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Water Supply Key to Outcome of Conflicts in Iraq and Syria

by LeeBeatyfuu Posted on July 5, 2014

Mother Jones

This story originally appeared in the Guardian and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The outcome of the Iraq and Syrian conflicts may rest on who controls the region’s dwindling water supplies, say security analysts in London and Baghdad.

Rivers, canals, dams, sewage and desalination plants are now all military targets in the semi-arid region that regularly experiences extreme water shortages, says Michael Stephen, deputy director of the Royal United Services Institute think tank in Qatar, speaking from Baghdad.

“Control of water supplies gives strategic control over both cities and countryside. We are seeing a battle for control of water. Water is now the major strategic objective of all groups in Iraq. It’s life or death. If you control water in Iraq you have a grip on Baghdad, and you can cause major problems. Water is essential in this conflict,” he said.

Isis Islamic rebels now control most of the key upper reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates, the two great rivers that flow from Turkey in the north to the Gulf in the south and on which all Iraq and much of Syria depends for food, water and industry.

“Rebel forces are targeting water installations to cut off supplies to the largely Shia south of Iraq,” says Matthew Machowski, a Middle East security researcher at the UK houses of parliament and Queen Mary University of London.

“It is already being used as an instrument of war by all sides. One could claim that controlling water resources in Iraq is even more important than controlling the oil refineries, especially in summer. Control of the water supply is fundamentally important. Cut it off and you create great sanitation and health crises,” he said.

Isis now controls the Samarra barrage west of Baghdad on the Tigris and areas around the giant Mosul Dam, higher up on the same river. Because much of Kurdistan depends on the dam, it is strongly defended by Kurdish peshmerga forces and is unlikely to fall without a fierce fight, says Machowski.

Last week Iraqi troops were rushed to defend the massive five mile-long Haditha Dam and its hydroelectrical works on the Euphrates to stop it falling into the hands of Isis forces. Were the dam to fall, say analysts, Isis would control much of Iraq’s electricity and the rebels might fatally tighten their grip on Baghdad.

Securing the Haditha Dam was one of the first objectives of the American special forces invading Iraq in 2003. The fear was that Saddam Hussein’s forces could turn the structure that supplies 30 percent of all Iraq’s electricity into a weapon of mass destruction by opening the lock gates that control the flow of the river. Billions of gallons of water could have been released, power to Baghdad would have been cut off, towns and villages over hundreds of square miles flooded and the country would have been paralyzed.

Iraqi men move a boat that was stuck on the banks of the Euphrates River after supplies were blocked by anti-government fighters who control a dam further upstream.

In April, Isis fighters in Fallujah captured the smaller Nuaimiyah Dam on the Euphrates and deliberately diverted its water to “drown” government forces in the surrounding area. Millions of people in the cities of Karbala, Najaf, Babylon and Nasiriyah had their water cut off but the town of Abu Ghraib was catastrophically flooded along with farms and villages over 200 square miles. According to the UN, around 12,000 families lost their homes.

Earlier this year Kurdish forces reportedly diverted water supplies from the Mosul Dam. Equally, Turkey has been accused of reducing flows to the giant Lake Assad, Syria’s largest body of fresh water, to cut off supplies to Aleppo, and Isis forces have reportedly targeted water supplies in the refugee camps set up for internally displaced people.

Iraqis fled from Mosul after Isis cut off power and water and only returned when they were restored, says Machowski. “When they restored water supplies to Mosul, the Sunnis saw it as liberation. Control of water resources in the Mosul area is one reason why people returned,” said Machowski.

Increasing temperatures, one of the longest and most severe droughts in 50 years and the steady drying up of farmland as rainfall diminishes have been identified as factors in the political destabilization of Syria.

Both Isis forces and President Assad’s army are said to have used water tactics to control the city of Aleppo. The Tishrin Dam on the Euphrates, 60 miles east of the city, was captured by Isis in November 2012.

The use of water as a tactical weapon has been used widely by both Isis and the Syrian government, says Nouar Shamout, a researcher with Chatham House. “Syria’s essential services are on the brink of collapse under the burden of continuous assault on critical water infrastructure. The stranglehold of Isis, neglect by the regime, and an eighth summer of drought may combine to create a water and food crisis which would escalate fatalities and migration rates in the country’s ongoing three-year conflict,” he said.

