Dave Grohl: deaf like me – except, of course, not like me

One of the most intense moments of the pandemic came when I was shopping for a Mother’s Day present. At a neighborhood store, I paused over a bracelet, responding to a question from the cashier. She asked me to repeat myself, then apologized, explaining she was partially deaf.

I felt my heart beat hard. “I am too,” I said.

Above both our masks, our eyes filled with tears. She asked if I wore hearing aids or signed. I explained that I wasn’t great at American Sign Language (ASL), and she said she wasn’t either, not having been exposed to the language when she was young. We talked briefly (and yes, with some difficulty) about how isolating the pandemic has been, with masks dampening the little we can hear and preventing lip reading. When I left the store, I was shaking over the intense recognition of finding someone like me. Of being heard.

That’s why I was moved when I learned Dave Grohl is deaf like me too. Except, of course, not like me.

Grohl, frontman and guitarist for the Foo Fighters and former drummer of Nirvana, described himself as deaf in a recent interview with Howard Stern, the result of years of playing loud music with little or no ear protection. According to Grohl, noise at high volumes damaged some of his hearing, including his ability to hear in one ear and led to the onset of tinnitus.

But I was born this way. And over the years, I’ve struggled with how to identify myself (Grohl went with the simple, if perhaps not precise, “f***ing deaf”). Most people in the disability community don’t like the phrase “hearing impaired” as it implies that there is something wrong with us. The same can be said of the phrase “hearing loss”— a phrase which doesn’t make sense for me at all, as I’ve always been the way I am. I didn’t lose anything.

Hard of hearing is perhaps medically correct on some level, but it prioritizes hearing as the default, and suggests that a person like me has failed at it, like it was a test I could study for and pass. What’s actually hard for me is dealing with ableism.

I’ve come to refer to myself as half deaf, which is what I am physically. Emotionally, I also feel half in two worlds, not fully a part of the abled world, whose spoken conversations exclude me on a regular basis, but nor did I benefit from being raised in or exposed to a real-world Deaf community. My first language was spoken English. I did not start to learn ASL until I was an adult — growing up, as I fought to keep up with spoken conversations, I didn’t realize signing was an option for me — and I am still a beginner in the language.

That’s not uncommon for deaf and Hard of Hearing children born into hearing families, as I was. Even before the pandemic, I often felt alone, especially in large group settings, or in crowded or noisy rooms where I wasn’t included in spoken conversations, a difficulty Grohl echoed. “In a crowded restaurant, that’s the worst now,” Grohl said, adding that he has the most trouble listening to someone right next to him in a noisy space.

But the pandemic has brought on whole new kinds of difficulties and loneliness for people like me. And Grohl.

Without the ability to lip-read, I don’t feel confident I can communicate with hearing people on the street (I know I can’t). I’ve become more of a homebody, and it’s not only the fear of illness keeping me inside, but the dread of a conversation that ends in frustration — or usually, much worse.

I was mocked by a post office employee for not being able to hear her. The only reason I was able to get my driver license renewed is that my partner came with me to interpret. (Bureaus of motor vehicles are not known for their acoustics or their accessibility.) Due to pandemic-imposed attendance limitations to one family member, I haven’t been able to be there at multiple school functions or meetings for my son. In situations like these, it’s always my hearing partner who must go, because the events are rarely captioned, amplified or accessible.

The pandemic also places deaf and hard of hearing people at greater risk because, when informed we can’t hear, some hearing people have tried to communicate with us by pulling their masks down and shouting, rather than writing on a phone or notepad. We would all benefit from learning to sign, not just those of us who are deaf.

Perhaps this is what led Grohl to disclose, frustration that his way of communicating, rough though it has been — “I’ve been reading lips for like, 20 years,” he said — is over, a frustration I share. My way of getting by is gone. So is my passing.

Deafness is often an invisible disability, whether or not we want it to be, but the constraints of the pandemic have forced me to be open about it always. Grohl explained to Stern how he identifies himself during this time of mask-wearing: “When someone comes up to me . . . [I say] I’m a rock musician . . . I can’t hear a word you’re saying.”

And now, thanks to the interview, everyone knows about Grohl.

He has an opportunity here. Hard of hearing is a label often falsely ascribed only to people who are elderly, as a purely aged-related disability. It’s part of the reason people discount that a younger, so-called healthy-looking person like me could be deaf (and perhaps why they yell at me in anger or embarrassment when I let them know I can’t hear them). Not only is Grohl still youthful, still rocking out (and bringing the next generation of drummers along with him), he’s a star.

In the interview, Grohl dismissed wearing in-ear monitors, which would protect his hearing while he performs, in part because of the physical difficulty (they keep “popping out,” he said) — but also because he doesn’t think they look cool. “I don’t want to look like a praying mantis with these things all over my head.” If anyone can make assistive or preventative technology look cool, it’s Grohl. He could help kids not only want to be musicians like him, but feel comfortable in their disabilities. Feel seen and supported by their hero.

Grohl also expressed hesitation about going to see a specialist about his hearing, an anxiety I understand, especially given rampant medical ableism from the very people supposed to help us. But he has options of which he may not be aware. Should he choose to go that route, there have been remarkable advances in technology over the years — some of my friends who wear hearing aids or cochlear implants call themselves “cyborgs” — and as someone with wealth and influence, Grohl could help pave the way for more.

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Over 37 million adults in the United States have some hearing differences. As the country’s population ages, that number will only grow. Grohl is not alone.

And I’m not either. Although I never met another deaf or Hard of Hearing person until I was nearly an adult, doing so changed my life. It was through the internet, and through finally writing openly about my disability, that I made friends like me who accept me as I am, relate to my frustrations as a disabled person in an ableist world — and have introduced me to disabled joy. We’re great the way we are, and we’re together, not only surviving but thriving.

Grohl may have “lost” part of his hearing — but he’s going to gain a whole new community, one who happens to love music and one who will cheer him on.

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“Tinder Swindler” Shimon Hayut sued by diamond magnate for using the family name to bamboozle women

Shimon Hayut, the infamous star of Netflix’s “The Tinder Swindler,” is being targeted by the real Leviev family he once claimed to be a part of.

According to court documents obtained by People, Israeli diamond magnate Lev Leviev and his family filed a lawsuit against Hayut for pretending to be Leviev’s son and slandering the family name while engaging in selfish ploys.

The lawsuit, which was filed in Tel Aviv Magistrate’s Court in Israel, states, “For a long time, he [Simon Leviev] has been making false representations as being the son of Lev Leviev and receiving numerous benefits (including material ones).” The document also claims that Hayut has been “cunningly using false words, claiming to be a member of the Leviev Family, and that his family will pay and bear the costs of his benefits.”

Hayut posed as Leviev’s flamboyant son “Simon Leviev” on the popular dating app Tinder and proceeded to con his matches out of approximately $10 million. Hayut was first convicted of theft, forgery and fraud in 2011 for cashing stolen checks. He was once again arrested in 2019 and served just five months of a 15-month sentence.

“The defendant used the dating application ‘Tinder’ to locate women who he then emotionally manipulated, cunningly bamboozled of funds, and eventually convinced to transfer large sums of money to him under the guise of being on the run from individuals intending on hurting him,” the court documents further outline.

The Leviev family’s attorney, Guy Ophir, told People that this lawsuit is “only the beginning of a number of lawsuits” that are in the works.

“In the next [phase] we will file a monetary suit against Hayut and any other affiliate that will work with him, including some websites that have Joint ventures with Hayut and/or have offered to buy cameos from him,” Ophir continued. “Anyone that will try to capitalize from this scheme will be sued.”

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Shortly after the release of the documentary, Hayut reportedly signed with a talent agent to pursue a career in Hollywood. Thanks to his tainted reputation, Hayut is banned on Tinder, Hinge and other dating platforms under Match Group Inc., including Match.com, Plenty of Fish and OkCupid.

In a separate statement to People, Leviev’s daughter Chagit Leviev called Hayut a “fraud who stole our family’s identity.”

“He has no relation to the Leviev family and has no affiliation with our company LLD Diamonds,” she said. “I am relieved that his real identity and actions have been globally exposed, and hopefully this will bring an end to his unscrupulous actions. The lawsuit we filed today is just the first step out of many we will be taking to have him face justice and get the sentence he deserves.”

At this time, Hayut has not responded to the lawsuit. It’s also unclear if Hayut has obtained a defense attorney or hired a legal team.

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Designer bacteria could replace oil-intensive chemical fertilizers

Chemical fertilizers, a scourge on aquatic ecosystems and human health, may be one of the most insufferable idiosyncrasies of industrial agriculture. A God complex drove humanity to believe we could comprehend and condense the vast complexities of natural ecosystems into a handful of chemical formulas. At its core, the synthesis and application of one nutrient in particular, nitrogen, remains a pale imitation of a process essential to life on Earth — the nitrogen cycle.

Now one peculiar species of bacteria, azotobacter vinelandii, may render these synthetic nitrogen fertilizers entirely obsolete. That’s because a. vinelandii can naturally “fix” atmospheric nitrogen gas into the soil as ammonia. Now, a team of scientists successfully engineered mutant strains of the bacteria to colonize the roots of rice plants and deliver a steady stream of nitrogen to them. By modulating the amount of ammonia the bacteria produces, they were able to do so without any waste.

“If we use bacteria that grow near the root of the plant, we can control the amount of ammonia delivered to the plant, and we will not have this issue of an excess use of chemical nitrogen fertilizer,” Dr. Florence Mus said. “We will provide only the amount of ammonia that the plant needs and all the excess is not going to be littering the water or the ecosystem.”

According to Mus, custom-made bacteria designed to meet the individualized needs of any crop could be next. Tailoring these mutant strains of nitrogen-fixing bacteria to the needs of specific crops would markedly reduce the contribution of nitrogen runoff to eutrophication — nutrient loading in aquatic ecosystems.

When farmers apply chemical nitrogen fertilizers to fields, they use far more than crops actually absorb. The rest washes into rivers, lakes, and oceans with devastating consequences. Algae, microscopic plants, thrive on the overabundant nitrogen and proliferate as any terrestrial plant would. Algal blooms that form as a result starve aquatic life of oxygen and light and can even harbor cyanobacteria that release deadly toxins into the water.

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Using gene-editing techniques, the researchers riffed on the bacteria’s knack for ammonia excretion and dialed that natural tendency up to eleven. Consistently, researchers found that the mutant strains produced large enough quantities of ammonia to sustain rice plants. Because they did so without any transgenic insertions — those spliced from other organisms — researchers even dodged regulations on genetically-modified organisms, which would have hindered their breakthrough.

“The modification we did doesn’t bring any transgene into the genome of this bacteria,” she explained. “We just modified it using indigenous genes. It’s not considered a genetically-modified organism. That allows us to use this bacteria in agricultural settings. There is no restriction for the way we have modified this bacteria.”

Use of nitrogen-fixing bacteria in agriculture is not in and of itself a particularly novel concept. In fact, large swathes of the United States are inundated with such bacteria. Where I live in rural Ohio, I only have to drive a few minutes down the road to witness the fruits of their labor. Soybeans, one of the most prodigiously grown crops around the world, along with other legumes, harbor one such bacteria in nodules that form along their roots. Replication of this symbiotic relationship is the goal.

The rhizosphere, as this poorly understood microbiome around the roots of plants is called, is host to any number of beneficial bacteria and fungi, many of which have been commercialized as biofertilizers. In fact, a. vinelandii has been applied as a biofertilizer for over a century. For nearly as long, researchers have sought to understand and control its nitrogen-fixing properties, yielding a variety of results.

“Bacteria that can fix the nitrogen gas can fix the nitrogen gas only in specific conditions, only when they don’t sense any presence of any nitrogen source in the soil,” Dr. Mus added. “This nitrogen-fixation mechanism is tightly regulated. If you want to optimize nitrogen fixation, you need to engineer the bacteria to be able to fix nitrogen all the time, constitutively. Otherwise, you will not get any nitrogen fixation if the bacteria can sense a little bit of nitrogen present in the soil.”

Numerous existing biofertilizers on the market remain extraneous to agricultural applications. Though many have proven effective, none had been able to entirely satiate the nutritional demands of crops alone until now.

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Nuclear winter, crop failures and fallout: What nuclear war would do to civilization

At the time this article is being written, Russian President Vladimir Putin is escalating his invasion of Ukraine with no end in sight. Because Russia has nuclear weapons, experts agree that it is possible they will be used during the war — perhaps on a smaller scale, perhaps on a larger one, say, with a NATO country like the United States. As Putin becomes increasingly desperate to recreate the Russian empire and destroy the liberal world order, there is no telling what he might do to save face and salvage what remains of his geopolitical ambitions.

If that happened, what would that mean for the rest of the world? The answer is both complicated (it depends to an extent on where you live) and terrifyingly simple — it would be an apocalyptic scenario right out of the most dire Biblical prophecy or dystopian science fiction story.

And the conflict doesn’t need to culminate in a literal world war to have an effect on your life.

