Why Medicare doesn’t pay for rapid at-home Covid tests

What group is especially vulnerable to the ravages of covid-19 even if fully vaccinated and boosted? Seniors. And who will have an especially tough time getting free at-home covid tests under the Biden administration’s plan? Yes, seniors.

As of Jan. 15, private insurers will cover the cost of eight at-home rapid covid tests each month for their members — for as long as the public health emergency lasts.

Finding the tests will be hard enough, but Medicare beneficiaries face an even bigger hurdle: The administration’s new rule doesn’t apply to them.

It turns out that the laws governing traditional Medicare don’t provide for coverage of self-administered diagnostic tests, which is precisely what the rapid antigen tests are and why they are an important tool for containing the pandemic.

“While at this time original Medicare cannot pay for at-home tests, testing remains a critical tool to help mitigate the spread of covid,” a statement from the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said. Medicaid and CHIP cover at-home covid tests, with no cost to beneficiaries, based on a 2021 Biden administration mandate.

Medicare patients are left to seek free tests other ways, including through the administration’s new website, covidtests.gov, and at community centers. The Medicare program does cover rapid antigen or PCR testing done by a lab without charging beneficiaries, but there’s a hitch: It’s limited to one test per year unless someone has a doctor’s order.

More needs to be done, advocates say.

The administration has changed some Medicare rules during the pandemic, including improving access to telehealth services and nursing home care, said David Lipschutz, associate director and senior policy attorney at the Center for Medicare Advocacy.

“We know that the Medicare program has significant flexibility relative to the public health emergency, and it has demonstrated it has the ability to alter the rules,” Lipschutz said. “We think they should find the flexibility to offer the covid at-home tests for free.”

Q: Why can’t the Medicare program reimburse beneficiaries for the over-the-counter tests or pick up the tab at the pharmacy as commercial health plans will do?

The services the Medicare program pays for are spelled out in federal law.

“It generally excludes over-the-counter things,” said Casey Schwarz, senior counsel for education and federal policy at the Medicare Rights Center, an advocacy group.

The public health emergency was recently extended 90 days, through mid-April, and the administration could yet decide to expand coverage. Some lawmakers in Congress are urging the administration to cover the tests.

“Demanding Medicare recipients — nearly one-fifth the population of the United States — to foot the bill out-of-pocket for at-home tests is unfair, inefficient, and will cost lives,” said Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr. (D-N.Y.), who has urged the Biden administration to expand Medicare coverage to include them.

It may not be a simple change, as these tests appear to fall into coverage gaps. Medicare Part A covers hospitalization, and Part B generally covers provider-based services like doctor visits and lab tests. Part D covers drugs.

“So there’s a little bit of a question of where this type of benefit would fit,” Schwarz said.

People in private plans sometimes pay upfront for services and then are reimbursed by their health plan. But that’s not how Medicare works. The program pays providers, not beneficiaries. So that’s another wrinkle that would have to be ironed out.

Q: So how can a Medicare beneficiary get free at-home covid tests?

There are a couple of options. This week, the Biden administration launched a website, covidtests.gov, where anyone, including Medicare beneficiaries, can order free at-home covid tests. One billion tests eventually will be available. Each residence initially can receive four tests.

Four tests is a far cry from the eight monthly tests that people with private insurance can be reimbursed for. But it’s better than nothing, experts say, especially when preventing the spread of covid requires repeated testing over a period of days.

“Four tests is not a lot of tests,” said Juliette Cubanski, deputy director of the program on Medicare policy at KFF. “This is one of the most at-risk populations, and to not have the opportunity to buy at-home tests and get reimbursed puts this whole population on their back foot.”

The Biden administration is also providing up to 50 million additional free at-home tests to community health centers and Medicare-certified health clinics.

But 50 million tests won’t even provide one test apiece to the 62 million Medicare beneficiaries, Lipschutz said.

About 4 in 10 Medicare beneficiaries are in Medicare Advantage managed-care plans. These private plans may offer free at-home tests to members, but it’s not required. Enrollees should check with their plans to see whether that’s an option.

Q: What other free covid testing options are available to Medicare beneficiaries?

In traditional Medicare, beneficiaries can get rapid antigen or PCR diagnostic tests without paying anything out-of-pocket if the test is ordered by a doctor or other health care provider and performed by a lab.

The federal government has set up more than 10,000 free pharmacy testing sites across the country that Medicare beneficiaries can visit as well.

With the recent extension of the public health emergency, the situation is fluid, and Medicare beneficiaries may yet get coverage for at-home covid tests that’s comparable to what privately insured people now have.

“This is all a moving target,” Lipschutz said.

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

Joe Rogan made anti-vax Dr. Robert Malone a right-wing media star: Was that the point all along?

Last Sunday afternoon, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, former TV producer and anti-vaccination activist Del Bigtree bellowed a warning: When the comeuppance arrives for what he described as authorities’ mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, “Unlike the Nuremberg trials that only tried those doctors that destroyed the lives of human beings, we’re going to come after the press,” too.

He wasn’t alone. Although the chief villain of Sunday’s anti-vaccination Defeat the Mandates rally was probably Dr. Anthony Fauci — depicted in a jail cell on multiple rally-goers’ signs — the media wasn’t far behind. Texas ophthalmologist Dr. Richard Urso led the crowd in a call-and-response that began with, “Does anyone trust the news media?” An Idaho pathologist who came under professional investigation for allegedly claiming that COVID vaccines actually cause COVID disease goaded the crowd into chanting “Do your job!” at the press platform behind them. And virologist Dr. Richard Malone concluded his warning that vaccines might leave children with brain damage or fertility problems with a rare note of promise, saying, “I sincerely believe we can break through the effects of the madness of crowds, the mass formation,” because the “dark winter … pushed by fear-mongers in the press is failing to materialize.”

Perhaps only second to anti-vax hero Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Malone was the man most in the crowd had come to see. Amid the Gadsden flags and “healers not dealers” signs, at least one attendee carried a poster reading “Malone/McCullough 2024,” fantasy-drafting Malone and his anti-vax colleague, Dr. Peter McCullough, as a ticket for the next presidential election.

These days, Malone is probably best known as the “mass formation” guy who got kicked off Twitter and promptly went viral on Joe Rogan’s podcast — which, with an estimated 11 million viewers per episode, has a larger audience than most news outlets. But before last year, Malone was best known as an immunologist and virologist who contributed early research towards the development of the mRNA vaccine technology that underlies some of the COVID-19 vaccines in widespread use today. That is, if Malone was known at all, which turns out to be a key piece of the psychological backstory in understanding how he became what he is today. That also helps explain why, amid all the other reasons the big anti-vax rally made headlines this week — its cynical invocation of Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington; Kennedy’s strategically inflammatory suggestion that unvaccinated Americans have it worse than Anne Frank during the Holocaust; how it drew Proud Boys and groypers together with anti-vaxxers in what’s quickly becoming a unified, far-right machine — Defeat the Mandates is a media story too.

Over the last year or so, Malone has loudly and repeatedly complained that he was “written out of [the] history” of the COVID vaccines that have now saved millions of lives. As Tom Bartlett reported in an Atlantic profile of Malone last August, the doctor wrote multiple, vaguely threatening letters to another scientist he felt had unfairly received more credit, and went on a conservative media tour to promote himself as the true “inventor” of mRNA technology. “To say that Malone remains bitter over his perceived mistreatment doesn’t do justice to his sense of aggrievement,” Bartlett writes. “He calls what happened to him ‘intellectual rape.'”

Since then, PolitiFact’s Bill McCarthy adds, Malone has “written himself back” into that history, “but as someone who has made inaccurate claims that cast doubt about the very vaccines he insists would not exist without him.”

He did that largely through right-wing media, where Malone has apparently found the public recognition he long felt he deserved. “The high degree of skepticism among Trump supporters and the right about vaccines and COVID-19 creates an audience for folks who, for whatever reason, haven’t gotten as much attention as they wish they had,” said A.J. Bauer, a media professor at the University of Alabama and co-editor of the 2019 book “News on the Right: Studying Conservative News Cultures.” “There’s this second-tier celebrity network of people you may never have heard of, but within the right-wing social media sphere, they’re huge.”

Most notably, in August, Malone went on Steve Bannon’s show “War Room: Pandemic,” to argue that vaccines lead to worse COVID infections than those suffered by the unvaccinated and to air the groundless claim that the FDA had approved different versions of the vaccines than those being offered to the public. On Twitter, where Malone grew a following of around 500,000, he shared a torrent of disinformation, including, last fall, a video that falsely suggested a high school athlete who died in 2013 was killed by a COVID vaccination.

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In late December, Twitter banned Malone for violating its policy against pandemic misinformation. But the next day, Malone made his scheduled appearance on Rogan’s podcast, wearing a tie festooned with images of the spiky COVID-19 virus and making a startling new claim: A third of Americans are living in a state of “mass formation psychosis,” wherein isolated and anxious people are “literally … hypnotized and can be led anywhere” by their leaders.

After Malone’s deplatforming, the three-hour Rogan interview took on the air of forbidden knowledge, particularly after YouTube removed the video in early January for violating its own misinformation policies. Clips of it were shared widely by right-wing figures like former Trump White House aide Seb Gorka; a Texas Republican congressman entered the show’s full transcript into the Congressional Record as a protest against “big Pharma, big media” censorship; and Malone embarked on a new media tour, appearing on multiple Fox News shows, Infowars and smaller operations that target niche audiences like the Christian right. On one such outlet, an ebullient Malone pointed out a meme swapping his head onto the body of Dos Equis’ brand character “The Most Interesting Man in the World” (“I don’t always lose half a million followers on Twitter, but when I do, I gain 50 million views on Rogan”), noted that his Substack had “just exploded,” and gloated that, in ousting him,Twitter had badly miscalculated “from a strict media standpoint.”

“I think the Malone development over the last couple months is a really expository case study about how right-wing media works,” said Madeline Peltz, a senior researcher at the liberal media watchdog group Media Matters for America. “Bannon has this unique talent to pull people out of seemingly nowhere and turn them into right-wing media celebrities.”

Malone has evidently returned the favor, in helping introduce new people to a broader right-wing agenda. In the days leading up to the Defeat the Mandates rally, notes Jared Holt, a resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, “Malone made several appearances on hyperpartisan right-wing media programs, many of which have regularly peddled vaccine misinformation that is more blatant and egregious than the general vaccine hesitancy that Malone himself advances,” Holt said. “So audiences seeking content featuring Malone may find themselves in the misinformation-soaked swamps where those programs exist online, and in turn could be exposed to more intense and harmful falsehoods.”

Over the last few years, political scientists and media researchers have charged that right-wing media has evolved into a separate and unaccountable ecosystem that functions as a “propaganda feedback loop,” providing its audience with news and opinions that reconfirm what they already believe, while simultaneously making them distrustful of any outside media source that might serve as a check on disinformation. In the 2018 book “Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation and Radicalization in American Politics,” authors Hal Roberts, Robert Faris and Yochai Benkler describe this as “identity-confirming news” that attacks all potential sources of error correction as too biased to be worth considering. As journalist David Roberts has noted, that self-perpetuating cycle was pioneered in part by Rush Limbaugh in the early days of “Climategate,” when the demagogic radio host told listeners that the U.S. was divided into two universes: One was a lie, controlled by “the four corners of deceit” (media, government, academia and science), and the other was “where we are,” and “where reality reigns supreme.”

The last few years have set that cycle spinning faster. And Malone added to its momentum on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” when, in addition to proclaiming that “what we’re experiencing is coordinated media warfare the level of which we have never seen before,” he charged that the Trusted News Initiative, a media-technology partnership founded first to prevent the spread of election disinformation, and then expanded to address pandemic disinformation, is the propaganda arm of the powers-that-be. “So if CDC says the world is flat, then the world is flat, and there will be no discussion about whether or not the world is flat,” Malone told Rogan.

As it happened, flat-earthers got a warmer reception at Sunday’s rally, where event emcee JP Sears said, “I kind of feel like a flat-earther believing in natural immunity. No offense, flat-earthers.”

But the effects of Malone’s variety of delegitimation can be immense. Since mid-January, close to 1,300 doctors, other medical professionals and scientists signed an open letter to Spotify, which now hosts Rogan’s podcast, asking the audio platform to clarify its policies on spreading misinformation. But that expression of expert opinion is no match for the power of Google search results, where five of the first 10 returns for “Trusted News Initiative” currently lead to anti-vaccination content, often citing Malone.

While Malone has gained the prominence he long sought through right-wing media, he’s also driving new audiences toward platforms that might otherwise have far more limited appeal. When Malone told Rogan he was joining the right-wing Twitter-alternative Gettr, founded by former Trump spokesman Jason Miller, Rogan followed suit (if not without complications), allegedly bringing more than a million new users with him. At Media Matters, Peltz reports that Miller subsequently launched a victory tour of his own, including a Jan. 7 appearance on Infowars, where he thanked Alex Jones and his followers for helping Gettr reach a level where it could attract the likes of Rogan and Malone. Not to be outdone, in early January a competing right-wing social media platform, Gab, issued promotional posts and emails advertising that Malone fans could find the doctor and his Rogan interview on their site, too.

This kind of self-accelerating cycle has the potential to draw more people into Gab- and Gettr-style politics, warn media experts. While Malone’s appearances on Fox or Infowars are largely preaching to the choir, Peltz and Bauer say that Rogan’s show is different. Unlike figures like the late Limbaugh or Sean Hannity, whose audiences are already committed to right-wing politics, Bauer says that Rogan and his avid fans tend to see themselves as “independents” or iconoclasts, even as right-wing ideology transparently informs many of Rogan’s programming choices. That fig leaf can make Rogan’s elevation of right-wing figures that much more dangerous.

Already, prior to Rogan’s 2020 Spotify deal, research such as Becca Lewis’ 2018 Data & Society Report, “Alternative Influence: Broadcasting the Reactionary Right on Youtube,” found that libertarian and mainstream conservative shows with mass appeal, like Rogan’s, were easy entry points for radicalization, especially by way of a YouTube algorithm that led viewers, within a few video recommendations, from Rogan-esque self-help content into far-right or white nationalist fare.

With or without YouTube’s infamous algorithm, the right-wing media cycle exemplified by Malone’s recent celebrity shows that the wheel keeps on spinning. “There’s a lot of people on Gettr who have been deplatformed from mainstream platforms. Infowars is everywhere on Gettr. So you’re going to get stuff there that you’re not going to get on mainstream platforms,” said Peltz. “If Rogan is bringing people over there, then you’re sparking that cycle again, of being a gateway to more hardcore ideologies.”

