral values,” Savage said. “They choose to flee tyranny and leave behind all the attributes of the big city that have turned them away.”

Savage spoke as he drove his Chevrolet Suburban with an AR-15 rifle tucked next to the driver’s seat, a handgun between the front seats, and body armor and more than 200 rounds of extra ammunition in the back — along with a chain saw to move fallen trees and

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MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

two medical kits, just in case.

“You have Geico; I have an AR-15,” Savage said.

Trevor Treller, 44, who carries a small Smith & Wesson pistol on his hip, moved to north Idaho last year from Long Beach, Calif., and recently paid a little less than $400,000 for a defensible three-bedroom house on five wooded acres.

Treller, a sommelier at a local resort, said Obama was a key factor in his decision. He said the president has inflamed racial tensions in America, presided over a dangerous expansion of the national debt, been “hostile” to Second Amendment rights and failed to curtail the nuclear ambitions of North Korea and Iran.

Treller said any one of those factors could lead to crippling chaos, so he and his wife have stockpiled food, weapons and ammunition and are installing an iron gate across their long gravel driveway.

“I think there’s a very good chance that these things won’t happen in my lifetime, but I also think there’s a chance that they will,” Treller said. “It’s extreme collective hubris to think that we’re exempt from everything that happened to every single society before us throughout history.”

Treller said he settled on Coeur d’Alene after scouring City-data.com, a website where he looked for his ideal mix: conservative election results, low crime rates, solid incomes, low population density, affordable house prices — and few illegal immigrants, because he said they erode “American culture.”

Idaho is about 83 percent white, and its three northernmost counties are more than 90 per-

cent white, according to Census Bureau data.

Those interviewed in the American Redoubt insisted they are not trying to segregate themselves by race. And while the Aryan Nations white supremacist group was based near Hayden Lake in the 1980s and 1990s, Rawles has described the Redoubt movement as “antiracist” and said like-minded folks of all races are welcome.

Walsh, the real estate agent, said he saw far more racism in Detroit, where he was raised, than in north Idaho.

“Here, a black person, they’re a novelty,” Walsh said. “You’ll see people walk up to black people here sometimes and just talk to them because they’ve never spoken to a black person before. In terms of them walking around [saying racist things], you never see it.”

Treller’s wife, Christina Treller, 38, a critical care nurse at a hospital, said she initially resisted her husband’s proposal to move to Idaho. Now she loves their new Victorian-style house in the woods, with its fresh well water and clean air, and fruit and nut trees that they recently planted.

Having lived through the 1992 riots after Los Angeles police were acquitted in the videotaped beating of Rodney King, she said she views society as more fragile than most people realize. “I’m being wise,” she said.

I

n north Idaho, the narrow panhandle that stretches to the Canadian border, many people on the streets of pretty towns such as Coeur d’Alene, Sandpoint and Bonners Ferry have never heard of the American Redoubt.

A home that is up for sale in north Idaho is seen outside of Sandpoint.

WEEKLY

That’s mainly because of the prepper ethos of privacy — most don’t even tell their neighbors they have years’ worth of food in a safe room.

Several locals did express unease about their new ammo-stockpiling neighbors.

“I don’t have a problem with preppers, but it’s the extremists people don’t want around — the fringe, the radicals. That’s the concern I hear from people,” said Mike Peterson, a real estate agent in Bonners Ferry and retired Los Angeles firefighter and EMT. Keough, the state senator, recently fought off a tough GOP primary challenge in which she was labeled a “progressive traitor” by Alex Barron, a blogger who calls himself the Bard of the American Redoubt.

“We’re certainly not oblivious to the turmoil in the world and not oblivious to the huge challenges we have at the national level,” Keough said. “But those who subscribe to the ‘world is coming to an end’ theory, people tend to shake their heads at those folks. They come across as paranoid.”

State Rep. Heather Scott, a Republican who represents north Idaho, said the newcomers have adapted smoothly.

“I have met many people, especially recently, who have moved here after being inspired by the idea of the American Redoubt,” she said. “I haven’t heard any of them speak about the ‘end of the world’ but rather the appreciation for a simpler and safer life.”

Scott said preparing for a natural or manmade disaster was “simply prudent,” because, “Economic experts are consistently saying that global markets are at risk, and they are telling people to take precautions to weather through an economic crisis.”

D Trevor Treller said President Obama was a key factor in his decision to move to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, where he and his wife, Christina, bought a defensible three-bedroom house on five wooded acres.

KLMNO

on Bradway dug into a plate of homemade enchiladas in the kitchen of the cozy house he and Jonna bought for $259,000in 2010.

What they have looks like an idyllic retirement experience: his and hers recliners in front of a big-screen TV, a “side-by-side” all-terrain vehicle in the barn, an art studio for retired nurse Jonna, a carpentry and machine shop for retired firefighter and EMT Don, and a sweetnatured dog named Moose.

Their 30-year-old son, who moved to Idaho with them, lives nearby.

Don, who’s a member of the GOP Central Committee of Kootenai County, won’t say how much food and supplies they have on hand.

“There are some things you don’t talk about,” he said. “But the Bradway motto is that it’s better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it.”

As Don sees it, you need look no further than the economic chaos in Venezuela, with its hungry people storming grocery stores, to see that a society-ending economic collapse could easily happen anywhere.

“We pray to God that it never happens,” he said. But if it does, he said his “fellow thinkers” in the American Redoubt are prepared.

“They know they can depend on the Bradways to help them,” he said. n

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TECHNOLOGY

Pokémon Go and the life span of fads in the Internet age BY

H AYLEY T SUKAYAMA

P

okémon Go — the augmented-reality game that sent the classic Japanese franchise into a new age — took the world by storm in July.

