Allergies may not have existed before the Industrial Age, but records of these health issues are rare from ancient times.

Chronic kidney disease affects over 800 million people and can lead to kidney failure. Here are the symptoms, causes, and stages to protect your kidney health.

Phytochemicals in fruits and veggies can improve your health. Learn how eating a rainbow of colors can boost your immunity and fight diseases.

Diverticulitis is a common condition that affects digestive health. Learn the causes and symptoms and get the best tips for managing and preventing flare-ups.

Is bronchitis contagious, and how can you protect yourself? Learn how this respiratory illness spreads, key symptoms to watch for, and ways to prevent infection.

It’s probably best to enjoy your Halloween spoils in moderation.

Rates of heart disease and cardiac events in women are often underestimated.

From boosting bone strength to balancing hormones, weight lifting offers powerful benefits that support our overall health and wellness.

Tonsil stones can be painful, but they are manageable with proper care. Learn how to treat them and get the best tips for prevention.

Ultrafine particles stem from a variety of natural and human-made sources, including vehicle exhaust.

Getting more fiber in your diet is important. Here are some fiber-rich foods that are delicious as well as nutritious.

Carl Rogers, the founder of the person-centered approach, revolutionized early psychotherapy. Learn how his methods continue to change the world today.

A growing body of evidence points to MDMA’s therapeutic potential for managing an array of hard-to-treat conditions like PTSD and depression.

Margaret Floy Washburn overcame barriers in the male-dominated field of psychology. Learn how she established herself as the founding mother of comparative psychology.

The risk factors include smoking, excessive alcohol use and high LDL cholesterol.

Did some famous people throughout history have ADHD? Researchers explain why yes, some could have been neurodivergent and why the traits may be increasing today.

The comprehensible input method of language learning says you can learn a second language the way you learned your first.

The speed of human perception is surprisingly slow, say neuroscientists. That has important implications for our understanding of cognition and for the limits of brain computer interfaces.

Some people can visualize things perfectly in their mind’s eye, while others can’t.

Learn what causes aggression for those living with dementia and find gentle ways to comfort your loved one during challenging times.

When it comes to mental illness, we’ve come a long way since the days of superstition and sorcery. But we still have work to do.

Parents may worry about connecting with a child who is hard to comfort.

Pet owners can feel immense guilt when leaving their pets at home.

Do you have a healthy relationship with your phone?

The massive networks of neurons in our brains produce complex behaviors, like actions and thought. Now physicists want to understand the laws that govern this emergent phenomena.

Superstitions may seem irrational, but research suggests they have benefits. These age-old rituals may be part of an evolutionary trait.

What is the psychology behind keeping secrets? How the things we hide affect our wellbeing. Here are some ways to cope with them.

A controlled scary experience can leave you exhilarated and relaxed afterward.

New brain-coding technology brings us one step closer to mind reading.

There are several reasons to feel this way, and a few ways to cope with the feeling.

Bridgetown (Barbados) - Puerto Plata (Dominican Republic)

[Finish line of The Amazing Race 36, Episode 9, at the Anfiteatro La Puntilla in Puerto Plata, with the Taino Bay cruise port in the background. Screenshot from CBS television broadcast.]

It's a sign of the times that The Amazing Race made its first visit to the Dominican Republic this season. The DR has had the fastest-growing economy in the Caribbean or Central America for the last twenty years, and is now the region's largest economy. A substantial part of that economic growth, and a deliberate target of the government's efforts to attract investment, has been tourism.

Until a decade ago, more money came into the DR through remittances from Dominicans living and working abroad, mainly in the USA, than from any other source. Since then, boosted by government policies to promote tourism development, revenues from international tourism to the DR have doubled, passing remittances as the country's largest source of foreign exchange.

The DR is the eastern two-thirds of the island of Hispaniola; Haiti is the the western third of the island. If the DR doesn't get as much notice abroad, that's partly because it's a relatively stable, middle-income country, not notable for poverty, wealth, or war. "If it bleeds, it leads", and the DR hasn't had the crises that have brought so much attention (although little understanding or empathy) to its closest neighbor.

To put the situation in perspective, per capita income in the DR is half what it is in Barbados, the last previous destination visited by The Amazing Race 36, but five times that of Haiti. A major issue in the DR is immigration from Haiti and ongoing discrimination in the DR against a racially stigmatized underclass of Haitian immigrants and Dominicans of Haitian ancestry.