Read more on America’s overheating vaccine wars:

Former Oath Keeper and Jan. 6 protester launches effort to “audit” Michigan election

Two Trump supporters who attended the “Stop the Steal” rally ahead of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, including a former Oath Keeper, are behind a ballot initiative campaign that would force yet another “forensic” audit, this time of the 2020 presidential election in Michigan.

Jon Rocha, a Republican congressional candidate and the president of Audit MI, and Jon-Paul Rutan, the campaign’s co-founder and treasurer, both attended the protest ahead of the riot. Both men deny going inside the Capitol and say they did nothing wrong. They have not been charged with any crimes.

Rutan told Salon in a phone interview that he is a former member of the Oath Keepers, though he said his membership with the group lapsed in 2020.

“I paid membership, I got a sticker,” he said. “Boy, that makes me dangerous.”

Eleven members of the Oath Keepers were charged earlier this month with seditious conspiracy for their alleged plot surrounding the certification of President Joe Biden’s election win. All have pleaded not guilty. Rutan dismissed the arrests, arguing that the Justice Department only filed the charges after Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, questioned why the DOJ had not charged anyone with insurrection or sedition.

Rutan told Salon that he attended the Capitol demonstration because he “sensed that there was something wrong with the vote.” He said he hoped the demonstration would give Congress more time to “investigate and then see if there was any fraud.”

Rutan said he saw no violence on Jan. 6 and criticized the media for conflating actual rioters, who he said deserved to be punished, with peaceful protesters who did nothing wrong. He argued that it is similarly wrong when conservatives conflate Black Lives Matter protesters with looters and rioters.

Rutan said he was contacted by the FBI after attending the rally.

“I’m here talking to you and I’m not in jail,” he said. “Because I didn’t do anything wrong.”

Rocha did not respond to a request for comment. Bridge Michigan previously reported that he was at the Capitol on Jan. 6 before launching a primary campaign against Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., who voted to impeach Trump after the riot. Rocha told the outlet that he was “too far away” from the Capitol to see what was happening and “didn’t even know anybody had broken into the Capitol” until driving away.

Rocha has denied any knowledge of Rutan’s Oath Keeper ties but has said he has no have a problem with the group, comparing it to being a member of Black Lives Matter in an interview with the Daily Dot, which first reported links between the Capitol riot and the Michigan ballot initiative. Rocha insisted that the audit initiative was “nonpartisan,” while also accusing Michigan officials of refusing to accept 10,000 affidavits from people who claimed they saw something suspicious during the 2020 election.

“That is an absolute travesty, and I don’t care which party you’re a part of,” he said.

The Michigan Board of State Canvassers last week approved summary language for the Audit MI petition last week, though the petition itself must still be approved before the group can begin collecting signatures to get it on the November ballot. The petition would force a “forensic” audit of the 2020 race, even though repeated investigations have found no evidence of any significant irregularities, and would also create criteria to trigger such audits in future elections, according to the Detroit News.

Democrats slammed the campaign as an effort to undermine elections.

“Let’s be clear. This movement that spurred the violent and deadly insurrection on our nation’s Capitol and resulted in Michigan’s vote tallies getting audited over 250 times to date, has nothing to do with uncovering fraud,” Lavora Barnes, chair of the Michigan Democratic Party, said in a statement. “It’s about dismantling reality and democracy alike in order to install, rather than elect, our future cycles of leaders.” Barnes called Rutan the “Audit MI ringleader and insurrectionist,” saying he was “demanding an Arizona-style audit despite it ultimately netting fewer votes for the candidate these rabid conspiracy theorists are still trying to flip 2020 for and costing taxpayers millions. This pursuit fueled by baseless lies will never end and is dangerous to the future of our state and democracy.”

This ballot initiative may never actually make it before the voters, according to Ingham County Clerk Barb Byrum, a former Democratic state lawmaker. A quirk in Michigan’s constitution allows the state legislature — currently dominated by Republicans — to enact ballot initiatives by majority vote, with no possibility of veto, once an initiative gathers roughly 340,000 signatures from voters. Republicans are now trying to enact voting restrictions in similar fashion, in an effort to circumvent Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s almost certain veto.

“The only reason that would go on the ballot is if the legislature voted it down,” Byrum told Salon.

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The push for new voting laws comes even after a Republican-led investigation by the state legislature found “no evidence of widespread or systemic fraud,” and even called for legal action against those that used false claims about the election to “raise money or publicity for their own ends.” The state also completed 250 election audits involving 1,300 Republican, Democratic and nonpartisan clerks, all of which found no improprieties or errors in the election results. Other states have similarly found no evidence of widespread fraud, including the ill-fated “forensic audit” in Arizona’s Maricopa County.

“Yet calls persist from those who have been lied to and taken advantage of by partisan state legislators, national figures, and others for unofficial, illegitimate reviews of the election results,” Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said in a statement. “Over a year into this grift their goal is now clear. They no longer want only to change the outcome of the 2020 election, but to also undermine citizens’ faith in our democracy and dissuade them from being engaged and informed voters in future elections. This small group of grifters and wealthy supporters is pursuing a political strategy that threatens the survival of our democracy, and our nation.”

Byrum said she is not surprised that the latest effort is led by Trump supporters who were at the Capitol last January, noting that Rutan, who has run unsuccessfully for sheriff in the past, has a history of promoting conspiracy theories.

“I’m not surprised, as all indications are that he is a conspiracy believer and a proponent of the Big Lie,” she said.

The Capitol insurrection last Jan. 6 came two months after the presidential election, and after Trump administration officials, the Justice Department and countless state and local election officials and judges had reported finding no evidence of any kind of fraud that could have affected the outcome.

Rutan, however, insists that he remains agnostic on that point. “I don’t know if there was or wasn’t” fraud,” he said. “Nobody can say whether there was or wasn’t.” He does not consider the 250 audits conducted by the state of Michigan legitimate, he said. The only “satisfactory” form of audit, Rutan contended, would involve going through the poll books to determine if “more people voted than what we have on the books.”

That particular conspiracy theory has been floated many times about many different locations, particularly on right-wing media. Actual turnout data shows there were no instances where more people voted than were registered in any jurisdiction, setting aside a handful of minor reporting errors that were later corrected.

“There’s no evidence because there was no fraud,” Byrum said, adding that hundreds of audits and recounts have proven that the November 2020 election results are accurate. “It is so frustrating that with all of the evidence presented, these conspiracy believers refuse to admit that they’re wrong and refuse to admit that the results are accurate, and that Joe Biden is the president.”

Rutan argued that the push to investigate the election is no different from the Justice Department’s investigation into allegations of collusion between Trump and Russia.

“We humored the Democrats when they said there was a problem with the 2016 election,” he said. “We humored them because we need to investigate if people have concerns about that.”

There is not much public appetite to spend taxpayer dollars on endless investigations of an election that happened 14 months ago, and the Audit MI initiative would allow private donations to fund the audit, as did to the Arizona audit. Meanwhile, Republicans are simultaneously pushing the Secure MI Vote initiative, which would ban election clerks from accepting private donations to help conduct elections, as many did in 2020 amid worker and resource shortages caused by the pandemic.

“Funding has been drained from the Bureau of Elections, municipal funding has been decreased,” Byrum said. “All of this funds local clerks and our elections.”

Those concerned about election integrity, she argued, should instead listen to the clerks that actually administer the elections.

“Local clerks have made requests to the legislature to assist, but the Republicans continue to push other alleged election reforms that would make election administration more difficult, make voting more difficult, and not any more secure,” she said. “It seems as though Republicans in Michigan — and this is probably true in many other states — care not what election administrators want or need but rather what their base desires and demands.”

Read more on the Republican voter-suppression campaign in Michigan and nationwide:

“No military solution” on Ukraine: Progressives in Congress demand diplomacy

Reps. Pramila Jayapal and Barbara Lee, two top members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, implored the Biden administration on Wednesday to urgently pursue a diplomatic outcome in Ukraine, warning that “there is no military solution” to surging tensions with Russia.

“Diplomacy needs to be the focus,” Jayapal, D-Wash., who chairs the CPC, and Lee, D-Calif., the head of the caucus’ Peace and Security Taskforce, said in a statement.

While voicing support for the Biden administration’s efforts to “extend and deepen the dialogue” with Russia amid fears of a disastrous war involving two nuclear-armed nations, the two progressive lawmakers raised alarm over the flow of U.S. arms into Ukraine and the prospect of American troops being deployed to Eastern Europe.

“We have significant concerns that new troop deployments … and a flood of hundreds of lethal weapons will only raise tensions and increase the chance of miscalculation,” Jayapal and Lee said as their party’s leadership planned to fast-track legislation authorizing $500 million in U.S. military aid to Ukraine.

The pair also warned against imposing “sweeping and indiscriminate sanctions” on Russia, arguing such a tactic would do more harm than good.

“In past crises, where events are moving quickly and intelligence is unclear, vigorous, delicate diplomacy is essential to de-escalation,” the lawmakers said. “We call upon our colleagues to allow the administration to find a diplomatic way out of this crisis.”

Jayapal and Lee’s statement came shortly before the U.S. on Wednesday delivered a written response to Russia’s security demands on Ukraine and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), an alliance Ukraine may be looking to join. Russia sees the admission of Ukraine into NATO as a serious security threat.

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As the Associated Press reported, “Moscow has demanded guarantees that NATO will never admit the country and other ex-Soviet nations as members and that the alliance will roll back troop deployments in other former Soviet bloc nations.”

“Some of these, like the membership pledge, are nonstarters for the U.S. and its allies, creating a seemingly intractable stalemate that many fear can only end in a war,” AP noted.

While the details of the U.S. response to Russia have not been made public, Secretary of State Antony Blinken indicated Wednesday that the Biden administration did not make any concessions to Moscow’s top demands, which are laid out in a draft security pact.

“We make clear that there are core principles that we are committed to uphold and defend, including Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and the right of states to choose their own security arrangements and alliances,” said Blinken, who met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in person last week.

Lavrov, for his part, told reporters Wednesday that “if the West continues its aggressive course, Moscow will take the necessary retaliatory measures.”

“We won’t allow our proposals to be drowned in endless discussions,” he added.

Read more on the Russia-Ukraine crisis and the threat of war:

The road to Jan. 6: How 50 years of violent white nationalism inspired the Oath Keepers

The Jan. 13 filing of seditious conspiracy charges against 11 members of the Oath Keepers militia is one of the darkest and most important chapters in the history of right-wing extremism.

The government case opens a window into the comically dangerous world of paranoid coup plotters who stormed the Capitol last Jan. 6. It shows how the Oath Keepers acted as a bridge between far-right extremists and average Trump supporters. The case sheds new light on how the “war on terror” led directly to Jan. 6 by stoking nativism, racism, and Islamophobia and created a huge pool of angry veterans ripe for recruitment by the Oath Keepers.

Most significant, the case shows how the Oath Keepers almost fulfilled the decades-long plotting by violent white nationalists to overthrow the government.

At the center of the conspiracy is Oath Keepers founder and leader Stewart Rhodes. In effect, he organized an insurrection within the government itself. He recruited police and soldiers armed with a zealous faith in the Constitution to wage a “bloody revolution” against a tyrannical government they believed was subverting the Constitution. Instead, the Oath Keepers find themselves accused of trying to violently overthrow the constitutional order.

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The Oath Keepers, Proud Boys and loosely organized Three Percenter militia, are considered the main instigators of violence among thousands of Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol. But with 566 extremist anti-government groups and 169 active militias around the country as of 2020, how did the Oath Keepers, once ridiculed as “keyboard warriors,” become the tip of the spear for Jan. 6?

Tea Party Days

The Oath Keepers began with a blog post. In early 2008, Rhodes fantasized Americans would rise up to stop President “Hitlery” Clinton from imposing martial law, confiscating guns, dragging off patriots to internment camps, and with the public defenseless, ordering soldiers to “shoot old women and little children.” That post caught the attention of Tea Party activists when they burst on the scene weeks after Obama took office. On April 19, 2009, Rhodes turned his fantasy into reality at Lexington Common in Massachusetts. He held the Oath Keepers founding “muster” on the same spot and date when the first shots were fired in the American Revolution 234 years earlier. The date is deeply symbolic to the extreme right. It is also the anniversary of the fiery end to the Waco siege, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the execution of Richard Wayne Snell, a fellow traveler with the ultraviolent Posse Comitatus.

Rhodes thrived in the hothouse of hate media, earning praise from Pat Buchanan, Glenn Beck, and Lou Dobbs. He found a powerful megaphone on the Alex Jones Show with dozens of appearances and set his sights on the mainstream. On July 4, 2009, Rhodes held swearing-ins for members at 30 Tea Party rallies across the country. But Rhodes wasn’t interested in town halls, emailing, and voting.

Rhodes was recruiting police and soldiers to resist orders they saw as unconstitutional. They recited an oath he adopted from the one military officers and soldiers swear “to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” They also pledged to a “Declaration of Orders We Will NOT Obey” to “prevent the destruction of American liberty.” The Oath Keepers stood apart from other militias popping up around the country: Only current or retired police, soldiers, or first responders qualified as full members.

Based on leaks of Oath Keepers databases, Rhodes’ efforts paid off with 25,000 members who joined by 2015. Some 500 members identified as having police or military experience as of 2021. Rhodes’ apocalyptic vision came to be on Jan. 6. So far at least 134 insurrectionists out of some 700 charged with crimes have been identified as current or former military personnel or police officers.

The Oath Keepers was part of the surge in the antigovernment Patriot movement during Obama’s first three years in office. The Southern Poverty Law Center recorded an eight-fold increase in “conspiracy-minded groups that see the federal government as their primary enemy.” David Neiwert, who wrote the book on the Patriot movement In God’s Country describes its mindset as an “ultranationalistic and selective populism which seeks to return the nation to its ‘constitutional’ roots — that is, a system based on white Christian male rule.”

In leading the first violent coup in American history, the Oath Keepers can trace their success back to how violent white nationalism has gone mainstream over the last 50 years.

The Roots of Extremism

The Patriot movement did not appear out of thin air. It grew out of Posse Comitatus, which nurtured the twisted branches of today’s far-right extremism. Founded in 1971 by Bill Gale, a malingering former Army Lieutenant Colonel, Posse Comitatus advocated for armed insurrection. The son of a Russian Jew who fled pogroms, Gale was a preacher in the viciously anti-Semitic, white nationalist, and anti-communist Christian Identity movement.