But just the other week, there were already a number of articles declaring the game all but dead. A report from Bloomberg News showed that Pokémon Go was already “in decline,” including charts from Axiom Management that fewer people are playing the game every day and that the people who are playing are not playing for quite as long.

In other words, the red-hot game seems to be cooling fast, according to these statistics, even though the game is barely two months old. And with its apparent decline, one might easily wonder: Is the half-life of a fad getting shorter, too?

In some ways, yes.

“The Internet has accelerated the spread of fads and shortened their life spans,” said Robert Bartholomew, a New Zealand-based sociologist who recently examined Pokémon Go for Psychology Today. In an email, Bartholomew said, “I also think we are seeing more fads, but they are flaming out much quicker on average.”

For example, one of history’s most famous fads, the hula hoop, took weeks to catch on across the globe and was the it-toy of 1958. “It essentially lasted the entire year,” Bartholomew said. “Contrast this with Internet fads. The CharlieCharlie pencil game only lasted a couple of months and was driven

by YouTube. Pokémon Go spread around the world in a matter of days despite attempts to delay its release in certain countries. It too is fading fast and will soon go the way of Flappy Bird, Fruit Ninja and Candy Crush.”

Looking at search interest, it is certainly clear that Pokémon Go has had a much sharper decline in interest than, say, FarmVille — another game that seemed to be ev-

KIM KYUNG-HOON/REUTERS

erywhere all at once, back in 2010.

Google Search trends show that Pokémon Go hit its peak fast in July and dropped to half of that interest by the start of August.

Meanwhile, it took FarmVille months to fall to that level of interest.

But it’s not at all clear that the life span of a fad is speeding up in every case.

Some recent Internet fads have taken a quick nose-dive — people pretty much stopped searching for “Left Shark” once all the Super

Bowl confetti had cleared. But Google also shows, for example, that it took us about as long to shut up about “the Dress” in 2015 as it did to get us to stop being so darn interested in “The Ice Bucket Challenge” a year earlier. And “Pizza Rat,” which surfaced in 2016, fell off its peak quickly but has had seen further bursts in popularity to keep the ball in the air.

In other words, while the life span of a fad certainly may have changed in the past 50 years, that doesn’t mean that every new fad is

Game’s popularity has fallen but that doesn’t mean the end

going to have a shorter and shorter time at the top.

Which brings us back to Pokémon Go. Pokémon Go is an interesting case. For one, it’s not unusual to see sales of any entertainment drop off after an initial sales period — there’s a reason that opening weekend sales are the ones touted most often. Secondly, the game has had some problems of its own making, which may have prematurely squelched some enthusiasm for it. Not to mention, the school year has started in many places, meaning that players can no longer take advantage of long, empty summer days.

And even with all of the doom and gloom in the headlines, it’s still the top-grossing app in many countries — including the United States. By those metrics and the standards of mobile gaming, it’s still a major success.

“Pokémon Go has exceeded over $400 million in customer spending across both app stores with well over 160 million downloads globally,” said Fabien-Pierre Nicolas, vice president of marketing communications at the app analysis firm App Annie. Pokémon Go and other fads may see the most intense interest fade quickly, but what goes up does not necessarily have to come all the way back down.

Not only that, the game is retaining its core audience — the people who will actually pay to play — very well, Nicolas said. And, he said, it’s managing to do that and still attract players without any heavy marketing campaigns.

(No Arnold Schwarzenegger or Kate Upton Super Bowl commercials here. Yet.) Nicolas does agree that, when it comes to mobile games, we are seeing titles such as Clash Royale (from the makers of Clash of Clans) or Pokémon Go reach their heights faster. “Where it took a few months for Clash of Clans or Candy Crush, Clash Royale can hit that peak faster,” he said. “Overall adoption of apps is shorter and shorter than it was in 2014.”

To avoid becoming a flash in the pan, he said, mobile games must work to transform their product into more of a service — an app that keeps people coming back with fresh content and new experiences.

As long as Niantic listens to its players, he said, the company shouldn’t have to worry about it fading completely into obscurity. n

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FEATURES

What’s going on in your dog’s brain?

K ARIN B RULLIARD

the researchers saw that the dogs processed the familiar words regardless of intonation, and they our dog gets you. He realdid so using the left hemily gets you. So say sciensphere, just like humans. Tone, or tists in Hungary, who the emotion behind the word, on have found dogs underthe other hand, was analyzed in stand both the meaning of words the auditory regions of the right and the intonation used to speak hemisphere — just as it is in peothem. ple, the study said.

Put simply: Even if you use a Co-author Tamás Faragó acvery excited tone of voice to tell the knowledged that the dog he’s going to the left hemisphere’s revet, he could well see sponse to praise words through you. didn’t prove that the What’s more, the dogs were comprenew study used brain hending meaning rathscanning to show that er than simply reacting dogs use brain regions to familiarity. But, he similar to what husaid, it’s safe to assume mans use to underthat the dogs hear the stand words and intoneutral words in daily nation. human conversation as It had already been Researchers often as they hear the established by carefully studied how dogs praise words, “so the controlled tests that comprehend words main difference will be dogs respond to human and intonation. not familiarity, but voices, are able to match whether the word is addressed to hundreds of objects to words and the dog or not.” In other words, learn elements of grammar, and whether it has meaning for the can be directed by human speech. pooch.