International tourism rebounded from the COVID-19 pandemic much more quickly in the DR than in most other countries. There were more foreign visitors to the DR in 2022 than there had been in 2019, the last year before the pandemic. As they started travelling again after the worst of the pandemic, some visitors from the USA probably chose the DR as a destination closer and a shorter flight away than other places they might otherwise have gone.

Other visitors come to the DR -- especially to the area around Puerto Plata where this episode of The Amazing Race took place -- on a growing number of cruise ships. The main challenge for the racers took place at the Damajagua waterfalls, which are promoted primarily as a shore excursion for cruise ship passengers. I had hoped that the pandemic might kill off the cruise industry as we know it, or at least reduce demand for cruises enough that some cruise ships might be repurposed for transportation. I was wrong. Cruising is back with a vengeance.

Puerto Plata has only a tenth of the population of the country's capital city and main cargo port, Santo Domingo, but Puerto Plata is overwhelmingly and increasingly the dominant cruise ship port of call in the DR. There are two cruise ports in the Puerto Playa area, one purpose-built and operated exclusively for Carnival Cruise Lines at Amber Cove, and the Taino Bay Cruise Port in the center of the city that was visible in the background at the finish line of this episode of The Amazing Race 36.

Next week The Amazing Race 36 returns to the USA. For the season finale, two episodes have apparently been edited down to a total of an hour and a half of broadcast time to suit the demands of CBS television schedulers. Stay tuned!

Puerto Plata (Dominican Republic) - Philadelphia, PA (USA)

What you're not realizing is, if you want to go to another state, nobody's gonna' stop you. Like, you can get in the car, and you go!

[Juan, at the finish line of The Amazing Race 36 in Philadelphia, PA.]

En route to the finish line of The Amazing Race 36 in Philadelphia, Juan and his partner Shane mistakenly drove across the Delaware River from Pennsylvania to New Jersey and back. Despite numerous historical allusions in this episode of the reality-TV travel show, the racers weren't supposed to reenact Washington's crossing of the Delaware: they were supposed to go to a famous Philly cheesesteak house. But they borrowed a bystander's phone and got directions to a similarly named Jersey pizza joint. Their third-place finish on the race was due not to getting lost, but to relying blindly on the first response to a Google search.

How is it, though, that it seems so natural to Juan, as perhaps to most of us, that we can cross state lines so easily, but it seems equally natural that we have to request and obtain permission (visas), show passports, and submit to inspection to cross international borders?

Should international travel everywhere be as easy as crossing between US states or between member states of the European Union?

Can we have borders without border controls, as these examples might suggest?

These are important questions for all travellers, but perhaps especially for those of us whose passports privilege us to cross many borders with only minor inconvenience and without having to worry too much, or too often, about whether or not the border guards or the authorities at the airport or seaport will permit us to enter, will detain us, or will turn us back.

Last week I attended a fascinating discussion on this subject with John Washington, a reporter for Arizona Luminaria and the author of The Case for Open Borders (Haymarket Books, 2024) at the wonderful Medicine for Nightmares bookstore in San Francisco, co-sponsored by the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild.

The conversation was even more thought-provoking than a mere summary of the book would suggest.

Washington's goal, as he describes it, is not so much to provide a comprehensive treatise on the rationale for open borders as to introduce and inject the idea -- today invoked most often as a bogey-man like "Communism" to be automatically dismissed -- into the realm of possibility and serious debate. Closed or controlled borders are not things that have always existed, that exist everywhere even today, or that should be taken for granted. The Case for Open Borders is only a starting point for the debate we need to have.

I was particular pleased that Washington mentioned, both in his book and in his presentation, several other books and authors that have influenced my thinking and that I think deserve more attention. So rather than restate Washington's argument (open borders would be good for almost everyone, and are a realistic possibility which can and should be adopted without delay), which you can read for yourself, let me highlight some key topics related to travel across borders, and some of these sources of additional insight.

In his talk, Washington acknowledged How Migration Really Works by Hein de Haas as a source of quantitative data about migration, even though de Haas criticizes some of the specific arguments Washington makes for open borders. You don't have to agree with all of de Haas's conclusions to value his marshalling of migration data and his interpretations of what it says about who crosses borders and why.

