Cori Bush pushes back on Joe Manchin’s demands: “I do not trust his assessment”

Congresswoman Cori Bush of Missouri blasted Sen. Joe Manchin on Monday for once again threatening to tank the Build Back Better Act, a safety net and climate proposal that the West Virginia lawmaker and other corporate Democrats have already watered down by removing key provisions and slashing funding for the remaining programs.

“We cannot leave anyone behind. Senator Manchin must support the Build Back Better Act.”

“Joe Manchin does not get to dictate the future of our country,” Bush said in a statement Monday evening after Manchin—a necessary swing vote in the evenly split U.S. Senate—publicly refused to support the latest iteration of Democrats’ reconciliation package, whose top-line was cut from $3.5 trillion over 10 years to $1.75 trillion in an effort to appease a small group of conservatives.

“I do not trust his assessment of what our communities need the most,” the Missouri Democrat continued. “I trust the parents in my district who can’t get to their shift without childcare. I trust the scientists who have shown us what our future will look like if we fail to meaningfully address the climate crisis. I trust the patients and doctors crying out for comprehensive health coverage for every person in America.”

During a press conference on Monday, Manchin insisted that the House approve a Senate-passed $550 billion bipartisan infrastructure package before moving ahead with the broader reconciliation bill, which has the backing of a strong majority of Democrats in Congress and the party’s voters.

“I’m open to supporting a final bill that helps move our country forward,” Manchin said of the reconciliation package, “but I am equally open to voting against a bill that hurts our country and the American people.”

In response to Manchin, Bush argued that the bipartisan measure “overwhelmingly” excludes vulnerable communities, echoing the longstanding progressive critique of legislation that the West Virginia Democrat—a fossil fuel industry ally and coal profiteer—helped craft. For months, members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) have said they are willing to vote for the bipartisan package only if the Build Back Better Act is advanced simultaneously.

“We cannot spend the next year saying, ‘The House did its part, and now it’s the Senate’s turn.’ We need the Senate to actually get this done,” Bush, the CPC’s deputy whip, said Monday. “Joe Manchin’s opposition to the Build Back Better Act is anti-Black, anti-child, anti-woman, and anti-immigrant. When we talk about transformative change, we are talking about a bill that will benefit Black, brown, and Indigenous communities.”

“We cannot leave anyone behind,” she added. “Senator Manchin must support the Build Back Better Act.”

Joe Manchin does not get to dictate the future of our country. pic.twitter.com/aG7zBuyMQy

— Congresswoman Cori Bush (Archived) (@RepCori) November 1, 2021

Despite Manchin’s comments on Monday, progressive leaders expressed confidence that the Build Back Better Act remains on track for a vote as lawmakers race to iron out final details, including a prescription drug plan that was axed from the updated reconciliation framework unveiled last week.

CPC chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) told reporters Monday that her caucus is prepared for a vote on the Build Back Better Act and the bipartisan infrastructure bill as soon as this week even if Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.)—another key Democratic holdout—don’t publicly vow to support the reconciliation package.

“We are going to do our work in the House and let the Senate do its work,” Jayapal said. “But we’re tired of, you know, just continuing to wait for one or two people.”

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), the CPC whip, told The Intercept‘s Ryan Grim Monday that “it’s time to call [Manchin’s] bluff” by pushing the reconciliation measure and the bipartisan bill through the House.

Given that progressives previously insisted that the Senate approve the reconciliation package before a House vote on the bipartisan bill, Omar and Jayapal’s latest comments were viewed as an indication that the CPC is changing course after months of negotiations.

“These bills will pass the House and everyone will get to see if Manchin is willing to vote it down,” Omar said Monday. “It is also time to see if the president [can] get his friend on board and get the votes for his agenda.”

What if the truth about Jan. 6 is revealed — and the American people just don’t care?

Reality is being rewritten before our eyes. Some Americans can see this, and understand it. The results include an inescapable feeling of dread and doom. The frustration mounts because as a group those who see the truth and are ready to speak it do not yet have the full vocabulary required to make sense of it all.

Too many other Americans appear not to care about the blatant effort by the Republican fascists and others to rewrite reality. They are indifferent or tired, or just so hyper-focused on their own lives that nihilism and surrender are preferable to confrontation and engagement. Others are either incapable or unwilling, or remain in a profound state of denial.

This is not a claim about some grand secret conspiracy. It’s an observation about how people function in a society caught in an interregnum, that time of in-betweenness when the old is giving way to something new (and potentially something horrible), when truth and reality are being dismembered by fascists and their fellow travelers. It all feels like a confusing slow blur.

For those of us who do care and who choose to see the truth, what do we do when the final form, the entire ugliness behind America’s crisis of democracy, is finally revealed?

On Jan. 6, Donald Trump and his cabal attempted a coup to overthrow American democracy. As part of that coup plot, Trump’s followers launched a lethal terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol. These events were publicly announced by Trump, his spokespeople, allies and followers. America’s political elites, including too many among the news media, chose to ignore these warnings or somehow convince themselves that it was all “hyperbole.”

With a few notable exceptions, the mainstream news media and other public voices described the right-wing terrorist attack on the Capitol in relatively benign terms as the acts of a “disorganized mob” or as something “spontaneous” and “shocking.”

Donald Trump and his propagandists and co-conspirators, on the other hand, created their own alternate reality in which Jan. 6 was a festive gathering, a “regular day” when many “tourists” decided to visit the Capitol.

Alternatively, the right-wing propaganda machine argued that, yes, there was political violence, but it was actually committed by antifa or Black Lives Matter activists, as part of a false flag operation to harm Trump and the Republican Party’s supposedly pristine reputation.

It’s all a lie, of course. But public opinion polls and other evidence reveal that a large majority of Republicans and Trump supporters — as though there were some meaningful distinction between those groups — believe in the Big Lie and the many little lies that support it.

As more information about how close Donald Trump and his cabal really came to nullifying the 2020 election has become known, the language has shifted. Now the mainstream media says “insurrection” rather than “mob.” That’s certainly a more accurate description, but it still fails to capture the scale of the Trump cabal’s efforts to overthrow American democracy.

“Insurrection” suggests something momentary, as opposed to a sustained attack whose result would be a long-term and perhaps permanent change in American society and government. Trump and his forces wanted to spark a fascist revolution in America; Jan. 6 was not intended as a one-off outburst of white authoritarian fascist rage.

In her review of the new HBO documentary “Four Hours at the Capitol,” Sophie Gilbert of the Atlantic grapples with the question of what language to use in describing those events:

In the days and weeks after the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, commentators and media outlets grappled with the question of what to call that event. Language is sticky; it clarifies and obfuscates the truth depending on who’s wielding it. January 6 was described as or likened to a “riot,” a “tourist visit,” an “insurrection,” a “peaceful protest,” and a “coup attempt.” And yet, watching Four Hours at the Capitol, Jamie Roberts’s tight, unsettling new HBO documentary about that day, another word seemed more appropriate to me, one that most of the participants interviewed in the film might agree on. More than anything else, January 6 was war….

With his rigidly chronological framing and his interviews with people who were present at the Capitol that day, [director Jamie] Roberts captures the extent to which both sides were engaging in combat. This dynamic emerges over and over again throughout different accounts and video clips. One clash between Capitol Police officers and pro-Trump extremists is referred to by a participant as “the battle for the tunnel.” Different interviewees describe fighting on “the front line,” engaging in “hand-to-hand combat,” and, in the case of one police officer, the strangeness of walking through his own colleagues’ blood. In a scene that seems ripped right out of a Bruce Willis movie, a police commander shouts, “We are not losing the U.S. Capitol today, do you hear me?”

Gilbert continues by observing that Capitol Police are of course equipped to deal with violent threats, but are “not trained for warfare, which is what must have made January 6 and their task of defending the U.S. Capitol seem so absurd.” It was the first time hostile forces had invaded the Capitol in large numbers since the War of 1812. What the film captures, Gilbert concludes, is simple: “Pro-Trump forces went to war against the American officers charged with defending democracy.”

A series of recent books, most notably Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s “Peril,” have offered evidence that Trump and his allies were following a detailed plan meant to replace our democratic system with an autocracy where Trump would remain president indefinitely. This plan came close to succeeding.