But the new findings mean dogs are Finally, the researchers saw that more like humans than was previthe dogs’ “rewards center” — ously known, according to the rewhich is stimulated by pleassearchers, whose paper was pubant things such as petting and food lished in Science. and sex — did the brain equivalent Previous studies observed dog of jumping and yelping when posbehavior, but no one had seen how their language comprehension itive words were spoken in a positive tone. works inside the brain. To deter“It shows that for dogs, a nice mine this, Attila Andics and colpraise can very well work as a leagues at Eotvos Loránd Univerreward, but it works best if both sity in Budapest recruited 13 famwords and intonation match,” ily dogs — mostly golden retrievAndics said in a statement. “So ers and border collies — and dogs not only tell apart what we trained them to sit still for seven say and how we say it, but they can minutes in an fMRI (or functional also combine the two, for a correct MRI) scanner that measured their interpretation of what those brain activity. words really meant.”

A female trainer familiar to the Oh, and if you’re a cat person? dogs then spoke words of Faragó said it’s likely they — and praise that all their owners said other domestic animals — might they used — “That’s it,” “Clever,” also be able to understand words and “Well done” — and neutral, and tone. But given that cats were common words, such as “yet” and domesticated thousands of years “if,” which the researchers belater and have generally lived less lieved were meaningless to the closely to humans, they might not animals. Each dog heard each be as adept as dogs. They certainly word in both a neutral tone and a wouldn’t be as cooperative in an happy, attaboy tone. fMRI scanner. n Using the brain activity images,

BY

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KLMNO WEEKLY

ON LEADERSHIP

When you’re likely to start job hunting BY

J ENA M C G REGOR

A

disappointing performance review. An acquisition by some big faceless corporation. A bonus that was kind of “meh.”

These might seem like the most obvious milestones that would prompt someone’s job search activity — fueled by feeling undervalued, underappreciated or apprehensive about the professional changes to come — to see a big boost.

But on this Labor Day weekend, newly released research from the advisory firm CEB, highlighted in a recent Harvard Business Review, shows that such career-related events aren’t always the biggest things driving people’s decisions to jump ship.

Rather, it’s often more personal milestones, such as birthdays or class reunions, that cause people to rethink their work life.

In surveys of 8,500 employees, which asked people separately about both their job hunting activity and a variety of events that may have happened in the past couple of months — ranging from getting a new boss to having a child — CEB found that people tend to think about their careers in relative terms.

“What we came to realize is that when people think about whether they’re having a good career, they’re thinking about whether they are they having a good career relative to other people, or relative to what their own expectations were” for their lives at a given age, said Brian Kropp, who runs CEB’s human resources practice.

Unsurprisingly, job search activity jumped the most, by 17 percent, when people had a change in their manager or their responsibilities. But just behind that was attending a major gathering with friends, family or classmates, such as a class reunion. And birthdays came in third, at 12 percent. More

traditional professional moments that might prompt self-reflection — an anniversary at the company, say — sparked a 6 percent boost in job-seeking activity. And after bonuses are handed out or performance reviews are given, respondents’ search for new employment actually declined.

Conceptually, CEB’s data may not be all that surprising. That we continue to measure our progress by others’ — yes, even our archrivals from high school — or by where we thought we’d be in life by a major birthday, will make ISTOCK sense to anyone who’s been to a class reunion or turned 40 years old.

What’s important about their finding is that it’s not how most managers and organizations think about retaining their best people.

“Most [human resources] executives say we want to talk about careers during performance reviews and at midyear,” Kropp said in an interview. “But most people’s lives don’t conveniently follow the HR calendar.”

His advice for managers, especially as the labor market grows stronger and more people get in a position to voluntarily switch jobs: Pay more attention to personal milestones, not professional ones. “Know your employee’s birthday, and about a month before have a conversation with them about their career,” he said.

Before they take an extended vacation, sit down and have a chat with them about opportunities.

Doing so — in those moments when people actually stop to think about their lives and their goals — could have them thinking they have an interested boss, rather than resolving to brush up their résumés as soon as they get home.

“You’re sitting on the beach, having an adult beverage, going ‘What am I doing with my life?’ ” Kropp said. “That’s when decisions really get made.” n

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BOOKS

A year of living analytically N ONFICTION

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REVIEWED BY

D AVID S ILVERBERG

H DEAR DATA

By Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec Princeton Architectural.

288 pp. Paperback, $35

ow many times do you check your phone weekly? Or say hello to strangers? How do you spend your time alone? The answers to those questions — and many more — are illustrated by hand in the data-visualization memoir “Dear Data,” by Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec.

In a year-long correspondence project, Lupi, an Italian living in New York, and Posavec, an American living in London, exchanged postcards each week about a different aspect of their daily lives.

One week they tracked their spending habits, another how often they swore, another the things they found beautiful.

In other words, “Dear Data” paints a human portrait with data.

With each graph and information map, we get a deeper sense of the authors’ personalities. What emerges from this information overload is a fascinating catalogue of the complexity of daily living. By tracking such minutiae, Lupi and Posavec, who both work in information design, reveal the patterns that inform our decisions and affect our relationships.

The book works best when visualizing the many aspects of life we often ignore. For example, the authors compile everything they’ve bought during a week. Lupi even breaks down how long each purchase lasted and whether the item was an impulse buy. One particularly memorable selection illustrates the authors’ emotional wellbeing by listing when and why they felt stressed, happy, excited, nostalgic and so on. In one Posavec postcard, she tracks how some of her husband’s habits frustrate her.

Written out, such diary entries may have come across as ho-hum.