“The deliberate targeting of water supply networks…is now a daily occurrence in the conflict. The water pumping station in Al-Khafsah, Aleppo, stopped working on May 10, cutting off water supply to half of the city. It is unclear who was responsible; both the regime and opposition forces blame each other, but unsurprisingly in a city home to almost three million people the incident caused panic and chaos. Some people even resorted to drinking from puddles in the streets,” he said.

Water will now be the key to who controls Iraq in future, said former US intelligence officer Jennifer Dyer on US television last week. “If Isis has any hope of establishing itself on territory, it has to control some water. In arid Iraq, water and lines of strategic approach are the same thing.”

A satellite view showing the two main rivers running from Turkey through Syria and Iraq. MODIS/NASA

The Euphrates River, the Middle East’s second longest river, and the Tigris, have historically been at the center of conflict. In the 1980s, Saddam Hussein drained 90 percent of the vast Mesopotamian marshes that were fed by the two rivers to punish the Shias who rose up against his regime. Since 1975, Turkey’s dam and hydropower constructions on the two rivers have cut water flow to Iraq by 80 percent and to Syria by 40 percent. Both Syria and Iraq have accused Turkey of hoarding water and threatening their water supply.

“There has never been an outright war over water but water has played extremely important role in many Middle East conflicts. Control of water supply is crucial,” said Stephen.

It could also be an insurmountable problem should the country split into three, he said. “Water is one of the most dangerous problems in Iraq. If the country was split there would definitely be a war over water. Nobody wants to talk about that,” he said.

Some academics have suggested that Tigris and Euphrates will not reach the sea by 2040 if rainfall continues to decrease at its present rate.

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Water Supply Key to Outcome of Conflicts in Iraq and Syria

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Contact: Country Music Heiress Holly Williams Waves Her Flag of Independence

by MaricruFerraro Posted on July 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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Holly Williams in Brooklyn. Jacob Blickenstaff


Ben Watt


Joe Henry


Gabriel Kahane


Jolie Holland


Rodney Crowell


Jill Sobule


Benmont Tench


Leyla McCalla


Keith & Tex


Declan O’Rourke


Michael Daves

As the granddaughter of Hank Williams Sr. and daughter of Hank Williams Jr., Holly Williams‘ real inheritance may be the art of self-invention. Under a heavy mantle, Holly has carved out her own career as a singer-songwriter with a sweet but commanding voice and songs that tell the stories of family and friends in a wistful Southern setting.

The diamond-studded “HW” ring on her right hand is the only outward indication of country-royalty glitz. She grew up mostly outside of the music business, picking up the guitar in her late teens with a little help from her step-father, Johnny Christopher, a busy Nashville session guitarist and songwriter who co-wrote the modern classic “Always On My Mind.“

Last year, Williams released her third album, The Highway, produced by Charlie Peacock and featuring guest appearances by Jackson Browne, Jakob Dylan, and Gwyneth Paltrow. She’s touring behind the album through August, here and in the United Kingdom. Jacob Blickenstaff photographed Holly in Brooklyn and spoke with her by phone from the road. The following is in her words:

It’s not that I see myself operating outside of country music in that I don’t like it, or I don’t want to be there. I’d like to think that my music would be played on country radio if it were the ’90s, when they had a lot more singer-songwriters on there, like Lyle Lovett and Mary Chapin Carpenter. Now it’s all that “bro-country,” with Daisy Dukes, beer, tailgating, and fireworks. So everybody calls me an Americana artist or singer-songwriter, along with those people who are not mainstream enough for country radio today. I think “The Highway” is a country song, but radio doesn’t hear it that way, so I’m just living on the outskirts.

I opened my first store a year and a half after the car wreck with my sister. I couldn’t play for about eight months, and I didn’t know how long it would be. My sister was terribly broken. She had 28 surgeries and was in bed for two years. I didn’t want to leave my family and go back on the road. The recession hit and I had split with my first label. I had to take off big chunks of time from music. Music is my first love and always will be, but retail is just in me. Hank Williams and his wife Audrey owned one of Nashville’s first retail stores on Broadway—Hank and Audrey’s Corral—and my grandfather on my mom’s side owned a mercantile, and that’s what my new store is named, White’s Mercantile.