We think of borders as being between states (i.e. countries, not all of which are "nation states"). But that hasn't always been the case. Until recently, "states" were the exception, not the rule. Borders and walls -- the Great Wall of China, Hadrian's Wall at the northern border of the Roman Empire, and so forth -- were what separated the territory of "civilized" states and peoples from the stateless territories inhabited by nomads, shifting agriculturists, hunter-gatherers, and other "barbarians". The Art of Not Being Governed, by the political theoretican and anthropologist James C. Scott, is a detailed historical case study of how the borders between states (mostly in the easily controlled flatlands) and stateless regions (mostly in the hills) have shaped the movements of people.

Why is the fundamental right of movement lagging, even backsliding, throughout the world? Why do states decry and prosecute impingements on the right to free speech, the free press, or the right to freedom from government oppression... and yet so enthusiastically impinge on the right to free movement? Is the right to free movement somehow different from the right to free speech, or the right to liberty? Why is the fundamental right to leave your country enshrined in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, but not the right to enter another country? In a world (almost) completely carved into nation states, the right to leave is only half a right without the right to enter.

[John Washington, The Case for Open Borders, p. 182.]

As Washington notes, international human rights law distinguished between right to leave any country and the right to enter "your own" country (but not to enter any other country). Who is allowed to cross which borders thus depends on which country or countries is/are defined to be "your own". Citizenship is typically defined by birth: where you were born ("jus soli", right of the soil) and/or who your parent were ("jus sanguinis", right of blood). But should we take either or both of these principles of citizenship for granted?

Jacqueline Stevens, in Reproducing the State, presents a feminist critique of the idea of "birthright" citizenship, especially as the basis for distinctions between who does, and who does not, have certain rights. If some people have more rights, especially rights of place, and some have fewer, depending on who their parents are or where they were born, doesn't that amount to -- as Stevens and Washington both name it -- apartheid?

Mahmood Mamdani, in Neither Settler nor Native, argues that the very idea of the "nation-state" defined by citizenship is a settler-colonial invention that reifies discriminatory distinctions. And in States Without Nations, Stevens envisions a world without birthright citizenship or citizenship-based border controls.

That's not the world we live in today, though. On the ways in which borders are becoming less and less open, Washington cites Todd Miller's Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border Around the World. For a global perspective on this issue, I would add David Scott FitzGerald's Refuge Beyond Reach: How Rich Democracies Repel Asylum Seekers -- and, of course, my own writing for the Identity Project.

Control of cross-border movement based on who we are depends on documents (passports) and/or biometric databases that identify who we are and link us with attributes that form the basis for deciding which borders we can and can't cross. Washington cites John Torpey's The Invention of the Passport as one version of the history of passports and travel documents. Another is provided by Mark B. Salter in Rights of Passage: The Passport in International Relations.

Finally, to Washington's moving stories about life and death in the USA-Mexico borderlands, I would add Sally Hayden's tour de force of witness from another border region, My Fourth Tine, We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World's Deadliest Migration Route. Trigger warning: This is both the easiest and, in other ways, the hardest of the books on this list. But it's also the one I most strongly recommend.

On another note, there was an unfortunate omission earlier in this episode of The Amazing Race 36. The racers were sent to the Arch Street Meeting House, but nothing was said to explain this building or its historical significance to viewers of The Amazing Race. I'll be generous to the TV producers and assume that this context was left on the cutting-floor when what had been planned and filmed as the final two hour-long episodes of The Amazing Race 36 were edited down to a single ninety-minutes episode to suit the CBS-TV broadcast schedule. It's too bad that TV viewers missed out on that lesson, though, because Quakers have had an influence -- not just in the founding of Pennsylvania, but in the structure of American society at large -- far out of proportion to their small numbers and extending far beyond the membership of the Religious Society of Friends, but often overlooked in history texts and classes.

Quakers have had key roles in every period of American history, especially in times of social struggle and social change: in the abolitionist movement of the 1860s, in the civil rights movement of the 1960s (Bayard Rustin, a queer African-American Quaker who had been imprisoned for resisting the draft during World War II, was a key tactical and strategic advisor to the Rev. M. L. King, Jr., and one of the main organizers of the 1963 March on Washington), and in the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s and subsequent campaigns of nonviolent direct action that have used consensus-based structures of organizing derived from Quaker decision-making and articulated and taught by, among others, George Lakey.