Even a comparatively smaller nuclear conflict, such as one that “merely” incinerates a few cities, would instantly plunge the world’s economy into chaos. Globalization has resulted in a worldwide web of supply chains that are extremely vulnerable to disruption — this is already being seen with COVID-19 and climate change — and any goods that linked to supply chains in affected areas would grind to a halt. That, however, would be the least of humanity’s problems. As smoke from the destroyed areas rises into the atmosphere, the entire planet will soon be choked to its breaking point under a blanket of soot. The Sun will not be able to reach vital crops, leading to dire food shortages, and survivors will be left inhabiting a state of constant winter.

Hence the term “nuclear winter.”

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For what it’s worth, there are scientists who believe that a small scale nuclear war might not automatically result in a nuclear winter (although it would still be devastating). When it comes to predicting nuclear war, there are a number of variables to consider: The physical composition of the cities being attacked, which will impact what they put into the atmosphere after being destroyed; how many weapons will be used; what kinds of clouds will emerge; and so on. Even the scientists who are skeptics about what would happen during a smaller nuclear conflict readily state that a worldwide nuclear conflict would lead to winter. In the case of a smaller one, questions of scale come into play.

The wind also makes a big difference. In addition to destroying our climate, nuclear war will release radioactive materials as high as 50 miles into our atmosphere. While most of these particles fall to the ground around the area where the bombs detonated, the lighter ones will stay in the atmosphere indefinitely and become known as fallout. As they get carried all over the world by the wind and various other atmospheric variables, they cause diseases like radiation sickness and cancer to anyone exposed to them. This can continue for years as fallout circles the globe, only landing due to precipitation or just gradually settling on the ground. After that, however, they can continue to be dangerous; there are usually hundreds of different radionuclides in nuclear fallout, and some of the more lethal ones (like cesium-137) have long half-lives (in the case of that element, more than 30 years).

(For what it is worth, the likelihood is that things would not be quite as bleak in the Southern Hemisphere as in its northern counterpart. The reason for this is simple: Planetary wind patterns tend to not cross the equator, and as such scientists believe that most of the fallout from a nuclear conflict would stay in whichever hemisphere the bombs exploded in.)

A nuclear war would also exacerbate climate change. As the nuclear weapons rip into the atmosphere, they will destroy massive chunks of what is left of Earth’s ozone layer. Organisms would suffer from the increased exposure to ultraviolet light, and the trends that already exist due to climate change — wildfires, hurricanes, loss of species diversity — will be accelerated.

These thoughts may not bother Putin, who has reportedly toyed with the idea of nuclear war and said it would end in Russians going “to heaven as martyrs,” but it weigh heavily on much of the rest of the world. Occasionally there have been successful efforts to protect humanity from the threat of nuclear annihilation through political means. Perhaps the most important example was the campaign to ban above-ground testing of hydrogen bombs. When it was kicked off by Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson in 1956, he was widely derided as being soft on Russia (at that time the Soviet Union). Yet as he spread knowledge to the international public about how above-ground hydrogen bomb tests were putting fallout into the atmosphere, people realized he was correct. Within a few years, treaties were signed to make sure that nuclear tests could only be performed underground.

Given the threat of nuclear war today, it is easy to see why.

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Howard Stern slams the right for supporting “scumbag” Putin: “I used to love the Republicans”

During Monday’s episode of “The Howard Stern Show,” its brash host didn’t miss an opportunity to slam Republicans, particularly Donald Trump, for supporting President Vladimir Putin amid Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

“I used to love the Republicans. And their stance is firmly anti-communist — pro-capitalist, anti-communist and certainly a staunch defender of free people and free elections,” Stern said, per Variety. “I voted for many Republicans. I don’t see how I’ll ever get back to that. They’ve just totally disappointed me and their support of Vladimir Putin, the praise they heap on him. Trump’s praise of Vladimir Putin.”

In an appearance on “The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show” on Tuesday, Trump praised the Russian leader and added that Putin’s recognition of the Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics in eastern Ukraine was both “smart” and “pretty savvy.”

“I went in yesterday, and there was a television screen, and I said, ‘This is genius,'” Trump said. “Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine — of Ukraine — Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful.”

Stern then directed his attention to Putin and described the leader as a “human stain,” “thug,” and “bully.”

“I can’t imagine the horror of the life of the Ukrainian people. They’re living in a country – they decided to have free elections … and this scumbag who has more money than anybody, who has more power than anybody, who enslaves an entire country, who will kill you if you’re a journalist, will kill you if you speak out against him, who’s got everything a man could want if you’re truly a megalomaniac, and he didn’t have enough,” Stern said.

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“The guy’s a f**king animal,” he added. “I wish he was dead like I wish Hitler was dead.”

Stern also said that Putin’s actions are a consequence of him “not being loved as a child.” A similar remark was made last week by “90210” actor AnnaLynne McCord, who claimed that if she had been Putin’s loving mother, he would have been filled with so much love to not initiate the war.

“He is a little boy who says, ‘Everything in this world is for me, and I’m going to gobble it all up for myself,'” Stern said. “That’s all that’s going on here. That’s what’s happening. We have a guy who feels like he’s never full. He wants more and more.”

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GOP leaders condemn Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar — Dems say they’re “just as culpable”

Republican congressional leaders on Monday denounced Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., for their appearances at a white nationalist event led by far-right “groyper” guru Nick Fuentes. But the GOP leadership’s statements were met with skepticism, especially since Republican House leader Kevin McCarthy has repeatedly defended both members.

Greene and Gosar spoke over the weekend at the America First Political Action Conference in Orlando, an event organized by Fuentes as a far-right alternative to the nearby CPAC conference.

Gosar, who also headlined the event last year, previously defended his appearance by arguing that “you don’t accomplish anything by isolating” certain audiences. Greene on Saturday similarly defended her appearance at the event by claiming that she did not know anything about Fuentes but had attended the conference to “address his very large following because that is a young, very young, following and a generation I am extremely concerned about.”

Republican leaders denounced the appearances on Monday.

“There’s no place in the Republican Party for white supremacists or antisemitism,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said in a statement to Reuters when asked about Greene and Gosar.

McCarthy, in a statement, noted that Fuentes at the conference espoused antisemitic rhetoric and led a chant in support of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

“Last week, I was just in Israel. … And then when I come back, I see two colleagues, who went and participated with a group that has a leader that many times gives you antisemitic views, led a chant for Putin,” McCarthy told CNN. “To me, it was appalling and wrong. There’s no place in our party for any of this.”

McCarthy said he would have a discussion with Greene and Gosar, rejecting Greene’s explanation.

“The party should not be associated, any time, any place, with somebody who is antisemitic,” McCarthy said. “She has personally gone to answer this, saying she did not know. But I think with that introduction, you should have walked off stage. That is unacceptable.”

Other Republicans also hit out at the pair. Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, called Greene and Gosar “morons” who are “certainly missing a few IQ points.” Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo accused Greene of “playing footsie” with “antisemitic neo-Nazis.” Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, rejected Greene’s claim that she was unaware of Fuentes’ views.

“I f**king hate Nick Fuentes. Everybody should know they’re supposed to hate Nick Fuentes. He’s one of the worst human beings I’ve ever come across,” Crenshaw told CNN. “And there’s no way [Greene] didn’t understand that before going to the conference.”

But the Republican leaders’ condemnation garnered great skepticism given Greene and Gosar’s extensive track records of extremism.

“McCarthy has been protecting his little KKK Caucus for years with these toothless statements and meetings. It’s how he covers for them,” tweeted Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. “He’s now helped them for so long they’ve escalated their open antisemitism & collaboration w/ white nationalist groups. He’s just as culpable.”

Ocasio-Cortez added that McCarthy had “passionately defended” Gosar on the House floor after Gosar’s previous appearance at Fuentes’ conference and his House censure over an anime video depicting him killing Ocasio-Cortez.

“It’s not an exaggeration in the slightest to say he works to protect them,” she wrote.

Former Republican congressman Joe Walsh, now a vocal opponent of Donald Trump, quipped that this would be McCarthy’s “284th ‘talk’ with MTG and Gosar.”

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House Democrats and a small group of Republicans last year voted to strip Greene of her committee posts over past social media posts espousing antisemitic conspiracy theories and calling for the death of prominent Democrats. In November, House Democrats and two Republican members voted to censure Gosar over the AOC video.

Not only did McCarthy refuse to take any disciplinary action against the two members on his own, he vowed to restore their committee assignments if Republicans regain control of the chamber in November’s elections.

“They’ll have committees,” McCarthy said last fall. “They may have other committee assignments. They may have better committee assignments.”

Democrats have repeatedly called out McCarthy’s inaction as he tries to keep his caucus unified while also avoiding picking fights with hardcore pro-Trump members of his party.

“It continues to disturb me that the Republicans in Congress have allowed white supremacists to infiltrate their ranks and that not only do they not repudiate it, they encourage it,” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., told NBC News. “They fan the flames of those who are white supremacists. They don’t shun candidates who are running for Congress with their party who embrace white supremacists.”

Instead, the Republican National Committee recently voted to censure Reps. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., and Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., for joining the House committee investigating the deadly Jan. 6 pro-Trump Capitol riot, a move defended by McCarthy.

Kinzinger predicted that nothing would happen to Greene or Gosar.

“What I think we should do is kick them out of the party. What do I think we’re going to do? Nothing. Liz and I can get censured, they’re going to get help up as the future leaders of the party,” he told Politico, calling for McCarthy to hold a press conference booting Greene and Gosar from the Republican conference. “He’s not going to do that,” Kinzinger said.

Greene, meanwhile, criticized her fellow Republicans for not doing more to reach out to the types of audiences that attend Fuentes’ white nationalist events.

“It doesn’t matter if I’m speaking to Democrat union members or 1,200 young conservatives who feel cast aside and marginalized by society,” she said in a statement to CBS News. “The Pharisees in the Republican Party may attack me for being willing to break barriers and speak to a lost generation of young people who are desperate for love and leadership.”

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First, the book-banners came for CRT and LGBTQ. Now they’re censoring women’s history

Just in time for Women’s History Month, the Republican book banners are trying to erase women’s history.

On Friday, the Republican-dominated Wyoming state Senate passed a bill barring the University of Wyoming from funding “any gender studies courses, academic programs, co-curricular programs, or extracurricular programs.” Unsurprisingly, the Republican senators who supported this used hyperventilating language to justify this censorship. Sen. Charles Scott called it “an extremely biased, ideologically driven program that I can’t see any academic legitimacy to.” And the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Cheri Steinmetz, claimed that the program “caused me to lose some sleep,” because “I felt that this was one that our constituents, I know certainly mine, wouldn’t agree with.”

This move is an expansion of the same hysterics we’ve witnessed for the past year or so over “critical race theory.” In real life, “critical race theory” describes a specific academic approach largely found in law schools and other graduate programs. But in GOP hands, it has become a broad scare term use to demonize any book or course that addresses factual history about racism, slavery or Jim Crow oppression. Books about Martin Luther King Jr., the Holocaust and the era of American slavery were immediately marked for banning. The circle of censorship swiftly expanded to expunge any acknowledgment of the existence of queer people. In Florida, the “don’t say gay” bill was justified with overwrought language implying that teachers were somehow sexifying kids. It soon became apparent, however, that the bill as written is so expansive that teachers could potentially be sued simply for letting students raised by same-sex couples talk about their families in class.

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Readers will not be surprised to find out the same idiocy is going on in Wyoming, one of the most conservative and most rural states in the nation. The courses that are keeping Steinmetz up at night have titles like “Victorian Women’s Lives: Their Art, Literature and Culture” and “Women, Gender & Migration.” As Kate Hartmann, a Buddhist studies professor at the University of Wyoming, tweeted, this would “affect 30 academic programs and 105 courses, and limit the ability of students to learn about the many ways gender affects our past, present, and future.”

Hartmann went on to note that gender affects all aspects of our lives, including health care, education and even marketing — a reality so deeply ingrained that it’s frankly impossible to talk about human life without addressing it. As with the way bans on “critical race theory” have been used to attack teaching the history of the civil rights movement, this sort of ban could make it difficult to teach basic historical facts about feminism and the suffragist movement.

Steinmetz, who brought forth this bill, is no stranger to talking about the impacts of gender on human life, albeit in ways that celebrate rigid and unforgiving gender roles. She has previously backed legislation stipulating that marriage is “between one man and one woman,” which would have allowed health care workers to deny care to people based on their sexual orientation or gender identity. She has also backed bills banning trans girls from playing on girls’ sports teams. None of these stances make sense without the acknowledgment that gender affects how people live, even if Steinmetz’s views favor using gender as a tool of oppression.

Unsurprisingly, Christopher Rufo — one of the main architects of the “critical race theory” hoax — was ecstatic about this new attack on academic freedom. Of course, Rufo’s claims to believe in race neutrality were always a lie, as well. He’s been on Twitter screeching incoherent nonsense about how progressives supposedly want to “abolish white people,” which shouldn’t be a concern to the supposedly colorblind folks who “don’t see” race.

That, of course, gets to the crux of this nonsense. None of these book-banning efforts are about “neutrality” or “unbiased” education. They’re a blatant effort to force educators to adhere to biased, outdated and downright false views on race, sexuality and gender. Bans on talking about “sexual orientation” won’t be used to punish teachers for talking about straight people or to censor books that feature heterosexual couples. Bans on “critical race theory” will only cover books that frame racism as a bad thing, but will not target books where white supremacy is unquestioned. This attack on gender studies is about censoring any education that proposes that misogyny is bad or that gender is more complicated than the religious right would have you believe. But acknowledging gender in hidebound, sexist ways will undoubtedly continue, or in fact be accelerated.