It’s really nice for me to escape and have a couple of hours a day to work on the stores. When you’re a solo artist, you really just think about yourself all day: Here is my interview, here are my songs. I just love getting out of my own head. Even at home vacuuming, just staring at a machine sucking up dirt and it’s very mindless—these domestic things somehow bring the creativity and ideas.

I didn’t have a big struggle finding my own identity. I consider what my dad went through to be much harder, considering he was the son of Hank Williams. His mom had him on tour at eight years-old; he dealt with an unbelievable amount of pressure. He would sing his own songs and the audience would boo and leave. But he proved he could do his own music and sell 50 million records. I come from a line of very independent people.

In the beginning, people would come to the shows after drinking all day, thinking it was going to be rowdy because I’m Bocephus’ daughter. And here I am at the piano singing Tom Waits songs. I could probably be a lot wealthier if I had signed with a major label and did straight-up country songs. I wanted to be able to find it on my own. It’s the longer road, but the more fulfilling one.

I was completely kept away from the music business. It was always, “I’m not Bocephus, I’m Daddy.” All we knew was fishing on the farm and hunting and going to Montana and playing with the cows. Dad was on tour all the time, we saw him every two to three months. We lived a very normal life in Nashville. My dad didn’t even listen to the radio. It is the complete opposite of what people think.

The funny thing is, I didn’t pick up a guitar until I was 17, and it was through my stepfather. It was his guitar in the house. My dad never once mentioned, “y’all want to learn an instrument?”

I was writing lyrics at a really young age, like seven or eight. I loved to write stories. Throughout my teenage years I actually wanted to write poetry. When I picked up a guitar and learned three or four chords, that first day I ran downstairs and said, “Mom, I wrote a song!” it seemed like it came out of nowhere. It was very natural.

Whenever I’ve tried to sit down and write a song it never happens. Usually they come out of nowhere. “Waiting on June” came when I was washing dishes. A lot of songs get started that way, at a still moment. I just started singing it like that. I wanted to follow the story as starting from my Papaw’s standpoint; he was always waiting for her, from when they met to when they went to heaven.

The saying is true: “You don’t know what you have until it’s gone.” My grandparents died and suddenly we can’t go to their house for Christmas anymore; the family July 4 is over. There’s so much tradition that ends when a couple who had been together for 60 years are gone. We try to do it the same, but it will never be the same. Part of what I write is about getting older and reminiscing and wanting things to be back how they were, like picking pecans and hanging with the cows on Papaw’s farm.

The cemetery that the song “Gone Away From Me” was written about, Oak Ridge Cemetery, is about two miles from my grandparent’s house. It’s where they are buried and my great-great-aunt Stella who died in infancy is buried, as well as relatives that go back five generations. The song is from my mom’s viewpoint, and also the generation before her—they had a lot of tragedy. Every year, the whole White family would go down to the cemetery around July 4 and visit in the afternoon and be there for each other. Now my grandparents are buried there with just a quiet little oak tree, it’s a sacred place for me.

July 3rd was a dreaded friend of mine
We’d all go down to the family plot in the Louisiana pines
Staring at that little baby’s grave
Stella was as young as she was brave

And what I’d give to go there again
Kiss my daddy’s face, hold my mama’s hand
Little did I know soon they would be
Lying right beside her, gone away from me
Gone away from me.

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Contact: Country Music Heiress Holly Williams Waves Her Flag of Independence

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How Hobby Lobby Undermined The Very Idea of a Corporation

by AidenLoche Posted on July 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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Here’s one more reason to worry about the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision, which allowed the arts and crafts chain to block insurance coverage of contraception for female employees because of the owners’ religious objections: It could screw up corporate law.

This gets complicated, but bear with us. Basically, what you need to know is that if you and some friends start a company that makes a lot of money, you’ll be rich, but if it incurs a lot of debt and fails, you won’t be left to pay its bills. The Supreme Court affirmed this arrangement in a 2001 case, Cedric Kushner Promotions vs. Don King:

linguistically speaking, the employee and the corporation are different “persons,” even where the employee is the corporation’s sole owner. After all, incorporation’s basic purpose is to create a distinct legal entity, with legal rights, obligations, powers, and privileges different from those of the natural individuals who created it, who own it, or whom it employs.