Posse Comitatus went on to spawn militias, “constitutional sheriffs” who claim they are the highest law in the land, “sovereign citizens” who reject federal authority, and “common law grand juries” that claim the power to arrest and try public officials. In 2016, each one of these types of extremists converged at the Bundy occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge — including the Oath Keepers and other militias.

According to Daniel Levitas, author of The Terrorist Next Door, Posse Comitatus “embraced Identity theology; preached its unique form of constitutional fundamentalism; opposed taxes, government, and gun control; promoted countless conspiracy theories; and reveled in all things racist and anti-Semitic.” It breathed life back into Klan and neo-Nazi ideologies that had retreated to the darkest corners of America after the defeat of European fascism and the progress of the Civil Rights Movement. By the 1980s Posse Comitatus had won over a thousand hardcore followers with appeals to the Constitution and sovereignty, and capitalizing on anger over the devastating farm foreclosure crisis by “blaming an international Jewish banking conspiracy.”

Posse Comitatus carried out bombings, murders, and bank robberies, and Gale told followers to “run a sword” through Jews and to lynch Black people. It was part of a network of violent white nationalists, including the Montana Freeman, Aryan Nations, and the Klan, that was largely eliminated in the 1980s through criminal prosecution, civil suits, and counter-organizing. But Gale started a process of sugarcoating extremism. He founded the precursor to Patriot militias that took center stage during the Clinton era. The militias publicly rejected racism, ties to neo-Nazis, or America ruled by white Anglo-Saxon Christians. They promoted themselves as Constitutionalists, as lawful, as defensive in posture against an out-of-control government.

But key militia figures were affiliated with the Aryan Nations and Christian Identity. They were insurrectionists like Posse Comitatus. Their plans drew from the Klan and The Order, white supremacist terrorists who took their name from The Turner Diaries, “a racist’s vision of a nightmare world, in which ‘The System’—African American enforcers led by Jewish politicians—attempt to confiscate all guns.” Patriot militias slightly toned down the racism to a “New World Order” of powerful bankers who would use the Bloods and Crips gangs to conduct house-to-house searches. Guns would be seized, resistors arrested, and the population culled in death camps. Timothy McVeigh, who in 1995 killed 168 people by bombing the federal building in Oklahoma City, came out of this world, linked to militias and inspired by The Turner Diaries.

The War on Terror Comes Home

A decade later the landscape had changed dramatically. Militias were reviled after Oklahoma City and looked foolish after their prediction society would collapse as a result of Y2K fizzling. They were further isolated by the patriotic fervor for the Republican-led war on terror. By the mid-2000s, active militias dwindled to 35. The Great Recession and Obama’s election that seemed like signs of End Times would revive their fortunes.

It’s clear there was little daylight between Rhodes’ fever vision and that of Patriot militias. From the start, the Oath Keepers traded in extremism. Board members included Richard Mack, a leader of Posse Comitatus-influenced constitutional sheriffs, and the founder of the Three Percenters, an umbrella for violent anti-government extremists that came out of the Patriot militias.

But Rhodes built one of the largest far-right outfits by further sanitizing extremism. He made the Oath Keepers palatable to conservatives by shunning the secrecy of the Patriot movement and denying it was an official militia. He sanded off rough edges by banning racists and attracting some military veterans active in Occupy Wall Street. He walked a line between warning of revolution and rejecting open appeals to violence. He used digital media to draw in thousands of new recruits. And he saw an opportunity in the upheaval created by the Great Recession, the Tea Party movement, and endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Oath Keepers benefited as well from the Fox News and internet pipeline feeding paranoia and conspiracies to the mainstream. The Tea Party movement helped them mask explicit racism and Christian fanaticism even as they fell head over heels for the crude bigotry of birtherism and Obama was a secret Muslim.

At the same time, the Oath Keepers were more than a far-right retread. Just as Posse Comitatus took advantage of the farm crisis and the Patriot movement exploited the anger over the FBI’s disastrous handling of the Waco standoff that killed 76 members of the Branch Davidians, Rhodes mined discontent over the war on terror.

Willing to Die

In 2004, while at Yale Law School, Rhodes won an award for the best paper on the Bill of Rights. He argued the ability of the Bush administration “to designate any person on the planet an enemy combatant” was unconstitutional. He warned unless the Supreme Court vacated this power, not only would it remain “a loaded weapon — a perpetual threat to our liberties — to be picked up by the next overzealous, overconfident and willful president,” it would be national “suicide.”

Rhodes was obsessed with enemy combatants in founding the Oath Keepers. He envisioned police and soldiers going “house-to-house to disarm the American people and ‘black-bag’ those on a list of ‘known terrorists,’ with orders to shoot all resisters.” Militias would be declared enemy combatants and subjected to “secret military detention without indictment or jury trial, ‘enhanced’ interrogation techniques, and trial before a military tribunal.”

Rhodes was paranoid, but he wasn’t crazy. He was as incisive as an ACLU lawyer in shredding the flimsy legal architecture of the war on terror. In January 2012 he analyzed the grave dangers posed by allowing the president to declare anyone an enemy combatant, which Bush had done to two U.S. citizens. Days earlier, Obama had signed the National Defense Authorization Act “codifying indefinite military detention without charge or trial into law for the first time in American history,” according to the ACLU. Rhodes noted Obama went further by killing a U.S. citizen without due process— the drone assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki in September 2011.

It turns out the militias were right. A rogue U.S. government was waging war on its citizens. But the Oath Keepers could not leave behind their white nationalist past. Rhodes ignored that the targets of post-9/11 government repression were Muslim immigrants. Al-Awlaki was Muslim as were the two U.S. citizens placed in military detention.

White, far-right gun owners, the base of militias, were least likely to draw government scrutiny. Two weeks before the Oath Keepers was founded, the Department of Homeland Security released a report that now reads like a road map to the coup. It warned of Obama’s election and “a prolonged economic downturn … could create a fertile recruiting environment for rightwing extremists.”

DHS could have been talking about the Oath Keepers’ role in Jan. 6 when it stated, “right-wing extremists will attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to exploit their skills and knowledge derived from military training and combat … to carry out violence.”

Predictable right-wing outrage was matched by typical Democratic gutlessness. DHS repudiated the report and gutted the unit tasked with monitoring far-right extremism, ensuring it could spread unchecked.

Even as he dissected the threats posed by the war on terror, what Rhodes advocated in response was ripe with the threat of violence rooted in white nationalism. He bluntly said soldiers should be “willing to die or lose your freedom in order to keep your oath.” If a soldier carried out an unlawful order “that violates the rights of the people, then you’re no different than a traitor who fights for a foreign enemy.”

Soldiers who don’t defend the rights of the people, Rhodes said, are “oath breakers.” To the Founding Fathers that “was like renouncing God.” This is revealing. David Neiwert points out that far-right extremists from the Patriot movement to fringe Mormons like the Bundys treat “the original text of the Constitution as though it were Biblically inerrant.”

Rhodes called on soldiers to refuse orders individually, or even better, organize their units to do a “peremptory refusal,” to revolt. He excoriated senators who voted for the NDAA. “I think they are guilty of treason. I think they should be arrested and indicted and tried for it and then once they’re found guilty they should suffer the proper sentence.” The proper sentence being death.

He saw a stark choice. The United States was at a crossroads. “We’re going to slide into Nazi Germany … or we’re going to have to fight another revolution.”

Everything Rhodes said ten years ago, about soldiers needing to revolt and be willing to die, fighting a revolution, believing members of Congress needed to pay the ultimate penalty, is precisely what happened on January 6, 2021.

But how it came to pass is the story of how Stewart Rhodes and the Oath Keepers moved closer and closer to the white nationalist roots they sprang from, and how they went from opposing government tyranny to being an enthusiastic and bloody arm of it.

Trump’s finance report shows he has a lot less cash than he claimed in his final year in office

Forbes has reviewed campaign finance disclosures from former President Donald Trump and discovered that he apparently had far less cash in his final year of office than he claimed.

According to the documents, the self-described billionaire only had about $93 million in cash during the final year. They were part of the information released by New York Attorney General Letitia James as part of her civil probe into the Trump Organization.

The amount is significantly less than his 2015 claim that he had $793 million in the bank and $302 in “liquid assets.” Until recently Trump’s actual wealth has been difficult to discern because he so frequently misled the press about it. He’s also lied about the extent to which his father contributed to his finances and his business ventures.

When Trump filed his financial statement he was required to submit as part of his presidential campaign put the sum lower, between $78 million and $232 million in mid-2015.

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“Because I sell stuff,” Trump said in 2015, citing $30 million from the sale of the Miss Universe pageant. “‘Here’s your cash number here — or market value: 793.”

He then wrote the number down on a piece of paper.

The New York AG documents showed the liquid holdings at closer to $114 million in 2016. They were then listed at $76 million in 2018 and $87 million in 2019. They then increased to $93 million in 2020.

Read the full report here.

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Roy Choi shines a light on our broken food systems: “We’ll throw away food before we feed people”

“I’m a dreamer,” says Roy Choi, the Los Angeles author, chef and entrepreneur who helped spark the food truck revolution.

In the second season of his PBS series “Broken Bread,” Choi brings his unique brand of activism, appetite and optimism to our complex and often contradictory American food system. It’s a show that not only deals frankly with gentrification and labor exploitation, but also tells a deeply personal and hopeful story.

Choi isn’t content to point out snobbery and injustice. Instead, he focuses on the persistent, resourceful individuals and groups who are creating positive change in their communities.

In a recent Zoom conversation, Salon talked to Choi about the series, his legacy and how to break bread while fixing the food industry. In the process, we also learned how “Broken Bread” got its name.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

It’s an interesting name for a show. It’s not “Breaking Bread,” it’s “Broken Bread.” Tell me why it’s called that.

For all the obvious reasons — the alliteration, the inflection towards “Breaking Bad,” the double entendre of breaking bread with people. But really, at the core of it, it’s about broken food systems. The show is looking at hard issues that affect people that a lot of us don’t want to confront, or that are being done deliberately, for generations.

The thing is, we are not a political show. We don’t want to get into the divisiveness. We’re about generosity, love, kindness, bringing people together, finding solutions. We always bring it back to food.

What we try to do is get into these deep topics, but use food as a through line, so that there is some form of balance, some form of nurturing and love that everyone can put their guard down a little bit. Instead of fighting with each other and arguing with each other or pointing fingers, we can just talk with each other. At the end of the day, it’s a social justice show disguised as a food show. The “broken” is the social justice and the “bread” is the food. Together it is “Broken Bread.”

Numerous times you show things that seem to be working, then something happens and they don’t work anymore. It’s about the flexibility of solution finding and understanding maybe something that worked this month won’t be available to us next month. Was that part of the narrative plan for this season?

No, but the great thing about “Broken Bread” is we’re documenting real life as it’s happening. Obviously, we’re in a pandemic. and we’re filming within the pandemic. Every day, every moment, everything changes. We started the season with Avenue 26, and by the time we were done editing, Avenue 26 had been stopped by the local governments. We were all about pivoting, even bringing in someone like Wolfgang Puck or Alice Waters, legends that have been around for decades that really know things and are extremely experienced and intelligent. They’re still pivoting every second. The show is very malleable. We just go with wherever reality is going.

We try to balance that, through my narratives and my perspectives and the theme of the show, with a lot of idealism of where we want the world to go and what we believe the world should be. We don’t understand how you can have mountains of produce and people are starving. Ultimately, that’s the number one analogy that I use for myself every time I step into filming or editing or writing for the show — how can we have so much abundance, but then yet so many people don’t have anything? It’s not the fact that the systems themselves can’t work. It’s us, as humans, in between that are kind of ruining it for a lot of people.

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There is not a shortage of food — just so that’s clear. There’s a problem with distribution, with access, with our morals and our values towards what food is and how valuable it is to people. We will throw away food before we feed someone who needs food. That’s fundamentally a broken system, a broken thing. What we’re trying to do with the show is just get people to see the humanity behind things. We get fed all this information, and it’s hard to comprehend and maybe get a grasp on how everything just feels so big and so out of our reach. We’re just trying to show you that sometimes the biggest problems just take the smallest, smallest step-by-step solutions.

That’s really what we try to show you with the people in the show. You don’t have to feed five million people. You could feed five people, but that could mushroom into five million. Your movement can make a break somewhere and shoot off into something. We want to bring awareness so that people can really look at and have the knowledge and say, this is ridiculous. I can’t believe that we have all this food and so many people can’t access it, yet we’ll throw away the food before we feed people.

Before we feed schoolchildren.

Before we feed children — especially children. My whole crusade in life is about the youth. Every step of my journey, from Kogi to Locol to “Broken Bread,” is all building, hopefully, towards the foundation that I want to leave on this planet. That’s really about feeding the youth and providing nutrition, knowledge, access, all of those things. The problem right now is that for the youth in elementary school, in junior high school, especially within the cities that I represent and the neighborhoods that I represent, so many resources are stripped every single day.

If we were to just talk about it point blank, it would be the most absurd thing ever. If you were to come on this planet and go into any inner city in America, and look at what’s supposed to be the nurturing systems to keep the community thriving and healthy, and look at exactly what’s going on on a day-to-day basis, you would be scratching your head trying to understand what the heck is going on.

In this pandemic, there have been public school kids whose access to their free breakfast and free lunch programs was affected. Plus, there’s the impact on university students.

That’s the biggest elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about — the homelessness within college students, the lack of ability to access food. Scarcity, affordability, everything. Because it would taint the illusion of the college dream.

The food scarcity in college students, and the sleep deprivation, and the fact that these kids are often working two jobs. That craziness around people who we call adults, yet don’t have the resources that minors might have — it’s immoral.

It’s immoral — and colleges don’t want you to hear that.

What I appreciate about this show is you don’t just leave it with, “This is immoral, this is wrong.” You use tough words like “exploitation” and “erasure.” Then you ask, “OK, so what are we going to do about it? Here are people who are taking actions.” You’re calling upon us — wherever we are in the food cycle, even as consumers and eaters and home cooks — to ask what are we going to do creatively.

Absolutely. That’s “Broken Bread.” This is a show built around fixing the problem and finding solutions, and finding people that are already doing it and finding the solutions. It’s a personal show, but it’s also a communal show. The personal parts are that I’m a chef, I’m a cook. If you know kitchens and you know professional chefs, we are just problem solvers. That’s what we are.

You live in New York City. Every restaurant in New York City, every chef, every kitchen — they’ve got to open every night, no matter what happens. You could have a million things happen. Everything breaks, everything goes down, deliveries don’t show up, cooks don’t come in, the power doesn’t work, whatever the case may be. But we’ve still got to honor your reservation, and the show must go on. We have to, behind the scenes, always figure things out.