You can't fully understand American history without some understanding of Quaker thought and action. If you go to Independence Hall to see the Liberty Bell, it's worth a small detour to check out the modest exhibits at the Arch Street Meeting House on the next block.

Coalition Senate floor alert in opposition to California SB-1081

The California Senate will vote this week on a bill to automatically register register draft-age applicants for driver’s licenses and state IDs with the Selective Service System for a possible future military draft.

The floor vote in the state Senate on SB-1081 is expected this week and could come at any time.

[Update: The Senate voted 23-2 in favor of SB-1081, with 15 Senators not voting. The Senate approved minor amendments to the bill by its author, which make the bill somewhat worse. The bill now goes to the state Assembly Committee on Transportation, where it is scheduled for a hearing on Monday, 1 July 2024. See this letter to the Assembly Transportation Committee in opposition to the current version of SB-1081.]

SB-1081 was held in the 'suspense' file by the Senate Appropriations Committee, but was called up and sent to the floor for a vote by the full state Senate despite both Democratic and Republican opposing votes in committee, with only minor amendments that fail to assuage any of the opponents of the bill.

As amended, SB-1081 is still opposed by a diverse coalition including the ACLU, the California Immigrant Policy Center, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, and the Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers Guild.

Yesterday, during markup of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2025, the U.S. House Armed Services Committee approved an amendment to the NDAA that would automatically register all draft-aged male U.S. residents with the Selective Service System for a possible military draft, based on information from other Federal databases.

This system of automatic draft registration would replace the system in effect since 1980 in which young men can decide for themselves whether or not to sign up for the draft -- and so many choose not to register that the Selective Service database would be useless for an actual draft.

[Excerpt from the summary released by the Senate Armed Services Committee of the version of the NDAA for FY 2025 approved by the SASC and to be voted on by the full Senate.]

A proposal to expand registration for a possible military draft to young women as well as young men is moving forward again this year in Congress, along with a seductively simple-seeming but in practice unfeasible proposal to switch from the current system in which young men are required to register with the Selective Service System (SSS) to a system in which the SSS tries to identify and locate everyone eligible for a future draft and automatically register them based on other existing Federal databases from the Social Security Administration, IRS, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, etc.

Today both the U.S. Senate Armed Service Committee and the full U.S. House of Representatives approved different proposals to expand and/or make it harder to avoid the requirement for men ages 18-26 to register with the Selective Service System for a possible military draft.

The proposals for changes to Selective Service registration were approved during consideration of the Senate and House versions of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2025, a "must-pass" annual bill that typically runs to more than a thousand pages.

The Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) approved a version of the NDAA that would expand Selective Service registration to include young women as well as young men. This version of the NDAA will now go to the floor as the starting point for consideration and approval by the full Senate.

Also today the full House of Representatives approved a different version of the NDAA that would make Selective Service registration automatic while keeping it for men only.

A House amendment proposed by Rep. Warren Davidson (R-OH), a West Point graduate and Army veteran, which would have replaced the provision to make draft registration automatic with a provision to repeal the Military Selective Service Act, was not "made in order" by the Rules Committee to be considered or voted on by the full House. There was no separate House floor vote on the proposed change to Selective Service registration, only a single vote on the entirety of the NDAA as a package.

The SASC markup was conducted in closed session, and only a summary of highlights of the version adopted by the SASC was released. It's not clear whether the SASC version also includes the provision in the House version of the NDAA to try to make Selective Service registration 'automatic' or only the provision to expand the registration requirement (with which compliance is currently low) to young women as well as young men. A spokesperson for the SASC told The Hill today that the full text of the Senate version of the NDAA won't be released until sometime in July.

Floor amendments are still possible in the Senate before it approves its version of the NDAA. But as of now, it seems likely that competing bad proposals with respect to expansion and/or attempted enforcement through automation of Selective Service -- one from the Republican-majority House to try to make it automatic, and one from the Democratic-majority Senate to expand it to women -- will be included in the House and Senate versions of the NDAA and go to the eventual House-Senate conference committee to sort out in closed-door negotiations late this year, after the elections.

It's possible that either or both of these proposals were included as "bargaining chips" intended to be withdrawn in exchange for concessions on other issues during the conference negotiations. The conference committee could include either, neither, both, or some other compromise on Selective Service in its final package of compromises, which typically are voted on and approved "en bloc" without further amendments.