But by surveying this emotional catalogue in its easy-to-read, graphical format, we can see the authors’ data collection in our own selves and uncover correlations that may have been hidden. Imagine if you could really see when and how many times you impulsively

STEFANIE POSAVEC

bought candy. Would you change your behavior for the better? Maybe, maybe not. But at least you’d be confronting your actions head-on.

It’s not necessary to be acquainted with the language of data visualization to appreciate “Dear Data.” In many ways, this data dump coincides with the everyday oversharing we are happy to indulge in via social media. Such an embrace of peep culture, to use Hal Niedzviecki’s

We can see the authors’ data collection in our own selves.

phrase, recognizes how our voyeuristic tendencies can hold a mirror to our behavior and cause us to react to our own reflection. “Dear Data” emphasizes that idea and says: “This is every detail of your life.

What are you going to do about it?”

We live in a world obsessed with big data. Algorithms and apps detect and aggregate every bit and byte of information passing through our online and offline interactions. Analytics increasingly inform us about user behavior in real time. But “Dear Data” harks back to a more nostalgic era when we deliberated over the information we took in and offered to others. Let’s call it Slow Data. “To draw is to remember,” the authors write, and their book reminds us that physical documents can be a time capsule we continually pore through long after Facebook and Instagram have made way for the

next Internet flavor of the month.

Selecting such an analog visualization method is not without its faults, though. At times, the authors’ graphs call for clearer notations: Why not tell us how much Lupi spent on beer rather than ask us to add up each little orange-colored dot? And many of these visualizations may frustrate the farsighted: The postcards aren’t reproduced beyond their original size, and differentiating between tiny purple and pink lines can get difficult.

But Lupi and Posavec have created a magnifying glass to examine what we rarely study about ourselves. Their year-long project should motivate us to find the beauty in the small in a world that begs us to see the bigger picture. n Silverberg is a freelance journalist who writes for BBC News, BuzzFeed, Vice and Quill & Quire.

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

A riveting hunt for a killer’s backstory

A robust defense of Adnan Syed

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

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REVIEWED BY

C AROL M EMMOTT

hots ring out and the wounded are screaming in the opening lines of Neely Tucker’s new novel, “Only the Hunted Run.” Before we even can take a breath, this fast-paced thriller has dropped us into spitting distance of a mass shooter. It’s “the modern American nightmare” that all of us dread and a gripping start to this enthralling novel.

We’re in this unsettling situation with newspaper reporter Sully Carter who, based on his exploits in past Tucker novels, is a magnet for trouble. Carter is on assignment in the Capitol when the “pop pop popping” of automatic-weapon fire begins echoing off the building’s marble and granite surfaces. Carter runs toward the automatic-weapon fire — and all we want to do is run forward with him.

“Only the Hunted Run” is Tucker’s third novel featuring the intrepid Carter. Like the flawed and broken hero of many noir novels, he’s holding it together by marinating himself daily in hefty doses of bourbon. He’s battle-weary, having done time in war zones, but he’s never tired of chasing the news. He needs the high that comes with having his byline on a Page One story. It’s why, as he’s trying to scope out the Capitol shooter, “his heart rate slowed and his breathing deepened. Day-today stress drove him up the wall.

Chaos suited him.”

Blessed with the kind of luck that die-hard journalists live for — always in the right place when big news is breaking — Carter gets dangerously close to the shooter and elbow deep in the blood of the dead and injured. Turns out that the shooter, Terry Waters — Carter has his name before the police do — was in the Capitol to kill one person, U.S. Rep. Barry Edmonds. He represents the Oklahoma district from which Waters hails. The horrifying description of Edmonds’s corpse and how Waters has exacted revenge on Edmonds is a set piece worthy of a slasher film.

After Carter’s first-person report

on the mass murder is published — he works for a major daily in Washington (Tucker writes for The Washington Post) — Waters, who claims to be a Native American, becomes obsessed with Carter. An unsolved murder in Carter’s past intrigues Waters, and he believes they share a similar pain and hunger for revenge. Carter, equally obsessed with Waters’s motives, heads to Oklahoma to suss out Waters’s life story. The 60 or so pages detailing Carter’s visit to the Waters homestead, the story Carter learns from one of the Waters family’s eerie neighbors and his hunt for a grave in a pitch-black cemetery are cloaked by Tucker in a mesmerizingly sinister atmosphere.

The real story of Terry Waters — Carter risks his life to get it — is a doozy, but it’s Carter’s backstory we thirst for. He’s constantly thinking about the next shot of bourbon and the one after that. We can’t help but crave a few more drops of information about the personal events that have formed him, including his mother’s murder. Mostly, these cravings are derailed by the fast-moving plot.

“Only the Hunted Run” is inspired by an actual event. In 1998, Russell Weston entered the Capitol and killed two police officers before he was captured. Weston spent time in St. Elizabeths, the notorious mental health institution in Washington, where John Hinckley, the man who shot Ronald Reagan, spent the past 35 years. Tucker’s descriptions of St. Elizabeths roll out like a blackand-white reel of a mid-20th-century B movie: “The windows looked like cataracts, blind and unseeing. It looked like it could take an artillery hit. It had presence. Like movie stars. Like monsters.”

It’s at St. Elizabeths that “Only the Hunted Run” comes to its dazzling finish. Like the rest of this thriller, it’s dark, ghoulish and dripping with blood and sorrow. n Memmott reviews books for The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune and the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

‘S ONLY THE HUNTED RUN

By Neely Tucker Viking.

277 pp. $27

ADNAN’S STORY The Search for Truth and Justice after ‘Serial’

By Rabia Chaudry St. Martin’s.