We also have our own moral compass. If something is rotten, or spoiled, or not correct, or cut improperly or someone’s wasting too much, we don’t let things fester. In a kitchen, you don’t just see something and let that thing continue to rot, or continue to spoil. You do something about it, and you find solutions to fix it. You research and investigate, and you go to the point where you think it went wrong and you fix it.

For a lot of us in the kitchen, it’s hard for us to go back into the real world and see all of these things that just are left to spoil in life. The show has helped me feel and believe that I’m not alone in certain things. I have a very childlike viewpoint towards life. I’m a dreamer, and I want to believe that we can do better and that there is a world where we can take care of each other and give without expecting something in return to each other. I try to operate my businesses that way.

The world constantly hits you in the face and says, “That’s not how it’s supposed to work, you ignorant child.” Sometimes when you are burdened with that purpose and belief that you want to do righteous things and moral things, you feel alone a lot. You just feel like, maybe the world is right. And then I go out there and I film “Broken Bread,” and it’s like I’m not alone. There are so many amazing people doing so many things. In the Alice Waters episode, when I hear her say things like, “Time is not money. Bigger is not better.” There is power and strength in believing and wanting to heal and not having to just destroy, and win, and scale and be on top all the time.

You also, in the midst of all this big picture problem solving, ask us as viewers and eaters fundamental questions. Why do we put down the idea of eating standing up? Eating in front of a cart — why is eating at a cart somehow less valuable or less meaningful than sitting at a table? Why do we value a plate of pasta because it’s European cuisine, and we don’t have that same sort of love and respect for a plate of beans or a bowl of rice? How do you approach these fundamental questions that get to the heart of trying to have a relationship with food that is more authentic and more respectful?

First and foremost with the show, I always never try to forget that it’s a show. It’s television. It’s entertainment. We try to make an entertaining show. I try to be an entertaining host while also tackling very difficult topics. I don’t want to just be a buzzkill to people. I don’t want to just feel like it’s a lecture. The big things that I try to focus on are just bringing up these structures we have in our world that are affecting millions and millions of people, and millions and millions of kids, and how they are treated and view themselves and can succeed within America.

We’re still in a psyche and a psychology that is dominated by Western European thought. Because of that, we’re still in a situation where we value certain humans, and we don’t value certain humans. Through that perspective and through that lens, we have a very hurtful way of separating and valuing people in who they are. The perfect example of that is pasta compared to phở or chow mein. I just try to give my dime-store philosophy of how that all works together. Then maybe smarter people can trampoline and leapfrog that into something where we can maybe make some changes in the world. It is racism in its purest form. What is happening is with the bowl of pasta, because you’re talking about all these different barriers. Maybe with certain cuisines and the people who cook those cuisines, they can’t speak English. That’s why a lot of us, as these second generation kids are stepping up, to speak up for our parents. We grew up in a whole generation, through the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, where we saw our elders and our parents basically get treated like sh_t. The only thing that was really hindering them is that they couldn’t express themselves in English. Then people would take advantage of them, or would relegate their food as less than, or as cheap eats.

That’s supported, again, by a lot of mainstream media, through a Western European lens. This bowl of pasta, you add storytelling to it. You can add poetry to it. “These ingredients were kissed by the sun in Tuscany.” The San Marzano tomato is the perfect anecdote to this whole thing. You can create this whole folklore and story behind it. You could take something that costs like a $1.20 to make, and in New York City, I could charge $46 for marinara pasta, probably. And get away with it. Yet phở has to be $7 or $9. Or else, all of a sudden there’s an outcry. I’m just trying to bring those things so that we can all confront them and hopefully do our part as storytellers to add value to things that people decided didn’t have value. Ultimately that’s what I was trying to do with the show, is be a storyteller, and do the same thing that was done for pasta, but do it for the things that have been relegated to cheap eats.

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Florida senators walk out after DeSantis’ surgeon general refuses to answer if vaccines work

Florida Democrats walked out of a Florida Senate Health Policy Committee hearing on Wednesday after state Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo refused to answer their questions.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) appointed Ladapo to be the state’s surgeon general, but since then, many questions have surfaced about his experience, his resume and his medical advice.

In the hearing before the state Senate Wednesday, Dr. Ladapo refused to answer questions about whether he supported vaccines. In fact, he was asked five times about vaccines in general, not exclusively about the COVID-19 vaccine.

“I know the members of our caucus are looking forward to having a serious conversation and have concerns about his ability to lead,” said Senate Democratic Leader Lauren Book.

An example is that Ladapo spoke to the Health and Human Services Appropriations Committee without a “single slide or chart about COVID, where we are and what we’re doing about it.”

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Senate President Wilton Simpson, a Republican, has taken issue with Ladapo, the Tallahassee Democrat described. Simpson oversees the confirmation process and Ladapo refused to wear a mask at Sen. Tina Polsky’s request. Polsky has cancer and is undergoing treatment, prompting Simpson to send out a memo on the incident.

“It shouldn’t take a cancer diagnosis for people to respect each other’s level of comfort with social interactions during a pandemic,” said Simpson.

Peter Dinklage pushes Disney’s “Snow White” remake to rethink “f**king backward” dwarf depictions

Another day, another Disney animated film is up for a lesser live-action remake. The latest film dusted off from the vault, however, has created a stir with Peter Dinklage.

In a recent episode of Marc Maron’s “WTF” podcast, the “Game of Thrones” actor Peter Dinklage criticized the upcoming “Snow White” remake for its portrayal of the title character’s mentors and saviors.

Last June, it was announced that “West Side Story” star Rachel Zegler — who is of Colombian and Polish descent — would play the film’s titular character. While her casting made the character more inclusive, that same degree of thoughtfulness however, was not afforded to the narratives of Snow White’s seven companions.

“Literally no offense to anyone, but I was a little taken aback when they were very proud to cast a Latina actress as Snow White — but you’re still telling the story of ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,'” Dinklage told Maron.

“Take a step back and look at what you’re doing there. It makes no sense to me,” Dinklage continued. “You’re progressive in one way, but then you’re still making that f**king backward story about seven dwarfs living in a cave together? What the f**k are you doing, man? Have I done nothing to advance the cause from my soapbox? I guess I’m not loud enough.”

On Tuesday, Disney quickly responded to Dinklage’s remarks in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter.

“To avoid reinforcing stereotypes from the original animated film, we are taking a different approach with these seven characters and have been consulting with members of the dwarfism community,” the statement detailed. “We look forward to sharing more as the film heads into production after a lengthy development period.”

Consulting with members of the dwarfism community is a step in the right direction, because this is not merely a casting issue but one of storytelling and characterization. Snow White’s dwarf friends have traditionally been depicted as less than fully realized people, basically there to work in the mines and offer her shelter. The Brothers Grimm fairy tale in 1812 doesn’t even give them separate identities or names, referring to them as “the first one,” etc. Subsequent adaptations have given them cutesy, non-human names (such as Dopey or Sneezy) and depicted them as childlike or as the vehicle for jokes.

As with many issues regarding authentic and nuanced representation, the benefits are not just for those in the community to see themselves on screen. Rather, the way people are portrayed also affects those outside of the community by how they regard and treat people of color, with dwarfism, with disabilities or other marginalized groups in real life.

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Throughout his career, Dinklage has been outspoken about the on-screen portrayal of people with dwarfism. In his 2012 Golden Globe acceptance speech, Dinklage urged his audience to Google a name — Martin Henderson. Henderson, who was 4-foot-2, was left partially paralyzed after being thrown by an unknown, drunk Rugby fan in 2012. Four years later, Henderson passed away at the age of 42.

“People are all, like, I dedicated it to him,” Dinklage told The New York Times. “They’ve made it more romantic than it actually was. I just wanted to go, ‘This is screwed up.’ Dwarves are still the butt of jokes. It’s one of the last bastions of acceptable prejudice. Not just by people who’ve had too much to drink in England and want to throw a person. But by media, everything. You can say no. You can not be the object of ridicule.”

Dinklage is not involved in the production of Disney’s “Snow White.” At this time, Gal Gadot, who is slated to play the Evil Queen, and Tony Award winner Andrew Burnap will star alongside Zegler.

Disney previously sought advice from Pixar’s lead cultural consultant Marcela Davison Avilés during the production of its 2017 animated film “Coco” — which centers on Mexico’s Día de los Muertos holiday. The entertainment conglomerate also employed cultural consultants for its 2019 live-action remake of “Aladdin.” According to a Conversation article by Evelyn Alsultany, Disney reached out to Middle Eastern, South Asian and Muslim scholars, activists and creatives to help prevent stereotyping, which was also a major issue in the 1992 animated feature. Alsultany — who is an associate professor of American studies and ethnicity at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences — was part of the group.

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Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson give their definition of Black and say “there’s no such thing as climate”

Spotify’s $100 million dollar man, Joe Rogan, has found himself at the wrong end of a number of controversies recently for the scientifically questionable content being put forward on his wildly popular program, “The Joe Rogan Experience.” First, he hosted an anti-vax scientist who compared U.S. public health authorities promoting COVID-19 vaccination to the Nazis — comments that inspired a fierce backlash and calls for a boycott of Rogan’s show.

Then came a feud with legendary artist Neil Young, who pulled his music from Spotify after an ultimatum: You can have me or Rogan’s COVID-19 misinformation, but not both.

Now, Rogan’s back in the crosshairs of the scientific community after an episode with the clinical psychologist and occasional right-wing pundit Jordan Peterson, which was riddled with false claims about a number of topics — most notably during extended riffs on climate change and racial identity of “Black” Americans.

Here are some of the wildest claims from a particularly wild conversation:

1) That climate change doesn’t exist because there’s “no such thing as climate.”

For more than 30 minutes of the episode’s more than four-hour run time — yes, seriously — the two men discussed the veracity of the scientific establishment’s broad agreement that climate change is real and that humans are to blame.

Rogan begins by saying he’s reading a book about the subject, which he says “requires a lot of thinking” to look at criticisms on “both sides” of the issue.

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“The climate change one is a weird one,” he says, prompting an equally articulate response from his guest.

Though it’s not exactly clear, Peterson seemed to be making the point that measuring Earth’s climate over time will naturally lead researchers to assess a large number of variables — and that making sense of so many variables is an impossible task. For the record, it’s not exactly what real climate scientists say about the subject.

PETERSON: Well, that’s because there’s no such thing as climate. Right? “Climate” and “everything” are the same word, and that’s what bothers me about the climate change types. It’s like, this is something that bothers me about it, technically. It’s like, climate is about everything. Okay. But your models aren’t based on everything. Your models are based on a set number of variables. So that means you’ve reduced the variables, which are everything, to that set. Well how did you decide which set of variables to include in the equation, if it’s about everything? That’s not just a criticism, that’s like, if it’s about everything, your models aren’t right. Because your models do not and cannot model everything.

ROGAN: What do you mean by everything?

PETERSON: That’s what people who talk about the climate apocalypse claim, in some sense. We have to change everything! It’s like, everything, eh? The same with the word environment. That word means so much that it doesn’t mean anything. … What’s the difference between the environment and everything? There’s no difference.

2) Calling a light-skinned person Black is “weird” — and should only be reserved to African natives “not wearing any clothes” all day.

This side-conversation began when Rogan brought up the work of author and academic Michael Eric Dyson, who several years ago criticized Peterson as a “mean, mad white man.”

In response, Peterson said it was “a lie” to call him white, insisting that he’s “kind of tan” — a description he would extend to Rogan as well.

“And [Dyson] was actually not black — he was sort of brown,” Peterson added. Rogan then took that idea and ran with it:

“Well, isn’t that weird? The Black and white thing is so strange because the shades are… There’s such a spectrum of shades of people. Unless you’re talking to someone who is, like, 100% African from the darkest place where they’re not wearing any clothes all day and they’ve developed all that melanin to protect themselves from the sun. Even the term Black is weird and when you use it for people that are literally my color, it becomes very strange.

3) Honorable mention: Jordan Peterson’s tuxedo

For some unknown reason, Jordan Peterson also wore a full tuxedo to the interview — a strange choice given the host’s notably laid-back style.

Listen to the full episode (if you must):

The best scenes in “The Book of Boba Fett” are silent

In year one of the pandemic, my partner and I introduced our young son to the entirety of the “Star Wars” universe, from the Skywalker saga to the standalone films and series. It filled the time in a delightful way. Soon my son invented a game. At night, when we were tucking him into bed, he would quiz me on “Star Wars” quotes.

What movie or show had this line come from? What about this one? I often got the answers wrong, sometimes to amuse him. Sometimes, because I just couldn’t remember. He, with the encyclopedic knowledge of children able to memorize the most random dinosaur, always got the quotes right.

That game wouldn’t work with “The Book of Boba Fett,” the Disney+ spin-off of “The Mandalorian.” Most of the best scenes in the first few episodes of “The Book of Boba Fett” are silent. Or, at the very least, they do not contain spoken English, not as uttered by anyone except Boba Fett to himself.

In “The Book of Boba Fett” creator Jon Favreau gets the legendary bounty hunter out of the devouring sarlacc pit and into a lot of other trouble. Boba Fett (Temuera Morrison) is vulnerable in a way we haven’t seen before: at the mercy of the Tatooine sun, of the acids in the sarlacc’s stomach, of the annoying Jawas who steal his armor, and of a band of Tusken Raiders who capture him.

Most of the initial episodes rely heavily on flashbacks. Unlike recent shows like “Yellowjackets,” which blends the past and present like an intense, meaty protein shake, or “Station Eleven,” which flashes back so hard and fast one can get whiplash, so much of “The Book of Boba Fett” is set in the past that you start to miss those long-gone days. Flashbacks feel more like the center of the show than the center of Mos Espa does.

In the past with the Tuskens, Boba Fett is at first a captive. He’s bound. He’s placed in the care of a child (Wesley Kimmel). But then, after Boba Fett kills a sand creature to protect the child, Boba Fett’s status is elevated. Like a space “Dances with Wolves,” Boba Fett slowly earns the trust of the tribe and vice versa.

There are problems here, namely: Is this veering into a colonial narrative? “The Book of Boba Fett” takes the conceptualization of “Star Wars” as a space western to the extreme, with a train robbery glaringly reminiscent of — you guessed it — “The Great Train Robbery.” But it’s troubling that this established, indigenous group basically elects Boba Fett as their singular spokesperson. It smacks uncomfortably of saviorhood, though possibly it’s because he’s the only one who can speak English.

One thing that works here is that nobody talks much.