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Rolling Stone reports that dozens of meetings occurred between Trump’s coup plotters and those others who organized the rallies on Jan. 6 which served as a staging ground for the attack on the Capitol. At least one high-ranking Trump White House official and several Republican members of Congress allegedly took part in these meetings.

Donald Trump and his allies are continuing to encourage right-wing political violence as part of the “Big Lie” strategy to undermine Joe Biden’s presidency and to further radicalize the supporters of the Republican fascist movement.

Unfortunately, Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Department of Justice have so far done nothing to hold Trump and other leaders of the coup plot accountable for their apparent crimes. Biden and the Democratic leadership are also not exerting the pressure necessary to ensure that Trump and his co-conspirators are punished to the maximum extent of the law.

At the Nation, Elie Mystal laments that the DOJ’s failure “to investigate the planning of the putsch is all the more shameful given the publicly available evidence that the insurrectionists may have had help on the inside”:

For instance: The people who sacked the Capitol made a beeline for the Senate parliamentarian’s office. Pictures after the putsch showed that the office had been ransacked. The location of that office is not obvious; it’s one of those places that is hard to find unless you’ve been there before. But the insurrectionists somehow got there and began looking for the hard copies of the electoral votes that Congress was meant to certify that day. Had they gotten their hands on those votes, even for a moment, they would have broken the chain of custody of the Electoral College count and at least delayed the certification of the election, as was their goal.

It strains credulity to think that a bunch of white supremacists and shamans knew precisely where to go and what to look for on their own. At the very least, a thorough criminal investigation of events would seek to uncover where these people got their information. It would look into claims that tours were given beforehand to eventual insurrectionists. Congress can piece together events, but the DOJ and the FBI are not supposed to wait until the political branches get it together before investigating and prosecuting people for crimes.

At some point in the near future, the American people and the world will likely learn the full details of the Trump regime’s coup plot — or at least, as full an accounting as we will ever get. But what if the American people simply don’t care? What if the overall public response is indifference and a feeling of futility, driven by the perceived “need to move on” or the feeling that “nothing matters anyway.”

That will leave the door open for the next fascist coup attempt and serve as an act of surrender in advance — which was very likely the plan from the beginning.

More from Salon’s coverage of the Jan. 6 aftermath and America’s democracy crisis:

Sounding the first alarm on COVID-19

Wuhan is a beautiful place. It’s also full of danger.

The capital of central China’s Hubei province, Wuhan is an enormous city of 11 million, about as many as the combined populations of New York City and Chicago. Full of spectacular lakes and lush parks, Wuhan is divided by the magnificent Yangtze River and historically important Han River. The city boasts high-speed trains to various cities around China and flights to the rest of the world, with three train stations and a major international airport ferrying a steady stream of visitors.

Wuhan has long been known for a variety of fish dishes, thanks to its proximity to fresh water, and a hot noodle dish known as reganmian. Like some other big Chinese cities, Wuhan — at least prior to the pandemic — was also home to dozens of sprawling markets that sold a variety of fresh meat, fruits, seafood, and vegetables. Some were known to slaughter live animals on-site for their customers. Animals for sale included raccoon dogs, civets, mink, badgers, rabbits, hedgehogs, and baby crocodiles. Much of the wildlife trade is illegal, and though most of the species sold in Wuhan’s markets are protected by the government, there was precious little enforcement. In response to Covid-19, Chinese leaders ultimately banned the sale of wildlife for food, though markets continue to sell fish, poultry, and other meats.

Many of the wild animals that were butchered in the Wuhan markets are susceptible to infection and can transmit viruses. And they were often stored in cramped, unhygienic conditions, making it easy for pathogens to jump species. The storage and handling of the animals has long been a matter of concern, partly because similar conditions led to serious problems elsewhere in the country. In 2002, the SARS-CoV coronavirus first appeared in and around a similar market in the southern Chinese city of Foshan, about 621 miles from Wuhan. More than a third of the early patients who developed the SARS disease were food handlers who likely had close contact with some of these same animals.

In December 2019, word began to emerge about a mysterious sickness spreading in the Wuhan area. Reports on social media and elsewhere described dozens of people sick from some kind of respiratory virus. No one knew the cause of the ailments — in early January, The Wall Street Journal described it as “a mystery viral pneumonia” that was causing “fever and breathing difficulties.” Some of the infections were linked to vendors at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, one of the city’s bigger markets, featuring a complex set of stalls and alleyways. It wasn’t clear if the sickness originated in the market or if it was merely spreading there, but Chinese authorities, who already were battling an outbreak of African swine fever in the country, ordered it shut down.

Around midday on Friday, Jan. 3, Zhang Yongzhen, a 58-year-old infectious disease expert at the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center, which is part of Fudan University, received a package he had been eagerly awaiting: a metal box containing a test tube, packed in dry ice, with lung-washing swabs from a patient suffering from the new virus in a Wuhan hospital. They had all been in the Wuhan market or lived nearby. Zhang and his colleagues got right to work and didn’t stop for the next 40 hours, spending two straight nights in the lab. By 2 a.m. on Sunday, Jan. 5, the team had mapped the virus’s genome, or its complete set of genetic instructions, declaring the pathogen to be “very similar to SARS-type coronavirus.” They also noticed a gene producing a spike protein on the pathogen’s surface, one that resembled the one used by SARS-CoV to bind to human cells.

This was truly bad news — SARS had inflicted enormous damage on China, sparking the kind of social unrest that kept authorities up at night. If the new pathogen was anything like that one, the country was in some trouble. Local scientists knew it and so did Chinese officials. Over the next week, though, Chinese authorities went out of their way to reassure the public and others. Wuhan health officials said they hadn’t seen new cases in the previous week, which was encouraging, and they hadn’t found “significant” human-to-human transmission, though they didn’t elaborate on what “significant” meant.

The World Health Organization, a United Nations agency specializing in global health, issued statements complimenting China’s public health resources as well as its system for monitoring illness outbreaks, providing more reason for comfort. Wuhan itself was the home of China’s first Biosafety Level 4 laboratory, a specialized research laboratory dealing with potentially deadly infectious agents, a sign the city was no scientific backwater. Experts said that even if a new coronavirus had in fact emerged, it was unlikely to have the impact of the virus that led to SARS. Health authorities had learned so much since 2002 and the Chinese government was better prepared to respond, they said.

For all the calm and confidence displayed by health authorities and others, Zhang and other Chinese scientists were becoming alarmed about what was happening in Wuhan. They were especially worried about a family of six who lived in a different and even larger city, Shenzhen, nearly 700 miles away. Just before the New Year, the family had traveled to Wuhan for a weeklong visit. Now, five members of the family were infected with Wuhan’s new virus, each suffering from a variety of maladies, including fever, upper or lower respiratory tract symptoms, and diarrhea.

People get sick while traveling; it happens. But what was especially troubling about this case was that one of the family members hadn’t made the trip to Wuhan, yet had still become infected with the new virus after several days of contact with family members. It was a clear sign the virus was potentially transmittable between people. Just as chilling: One family member — a 10-year-old who was later described in the medical journal The Lancet as being “non-compliant to parental guidance,” seemingly because he didn’t wear a surgical mask during the Wuhan vacation like another child on the trip — had become infected yet didn’t demonstrate any symptoms of the virus. That was great for him, but awful for everyone else. To Zhang and others, it meant many more asymptomatic people in the country and elsewhere could already be carrying and spreading the new virus, without anyone knowing they had been infected.

Zhang, who also worked for the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, had to figure out what to do. A few days earlier, the National Health Commission (NHC), an agency that oversees the Chinese CDC, had ordered labs with samples of the new virus to destroy them or hand them to the government. The agency forbid researchers from publishing any details about the virus.

Zhang looked at his phone and saw another email from Eddie Holmes. He had been emailing for days but Zhang mostly ignored him. Holmes, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Sydney, had written a number of scientific papers with Zhang about the evolution of various new and emerging viruses. They were even working on a paper about respiratory disease in Wuhan, of all places. Now, Holmes was hearing chatter about an emerging virus in the city and he was desperate to learn what Zhang knew about the new pathogen.

“Are you working on it?” Holmes asked in yet another email.

Zhang didn’t share any details about his work or the new virus. It didn’t seem necessary, and he feared such a disclosure would cause trouble. Early on Sunday, Jan. 5, though, a few hours after he finished sequencing of the virus genome, Zhang sent an email to Holmes, who read it as his wife drove their car to a Sydney beach for an outing with family members visiting from the United Kingdom.