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As Yale professor and expert in fascism Jason Stanley noted on Twitter, Wyoming’s proposed ban “goes much further than what Orban did in Hungary.” He’s referring to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary, who barred two Hungarian universities from offering a master’s degree in gender studies. Orbán has become a hero to the Trumpist right in the U.S., frequently praised by Tucker Carlson of Fox News as a hero who has turned a culturally rich European nation into a white nationalist utopia that Americans could emulate for the low, low price of giving up democracy. Orbán’s vision isn’t just racist, anti-immigrant and antisemitic. He’s also, like most if not all authoritarian leaders, homophobic and misogynist, and attached to the view that a woman’s place is in the home, where she can focus on breeding more white Hungarians.

This Wyoming bill serves as another reminder of how much the tide of authoritarianism in the U.S., catalyzed and to some degree led by Donald Trump, is rooted not just in racism, but a profoundly insecure sexism. Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida recently released an 11-point GOP vision for America, much of it centered on enforcing rigid gender hierarchies and heterosexuality, insisting that it’s “God’s design for humanity.” Much of the lavish praise that Republicans have offered to Russian President Vladimir Putin — even as they try to backpedal away from his invasion of Ukraine — is also gender-obsessed. Conservatives repeatedly insist that Russia is “strong” and America is “weak,” either implicitly or explicitly because of Russia’s oppression of women and LGBTQ people. And of course the GOP is moving rapidly to ban abortion, having already done so in Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott has also signed an order that threatens to remove trans children from parents who love and accept them.

There are still questions about whether this Wyoming bill will last very long, since it likely violates the First Amendment and is so extreme that even many Republicans in that overwhelmingly conservative state oppose it. Still, the fact that it passed the state Senate represents a chilling advance of the GOP’s ever-expanding book banning campaign. The right shows no signs of slowing down its campaign to terrorize educators in public schools or universities who teach anything that might conflict with old-school conservative ideology.

Jim Jordan promises to “investigate” Dr. Fauci if GOP retakes the House this year

Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, on Tuesday said that investigating Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s leading expert on infectious disease, will be one of his top priorities if the GOP retakes the House in this year’s midterm elections.

The probe, Jordan told Just the News, will aim to untangle “all the lies [and] the misinformation, the disinformation” that he claims Fauci has spread about the origins of the COVID-19 virus.

“That is because they knew from the get-go [coronavirus] came from the lab, likely came from a lab, gain-of-function likely done, and our tax dollars were used,” the lawmaker added.

Jordan, an ardent supporter of Donald Trump, has been one of the leading Republican proponents of the “lab leak” theory, the unproven and dubious notion that the coronavirus was leaked, accidentally or otherwise, from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.

At the center of this theory is the allegation that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) at one point provided a grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for “gain-of-function” research, a process in which a virus is genetically altered in order to anticipate ways it may mutate in the future. Supporters of the lab leak theory contend, by that logic, that the coronavirus which causes COVID-19 is a man-made “supervirus,” generated in a lab, whose origins have been covered up by leading health officials, including Fauci.

According to the Washington Post, there is no clear evidence that the NIH funded any such research. Furthermore, most scientists have concluded that the lab leak theory is unlikely, although it cannot entirely be ruled out. The dearth of evidence for the claim hasn’t stopped conservatives from repeatedly accusing Fauci of masterminding the pandemic.

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During a Senate hearing just last month, Fauci and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., got into a heated exchange over the matter, with Fauci accusing Paul of promoting the theory for political reasons.

“You are making a catastrophic epidemic for your political gain,” Fauci told the senator at the time. “What happens when [Paul] gets out and accuses me of things that are completely untrue is that all of a sudden that kindles the crazies out there, and I have threats upon my life, harassment of my family and my children, with obscene phone calls because people are lying about me.”

On Sunday, the New York Times cited two extensive new studies backing the idea that COVID-19 originated from a live animal market in Wuhan, China. This was largely the consensus earlier into the pandemic.

Jordan appeared unconvinced, writing of the report this week: “These aren’t new facts or new studies. This ‘new’ info is from the same crew that told Fauci it came from a lab but suspiciously changed their tune and were rewarded with a 9 million dollar grant.”

According to the Times, the two novel studies have been verified by multiple independent experts, which renders the lab leak increasingly unlikely.

“When you look at all of the evidence together, it’s an extraordinarily clear picture that the pandemic started at the Huanan market,” said Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona.

Why pregnant people were left behind while vaccines moved at “warp speed” to help the masses

Kia Slade was seven months pregnant, unvaccinated, and fighting for breath, her oxygen levels plummeting, when her son came into the world last May.

A severe case of covid pneumonia had left Slade delirious. When the intensive care team tried to place an oxygen mask on her face, she snatched it away, she recalled. Her baby’s heart rate began to drop.

Slade’s doctor performed an emergency cesarean section at her bedside in the intensive care unit, delivering baby Tristan 10 weeks early. He weighed just 2 pounds, 14 ounces, about half the size of small full-term baby.

But Slade wouldn’t meet him until July. She was on a ventilator in a medically induced coma for eight weeks, and she developed a serious infection and blood clot while unconscious. It was only after a perilous 2½ months in the hospital, during which her heart stopped twice, that Slade was vaccinated against covid-19.

“I wish I had gotten the vaccine earlier,” said Slade, 42, who remains too sick to return to work as a special education teacher in Baltimore. Doctors “kept pushing me to get vaccinated, but there just wasn’t enough information out there for me to do it.”

A year ago, there was little to no vaccine safety data for pregnant people like Slade, because they had been excluded from clinical trials run by Pfizer, Moderna, and other vaccine makers.

Lacking data, health experts were unsure and divided about how to advise expectant parents. Although U.S. health officials permitted pregnant people to be vaccinated, the World Health Organization in January 2021 actually discouraged them from doing so; it later reversed that recommendation.

The uncertainty led many women to delay vaccination, and only about two-thirds of the pregnant people who have been tracked by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were fully vaccinated as of Feb. 5, leaving many expectant moms at a high risk of infection and life-threatening complications.

More than 29,000 pregnant people have been hospitalized with covid and 274 have died, according to the CDC.

“There were surely women who were hospitalized because there wasn’t information available to them,” said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Vaccine developers say that pregnant people — who have special health needs and risks — were excluded from clinical trials to protect them from potential side effects of novel technologies, including the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines and formulations made with cold viruses, such as the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

But a KHN analysis also shows that pregnant people were left behind because including them in vaccine studies would have complicated and potentially delayed the delivery of covid vaccines to the broader population.

A growing number of women’s health researchers and advocates say that excluding pregnant people — and the months-long delay in recommending that they be immunized — helped fuel widespread vaccine hesitancy in this vulnerable group.

“Women and their unborn fetuses are dying of covid infection,” said Dr. Jane Van Dis, an OB-GYN at the University of Rochester Medical Center who has treated many patients like Slade. “Our failure as a society to vaccinate women in pregnancy will be remembered by the children and families who lost their mothers to this disease.”

New Technology, Uncertain Risks

At the time covid vaccines were being developed, scientists had very little experience using mRNA vaccines in pregnant women, said Dr. Jacqueline Miller, a senior vice president involved in vaccine research at Moderna.

“When you study anything in pregnant women, you have two patients, the mom and the unborn child,” Miller said. “Until we had more safety data on the platform, it wasn’t something we wanted to undertake.”

But Offit notes that vaccines have a strong record of safety in pregnancy and sees no reason to have excluded pregnant people. None of the vaccines currently in use — including the chickenpox and rubella vaccines, which contain live viruses — have been shown to harm fetuses, he said. Doctors routinely recommend that pregnant people receive pertussis and flu vaccinations.

Offit, the co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine, said that some concerns about vaccines stem from commercial, not medical, interests. Drugmakers don’t want to risk that their product will be blamed for any problems occurring in pregnant people, even if coincidental, he said.

“These companies don’t want bad news,” Offit said.

In the United States, health officials typically would have told expectant mothers not to take a vaccine that was untested during pregnancy, said Offit, a member of a committee that advises the FDA on vaccines.

Due to the urgency of the pandemic, health agencies instead permitted pregnant people to make up their own minds about vaccines without recommending them.

Women’s medical associations were also hampered by the lack of data. Neither the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists nor the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine actively encouraged pregnant people to be vaccinated until July 30, after the first real-world vaccine studies had been published. The CDC followed suit in August.

“If we had had this data in the beginning, we would have been able to vaccinate more women,” said Dr. Kelli Burroughs, the department chairman of obstetrics and gynecology at Memorial Hermann Sugar Land Hospital near Houston.

Yet anti-vaccine groups wasted no time in scaring pregnant people, flooding social media with misinformation about impaired fertility and harm to the fetus.

In the first few months after the covid vaccines were approved, some doctors were ambivalent about recommending them, and some still advise pregnant patients against vaccination.

An estimated 67% of pregnant people today are fully vaccinated, compared with about 89% of people 65 and older, another high-risk group, and 65% of Americans overall. Vaccination rates are lower among minorities, with 65% of expectant Hispanic mothers and 53% of pregnant African Americans fully vaccinated, according to the CDC.

Vaccination is especially important during pregnancy, due to increased risks of hospitalization, ICU admission and mechanical ventilation, Burroughs said. A study released in February from the National Institutes of Health found that pregnant people with a moderate to severe covid infection also were more likely to have a C-section, deliver preterm, or develop a postpartum hemorrhage.

Black moms such as Slade were already at higher risk of maternal and infant mortality before the pandemic, due to higher underlying risks, unequal access to health care, and other factors. Covid has only magnified those risks, said Burroughs, who has persuaded reluctant patients by revealing that she had a healthy pregnancy and child after being vaccinated.

Slade said she has never opposed vaccines and had no hesitation about receiving other vaccines while pregnant. But she said she “just wasn’t comfortable” with covid shots.

“If there had been data out there saying the covid shot was safe, and that nothing would happen to my baby and there was no risk of birth defects, I would have taken it,” said Slade, who has had Type 2 diabetes for 12 years.

Working at Warp Speed

Government scientists at the NIH were concerned about the risk of covid to pregnant people from the very beginning and knew that expectant moms needed vaccines as much or more than anyone else, said Dr. Larry Corey, a leader of the COVID-19 Prevention Network, which coordinated covid vaccine trials for the federal government.

But including pregnant volunteers in the larger vaccine trials could have led to interruptions and delays, Corey said. Researchers would have had to enroll thousands of pregnant volunteers to achieve statistically robust results that weren’t due to chance, he said.

Pregnancy can bring on a wide range of complications: gestational diabetes, hypertension, anemia, bleeding, blood clots, or problems with the placenta, for example. Up to 20% of people who know they’re pregnant miscarry. Because researchers would have been obliged to investigate any medical problem to make sure it wasn’t caused by one of the covid vaccines, including pregnant people might have meant having to hit pause on those trials, Corey said.

With death tolls from the pandemic mounting, “we had a mission to do this as quickly and as thoroughly as possible,” Corey said. Making covid vaccines available within a year “saved hundreds of thousands of lives.”

The first data on covid vaccine safety in pregnancy was published in April, when the CDC released an analysis of nearly 36,000 vaccinated pregnant people who had enrolled in a registry called V-safe, which allows users to log the dates of their vaccinations and any subsequent symptoms.

Later research showed that covid vaccines weren’t associated with increased risk of miscarriage or premature delivery.

Dr. Brenna Hughes, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist and member of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ covid expert group, agrees that adding pregnant people to large-scale covid vaccine and drug trials may have been impractical. But researchers could have launched parallel trials of pregnant women, once early studies showed the vaccines were safe in humans, she said.

“Would it have been hard? Everything with covid is hard,” Hughes said. “But it would have been feasible.”

The FDA requires that researchers perform additional animal studies — called developmental and reproductive toxicity studies — before testing vaccines in pregnant people. Although these studies are essential, they take five to six months, and weren’t completed until late 2020, around the time the first covid vaccines were authorized for adults, said Dr. Emily Erbelding, director of microbiology and infectious diseases at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of NIH.

Pregnancy studies “were an afterthought,” said Dr. Irina Burd, director of Johns Hopkins’ Integrated Research Center for Fetal Medicine and a professor of gynecology and obstetrics. “They should have been done sooner.”

The NIH is conducting a study of pregnant and postpartum people who decided on their own to be vaccinated, Erbelding said. The study is due to be completed by July 2023.

Janssen and Moderna are also conducting studies in pregnant people, both due to be completed in 2024.

Pfizer scientists encountered problems when they initiated a clinical trial, which would have randomly assigned pregnant people to receive either a vaccine or placebo. Once vaccines were widely available, many patients weren’t willing to take a chance on being unvaccinated until after delivery.

Pfizer has stopped recruiting patients and has not said whether it will publicly report any data from the trial.

Hughes said vaccine developers need to include pregnant people from the very beginning.

“There is this notion of protecting pregnant people from research,” Hughes said. “But we should be protecting patients through research, not from research.”

Recovering Physically and Emotionally

Slade still regrets being deprived of time with her children while she fought the disease.