410 pp. $26.99

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REVIEWED BY

D ANIEL S TASHOWER

he’s adorable-looking, but you definitely shouldn’t mess with her,” Sarah Koenig remarked in the first episode of the wildly popular “Serial” podcast.

“She’s very smart and very tough, and she could crush you.” Koenig was describing Rabia Chaudry, best known for her tireless campaign on behalf of Adnan Syed, whose dramatic murder conviction and tortuous appeals process were chronicled in the podcast’s first season. Chaudry, a lawyer and a senior fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace, expands on the story in this fascinating book and details her 17-year struggle to win a new trial for Syed.

The outlines of the case will be familiar to millions of “Serial” fans: Syed was a 17-year-old high school student when he was arrested in late February 1999 in the murder of his former girlfriend Hae Min Lee, whose body had been found in a shallow grave in Baltimore’s Leakin Park three weeks earlier. After a trial in which, Chaudry contends, the state “committed prosecutorial misconduct” and “suppressed favorable material evidence,” Syed was convicted and sentenced to life plus 30 years.

Chaudry’s clear, vivid and highly readable account of the case will bring the story to life for readers unfamiliar with the podcast, and even the most devoted “Serial” fans will find fresh insight and a vast amount of new material, including more than 100 documents, transcripts and letters.

Chaudry’s legal training serves her well as she marshals her defense, but so too does the Pakistani heritage and Muslim faith she shares with Syed. She is convinced that Baltimore police “went after Adnan because he was Muslim and Pakistani” and that, early on, the investigators allowed faulty evidence to “narrow their suspect list down to one.” She explores the ways that misperceptions about matters such as “honor killings”

may have shaped the outcome.

Chaudry does her best work guiding the reader through an otherwise impenetrable mass of legal proceedings. She skillfully navigates the inconsistencies in the testimony of Jay Wilds, the key witness at Syed’s trial, whose plea deal and the circumstances surrounding it, she asserts, “violated Adnan’s due process.”

Chaudry is also passionate about the “catastrophic decision” to hire Cristina Gutierrez as Syed’s defense attorney. Though Gutierrez had once been a “legal legend” in Baltimore, she was seriously ill at the time of Syed’s trial and would be disbarred a few months after her client’s conviction. Later, when Chaudry discovers that Gutierrez had largely failed to chase down a potential alibi witness, her frustration boils over. “I have felt a lot of anger over this case, but certain moments of absolute rage stand out,” she says.

“This was one of them.”

Not surprisingly, Chaudry devotes considerable space to the manner in which Syed’s cellphone records, “the only real evidence in the case,” were used to support the prosecution’s timeline of the murder.

On June 30, Baltimore Circuit Judge Martin Welch vacated Syed’s murder conviction and granted a new trial on the grounds that Gutierrez had rendered “ineffective assistance” with regard to the cellphone evidence.

Unlike Koenig in the “Serial” podcast, Chaudry makes no pretense of allowing for the possibility of Syed’s guilt. She is unapologetic in projecting her “abiding belief that he is innocent” onto every aspect of her reporting.

Some readers will balk at this, but few will dispute that the case against Syed was deeply flawed and that a new trial is warranted. n Stashower’s most recent book is “The Hour of Peril: The Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln Before the Civil War.”

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OPINIONS

Allow paramedics to take more risks to save lives KEVIN HAZZARD worked as a paramedic in Atlanta from 2004 to 2013. He is the author of “A Thousand Naked Strangers: A Paramedic’s Wild Ride to the Edge and Back” and a staff writer for the CBS series “Code Black.”

I followed news of the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting with one thing on my mind: Where was EMS? As Omar Mateen’s three­hour assault played out, we now know, the 80 medics on the scene were kept more than 100 yards from the club, outside what’s known as the “hot zone.” Many of the injured were transported to hospitals in pickup trucks.

The same was true during the Columbine school shooting in Littleton, Colo., in 1999, when crews waited outside nearly an hour for a SWAT team as a teacher lay dying. Medics were also kept from entering the Aurora, Colo., movie theater where 12 people were killed in 2012 during a showing of “The Dark Knight Rises.” Cops took many of the victims to hospitals in their squad cars.

After these tragedies, grieving friends and family have pressed officials for answers — why were the lifesavers kept from the victims?

I understand that frustration.

I was a paramedic for nearly 10 years. In that time, my job certainly put me in danger’s way; like many of my co-workers, I believed that saving a patient’s life was worth losing my own.

But because EMS departments (rightly) prioritize the safety of their crews, we were encouraged to stay on the periphery of crime scenes.

This approach is outdated.

Paramedics must be trained to respond in dangerous environments, and they should be given the tools they need to stay safe. With the uptick in mass shootings across the country, we can’t afford to keep them on the sidelines.

Early in my training, my instructor presented my class with a seemingly simple scenario: man down in the street. But after my partner and I rushed to his side and began rendering care, our teacher

yelled that we were both dead.

By not confirming that the scene was safe, we’d stepped on the same downed power line that had electrocuted our patient.

Now there were three people dying in the street.

The point of that exercise was to drill into our heads that if we don’t protect ourselves, we can’t save anyone else. Our instructors told us that we’re sent into very dangerous situations not to impose order but to save lives.

Yet once I got into the field, I realized how tough it is to follow this advice. Often, a scene considered safe at the time of dispatch quickly and unexpectedly spirals into chaos; just because nobody had pulled a weapon when 911 was called doesn’t mean that won’t happen when we show up. One time, I responded to a call in a massive housing project. A woman had been beaten nearly to death by her boyfriend. When we emerged from the apartment with her limp body, we were confronted by a large, upset crowd. The victim was a friend; the assailant had disappeared. There was no outlet for all that raw emotion, so the crowd turned on us. They surrounded us, 100 people pressing in, screaming, pushing.