“Please call me immediately!!!” Zhang wrote.

Holmes excused himself from his guests and phoned Zhang. They began discussing details of the new pathogen and its similarities with previous deadly viruses. Almost simultaneously, they reached the same conclusion.

“It’s SARS, it’s SARS!” Zhang said.

Shit, it’s back, Holmes thought, referring to another pernicious coronavirus.

Zhang and his colleagues in China began cautioning authorities in the country. After sending a warning to the NHC, Zhang boarded a flight to Wuhan, where he told senior public health officials in the city that they needed to take emergency measures to protect against spread of the pathogen ahead of the busy Lunar New Year holiday season later that month.

That wasn’t enough, Holmes told Zhang. Cases were growing in Wuhan, Hong Kong, and elsewhere. You need to share the genetic details of the virus with the world, Holmes said. If a SARS-like pathogen is spreading, testing kits would be needed within days. A vaccine might even be required. But no test kits or vaccines could be produced without knowledge of the virus’s genetic makeup.

Zhang was torn. He was a serious scientist who had sequenced thousands of virus genomes in his career. Like Holmes, Zhang was sure the genetic data he had would make a well-read paper in a high-profile journal, a goal of every researcher. The two researchers had received interest in their paper from the prestigious journal Nature. The information would be helpful to scientists around the world. Yet Zhang also knew Chinese authorities wanted to control information about the new virus. Other government labs had decoded the same genetic material, and a few days later Chinese leaders confirmed they were dealing with a new coronavirus. But they still sat on the genetic information. It was a warning sign to Zhang — the Chinese government didn’t want the information released, possibly because it would invite scrutiny of the country’s handling of the new virus.

Zhang had already dealt with his share of recent personal trauma. Several months earlier, Zhang’s wife had died of cancer, and he was still mourning her loss. He led a stressful life, even apart from that tragedy. Zhang was so busy chasing viruses that he sometimes slept two or three nights a week in his office. The last thing he wanted was to add more tension to his life. He already had done a lot to help stop the virus. It seemed wise to avoid crossing his superiors and to do nothing more with the genetic information.

Now Holmes was getting frustrated. Each day without the genetic information meant another day before tests could be developed, potentially jeopardizing global health. Besides, he and Zhang had a huge scoop they were bound to lose to some other researcher. Word was getting out that the sequence data was available, and that a scientific paper had been written, but someone was refusing to release it. On Jan. 10, Jeremy Farrar, the director of the huge Wellcome Trust in the U.K., one of the largest foundations in the world, tweeted that if the rumors are true and someone wasn’t releasing this crucial information, “something is very wrong.”

Oh God, that’s me! Holmes thought.

Holmes called Farrar, asking if he might be able to get the Chinese CDC to share the sequence and try to persuade Zhang. Then Holmes called Zhang, trying to convince him once again.

“We really, really need it,” he told Zhang, but he resisted the entreaty.

On the morning of Saturday, Jan. 11, Zhang sat on a plane on the runway at Shanghai Hongqiao International Airport. He was about to take off for Beijing so he could warn additional authorities about the virus, when he got another call from Holmes.

“Can you release it?” Holmes asked.

“I need to call you back,” Zhang said.

The cabin crew saw Zhang speaking on his mobile phone and ordered him to turn it off.

“You need to release it to me,” Holmes said.

Silence.

“Okay,” Zhang said softly.

Zhang made a quick call to a staffer in his lab. A few minutes later, Holmes saw an email with an attachment in his inbox. He did a quick calculation and realized it was after midnight in Edinburgh, Scotland, the home of Andrew Rambaut, an academic who ran a website called virological.org. He and Holmes had agreed to publish the sequence on his open site if Zhang ever released the information. Rambaut, a night owl, picked up the phone right away. Holmes told him the sequence was on its way. Holmes hadn’t even read Zhang’s attachment — there wasn’t any time.

“It could have been DNA from a blowfly,” Holmes says. “I didn’t even check.”

Fifty-two minutes later, during the evening of Friday, Jan. 10, on the East Coast of the United States, the information was available and scientists around the world were furiously downloading the sequence of the virus, which later would be named SARS-CoV-2. A day later, the Chinese CDC officially released the virus’s genetic information and Holmes felt enormous relief. Finally, the world could start defending itself against the new virus.

“It was a weight off my shoulders,” Holmes says.

Zhang was just as thrilled, at least at first. A day later, though, he began to come under pressure from Chinese authorities. They were unhappy that the nation was receiving criticism for its handling of the emerging virus, and that he had released the sequence without their permission. Holmes sent emails to senior officials saying Zhang’s act had benefited global science and health. It was a great moment for China. Don’t punish Zhang, he urged the officials.

Soon, though, Zhang’s lab was temporarily closed for “rectification,” and funding for his research was suspended.

An Update From Gregory Zuckerman

In recent weeks, debate has raged about whether the coronavirus emerged from a laboratory, rather than an animal. Reasonable people of all political persuasions doubt SARS-CoV-2 emerged naturally. The pressure Zhang felt from Chinese officials before and after he released the virus’s sequence is more reason for skepticism. Indeed, the Chinese government has dragged its feet about cooperating with world bodies working to understand the pathogen’s beginnings. Scientists still can’t point to a virus circulating in nature that was the precursor of SARS-CoV- 2.

Still, there’s a much higher likelihood that SARS-CoV-2 originated in an animal and spilled over into humans, directly or through an intermediate animal host, a phenomenon called zoonosis.

These kinds of infections are quite common. Animals that are known to be particularly susceptible to coronaviruses, including raccoon dogs and civets, were sold in markets in Wuhan.

After HIV was first identified, speculation was rampant that it, too, had been engineered, either intentionally or not, perhaps by the CIA or U.S. Army. There was no clear viral parent to HIV, either. In 1990, though, more than a decade after it was identified, a virus that was a close cousin of HIV was found in chimpanzees.

It may take even longer to discover the origins of the coronavirus in nature. But it’s still the most likely explanation for the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Gregory Zuckerman is a Special Writer at The Wall Street Journal, a 20-year veteran of the paper, and a three-time winner of the Gerald Loeb award — the highest honor in business journalism. He is the author of several books, including “The Man Who Solved the Market” and “The Frackers: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters.” He lives with his wife and two sons in West Orange, N.J.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

Why developing countries say net-zero is ‘against climate justice’

In less than a week, world leaders will convene in Glasgow for the most important climate conference of the year, the United Nations’ COP26. One of the biggest questions of the conference is whether developed countries like the U.S. will finally cough up the rest of the money they promised to poorer nations a decade ago to help them cut emissions and adapt to climate change. But as the conference draws near, the paucity of funding isn’t the only thing drawing the ire of developing countries and breeding distrust.

Last week, a coalition of 24 developing nations that work together on international negotiations issued a statement criticizing rich countries for proselytizing a universal goal of net-zero by 2050. “This new ‘goal’ which is being advanced runs counter to the Paris Agreement and is anti-equity and against climate justice,” the statement from the ministers of the Like-Minded Developing Countries (LMDC) Ministerial said.

The LMDC argued that its member countries should not be forced onto the same timeline to cut emissions as the industrialized world when they have done little to contribute to historic emissions and may want to use fossil fuels in their own economic development, as wealthier nations have.

This argument is not new. The recognition that different countries have different responsibilities for and capabilities to address climate change is at the heart of the U.N. negotiation process. It was also embedded in the 2015 Paris Agreement, which says that emissions should peak sooner in developed countries than elsewhere. And yet rich countries have delayed taking action to cut their own emissions for more than a decade, and now are demanding that the whole world commit to net-zero. In September, U.S. climate envoy John Kerry went to India to urge Prime Minister Narendra Modi to set a net-zero target. A few weeks ago, U.K. politician and COP26 president Alok Sharma called on G20 countries, some of which are members of the LMDC, like China, Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia, to step up now and set a net-zero target.

The LMDC put forward a different framework. The bloc proposed that rich countries get on the fast track, fully decarbonize by the end of this decade, and “leave the remaining atmospheric space” for carbon emissions to the developing world.

That last line is an allusion to the carbon budget, the idea that the world can only put a set amount of carbon into the atmosphere before we surpass the goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), which is the primary aim of the Paris Agreement. Scientists estimate that we can emit only 400 billion to 500 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide before hitting the limit, and current global emissions are around 40 billion metric tons per year.