More MoJo coverage of the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision.


Hobby Lobby’s Hypocrisy: The Company’s Retirement Plan Invests in Contraception Manufacturers


The 8 Best Lines From Ginsburg’s Dissent


Why the Decision Is the New Bush v. Gore


How Obama Can Make Sure Hobby Lobby’s Female Employees Are Covered


Hobby Lobby Funded Disgraced Fundamentalist Christian Leader Accused of Harassing Dozens of Women

That separation is what legal and business scholars call the “corporate veil,” and it’s fundamental to the entire operation. Now, thanks to the Hobby Lobby case, it’s in question. By letting Hobby Lobby’s owners assert their personal religious rights over an entire corporation, the Supreme Court has poked a major hole in the veil. In other words, if a company is not truly separate from its owners, the owners could be made responsible for its debts and other burdens.

“If religious shareholders can do it, why can’t creditors and government regulators pierce the corporate veil in the other direction?” Burt Neuborne, a law professor at New York University, asked in an email.

That’s a question raised by 44 other law professors, who filed a friends-of-the-court brief that implored the Court to reject Hobby Lobby’s argument and hold the veil in place. Here’s what they argued:

Allowing a corporation, through either shareholder vote or board resolution, to take on and assert the religious beliefs of its shareholders in order to avoid having to comply with a generally-applicable law with a secular purpose is fundamentally at odds with the entire concept of incorporation. Creating such an unprecedented and idiosyncratic tear in the corporate veil would also carry with it unintended consequences, many of which are not easily foreseen.

In his opinion for Hobby Lobby, Justice Samuel Alito’s insisted the decision should be narrowly applied to the peculiarities of the case. But as my colleague Pat Caldwell writes, the logic of the argument is likely to invite a tide of new lawsuits, all with their own unintended consequences.

Small wonder, then, that despite congressional Republicans defending the Hobby Lobby decision as a victory for American business against the nanny state, the US Chamber of Commerce—the country’s main big business lobby—was quiet on the issue. Even more telling: Despite a record tide of friends-of-the-court briefs, not one Fortune 500 weighed in on the case. In fact, as David H. Gans at Slate pointed out in March, about the only sizeable business-friendly groups that did file briefs with the court were the US Women’s Chamber of Commerce and the Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce. Both sided against Hobby Lobby.

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How Hobby Lobby Undermined The Very Idea of a Corporation

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Keeping Track of Hurricane Arthur

by Myrna Posted on July 3, 2014

If conditions align, Hurricane Arthur could break a 3,173-day stretch in which no major hurricane has made landfall on United States shores. See original article:  Keeping Track of Hurricane Arthur ; ;Related ArticlesThe Agriculture Secretary Sees a Smart (Phone) Solution to GMO Labeling FightTechnology as a Path to Product TransparencyStunning New Video View of Swimming Polar Bears ;

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Keeping Track of Hurricane Arthur

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Why This Summer Could Be the Arab Summer

by MadgePiddington Posted on June 30, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Three and a half years ago, the world was riveted by the massive crowds of youths mobilizing in Cairo’s Tahrir Square to demand an end to Egypt’s dreary police state. We stared in horror as, at one point, the Interior Ministry mobilized camel drivers to attack the demonstrators. We watched transfixed as the protests spread from one part of Egypt to another and then from country to country across the region. Before it was over, four presidents-for-life would be toppled and others besieged in their palaces.

Some 42 months later, in most of the Middle East and North Africa, the bright hopes for more personal liberties and an end to political and economic stagnation championed by those young people have been dashed. Instead, a number of Arab countries have seen counter-revolutions, while others are engulfed in internecine conflicts and civil wars, creating Mad Max-like scenes of post-apocalyptic horror. But keep one thing in mind: the rebellions of the past three years were led by Arab millennials, twentysomethings who have decades left to come into their own. Don’t count them out yet. They have only begun the work of transforming the region.