Then, as grief turned to violence, there were sirens. Two county marshals had heard our distress call and rushed in. The crowd calmed just enough for us to leave.

Another night, a man was shot in the neck in front of our parked ambulance. It was late, on a dark

JOHN J. KIM/CHICAGO TRIBUNE/TRIBUNE NEWS SERVICE VIA GETTY IMAGES

Paramedics are often trained to stay back from active crime scenes, out of harm’s way. In some cases, victims have died waiting for help.

street in a rough part of town. No help for blocks around. We quickly made the decision to treat the patient, fully aware that the shooter was close by, gun in hand. We were jumpy as we worked — I remember hoping against hope that if the gunman fired another round, I’d hear the shot before the bullet arrived.

That act went against both my training and department policy.

But a man was dying, and we were his only hope. It’s a perfect illustration of EMS’s wild nature — training and policy manuals carry you only so far when you’re practicing medicine in the street.

Which is why it’s time for emergency responders to adopt a new model, one that acknowledges the reality of our jobs.

Some places are already heeding this call. Departments such as Dallas Fire-Rescue and Pennsylvania’s West End Ambulance Service have ordered bulletproof vests and helmets for paramedics. In states including Michigan, Virginia and New York, EMS departments are teaching paramedics how to enter violent scenes long before they’re deemed “safe” in order to speed up treatment and save more lives. In this “rescue task force” training, endorsed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, paramedics learn the language and choreography of armed entry.

They learn how to team up with armor-clad cops to enter

buildings where active shooters are on the loose. They learn how to identify “warm zones” — relatively safe areas at a shooting scene where patients can be collected, treated and readied for transport. Rather than diagnosing and treating patients where they’re found, the rescue task force model focuses on rapid triage, stabilizing lifethreatening injuries and getting patients off the scene as quickly as possible.

Patients treated within 60 minutes of an injury — the “golden hour,” in emergencymedicine parlance — have the best chance of survival. The majority of gunshot victims who receive care within five minutes survive. After the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association attributed the miraculous survival rate — 261 of the 264 casualties — to the fact that EMS units were already on the scene when the bombs detonated and went to work immediately.

Imagine if paramedics had entered the Pulse nightclub and started treating patients immediately. Imagine medics in flak jackets and helmets, surrounded by police assault rifles, setting about the critical work of saving lives right there on the dance floor. Would more people have survived if EMS had been able to treat patients sooner? The answer is almost certainly yes. n

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2016

21

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Kaepernick’s protest is patriotic KAREEM ABDULJABBAR is an author, commentator and former professional basketball player.

During the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Army Reserve 2nd Lt. Sam Kendricks was sprinting intently in the middle of his pole-vaulting attempt when he heard the national anthem playing. He immediately dropped his pole and stood at attention, a spontaneous expression of heartfelt patriotism that elicited more praise than his eventual bronze medal. On Aug. 26, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick chose not to stand with his teammates during the national anthem. To some, Kendricks embodies traditional, all-American, Forrest Gump values of patriotism, while Kaepernick represents the entitled brattish behavior of a wealthy athlete ungrateful to a country that has given him so much.

In truth, both men, in their own ways, behaved in a highly patriotic manner that should make all Americans proud.

The discussion of the nuances of patriotism is especially important right now, with supporters of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton each righteously claiming ownership of the “most patriotic” label. Patriotism isn’t just getting teary-eyed on the Fourth of July or choked up at war memorials. It’s supporting what the Fourth of July celebrates and what those war memorials commemorate: The Constitution’s insistence that all people should have the same rights and opportunities and that it is the obligation of the government to make that

happen. When the government fails in those obligations, it is the responsibility of patriots to speak up and remind it of its duty.

One of the ironies of the way some people express their patriotism is to brag about our freedoms, especially freedom of speech, but then brand as unpatriotic those who exercise this freedom to express dissatisfaction with the government’s record in upholding the Constitution.

Kaepernick explained why he will not stand during the national anthem: “There are a lot of things that are going on that are unjust [that] people aren’t being held accountable for. And that’s something that needs to change. That’s something that

this country stands for — freedom, liberty, justice for all.

And it’s not happening for all right now.”

What makes an act truly patriotic and not just lip service is when it involves personal risk or sacrifice. Both Kendricks and Kaepernick chose to express their patriotism publicly because they felt that inspiring others was more important than the personal cost. Yes, Kendricks is a national champion pole vaulter, but every athlete knows that breaking focus and concentration during a highpressure competition can be devastating to the athlete’s performance. The Olympics were filled with favorites who faltered because of loss of focus. Halting his run to honor the national anthem could have cost Kendricks his medal. He was willing to take that chance.

Likewise, Kaepernick’s choice not to stand during the national anthem could create a public backlash that might cost him millions in endorsements and affect his value as a player on his team, reducing his salary earnings or even jeopardizing his job. If team ticket sales seriously dipped as a result, he would pay for his stance.

We should admire those who risk personal gain in the service

of promoting the values of their country. Both athletes are in the fine company of others who have shown their patriotism in unconventional ways. In 1989, when a federal law prohibiting flag desecration went into effect, Vietnam veterans burned the American flag in protest to a law curbing the First Amendment.

Their argument was that they fought for the freedoms in the Constitution, not a piece of cloth, and to curtail those freedoms was an insult to their sacrifice.

