Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

This year, Americans will experience some 1,200 tornadoes and 8,000 wildfires. A handful of storms will probably turn into honest-to-God hurricanes. Disasters are getting more common and more expensive, largely because we keep moving more of our valuables into the country’s most beautiful, unstable places.

Watching over this all-night, boom-bust casino is Craig Fugate, the new head of FEMA under President Barack Obama. Check out my story in the new Atlantic about why Fugate, a former firefighter, is an unusual choice for the job.

My prediction is that Fugate’s personality will be an asset on some days--and a handicap on the Hill on other days. The little known secret about FEMA is that it doesn’t actually do anything; it just leverages partnerships with other organizations. As head of this giant co-op, Fugate will likely command the respect of many of FEMA’s partners. But he will also have to kowtow to Congress to get the resources he needs.

Watching a single woman-in-red denounce President Barack Obama as a noncitizen is not particularly scary. We can imagine any number of complicated life narratives for this woman’s shotgun rage. We may even muster compassion. The more alarming question is, Why are all those other people cheering her on?

Just did a story for The Daily Beast on the latest conspiracy theory in a summer ripe with paranoia. Before the gentleman who warned the government to get its hands off of his Medicare, there was the resurgence of the moon-landing “hoax” and rampant speculation about the real purpose of Swine Flu.

Are conspiracy theories getting worse? The limited research that has been done suggests….well, yes, maybe. Two of the major forces that propel conspiracy theories into popularity both happen to be on the rise at the moment.

The first is what psychologists call anomie—a sense of alienation and anxiety about the future. In 1992, a Rutgers University sociologist named Ted Geortzel decided to try to measure the belief in conspiracy theories among a sample of Americans. He surveyed 348 southern New Jersey residents—a racially diverse group that represented the region overall—to find out what they thought of 10 different conspiracy theories.

The results were a little frightening. Most of the participants believed several of the conspiracies. And people who believed in one theory were likely to believe in others. Some 41% thought it was at least partially true that the Air Force is hiding evidence that the United States has been visited by flying saucers. And 42% said it is partly or definitely true that the FBI was involved in the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

In this and other such studies, minorities were significantly more likely to believe in conspiracy theories. But plenty of white people raised their hands, too. In general, people who believe that the average person’s situation is getting worse, that it is unfair to bring a child into the world today, and that most public officials are uninterested in the average man seem to be more likely to also believe outlandish but sinister explanations for major historical events.

Anomie may be more prevalent in times of high unemployment and widespread uncertainty—times like right now, in other words. People feel a generalized sense of malaise and distrust. To relieve that discomfort, it may help to assign blame to an evil mastermind. Which evil mastermind depends on what patterns your brain has previously held to be true.

For some people, the most sensible evil doer will be a liberal, dark-skinned president with foreign relatives and a tendency to see America as something less than perfect. For others, the obvious dark lord would be the opposite—a conservative, pink-skinned vice president with a tendency to see America as perfect. Psychologists have a name for this tendency, albeit a lame one: “confirmation bias.” We pay more attention to theories that support our pre-existing conditions.

Which leads to the second force behind modern conspiracy theories. The Internet (you knew this was coming) makes it effortless to find detailed confirming evidence to support our biases. In his 2009 book, Going to Extremes, legal scholar Cass Sunstein detailed the tendency of like-minded people to become more extreme--after they spend time talking amongst themselves. He should know, now more than ever.

Over the course of a lifetime, about 1 in 4 Americans will buy their own health insurance. Why? Because things happen, as is painfully clear right now. Maybe you get laid off. Or your company stops offering insurance. Or maybe you start your own business. The American way, right?

My friend Sarah Wildman is a freelance writer (like most reporters these days, including myself), so she had to buy insurance herself. For those of you who think the private market gets health care right, check out her story on Slate’s Double XX. 

She and her husband researched the plans, found one that promised comprehensive maternity coverage (for which they paid extra, since they were hoping to have a baby at some point). They paid $500 a month for coverage. Then Sarah got pregnant and delivered a healthy baby. That’s when she found out that “maternity coverage” did not cover labor, delivery or her hospital stay.

Apparently most voters don’t want to lose their current health insurance, so they are not supporting reform. Stories like this remind us that we are clinging to a capsizing ship. Bye, bye life boat! 