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The Tusken Raiders have a long, troubled history in “Star Wars.” Also referred to by characters as the “sand people” and other derogatory terms, they are indigenous to the desert world Tatooine, and live in small groups as nomads. They wear wrappings of rough-looking cloth and protective headgear: masks, goggles, and respirators that obscure their faces, making them resemble, in the immortal lyrics of my favorite Bad Lip Reading song “Bushes of Love”: “a chicken head with duck feet.” They are a strange cross of very ancient looking and also, with that Burning Man headgear, kind of futuristic steampunk.

In the prequels, things get real dark with them real fast, as Anakin’s mother dies graphically at their hands. You may also know them as the group that attacks Luke Skywalker in Episode IV.

Tuskens speak a language called Tusken, which is a combination of spoken and signed language. To those unaccustomed to the spoken part (that’s us, the audience, and a lot of other “Star Wars” characters), their utterances sound like inhuman shrieks and guttural sounds. But Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) in “The Mandalorian” communicates in fluent Tusken, as the show attempted to correct some of the franchise’s earlier blunders in creating (and demonizing) the Tusken people.

Boba Fett seems confused by spoken Tusken. But he does pick up many of their signs, enough to communicate with them. That he would adapt to their signs rather than just expect them to speak his language is a good start.

Language doesn’t have to be spoken. Many languages aren’t, including American Sign Language, and “The Book of Boba Fett” scenes that feature little to no spoken English don’t suffer. They’re richer because of it. Perhaps we as viewers pay closer attention because we know information will not be telegraphed orally. We need to watch.

And we do as the Tuskens teach Boba Fett how to find liquid in black melons they dig out of the sand. Their offering a melon to him to drink is a meaningful gesture of trust, as is painstakingly teaching him the way they fight, and teaching him to make his own staff, which will serve him well later. In return, he instructs them on the riding of speeders.

Relative silence can be riveting, and these long, quiet scenes hint at the potential for other kinds of expression. We don’t need a character to speak orally to understand them, and we also don’t need to see their faces to care for them. Witness how compelling Mando was for episode after episode when he kept his helmet firmly on.

Joanna Bennett, a stunt performer who was the double of Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) in the movie of the same name, is riveting as the main Tusken warrior who takes Boba Fett under her wing. Strong and confident, her fighting looks like dance moves, and her dance moves look like fighting. (It should be noted that Morrison, who is part Maori, drew from his culture for some of the Tusken movement scenes.) Despite never seeing her face or hearing her utter a word I could discern, I rooted for her. I also knew her character was not a man, despite no one ever saying anything to that effect, because of how her clothes and headgear differed from other Tuskens, including Xavier Jimenez as the leader of the group, and Kimmel as the precocious Tusken youth.

It’s meaningful that she has a position of authority among the Tuskens, that Boba Fett’s mentor is a woman. Spoken words aren’t necessary for their training, for the emotional connection they establish — or for the emotion connection we the audience establish with Bennett, Jimenez and Kimmel’s characters. These quiet scenes are loaded with tension and meaning, which humanizes both Boba Fett and the Tuskens.

Much of the rest of the show falls flat, in part because we haven’t gotten to know anyone else the way we have become close with Boba Fett and the Raiders. You realize how many spoken lines are unnecessary, poorly written noise, and how well someone can act without saying a thing. It’s disappointing that this entire, rich backstory of the Tuskens seems to have been a build-up for . . . something? So far, it’s unfulfilling and the ending of the Tusken group, unearned.

Before my child’s “Star Wars” obsession and the nightly quiz game that kept me on my toes, before “The Mandalorian,” I mostly remembered Boba Fett as the action figure everybody wanted and nobody could find. In the present scenes of “The Book of Boba Fett” where characters say a lot and mean nothing at all, we can’t really find him either.

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Retirement of Justice Stephen Breyer ramps up pressure on moderate Senate Democrats

With Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer now expected to retire at the end of the term, progressive advocates and commentators are already putting intense pressure on Sens. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., and Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., to approve President Biden’s nominee.

On Wednesday, the 83-year-old Breyer, one of the court’s three liberal judges, announced that he’s down from the bench this summer. Breyer’s impending resignation was much-anticipated by Democrats, who have over the past year repeatedly expressed concerns that he may serve into the midterms, when Democrats are expected to lose roundly in 2022.

Among the most likely contenders to fill Breyer’s vacancy are Ketanji Brown Jackson of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, a former Breyer law clerk; U.S. Circuit Judge Ketanji; and Leondra Kruger, California Supreme Court Justice, according to NBC News.

Senate Democrats, who hold a majority in chamber, theoretically have the power to usher in a new justice without any Republican support, since Supreme Court nominations cannot be filibustered.

However, some on the left fear that the path to confirmation will not be smooth sailing in light of Cinema and Manchin’s alienation from the Democratic Party.

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“Democrats need to be united in supporting a progressive replacement for Justice Breyer,” said the Primary Sinema Project in a statement. We can’t afford any obstruction or delay from Sinema. She’s already done enough to harm Biden’s first term. We will be watching her actions closely.”

“If you thought the pressure on Manchin and Sinema to toe the party line was intense before, just wait for the stakes of a Supreme Court confirmation,” echoed New York Times reporter Shane Goldmacher.

Last year, Sinema and Manchin aggressively stonewalled the passage of Biden’s signature $2.2 trillion social spending bill “Build Back Better.” After months of legislative downsizing and restructuring, the long-awaited measure was declared dead in the water after negotiations between Biden and Manchin turned sour in December. This year, Sinema and Manchin also proved formidable mules when Biden pivoted from Build Back Better to his landmark voting rights overhaul, which last week might have circumvented a Republican filibuster if both senators’ had supported the bill.

It remains unclear which way either senator would swing on Biden’s eventual Supreme Court nominee. In the past, Manchin has “long deferred to presidents’ nominees,” as CNN’s Manu Raju noted, and “Sinema tends to vote for Biden nominees.”

At the same time, both Sinema and Manchin’s support might not be entirely necessary, wrote Vox’s Andrew Prokop. During the Obama administration, for instance, Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, voted to confirm both the former president’s picks. And because conservatives already have a 6-3 majority in the court, they might be more amenable than usual to a left-leaning Democrat.

President Biden has thus far refused to answer questions surrounding any potential nominees, telling reporters on Wednesday that he’ll “let [Breyer] make whatever statement he wants to make, and I’m happy to talk about it later.”

Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has said that Biden’s nominee will “receive a prompt hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee, and will be considered and confirmed by the full United States Senate with all deliberate speed.”

“Trump has it completely wrong”: Allies revolt after Trump endorses rival to MAGA darling

Top allies of former President Donald Trump pushed back after he endorsed a former administration aide over a conservative influencer who is highly popular on the far right.

On Tuesday, Trump endorsed Morgan Ortagus, a former State Department spokeswoman and Fox News contributor, in the upcoming Republican primary in Tennessee’s 5th congressional district. Incumbent Rep. Jim Cooper, a Democrat, has announced that he will retire, saying that Republicans had “dismembered” his longtime Nashville district for partisan gain.

“Morgan was fantastic in her role working with Secretary Mike Pompeo at the U.S. State Department and understands the threats posed by China, Russia, Iran and others, and will be tough, not just roll over like the Democrats and RINOs,” Trump said in a statement. “She won’t bow to the Woke Mob or the Leftist LameStream Media. Morgan Ortagus will have my Complete and Total Endorsement if she decides to run!”

That statement brought immediate and highly unusual pushback from some of Trump’s most ardent supporters.

“Nope. Trump has this completely wrong,” tweeted conservative pundit Candace Owens, writing that the “correct pick” is Robby Starbuck, a former music video producer running as a pro-MAGA Republican in the district.

Former Trump aide Sebastian Gorka and former Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis echoed that sentiment.

Starbuck is running on a platform to crack down on ballot access, so-called Critical Race Theory, LGBTQ rights and Big Tech companies. It’s unclear why Trump snubbed Starbuck in favor of Ortagus, who called him “disgusting” during his 2016 campaign before joining his administration.

Numerous other Trump allies joined in backing Starbuck over Trump’s preferred candidate.

“I endorsed [Starbuck] months ago and I stand by my endorsement,” tweeted Rep. Madison Cawthorn, R-N.C.

“I endorsed Robby months ago & believe he’s exactly what we need in these difficult times,” wrote Trump-backed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake. “He’s a God-fearing man who loves his wonderful family — he’s a true ‘citizen politician.'”

The Republican scramble comes after the GOP-dominated state legislature carved up Cooper’s Nashville-area district. Cooper, who has trounced every Republican challengers for decades and ran unopposed in 2020, said the Republican plan to split reliably blue Nashville into three Republican-leaning districts made it impossible for him to win.

“Despite my strength at the polls, I could not stop the General Assembly from dismembering Nashville,” he said in a statement. “No one tried harder to keep our city whole. I explored every possible way, including lawsuits, to stop the gerrymandering and to win one of the three new congressional districts that now divide Nashville. There’s no way, at least for me in this election cycle, but there may be a path for other worthy candidates.”

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The Tennessee House of Representatives on Monday approved a new congressional map that would split Nashville, combining areas of the state’s largest city with more conservative parts of the state. Cooper, who represented a district President Joe Biden won by 24 points, was drawn into a new district that former Trump carried by nine points, according to Cook Political Report editor Dave Wasserman.

“Our Republican legislature has savaged Nashville in order to get one more vote in Congress,” Cooper told Axios. “This is a cruel blow to all people of Nashville, certainly to minority groups, but to every resident of Nashville,” he added.

Although Republicans have not been as aggressive at carving out new districts in other states, many of the Republican-drawn maps have been perceived as intended to dilute the power of voters of color. Several Republican-drawn maps have already been struck down and Democrats have vowed to continue to litigate partisan and racial gerrymanders.

“The maps passed by Tennessee Republicans are blatant partisan gerrymanders,” former Attorney General Eric Holder, the chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, said in a statement. “The congressional map splits Nashville into three separate districts, weakening the voting power of the region’s economic powerhouse and the city’s black community. This map is an obvious attempt to deliver illegitimate political power to the Republican Party for the next decade.”

Republicans already hold a 7-2 edge in the state’s congressional delegation but the Nashville redistricting could give the GOP eight of the state’s nine House seats. Cooper suggested that the aggressive gerrymander was unnecessary, since Republicans are likely to win back control of the House in November anyway. Cooper is the 29th Democratic incumbent to announce he won’t seek re-election ahead of a likely power shift.

While Cooper said the redistricting plan would prevent him from winning re-election, it’s unclear whether progressive primary challenger Odessa Kelly plans to continue her campaign after comparing the effect of the redistricting to Jim Crow-era laws that prevented Black people from voting.

“I joined the congressman in fighting back against the Tennessee General Assembly’s racist gerrymandering that will erase the voices of Black and brown voters in Nashville,” Kelly told Tennessee Lookout. “But I know one thing is true: People-powered movements in this state have been building power for years and no map is going to slow it down.”

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Fox News host Dan Bongino permanently banned from YouTube

Video streaming giant YouTube permanently banned right-wing pundit Dan Bongino Wednesday, claiming that the Fox host and successful social media star attempted to evade a temporary ban handed down by the company for spreading dangerous COVID-19 misinformation.

The move comes after YouTube suspended one of the commentator’s channels last week for falsely claiming mask-wearing does not work to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. Rather than wait for the ban to expire, Bongino apparently attempted to post another video from another channel, triggering Wednesday’s permanent ban.

“When a channel receives a strike, it is against our Terms of Service to post content or use another channel to circumvent the suspension,” YouTube said in a statement. “If a channel is terminated, the uploader is unable to use, own or create any other YouTube channels.”

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The decision didn’t seem to surprise Bongino, who announced in a video earlier this week that he was already planning on leaving the platform for Rumble — a rival “free speech” video service championed by a number of far-right figures. “The Dan Bongino Show” has over 2 million Rumble subscribers — compared to Bongino’s 900,000 YouTube subscribers.

“See ya, @youtube communists,” Bongino wrote on Instagram after YouTube handed down its ban. “It’s hilarious they only “banned” me after I announced I was leaving their platform,” adding a poop emoji for good measure.

Rumble — which also counts Bongino as an investor — has experienced an uptick in popularity on the back of a recent announcement that it would team up with former President Donald Trump’s yet-to-materialize social media venture, TRUTH Social. The platform’s recent popularity can also be attributed to its recent popularity among well-known right-wing personalities — like Bongino and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky. — who have been banned from YouTube over its COVID-19 misinformation policies.

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“Son of omicron” variant worries public health officials amid new wave of COVID-19 infections

As the omicron variant became the dominant strain in the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists began to nervously observe that we knew very little about its origin. If this unusually vaccine-evasive and infectious mutant can arise seemingly out of nowhere, they warned, it is entirely possible that another related virus might pop up and surprise everyone. Some even speculated that omicron itself could mutate into a new virus that would present a different range of problems for scientists trying to study them.

New reports from California reveal that this last warning may have been prophetic.

The California Department of Health confirmed on Tuesday that it had identified 11 cases throughout the state of BA.2, a sub-variant of omicron. At the time of this writing, 96 people around the country in total have been diagnosed with the BA.2 sub-variant in the United States. The World Health Organization (WHO) has dubbed the strain a “variant of concern,” or a virus that will spread more rapidly, hinder public health precautions more effectively or in some way prove to be more dangerous than other forms of the SARS-CoV-2 virus (which causes COVID-19). Unfortunately, there are early signs it may be more transmissible than the earlier strain of omicron (now known as BA.1), as Imperial College London virologist Tom Peacock opined on Twitter.

“Any variant that proves to be able to transmit more efficiently will cause more cases, and therefore likely more hospitalisations,” Pam Vallely, a professor of medical virology at the University of Manchester, told Newsweek. “But we cannot infer anything meaningful from the limited data available for this variant so far.”

That paucity of data is precisely the problem, and is why United States health authorities are joining with the World Health Organization to urge scientists to learn more about the new bug.

“We know that omicron … can clearly evade preexisting immunity” both from COVID-19 vaccines and from exposure to other COVID-19 variants, James Musser — director of the Center for Molecular and Translational Human Infectious Diseases Research at Houston Methodist — told The Washington Post. “What we don’t know yet is whether son-of-omicron does that better or worse than omicron. So that’s an open question.”

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Until more information comes to light, scientists also urge the public to avoid overreacting. After all, it is not surprising that a new variant has emerged, and the fact that it has happened does not automatically mean that the pandemic is going to take another turn for the worse.