Ironically, the original purpose of flag-desecration laws between 1897 and 1932 wasn’t to prevent political dissent, but to prevent the use of flag imagery for political campaigns and in advertising.

What should horrify Americans is not Kaepernick’s choice to remain seated during the national anthem, but that we still need to call attention to the same racial inequities nearly 50 years after Muhammad Ali was banned from boxing for refusing to be drafted to fight other people of color and Tommie Smith’s and John Carlos’s raised fists during an Olympic medal ceremony caused public ostracism and numerous death threats. Failure to fix this problem is what’s really unAmerican here. n

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2016

22

OPINIONS

BY SIGNE WILKINSON FOR THE PHILADELPHIA DAILY NEWS

U.S. Latinos won’t tolerate Trump JORGE RAMOS is the anchor of “Noticiero Univision” and host of “Al Punto” on Univision and “America with Jorge Ramos” on Fusion.

U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto are two of the most despised and hated politicians by Mexicans on both sides of the border. Peña Nieto has been accused of corruption and plagiarism — charges that he denies — and, so far, more than 52,000 Mexicans have been violently killed during his presidency. Trump, meanwhile, has centered his presidential campaign around attacking undocumented Mexican immigrants and on building a 1,900-mile wall along the southern U.S. border.

So they made for a strange couple Wednesday in Mexico City: It was the meeting of the most unpopular.

The numbers are staggering.

Sixty-six percent of Mexicans think that Peña Nieto has done a bad job as president. It’s the worst showing for any Mexican president since the newspaper Reforma started polling in 1995.

Trump, for his part, is not doing any better with Latinos in the United States: 80 percent of Hispanics have a negative opinion of the Republican candidate, according to a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll.

With such poor support from Latinos, nobody — not even Trump — can win the White House. (A disclosure I’ve made before: My daughter, Paola Ramos, works for the campaign

of Hillary Clinton, Trump’s Democratic opponent.)

The meeting was never going to be easy, no matter what.

Trump had tweeted Feb. 24, 2015, that Mexico had a “corrupt court system.” A few months later, when he announced his presidential campaign, he infamously said about Mexican immigrants: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime.

They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

Peña Nieto took 265 days to respond. But when he did, the Mexican president criticized Trump’s “strident rhetoric” and compared Trump to two tyrants, saying “that’s how Mussolini got in, that’s how Hitler got in.”

So why did they meet for more than an hour? Because both of them thought they could win.

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY JONES

But, in the end, only Trump did.

Trump didn’t change his immigration proposals one bit.

He still wants a wall. “We recognize and respect the right of either country to build a physical barrier or wall on any of its borders to stop the illegal movement of people, drugs and weapons,” he said after the meeting. Who will pay for the wall? “That will be for a later day,” he responded. (Later on, Peña Nieto insisted that he did tell Trump in the meeting that Mexico wouldn’t pay for it.)

He left Mexico City with his immigration plan still intact and without offering an apology to the Mexican people. Not only that, he took full control of the news conference, taking a few questions in English, while his host, Peña Nieto, waited.

Peña Nieto was not ready for Trump. His indirect public statements after the meeting were weak and insufficient. He needed a big, defining moment confronting Trump to change the narrative of his failing presidency. However, he couldn’t pull it off. He is the loser. Again.

And with the meeting over, Trump crossed the border again, an American problem once more.

A year ago this past week, I went to a Trump news

conference in Dubuque, Iowa, to tell him that he couldn’t deport 11 million undocumented immigrants. But his bodyguard threw me out. Trump says I didn’t wait for my turn. I say he didn’t like my questions.

The fact remains that Trump is still proposing the largest mass deportations in U.S. history, far more than the 2.5 million immigrants already deported by President Obama.

Trump insists on building a wall, denying citizenship to 4.5 million children who have at least one undocumented parent and canceling Obama’s executive actions to defer deportation for some undocumented immigrants (already partially blocked by a Supreme Court ruling).

It is too late for Trump to soften his immigration stance, and in Phoenix later Wednesday evening, he didn’t try. The damage has been done. He might have the lowest Hispanic support in decades. Mitt Romney lost in 2012 with 27 percent of Latinos and John McCain with 31 percent in 2008.

So maybe Trump won the meeting of the unpopular in Mexico City. His real test will come Nov. 8 in the United States.

Unlike Peña Nieto, Latinos here won’t stay silent. n

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2016

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Mosquitoes BY

K IM K NOWLTON

This year, daily headlines remind us that a mosquito bite can bring more than an irritating itch. Mosquitoes are highly efficient disease­ transmission machines for viral illnesses such as Zika, West Nile vi­ rus, dengue fever and chikungunya. Separating fact from fancy can help us better protect ourselves against mosquito bites and the dis­ eases they can spread.

MYTH NO. 1 Mosquitoes find everyone equally tasty.

Research has shown that some mosquito species prefer certain types of people. The insects rely primarily on smell to find prey, and female mosquitoes seem to flock to certain individuals over others based on differences in the odoriferous chemicals produced by the human body.

One study in Gambia, for example, found that pregnant women were especially attractive to the Anopheles mosquitoes that can transmit malaria.

Another study in Burkina Faso found that beer consumption increased subjects’ attractiveness to the same type of mosquitoes.

That doesn’t mean you can change your diet to change your smell. You won’t stop a skeeter, for example, by eating garlic or taking vitamin B supplements, studies suggest. And there aren’t clear, consistent dietary explanations for why some people seem to be mosquito magnets.

MYTH NO. 2 You’re safe if you spend most of your time in air conditioning.