Either of these misguided proposals would be the most significant change to the Military Selective Service Act since 1980. There have been no hearings, debate, or recorded vote on either of these proposals, and there appear unlikely to be any. The decision will probably be made in secret by the House-Senate conference committee for the NDAA.

"Firestorm erupts over requiring women to sign up for military draft", reads the headline on a story today on TheHill.com.

Unfortunately, that firestorm amounts mostly to an exchange of sound bites and social-media posts, not a real debate, much less a hearing with independent witnesses, in either the House or Senate. It focuses on the proposal included in the Senate version of the annual National Defense [sic] Authorization Act (NDAA) to expand registration with the Selective Service System to include young women as well as young men, rather than on what may be a more significant proposal in the House version of the same bill to try to make draft registration automatic by basing the list of potential draftees on information aggregated from other Federal records rather than provided by registrants themselves -- denying potential draftees the chance to indicate their opposition to being drafted, and to obstruct the mobilization for total war, by opting out of draft registration.

Most importantly, the current "debate" ignores both the profound and quite possibly insolvable practical problems with trying to compile a registry of potential draftees from other existing Federal databases, and the more fundamental issue with any contingency planning or preparation for a draft: the way that, even when a draft is not active, the perceived availability of a draft as a fallback emboldens warmakers to embark on wars that people wouldn't volunteer to fight.

[First published on Antiwar.com.]

[“I have an amendment at the desk.” Rep. Chrissy Houlahan introduces a proposal from the Selective Service System to automate draft registration in the House Armed Services Committee, May 22, 2024.]

Under fire for proposing an ill-considered amendment to this year’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to “automatically” register all young men in the U.S. for a possible military draft, Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA) has issued a statement that casts more doubt on her understanding of the current draft law and on the wisdom of her proposed changes to Selective Service registration.

Rep. Houlahan starts by claiming that “This new legislation saves taxpayers significant money.” But there’s absolutely no evidence to support this claim.

A proposal to automatically register applicants for California driver's licenses with the Selective Service System for a possible military draft was pulled by its author, Sen. Bob Archuleta (D-Pico Rivera), just before a scheduled hearing today in the state Assembly Transportation Committee. This was the last scheduled meeting of that committee before the deadline for consideration of bills in this year's legislative session, so the bill is effectively dead for the year.

Like similar laws in other states, California SB-1081 faced opposition from a coalition of peace, civil liberties, and immigrant rights organizations, on both policy and fiscal grounds. Pulling the bill before the hearing today was a face-saving way for Sen. Archuleta to avoid a vote by the committee not to advance his bill to the Assembly floor. This was at least the seventh time that similar proposals in California have been rejected, but the Selective Service System and its California state directors keep finding new sponsors to reintroduce them in the state legislature.

Meanwhile, however, an ill-considered proposal to try to automate draft registration introduced at the instigation of the Selective Service System by Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA) remains under consideration as part of the House version of this year's National Defense [sic] Authorization Act (NDAA), along with a proposal to expand draft registration to include young women as well as young men in the Senate version of the NDAA.

There's a chance that both of these proposals for changes to Selective Service registration could be removed during back-room negotiations in the House-Senate conference committee on the NDAA later this year, after the elections. But we've seen this movie before. These bad ideas will be back again next year, regardless of which party wins which federal elections.

Preparation for a military draft, and reliance on the perceived availability of a fallback draft as the basis for planning of endless, unlimited, unpopular wars, won't stop until Congress repeals the Military Selective Service Act and ends draft registration entirely, either through a standalone bill like the Selective Service Repeal Act or through a provision in this or a future year's NDAA.

[Originally published by Responsible Statecraft, the journal of the Quincy Institute]

Two proposals that would radically alter the current system for registering Americans for a future draft were introduced recently in Congress without any hearings or debate.

They raise practical issues about whether any draft today would even be possible.

As part of this year’s National Defense Authorization Act, the House voted this month to make registration with the Selective Service System of all draft-eligible men ages 18-26 “automatic.” In addition, the version of the NDAA on its way to the Senate floor would expand draft registration to include young women now, too.

Debate about the draft has typically been framed around whether the U.S. “needs'' a draft. Debate about women and the draft has been framed around whether women “should” be required to register. But the bigger question we face is three fold: will women sign up voluntarily (if in fact registration is not “automatic”), is “automatic” registration based on other databases feasible, and can registration or a draft – for men and/or women -- even be enforced.