RNA viruses like SARS-CoV-2 have relatively malleable genetic codes, prone to mutation; indeed, every time they enter a host’s cell and replicate, there is a chance that mutations will occur. This is not always a bad thing, as natural selection tends to favor viruses that are highly transmissible and not those that are necessarily deadliest. While a virus does not “care” if its host dies (viruses are almost certainly not self-aware), it does not receive any intrinsic selective advantage from being deadlier. (Deadliness can actually be a hindrance to a virus, as killing one’s host isn’t always a great strategy for reproduction.) Hence, a new dominant strain of SARS-CoV-2 could, in theory, wind up being more innocuous than its counterparts.

Scientists also point out that, unlike when the COVID-19 pandemic first broke out, scientists today have a lot of tools for fighting this particular infectious disease.

“I don’t think it’s going to cause the degree of chaos and disruption, morbidity and mortality that BA.1 did,” Dr. Jacob Lemieux, an infectious disease specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, told USA Today. “I’m cautiously optimistic that we’re going to continue to move to a better place and, hopefully, one where each new variant on the horizon isn’t news.”

For the time being, the world will have to wait before it can learn exactly what BA.2 holds in store, with public health officials urging the public to not take anything for granted.

“There are different scenarios for how the pandemic could play out, and how the acute phase could end – but it is dangerous to assume that Omicron will be the last variant, or that we are in the endgame,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said earlier this week in a statement to the public.

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James Webb Space Telescope: When to expect the first images from the state-of-the-art observatory

This week, nearly 30 days after its launch, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) reached its final destination — a small, gravitational well in space about a million miles from Earth, where it will live for decades or perhaps even all eternity.

“Webb, welcome home!” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement Monday. “We’re one step closer to uncovering the mysteries of the universe. And I can’t wait to see Webb’s first new views of the universe this summer!”

The observatory’s permanent home is a stable point in space known as Lagrange Point 2, also referred to as L2. L2 is also a point in space where gravitational forces of the Earth and Sun are in equilibrium, allowing JWST to stay aligned with Earth. L2 will also allow JWST to have a wide, unobstructed view of the universe at any given moment, unlike telescopes closer to Earth (like Hubble) whose point of view is often obscured by the Earth itself.

JWST is a once-in-a-generation space observatory poised to usher in a new chapter for astronomy by peering into distant corners of the universe, surveying the atmospheres of Earth-like exoplanets, and observing more distant stars and galaxies than its predecessors. As the Hubble Space Telescope‘s successor, it is also one of the most expensive space missions (roughly $9.7 billion) in history. In other words, a lot is at stake.

Scientists collectively breathed a sigh of relief when JWST arrived at L2. While the observatory had been tested extensively to ensure that it could survive the vibrations and sound waves associated with launch, it was still a difficult, tense milestone to reach; testing on Earth cannot compare with all that can go wrong in space. JWST also differs from Hubble in that there is no way to fix it in-person should something go wrong; Hubble orbited close enough to Earth as to be able to be serviced by astronauts via the now-retired space shuttle.

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“During the past month, JWST has achieved amazing success and is a tribute to all the folks who spent many years and even decades to ensure mission success,” said Bill Ochs, Webb project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in a statement. “We are now on the verge of aligning the mirrors, instrument activation and commissioning, and the start of wondrous and astonishing discoveries.”

Now that JWST has arrived at its home, is it ready to start collecting data and moving the needle in science? Not yet. There are a few more steps that must come first.

Next, scientists have to give JWST time to quite literally cool down after its long journey to L2. That’s because the observatory’s instruments can only operate at optimal capacity at specific temperatures. As Ochs mentioned, also scientists need to align the primary mirror properly before deploying the instrument package.

JWST consists of eighteen 46-pound mirrors, which together form one big mirror (the “primary mirror”), which in total is roughly 21 feet wide. The mirror was built in segments that could fold on top of each other; hence, it will take about two months for those mirrors to unfold and get in their proper, precise positions. The mirrors need to be precise to a length of around 1/5,000th of a human hair to get the most accurate and precise images of the universe.

After mirror unfolding, technicians must align the primary mirror with the secondary mirror, in order to direct the light that JWST collects onto its instruments. After the mirrors are aligned, the equipment will go through rounds of testing.

This means it will be a while before we can see JWST’s first images. Scientists estimate we won’t have those for another five months— around this summer. That is, provided that JWST doesn’t have any malfunctions, which is not guaranteed.

Avi Loeb, the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University and author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth,” previously told Salon that we won’t know if anything is wrong with the instruments on JWST until it actually starts to observe the sky — which could be a bit problematic.

“Unfortunately, its location at the second Lagrange point at four times the distance to the Moon will not allow us to service it as we did with the Hubble Space Telescope — which is 2,600 times closer,” Loeb said. “The response will depend on the mode of failure; some problems can be partially solved remotely.”

But if the rest of the preparation goes as smoothly as its launch, we should be able to see those spectacular images this summer.

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Florida radio host with “intimate details” of Matt Gaetz’ alleged sex crimes pleads guilty

A Florida radio host who is connected to Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) has pleaded guilty in a deal that could see him give evidence against the controversial congressman in a sex-trafficking investigation.

Sources told The Daily Beast that “Big Joe” Ellicott pleaded guilty in federal court to a plot to “pay bribes and kickbacks.” He also pleaded guilty to a separate crime related to illegally selling Adderall.

Ellicott is the best friend of Joel Greenberg, a former “wingman” of Gaetz who is said to be cooperating in the sex-trafficking investigation.

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It was reported last year that Ellicott knows “intimate details” of a relationship Gaetz and Greenberg allegedly had with a 17-year-old girl. For his part, Gaetz has denied having sex with the girl.

The report indicated that Ellicott’s plea deal requires him to cooperate in other ongoing investigations. In exchange, he will have an opportunity to receive a significantly reduced sentence.

The crypto crash isn’t just tulip-trading — it’s a result of the toxic entitlement that led to Trump

It was an outcome that anyone familiar with the terms “tulip trading” or “Beanie Babies” could see coming: Cryptocurrency is crashing. Prices for cryptocurrencies “have cratered since reaching all-time highs in early November, wiping out an astonishing $1.35 trillion in value globally, nearly half of the total market,” the Washington Post reports.

The whole thing had an air of a pyramid scheme to it. Media hype and ads featuring Matt Damon lured a bunch of ordinary people into the market, inflating the value of the already questionable currencies. Then, predictably, more professional investors got out, running off with their very real money while the rest of the market collapsed.

But the story of cryptocurrency is about more than just a bunch of gullible people losing their shirts gambling with Monopoly money. Cryptocurrency mania is part of a the same social forces that created libertarianism, rising fascism, and Donald Trump. (Unsurprisingly, the Trumps are trying to cash in, unsuccessfully so far, on crypto.)

It’s all rooted in the overblown sense of entitlement held by a lot of Americans — especially white Americans, and especially male Americans. It leads them to believe they are above having to live with the same social contract that binds the rest of us. Millions of Americans have decided that they not only can, but should, cheat the system — even to the extent of having separate currency systems. The result is that social structures we all rely on are starting to get shaky and, in some cases, are already on the verge of collapse.

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Two bizarre-but-funny stories went viral in recent weeks, which illustrate the absurd levels of entitlement we’re dealing with. Last week, an anonymous crypto investment group called Spice DAO spent $3 million on a rare book of concept art for a never-produced version of “Dune” by surrealist filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky, apparently believing they could use it to produce and sell an animated series. But all they had bought was a physical book, not the actual copyright. Despite widespread mockery for failing to understand how intellectual property rights work, the crypto bros are still at it, insisting their white elephant of an art book will translate into movie-making power.

Last week, Vice also reported that after Tesla head Elon Musk let loose a dumb tweet about “population collapse,” the “obligatory Battle Of Ideas thus commenced” on Twitter, with very rich, influential tech figures speculating about how to generate more of this supposedly scare resource of human babies. (There are approximately 370,000 babies born a day worldwide.) Soon, multiple tech titans with hundreds of thousands — sometimes millions — of followers started hyping the idea of “synthetic wombs” as the solution, ignoring the fact that half the human race grows real wombs in their bodies for absolutely free.

These two dumb stories illustrate the same very real problem: A whole bunch of dudes, some of whom are very rich and powerful, think there’s a cheat code to every system.

Want to make a “Dune” movie, but don’t want to ask Frank Herbert’s son for permission? Want to have a baby, but turned off by the idea of having to persuade a person with a womb into having one with you? Surely, there’s got to be a workaround! Having to do things the standard way, which requires playing nice with others, is for the little people.

Despite the tech utopian spin, this mentality is not about “innovation.” It stems from a larger rejection of the social contract that is reaching pandemic levels in American society. This is quite literally illustrated by the actual COVID-19 pandemic, which has spiraled in recent weeks due to so many ordinary conservatives refusing to get vaccinated. This started because GOP leaders and pundits believed it would weaken Joe Biden’s presidency to convince their followers to reject vaccines. But the kindling that fueled the fire was the same sense of entitlement that is also fueling the cryptocurrency craze. Millions of people, especially white men and especially Republicans, are ready to hear that they’re special snowflakes who don’t need to participate in the same boring systems as everyone else — even though systems like vaccination require everyone’s participation to work.

It’s the Aaron Rodgers/Joe Rogan/Tucker Carlson vortex of vaccine rejection. The three have varying degrees of right-wing ideology, but ultimately, all three tie their anti-vaccine rhetoric to this sense of white guy entitlement and a belief that people like them aren’t constrained by the same biology and social obligations as everyone else. It’s the same attitude fueling the demand for ivermectin and other “alternative” COVID-19 treatments. These snake oil treatments are the cryptocurrency of health care. It doesn’t matter that they’re useless. Their appeal lies in flattering the egos of those drawn to them, letting them believe they’ve found a way to cheat the system and avoid the same boring health care (vaccines) used by the hoi polloi.

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The most destructive result of this entitlement is both the election of Trump and his attempted coup, which continues to have widespread support among the Republican Party.

From the very beginning, Trump’s appeal to his voters was a promise that he knew how to cheat the system. This was an alluring promise because his base — conservative white voters — is rapidly shrinking in size and cannot hang onto power in a multiracial democracy. Rather than learn to compromise with others and share power fairly, they instead backed a man who claimed he could rig the system in their favor. Now, instead of graciously admitting they lost the election, most Republicans are backing Trump’s false claims that the election was stolen. Only 21% of Republicans will now admit that Biden won the 2020 election.

Could it really be that so many millions of Americans are that delusional? It’s unlikely. Instead, the conspiracy theory is instrumental. It creates the justification they intend to rely on for the ongoing efforts to steal the next election. Like cryptocurrency or ivermectin, the Big Lie is viewed as a kind of cheat code, a way for Republicans to get their way without having to play by the same rules that constrain everyone else. The insurrection was a violent manifestation of this entitlement, which is why the people who stormed the Capitol seemed genuinely shocked that there were legal consequences for doing so.

Criticizing and tweaking systems so they work better for everyone is a good thing. But that is not what is going on with modern horrors like cryptocurrency, vaccine refusal, and Trumpism. None of those are genuine attempts to fix existing systems. It’s about “alternatives” for people who think they are above honoring the basic social contract. Systems don’t work, however, unless everyone plays by the rules. As the cryptocurrency crash demonstrates, if you inject too many wannabe cheaters into a system, the whole thing will eventually fall apart.

Michelle Obama 2024? Republicans raising money off invented “rumor”

Republicans are using a baseless “rumor” that former first lady Michelle Obama will run for president in 2024 to raise money for Senate candidates.

The former first lady has repeatedly ruled out a presidential run — or any other entry into electoral politics — but the National Republican Senatorial Committee twice this week sent out fundraising appeals warning supporters that she is exploring a White House bid, while offering no evidence.

“Yup, you are reading this right. Michelle Obama? Running for PRESIDENT in 2024?” the NRSC, which is led by Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., said in a Jan. 24 fundraising email first flagged by Punchbowl News. “Left-wing Democrats KNOW they are going to LOSE their Majority in Congress this November, so they want to bring out an OBAMA to save them in 2024.”

The group sent a similar fundraising email one day earlier.

“We did not believe it when we first heard,” that email said. “Rumors are spreading like wildfire that a certain someone, someone who already spent 8 YEARS in the White House, is thinking of running for PRESIDENT in 2024.”

Obama has repeatedly ruled out running for president since leaving the White House.

“The reason why I don’t want to run for president… first of all, you have to want the job,” she said in a 2018 interview. “I’ve never had the passion for politics. I just happened to be married to somebody who has the passion for politics, and he drug me kicking and screaming into the arena.”

There have been no any rumors coming from the Obama camp or reliable Democratic sources to suggest that the former first lady has had a change of heart. But content mills quickly seized on comments made by podcaster Joe Rogan to hype a potential 2024 run, in headlines unsupported by evidence of any kind.

“I really believe if Michelle Obama runs, she wins,” Rogan said on a recent episode. “She’s great, she’s intelligent, she’s articulate, she’s the wife of the best president that we have had in our lifetime in terms of, like, a representative of intelligent, articulate people.”

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People with no insight into Michelle Obama’s thinking or her family life have repeatedly claimed that Obama could end up running, citing polls that have repeatedly found her to be one of the most popular figures in the country. A 2020 Gallup poll found that Obama is the most admired woman in the world and a Morning Consult/Politico survey found that her favorable rating was 20 points higher than former President Donald Trump’s and 14 points higher than President Joe Biden’s.

Obama, who founded the voter registration campaign When We All Vote, announced earlier this month a partnership with a coalition of voting rights groups to register more than a million new voters ahead of the 2022 midterms. The coalition plans to recruit 100,000 volunteers, organize at least 100,000 voters to call their senators to support voting rights legislation, and recruit thousands of lawyers to fight Republican “voter suppression” laws, which the letter compared to “poll taxes” and “literacy tests.”

“One year ago, we witnessed an unprecedented assault on our Capitol and our democracy,” Obama wrote. “From Georgia and Florida to Iowa and Texas, states passed laws designed to make it harder for Americans to vote. And in other state legislatures across the nation, lawmakers have attempted to do the same.”

Obama has repeatedly been targeted by right-wing conspiracy theories, despite largely focusing her public life since leaving the White House on seemingly uncontroversial efforts to encourage healthier lifestyles and civic engagement.

Even her vow to register voters drew conspiracy theories from far-right figures like Steve Bannon, who suggested that her coalition would register non-citizens even though that’s both illegal and effectively impossible.

Read more on the right’s Michelle problem:

Book banning fever heats up in red states

Amid the GOP’s national campaign to purge “leftist ideology” from public schools, local officials across the nation are now banning certain books that deal with race, sex, and gender, from school shelves.