The feds have charged Daniel Patrick Boyd and six other men, including two of his sons, with conspiring to support terrorists and to “murder, kidnap, maim and injure persons in a foreign country.” As is often the case with these pre-emptive terrorism cases, the indictment is somewhat less impressive than the law-enforcement rhetoric.

To wit: The indictment alleges that in March 2008, one defendant said to another: “We can do something,” and “I’m gonna go, we can go together,” and “I can find a few brothers,” among other things. Without context, it’s impossible to assess these comments, but they don’t exactly make the blood run cold. There are other accusations, to be sure--about traveling to Israel and then lying about it to the feds and about buying weapons, for example. But the indictment does not reveal whether the feds had an informant in the case (a complicated but likely strategy) or any specifics of the alleged overseas plots.

But the FBI sounds far more outraged in its press release.  “Their ultimate goal is to wage war on freedom and democracy,” says Owen D. Harris, Special Agent in Charge of the Charlotte Division of the FBI. “September 11th is not a vague memory for us, nor should it be for anyone.”

OK, that’s all “normal” in this day and age. But the weirdest part of this case is not mentioned in the indictment at all. Turns out that before it arrested the men, the U.S. government actually saved the lead defendant from a grisly criminal sentence in Pakistan 18 years ago… Back when he was in his early 20s, Boyd, his brother and their families moved to Pakistan to help support Afghanistan’s mujahideen rebels, who were fighting the Soviet-backed government there. We know by now that this cause fostered at least one other famous extremist… But after a couple of years, the Boyds ran into trouble. They were convicted of robbing a bank in a somewhat dubious Pakistani trial, and it was the U.S. government that helped to save them from having their hands and feet amputated. Members of Congress, as well as State Dept officials, got involved to defend the men, and their mother went on Larry King to plead their case. After a rash of publicity, the Pakistani courts overturned the verdict and sent the men home.

I don’t know what to make of this yet, but it is a strange irony. Meanwhile, Boyd’s wife has talked to the News & Observer in Raleigh. She said that her husband and their two sons are innocent. And her story about how the arrests went down is truly bewildering. If it is true, it suggests the weirdness has only just begun…

My new hero Matt Richtel scared the crap out of me again today. In a front-page NY Times story on texting-while-driving, he describes a new study showing that when truck drivers text, they are 23 times more likely to get in an accident. Let me say that again. Not twice as likely. 23 times as likely. In other words, about the same as if you repeatedly blacked out for 5-second intervals at high speeds--since that is essentially what happens when we read or write text messages.

I have studied the brain for a while now, and I know that it is not capable of multi-tasking in this way. I also know that it is very bad at resisting the urge to peek at a message. For many people, reading or sending a text or email provides a sort of dopamine boost that is addictive. By now, if you don’t know someone who is addicted to checking his or her Blackberry, you must not have many friends.

William Saletan describes the problem well:

Millions of people move among us in this half-absent state. Mentally, they’re living in another world. It’s like the Rapture, except that they’ve left their bodies behind.

So I am more convinced than ever that we will need to find a way make it impossible (or at least very hard) to read or write texts or email while driving. I wonder which state or country will be the first to make this happen? And how many more people will have to die beforehand?

Should soldiers be banned from smoking in war zones?

According to a recent Institute of Medicine (IOM) report (commissioned by the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs), 30% of active-duty personnel and 22% of vets smoke. By comparison, 21% of Americans use tobacco. Soldiers’ habits cost the U.S. $1.6 billion per year on tobacco-related medical care, increased hospitalizations, and lost days of work, according to the report. And “smoking rates among military personnel returning from Iraq and Afghanistan may be 50 percent higher than rates among nondeployed military personnel.”

The IOM report recommended a gradual ban on smoking in war zones, but the very idea has proven radioactive. Smoking is already restricted on bases. And many vets, like reporter Jeff Emanuel, point out that the timing is atrocious: “Yes, tobacco has been proven to cause both short and long-term health problems - but are we really going to preach about health benefits of their activities to Americans we pay (albeit poorly) to be shot at for a living?”