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Why This Summer Could Be the Arab Summer

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Hopefully NASA won’t screw up its CO2-measuring satellite this time

by MarilouK96 Posted on June 30, 2014

Space Oddity

Hopefully NASA won’t screw up its CO2-measuring satellite this time

By

JPL/NASA

The last time NASA tried to launch a satellite to measure carbon dioxide levels from space, within minutes the $273 million project plopped into the Southern Ocean (oops). Tomorrow they’re giving it another go. The Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO)-2 will blast off at 2:56 a.m. PDT from the Vadenburg Air Force Base in California. This time, it’ll hopefully make it to 438 miles above the planet, where it will be in a prime position to obsessively watch Earth breathe.

JPL/NASA

Which sounds stalker-esque, but don’t get too creeped out. OCO’s main goal is to figure out where, exactly, atmospheric CO2 currently comes from – and, more mysteriously, where it ends up. While fossil fuel emissions have tripled since the 1960s, levels of atmospheric CO2 have risen by less than a quarter (but unfortunately that’s still enough to cause big global change). That’s because somehow our oceans and plants have, on average, been able to keep pace with absorbing half of the total atmospheric CO2. But scientists still don’t know a lot about the dynamics of how this is happening, which leaves them wondering: How long can we expect these carbon sinks to keep sucking the stuff down?

“Understanding what controls that variability is really crucial,” OCO project manager Ralph Basilio said at a press conference in Pasadena. “If we can do that today, it might inform us about what might happen in the future.”

The satellite will carry a 300-pound instrument that measures the colors of sunlight that bounce off the earth, because that color intensity indicates how much CO2 the light beams through. While it will only take in a square mile at a time – an area smaller than New York’s Central Park – scientists say that it will tell a much more complete story of the comings and goings of atmospheric CO2 than the 150 land-based stations from which they currently get their measurements. It will collect 24 measurements a second, which means a million a day, but scientists predict that only a tenth of them (100,000/day) will be clear enough of clouds to be usable.

If they can get it up there in the first place, that is. Ground control to Major Tom, take your protein pills and put your helmet on …


Source
NASA satellite to inventory climate-changing carbon from space, Reuters
NASA Launching Satellite to Track Carbon, The New York Times

Samantha Larson is a science nerd, adventure enthusiast, and fellow at Grist. Follow her on Twitter.

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Inside the Wild, Shadowy, and Highly Lucrative Bail Industry

by Sue Allen Posted on June 30, 2014

Mother Jones

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The largest annual gathering of bail bondsmen in the country—the convention of the Professional Bail Agents of the United States, or PBUS—was slotted between Dunkin’ Donuts and Elk Camp 2013 at the Mirage Resort and Casino, a tall, shiny structure shaped like an open book and set against replicas of the Colosseum and Eiffel Tower on Las Vegas’ Strip. The sidewalk out front was littered with cards bearing phone numbers and pictures of naked women. In the courtyard, flames licked the late-winter air to the rhythm of a tribal drum every hour, on the hour. A sign at the entrance announced that the casino’s dolphin just had a baby and we would be able to see it soon. As I walked through the smoky slots area I saw a man with a PBUS lanyard doing an extremely forced I’m-having-fun dance with his assistant while a casino employee showed them how to play the one-armed bandit. It was a bit of a letdown from what I’d been anticipating—all-night blackjack sessions with bondsmen and bounty hunters telling tales from the street over stiff drinks. I’d even grown a mustache for the event, thinking it would help me blend in a little—bondsmen have mustaches, don’t they?

Not really, I discovered when I arrived at the welcome reception. “So how do you like the industry?” I asked a clean-shaven man in a shiny gray suit who looked to be about 30. “I like it,” he said buoyantly, taking a sip of his beer. “Sometimes you get real lucky.” He told me about the first bond he ever wrote in the cheerful, blow-by-blow manner of a poker player recounting a winning hand. A college student went out drinking and crashed his car into a fence, he explained. “So him and a girlfriend both get kinda messed up.” He beamed. I was confused—was I to realize that this was a boon? He quickly explained that normally, bail for a DUI was $5,000, but since it involved an injury, the amount automatically jumped to $100,000. When he told the driver’s mom she would have to pay him a $10,000 fee to get her son out of jail, she said, “No problem. Here’s my credit card number.” He smiled and took a sip from his beer, nodding happily. “I couldn’t believe it.”