Eddy Pérez, the international climate diplomacy manager at Climate Action Network Canada, said the statement was a clear call for the U.K., as the host of the upcoming climate conference, to ensure that the negotiations are fair. “It can’t just be about mitigation pledges,” he said in an email. “Keeping 1.5C within reach requires urgently scaling up adaptation support and mobilizing trillions of dollars.”

The message also arrives as the U.S. is struggling to pass any policies that will prove to the world it is willing to do the bare minimum on climate change. While President Biden announced earlier this year that he was strengthening the nation’s commitment by aiming to halve emissions by 2030, the U.S. does not yet have any new legislation in place that would help it achieve the new goal. A program that would have incentivized electric utilities to get off fossil fuels and brought credibility to the U.S.’ pledge has been axed by Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, and the details of the climate portion of Biden’s vaunted budget reconciliation package are in flux.

Rachel Cleetus, the climate and energy policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said there’s no excuse for the U.S.’ inaction. “Richer nations must take on a fair share of the burden of cutting emissions, both within their borders and by providing climate finance to help developing countries,” she said in an email. Cleetus added that China, an LMDC member that does have a goal to reach net-zero by 2060 but currently holds the title of the world’s largest emitter, also has a responsibility to step up. “China has to turn down coal and ensure its emissions peak well before 2030.”

But full decarbonization by the end of this decade, as the LMDC wants rich countries to achieve, may be an impossible ask. Holly Buck, an assistant professor of environment and sustainability at University of Buffalo who has written about how First World nations have “colonized the atmosphere,” said that what is happening is “gravely unjust” but that some of the technologies needed to cut emissions aren’t ready yet. She said decarbonizing this decade might require rich countries to cut down on air travel, shipping, and industrial production and could lead to instability in the global financial system and social unrest.

“It’s not immediately clear that this scenario is necessarily better for developing countries — given the integration of the world economy,” she said in an email. Her hope is that if the developed world increases its financial support for developing countries, that will be “a promising first step towards further dialogue on timelines and roadmaps for decarbonization around the world.”

Another way that empowering developing countries to emit more could backfire is if wealthier nations enact fees on carbon-intensive imports, as the U.K. and E.U. have proposed. As a recent paper that discusses these issues put it, “in a world moving toward net-zero carbon … ‘rights to emit’ will be a depreciating asset.” The issue of “carbon border adjustment” fees is sure to come up at this year’s climate conference — the LMDC statement calls them “discriminatory” and says they violate international trade rules.

Thus far, international climate negotiations and climate policies in general have been narrowly focused on emissions. But Buck and Pérez both said that more equitable pledges from developed nations would include plans to phase out fossil fuel extraction. “If we are to take a 1.5°C limit seriously, that clearly implies no further expansion of new fossil fuel extraction, and essentially fully phasing out existing fossil fuel mines and fields by 2050,” said Pérez.

A recent study found that Canada, where Pérez lives, must keep 83 percent of oil reserves in the ground in order for the world to have a 50 percent chance of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees C. The U.S. would have to relinquish 31 percent of its oil and 52 percent of its gas. Both countries continue to provide billions in support to oil and gas companies.

“The call from the LMDC offers an opportunity to use COP26 to address the elephant in the room,” said Pérez. “Doing so will require discussing where the transition needs to happen first, in this case in developed countries, and the challenges of doing this, which are dramatically greater for lower-income, highly dependent countries.”

An “alarming finding,” but no surprise: Many Republicans now ready to support violence

New public opinion research from the nonprofit Public Religion Research Institute, part of its 12th annual American Values Survey, has returned alarming findings.

Close to one-third of Republicans in the survey, or 30%, agreed with the statement that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” That was more than the combined total of Democrats and independents who say the same thing (at 11% and 17%, respectively).

PRRI CEO and founder Robert Jones said the large proportion of Republicans who appear ready to endorse political violence is “a direct result of former President Trump calling into question the election.” Jones noted that according to the same survey, more than two-thirds of Republicans (68%) claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump, as opposed to only 26% of independents and 6% of Democrats.

The study also found that 39% of those who believed that Trump had won the 2020 election endorsed potential violence, compared to only 10% of those who rejected election misinformation. There were also signs of a split based on media consumption, with 40% of Republicans who trust far-right news sources agreeing that violence could be necessary, compared to 32% of those who trust Fox News and 22% among those who trust mainstream outlets. In addition, respondents who said violence may be necessary are more likely to report feeling like strangers in their country, to say American culture has mostly worsened since the 1950s and to believe that God has granted America a special role in human history.

This study comes out just before Tuesday’s “off-off-year” 2021 elections, with the national media focused on the race for governor in the swing state of Virginia. Republican nominee Glenn Youngkin has floated baseless conspiracy theories about the election and allowed surrogates to perpetuate Trump’s Big Lie, while maintaining some distance from the most extreme claims. Youngkin has said the disgraced former president’s endorsement is an “honor” and Trump has repeatedly urged his supporters to vote for Youngkin. The unexpectedly close race between Youngkin and Democrat Terry McAuliffe in a state that has largely trended Democratic since 2008 could provide an important symbolic victory for Republicans.

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The PRRI survey is not the first indicator that the violent assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 may represents a trend rather than an anomaly. Ashli Babbitt, a Jan. 6 rioter killed by a Capitol police officer while attempting to force her way into a secure area, has been turned into a martyr by both Trump and many of his followers. At a recent rally in Virginia, Republicans pledged allegiance to a flag that was supposedly at the Capitol during that riot, and speakers called for Trump supporters to “monitor” election workers and officials. One Virginia election official recently described how Republican poll watchers in his state have acted with “a level of energy and sometimes aggression” and said he had received “very personal attacking, trolling emails accusing me, pre-election, of fraud and even making specific allegations of what the fraud would be.”

Indeed, the idea that hypothetical voter fraud could justify violence is, in itself, something new on the American political scene. There have been accusations of fraudulent elections throughout American history — some valid, some bogus — but Trump and his supporters are alone in suggesting violence. (Of course, there was one other presidential election that led to violence: The election of 1860, which sparked the Civil War.) Trump’s team lost virtually all the dozens of court cases filed over the 2020 election, and their attempt to get the results overturned was unanimously rejected by the Supreme Court. Even former Attorney General Bill Barr and many key Republican legislators rejected Trump’s claims of fraud, meaning that anyone who insists Trump was the real winner presumably thinks that the nefarious conspiracy included dozens of high-ranking Republicans.

Jones, the PRRI CEO, did not mention that additional context, but perhaps did not have to. He described the results of the group’s new survey “an alarming finding,” adding: “I’ve been doing this a while, for decades, and it’s not the kind of finding that as a sociologist, a public opinion pollster, that you’re used to seeing.”

More on the darker possibilities emerging from the Trump-era right:

Kyrsten Sinema epitomizes 21st-century political corruption — but she didn’t cause it

When Bobby Kennedy went after organized crime in the early 1960s, one of the things he learned was that the Mafia had a series of rituals new members went through to declare their loyalty and promise they’d never turn away from their new benefactors. Once in, they’d be showered with money and protection, but they could never leave and even faced serious problems if they betrayed the syndicate.

Which brings us to the story of Kyrsten Sinema.

For a republican democracy to actually work, average citizens with a passion for making their country better must be able to run for public office without needing wealthy or powerful patrons; this is a concept that dates back to Aristotle’s rants on the topic. And Sinema was, in the beginning, just that sort of person. But I’m getting ahead of myself …

After the Nixon and Agnew bribery scandals were fully revealed with a series of congressional investigations leading to Nixon’s resignation in 1974, Congress passed and President Gerald Ford signed into law a series of “good government” laws that provided for public funding of elections and strictly limited the role of big money in campaigns.

Just like the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol produced a “select” committee to investigate the anti-democracy crimes of Donald Trump and his cronies, Congress authorized the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities to look into Nixon’s abuses and make recommendations.

The committee’s 100-page report documented how Nixon had taken bribes (most notably $400,000 from ITT to squash an antitrust lawsuit); used “dark” money from wealthy friends and corporations to set up astroturf “citizens committees” (an early version of the Tea Party) to make it appear he had widespread support among the American public; and used off-the-books money to both support loyal Republican politicians whose help he needed as well as to pay for “opposition research” surveillance, which included the Watergate break-in of the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters.