Being on a ventilator kept her from spending those early weeks with her newborn, or from seeing her 9-year-old daughter, Zoe.

Even when Slade was finally able to see her son, she wasn’t able to tell him she loved him or sing a lullaby, or even talk at all, due to a breathing tube in her throat.

Today, Slade is a strong advocate of covid vaccinations, urging her friends and family to get their shots to avoid suffering the way she has.

Slade had to relearn to walk after being bedridden for weeks. Her many weeks on a ventilator may have contributed to her stomach paralysis, which often causes intense pain, nausea and even vomiting when she eats or drinks. Slade weighs 50 pounds less today than before she became pregnant and has resorted to going to the emergency room when the pain is unbearable. “Most days, I’m just miserable,” Slade said.

Her family suffered, as well. Like many babies born prematurely, Tristan, now nearly 9 months old and crawling, receives physical therapy to strengthen his muscles. At 15 pounds, Tristan is largely healthy, although his doctor said he has symptoms of asthma.

Slade said she would like to attend family counseling with Zoe, who rarely complains and tends to keep her feelings to herself. Slade knows her illness must have been terrifying for her little girl.

“The other day she was talking to me,” Slade said, “and she said, ‘You know, I almost had to bury you.”

UN report warns climate change could spur 50% more wildfires by 2100

In the past few years, wildfires have broken out around the world at a scale rarely experienced by modern humans. In 2020, fires in the western U.S. charred more than 10 million acres, killed at least 43 people, and inflicted $16.5 billion in damage. Australia’s Black Summer, the devastating fire season that started in late 2019 and burned through early 2020, razed some 4.4 million acres on the continent, directly killing at least 34 people and harming billions of animals.

By 2100, the likelihood of unusually intense fire seasons happening in a given year will have increased by 31 to 57 percent, depending on the rate of global climate change. That’s according to a new report from the United Nations Environment Programme, which also says that the annual number of wildfires around the globe could rise 50 percent by the end of the century. The rise in the number and frequency of wildfires will exacerbate global warming by releasing the carbon stored in trees. That will create a vicious cycle in which climate change and wildfires intensify each other.

Already, wildfires cost governments billions of dollars, contribute to adverse health outcomes, and claim hundreds of lives each year. Those impacts are projected to get worse, the report says, as a combination of rising temperatures and poor forest management practices give rise to monster wildfire seasons. Wildfires won’t just continue to grow in intensity and frequency, the report warns, they’ll start cropping up in areas that haven’t seen fires in millennia. Even the Arctic, a region that has historically been too wet and cold for large wildfires, could start to regularly host big fires like it did in 2020 and 2021 as global warming transforms permafrost and peatland swamps from soggy, fire-resistant areas into flammable tinderboxes.

“What climate change is doing is it’s leading to a situation where wildfires are burning hotter and burning longer in places where they already occur regularly,” Hugh D. Safford, a coauthor of the report, a former Forest Service ecologist, and a member of the research faculty in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of California-Davis, told Grist. “But they’re starting to flare up in places where they’re unexpected, too,” he said, citing recent fires in Indonesia’s peatlands. The report shows that fires could also start cropping up in eastern Asia’s arid areas, parts of the central United States, and the South American desert.

Some of the projected fire risk outlined in the U.N. report is already baked in. “Even with the most ambitious efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions, the planet will still experience a dramatic increase in the frequency of extreme fire conditions,” more than 50 experts from research institutions, government agencies, and international organizations from around the world wrote in the report, which is the Environment Programme’s first effort to assess the scale of the global wildfire crisis. But that doesn’t mean that all hope is lost. On the contrary, the report shows that there are actions governments can take right now to alleviate future fire risk.

The first and most important step nations can take is to spend more money on fire prevention — practices like thinning forests so that trees aren’t crowded close together and clearing brush and other fuels from the forest floor by burning or mulching them — instead of pouring all of their resources into stopping fires once they start. Right now, the world spends about two-thirds of its wildfire-related resources on responding directly to fires when they break out. Just 1 percent of fire-related expenditures go toward planning and prevention, the report said. “The biggest issue is that we are almost entirely playing a reactionary role rather than a proactive role,” Safford said. The U.S. Forest Service, for example, still spends roughly two-thirds of its budget on fire suppression when it would be more cost-effective to put more resources toward managing forests before they start burning. “It’s beggaring the entire Forest Service budget,” Safford said. “And the paradox is that it’s increasing the probability of catastrophic outcomes in the long run.”

Aside from directing more money and personnel to preventive activities like prescribed burning, the report recommends that governments also collaborate with other countries and with Indigenous peoples who have expertise in fire management dating back hundreds or thousands of years. Ultimately, the report recommends creating an international standard for wildfire management that’s the product of joint cooperation and problem solving between nations that regularly deal with fire. Right now, nations frequently tap one another for help quenching fires. The report’s authors want countries to work together before fires break out, too.

Some countries are already beginning to think more collaboratively about solving their wildfire problems. Officials in parts of Australia and California have turned to Aboriginal Australians and Native American tribes, respectively, to help manage the landscape. The report also urges governments to invest in research on fire behavior and mapping, so that firefighters have more information going into blazes and firefighting agencies can deploy resources in smarter and more effective ways.

The stakes are high. If the world doesn’t start thinking about managing fire more carefully, public health, water quality, and entire ecosystems could degrade even further in coming years, particularly in low-income countries with few resources to help communities recover post-disaster. Fires could even give rise to new zoonotic infectious diseases similar to COVID-19 by pushing animals out of their natural habitats and closer to areas where humans live, according to the report.

The question for Safford is whether governments will start planning for wildfire in time to limit the damage. “When is it going to be that we’re going to burn up so much and kill so many people that people are finally going to say, ‘Fire is an inevitability; we need to learn how to live with it, and we need to learn how to manage ecosystems that are resilient to it’?”

“Protecting his little KKK Caucus”: AOC slams GOP leader for “toothless” condemnation of MTG

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., on Monday delivered a blistering denunciation of House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., after he finally condemned Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., for appearing at a white nationalist conference over the weekend.

Writing on Twitter, Ocasio-Cortez accused McCarthy of covering for the racist behavior of Greene and Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) for years.

McCarthy has been protecting his little KKK Caucus for years with these toothless statements and meetings.

It’s how he covers for them.

He’s now helped them for so long they’ve escalated their open antisemitism & collaboration w/ white nationalist groups. He’s just as culpable. https://t.co/on4twfags5

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) February 28, 2022

“McCarthy has been protecting his little KKK Caucus for years with these toothless statements and meetings,” she wrote. “It’s how he covers for them. He’s now helped them for so long they’ve escalated their open antisemitism and collaboration with white nationalist groups. He’s just as culpable.”

She then explained how McCarthy had the opportunity to condemn Gosar after the first time he attended a white nationalist conference, but declined to do so until the Arizona Republican defiantly did it a second time.

“McCarthy stood on the House floor and passionately defended Rep. Gosar, who also headlined fundraisers for white nationalist orgs and escalated into inciting violence in the House,” she said, referring to a cartoon video Gosar posted that depicted him murdering her. “He made it fair game. It’s not an exaggeration in the slightest to say he works to protect them.”

War is the greatest evil: Russia was baited into this crime — but that’s no excuse

Preemptive war, whether in Iraq or Ukraine, is a war crime. It does not matter if the war is launched on the basis of lies and fabrications, as was the case in Iraq, or because of the breaking of a series of agreements with Russia, including the promise by Washington not to extend NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany, not to deploy thousands of NATO troops in Eastern Europe and not to meddle in the internal affairs of nations on the Russia’s border, as well as the refusal to implement the Minsk II peace agreement. The invasion of Ukraine would, I expect, never have happened if these promises had been kept. Russia has every right to feel threatened, betrayed and angry. But to understand is not to condone. The invasion of Ukraine, under post-Nuremberg laws, is a criminal war of aggression.

I know the instrument of war. War is not politics by other means. It is demonic. I spent two decades as a war correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans, where I covered the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo. I carry within me the ghosts of dozens of those swallowed up in the violence, including my close friend, Reuters correspondent Kurt Schork, who was killed in an ambush in Sierra Leone with another friend, Miguel Gil Moreno.

I know the chaos and disorientation of war, the constant uncertainty and confusion. In a firefight you are only aware of what is happening a few feet around you. You desperately, and not always successfully, struggle to figure out where the firing is coming from in the hopes you can avoid being hit.

I have felt the helplessness and the paralyzing fear, which, years later, descend on me like a freight train in the middle of the night, leaving me wrapped in coils of terror, my heart racing, my body dripping with sweat.

I have heard the wails of those convulsed by grief as they clutch the bodies of friends and family, including children. I hear them still. It does not matter the language. Spanish. Arabic. Hebrew. Dinka. Serbo-Croatian. Albanian. Ukrainian. Russian. Death cuts through the linguistic barriers.

I know what wounds look like. Legs blown off. Heads imploded into a bloody, pulpy mass. Gaping holes in stomachs. Pools of blood. Cries of the dying, sometimes for their mothers. And the smell. The smell of death. The supreme sacrifice made for flies and maggots.

I was beaten by Iraqi and Saudi secret police. I was taken prisoner by the Contras in Nicaragua, who radioed back to their base in Honduras to see if they should kill me, and again in Basra after the first Gulf War in Iraq, never knowing if I would be executed, under constant guard and often without food, drinking out of mud puddles.

The primary lesson in war is that we as distinct individuals do not matter. We become numbers. Fodder. Objects. Life, once precious and sacred, becomes meaningless, sacrificed to the insatiable appetite of Mars. No one in wartime is exempt.

“We were expendable,” Eugene Sledge wrote of his experiences as a Marine in the South Pacific in World War II. “It was difficult to accept. We come from a nation and a culture that values life and the individual. To find oneself in a situation where your life seems of little value is the ultimate in loneliness. It is a humbling experience.”

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The landscape of war is hallucinogenic. It defies comprehension. You have no concept of time in a firefight. A few minutes. A few hours. War, in an instant, obliterates homes and communities, all that was once familiar, and leaves behind smoldering ruins and a trauma that you carry for the rest of your life. You cannot comprehend what you see. I have tasted enough of war, enough of my own fear, my body turned to jelly, to know that war is always evil, the purest expression of death, dressed up in patriotic cant about liberty and democracy and sold to the naïve as a ticket to glory, honor and courage. It is a toxic and seductive elixir. Those who survive, as Kurt Vonnegut wrote, struggle afterwards to reinvent themselves and their universe which, on some level, will never make sense again.

War destroys all systems that sustain and nurture life — familial, economic, cultural, political, environmental and social. Once war begins, no one, even those nominally in charge of waging war, can guess what will happen, how the war will develop, how it can drive armies and nations towards suicidal folly. There are no good wars. None. This includes World War II, which has been sanitized and mythologized to mendaciously celebrate American heroism, purity and goodness. If truth is the first casualty in war, ambiguity is the second. The bellicose rhetoric embraced and amplified by the American press, demonizing Vladimir Putin and elevating the Ukrainians to the status of demigods, demanding more robust military intervention along with the crippling sanctions meant to bring down Putin’s government, is infantile and dangerous. The Russian media narrative is as simplistic as ours.

There were no discussions about pacifism in the basements in Sarajevo when we were being hit with hundreds or Serbian shells a day and under constant sniper fire. It made sense to defend the city. It made sense to kill or be killed. The Bosnian Serb soldiers in the Drina Valley, Vukovar, Srebrenica had amply demonstrated their capacity for murderous rampages, including the gunning down of hundreds of soldiers and civilians and the wholesale rape of women and girls. But this did not save any of the defenders in Sarajevo from the poison of violence, the soul-destroying force that is war. I knew a Bosnian soldier who heard a sound behind a door while patrolling on the outskirts of Sarajevo. He fired a burst from his AK-47 through the door. A delay of a few seconds in combat can mean death. When he opened the door, he found the bloody remains of a 12-year-old girl. His daughter was 12. He never recovered.

Only the autocrats and politicians who dream of empire and global hegemony, of the godlike power that comes with wielding armies, warplanes and fleets, along with the merchants of death, whose business floods countries with weapons, profit from war. The expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe has earned Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Analytic Services, Huntington Ingalls, Humana, BAE Systems and L3Harris billions in profits. The stoking of conflict in Ukraine will earn them billions more.

The European Union has allocated hundreds of millions of euros to purchase weapons for Ukraine. Germany will almost triple its own defense budget for 2022. The Biden administration has asked Congress to provide $6.4 billion in funding to assist Ukraine, supplementing the $650 million in military aid to Ukraine over the past year. The permanent war economy operates outside the laws of supply and demand. It is the root of the two-decade-long quagmire in the Middle East. It is the root of the conflict with Moscow. The merchants of death are Satanic. The more corpses they produce, the more their bank accounts swell. They will cash in on this conflict, one that now flirts with the nuclear holocaust that would terminate life on earth as we know it.

The dangerous and sadly predictable provocation of Russia — whose nuclear arsenal places the sword of Damocles above our heads — by expanding NATO was understood by all of us who reported from Eastern Europe in 1989 during the revolutions and the breakup of the Soviet Union.