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Inside the Wild, Shadowy, and Highly Lucrative Bail Industry

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At the Moment, Inflation Is Our Friend, Not Our Enemy

by ImogeneEnright Posted on June 23, 2014

Mother Jones

Atrios makes a point today that’s been on my mind as well. So instead of writing it myself, I’ll just let him say it:

I think more people need to make the point regularly (even Krgthulu!) that the lack of inflation risks isn’t simply because we don’t have any actual inflation, it’s because if there’s one thing the major central banks know how to do — and are biased in favor of doing — is killing inflation. If we do wake up and discover that we’ve had sustained inflation at, say, the unimaginable level of 3% for several months, ushering in the Zombie Apocalypse, our great and glorious central banks will actually step on the brakes. Genuine inflation risk isn’t about a few months of too high inflation (which we should have but that’s another discussion), it’s about “irresponsible” central banks that will keep stepping on the gas even as hyperinflation is destroying the world. But that isn’t going to happen and no one with half a brain really believes it’s going to happen. Are those who fret about inflation evil or stupid? I have no idea, but…

In addition, I’d expand a bit on his aside that a few months of high inflation would be a good thing. That’s true, and it’s the primary reason we shouldn’t let inflation fears overwhelm us. If the CPI rises by 4 or 5 percent for a few months, that’s not a problem. It’s happened before, and then reverted back to the mean. Even a year wouldn’t be a problem. In fact, it would probably be helpful since it would implicitly reduce real interest rates and act as a spur to the economy. And if inflation stays at an elevated level for more than a year? Then Atrios is right: if there’s one thing the Fed knows how to do, it’s kill inflation. There’s a ton of controversy over whether and how the Fed can influence other things (growth, employment, strength of the dollar, etc.), but there’s no question about its ability to curb inflation if it wants to. This is something that left and right both agree about.

So yes: we should tolerate higher inflation for a while. With the economy still as weak as it is, there’s a lot of potential upside and very little potential downside.

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At the Moment, Inflation Is Our Friend, Not Our Enemy

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Want to Suppress the Vote? Stress People Out

by JasmineSeymour Posted on June 23, 2014

Mother Jones

The United States has a voting problem. In the 2012 presidential election, only about 57 percent of eligible American voters turned out, a far lower participation rate than in comparable democracies. That means about 93 million people who were eligible to vote didn’t bother.

Clearly, figuring out why people vote (and why they don’t) is of premium importance to those who care about the health of democracy, as well as to campaigns that are becoming ever more sophisticated in targeting individual voters. To that end, much research has shown that demographic factors such as age and poverty affect one’s likelihood of voting. But are there individual-level biological factors that also influence whether a person votes?

The idea has long been heretical in political science, and yet the logic behind it is unavoidable. People vary in all sorts of ways—ranging from personalities to genetics—that affect their behavior. Political participation can be an emotional, and even a stressful activity, and in an era of GOP-led efforts to make voting more difficult, voting in certain locales can be a major hassle. To vote, you need both to be motivated and also not so intimidated you stay away from the polls. So are there biological factors that can shape these perceptions?

In a new groundbreaking study just out in the journal Physiology and Behavior, a team of political scientists, psychologists, and biologists say they’ve found one. They maintain that individuals who have higher baseline levels of the bodily stress hormone cortisol are, as a group, less likely to vote. In other words, individuals who are more sensitive to stress don’t appear to vote as often. “Our study is unique in that it is the first to examine whether differences in physiology may be causally related to differences in political activity,” says Jeffrey French, the lead author of the paper and director of the neuroscience program at the University of Nebraska-Omaha.

Dubbed the “stress hormone,” cortisol follows a daily cycle in the body, tending to be higher in the morning and lower in the evening. But it also spills into the bloodstream, from its home in the adrenal gland, in response to stimuli that are perceived as stressful. Moreover, some people tend to have more cortisol in their blood than others, even when they’re not stressed out. These people tend to be more socially avoidant, sensitive to fear, and prone to depression. High cortisol levels can lead to a wide range of negative health outcomes.

The research was conducted in a group of 105 ideologically diverse citizens of Lancaster County, Nebraska. Official voting records from the secretary of state’s office were correlated with the participants’ cortisol levels before and after each participant had to perform stressful tasks, such as conducting difficult math calculations out loud or preparing to give a 10-minute speech that (they thought) would be filmed and evaluated. While these exercises were being mounted, the cortisol levels of the participants were collected from their saliva. (All of the research was done at the same time in the afternoon to weed out natural bodily swings in cortisol levels.)

