Many years ago, the Israeli Bedouin expert Clinton Bailey told me a story about a Bedouin chief who discovered one day that his favorite turkey had been stolen. He called his sons together and told them: “Boys, we are in great danger now. My turkey’s been stolen. Find my turkey.” His boys just laughed and said, “Father, what do you need that turkey for?” and they ignored him.
A few weeks later the Bedouin chief’s camel was stolen. His sons went to him and said, “Father, your camel has been stolen. What should we do?” And the chief answered, “Find my turkey.”
A few weeks later the chief’s horse was stolen, and again his sons asked what they should do. “Find my turkey,” the chief said.
Finally, a few weeks later his daughter was abducted, at which point he gathered his sons and told them: “It’s all because of the turkey! When they saw that they could take my turkey, we lost everything.”
.. how and why we failed to contain the egregious behavior of both Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.
They each started by — metaphorically speaking — stealing a turkey. And when we didn’t respond, they kept ratcheting up their wretched behavior to the point where Trump thinks he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and Putin thinks he could poison a wayward spy in London, and get away with it.
Trump’s turkey was his tax returns. During the campaign he promised to release them after the I.R.S. finished auditing him. Then, after he was elected, Trump said, sorry, not going to release them ever. And nothing happened. Trump, I am reliably told, has actually said to people close to him, “Can you believe I got away with that?”
.. Once Trump saw that he could get away with not disclosing his tax returns, he knew he could get away with anything.
.. Any Bedouin chief who watched the steady acceleration in the breadth and pace of Trump’s lying — like his recent boast that he had fabricated a trade deficit with Canada in talks with Canada’s prime minister or his dishonest statements to discredit Robert Mueller’s investigation — would tell you: Get me Trump’s tax returns.
.. Because there must be something very important in them that he wants to keep hidden.
.. Maybe it’s just the embarrassment that he is not as rich as he claims, or, maybe, it’s something more fundamental — like how dependent he is on Russian oligarchs for financing
.. Putin’s turkey was even more serious. It was the shooting down of that Malaysian civilian airliner, Flight MH17
.. Putin’s proxies in eastern Ukraine had requested that Russia send them an SA-11 surface-to-air missile launcher.
.. Putin did not push the button on that missile, but he created the conditions for it to shoot down that plane — and he walked away from it as if the plane were brought down by lightning, making up one implausible story after another. He got slapped on the wrist with a few sanctions, but his complicity faded away into a mist of baldfaced lies.
.. Who wanted to confront Russia, with all its gas exports to Europe and all its oligarchs throwing money around London or buying condos in places like … Trump Tower in New York?
.. Why not poison a former Russian spy in London with a banned military nerve agent or perpetrate genocide in Syria? Who’s going to stop me?”
Trump and Putin are cut from the same cloth. Their strategy is: keep pushing, keep grabbing, keep lying, keep denying, no matter how implausible the denials — and never apologize. Because when you lie on an industrial scale, it overwhelms everyone else. Normal people just don’t behave that way, and the sheer shamelessness eventually exhausts them.
.. when people keep eroding the norms of society, stealing — turkeys or the truth — eventually becomes the norm.
.. That steady erosion of norms is what Trump is doing to America and Putin is doing to the world.
.. American voters have to go to the polls and deal a resounding electoral defeat to this Republican Party, which Trump has taken over like an invasive species.
.. America needs a healthy conservative party in our two-party system. But this G.O.P. is not a conservative party and it is not healthy.
.. As for Putin, the only way to brush him back is with economic sanctions that truly hurt him and his corrupt clique of oligarchs, and an offensive cyber campaign that exposes just how much money they have all stolen from the Russian people.
.. Bullies like Trump and Putin are relentless. They will keep driving through red lights, smirking all the way, as long as we let them.
.. As the great philosopher Mike Tyson once said, “Everybody has a plan till they get punched in the mouth.”
Even if we don’t love starlings, we should learn to live with them
They devour crops and cattle feed, and they nab other birds’ nesting sites. Still, starlings can actually show us how we can adjust our relationship to the natural world, says writer Lyanda Lynn Haupt.
.. Starlings are among the most despised birds in all of North America, and with good reason (TEDxRainier Talk: Encounter the everyday wilderness). They are a ubiquitous, nonnative, invasive species. There are so many that no one can count them — estimates run to about 200 million.
.. As deputy of the American Acclimatization Society of New York, Schieffelin, it is believed, latched onto the goal of bringing every bird mentioned in the works of Shakespeare to Central Park, and he zeroed in on the Bard’s single reference to a starling in Henry IV. In 1890, he purchased 80 of the birds, had them shipped to the US, and released them on a snowy March day in Central Park. Genetic research in sample populations across the continent leads ornithologists to believe that all of the hundreds of millions of starlings in North America are descendants of Schieffelin’s birds.
It took them just 80 years to populate the continent, and they’ve behaved atrociously in their New World. They feast on crops and lurk around farms and lots where they binge on feed in the troughs of cattle and swine. According to an estimate by Cornell University researchers, in the US starlings cause $800 million in agricultural damage every year.
.. In 1960, Eastern Airlines Flight 375 took off from Boston’s Logan Airport for Philadelphia and other points south. Seconds after takeoff, it collided with a flock of 20,000 starlings. Two of the four engines lost power, the plane plunged into the sea, and 62 people died. After the crash, officials tested seasoned pilots on flight simulators to see if any could have saved the plane in such a scenario. All failed. In other tests, live starlings were thrown into running engines. It was found that just three or four birds could cause a dangerous power drop.
.. Starlings are despised above all else by conservationists for their ability to outcompete native birds for food and a limited number of nest sites.
.. In 2015, US government agents killed over one million starlings — more than any other so-called nuisance species.
.. Yet these killings have made no dent in starling numbers, and they never will. There are simply too many starlings, and they are too good at reproducing and surviving.
.. while their populations have grown and spread exponentially, they have for the last thirty years or so been stable. Every species has a carrying capacity
.. at least some of their impact on native birdlife may turn out to be more perceived than real. Researchers at Berkeley conducted a years-long survey, published in 2003, that was designed to document the impact of starlings on indigenous species, and they were not able to determine quantifiable harm.
.. In 1939, a not-yet-famous Rachel Carson wrote an essay titled “How About Citizenship Papers for the Starling?” In it she argued that instead of seeing the bird as an invader, people should accept starlings as a regular species and give up talk of “invasive” and “nonnative.” This notion is echoed by some modern conservationists, who say there are many invasive species, like the starling, that are simply ineradicable. Instead of spending time and effort worrying about such species, we should accept them as part of the modern landscape and move on to issues we can actually do something about.
.. the most significant point to remember is that starlings thrive in areas that are disturbed by human presence, including dense urban environments — places where more sensitive species cannot survive in the long term. For now, it seems some birds go elsewhere when their nests are usurped.
.. We need to design human landscapes that are hospitable to more species of native birds. This means less grass and more trees.
.. even a few trees in urban neighborhoods will increase the diversity of bird species, and that people who live near trees are healthier — mentally and physically — than those who don’t.