In response to the report, Congress passed an exhaustive set of new laws and regulations, most significantly creating from scratch the Federal Elections Commission (FEC), outlawing secret donations to politicians while providing for public funding of federal elections to diminish the power of big money. (Jimmy Carter was the only presidential candidate to win using such public funding.)

Over the years since, conservatives on the Supreme Court have repeatedly gutted provisions of the 1974 amendments to the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA), most famously in 2010 with their notorious Citizens United decision.

With that stroke, over the loud objections of the four “liberals” on the court, corporations were absolutely deemed as “persons” with full constitutional rights, and billionaires or corporations pouring massive amounts of money into campaign coffers was changed from “bribery and political corruption” to an exercise of the constitutionally-protected “right of free speech.”

Into this milieu stepped Kyrsten Sinema, running from a seat in the Arizona state Senate for the U.S. House of Representatives in 2012 as an out bisexual and political progressive. The campaign quickly turned ugly.

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Following the Citizens United script, the Republican she confronted in that race (Vernon Parker) used corporate and billionaire money to carpet-bomb their district airwaves with ads calling her “a radical left-wing activist promoting hatred toward our country, our allies, and our families” and warning people that she “engaged in pagan rituals.”

The district was heavily Democratic (Obama handily won it that year) but the race was close enough that it took six full days for the AP to call it for Sinema. And that, apparently, was when she decided that if you can only barely beat them, you’d damn well better join them.

Sinema quickly joined other Democrats who’d followed the Citizens United path to the flashing neon lights of big money, joining the so-called Problem Solvers caucus that owes its existence in part to the Wall Street-funded front group No Labels.

Quietly and without fanfare, she began voting with Republicans and the corporate- and billionaire-owned Democrats, supporting efforts to deregulate big banks, “reform” Social Security and Medicare, and make it harder for government to protect regular investors — or even buyers of used cars to avoid being ripped off.

Sinema voted with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce 77 percent of the time in her first term; in return, political networks run by right-wing billionaires and the Chamber showered her with support. In her first re-election race, in 2014, she was one of only five Democrats endorsed by the notoriously right-wing Chamber.

She’d proved herself as a “made woman,” just like the old mafiosi documented by RFK in the 1960s, willing to do whatever it takes, compromise whatever principles she espoused, to get into and stay in the good graces of the large and well-funded right-wing syndicates unleashed by Citizens United.

So it should surprise precisely nobody that Sinema is parroting the Chamber’s and the billionaire network’s line that President Biden’s Build Back Better plan is too generous in helping and protecting average Americans and too punitive in taxing the morbidly rich. After all, once you’re in, you leave at your own considerable peril, even when 70 percent of your state’s voters want the bill to pass.

And this is a genuine crisis for America because if Biden is frustrated in his attempt to pass his Build Back Better legislation (which is overwhelmingly supported by Americans across the political spectrum) — all because business groups, giant corporations and right-wing billionaires are asserting ownership over their two “made” senators — there’s a very good chance that today’s cynicism and political violence is just a preview of the rest of the decade.

But this isn’t as much a story about Sinema as it is about today’s larger political dysfunction for which she’s become, along with Joe Manchin, a poster child.

Increasingly, because of the Supreme Court’s betrayal of American values, it’s become impossible for people like the younger Sinema to rise from social worker to the U.S. Senate without big money behind them. Our media is absolutely unwilling to call this what even Andrew Jackson would have labeled it: political corruption. But that’s what it is and it’s eating away at our republic like a metastasized cancer.

A guest on Brian Stelter’s CNN program this past weekend pointed out that there are today more autocracies in the world than democracies and, generally, democracies are on the decline. This corruption of everyday politics by the rich and powerful is how democracies begin the shift to autocracy or oligarchy, as I document in gruesome detail in “The Hidden History of American Oligarchy: Reclaiming Our Democracy from the Ruling Class.”

While the naked corruption of Sinema and Manchin is a source of outrage for Democrats across America, what’s far more important is that it reveals how deep the rot of money in American politics has gone, thanks entirely to a corrupted Supreme Court.

In Justice Stevens’ dissent in Citizens United, he pointed out that corporations in their modern form didn’t even exist when the Constitution was written in 1787 and got its first 10 amendments in 1791, including the first, which protects free speech.

“All general business corporation statues appear to date from well after 1800,” Stevens pointed out to his conservative colleagues on the court. “The Framers thus took it as a given that corporations could be comprehensively regulated in the service of the public welfare. Unlike our colleagues, they had little trouble distinguishing corporations from human beings, and when they constitutionalized the right to free speech in the First Amendment, it was the free speech of individual Americans they had in mind.

“The fact that corporations are different from human beings might seem to need no elaboration, except that the majority opinion almost completely elides it…. Unlike natural persons, corporations have ‘limited liability’ for their owners and managers, ‘perpetual life,’ separation of ownership and control, ‘and favorable treatment of the accumulation of assets….’ Unlike voters in U.S. elections, corporations may be foreign controlled.”

Noting that corporations “inescapably structure the life of every citizen,” Stevens continued: “It might be added that corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires. Corporations help structure and facilitate the activities of human beings, to be sure, and their ‘personhood’ often serves as a useful legal fiction. But they are not themselves members of ‘We the People’ by whom and for whom our Constitution was established.”

Even worse than the short-term effect of a corporation’s dominating an election or a ballot initiative, Stevens said (as if he had a time machine to look at us now), was the fact that corporations corrupting politics would, inevitably, cause average working Americans — the 95 percent who make less than $100,000 a year — to conclude that their “democracy” is now rigged.

The result, Stevens wrote, is that average people would simply stop participating in politics, stop being informed about politics, and stop voting … or become angry and cynical. Our democracy, he suggested, would be immeasurably damaged and ultimately vulnerable to corporate-supported demagogues and oligarchs. Our constitutional republic, if Citizens United stands, could wither and could die.

“In addition to this immediate drowning out of noncorporate voices,” Stevens wrote in 2010, “there may be deleterious effects that follow soon thereafter. Corporate ‘domination’ of electioneering can generate the impression that corporations dominate our democracy.

“When citizens turn on their televisions and radios before an election and hear only corporate electioneering, they may lose faith in their capacity, as citizens, to influence public policy. A Government captured by corporate interests, they may come to believe, will be neither responsive to their needs nor willing to give their views a fair hearing.

“The predictable result is cynicism and disenchantment: an increased perception that large spenders ‘call the tune’ and a reduced ‘willingness of voters to take part in democratic governance.’ To the extent that corporations are allowed to exert undue influence in electoral races, the speech of the eventual winners of those races may also be chilled.”

As if he were looking at Kyrsten Sinema facing a tough choice about her own political survival leading up to the 2014 election, Stevens added:

“Politicians who fear that a certain corporation can make or break their reelection chances may be cowed into silence about that corporation.”

And, again looking into his time machine, the now-deceased Stevens pointed to the frustration of average Americans with Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin.

“On a variety of levels, unregulated corporate electioneering might diminish the ability of citizens to ‘hold officials accountable to the people,’ and disserve the goal of a public debate that is ‘uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.'”

Stevens and his fellow “liberals” on the Court were both prescient and right.

They warned in their dissent that foreign money would corrupt our elections and we saw that in a big way in 2016. There’s apparently no way of knowing how much of today’s political turmoil — from school board to election commission to hospital and airplane violence — is being orchestrated and amplified by foreign players on social media masquerading as Americans to weaken our country.

They warned that because of the Citizens United decision Americans would become cynical and reactionary; that’s happening today. Armed militias are in our streets, people are regularly assaulted for their perceived politics, and right-wing media demagogues make millions (literally) promoting hate and fear.

And, they warned, it could doom our republic, something that’s now within our sight.

More from Salon’s coverage of the Kyrsten Sinema conundrum:

Members of Congress urged to boycott anti-LGBTQ National Prayer Breakfast

One of a series about the Fellowship Foundation, the secretive religious group that runs the National Prayer Breakfast and is popularly known as The Family. This series is based on Family documents obtained by TYT, including lists of breakfast guests and who invited them.

One of the nation’s largest secular organizations is calling on members of Congress to stop participating in the National Prayer Breakfast, describing it as “a pay-to-play political event with a troubling history.”

The Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) sent letters Thursday to members of Congress who were part of the breakfast host committee this year, asking them to end their involvement. The FFRF said it is also asking members to contact their representatives and do the same.

In comments to TYT, the FFRF connected their concerns about the breakfast to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, saying the attack raised awareness about “the dangers of Christian Nationalism.”

As TYT has reported, based on internal breakfast documents, the event skews overwhelmingly toward evangelical Republicans. Congressional allies of The Family describe the event as one of reconciliation, but there are precious few non-allies with whom to reconcile.

LGBTQ people and advocates for reproductive rights are almost nonexistent at the National Prayer Breakfast. And even nationally famous religious leaders who don’t adhere to Family ideology weren’t invited in 2016.

A source close to The Family told TYT that the group would love to have more liberals attend, but the invitations are generated via the relationships of individual insiders, and The Family is dominated by right-wing Protestants. There’s no evidence that participating Democratic politicians, from the president on down, make any effort to ensure equal representation at the event.

A handful of notable Democrats — who ostensibly support the separation of church and state, as well as LGBTQ and reproductive rights — routinely lend their names to the annual breakfast. The 2021 NPB host committee included five Democratic senators: Tom Carper of Delaware, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Tim Kaine of Virginia, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Joe Manchin of West Virginia. There were also five Democratic House members: Charlie Crist and Val Demings of Florida, Debbie Dingell of Michigan, Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware and Juan Vargas of California.

Just days before the 2021 breakfast, TYT reported that a number of Family leaders were supporting Republicans backing false election-fraud claims. A spokesman for Rep. Crist responded, “The issues raised by this reporting deserve attention and answers,” adding, “It would be very sad and disappointing if the organization were to fall into the hyper-partisan trap that’s engulfed our national politics — to our nation’s severe detriment.” President Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi participated in the event anyway.

FFRF’s opposition to congressional involvement is based on both longstanding concerns about corruption and constitutionality, but also more recent reporting revealing a pattern of anti-LGBTQ activity.

Specifically, the FFRF cites the following “serious issues” with the breakfast: Its ties to international dictators, its promotion of anti-LGBTQ policy, its financial support from evangelical leader Franklin Graham, its role in elevating MyPillow CEO and election-fraud “truther” Mike Lindell, the breakfast networking by Russian operative Maria Butina, participation by anti-LGBTQ foreign officials and the resulting opposition to the breakfast by LGBTQ advocacy organizations.

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Based on internal breakfast records, TYT recently revealed that as many as two dozen anti-LGBTQ politicians and leaders were part of the Ukraine delegation to the 2016 National Prayer Breakfast, co-chaired by the above-mentioned Rep. Juan Vargas, a California Democrat. In response, the EU organization Forbidden Colours warned members of Congress that prayer breakfasts are being used to build anti-LGBTQ, far-right networks. Two Democrats on the host committee that year told TYT they were not involved in making up the guest list.

TYT also reported that some Family insiders were involved in the political and religious radicalization of Mike Lindell, and that the breakfast played a key role. Lindell himself has cited the impact of Senate chaplain Barry Black’s remarks at the event.

After his purported epiphany at the 2016 breakfast, Lindell went on to become perhaps the leading figure spreading Donald Trump’s false claims that President Biden had stolen the 2020 election. Numerous Family leaders got on board with that lie almost immediately after Election Day.

Asked whether FFRF had anything to say to Republicans who agree with The Family’s goals, FFRF director of strategic response Andrew Seidel said, “We’d hope that every American could agree that influence-peddling and allowing Russian operatives easy access to Congress is, at the very least, unwise.”

Addressing Democrats specifically, Seidel said, “There are hundreds of houses of worship within walking distance of the Capitol. Members of Congress can enjoy fellowship, bonhomie and prayer without associating with this troubling group and without abusing the power attached to their public office to endorse a private religious event.” He added, “Public, performative Christianity that disrespects the Constitution is unnecessary.”

As FFRF co-president Annie Laurie Gaylor said in a news release, “Year after year, scandal after scandal, and still not a single prayer has been answered. All they’re proving is that they don’t respect the separation of state and church and that their god doesn’t give a fig for their mimosa-driven pleas.”

Seidel noted that the FFRF has pushed back against the breakfast for years, but said two things are different now.

“First, people are beginning to wake up to the dangers of Christian nationalism. Jan. 6 showed us how violent and dangerous mixing religion and politics can be,” Seidel said. “Second, new records and reporting are exposing the shadowy, secretive nature of the agents behind this event. More and more information is trickling out, and all of it is damning. Smart politicians ought to look at that steady flow and wonder, ‘What’s next?’ Because it’s not going to be good. The smart thing to do is to sever ties with the organization.”

Asked about the role the breakfast might play in the rise of Christian nationalism, Seidel called it “a major concern” and said the FFRF is investigating. “At the very least, Christian nationalists are able to point to events like this, officially sponsored by members of Congress, and their fallacious belief that America is a Christian nation is validated from the highest levels. Official congressional sponsorship of this event reinforces the myths that make up the Christian nationalist identity. That’s a serious problem.”

More from TYT and Salon on “The Family” and the National Prayer Breakfast:

There is nothing godly about outlawing abortion — and Texas’ law is particularly un-Christian

Conservative policymakers nationwide are on a crusade to crush women’s right to choose. But this war isn’t being waged based on science, the Constitution, or anything else that elected leaders should actually consider in their decision-making. It’s grounded in a fundamentally warped interpretation of Christianity.

Indeed, when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed his state’s draconian abortion bill into law — which empowers citizens to sue anyone who helps a woman obtain an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy — he proclaimed, “Our creator endowed us with the right to life, and yet millions of children lose their right to life every year because of abortion.” Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch, who filed a brief calling on the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, recently stated that the case was “chosen by God.”

As a Christian, a biblical scholar, and a mother, it is infuriating that lawmakers would twist and distort our sacred text to give the government the power to force women to carry a child to term. The Bible doesn’t say that abortion is a sin and has no explicit definition of when life begins. The reality is that abortion only became a rallying cry for conservative Christians — and particularly Evangelicals — when Republicans decided it was politically advantageous to do so.

It may come as a surprise, but the Christian movement against abortion is actually relatively new. Through most of the 1900s, evangelical Christians — who are the powerhouses of today’s anti-abortion push — didn’t say much about the subject, or even explicitly noted the issue should not be touched by the government. Indeed, a 1970 poll from the Baptist Sunday School Board revealed that a whopping seven in ten Baptist pastors supported abortion to protect the mental or physical health of the child-bearer. And in 1976, 1977 and 1979, the Southern Baptist Convention issued resolutions stating that they affirm their “conviction about the limited role of government in dealing with matters relating to abortion.”

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So how did the anti-abortion movement become so engrained in conservative Christianity? One word: politics. In the 1970s, conservative political activists were increasingly alarmed by desegregation efforts, particularly in schools, and were hoping to shore up the Republican base to preserve racial boundaries. But they struggled to identify an issue that would fire up white Evangelicals — a key part of the base — without being explicitly racist. Through careful research, they discovered that some Evangelicals were concerned about abortion and could be riled up to fight against it. So, activists made that a core issue, and ignited a national movement to end the practice.

Fast-forward to today, and many Republicans say that their Christian faith requires them to ban abortion. But it is clear to me that the Christian faith requires protecting the lives and well-being of women by allowing them reproductive freedom, not taking steps to eliminate it. In the Bible, God consistently tells us that all humans are moral agents, fully capable of making their own decisions.

Texas’ law is particularly un-Christian. If reignited, a woman in an abusive relationship who seeks an abortion could be turned in to authorities by her husband — and he would come away with thousands of dollars. A mother who helps her young teenage daughter get an abortion could be prosecuted, tearing a loving family apart. A woman who discovers that her fetus has a fatal abnormality would be forced to go through labor regardless and undergo immense emotional trauma.

It’s important to understand another crucial flaw in the anti-abortion Evangelical movement: The notion that life begins at conception is a very conservative, Christian idea. The government cannot legally impose this interpretation upon others, especially since other faiths directly contradict this belief.

Consider Judaism, for instance. Jewish law doesn’t consider a miscarriage to be a death, so devastated parents don’t say Kaddish, the Jewish mourning prayer, for a dead embryo or fetus.

The Talmud, a widely-utilized Jewish text, notes that a fetus is only considered to have a soul when the head has emerged. And the Tzitz Eliezer, another famous text, states that an Israelite woman can undergo an abortion, “even when there is no direct threat to the life of the mother, but merely a need to save her from great pain.”