This provocation, which includes establishing a NATO missile base 100 miles from Russia’s border, was foolish and highly irresponsible. It never made geopolitical sense. This does not, however, excuse the invasion of Ukraine. Yes, the Russians were baited. But they reacted by pulling the trigger. This is a crime. Their crime. Let us pray for a ceasefire. Let us work for a return to diplomacy and sanity, a moratorium on arms shipments to Ukraine and the withdrawal of Russian troops from the country. Let us hope for an end to war before we stumble into a nuclear holocaust that devours us all.

Read more:

QAnon followers are casting Putin in a positive light

While the International Criminal Court in The Hague is being called on to open an investigation into potential war crimes committed by Russian President Vladimir Putin in Ukraine, QAnon followers around the globe are praising him and casting him in a positive light. Though it might sound macabre, adherents of the bizarre and all-encompassing conspiracy movement believe that a major global crisis such as the current one is intrinsic to something they call the “Great Awakening,” a prophecy that forms the crux of the massive conspiracy that claims top Democratic leaders will one day be arrested for running a global sex trafficking ring.

Hence, QAnon followers have taken to social media in droves to explain that what’s really happening in Ukraine and how the invasion by Russian troops is actually everything “going as planned.” Case in point: the Conspirituality podcast, which studies the intersection of right-wing conspiracy theories and faux wellness, shared on its Instagram account a screenshot of one user stating that the “harvesting and trafficking of humans and children….it is all being stopped for good” — because of the ongoing fighting in Ukraine. “The old central bank systems are to be switched off, humanity if being liberated from its slave masters, and true freedom, health and abundance is at our doorstep,” the QAnon adherent continued, adding “nothing can stop what is coming.”

As Newsweek reported, John Sabal, who previously went by the name QAnon John on Telegram, praised Putin in a series of Telegram posts positioning him as some kind of hero. “Putin is straight gangsta,” he wrote. “MSM (mainstream media) is totally losing their minds right now,”

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This isn’t the first time a massive geopolitical event has been co-opted by QAnon’s all-encompassing conspiracy theory. Previously, global events ranging from Donald Trump’s presidency to the COVID-19 pandemic to Canada’s anti-vaccine trucker protests have all been integrated into the QAnon narrative. Indeed, QAnon followers have an indefatigable ability to fit any news item under its umbrella conspiracy that the world is run by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who just happen to mostly be Democratic leaders. And, as if it needed to be said, none of it ever manifests.

One of QAnon’s biggest baseless conspiracy theories, known as #SaveTheChildren — which dates back to 2016 — claims that Hillary Clinton and John Podesta, her former campaign manager, operated a child sexual abuse ring. Years later, there is still no evidence that there is any child sex–trafficking ring, or evidence of the other misinformation the conspiracy theory has generated. Still, the false narrative has not lost steam, and is now magically tied to yet another massive global event.

So why does this keep happening with QAnon? Is it a case of mass delusional, or textbook cult dynamics?

Experts tell Salon it’s a mix of both.

Matthew Remski, a co-host of the aforementioned Conspirituality podcast and a cult dynamics researcher, told Salon in an interview that QAnon’s attempt to reduce the war in Ukraine to being about saving children isn’t necessarily a way for the conspiracy theorists to rationalize what’s happening, but instead a strategy to keep QAnon followers engaged and focused.

“Everything that the QAnon imaginarium drives toward is on display at scale, but in real world form — and that’s a real problem for a community that imagined something like this needing to happen, but in some sort of different way or for a different purpose,” Remski said. “We have a real war that’s very complex and yet quite visible, and it’s a real challenge for the person who has been building a war-like alternate reality that only they and their comrades can see, and that they’ve had to convince and recruit everybody else into believing it.”

Joe Kelly, a cult intervention specialist, added that all QAnon has to lure its followers is this narrative of the so-called Great Awakening.

“They have some fundamental narratives that they keep pushing forward, and in various forms, depending on which conspiracy theory arises,” Kelly said. “In this case, it’s a geopolitical consequence dealing with Russia and Ukraine, and somehow they tie in their own justification.” Hence, the need to manipulate reality and fold everything back into QAnon.

Remski and his team explained on Instagram this is another example of QAnon’s playbook when a massive geopolitical event occurs. Their playbook, which is often propagated by wellness influencers who have become de facto QAnon followers, goes like this: first, communicate to one’s followers that such geopolitical events aren’t “real” and, rather, are part of some bigger plan, which usually has to do with child trafficking. Followers are then advised to do nothing in the face of said event, which is seen as the “enlightened” option. As part of this, followers are often advised to know which type of media to consume — another sign of “enlightenment”— and the source posting is the only person to be believed.

This strategy might be seen as a form of spiritual bypassing, a term developed by a psychotherapist in the 1980s to describe hiding behind spirituality to avoid emotional issues. Remski said in these wellness communities that are QAnon-adjacent, spiritual bypassing is a “self-soothing tactic that goes too far.”

“In some of the yoga-related, Pastel Q posts that we’ve come across so far, that’s kind of the name of the game,” Remski said. “They say, ‘I see this thing in the world, it appears to be terrifying, but I’m going to tell my followers that the secret truth of the circumstance is that everyone is on the verge of some kind of miraculous transformation, and we can’t be sure what that is yet, but that’s what we have to keep our focus on.'”

Remski added this strategy “gives people permission for their boredom to be participatory.”

Daniel Shaw, a psychoanalyst who specializes in cult recovery and who wrote a book called “Traumatic Narcissism and Recovery,” told Salon that QAnon followers’ praise of Putin also aligns with the conspiracy theory group’s ideology.

“There’s a very strong leadership group here who are interested in undermining democratic institutions, for whatever their ideological reasons might be, and they’ve aligned with Putin because Putin is representative to them of white nationalism and anti-wokeness,” Shaw said. Indeed, some QAnon supporters are conservative leaders in the U.S., like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who famously defended the movement and has made social media posts in the past that indicate that she is an adherent.

“Not all the [QAnon] followers understand what they’re following,” Shaw opined, noting that more people have become engaged with such frivolous conspiracy theories amid the pandemic. “Followers have been have been mainly recruited more than ever during COVID, especially during lockdown, where people are isolated, where they’re dependent on what they see on their screens for interaction and they believe that they are involved in a very important movement that fights evil,” he added.

Shaw said that with cults in general, which QAnon is often called, there’s a strong focus on “purification.”

“Purification is always at the heart of a cult,” Shaw said. “The leaders believe in a certain kind of purity and they profess to know how to restore this purity.”

Shaw added that in general, from a mental health perspective, people grasping on to QAnon conspiracy theories speaks to a “time of increased paranoia in this country.”

“There are fears that are generated at almost every turn of the century, and that has to do with some kind of paranoid fear,” Shaw said. “Psychologically, my view is that people seek out these kinds of movements, because they give meaning to their lives when they feel uncertain about what’s going on in the world.”

Read more on Russia & Ukraine:

Pat Robertson: Putin is “being compelled by God” to invade Ukraine and fulfill biblical prophecy

As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has blown up into a conflict of horrific atrocities against civilians, nations around the world have lined up to condemn it — even historically neutral countries such as Switzerland.

But former televangelist Pat Robertson, who came out of his retirement to weigh in on the situation, sees something even grander in the whole affair — according to him, Vladimir Putin is being willed by God to conduct the invasion, as a way of triggering the End Times.

“I think you can say, well, Putin’s out of his mind, and yes, maybe so,” said Robertson. “But at the same time he’s being compelled by God. He went into Ukraine, but that wasn’t his goal. His goal was to move against Israel, ultimately.”

“God is getting ready to do something amazing, and that will be fulfilled,” said Robertson. “And what Putin is doing, by moving as he is, to set up Ukraine as a staging ground for one of the armies, and then across is Erdogan in Turkey, and you’ve got between them that little Dardanelles area. And it’s going to happen. So I say, that is what’s coming up. Is Putin crazy? Is he mad? Well, perhaps. But God says, I’m going to put hooks in your jaws and I’m going to draw you into this battle, whether you like it or not. And he’s being compelled, after the move into the Ukraine, he’s being compelled to move to get a land bridge, and then across the Dardanelles with Turkey, and watch what’s going to happen next. You read your Bible, because it’s coming to pass.”

Contrary to Robertson’s claim, Turkey — although often friendly with Russia — has not backed Russia’s war and is firmly supporting Ukraine in the conflict. Additionally, as a NATO country, an attack on Turkey by Russia would compel a counterattack by the entire NATO alliance.

You can watch below via Twitter:

Pat Robertson came out of retirement to claim that Putin "is being compelled by God" to invade Ukraine in preparation for a massive End Times invasion of Israel. pic.twitter.com/Pmwybf57Ay

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) February 28, 2022

Too much reality: Putin’s Ukraine invasion summons Europe’s dark past

“Humankind cannot bear very much reality,” T.S. Eliot once noted. Americans, especially, have what the historian Louis Hartz called a “vast and almost charming innocence of mind.” But we can’t afford any willed innocence about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Vladimir Putin has reduced Russia to a failed state that runs on thuggery, cyber-piracy, gas and war, and all this has been getting cover from Putin’s longtime sycophant Donald Trump and his Republicans, not least through the recently concluded Conservative Political Action Conference. Putin must be stopped by force, and his American apologists must be thoroughly discredited, much as Hitler and Mussolini and their American apologists and collaborators were, even if doing so requires pain and sacrifice from the rest of us.

What T.S. Eliot called “very much reality” doesn’t stop there.

Putin has suggested that Russian forces will round up and kill anyone who resists the invasion. He is trapped in the past, mourning the Soviet Union’s collapse, whose redress, he believes, will be his legacy to Russia, it isn’t hard to imagine Russian soldiers collecting Ukrainian resisters, including civilians in street clothes who fired guns or threw Molotov cocktails at Russian troops, and massacring them on Putin’s orders.

Soviet soldiers did precisely that, on Joseph Stalin’s orders, in April and May of 1940, when they massacred nearly 22,000 Polish army officers, police, landowners, factory owners, lawyers, officials and priests and left them in mass graves. (Many of the victims were Ukrainians and Jews, including the chief rabbi of the Polish Army.)

Of course it’s true that most mass killings in Eastern Europe in that period, including the horrific massacres in Kharkiv, now Ukraine’s second-largest city, were committed not by Russians but by the German occupiers after 1941. It’s also true that many in the Soviet republics, such as Ukraine and the Baltic countries, welcomed the Germans at first as their liberators from the Soviet boot, and that many of their citizens collaborated with them in murdering Jews.

Photos taken by the Nazis in Ukraine in 1941 to document what they and some Ukrainians were doing, too horrifying for me to display here, can be seen easily enough at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. We don’t know whether Putin could do anything similar to Ukrainian resisters.

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I admit to being sensitive about this. Although my Lithuanian-Jewish grandparents came to America in 1909, they had siblings, cousins and elders who were terminated in 1941, in much the same way as the mass killings in Ukraine.

In 2002, I went to the sites where they’d been slaughtered, and I stood in a Lithuanian Jewish State Museum reading English translations of Nazi Einsatzgruppen reports about Lithuanians who worked with and for the Nazis. “Work” like that was done throughout Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, as recounted in the historian Timothy Snyder’s “Bloodlands” and in Jan and Irena Gross’ “Golden Harvest,” the latter showing how thousands of Poles raided the homes of Jews who’d been taken to slaughter, even extracting gold fillings from the teeth of the corpses.

The Einsatzgruppen documents report that some Lithuanians got drunk even while machine-gunning their victims under German supervision because they didn’t “like the work” and wanted to dull their pain and disgust. A few even went AWOL.

I abhor what Putin is doing and threatening to do, and support Ukrainians’ truly heroic resistance to it. They’re also redeeming their country from part of its past by standing with a president who happens to be Jewish.

But I can’t forget — and dread any renewed possibility — of the “very much reality,” mentioned by Eliot, that’s depicted in photos that perhaps we can’t bear to see but no willed innocence of mind can prevent. Read the lines below from W.H. Auden, who felt it all coming in 1939, and then a few lines from me about an arresting moment I experienced in Berlin on Holocaust Memorial Day, more than a decade ago.

From W.H. Auden, “Ode to W.B. Yeats,” January 1939:

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

To solace myself, I add some lines of my own, first published by the Washington Monthly in 2018. Some of it may appear outdated, but not by much.

Donald J. Trump isn’t a Nazi, although his father came close. It’s true that historical analogies between Trump’s policies and Hitler’s are often facile, and sometimes dangerously misleading. But here’s one that I’m not inclined to shrug off.

During a long stay in Berlin in 2009, I went often to the Grunewald railway station to have my coffee. It’s a picturesque little station, built in the 1899, fronted by a cobblestone square and surrounded by splendid, well-preserved villas of that period.

It’s also the point from which more than 50,000 Berlin Jews were shipped to concentration camps, a few hundred a week, from 1942 to 1945. At the station’s Track 17, a steel strip along the platform edge records, in raised letters, each week’s shipment of several hundred “Juden” to Theresienstadt, Minsk, Riga, Kaunas, Łódź and, later, directly to Auschwitz and other death camps.

