Hasta La Gadget!

My husband and I have been married for a little over a year. His ten year old son is with us every other weekend and longer on vacations. His mother was angry about the divorce (it happened three years ago) and has said bad things about me from the start. My stepson shows up ready to pick a fight. He screams at his dad over what we’re having for dinner, and even throws things across the room when he’s very mad. Should we stop having him come here for a while? He seems happier when he’s at his mom’s but my husband thinks that with time he’ll get used to being here and stop acting out.

Your stepson has been thrown into a situation that I see all too often: one parent says negative things about the other parent or stepparent, creating divided loyalties. The child is faced with an impossible dilemma: Whose side am I supposed to be on?

It would be wonderful if your husband’s former wife could see that she how much she is hurting her son by poisoning his view of you and his ability to feel comfortable when he spends time at his father’s home. But sadly, no one can force her to help her son adjust to your presence in his life. Perhaps one day she will recognize the damage she is doing to him and decide to work through her grief in a healthier way.

Still, there is much that your husband can do to help his son deal with the anger that is fueling his aggression.

Start by creating an atmosphere that allows him to express all of his feelings. This may require your husband to be less reactive if his son says things the believes are based on his former wife’s unkind remarks. For instance, your stepson may tell his father, “I hate coming here because my stepmom doesn’t know anything about kids cause she’s never been a mom like Mommy. Mommy knows just how I like my pasta.”

Now, your husband may want to argue his son’s logic by “proving” that you like children or that you’re willing to learn how to cook his pasta, but this won’t be very useful. Instead, I would encourage him to use a complaint to get to the heart of the issue. He might say, “It sounds like you feel that your stepmom isn’t used to having kids around…” or “Mommy knows just how to fix your pasta. I wonder if it’s hard to be here where things are a little different.”

Ask your husband to avoid denying, arguing, scolding, or correcting your son when he reveals something that is bothering him. And don’t take his negative comments at face value! It is unlikely that he is upset about whatever he is complaining about. Rather, see the things that trigger his anger as invaluable inroads that will let your husband help his son discover that it’s safe to offload his sadness and confusion.

The child you are describing is hurting. While I can appreciate the temptation to make the problem go away by pausing his visits, this little boy needs his father, and the chance to work through the difficult feelings surrounding his parents’ divorce.

All children go through some degree of upheaval when a marriage ends, but with care and support, they generally adjust. Still, it is important to remember that time does not heal all wounds. Your stepson needs help untangling the mixed messages and feelings that have been stirred up inside him. You may find it useful to enlist the help of a family counselor who can create a safe atmosphere for your stepson and his father to forge a connection built on openness and love.

Susan Stiffelman is the author of Parenting Without Power Struggles: Raising Joyful, Resilient Kids While Staying Cool, Calm and Connected and the brand new Parenting with Presence: Practices for Raising Conscious, Confident, Caring Kids (An Eckhart Tolle Edition). She is a family therapist, parent coach and internationally recognized speaker on all subjects related to children, teens and parenting.

To learn more about her online parenting courses, classes and personal coaching support, visit her Facebook page or sign up for her free newsletter.

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Here’s a quaint memory from a bygone period in American politics: Back in November 2012, after President Barack Obama secured his re-election, The New York Times’ Scott Shane reported that with “the possibility that President Obama might not win a second term,” his administration had “accelerated work in the weeks before the election to develop explicit rules for the targeted killing of terrorists by unmanned drones, so that a new president would inherit clear standards and procedures.”

It was, as Shane noted, the latest attempt to formalize these policies and protocols since reports that previous summer had revealed the “shifting procedures for compiling ‘kill lists'” and the like. But — but! — it had, apparently, become “particularly urgent” to nail this stuff down once “it appeared that Mitt Romney might win the presidency.”

Mitt Romney, folks! Who, for all his faults, seemed to be one of the least power-mad people ever to seek the Oval Office. We’re talking about a guy whose chocolate milk intake is probably governed by a spreadsheet — whose history of high-risk, impulsive behavior seems restricted to that one time he ironed a shirt that he was still wearing. This was enough to get the Obama administration thinking, “Hey, maybe we better batten down the hatches on this loosey-goosey little assassination program we got going on.”

You know where I’m going with this. But here’s the thing: we’ve known all along where we were going with this. It’s just that not enough people cared. Liberals more or less trusted that their guy would do the right thing with all his power, and conservatives were torn between hating Obama and really, really loving the idea of drones killing people from the sky.