The bottom line is, no government should have the power to force women to carry a pregnancy to term. Any faith leaders who say otherwise are willfully mischaracterizing the teachings of their religions — and taking steps that are actively harmful to countless people. It’s hard to think of anything that stands in starker opposition to the compassion that is at the heart of every major faith.

More stories on the fight to protect abortion rights:

Texas’ abortion ban makes parenthood harder

At her sonogram appointment in late September, Kendra Joseph received ominous news. Signs pointed to an impending miscarriage, but she wasn’t far enough along for the doctor to know for sure. He told her to come back in a week.

The 39-year-old San Antonio mom of one began to worry. Under Senate Bill 8, Texas’ new abortion law, even if the medical and developmental condition were still grim, if they could hear cardiac activity, she would have to wait out the pregnancy or leave the state to end it.

For nearly three years, Joseph and her husband, Eric, had been trying to have a second child, and laws intended to limit abortion access had, ironically, already made the process more difficult. With SB 8 in effect, given the risks her pregnancies entail, Joseph is hesitant to keep trying at all — one of the many unforeseen consequences of the new law.

The reality of her pregnancies so far has not been as black-and-white as the language in the bill, crafted by a childless, single man: state Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola.

On March 15, when Hughes discussed his bill to bar abortion after a patient is about six weeks into a pregnancy, he focused solely on what he called the heartbeat.

“That heartbeat is a key medical indicator of whether that unborn child is going to reach live birth,” Hughes said during a meeting of the Senate State Affairs Committee, of which he is chair.

Medical and legal experts say it is misleading to use “heartbeat” to refer to the cardiac activity of embryos at a developmental stage when they don’t possess a heart.

But for hundreds of thousands of pregnant Texans, especially those who face tough or unusual pregnancies, that cardiac activity is the starting point. Chromosomal conditions, malformed vital organs and other severe fetal abnormalities can develop along the way. When a doctor tells an expectant parent their child’s condition is “incompatible with life” or “lethal,” they find themselves in a world of gray.

Matter of viability

When Joseph’s first child was born five years ago — a daughter conceived and delivered with the kind of predictability Joseph took for granted — she left her job as a middle school theater and debate teacher and started working as a real estate agent. She hoped to spend more time with her daughter, Adalynn, and the sibling or siblings she assumed would follow.

Having been advised it might take longer to get pregnant as she was reaching what doctors consider “advanced maternal age,” the couple soon began to try for a second child. The average age for giving birth has increased in Texas, from 26.1 years old in 2009 to 28.3 years old in 2018, and is higher in the metro areas.

In 2018, Joseph had her first miscarriage. It stunned her, in a way, how unprepared she was. “We don’t talk about pregnancy loss [in our culture],” she said.

When she got pregnant again in March 2019, Joseph was 36, officially a high-risk pregnancy.

A pregnancy is considered to be at increased risk if the pregnant person is over 35. Certain conditions, like gestational diabetes and preeclampsia, are more likely during pregnancy in older women, as is miscarriage. Doctors often recommend additional screening and monitoring.

Genetic disorders are also more likely. And Joseph’s Ashkenazi Jewish heritage also elevated the risk of certain genetic conditions like Tay-Sachs and Canavan disease, so she already planned on prenatal screening.

Most genetic screening takes place at the end of the first trimester, well after cardiac activity is detected. Although it is optional, genetic screening, like ultrasounds and sonograms, is a common part of prenatal care.

Genetic screening tools offer valuable information, said Lorie Harper, division chief of maternal-fetal medicine at Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin.

But under SB 8, what families can do with that information is limited. Before the new law, some families went into genetic screening knowing if certain conditions were detected, they would terminate. “We’re not going to detect them before six weeks, because there’s not a lot to detect on ultrasound,” Harper said.

Plenty of families who would not consider abortion want genetic screening anyway, so they can be prepared for challenges, and Harper is not sure if more families will decline genetic screening now that termination isn’t an option.

When Joseph arrived at her genetic screening appointment in 2019, she wasn’t expecting to hear anything that would lead her to terminate the pregnancy. But when the results came in around her 15th week of pregnancy, her doctor delivered devastating news: The baby had trisomy 18, also known as Edwards syndrome, which is, in most cases, fatal before the baby’s first birthday.

“We looked it up and we realized how terrible it really was,” Joseph said. It’s difficult to find consistent information on the chance of a baby with the condition being born alive because so many women decide to terminate their pregnancies once they are told their baby has trisomy 18. Of those babies born with the chromosomal abnormality, the median lifespan is 10-14 days, and only 12% percent survive until age 5. Many of the symptoms of the condition are painful.

Advocates argue that more could be done to improve the odds of survival in babies with severe genetic disorders like trisomy 18, and claim that labeling the condition “incompatible with life” is a self-fulfilling prophecy. But for the time being, the condition is considered imminently fatal.

One of the reasons SB 8 used the objective presence of cardiac activity was to avoid the issue of “viability,” said Texas Right to Life legislative director John Seago.

“Viability has actually been an ambiguous concept that policymakers around the country are getting away from,” Seago said. “That is a judgment call from the physician.” While doctors might feel they are the right ones to make that judgment call, he said, “you can’t punt to medical judgment when at the core it is an ethical issue.”

Not every case of trisomy 18 is equally severe, but at 15 weeks, some of the more severe and painful effects of the condition were already showing in Joseph’s baby — swelling was visible on the sonogram. It was a boy, which made his chances of survival even slimmer.

Joseph and her husband couldn’t take a wait-and-see approach. In 2019, Texas already prohibited abortion after 20 weeks, and the law was unclear whether trisomy 18 would count as an exception due to “severe fetal abnormality” under the state’s 2013 restrictions.

They were watching the clock in another way as well: Joseph said they wanted to make the decision before her baby could feel pain — whether from the abortion or from his medical condition. Doctors disagree on when the ability to experience pain develops, but Joseph’s doctor assured her that at 15 weeks, it had not.

When she decided to end the pregnancy, Joseph’s doctors referred her to an abortion clinic. Insurance wouldn’t cover the procedure and doing it in the hospital was, for the Josephs, like most people, prohibitively expensive.

“That was my first time entering an abortion clinic,” she said.

“Already a hard situation”

Joseph had always believed that carrying a pregnancy to term should be a woman’s choice, as was abortion, but she didn’t necessarily feel like she was exercising her rights. She felt like she was in a medical emergency, trying to make the right decision for her entire family.

“It was extremely emotional. We wanted this baby so bad. We really did. My ultimate decision was because I didn’t want him suffering,” Joseph said. They decided to name the baby and called him Arlo.

Because of Texas’ 2003 “Women’s Right To Know Act,” a law authored by then-state Rep. Frank Corte Jr., R-San Antonio, Joseph had to visit the clinic twice. On the first day, she sat with a room full of other women, listening to information about the procedure.

Under Corte’s legislation, any pregnant person in Texas must wait 24 hours before going back to the clinic to have an abortion. So the next day, Joseph went back and, after sitting for hours in a packed waiting room, had the abortion.

Texas had just 22 abortion clinics at that point in 2019, and those facilities provided about half of the more than 56,000 medically induced abortions performed on Texas residents that year. The other half were performed at ambulatory surgery centers, and about 1% were in hospitals or outside the state. In the nearly two months since SB 8 went into effect, news reports show this demand is shifting entirely to out-of-state providers who are struggling to meet it.

Although she was heartbroken over losing the baby, Joseph was also keenly aware of how much she benefited from resources like therapy, insurance and a partner able to drive her to appointments — things not everyone has. She was thankful that Eric could handle the flood of paperwork and even more thankful they were both employed and could afford the $1,000 procedure.

Over the next two years, she would lose some of those resources herself, and her dreams for a second child would seem more and more unlikely. Time was not on Joseph’s side. Her hormone levels indicate her egg reserves, which decrease over time, are already lower than average.

Last year, the couple met with a doctor to begin in vitro fertilization. The first round didn’t produce enough eggs, so they started again in May, as the Legislature was passing SB 8. Joseph was watching the bill closely, wondering what it would mean for their work with the fertility specialist.