It’s hard for most Americans, especially those of us whose parents fought in World War II, to imagine that people who boarded the trains had no idea of what lay ahead. Yet, although Jews had been vilified and some attacked on the streets since 1938, some things remained unthinkable to Berlin Jews, most of whom had been middle-class, law-abiding citizens since birth. They showed up at station on the appointed dates, children and luggage in tow, for what they’d been told would be deportation to resettlement and work centers. At worst, they expected something like what Japanese-Americans experienced in internment camps on our own West Coast during the same war.

Under the watchful eyes of German police, they took their seats in ordinary passenger coaches for many of these departures. Only later, far beyond Berlin, were they transferred to box cars. Some time after that, postcards they hadn’t written were sent to relatives or acquaintances whom they’d listed with the authorities, assuring them that all was well in their new locations. …

I recount this now because some Americans remind me of Berlin Jews who didn’t think the unthinkable when they should have. After watching the Trump administration tear apart weeping parents and children — on the initiative of its senior policy adviser, Stephen Miller, who’s Jewish — I’m thinking that although Trump has now found it politically expedient to halt the practice, more than a few of my fellow Americans were thinking, “Well, they deserve it, unlike me, a law-abiding citizen, and a veteran.”

Those Berlin Jews had been law-abiding citizens, too, at least until 1935, and more than a few were military veterans: Some 12,000 of the Jews who had served in the German military had fallen in World War I. In an irony beyond ironies, it was a Jewish lieutenant, Hugo Gutmann, who secured an Iron Cross, First Class, for a 29-year-old corporal under his command, Adolf Hitler.

Read the rest of my historical analogy here.

Read more:

Bewildered conservatives call Putin a “Soviet dictator” who runs a “communist country”

Republicans are condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by calling Russian President Vladimir Putin a “Soviet” leader who runs a “communist” country, even though the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991, and Putin is decidedly not a communist.

On Saturday, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, described Putin as a “Soviet dictator,” tweeting that “the invasion of Ukraine by Soviet dictator Vladimir Putin cannot stand, and the people of the Commonwealth [of Virginia] are ready to rally in opposition to this senseless attack on a sovereign nation and western ideals.”

The invasion of Ukraine by Soviet dictator Vladimir Putin cannot stand, and the people of the Commonwealth are ready to rally in opposition to this senseless attack on a sovereign nation and western ideals.

— Governor Glenn Youngkin (@GovernorVA) February 26, 2022

Youngkin’s comments came just a day after similar false statements were made by Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., the former Auburn University football coach, who claimed that Russia is a “communist country.”

“He can’t feed his people,” Tuberville said of Putin, according to 1819 News. “It’s a communist country, so he can’t feed his people, so they need more farmland.”

It is of course true that the modern nation of Russia was formerly the center of the Soviet Union, a socialist state comprising numerous republics and nationalities that was founded after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and dissolved in 1991. Upon its demise, the Soviet Union disaggregated into 15 independent republics, two of which, Ukraine and Russia, are now making headlines around the world. While Russia has formally been a democracy since the Soviet collapse, Vladimir Putin has been its functional leader, either as president or prime minister, since 2000, facing only token opposition for most of that time.

The now-dismantled Soviet Union was dominated by the Communist Party, which controlled the state’s political and economic system and for the most part operated a “command economy,” with complete authority to set the prices, production and distribution of goods and services. (In a capitalist economy, such as the United States, marketplace competition, at least in theory, determines those things.)

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It is arguably true that Putin is seeking to reconstitute the former scope of the Soviet Union — or of the Russian Empire, which preceded it — but in any event the nuances of this history were apparently lost on many attendees at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which brought together right-wing politicians, pundits and activists in Orlando last weekend.

On Friday, John James, a perennial Republican candidate in Michigan, warned the audience that “communist power continues to expand abroad,” fanning Cold War-era concerns about “creeping” communism.

“In just one year, leaders in Moscow and Beijing are emboldened by a weakened United States because they see every misstep this administration has taken in Afghanistan and Eastern Europe and elsewhere,” James said. “Every American who casts a ballot this November will have the opportunity to take down communism, foreign and domestic.”

Daniel Schneider, executive vice president of the American Conservative Union, made similar claims, arguing that conservatives “are fighting against the evil forces of communism and socialism in all its forms.”

“Vladimir Putin and his Russian forces, what they’re doing is evil, authoritarianism is evil,” Schneider told the audience while interviewing a North Korean defector. “China, the Chinese Communist Party, they are suppressing their own people. The people of China deserve better than the communist regime that’s been forced on them. North Korea, it’s the same.”

Whatever some conservatives may believe, 21st-century Russia is not a communist or socialist state. Wealth remains largely in the hands of private oligarchs, and while state control over economic activity has increased under Putin, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the Russian system is perhaps closer to those of Germany, Italy and Spain in the 1930s and ’40s. There’s a name for such a system, but it isn’t “communism.”

“No walking that back”: Chris Christie slams Donald Trump for calling Putin a “genius”

Estranged Trump ally Chris Christie on Monday slammed the former president for declaring that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was a stroke of “genius” when by all accounts it has so far been a disaster for Russia.

“How can anyone with any understanding of the world call Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine ‘genius’ and ‘very savvy’ as we watch him unite the rest of the world against Russia in nearly an instant?” Christie asked on Twitter.

The former New Jersey governor then outlined how Putin had gotten himself into a geopolitical mess from which there would likely be no recovery.

“Putin has two choices now: an unwinnable occupation of Ukraine after leveling the country and murdering its hero President (if that is even achievable) or a humiliating retreat,” Christie wrote. “Yeah, that’s ‘genius’ and ‘very savvy’ alright. No walking that back. History is watching.”

Putin has two choices now: an unwinnable occupation of Ukraine after leveling the country and murdering its hero President (if that is even achievable) or a humiliating retreat. Yeah, that’s “genius” and “very savvy” alright. No walking that back. History is watching.

— Chris Christie (@GovChristie) February 28, 2022

Trump has continued to heap praise on Putin for his Ukraine invasion even as it has been condemned by the vast majority of Republican lawmakers.

Despite this, virtually no Republicans other than Christie and Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., have been willing to publicly call Trump out on it.

Americans can’t seem to get enough sleep — and it’s wreaking havoc on our brains

In American work culture, resisting sleep is often lauded as a heroic act. This antipathy towards sleep is evident in hard-working professionals plugging away at the office late into the night, or young people who cut loose by partying into the wee hours. The negative associations with sleep explain why a start-up CEO felt comfortable scolding employees as “weak” for needing sleep and why one of Donald Trump’s favorite insulting nicknames for President Joe Biden is “Sleepy Joe.”

Yet experts agree that this attitude towards sleep isn’t merely unhealthy — it is also downright unscientific. Needing to sleep does not signify laziness, weakness or stupidity. Most adults need to spend one-third of their lives sleeping, and for children the duration is even longer. Just as it is important to eat when your body says it is hungry, it is vital to sleep when your body says it is tired.

“Sleep is really the foundation which the rest of our health depends on,” Dr. Natalie Dautovich, Environmental Fellow at the National Sleep Foundation, told Salon by email. “What we know is that there is a cyclical relationship between sleep and overall health — adequate sleep contributes to overall mental health and physical well-being, but not having a good mental and physical health state can impact how well you sleep.”

Dautovich said “most Americans today” are not getting the amount of sleep they would need in order to be optimally healthy. That is borne out by research: a 2016 study from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that one-third of American adults don’t get enough sleep. A 2018 study agreed, noting that the numbers were higher for health care workers and police officers.

A big part of the reason is cultural, explained Dr. Constance H. Fung, an Associate Clinical Professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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“Prolonged wakefulness is often championed by leaders, like they are deserving of accolades for not sleeping, whether it’s because they were doing work or up late socializing or doing some recreational activity,” Fung wrote to Salon. “Sleep is often regarded as a period of inactivity (wasting time), which reflects a poor understanding of the ‘work’ that’s being done during the sleep period.” Your immune system releases proteins called cytokines that help your body fight infections and inflammation. Your muscles and other organs use the opportunity to heal. Your brain not only heals, but sorts through its own log of information to find patterns and help you cognitively as you proceed with your day.

“The long-term risks of sleep deprivation are under-recognized and not included as a cost of achievement (e.g., students study or do activities such as sports/arts/music instead of sleeping and they earn good grades and achieve medals/honors, but the short and long-term negative impact on mental and physical health are not recognized.),” Fung wrote to Salon.

Dr. Marco Hafner, the RAND Europe senior research leader who helped pen a study called “Why sleep matters — the economic costs of insufficient sleep,” shared a personal story about learning the importance of sleep after this reporter opened up about his own health crisis where his body needed to sleep (a concussion).

“I [became] interested in sleep … through a personal experience, when I became a dad,” which resulted in “severe sleep deprivation,” Hafner told Salon by email. “It started to affect my work productivity and my physical and mental health.” Hafner added that research shows your body clears out toxins when you sleep; for instance, when your brain is in deep sleep, a series of tubes called the glymphatic system removes waste-filled fluid from the brain.

Hafner also echoed Fung’s observation about how our professional culture discourages sleep.

“Then there is also the research showing that exposure to blue light could have a negative effect on the body’s natural levels of melatonin, and if a person is exposed to blue light just until bedtime it could delay the onset of tiredness,” Hafner explained. Studies prove that light suppresses melatonin, the chemical released by the pineal gland that regulates humans’ sleep-wake cycle — also known as our Circadian rhythm. The Circadian rhythm is a sort of biological clock in the brain, which “regulates the timing of things in your body like when you want to sleep or eat,” Dautovich told Salon. “A disrupted circadian rhythm can occur either due to an internal malfunction or a mismatch between your body clock and external factors like social or work environment.”

Exposure to light during nighttime is also linked to health issues like diabetes and obesity. “So in our culture where many people have smartphones, tablets, and other gadgets in their bedrooms, this could have a detrimental impact on a person’s sleep hygiene.” He also said that lack of exercise and poor diet also negatively impact people’s sleep cycles.

If you think your sleep hygiene is off, there are ways you can try to fix that.

“Start with some lifestyle changes, such as establishing a regular bedtime and reducing your caffeine intake later in the day so it doesn’t interfere with nighttime sleep,” Dautovich explained. “You might also benefit from creating a calm, relaxing sleep environment and eliminating distractions such as TV or texting on your phone before bed. Some elements to consider for improving sleep include creating a sleep-friendly bedroom including a cool, dark, quiet room with a comfortable mattress to help your sleep well.”

It is also important to establish that your bed is a domain strictly intended for sleep.

“Reserve the bed and bedroom for sleep if possible. If you find yourself lying awake at night, go to another room until you’re sleepy and then return to bed,” Dautovich added.

If you’re interested in the science of sleep, check out these other Salon.com articles.

The “Better Things” final season reminds us of how incredible it is that we – and it – exist

The final season of “Better Things” opens, appropriately, with a sequence of scenes set to the jaunty Monty Python number “The Galaxy Song,” in which Eric Idle cheerily sings about the cosmic magic of our being.

“Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown/ And things seem hard or tough/ And people are stupid, obnoxious or daft/And you feel that you’ve had quite eno-o-o-o-o-ough,” it begins, eventually reminding listeners that each of us is but a tiny speck in a universe that keeps on expanding and expanding, “In all of the directions it can whiz.” Mrs. Brown is all of us, in other words, but in these scenes the song’s message has a special relevance to Sam Fox (the alter ego of series creator Pamela Adlon) and her oldest daughter Max (Mikey Madison).

Sam has reached a point where navigating changes in her family and career with a healthy dose of patience, along with an unhealthy habit of evasion and bushels of self-sacrifice, is second nature. But when Max confronts the first significant crisis of her life that she can’t ask Sam to solve, or even tell her about, it’s the surest sign that she’s an adult now, too.

It’s up to her to draw her own map in this wonderful, bewildering and often aggravating constellation of choice even though, as Sam reminds her, she can always move back home.

Since “Better Things” debuted in 2016 it has only expanded, and expanded, in its dual capacity as an immersive TV experience and comfort device.

Knowing its end is coming also led me to examine a habit recently entrenched in my own household: a reluctance or outright refusal to finish seasons of favorite shows – unless, of course, work requires me to do so. Most of us want to see where and how our favorite TV shows end, but seeing a story through to its finish means letting go of what’s become a reliable consolation at a time when those seem to be vanishing.

In these years of unexpected and sorrowful goodbyes, the ability to delay ones that are within our control is a powerful impulse.

Adlon pokes at that concept vigorously in her last 10 episodes, each of which she directed, with a loose and gentle weave of stories that present letting go of what was as a chance to make room for what’s next. This is clearest in her life, alongside those of her middle child Frankie (Hannah Riley) and her youngest Duke (Olivia Edward), who we first met as a precocious grade schooler and is now a teenager.

Pamela Adlon and Celia Imrie in “Better Things” (Suzanne Tenner/FX)But we also experience her mother Phil (Celia Imrie) tossing nostalgic artifacts out the window in ways Sam sees as inspirational, until she realizes Phil is also trashing family photos. She calls it ephemera, meaningless boxes; Sam points out that when you open one of those boxes, there’s Phil’s brother.

“Never mind,” her mother sighs, “He’s gone now. That’s it. A life, and then – gone.”

By now, this show’s audience is used to Phil contradicting herself; in the same scene where she’s casually willing to toss out family memories, she snaps at her daughter to leave a vase that looks like a future garage sale item.