So the drones pounded on, and now the GOP nominee for president is a guy who respects the rule of law about as much as did Heath Ledger’s Joker. I refer, of course, to game-show luminary and rogue talking ball of snot from the Mucinex commercials Donald Trump.

Trump’s rise through the ranks has, in many quarters, touched off concerns about the ersatz mogul potentially finding himself in close proximity to the nuclear codes. Believe it or not, there might actually be worse things to worry about. America’s drone program — particularly its under-publicized whoopsie-daisy tendency to kill civilians and drive previously non-radicalized people toward apocalyptic death cults — seems to be precisely the sort of thing you wouldn’t want Trump messing with. Especially if the idea of Mitt Romney running the program makes your blood run cold.

Trump is, after all, the presidential candidate who vowed on national television that a cornerstone of his anti-terror policy would be to “take out” the families of known terrorists. Trump left people feeling a little agog and aghast when he said it, but here’s a fun fact: This is a thing that President Barack Obama has actually done, intentionally, with drones.

Heck, right at the beginning of his memoir Worthy Fights, Obama-era CIA Director Leon Panetta describes a situation where the U.S. has located a targeted combatant, but unfortunately he’s in close proximity to his family. What to do, what to do? Kill him, that’s what, along with his wife — a woman “with whom this country had no quarrel,” Panetta writes. The CIA chief goes on to assure us that these decisions “are never easy,” and that they often require “the fingering of a rosary, the whispered Hail Mary.” Which actually sounds pretty easy, if I’m being honest.

In fact, there’s not a lot of room for Trump to do something truly unique with the drone program, besides his vow to wage a less “politically correct” war with it. Presumably this means that Trump will be more ostentatious in the way he celebrates killing civilians, the same way he seems to get sprung whenever protesters emerge at his rallies. Maybe he’ll skip the whole rosary part, and grant himself his own market-rate indulgence.

At this juncture, let’s pause and consider the high school civics student — if those are still a thing — who has to answer the question “Who has the power to declare war?” In a more conventional era, the answer would simply be “Congress.” Nowadays, it might be more appropriate to give this imaginary student a little more leeway to properly define Congress’ role in warmaking, which might best be summarized as “¯_(ツ)_/¯.”

Over at The Week, Michael Brendan Dougherty rightly assails the simpering passivity that has allowed executive power to drift so far from its constitutional bounds during the past two presidencies:

In their lack of jealousy for their constitutional powers, in their opportunistic indifference when the president inserts American troops into a handful of civil wars in the Middle East without congressional approval, in their utter passivity and cravenness before the Executive branch, our ruling class has been implicitly crying out for the rule of a tyrant. Donald Trump is just answering the call.

That’s a pretty fair assessment. Congress has reduced its own role in all of this according to its preference for political expedience. Its preferred means of oversight has come in the form of blanket Authorizations for the Use of Military Force, which positions lawmakers as essentially the Statler and Waldorf of U.S. military doings. From that perch, they can take credit when things are going well and offer fervent criticism when they are not, all the while absolving themselves from responsibility. (Unless, of course, the president finds it convenient to put them on the spot for a military action he doesn’t want to undertake, as Obama did in Syria.)

It’s true that back in 2008, Obama ran for office as someone who’d undo the Bush-era executive-power abuses. But the fact is, Obama took to said abuses with aplomb, overseeing their expansion while Congress just kinda sat around and whistled. Now we have this tidy little “kill chain” process to deliver fully automated death from above, a process that’s only occasionally complicated by the fact that, for example, you can’t get clear permission to strike from a government that’s been taken over by rebels, like in Yemen. Details, details. Just another “politically correct” hiccup that Trump can cut through with his storied autocratic efficiency.