Bodily cortisol levels predicted voting behavior. Adapted from French et al., “Cortisol and Politics,” Physiology and Behavior, 2014.

The results were striking.The baseline cortisol levels (before the stress was induced) showed a relationship with the participants’ voting behavior in past elections. High cortisol individuals tended to vote less frequently than low cortisol ones. Meanwhile, the researchers were able to show that in a statistical model that controlled for standard demographic variables (such as age, sex, and income), using baseline cortisol as a factor led to more accuracy in predicting whether a person was likely to vote.

After the controls, the role of this hormone did end up being only modest. But French still thinks that’s a big deal. “When we’re talking about an electorate where only half of people vote, even a small amount of variance, we think, is important,” he says. Theoretically, this means that in the future, political campaigns might be able to target individuals based on their biology—to boost voter turnout, or perhaps suppress it.

These results also suggest that recent GOP efforts to combat alleged “voter fraud”—for instance, by implementing stringent ID laws or encouraging poll workers to place more demands on voters—are likely to make stressed-out people less inclined to participate.

French says that if we want high-cortisol individuals to vote more, we should make voting less stressful and challenging: “Things like absentee voting, or mail ballots, may make people with high afternoon cortisol more likely to engage.”

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Here’s What the Battle Over Iraqi Oil Means for America

by MarianneTejada Posted on June 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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As deadly sectarian violence continues to sweep through Iraq, the country’s oil industry is reeling from a brazen attack on one of its key domestic refineries. Here are five things you need to know about the role of oil in the current conflict, and what it means for the United States and the global economy.

UPDATE Thursday, June 19, 2:50pm EST: In a press conference this afternoon in which he announced the deployment up to 300 additional military advisers to Iraq, President Obama was asked how Iraq’s civil war affects the national security interests of the United States. In response, Obama listed several factors, including “issues like energy, and global energy markets.”

1. Oil infrastructure is a major flash point in the Iraq crisis. After a week-long siege, Sunni extremists from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, known as ISIS, fought their way into Iraq’s largest oil refinery in the northern city of Baiji on Tuesday and Wednesday. There are conflicting reports about how much of the facility was seized by the militants in the ensuing chaos, and whether Iraqi forces have in fact repelled the attack, as Iraqi military officials claim. Previously, repeated attacks shut down the major Turkey-bound Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline in the north.

A 2003 photo shows a guard tower outside the Baiji oil refinery. Ivan Sekretarev/AP

2. The Iraq crisis is already affecting oil and gasoline prices. Since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the country has steadily increased its oil production. It’s now the second biggest producer of crude oil in OPEC, exerting a growing influence on the global price of oil. And while the White House said Wednesday that there have been no “major disruptions in oil supplies in Iraq,” the crisis has clearly spooked the global market. Bloomberg reported last week that one international benchmark used by traders surged above $114 a barrel for the first time in nine months.

USA Today reported that even before the battle over the Baiji refinery, Iraq’s oil production had already fallen by about 10 percent, or 300,000 barrels a day, since March. The China National Petroleum Corporation, the giant state-run company that is the biggest foreign investor in Iraq’s oil industry, is now nervously watching for any threats to its $4 billion worth of oil interests.

And there are signs that oil market worries are already being reflected at your local gas station.

“I warned people on my Facebook, friends and family,” says Robert Rapier, an energy analyst and regular columnist for the Wall Street Journal. “I said: If you need to get gasoline, go get it now, because gasoline prices will be going up this week.”

3. But long-term impacts on global oil supply are unlikely, unless the insurgency spreads. For now, the insurgency is limited to the part of the country north of Baghdad. Unless there’s an increased threat of instability in the south, deeper and longer-lasting seismic shocks to the world energy market are unlikely, according to Luay al-Khatteeb, an energy and politics analyst with the Brookings Doha Center and a senior adviser to the Iraqi parliament. While Baiji is the country’s largest refinery, the overwhelming bulk of oil production in Iraq is centered around the city of Basra, in the country’s south, “far from the fault lines,” he said. Khatteeb called the recent oil price increases “baseless,” adding that “there is zero threat whatsoever to oil production.”