Sam’s accustomed to this too as a woman who rolls with whatever circumstances roll across her threshold, caring for Phil even when she does things that make Sam want to throttle her and raising her kids with a level of forbearance most parents couldn’t countenance (but may wish they could).

As they figure out who they are Sam, too, has to adjust and let go – not only of them, but many of her preconceived notions about who they are and who she is.

Much of the transformation Sam undergoes in these episodes and the rest of the show comes via the usual small revelations, whether those have to do with Frankie’s firmer notions of gender identity or Duke’s blossoming sexuality under the influence of the digital age.

Never has the show abandoned what originally made it singularly wonderful, which is Adlon’s portrayal of modern womanhood in its many shapes and stages.

“Better Things” is a dramatic comedy about life, which – as “The Galaxy Song” reminds us – can only be soft-scripted at best. But this final run travels a solid arc of releasing expectations about ourselves, other people, even our lineage, to lighten the load of moving forward.

A person doesn’t watch the show so much as drop by Sam’s big cozy house for a visit. That’s truer than ever in this series’ crowning season, one that also reminds us that Sam’s family consists of a network of friends, her own and her children’s, all of whom we’ll miss – Tressa (Rebecca Metz), Sunny (Alysia Reiner) and her dearest confidante Rich, who helped her raise her kids (Diedrich Bader) most of all.

Equally as heartfelt is Sam’s attempts to grapple with her various histories, both in the longer view and shorter ones. A “Finding Your Roots”-style session with her brother Marion (Kevin Pollak, closing out this role with a rich performance) opens a new way of understanding Phil to the both of them while resurfacing longstanding animosities. On all fronts, Sam is continually facing incorrect assumptions about herself and the people around her.

The genealogy session Marion dismisses makes Sam feel “we’re a part of a greater chain of history and humanity, like the past and the future. It gives me confidence, somehow. Like I’m important and you are.” Needless to say it takes each of them a few episodes to fully comprehend this.

“Better Things” navigates these arcs as a patchwork rather than a linear progression, since that’s how life goes. Presenting each episode as a visit instead of a story makes the show feel more lifelike, accentuating the growth of Adlon’s creative assuredness since she took the reins from the collaborator with whom she worked for the first two seasons.

This family’s story isn’t simply told in dialogue, but through cinematography centered in feeling. Every frame beams with a golden haze, and some of the most touching sequences are wordless assemblages of images – knickknacks in Sam’s house or an antique store Duke visits, Max’s expressionless face when she realizes a massive choice has been thrust upon her, rows of headstones at the Holllywood Forever cemetery, which has meaning for Sam but, to her children, is just another L.A. landmark.

More than ever, though, it trusts the audience’s intimacy with who these people are by enabling them to grow. This is how we understand why the ordinarily open-minded Sam jokes away the discourse around gendered pronouns or becomes unmoored by suddenly losing things she counted on always being there. She may be the accepting woman kids refer to as Mama Sam, but life is always presenting her with chances to realize how much she doesn’t know.

Sam’s identities as an ex-wife, sister and working woman come into sharper focus in these episodes as she enters a time in her acting career and her life where she realizes her best options will be the ones she makes.

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Sam’s life closely mirrors Adlon’s, which adds a special layer of comedy to a moment when she turns down a real acting job for a chance to build her resume as a director; we can have faith that this will work for Sam because it has for Pamela

It will for us too, as these last looks at the extended Fox family remind us, following wisdom bestowed in the lovely show tune that leads us into it. “Remember, when you’re feeling very small and insecure/ How amazingly unlikely is your birth,” Idle sings, which is much in line with the “Better Things” way of laughing at the random fullness of the fortune that is our existence.

The first two episodes of “Better Things” premiere Monday, Feb. 28 at 10 p.m. on FX and are streaming on Hulu. Watch a trailer for it below, via YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6CMNuEe3Ag

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AnnaLynne McCord says she identifies with Putin “becoming a dictator” while defending her viral poem

Last week, AnnaLynne McCord’s painfully cringeworthy poem addressed to Russian President Vladimir Putin went viral for all the wrong reasons. It received plenty of mocking responses for its self-indulgence, even drawing criticism from Meghan McCain.

Despite the backlash, McCord defends the poem, and once again brings the conversation back around to herself.

“I know how I could easily have moved in the direction of becoming a dictator myself,” McCord told BuzzFeed News. “If certain circumstances of my life were different, were I a little less bent toward healing and more toward vindication, I could have been a darkly powerful person.”

In her two minute-long video, McCord recites a spoken word-style poem claiming that if she had been Putin’s mother, he would “have been so loved” and “held in the arms of joyous light,” which would have been enough to stop him from starting the war.

“Dear President Vladimir Putin,” McCord began her message. “I’m so sorry that I was not your mother.

“If I was your mother/ The world would have been warm/So much laughter and joy/ And nothing would harm,” she continued slowly with dramatic pauses and a concerned gaze. “I can’t imagine the stain/ The soul-stealing pain/ That the little boy you must have seen and believed.”

The post received 23 million views in a single day, horrifying a vast swath of the internet. Even Meghan McCain was shook.

In a tweet posted just a few hours after the video garnered notoriety across the platform, the former “The View” co-host referred to McCord as “this actress lady” and questioned if all Hollywood celebrities were “just out of their minds.”

I’m not sure if this is meant to be a parody or truly everyone in Hollywood is just out of their minds.

But thank you to this actress lady for making me smile for the first time in 24 hours.

Nailed it girl, wars over. https://t.co/T6saCYnEXM

— Meghan McCain (@MeghanMcCain) February 24, 2022

“Nailed it girl, wars over,” McCain concluded.

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On Feb. 23, explosions were first heard in Kyiv shortly after Putin announced his plans to launch a military operation in eastern Ukraine. A few hours later, Russia initiated a full-scale invasion of Ukraine that began in the eastern territory of Donbas. Thousands of Ukrainian civilians have fled their homes and are seeking asylum in nearby European nations. Anti-war protests have also broken out across the streets of Russia.

This isn’t the first time McCord has taken to social media to post an out-of-touch video promoted as a call to action. In May of 2020, McCord directed a similar message to the police officer who senselessly murdered George Floyd.

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Amanda Bynes seeks to end her nine-year conservatorship, which is “no longer necessary”

Amanda Bynes wants to take back control of her own life in 2022.

On Friday, Bynes filed a petition at the Ventura County Superior Court in California to formally end her nine-year conservatorship of both her person and estate. Bynes’ conservatorship was filed by her parents in 2013 shortly after she was placed under psychiatric hold for setting a small fire in a stranger’s driveway. The conservatorship was maintained while Bynes dealt with substance abuse and mental health issues.

According to Page Six, Bynes also filed a capacity declaration on Tuesday with updated medical records from medical practitioners on her current mental state. An official court hearing is scheduled for March 22.

“Amanda wishes to terminate her conservatorship,” her attorney David A. Esquibias said in a statement to PEOPLE. “She believes her condition is improved and protection of the court is no longer necessary.”

Throughout her conservatorship, Bynes frequently took to Twitter to rant about her family, threaten media and gossip outlets and engage in brash feuds with other celebrities. In 2014, Bynes revealed that she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and manic depression.

Four years later, Bynes opened up about her public struggles in an interview with PAPER Magazine.

“My advice to anyone who is struggling with substance abuse would be to be really careful because drugs can really take a hold of your life,” she said. “Everybody is different, obviously, but for me, the mixture of marijuana and whatever other drugs and sometimes drinking really messed up my brain. It really made me a completely different person. I actually am a nice person. I would never feel, say or do any of the things that I did and said to the people I hurt on Twitter.

“Those days of experimenting [with substances] are long over. I’m not sad about it and I don’t miss it because I really feel ashamed of how those substances made me act,” Bynes added. “When I was off of them, I was completely back to normal and immediately realized what I had done — it was like an alien had literally invaded my body. That is such a strange feeling.”

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Amidst it all, Bynes has been pursuing a career in fashion. The “She’s the Man” star graduated cum laude from the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in 2018 with an Associate’s of Art degree in Merchandise Product Development. She’s currently getting her Bachelor’s degree from the same institution.

“The parents are happy, thrilled to get this good news,” attorney Tamar Arminak said in a phone interview with NBC News. “The professionals say she is ready to make her own life choices and decisions and are so proud of her. They 100 percent support her decision to end the conservatorship.”

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Right’s desperate Putin pivot: CPAC derailed by Ukraine invasion, struggles to blame “wokeness”

Political narratives shift constantly, but in more normal times it requires a bit of distance to see the subtle course corrections that politicians and pundits make en route to a new position. The four-day Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) that concluded Sunday afternoon presented a rare opportunity to watch that transformation take place in real time, as if in an exceedingly awkward time-lapse video.

As the most significant annual gathering of American conservatives got underway Thursday, organizers were faced with the unhappy coincidence of their domestic grievance agenda with a history-making foreign threat, as Russia launched its long-anticipated invasion of Ukraine. At the outset, a handful of speakers struck a stridently isolationist stance. Right-wing social media influencer Rogan O’Handley warned that GOP hawks from the “establishment, military-industrial complex” wing of the party would try to convince the crowd that defending Ukraine was in America’s interests, when really, he said, there was no reason to send U.S. troops “to cover up the Biden crime family’s corruption.” Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk agreed, saying he wasn’t “defending dictators,” but adding, “when your own country is falling apart, I don’t want to hear lectures about why we have to send our troops halfway around the world when we are being invaded!”

Other scheduled CPAC speakers had made similar arguments earlier in the week. Bestselling author turned Ohio GOP Senate candidate J.D. Vance told Steve Bannon the previous Friday, “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine.” Right-wing U.K. broadcaster and Brexit booster Nigel Farage, who has long expressed admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin, blamed the European Union’s “territorial expansionism” for provoking the attack.

Former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, in an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, blamed President Biden and NATO for not taking Ukraine’s potential membership in the defense alliance off the table. (Carlson’s and Gabbard’s comments in particular proved such a useful echo of Putin’s own justifications for the invasion that Russian state TV repeatedly broadcast them, with dubbed translation, last week.)

But by the time those three speakers reached the CPAC stage on Friday and Saturday, events on the ground in Ukraine had forced them to change their tune. Vance still complained that he’d unfairly gotten “flack” for suggesting Americans should care more about the opioid crisis than “people 6,000 miles away,” but also released a statement calling the attack a tragedy and charging that “Russia is always at its most bellicose when a globalist sits in the Oval Office.”

Gabbard, in a high-profile speaking slot during the conference’s Saturday night Ronald Reagan dinner, opened with a call to send prayers to Ukraine, before charging the Biden administration with hypocrisy, for wanting to “go to war to spread democracy and freedom while they actively work to undermine our democratic republic and our freedoms right here at home.”

Farage backpedaled furiously in his Saturday speech, admitting that while he’d always thought Putin was a “reasonable” nationalist, it was just possible that wasn’t the case; in any case, the invasion was still Biden’s fault, for giving Putin “nothing to fear.”

That theme was repeated throughout the conference: “Muscular diplomacy” was required to secure peace, but Biden “radiated provocative weakness,” as former Trump acting director of national intelligence Richard Grenell said. Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., argued that “weakness invites the wolves,” and Donald Trump himself, in his Saturday-night stem-winder, protested that “none of this ever would have happened if the election was not rigged and I was the president.”

To this was added another through-line that became a dominant focus of the conference: Biden’s abandonment of Trump’s oil and gas drilling had so enriched Russia that Putin could afford to start a war. In response, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., vowed in his address to introduce legislation to “reopen America’s energy production” this Monday.

Other speakers seemed to retrofit speeches written before the invasion, focused on the conference theme of “Awake Not Woke,” to account for the fast-changing news. Conservative commentator Eric Bolling suggested that the Biden administration’s concern with “being woke” over being “powerful and effective” was responsible for the situation in Ukraine. Or, as Nevada Senate candidate Adam Laxalt said, “If you attack your country, if your elites do not believe in our nation and they tell the rest of the world that we are flawed, and we are damaged, what do you think that tells Vladimir Putin? It tells him it’s the time to march.” Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., succinctly argued that Canada and the U.S. need to be liberated from tyranny as well.

CPAC speakers’ commitment to the culture wars, however, sparked no such ambivalence, and the conference featured an extensive array of McCarthyite descriptions of Democrats, liberals and progressives as the enemy within.

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Sen. Rick Scott of Florida used the language explicitly: “We survived the war of 1812, the Civil War, World War I and World War II, Korea, Vietnam and the Cold War. But today we face the greatest danger we have ever faced: the militant left wing in our country has become the enemy within.” In response, Scott proposed an 11-point plan “to save America,” including a requirement that all school children “learn that America is the greatest country in this world,” forbidding the government from collecting any demographic information about race or ethnicity and declaring socialism “a foreign adversary.”