Liberals who abandoned their own criticisms of the Bush era to support Obama — who definitely wears the white hat, don’t worry — might start returning to their previous point of view on the matter as Trump edges closer to attaining power. How will Congress adapt to these changing times? At a recent briefing with reporters, The Huffington Post asked a Trump-supporting GOP senator whether he was worried about giving The Donald the drone joystick, the chance to waterboard detainees or something even worse. The senator, who requested anonymity, replied as follows:

It’s not gonna be Donald Trump singularly, in a room by himself, making decisions. So let me give you one other area where I think the Obama administration has done a good job, that actually impacts all of these questions that you’re asking about Trump and national security and foreign policy. If you look at the generals that have been nominated and confirmed… there’s a really, really outstanding group of admirals and generals that are running the U.S. military right now… They’re gonna have an impact on these kinds of issues and these kinds of questions. With regard to torture, the law is out there right now. It’s the Army Field Manual. Right now. That’s the law. You know, those guys aren’t going away. Chairmans and a lot of the chiefs — they’re coming in and they’re going to be here for four-year terms. We have an institutional structure on foreign and national security policy that doesn’t necessarily give one person the remote. And the guys around, the guys and women who are already part of that structure, are some of the best members of the military we have.

Leaving aside the fact that the answer wasn’t simply “Don’t worry, we trust Donald Trump to make good decisions,” it’s interesting that this senator’s response basically boils down to “Don’t worry, there are so many smart and responsible people sitting around who will stop bad things from happening.”

So… where have those guys been this whole time?

Ryan Grim contributed reporting.

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Jason Linkins edits “Eat The Press” for The Huffington Post and co-hosts the HuffPost politics podcast “So, That Happened.” Subscribe here, and listen to the latest episode below.

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Evolution May Explain the Allure of Donald Trump

David Brooks, columnist for the New York Times, is repulsed by Donald Trump. Like many thoughtful Republicans, Brooks sees Trump as a narcissistic, misogynistic demagogue who is utterly unprepared for the presidency and whose nomination will spell doom for the party. He urges his fellow partisans to disown Trump and, like other pundits who failed to see it coming, struggles to make sense of Trump’s allure.

Political psychologists seek an answer in Trump’s followers. At the University of Massachusetts, Matthew MacWilliams found that authoritarianism is the psychological trait that best predicts devotion to Trump in a national survey of likely Republican voters. A subsequent poll replicated and extended his results. A third study, however, has complicated this picture. Psychologists Eric Oliver (University of Chicago) and Wendy Rahn (University of Minnesota) found that Trump supporters were not distinguished by authoritarianism so much as by populism, defined as anti-elitism, mistrust of experts, and a strong American identity.

Differences in methods may account for the discrepancies among these studies, but rather than try to sort that out here, my goal is merely to illuminate the problem from a new direction. I think Trump is tapping into something deep in his followers, something from our distant evolutionary past. If so, then we must also examine the leader, and the place to start is with his most distinctive and derided trait: narcissism.

More Than Self-Love

Brooks once advised Trump’s detractors to emphasize his narcissism as a way to bring him down, and many tried. Yet the brash billionaire went on to crush his rivals. Maybe this is because, to his followers, Trump’s narcissism is a feature, not a bug. This could explain their tolerance for his vulgarity, dishonesty, immaturity, unseemly sex life, multiple divorces, ignorance of the Bible, political flip-flopping, and so much else that conservatives normally abhor.

Narcissism is a strange package that includes ambition, grandiosity, insecurity, shallowness of emotion, lack of empathy, temper tantrums, self-aggrandizement, a need for praise, and above all a lust for sacrifice from others as proof of loyalty. Narcissists often end up in positions of power, and two studies strongly suggest that narcissism is a biological adaptation.

The first, a twin study published in 1993 by John Livesley and colleagues at the University of British Columbia, measured the extent to which various personality disorders are the result of heredity. Of the eighteen aspects of personality examined, narcissism was the most heritable, with 64% of the variance in this trait attributable to genetic factors.

The other study, published in 2008 by Bridget Grant and colleagues at the National Institutes of Health, measured the prevalence of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) in a sample of more than thirty-four thousand American adults. It found that 6.2% had NPD at some time in their lives, with a significantly higher rate for men (7.7%) than for women (4.8%). This is about ten times higher than the lifetime prevalence of schizophrenia. Many NPD subjects have the symptoms only during adolescence, but the data suggest that at least half have a more severe condition that lasts a lifetime.

That NPD is both common and largely heritable strongly suggests that it is a product of evolution. But if it contributes to reproductive success, why are we not all narcissists? If it is disadvantageous, why does it persist at all? The answer to these questions lies in a facet of evolutionary theory developed by John Maynard Smith, and it is most easily grasped through example.