But if the conflict does spread south, the effect on oil markets could be severe. “If all Iraq’s production got taken off line, for example, I’m pretty sure you’d see oil prices rise very quickly to $120, $130, maybe even higher,” Rapier said.

Moreover, the battle for the Baiji plant is likely to make the situation in Iraq worse because Baiji mainly refines oil for the domestic market. “The lack of oil products is likely to further the misery and discontent and my prediction is that a lot of that will be directed toward the central government,” said James F. Jeffery, a visiting fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a former US envoy to Baghdad, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.

President Barack Obama speaks about energy security and his climate plan at a Walmart in Mountain View, California. Jeff Chiu/AP

4. America imports much less Iraqi oil than it used to. When Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, he said that America’s dependence on the “tyranny of oil” helped fund terrorism in both Iraq and around the world. “One of the most dangerous weapons in the world today is the price of oil,” he said. “We ship nearly $700 million a day to unstable or hostile nations for their oil. It pays for terrorist bombs going off from Baghdad to Beirut.” His opponent that year, John McCain, said at a town hall that his plan to “eliminate our dependence on oil from the Middle East” would “prevent us from having ever to send our young men and women into conflict again in the Middle East.”

As president, Obama has continued to emphasize independence from foreign oil. “Today, America is closer to energy independence than we have been in decades,” he told an audience at Walmart in Mountain View, California, last month. “And for the first time in nearly 20 years, America produces more oil here at home than we buy from other countries.”

Indeed, in October, domestic crude oil production surpassed imports for the first time since 1995. More specifically, even though Iraq’s oil production has increased, the US now imports far less Iraqi oil than it did around the time of the 2003 invasion.

That’s not just the story in Iraq. America is now importing less oil overall—20 percent less, in fact—than in 2003. “We’re getting more of that oil domestically,” Rapier said, pointing to increased local production facilitated by the fracking boom, especially in Texas and North Dakota.

And America’s own neighbors are also chipping in to help, says Rapier, pointing to Canadian crude. “We’ve got lower cost production in our neighborhood here.”

This means the United States is now somewhat insulated from big shocks to the market like the 1970s oil crisis, in which oil-producing Arab states imposed a crippling embargo against the US.

“The increase of unconventional oil supplies from new emerging assets in the US, all of this has created some sort of a comfort zone,” said Khatteeb from the Brookings Doha Center.

John Duffield, who authored a 2008 book called Over a Barrel: The Costs of US Foreign Oil Dependence agrees: “I would say we are not as much over the barrel.”

5. But the United States is still tied to global oil markets, and that means what happens in Iraq can have an economic impact here. One thing every expert I spoke to agreed on is this: Even with decreasing oil imports, the US is inextricably linked to world markets. That means that if the situation in Iraq continues to deteriorate, the US economy may not be immune.

“The cost to the United States of a big oil shock…will be lower than they were in the past,” Duffield said. “Our main vulnerability is not so much the direct impact on oil, but the impact on the rest of the world’s economy, if there’s a big oil supply disruption.” He added that “as long as the world oil market is pretty highly integrated, the US is vulnerable to an oil supply disruption in the Middle East or the Persian Gulf, regardless of the amount of oil it imports from the region.”

Why? Because even though the United States has reduced its use of Middle Eastern oil, many of America’s key trading partners have not. “The oil production in Iraq has risen for seven years in a row,” Rapier said, and that oil is going somewhere. Much of it’s going to Asian economic powerhouses whose economies are deeply tied to our own.

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A US soldier stands guard at a burning oil well at the Rumeila oil fields after the 2003 American invasion. Ian Waldie/Pool/AP

“The United States, strategically, is a major trading power,” said Anthony Cordesman, an energy analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It is particularly dependent on the import of manufactured goods from three countries which are extremely dependent on energy imports. Those happen to be China, South Korea, and Japan.”

That’s why Middle Eastern oil still plays an important role in US policy, says Cordesman. “It is precisely because US security is global. It is not a matter of direct US dependence on foreign oil,” he said. “Because what really counts is global prices, and what counts is the steady and predictable flow of oil to a global economy.â&#128;&#139;”

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Here’s What the Battle Over Iraqi Oil Means for America

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