When I was invited to testify before the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service (NCMNPS) in 2019, I told them that “any proposal that includes a compulsory element is a naïve fantasy unless it includes a credible enforcement plan and budget.... Women will be more likely to resist being forced into the military than men have been, and more people will support them in their resistance.”

[I'm often asked, "Why should we care about draft registration if there isn't going to be a draft?" In the article below, which was first published earlier today on Antiwar.com, I look at what war planners say about why draft registration is an important weapon in the arsenal of military strategy, even if there isn't going to be a draft -- and what that says about why draft registration ought to be equally important to antiwar activists, even when an actual draft isn't active or likely.]

[Stages of mobilization for war. Image from CNAS report based on Department of Defense mobilization plan. Note the absence of a Congressional declaration of war at any stage up to and including total military mobilization.]

A new report released 18 June 2024 by the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) provides a remarkably candid window into the flawed and dangerous thinking of military strategists who support continual "readiness" for an on-demand military draft, even while they claim -- perhaps truthfully -- not to prefer a draft, even as Plan B, but only as Plan F for "Fallback" in case of prolonged and total war. (Thanks to longtime anti-draft activist Eric Garris of Antiwar.com for bringing this report to my attention.)

The CNAS report is intended to show supporters of the current bipartisan mainstream U.S. foreign policy and military consensus why the U.S. should step up planning and preparation for a draft as a tool of deterrence. But for those outside that consensus who think current U.S. policy is already bellicose enough, especially those who assume that opposing draft registration and other steps toward readiness for a draft should be a low priority for antiwar activists because the U.S. will never again (or at least not soon) activate a draft, the CNAS report provides an important lesson in how preparedness for a draft is itself a tool of war, even in "peacetime".

The CNAS report shows how its authors want to use readiness for a draft, and the circumstances in which they think it should be used.

The fundamental argument of the CNAS report is that a "credible" capability to quickly activate a draft is an important deterrent, especially to other great-power military "peers" and potential adversaries.

As with nuclear weapons, to speak of readiness for a draft as a deterrent is another way to speak of preparation for a draft as a threat. As also with nuclear weapons, that threat is itself a weapon.

Preparation for a draft is used as a weapon when it is used to threaten escalating war to another level of death and destruction, even when that threat isn't carried out. The "credibility" of U.S. readiness to implement a draft -- stressed repeatedly in the CNAS report -- is relevant only to the use of that readiness for a draft as a threat.

Proponents of draft registration and readiness for a draft such as the authors of the CNAS report argue that if, and only if, the great-power enemies of the U.S. believe that we are able and willing to activate a draft, we can use that threat of draft-enabled rapid and total military escalation and total war as a tool of diplomatic and military policy.

Resistance to planning and preparation for a draft is thus a way to rein in those policies that are based on the ability to rush into total war, and the threat to do so.

Contrary to earlier reports, the U.S. Senate has joined the House of Representatives in moving toward a foolhardy attempt to 'automatically' register all draft-eligible U.S. citizens and residents for a possible military draft, by extracting and aggregating information obtained from other Federal agencies.

The proposal for "automatic" draft registration is among several previously-undisclosed provisions related to Selective Service in the newly-release version of the National Defense [sic] Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2025 approved by the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) and to be considered by the full Senate.

The 1,197-page SASC proposal for this year's NDAA was approved by the committee in closed session last month, and only a summary was released. At the time, a spokesperson for the SASC told me that if "automatic" Selective Service registration had been included in the bill, it would have been included in the summary. That proves to have been incorrect: The proposal for "automatic" draft registration was included in the SASC version of the bill, but not in the summary.

[Originally published by Responsible Statecraft, the journal of the Quincy Institute]

How did this suddenly become the summer of “the draft”?

There are a number of proposals in the annual defense policy bill (National Defense Authorization Act, NDAA) that deal with the subject. There is one to expand Selective Service registration to women. Another that would make Selective Service registration for American men "automatic."

Still another proposed amendment to the NDAA, which has also been introduced as a freestanding bill, S. 4881, would repeal the Military Selective Service Act entirely. Meanwhile, the Center for a New American Security just published an exhaustive blueprint for modernizing mobilization, including readiness to activate conscription.

All this talk has compelled “fact checkers” to insist that no, the U.S. government isn’t suddenly "laying the groundwork" for a draft.