Cross-Dressing Cuttlefish

My favorite example is the mating behavior of the male giant cuttlefish that live off the coast of Australia. Relatives of the octopus, cuttlefish can change the texture, pattern and color of their skin almost instantaneously. Normally solitary, they congregate by the thousands during the mating season, and competition among the males is fierce. Disputes over females are decided through intimidating displays and damaging combat. The victor then mates with and jealously guards his female. But this is not the only path to success as a male cuttlefish.

Some sexually mature males are much smaller than the dominant ones, far too small to win a fight. They are, in fact, about the same size as females, and when unguarded females are hard to find, they change their pattern and coloration to disguise themselves as females. Thus cloaked, they can sneak up to a real female without being attacked by the guarding male. When the dominant male is distracted, usually by another large male, the little sneak quickly drops his pretense and mates with the female.

This is called an evolutionarily stable state, because the two different ways of being a successful male cuttlefish — alpha male or little sneak — coexist in a stable equilibrium. A population temporarily depleted of alpha males would not remain so for long, because their absence diminishes the need for sneaking and favors the mate-guarding tactic. Larger males would be favored in subsequent generations, and the balance would soon be restored. The restorative force is called frequency-dependent selection, because the fitness value of a trait, like mate-guarding or sneaking, depends on its frequency of occurrence in the population.

Leaders, Followers and Evolutionary Stability

Narcissistic personality disorder appears to be part of an evolutionarily stable state in human social behavior, with its prevalence probably maintained by frequency-dependent selection. This means that NPD is only part of the story. Just as mate-guarding cuttlefish are in equilibrium with female-impersonating sneaks, narcissistic leaders are in equilibrium with an alternative tactic in human social behavior: that of their followers.

More than anything else, it is social cooperation that has made us the most numerous large animals on Earth. Unlike the instinctive sociality of ants, however, ours is implemented through an innate system of socially-oriented emotions and intuitions that serve only as the foundation of the more elaborate social behavior we learn from our group. But as the size and complexity of a social group increase, so does the risk of cheating. Cooperation disintegrates if there are too many free riders, so our basic moral intuitions have been shaped by evolution to discourage such behavior. Most of us feel guilt and shame when we cheat, outrage and disgust at the cheating of others, and virtuous when we make sacrifices to a cause greater than ourselves.

Sacrifice as a Biological Signal

Sacrifice obviates the need to keep track of how much each member of a group contributes or takes because — if the sacrifice is sufficiently costly and hard to fake — it demonstrates to all that the person making it is loyal to the group. This costly signaling hypothesis explains why sacrifice is an essential aspect of nearly all religions. If you doubt this, try reading Leviticus — a grisly instruction book for sacrificing animals to Yahweh.

Sacrifice does more than send a signal of loyalty. It is an investment that profoundly affects behavior. If a person must suffer great pain to join a group, like a brutal fraternity hazing, then defection to another group is unlikely, because that would mean more hazing. Similarly, a person who has sacrificed her life savings to a church will see in it the security her wealth had once meant to her. If the preacher later turns out to be a fraud, prior investment makes that reality too painful to face. Better to deny it, keep making the sacrifices, and preserve the hope, however illusory, that it has all been for a worthy cause.

Narcissists not only understand this, they feel it in the core of their being. They erupt with rage when their demands are ignored or denied. Instead of guilt and shame, they feel joy and satisfaction when they exploit others. Their moral intuitions are different from those of most people. This peculiar genetic recipe for being a social animal is advantageous, but only if it occurs in a small fraction of the population, and only if a large fraction have a complementary recipe that includes a powerful need to belong, fear of ostracism, and willingness to sacrifice for a greater cause. If this idea is right, then these attributes of followers should also be significantly heritable. Twin studies of behaviors that are good proxies for willingness to sacrifice and the need for social belonging — like religiosity in adults and cell phone use by teens — confirm this prediction, as do twin studies of authoritarianism and prosocial attitudes.

Human narcissism and altruistic cooperation probably evolved together in our distant past, at a time when we lived in small groups that often competed fiercely with rival tribes. Antagonism toward the out-group is therefore yet another important aspect of this evolutionary dynamic, one in which uniting behind a charismatic leader could be essential to the war effort. This ancient pattern of narcissistic leader and sacrificing followers is so deeply engrained in human nature that it continually reappears, from office politics to Nazi Germany. Its apotheosis is the suicidal cult, like Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple.