It’s true that spending the bulk of your time inside, with doors and windows shut, will lower your risk. Buildings without air conditioning and window screens are contributing to mosquito-borne disease outbreaks in Puerto Rico, Florida and Texas.

But that doesn’t mean mosquitoes can’t be a problem

inside. Some, especially the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which can carry Zika and dengue, can live in nooks and crannies in homes and yards. One exterminator wrote about discovering mosquitoes breeding in boiler rooms and potted-plant containers. That’s why, in highrisk areas, experts recommend sleeping under mosquito netting at night, particularly for infants.

MYTH NO. 3 You’re safe from mosquitoes if you’re not near a swamp.

Many species don’t need a swamp to reproduce; some are more comfortable in human habitats. Aedes aegypti prefers the company of humans — so much easier to find blood.

Female Aedes aegypti chiefly lay their eggs in artificial containers with vertical walls and a bit of standing water. They find the perfect incubators in those flower pots, tires, buckets, planters, toys, birdbaths, empty garbage cans and lids in our yards and on our decks. Once the eggs hatch, the larvae drop down into the water, where they mature into adult mosquitoes.

This is why it’s so important to check your house, yard and neighborhood weekly for these kinds of containers. Empty and scrub them. Turn them over, cover them, dry them out or throw them out.

Even mosquitoes born in swamps can pose a danger to humans who don’t live nearby.

The species Aedes sollicitans prefers stagnant salt marshes along the ocean for its eggs and

FELIPE DANA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Aedes aegypti mosquitoes are raising concern because they can transmit Zika. But there’s a lot of faulty advice on how to avoid them.

larvae. However, the insect can fly 10 miles or more inland to find animals or people to bite.

MYTH NO. 4 Mosquitoes hate citronella candles, bats and Listerine.

The Internet is awash in ideas for repelling mosquitoes.

Websites sell wooden bat homes for back yards, promising that their omnivorous occupants will devour the pesky bugs. Emails circulate suggesting that a bowl of water with a few drops of liquid soap, a spray of Listerine or half a lemon stuffed full of cloves will keep the bloodsuckers away.

Amazon even sells an “eco friendly” device that emits ultrasonic waves to fight the bugs.

Unfortunately, most of these “natural” solutions provide little, if any, relief. Take citronella candles — Harry Savage of the CDC told CNN that they don’t do much. “To me,” he said, “citronella only protects the candle.” Ditto with mouthwash, bats (which don’t consume enough mosquitoes to make a measurable difference) and ultrasonic waves.

Research shows that the best mosquito repellents are Environmental Protection Agency-registered sprays for use on the body, such as products that contain DEET or picaridin.

As one expert noted, “Many, many studies throughout the

world have shown that botanical based repellents provide substantially less protection against biting mosquitoes than DEET or Picaridin.”

MYTH NO. 5 We should wipe mosquitoes off the face of the Earth.

In reality, total extinction of all mosquito species could be risky and almost impossible. First, not all mosquitoes are problematic — although there are about 3,500 varieties, only 200 or so bite us.

Additionally, in many places, such as the Arctic, the bugs are a vital source of food for animals.

Mosquitoes are also tenaciously resilient, and they live in close contact with human communities. Pesticides alone are not an answer, as there can be enormous risks to human and ecological health from misuse, and mosquitoes can often develop resistance.

In the future, experts say, we might be able to limit certain species of mosquitoes using genetic modification to make them infertile. But even that could be a challenge — the number of modified mosquitoes you’d have to release would be phenomenal. n Knowlton is the senior scientist and deputy director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Science Center.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2016

24

A & Q

THE RACE: Chelan County Commission | District 1

THIS WEEK’S QUESTION:

ES T A D I D N A ASK THE C

Do current taxation levels and regulations in Chelan county have us well positioned for future economic growth? Why or why not?

CANDIDATES:

KEVIN OVERBAY

RANDY HARRISON

Retires after end of year as assistant district commander for Washington State Patrol

Retires in December as chief of East Wenatchee Police

prefers Republican Party

prefers Republican Party

ANSWER: No – I believe some of the current governmental regulations and processes stifle economic growth as opposed to supporting growth. A regulatory review and process improvement is needed to cut out unneeded levels of bureaucracy in an effort to streamline the amount of time required for approvals. Additionally, government needs to partner with business and industry in an effort to review, revise, and/or repeal regulations that adversely affect current growth while mitigating adverse impacts to future growth potential.

Taxes should be levied only as a way to provide necessary services. Government is obligated to minimize tax burdens while utilizing revenues in the most efficient way possible. Strict financial accountability is necessary on all levels to ensure the most appropriate use of tax dollars while providing the best in customer service. By exercising this approach, government not only fulfills its obligation, but fosters a stable economy with future growth potential.

ANSWER: Through July, Chelan County’s 2016 fiscal budget has a healthy cash balance. Revenues are exceeding expectations, and expenditures are tracking under budget. I feel that the level of taxation positions well for the near future. With increased growth, revenues will increase.

State law allows a 1 percent increase annually for property tax.

More than that takes a vote of the people. One of government’s roles is to keep taxes as low as possible. Government needs to live within its means.

As far as the permitting and approval process, is it confusing, time consuming or is it inconsistent? Is the process as streamlined and user friendly as possible?

We don’t want to deter new business, building, agriculture, recreation, from considering Chelan County. My first task is to look at the process and be involved in making it the best it can be without burdening the productive sector with unnecessary government regulations and controls.

If you have a question you’d like to ask the candidates in any race in North Central Washington please your suggestion to newsroom@wenatcheeworld.com.

2016

ELECTI N GUIDE

WENATCHEEWORLD.COM

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