On Thursday, a Missouri school board voted 4-3 to formally pull Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” from high school libraries in the district. The book, which tells the story of a young Black girl growing up in the Great Depression, includes passages that describe incest and child molestation. Central to the book’s premise is the narrator’s struggle with society’s white standards of beauty, which cause her to develop an inferiority complex around the color of her skin.

Wentzville School Board member Sandy Garber told the St. Louis Post Dispatch that she voted against the book to shield her children from obscenity. “By all means, go buy the book for your child,” Garber said. “I would not want this book in the school for anyone else to see.”

The decision comes despite pushback from district staff and residents, who after a committee review advised the board that banning the novel would “infringe on the rights of parents and students to decide for themselves if they want to read this work of literature.”

Kris Kleindienst, owner of Left Bank Books in St. Louis, told a Fox affiliate that the board’s vote sweeps important discussions of race and sexual abuse under the rug.

“Kids are growing and developing and should have access to as much material as is out there,” Kleindienst said. “It shouldn’t be the decision of a few parents what kids should read.”

The book banning fever has reached a pitch in Mississippi this week as well.

Ridgeland Mayor Gene McGee is currently engaged in a budgetary standoff with Madison County Library System. McGee is attempting to deprive the school board of $100,000 in funding because the Republican wants to see a spate of LGBTQ-themed books banned from school libraries.

Tonja Johnson, executive director for the Madison County Library System, told The Mississippi Free Press that McGee is withholding the money due to his own personal beliefs. “He explained his opposition to what he called ‘homosexual materials’ in the library, that it went against his Christian beliefs, and that he would not release the money as the long as the materials were there,” Johnson said. “He told me that the library can serve whoever we wanted, but that he only serves the great Lord above.”

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According to the Free Press, McGee specifically demanded the immediate removal of the “The Queer Bible,” an essay collection featuring the voices of queer figures like Elton John, Munroe Bergdorf, Tan France, George Michael and Susan Sontag.

And in Tennessee, the Williamson County Schools committee has also joined the censorship fold, imposing restrictions on several different books in light of conservative backlash.

After a review of 31 different texts, the committee on Tuesday “removed one book” from the school shelves and “restricted seven others,” according to The Tennessean. The committee specifically removed “Walk Two Moons,” a 1994 fiction novel written by Sharon Creech. The book centers on the story of a 13-year-old girl with Native American heritage who is reckoning with the disappearance of her mother while traveling from Ohio to Idaho.

The books were reportedly first called into question by the Williamson County chapter of Moms for Liberty, a right-wing advocacy group that advocates for “parents’ rights” in education. The committee concluded that the text contained “objectionable content,” which according to Moms for Liberty, included “stick figures hanging, cursing and miscarriage, hysterectomy/stillborn and screaming during labor.”

The bans in Mississippi, Missouri and Tennessee are part of a larger right-wing movement to crack down on books with “objectionable” works often featuring Black and LGTBQ+ themes. According to the American Library Association (ALA), between June and September of last year, the U.S. saw “155 unique censorship incidents” in cities and districts across the nation.

“We’re seeing an unprecedented volume of challenges in the fall of 2021,” said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, the director of the ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom, last year. “In my twenty years with ALA, I can’t recall a time when we had multiple challenges coming in on a daily basis.

How to make sprinkle birthday cake, according to Molly Yeh

It’s always more fun (and fulfilling!) to DIY. Today, we’re making an artificially delicious childhood treat a little bit more authentic. Molly Yeh from My Name is Yeh shows us how.

Deep in the heart of Park Slope, my family and I sat at my sister’s wedding rehearsal dinner, eating and drinking merrily, as a wedding party does. Up until that point, my day had been spent in my small Brooklyn kitchen, baking cakes in five of my sister’s favorite flavors (pistachio, black sesame, lemon, chocolate, red velvet) for what would be my very first wedding cake. It was epic — enough for a wedding four times the size of my sister’s — and I was a very proud maid of honor.

But at the end of the night, I was a very annoyed maid of honor when the bridezilla demanded that she would like a sprinkle birthday cake at her wedding. To her credit, I’m exaggerating when I say “demanded,” but still, I couldn’t believe that it hadn’t occurred to either of us until then that her cake should have been studded with sprinkles. Every bride who grew up in the ’90s should have a sprinkle birthday cake, or something.

More: A beautiful cake stand for your beautiful creation.

Although I told her that I would absolutely not be making any more cake that day, I knew I had no choice. I swung by the Key Foods on my way home and wrote my speech as I whisked the oil and eggs into a boxed mix. To her delight, as signified by the top-of-her-lungs shriek in the middle of a jam-packed Dressler, the top layer of her cake was sprinkle birthday and all was right in the world.

So consider it my revenge that for my wedding this year, I will be having my sister make a three-tiered sprinkle birthday extravaganza — and no, cake from a box is not allowed this time. I’ve given my sis a head start though, with days and days of recipe testing. Here is my tried-and-true method for making sprinkle birthday cake (also known as confetti cake, sprinkle cake, or straight up birthday cake), straight from one very tired maid of honor.

What is sprinkle birthday cake?

Allow me to let you in on a little secret: Sprinkle birthday cake is the best cake! There’s a reason why both my sister and I requested it for our wedding day. A day of eternal love should have an epilogue dessert course that we both love too: sprinkle birthday. Traditionally, sprinkle birthday cake is made with white cake mix (something close to angel food cake is ideal) and lots and lots of rainbow sprinkles. It shouldn’t taste like vanilla cake with sprinkles. It should taste like, well, sprinkle birthday cake, which is in a league of its own. Of course, during the holidays you’ll probably find sprinkle birthday cake mix made with red and green sprinkles.

The key to a true sprinkle birthday cake is a light and fluffy cake batter, baked, and frosted with vanilla buttercream. Using cake flour and egg whites will help you achieve a cloudlike cake with a fine crumb. I’ll chat more about vanilla extract shortly, but it’s also an important ingredient for homemade sprinkle birthday cake.

Aside from the colorful sprinkles, I believe the thing that everyone loves about sprinkle birthday cake so much is that it’s not *too* artificial tasting. The boxed cake mix, that is. It tastes like everyone’s childhood and the fact that it’s so airy means you can eat a big wedge of it and then another and then another.

How to make sprinkle birthday cake from scratch

At first thought, a homemade sprinkle birthday cake seems like an easy task: Just fold a bunch of sprinkles into a vanilla cake and wham bam, you’re done. Wrong. Sprinkle birthday cake is not that simple. Sprinkle birthday cake is a complex being who has issues because when anyone tells him to just act natural, he fails. The secret to sprinkle birthday is that sprinkle birthday in its most natural element is, in fact, slightly artificial. Here’s why:

1. Artificial sprinkles and vanilla work best.

Natural sprinkles (in my experience) aren’t bright enough. Naturally colored nonpareils, naturally colored sprinkles, homemade sprinkles made with natural food dye, and a series of found objects including chopped mint leaves, bachelor’s buttons, dried mango, and cranberries were just not bright enough after baking. The best and brightest results came from artificially colored sprinkles, artificially colored nonpareils, and artificially colored homemade sprinkles. And forget about using any type of sanding sugar. Sorry not sorry — I don’t make the rules. (Well I guess in this case I am making the rules, but trust me. This is how it has to be).

Artificial vanilla works best. This is a tip I picked up from Marian Bull, who learned at a Momofuku Milk Bar cake class that McCormick’s clear imitation vanilla is way closer than an all-natural vanilla extract to achieving that nostalgic flavor we get from boxed cakes. Try it and you’ll understand.

2. Not every vanilla cake will work for sprinkle birthday cake.

The batter needs to be thick enough to suspend the sprinkles so that they don’t all fall to the bottom when the cake is baking. One-hundred percent oil-based cakes need not apply. We need the volume and structure from the creamed butter and sugar to suspend our sprinkles. We also need that *tiny amount* of water present in butter to encourage a *tiny amount* of gluten formation — structure is a good thing to have in a many-tiered wedding cake, after all. I did include some oil to help ensure an even crumb that stays tender and moist.

Egg yolks are not welcome here, since we want the cake to be light enough in color that the sprinkles really shine. Hence, only egg whites in the batter.

How important is the cake flour, you ask? Very good question. To answer that, we need a bit of cake science, so bear with me. Cake flour is ground from soft winter wheat, to all-purpose flour’s *hard* winter wheat. Soft wheats have less gluten — and thus, less protein — than hard wheats. Think of cake (*yum, cake*) and its ideal texture: soft, tender, moist, and crumbly almost. You’re not going for the chewy texture you get from the “strong* gluten networks in sourdough breads or pizza doughs.

Cake flour is also bleached with chlorine. This bleaching process not only makes for a whiter cake (remember, we need a light, neutral backdrop to really let the sprinkles shine), but makes the starch in the flour more absorbent, and the gluten even weaker. In cake, water and milk-holding starch translates as “moist,” and the weak gluten structure translates as “tender.”

3. Choose your frosting wisely.

I decided to go with a simple, quick American-style buttercream, for the sake of ease and time (and my sanity). American-style buttercream requires just four ingredients, and whips up rather quickly. But, if you want to swipe a colored icing over your sprinkle birthday cake, go for a glossy white meringue-based icing, like Italian or Swiss buttercream, instead. If coloring doesn’t matter to you, and you want a richer-tasting frosting, go for French-style. In addition to butter and sugar, French-style buttercream calls for whipped whole eggs and egg yolks. This makes for a custardy, lovely, pale yellow frosting.

Alright, got all that? Good. Go have fun!

***

Recipe: Sprinkle Birthday Cake

Yields

10-14 servings

Ingredients

For the cake

1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 1/2 cups sugar
4 large egg whites
2 tablespoons clear imitation vanilla (I use McCormick’s)
6 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 1/2 cups cake flour
2 1/4 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup whole milk
2/3 cup plus 1 tablespoon sprinkles

For the frosting

2 cups (or 4 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature
3 cups powdered sugar, or to taste
2 teaspoons clear imitation vanilla
1 pinch salt

Directions

Cake

Preheat oven to 350° F. Grease two 8-inch cake pans. Cut out circles of parchment paper and line the bottom of the pans. Lightly spray the parchment.
With an electric mixer or in the bowl of a stand mixer, cream together the butter and sugar until fluffy. Add the egg whites, one at a time, mixing well after each one. Mix in the vanilla and oil.
In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt. With your mixer running on low, add this to the butter mixture in three additions, alternating with the milk. Once you have a smooth batter, fold in the 2/3 cup of sprinkles.
Divide the batter evenly between the pans. Sprinkle the remaining tablespoon of sprinkles over the top and bake the cakes until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. Begin checking for doneness at around 25 minutes.
Let the cakes cool for a few minutes in the pans and then flip them onto a cooling rack to cool completely before frosting.
To make the colorful bunting, knead food coloring (liquid or gel) into marzipan, cut out triangles, and stick them onto the cake.

Frosting

Beat together the butter and sugar until creamy. Add the vanilla and salt and mix to combine. Taste and add more sugar, if desired.
Frost your cake and enjoy!

30 melt-in-your-mouth prosciutto recipes

We love a good charcuterie board (especially if it’s designed by Marissa Mullen). It might seem a little basic, but have you ever heard anyone complain about a board the size of a pirate’s plank covered in an assortment of meats, soft and hard cheeses, and everything in between? Mini pickles, nuts, jams, and half a dozen types of crusty bread: Please and thank you! But at the center of it all is prosciutto (we see you, too, burrata, but this isn’t about you). While I’ll never, never be tired of a plentiful prosciutto platter, it can do more than just look pretty. These 30 recipes will prove that Parma’s cured ham delicacy goes beyond the board.

Best prosciutto recipes

1. Dressed-Up Cara Cara Oranges with Prosciutto and Pistachios

This isn’t the first time we’ve made a prosciutto salad with juicy fruit and herbs — but it may be our best development to date. On a big platter, arrange alternating layers of orange rounds and prosciutto slices, then garnish with pistachios, mint leaves, shaved Pecorino Romano, and good-quality olive oil.

2. Pasta with Prosciutto, Snap Peas, Mint, and Cream

I’m not going to waste any time delivering the pasta recipe I know you came here for — creamy pasta (in this case we used orecchiette) mixed with crispy prosciutto. Ask your butcher for thick slabs of prosciutto rather than thin slices for this particular dish.

3. Champagne Alfredo with Crispy Prosciutto and Shrimp

I’m sure you’ve heard of the no-mess method for baking bacon strips in the oven, but did it ever cross your mind to do the same with prosciutto slices? You can thank recipe developer Grant Melton for his brilliant, splatter-free vision.

4. Honeydew with Prosciutto, Olives, and Mint

The sweet and salty prosciutto salad is one that manages to make its way onto every dinner party menu because it’s just so good. This one gets a briny touch with oil-cured olives and heat from crushed Calabrian chiles.

5. Sweet Fuyu Persimmon with Prosciutto, Burrata, and Mint From the Daley Plate

You had me at burrata. And then again at prosciutto. And then again at persimmons and fresh mint and smoked sea salt.

6. Prosciutto and Goat Cheese Strata

For a savory brunch that will feed a crowd, this eggy, cheesy casserole dish will fit the bill. But between the prosciutto, two types of cheeses, and fresh basil, it’s got enough going on that you could just as easily serve it for dinner, too.

7. Hasselback Prosciutto e Melone

“Prosciutto e melone is a summer classic, but we love the idea of serving it in a more exciting way. Hasselbacking the melon and stuffing the slices with pieces of prosciutto and basil takes something that might feel a bit expected and makes it exciting and new,” say our editors.

8. Smoked Gouda Cheese Ball with Crispy Prosciutto

Wait . . . it can’t be . . . is it? Is that crispy prosciutto on the outside of the cheese ball? Why yes, yes it is.

9. 3-Cheese Grilled Cheese with Prosciutto and Nectarine

This is no child’s grilled cheese sandwich (we love that, too, but that’s not what we’re doing here). It starts with Gruyère, sharp cheddar, and Brie and just gets better from there with prosciutto slices and thinly sliced nectarines.

10. Roasted Cauliflower with Prosciutto and Dates

Make roasted cauliflower not boring with sliced prosciutto cut into ribbons and chopped pitted dates.

11. Spicy Watermelon with Tomatoes, Prosciutto, and Salted-Lime Yogurt

Juicy watermelon dances with crisp cucumber, plump cherry tomatoes, and prosciutto in this summer salad.