To the Glory of Trump

The Trump phenomenon, of course, lies far short of that extreme. His followers claim to love him because “He says what people are thinking” or “We need a strong leader.” But beneath those sentiments lies a powerful unconscious force that draws them toward the whole charismatic package of narcissistic traits. Trump lacks the cult leader’s absolute control over the individual lives of his followers, and he knows that American voters have little appetite for painful sacrifice. Yet for a billionaire who boasts of his wealth during stump speeches, it is impressive that 72% of his campaign funds came from small donations as of October 2015, versus 20% for Clinton. Since then, the amount of Trump’s own money going into his campaign has risen sharply, though most of that was booked as a loan. And sacrifice need not be voluntary to bring joy to a narcissist. If recent polls hold up through election day, Trump will have extracted a grievous sacrifice from the Republican Party — all for his self-aggrandizement. And if he wins the presidency, we will all make that sacrifice.

Portions of this article were excerpted from The Illusion of God’s Presence: The Biological Origins of Spiritual Longing by John C. Wathey. Published by Prometheus Books. Copyright 2016 by John C. Wathey. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

John C. Wathey is a computational biologist whose research interests include evolutionary algorithms, protein folding, and the biology of nervous systems. Learn more about his work at watheyresearch.com.

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Secret is Out

It is no secret that solar energy is a money maker. Since 2011, the cost of solar electricity has been less than what consumers pay their electric utilities in a growing swath of America. Solar costs have plummeted like a rock and are continuing to drop.

This has created a surging market for solar technologies – 2015 was the biggest year in solar in U.S. history. Yet the American solar industry is set to more than double installed solar power this year. It is now economical and indeed profitable for a growing number of Americans to even go off grid.

These solar systems use photovoltaic technology that converts sunlight directly into electricity. The vast majority of these systems are connected directly to the grid. Such grid-tied systems are normally net-metered meaning they provide energy for their neighbors during the day and pull power from the grid at night or during cloudy weather. The solar prosumer simply pays for the net electricity they use from the grid. This can be a boon for everyone as solar is a well established sustainable technology. Solar cuts expensive and polluting conventional power and cuts losses during transmission over power lines, as net metered solar’s surplus energy flows to the grid and is consumed by neighbors. Most importantly it benefits all ratepayers by preventing the need to build new, expensive power plants or transmission lines.

Utility Responses

This sounds pretty good and some utilities have embraced solar energy, but sadly others fear it.

Cowardly electric companies are getting nervous that their customers are gaining some power over their “power” and they have used old tricks to make solar less economic and have even attempted to take away fair payment for solar electricity provided to the grid.

Long Term Thinking

This may work in the short term, but a new study released by the journal Energy Policy indicates this could be a disaster in the long term. Solar is not the only distributed technology that has been gaining prowess. Batteries with the help of companies like Tesla have been improving rapidly and have just started cost declines similar to the those seen in solar. In addition, small-scale combined heat and power (CHP) technologies are finally ready for prime time. CHP units about the size of a small refrigerator can provide both electricity and heat for homes economically. This technological triple threat is driving a virtuous cycle of technological improvements and cost reductions in off-grid electric systems that increasingly compete with the grid market.

This is a big change as for the first time in history consumers could actually make money for leaving the grid. An environmental group did a study showing this – but they cherry picked prime states (e.g. California) to evaluate.

Remarkably, the new study used one of the worst places in the U.S. as an example – the frigid Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where yes it literally snowed in May. Amazingly this study showed that already some households in the tundra of Michigan could save money by switching to a solar hybrid off-grid systems now in comparison to electric rates they are currently paying.

Across the region by 2020, 92% of seasonal households and about 75% of year-round households are projected to meet electricity demands with lower costs.

Furthermore, ~65% of all Upper Peninsula single-family owner-occupied households will both meet grid parity and be able to afford the solar systems by 2020.

What do you think they are going to do?

What this means is that simple economics could spur a positive feedback loop whereby grid electricity prices continue to rise and increasing numbers of customers choose alternatives, particularly in areas where utilities have chosen to treat their customers as threats rather than to embrace customer generated solar energy. There is a name for this effect: utility death spiral. If utilities want to survive and prosper in the longer term their best approach is one of embracing distributed solar power to keep as many solar homes as loyal paying customers as possible.

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Rogue One: A Star Wars Story won’t be released for almost seven months, and yet it’s already the talk of fans everywhere. Today, lots of that talk was about
a New York Post article saying the film was “in crisis” and needed “expensive reshoots.” A new report now adds some much-needed detail to those claims.

Read more…