But saying the U.S. isn’t preparing for a draft is like saying it isn’t preparing for nuclear war. Just as the Department of Defense is tasked with maintaining readiness to initiate nuclear strikes whenever the Commander-In-Chief so orders, the Selective Service System has the sole mission of maintaining readiness to hold a draft lottery within five days and start selecting draftees and sending out notices to report for induction whenever Congress and the President so order.

As such, there are currently ten thousand draft board members who have been appointed and trained to adjudicate claims for deferment or exemption. As recently as this month, states have been openly seeking volunteers to fill empty slots. And both the SSS and hawkish think-tanks have been war-gaming the government’s contingency plans to activate a draft.

[Timeline for a draft, counting from “Mobilization Day” (M=0), from SSS Agency Response Plan (ARP) Workshop (September 7, 2023)]

There’s room for argument about how likely it is that the U.S. would launch nuclear missiles or activate a draft. But there’s no question that it’s planning and preparing for both, as it has been for decades. It would seem that after years of atrophy, the government is stepping up its attention to military mobilization and readiness for a draft.

Maybe it’s time to ask whether more easy and efficient ways of tapping into human capital for war make it easier to get into one and whether it is in our best interest to do so.

[First published on Antiwar.com]

Fantasies underlying push for conscription are delusional and dangerous.

Doubling down on their recent war-game exercises and report on the (un)readiness of the U.S. to activate a military draft, Taren Sylvester and Katherine Kuzminski of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) have a new article in War on the Rocks, “Preparing for the Possibility of a Draft Without Panic,” laying out why they think the U.S. needs to prepare for a draft in order to be able to win an all-out war with China over Taiwan.

CNAS and War on the Rocks like to describe themselves as “realists”. But their arguments for stepped-up planning and preparation for a draft are strikingly unrealistic, in at least four respects:

Fewer young Americans are willing to fight the government’s wars.

[Also published on Antiwar.com. Portions of this article were first published by Responsible Statecraft and are reprinted by permission.]

Of men in the U.S. who turned 18 in 2023, fewer than 40% signed up for the draft – down from more than 60% in 2020 before the start of the war in Ukraine.

This eye-popping and previously undisclosed admission, as well as other revelations equally damning to plans to increase readiness to activate a draft, was included in documents released recently by the Selective Service System (SSS) in response to a Freedom Of Information Act request.

Generative Artifial Intelligence [sic] is one of the issues I've been working on with the National Writers Union and other allies.

Travel writers and others may be interested in the presentation I gave on Artificial Intelligence and Real Writers this issue to the Bay Area Travel Writers at our virtual meeting in September:

• Video (1 hour)
• Slides

Additional resources mentioned in my presentation:

• National Writers Union (NWU): Platform and Principles for Policy on Generative AI
• International Federation of Journalists (IFJ): Call to action on 'articifial intelligence'
• International Authors Forum (IAF): Principles for Artificial Intelligence and Authorship

Health: Dr. Joel Fuhrman, Nutritional and Natural Methods

God, the Universe and Everything Else (Sagan, Hawking, Clarke)

A Q&A with Ria Madrid of Wurl - she discusses BrandDiscovery, their new tech that makes it possible for marketers to precisely match CTV ads with the emotion and context of what viewers are watching to create positive attention, using Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions. Partners like Media.Monks are already driving impressive results for their clients through Wurl's solution, which uses scene-level contextual targeting to help advertisers align the emotional sentiment of their campaign creatives with content closest to the ad break.

In this wide-ranging interview with Monica Williams, NBCUniversal's SVP of digital products and operations for the company's content distribution business, we discuss how the proliferation of digital platforms across the OTT, CTV, and online ecosystems has brought new content distribution challenges, the boon of metadata for improving customer experiences, and the 17-day everything-must-go-perfectly marathon of distributing the Olympics.

As CTV is pulling in more advertising dollars and viewers than ever before, it's crucial for advertisers to ensure that they are optimizing their reach with the best-targeted data to represent audiences and outcomes, all while respecting data privacy laws and individual rights. What are the most significant challenges surrounding data identity and the privacy economy in today's CTV advertising ecosystem? How can content owners and platform providers supply advertisers with the user data that will maximize growth without violating personal privacy or privacy laws? And how might the idea of "TV" itself be redefined in an era when multiscreen use beyond the living room is so prevalent?