12. Crispy Prosciutto-Rosemary Khachapuri (Georgian Cheese Bread)

Prosciutto is often served in its cured form on an antipasto platter with cheese, olives, and nuts. But my personal favorite way to eat it is when it’s crispy and taking a nap on a bed of melted cheese.

13. Chicken Saltimbocca

One of the most classic ways to serve prosciutto is wrapped around thinly pounded chicken breasts, which are dredged in flour and pan-seared until crispy.

14. Lemony Whipped Goat Cheese with Crispy Prosciutto and Pomegranate

Pomegranates are at their peak during winter, which is perfect timing for holiday parties galore. Bring this dip adorned with crispy prosciutto and pomegranate seeds and you’ll be voted the MVP.

15. Smashed Chickpeas, Crispy Prosciutto, and Poached Eggs

This recipe is a study in textural contrasts: Toothsome chickpeas team up with crispy prosciutto and luscious poached egg, whose yolk is like an instant sauce. Perfect for a brunch crowd — or just yourself!

16. Prosciutto, Nectarine, and Fontina Panini on Rosemary Focaccia

For an easy, breezy summer lunch, take a bite outta this pressed sandwich inspired by the classic combination of prosciutto and melon.

17. Crunchy Spring Salad with Zesty Labneh

This isn’t exactly the type of salad you prep on a busy workday for lunch; you have to blanch snap peas, boil baby beets, whip up lemony labneh, sizzle anchovies, crisp up prosciutto, and whisk a Dijon-lemon vinaigrette. But don’t let that deter you from making it. It’s totally and completely worth your while…just save this one for when you have a bit more time.

18. Bread and Butter Salad with Dijon Vinaigrette

“This hearty, picnic-ready salad is a play on jambon beurre, the classic Parisian sandwich of ham and cheese on a buttered baguette,” writes recipe developer Emily C. Combine buttery croutons with thinly sliced prosciutto and Swiss cheese, sliced cucumbers, Castelvetrano olives, arugula, and Dijon vinaigrette, and marvel at your 15-minute, wholly delicious creation.

19. Mint and Prosciutto Grilled Shrimp

Low-key effort with a highly flavorful reward. Save yourself some time by requesting your fishmonger to peel and devein the shrimp for you in advance (just leave the tail on), so all you’ll need to do is skewer them as is before cooking.

20. Ricotta Crostini with Figs, Prosciutto, and Honey

Everything about this crostini makes sense. From the lemony ricotta to the ripe figs to the thinly sliced prosciutto to a generous drizzle of honey, all of the ingredients work in harmony together.

21. Leek, Prosciutto and Egg Tart

This prosciutto recipe is a top contender for “your best pizza recipe,” “your best holiday breakfast,” and “your best late-winter tart.” Top the tart with diced prosciutto, thinly sliced leeks, eggs, and Boursin (or any type of soft cheese, really).

22. Vincisgrassi (Wild Mushroom and Prosciutto Lasagna)

A duo of dried porcini mushrooms and fresh wild mushrooms, plus chopped prosciutto, form a hearty lasagna filling that’s an umami-rich alternative to the usual blend of ground veal, pork, and beef.

23. Prosciutto, Pear, Mascarpone, and Red Onion Tart

When this hearty tart is baked in the oven, the mascarpone filling becomes ever so slightly creamier, the pears slices become sweet, the sharp flavor of the red onions softens, and the prosciutto crisps up.

24. Roasted Butternut Squash, Prosciutto, and Sage Quiche

Our readers can’t get enough of this fall-vibes quiche. Your favorite pie crust will work as a beautiful blank canvas for butternut squash, leeks, chopped prosciutto, and plenty of salty cheese.

25. Deep Dish Sausage, Prosciutto, and Onion Pizza

This deep-dish pizza is made for meat lovers; it’s loaded with sausage and prosciutto and is formed in a springform pan, which creates a really deep-dish crust.

26. Crab Mac

I will never, ever get tired of mac and cheese. I will always go for classic, crunchy, creamy mac, totally unadorned. But this version, with a pound of good-quality crabmeat and a little bit of prosciutto, may just change my mind.

27. Colby Garrelts’ Grilled Pork Loin with Green Bean Salad

A double dose of pork appears in the form of grilled pork loins and a green bean and prosciutto salad on the side.

28. Grilled Pizza with Figs, Prosciutto, Gorgonzola, and Arugula Pesto

Prosciutto and arugula are always a classic combination, but the addition of toasted walnuts, fresh black figs, and Gorgonzola crumbles begs the question: “Where have you been all my life?”

29. Ina Garten’s Cauliflower Toasts

Anything Ina touches turns to gold — in this case, the gold is country-style crusty bread topped with roasted cauliflower, mascarpone cheese, Gruyère, and thin slices of prosciutto.

30. Cambozola with Roasted Fennel and Olives

I go to the Met and Guggenheim to look at beautiful art. I go to cocktail parties to look at beautiful cheese boards, and this one is up there with the most attractive spreads I’ve ever seen, complete with roasted fennel, pickled red onions, a couple of wedges of cheese, olives, shelled pistachios, and lots and lots of salty prosciutto.

What Ron DeSantis’ COVID fight with the FDA is really all about: Donald Trump

The FDA has announced that two of the monoclonal antibody treatments that have been useful in treating COVID are not effective in treating the omicron variant, so the government is no longer going to be distributing those treatments. That sounds quite reasonable, right? You don’t want to be giving people treatments that you know don’t work. That would be malpractice.

So naturally, Donald Trump’s mini-me, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, is having a fit over the decision. After all, DeSantis clearly thought he figured out a cunning way to avoid pushing the vaccines and angering the GOP’s rabid anti-vax base while still pretending to offer some solution to the raging pandemic. His entire COVID response has been based upon the idea that the monoclonal antibody treatments are the answer. The fact that vaccines offer the best protection against serious disease in the first place was never of interest to DeSantis. Neither was the fact that monoclonal antibody treatments cost around $2,100. Vaccines, meanwhile, cost about $20-$40. For supposed fiscally conservative Republicans, that’s quite a waste of government money.

DeSantis’ plan was always a little too cute by half and it didn’t work very well as a medical intervention. But as a political strategy, it was quite effective.

Building on his months-long crusade against masks and mitigation efforts he began whining about the federal government’s alleged unfair distribution of the treatments back in September when the Delta variant was still raging. There were plenty of the treatments available but he got tons of praise from the right-wing media anyway and further established his MAGA bonafide. Then in December, the National Institute of Health (NIH) discovered that the treatments were not working against the omicron variant so they advised the government to pause its distribution. Once again DeSantis and company went ballistic, ostentatiously pounding their chests and insisting that the federal government was denying the people of Florida their life-saving treatments. At the time, Delta still made up about 25% of cases so the feds relented and resumed distribution to Florida. Today, omicron makes up 99% of the cases in the U.S. and these treatments remain ineffective against it. Even the pharmaceutical manufacturers who make them agree:

As the DeSantis administration rails against the FDA decision to limit use of monoclonal antibody treatments made by Regeneron and Eli Lilly, worth noting both companies say they agree with the feds that these drugs aren’t effective against omicron.

Regeneron left, Lilly right: https://t.co/3QWxqDC4zC pic.twitter.com/3vDj4ojWjm

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) January 25, 2022

As you can see, DeSantis insists that “there is no clinical evidence” that it doesn’t work as if that has some relevance. Scientists all over the world have come to the same conclusion. As the Washington Post reported, studies in December showed the therapies were ineffective. Scientists at Columbia University working with the University of Hong Kong came to the same conclusion as did German researchers. A more recent study showed that the Regeneron and Eli Lilly therapies “completely lost neutralizing activity against” omicron and “also lacked inhibitory capacity.” The NIH and the FDA, which have a responsibility to ensure that drugs do more good than harm, have both looked at the data and concluded the same thing. In other words, they don’t work.

Nonetheless, DeSantis made the daft claim that some people who are taking the drugs are getting better. Of course they are! Most people who get COVID get better. That doesn’t prove that the treatments are the reason. What it does prove is that people are getting pumped full of expensive, experimental drugs they don’t need — which considering that many of them are among the stubbornly unvaccinated is enough to make you reach for the cheap tequila.

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This is nothing new. The Republicans have been pushing ineffective cures from the very beginning of this pandemic. From Hydroxychloroquine to Ivermectin to ingesting disinfectant, bathing in bleach and now drinking urine, they’ve willingly tried it all — except the safe and available vaccines which have been proven to drastically reduce your chances of getting seriously ill.

For all of Desantis’ cheap political caterwauling, there are still plenty of therapeutics being sent to Florida. According to the Miami Herald, while the state will no longer receive the Regeneron and Eli Lilly treatments, the state will get “3,200 doses of the monoclonal antibody manufactured by Sotrovimab; about 4,700 doses of AstraZeneca’s Evusheld treatment meant for high-risk patients and some 26,000 total doses of antiviral pills developed by Merck and Pfizer.” And there is an ample supply of cheap vaccines if anyone chooses to be sane enough to get a couple of simple shots and save themselves the trouble.

Despite all that, DeSantis moved quickly to cover his error in putting all his eggs in the monoclonal antibody basket by going on the offensive. He claimed that the president “has forced medical pros to choose treating their patients or breaking the law” and that Floridians’ “access to treatment shouldn’t be denied at the whims of a floundering president.” His spokesperson retweeted a post by a right wing conspiracy pusher that said “the FDA is trying to make it so that people in Florida die of COVID. They’ll kill people to harm Republicans.” It was quite a performance.

Naturally, the oleaginous Senator from Texas, Ted Cruz, got in on the act:

The Biden admin’s track record on COVID is a disgrace. After months of rationing critical antibody treatments, they now entirely pulled the approvals.

Biden needs to put patients first and stop politicizing medicine.

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) January 25, 2022

Cruz has always trafficked in this smarmy, patently obvious sanctimony but Desantis does it better. He combines that with the phony outrage, the histrionic battling with the federal government, the fist shaking and tremulous defenses of the regular folks in the natural voice of a demagogue. He has that knack of being aggressively shameless that the American right just loves so much.

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It will be interesting to see how DeSantis’ former mentor down the road in Palm Beach deals with this. Donald Trump blasted those who refuse to admit if they got the booster — DeSantis being the most prominent — for being “gutless” and has, on occasion promoted the vaccines in his ongoing quest to be given personal credit for inventing them. But he also received the monoclonal antibody treatment under a very special dispensation when he had COVID and promised to ensure that every American had access to them — a promise he never fulfilled because he was so busy lying about the election results. Who knows where he will land?

The word is that Trump has been frustrated with DeSantis for failing to show proper deference by promising not to run against him in a primary in 2024. But he may just let this one go since the latest polling shows him running 45 points ahead of his former protege in a primary match up, 57-12. Those numbers have been unchanged for months. As New York Magazine’s Ed Kilgore observes, “if two impeachments and a failed insurrection haven’t shoved him toward the dustbin of history, will Ron DeSantis?”

I don’t think so. And all of the clever positioning to Trump’s right or left, insulting Joe Biden and catering to the anti-vax MAGA faithful on COVID isn’t going to change that. It’s Trump’s base now — all the rest of the GOP presidential hopefuls are just wallowing in it.

Why doesn’t every big box store have rooftop solar?

Last year, a reader wrote in to Grist’s advice column with a question: Why doesn’t every roof have solar panels? A report released this week by the nonprofit Environment America and the research firm Frontier Group poses a followup question: At the very least, why doesn’t every big box store have rooftop solar?

The amount of space available on the rooftops of Walmarts, Targets, Home Depots, Costcos, and other large stores and shopping malls in the continental U.S. is staggering. Environment America estimates that it amounts to 7.2 billion square feet, or about the size of El Paso, Texas. Even tiny little Rhode Island has 279 stores that span at least 25,000 square feet each.

From one perspective, these shrines to consumption represent the root cause of our climate catastrophe. But there’s a potential silver lining: These stores can make up for at least some of that damage by opening up their vast rooftops to solar development. At best, blanketing these stores in solar panels could reduce the need to site solar farms in rural areas where they often face opposition from neighbors and can threaten endangered species.

The report finds that superstore roofs could generate enough clean energy to power almost 8 million average U.S. homes. Or to put it another way, rooftop solar panels on big box stores could provide half of the annual electricity that these stores currently demand.

The report is a followup to a similar analysis the nonprofit conducted in 2016. In the years since, the potential power that could be generated on box store roofs increased 9 percent — not because there are so many more stores, but because solar panels have become more efficient.

In addition to reducing demand for fossil fuel energy and potentially enabling conservation elsewhere, the report points out that rooftop solar has big benefits for the stores themselves. It reduces electricity costs directly, and can also reduce heating and cooling costs by providing shade during the day and insulation at night.

Some companies have already tapped into this potential. The report identifies Ikea, Walmart, and Target as leaders in rooftop solar. Ikea has installations on 90 percent of its U.S. locations. Walmart ranks as the top retailer involved with the Environmental Protection Agency’s Green Power Partnership to help businesses procure renewable energy, but the report points out that the company is involved in a lot of renewable energy development that is not on its rooftops and could redouble its efforts to generate power on its own buildings.

Environment America recommends several ways state and federal policymakers can help get this show on the road. One is to extend the federal investment tax credit for rooftop solar for 10 more years and allow companies to claim it via direct payments rather than through their tax returns. The version of the Build Back Better Act that passed in the House last fall and is currently held up in the Senate would do both. Other options include bolstering state tax credits, offering property tax exemptions for the value of the solar equipment, or exempting the equipment itself from sales taxes.

The report also encourages states to enable other business models, like allowing companies to lease the solar panels from a third party or allowing communities to invest in the projects and earn some of the benefits.

David Hughes, an environmental anthropologist at Rutgers University, has a more radical idea. When Grist spoke with him last fall, he suggested that when the owners of these large flat rooftops fail to take advantage of their solar potential, they should forfeit their rights to do so to the community or municipality. Hughes bases his argument on a law from the 1800s called the Homestead Act, under which the government offered up plots of land (stolen from Indigenous peoples) to white settlers to cultivate. But if the homesteaders failed to do anything “useful” with it within five years, the rights to the land reverted back to the government. Hughes argues that the Homestead Act could be repurposed for progressive priorities today, ensuring that when a company doesn’t take advantage of the resources at its fingertips, the local community can.

“If you’re Amazon — the vast majority of their warehouses are wasting sunlight. They should not have control over those roofs anymore,” Hughes told me at the time. “The community or the municipality or somebody should seize it and put panels on top of it. I’m not saying seize the warehouse — I’m just saying claim the authority to climb up there and put panels on top of it!”