Some see a liberal conspiracy: check out the Free Republic’s lively debate on the subject. Of course, it’s hard to imagine that the IOM had any other motive than the health of our troops. (It’s worth remembering that 1 in 5 American deaths will be tobacco-related.  Add that to an already dangerous job and you’ve got more risk factors than you can count.) But the military has a long and mixed history of trying to purify the ranks. During WWI, the military banned the use of prostitutes and encouraged soldiers to masturbate. Around the same time, alcohol was forbidden on Navy ships.

But the more stress and deployments soldiers endure, the more alcohol and drugs they use--ban or no ban. Last week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates reassured soldiers that no blanket ban on smoking is forthcoming. Makes sense. If there’s a time to take away a soldier’s last vice, this ain’t it.

Nice article on Tweeting Under Fire in Reason. Summarizes a study by disaster sociologist (love the title) Jeannette Sutton about how regular people communicated during the 2007 Southern California wildfires--and it leaves no doubt that locals are by far the most important messengers. My favorite line (from a resident):

“There is no ‘they.’ ‘They’ won’t tell us if there is danger, ‘they’ aren’t coming to help, and ‘they’ won’t correct bad information. We (regular folks) have to do that amongst ourselves.”

For future reference, two good community forums for fire info:
socalmountains.com & rimoftheworld.net

Check out the full study here (warning: PDF).

Thanks to Dan for the heads up.

If there is one story you read all year on risk, it should be Matt Richtel’s New York Times story on driving while texting or talking on a phone. Seriously: don’t worry about your plane crashing. Don’t worry about your child getting kidnapped. Cut that out. Take all that worry and put it here.

“On his 15th birthday, Christopher Hill got his first cellphone. For his 16th, he was given a used red Ford Ranger pickup, a source of pride he washed every week. [L]ast Sept. 3, Mr. Hill, then 20, left the parking lot of a Goodwill store where he had spotted a dresser he thought might interest a neighbor...Mr. Hill was so engrossed in the call that he ran a red light and didn’t notice Linda Doyle’s small sport utility vehicle until the last second. He hit her going 45 miles per hour. She was pronounced dead shortly after. Later, a policeman asked Mr. Hill what color the light had been. ‘I never saw it,’ he answered.”

The most dangerous thing most Americans do is to drive. If you drive while using your phone, you are four times as likely to cause a crash. Personally, that isn’t what worries me the most. I know enough about my brain by now to know that I can’t text or talk on the phone while driving--so I don’t do it. What terrifies me is that everyone else is four times more likely to cause a crash.

Regular readers of this blog know that I usually make a serious effort not to fear monger. But not this time. We can expect this problem to get much worse. If you have a Blackberry or an iPhone (or are under 30 and have never used a phone for anything but texting), you know that talking is no where near as distracting as writing or reading a printed message. The other day, I tried to read an email while walking around in my house and slammed into a wooden beam. I collapsed in a pathetic heap and spent the rest of the day feeling vaguely dizzy and highly moronic. I shared this story with a few friends. Guess what? Everyone has a story about running into a sign or falling on the sidewalk while emailing or texting.

Now imagine doing that behind the wheel. Now imagine 17-year-olds doing that behind the wheel (see Dr. Phil’s interview with a shameless texter above.) These are people whose brains are literally not developed enough to understand their own mortality.

So what next? The research on using a cell phone while driving is about five years behind where it should be. We know enough about the dangers of talking--we need to know about texting and emailing. Meanwhile, the laws are so far behind they not even worth talking about. (Laws requiring hands-free devices have no effect on traffic accidents. We’ve known this for a long time, but for some reasons, hands-free laws keep coming up in state legislatures.)

We kill about 40,000 people a year on the roads in this country. The dead people are already disproportionately young. Even as we have built safer cars, with air bags and anti-lock brakes, we have raised worse drivers. I know people hate the government interfering in their lives, and I generally rail against any attempt to block communication between people. But I would happily support a cell-phone-jamming signal in every car. Because banning cell phones (which hasn’t been done anywhere anyway) won’t work. We are rewiring our brains to crave the instant stimulation of a text or email. We won’t be able to resist the temptation if all we are facing is a hard-to-enforce law. But if we literally can’t use our phones while the car is in drive, we could override our own worst instincts.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want some 20-year-old who is texting his friend about a dresser to end my life.