There was more. From North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, we heard that Democrats are “the real virus.” Farage contended that universities have become “madrassas of Marxism,” creating more “enemies inside.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, basking in the ubiquitous praise of the Sunshine State for having fended off “some Faucian dystopia,” hinted at antisemitic conspiracy theory with his vague but ominous claim that “Wokeness is a form of cultural Marxism” aimed at “tearing at the fabric of our society and trying to replace it with something that will be much, much more sinister.” From scandal-plagued former Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens (now a Senate candidate) came a warning: “The left is actively trying to destroy our country,” and conservatives must “recognize the nature” of their enemy. “The nature of leftism is that it never stops,” Greitens said. “Those who ride the tiger of tyranny, they keep progressing to more and more oppression, because they know that if they step off, the tiger will eat them as well.”

Unsurprisingly, the education wars dominated the conference, meriting multiple dedicated panels as well as mention in almost every major speech. Some of it was bizarre, like “Blexit” founder Candace Owens’ discourse on the origins of the term “mama bear” to call for continued parental crusades against public schools, or her suggestion that critical race theory is an intentional ploy to prevent Black children from learning how to read, as during slavery, so they can more easily be controlled. (As for teaching children about slavery, Sen. Kennedy used a peculiarly passive construction: “Like every other culture in the history of humanity, America caught the disease of slavery, but we beat it back.”)

Much of the CPAC discourse, though, was tactical, with lengthy panel discussions featuring activists from Virginia and Texas who had waged war on their local school boards or taken them over outright. As Ian Prior, an architect of Loudoun County, Virginia’s school board recall campaign, told the crowd, “We’re looking at a moment where we have the potential to build the biggest bloc of single-issue voters in the history of American politics.”

Also unsurprisingly, the conference featured a good deal of COVID skepticism, with numerous calls to “lock” Anthony Fauci “up,” and a contingent of doctors who have become celebrities in the anti-vaccination world, including Peter McCullough, Robert Malone and TV celebrity turned Pennsylvania Senate candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz. McCullough told the roughly 70 percent of the CPAC audience who said they’d had COVID that, “for you, this pandemic is effectively over with.” Conference organizer Mercedes Schlapp, of the American Conservative Union, introduced one panel by coming on stage wearing a mask and saying, “It’s not Mercedes Schlapp, it’s Joy Behar from ‘The View,’ and I wear my mask everywhere,” before theatrically tearing it off and tossing it toward the crowd. Former Trump HUD Secretary Ben Carson said that masking children might lead to “a generation of psychopaths,” while Rep. Matt Gaetz, the embattled Florida Republican surrounded by rumors of illicit sexual conduct, said it would create “a generation of little sociopaths who will act like the Menendez brothers.”

Another recurring focus was the call to restrict voting to a single day — “It’s called Election Day!” said Josh Mandel, Vance’s rival in the Ohio Republican Senate race — and to ban both early voting and most mail-in voting.

Throughout the conference, there was a steady theme of purported conservative victimization at the hands of Democrats, the “deep state,” liberals or “wokeness,” though sometimes the complaints required some research and translation to be intelligible.

Echoing the repeated proclamation of speakers that they, or perhaps everyone in the room, had been labeled a “domestic terrorist” by the Biden administration, Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn claimed that the Department of Homeland Security has called on the public to begin informing on their neighbors, “saying, if you hear anyone who’s speaking out against COVID policies, school policies, let us know.” While that would certainly be alarming, you couldn’t possibly have gathered from Blackburn’s speech that she’s actually referring to a February memo from the agency that described multiple factors of “a heightened threat environment” in the U.S., including online disinformation and conspiracy theories that have sparked calls for violence against immigrants, inspired threats against historically Black colleges and universities, and are part of continuing racially- and religiously-inspired violence like the hostage situation at a Texas synagogue last month. The call to contact authorities was nothing more than the by-now-familiar “see something, say something” language that referenced threats of violence, not expressions of political opinion.

In a Saturday session, conference organizer Matt Schlapp spoke with Tennessee Sen. Bill Hagerty about their work to create a new “First Amendment Fund” to provide funds and legal support to “the canceled.” This meant, first and foremost, Republican staffers on Capitol Hill who have been summoned before the House Jan. 6 committee, along with a former Trump employee now included in a lawsuit brought by Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman against Donald Trump Jr., Rudy Giuliani and other Trump aides, for retaliating against him after his 2019 testimony to Congress. This is an impressive feat of projection: Vindman’s actual lawsuit charges that Trump’s aides spread lies meant to intimidate him (including the claim that he was a Ukrainian spy) and got both him and his twin brother fired from government posts, but Hagerty cast the suit as a Democratic effort to use legal harassment to “cancel” young conservatives and bar them from working in government.

“Who would have thought in America it’s become illegal to be a Republican supporting a Republican president?” Schlapp responded.

In her Saturday night speech, Gabbard matched the tone of her conservative fellow speakers, stressing God-given freedoms, shouting out to parents “in the trenches” of school board fights, and demonstrating a very Republican understanding of what tyranny might be.

“The biggest threat to our country is not coming from some foreign country,” she said. “It is coming from power elites here at home and their co-conspirators in the mainstream media and the security state who are working to undermine our freedoms from within.” Gabbard raised the same Homeland Security memo Blackburn had, arguing that it represented an effort to label all dissent as disinformation. “If you replace the word ‘U.S. government’ with the word ‘church,’ we can see how those in power see themselves as the high priest in a secular theocracy,” under which anyone who disagrees with them are “heretics.”

In much the same spirit as Boebert’s claim that Canadian and American democracies are in dire need of intervention and salvation, Gabbard referred to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as “the autocratic leader in Canada who’s resorted to genuinely authoritarian and tyrannical means to suppress a peaceful mass protest against the power elites there.”

There were a few isolated calls for moderation, as when Farage gingerly suggested that Republicans stop focusing on the “negative, backward-looking message” of a stolen election, or when COVID conspiracy theorist Alex Berenson pleaded with CPAC attendees to “Stop trying to ban books. … If you stand for free speech, you have to stand for free speech no matter if you don’t like what’s being said.”

But those arguments were drowned out by declarations, delivered like a loyalty oath, that the election was rigged; that “radical librarians” are “grooming” children; and that the most vicious threat Americans face, once again, is right next door.

Scallions and green onions aren’t the same . . . or are they?

Even though they have different names, scallions and green onions are actually the same vegetable. Spring onions, on the other hand, are a classic third-wheel situation. They’re entirely different. Scallions and green onions are the same type of onion, just sold under different names. Both are part of the genus Allium family (which includes other greens like leeks, garlic, onions, and shallots) and you can use scallions in recipes that call for green onions, and vice versa.

So where do spring onions fit into this? They’re similar. In fact, so similar that after a few too many bartender-made cocktails, you might start to confuse them with scallions and green onions. But one thing that distinguishes them from other onions and scallions is the large white bulb that resembles almost a small cippolini onion. And like those petite onions, the white bulb on spring onions is edible, and has a milder onion flavor.

Its name doesn’t just indicate its seasonality; like a spring chicken, spring onions are literally young onions, plucked earlier, which means that they aren’t so bitter and, well, onion-y tasting.

Ahead, learn how to cook with scallions, green onions, and spring onions (and consider this permission to substitute one for the other at your own convenience).

Scallion Recipes

Skillet Scallions from Edna Lewis

Scallions can be, and deserve to be, so much more than a garnish. This incredible Southern side dish calls for just two ingredients — scallions and butter — so that the stringy green onions can shine.

Cheesy Potato Soup with Peppered Scallions

OK, yes, you could technically say that the scallions here are just a garnish. But they’re a good garnish that’s so much more than thin slices of scallions in their raw form. Here, they’re cooked down with butter, the juice and zest of lemons, butter and olive oil, salt, and lots and lots of pepper.

Spicy Scallion Pasta with Ricotta

Pasta primavera usually includes a bevy of different seasonal vegetables like eggplant, tomatoes, onions, and asparagus. But who needs all of that when you have crisp scallions by the bundle on hand? Here, they are sliced thin and sautéed with garlic and Calabrian chili paste before being tossed with the paste.

Scallion Star Bread

This intricately braided bread has scallions peeking through each crevice. Though the star shape is a nod to Christmas, there’s no reason you have to wait to make this.

Spaghetti Pasta with Charred Scallion Sauce

“An extremely untraditional riff on the Italian aglio e olio. Instead of garlic, we’re using scallions. And we’re using a lot of them — three bunches to be exact,” writes food editor Emma Laperruque.

Scallion Pancakes

Everyone will enjoy this homemade riff on a classic Chinese appetizer. Don’t believe us? Our readers call this recipe their all-time favorite pancake preparation.

Green onion recipes

Grilled Green Onion Dip (Charred Scallion Dip)

Told ya you can swap one for the other! Scallions (or green onions, for those in the know) is a garlickier, onionier, and all-around simpler version of French onion dip.

“Pizza” Focaccia with Tomato Sauce and Green Onion

Is your heart pulling you in two different directions (being raw or roasted)? This focaccia recipe is the ultimate lesson in compromise, as green onions appear both ways on ways on top of a saucy slice of dough.

10 feel-good snacks to pick up at Trader Joe’s

New year, same me…at least when it comes to my obsession with Trader Joe’s. The experience of shopping for food at the beloved grocery store chain is so much more than a necessity — it’s a never-ending scavenger hunt to find products I’ve never tried before.

But sometimes it’s easy to get a little too carried away with the excitement, resulting in moments of scarfing down entire bags of Patio Potato Chips and Smashing S’mores in one sitting. And then good ol’ indigestion inevitably comes knocking at my door.

I’m not here to tell people how or what to eat, but I do know that January marks the start of many people resolving to make more mindful eating choices. While Patio Potato Chips and Smashing S’mores aren’t going anywhere any time soon (at least for me), it’s important to note that TJ’s also boasts a bevy of wonderful snack options that come with the added benefit of vitamins, nutrients, and minerals.

Here are 10 of my all-time favorites, both new and old, to add to your list if you’re seeking a few more healthful, feel-good alternatives to snack on with abandon.

1. Trader Joe’s Contemplates Inner Peas

Pass the peas, please. But first, bake them and roll them in salt to create one of Trader Joe’s latest high-fiber home runs. These are not only delicious right out of the bag, but can also be dipped into a tzatziki or French onion dip for a mid-afternoon snack that will hold you over until dinnertime.

2. Organic Creamy Cashew Cultured Yogurt Alternative

Greek yogurt is a fantastic base for easy-to-make parfaits and fruit smoothies, but not everyone can stomach dairy products. This just-released, cashew-based alternative takes the richness and tang you love from the beloved Mediterranean export, but replaces its milk with nuts and a decadent coconut cream. So moo-ve over, lactose — there’s a new plant-based breakfast staple in town.

3. Thai Lime & Chile Cashews (or Almonds)

Plain nuts can get boring. Spicy Thai lime nuts with baked makrut leaves and a Tom Yum powder offer a zesty, citrusy departure from the norm, making them your new must-try handful for an irresistible snack on the go. There really is no complex nut seasoning like this on shelves, so consider the munching experience special and authentically Thai (in fact, TJ’s sources the bag directly from the country).

4. Organic Chia Bar

Ch-ch-ch-chia. No, not the famous infomercial plant in your windowsill that has given Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors a run for its money. I’m talking about its Omega 3-heavy seeds you can eat. Trader Joe’s takes full advantage of the trendy ingredient by putting it in a granola and brown rice bar with the addition of almonds, pumpkin seeds, and dried cranberries — a nutrition-packed upgrade to any chocolate-laden candy bar.

5. Crunchy Curls

These crunchy curls make a wonderful protein-packed alternative to standard potato chips. The mighty lentil, its primary ingredient, is also chock-full of fiber to prevent your tummy from grumbling around the 2:00 p.m. mark, if you pair them with a lunch salad or sandwich.

6. Seasoned Kale Chips

I know, I know. Kale chips are so 2012. But have you had a kale chip pressed with cashew butter and tahini? Chances are likely that you have not, which means you owe it to yourself to give these nutty, baked greens a try. Just be sure to brush your teeth afterwards — the leaves stick to your enamel and can make for an embarrassing social situation (not that I know from personal experience or anything).

7. Popcorn with Herbs & Spices

Fun-to-eat popcorn has always found a permanent spot on most nutritionists’ lists of good-for-you snacks. Delve into these herb and spice-coated kernels that deliver on bold flavor and you’ll see why.

8. Crispy Crunchy Broccoli Florets

If you were the kid who bleh-ed at broccoli, these florets will blow your mind. They’re oven-baked to cut down on broccoli’s natural bitterness, while also accentuating an earthy taste that doesn’t skimp on crunch. Not only will you nosh on these throughout the day, but you’ll also be adding them to soups, stews, and even salads as a crouton replacement.

9. Gluten-Free Norwegian Crispbread

Sunflower and sesame seeds make this whole grain crispbread low on carbs, but high in healthy fats. Dip these in hummus, nut butters, or a ranch made from the aforementioned cashew yogurt. Or simply enjoy a few on their own for a texture-diverse snack sans the hard-to-pronounce ingredients you find in many crackers and loaves of bread.

10. Gone Bananas and Gone Berry Crazy

This heart-healthy, dark chocolate-covered frozen fruit treat had its big PR moment a few years ago with many food media outlets praising its simplicity and taste, but it’s still going strong in the frozen food aisle and worthy of a mention. Pro tip: Let them sit out for a few minutes before serving — the fruit will slightly melt to create a frozen yogurt-type consistency that’ll even give Pinkberry a run