For families looking to increase their chances of getting pregnant quickly with IVF, some opt to try with two or more embryos transferred into the uterus at once. Whether to recommend multiple-embryo transfer is a complex issue in the IVF community. If more than one embryo implants — resulting in a multiple pregnancy — the associated risk increases.

Now, doctors advising these families have to work within the limits of SB 8, said Elizabeth Sepper, who teaches health law at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law.

“Often the implantation of multiple embryos means selective reduction toward the end of the first trimester to help increase the odds of a successful pregnancy,” said Sepper. “These procedures can’t be done consistent with SB 8.”

The effects of an anti-abortion bill on fertility treatments is always an area of concern, said Seago, but seeking an abortion after a fertility treatment is the same as any other abortion: the taking of a human life.

As the Josephs watched SB 8 signed into law on May 19, they were already scheduled for egg retrieval the next week. Then Eric lost his job at Caterpillar and, with that, their insurance. They discontinued IVF, and Joseph started having more serious doubts.

When she thinks about the new barriers created by SB 8 — what it would have been like waiting for Arlo to die — she wonders if it’s worth the risk to try again.

“It just makes what was already a hard situation impossible,” Joseph said.

Uncertain futures

She’s not alone in her hesitation. Austin OB-GYN Rachel Breedlove said she’s seeing patients consider or ask for more reliable forms of birth control — like IUDs — now that abortion is not an option. “It’s on people’s minds,” Breedlove said.

Exceptions in the law provide little reassurance, she said. What patients and their doctors consider an “emergency” situation might still open them up to litigation under SB 8. The law uses “emergency” with little clarification, similar to the exception for “severe fetal abnormalities” in the 2013 law — those terms are not absolute in the medical field.

“The language doesn’t protect doctors,” Breedlove said. “It protects the people suing them.”

Fear of being sued for “aiding and abetting” an abortion could lead to more hesitancy around offering what is ultimately appropriate medical care, said Harper, who is also an associate professor in the women’s health department at Dell Medical School. “Termination is sometimes appropriate medical care for women.”

Some people know that they cannot safely take a pregnancy to term because of preexisting medical conditions, but they may also not have reliable birth control or their birth control can fail. All they can do now, if they cannot leave Texas, is let the situation play out until it becomes an unquestionable emergency — by which time the risk to their health is even greater.

Even if a situation would ultimately qualify as an emergency, or the procedure would be legal, such as in an ectopic pregnancy, Harper worries that doctors will be too fearful to recommend it when they otherwise would, or the need to involve lawyers will result in delayed care.

Then when all agree the procedure is both legal and necessary, finding someone to perform it will be a whole different barrier, Harper said. As hospitals consider their liability, Harper worries fewer will offer termination-focused medical procedures and surgeries, and with ambulatory clinics closing, women won’t have access to what few abortions are still legal. Those who can will go across state lines, but not everyone can.

When Joseph found out she was pregnant a fourth time in September, her excitement was mixed with apprehension, and it only got worse when the first ultrasound showed signs of trouble.

A week later, when she went back to her doctor, the situation was clear: There was no cardiac activity. She was able to take misoprostol, a drug that speeds up the miscarriage process, which can take weeks.

As she continues to see her therapist and sort out the disappointment and grief of the past four years, Joseph has shared her story with family and friends, including those who are ardently against abortion. The feedback has been encouraging, she said. People, she said, have been willing to see the “gray areas” of abortion — situations already fraught with trauma and sadness — overlooked in the language of laws.

“It’s given me a very different view,” Joseph said. “I see pregnancy, I see loss, I see the decision to not follow through. … It’s very private. I don’t think anyone comes through it lightly.”

Bekah McNeel is a San Antonio-based freelance writer. If you have feedback or a tip related to this story, email editors@texastribune.org.

Disclosure: The University of Texas at Austin has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2021/10/29/texas-abortion-law-complications/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

Marjorie Taylor Greene may have violated law in feud with Trump-supporting lawyer Lin Wood

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-GA, has been publicly feuding with Trump-supporting lawyer L. Lin Woods — and the fallout may have revealed the first-term congresswoman violated federal law.

“Two MAGA world luminaries who have spent the better part of a year promoting some of the same election conspiracy theories—Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-GA, and QAnon-aligned lawyer Lin Wood—are now pitted against each other in a dispute that could put Greene on the wrong side of a campaign finance violation,” The Daily Beast reported Monday night.

Wood reportedly accused Greene of failing to pay her bills.

“But it turns out that Wood was not representing his former ally in her personal capacity. Instead, his services went to Greene’s campaign committee as it fought two defamation disputes. Worse still for Greene is Wood’s claim that the Greene campaign has never paid him, raising a number of questions about the legality of their arrangement,” The Beast reported.

Lin has recently accused Greene of being a “communist.”

“Four campaign finance experts consulted for this article said Greene’s candidate committee—Greene for Congress—appears at minimum to have violated federal financial reporting laws. They also raised concerns about illegal corporate and in-kind contributions, with some experts pointing to two possibilities in other legal realms: breach of contract, and, in a word, ‘theft,’ if Wood were to take an austere line in state court,” The Beast reported. “Wood seems to have ruled out that option, but in a conversation with The Daily Beast, the veteran attorney claimed that Greene owes him $5,000 for legal services rendered in July and September 2020.”

The legal services concerned two defamation disputes.

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“Part of the problem in this case is that Wood had already donated the maximum allowable amount to Greene before he billed her, so she would not be allowed to accept his in-kind services for free,” The Beast noted. “The in-kind contribution would therefore be illegal, the campaign finance experts said.”

Read the full report.

Watch the trailer for “The Mandalorian” spinoff “The Book of Boba Fett”

“The Mandalorian” was Disney’s first foray into live-action Star Wars TV, but it will by no means be the last. The company has a long list of upcoming TV shows set in that famous galaxy far, far away. The first is “The Book of Boba Fett,” about the titular bounty hunter (Temuera Morrison) taking over Jabba the Hutt’s old criminal empire on Tatooine and apparently ushering in a new era of “respect,” at least according to the trailer. Watch below.

Well, Boba Fett’s version of respect still involves a lot of guns and threats. No one ever ruled a criminal empire on good vibes alone.

Will “The Mandalorian” cross over with “The Book of Boba Fett”?

I called “The Book of Boba Fett” a “spinoff” of “The Mandalorian,” and it kinda is, although there’s more to it. The character of Boba Fett, of course, was introduced way back in 1980’s “The Empire Strikes Back,” and has been a fan favorite among Star Wars fans for the last 40 years. We saw him briefly as a child in the Star Wars prequel movies, but he became a proper character again on “The Mandalorian,” where he fought and then teamed up with lead character Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal).

In fact, we learned more about his personality on “The Mandalorian” more than in any other movie. And “The Mandalorian” Season 2 ended with a preview of his adventures in “The Book of Boba Fett.” I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw a few characters from the first show turn up on the second.

“The Book of Boba Fett” premieres on Dec. 29.

Kal Penn comes out and announces engagement to fiancé Josh

Actor and former Obama administration official Kal Penn has publicly come out as gay, and announced his engagement to his fiancé Josh, who has been Penn’s partner for 11 years.

The news comes as the “Harold & Kumar” and “House” star promotes his new memoir “You Can’t Be Serious,” which releases Tuesday. In the book, Penn details meeting Josh, whose last name he doesn’t give, while working in Washington and opens up about why he’s been relatively private about the relationship until now.

“I’ve always been very public with everybody I’ve personally interacted with. Whether it’s somebody that I meet at a bar, if Josh and I are out or we’re talking to friends,” Penn told People magazine in an interview about his new book. “I’m really excited to share our relationship with readers. But Josh, my partner, my parents, and my brother, four people who I’m closest to in the family, are fairly quiet. They don’t love attention and shy away from the limelight.”

Still, Penn wanted to find a way to be honest and share more of his story in his new book, while also guarding the privacy and comfort of his loved ones. “Figuring out the narrative [in the book], of how to respect who they really are, with telling my story — that includes: my work life, both in Hollywood and D.C., it includes my love life with Josh and how we met, it includes my parents, to the extent that I’m willing to share stories about their upbringing,” Penn said.

Honesty was “the most important thing” for Penn in writing “You Can’t Be Serious.” “I wanted my story to be authentic from my perspective and told in a way that makes you feel like you really get to know me,” he explained.

Penn even got candid about his first date with Josh and why he was initially certain the relationship wasn’t going to go anywhere. According to Penn, Josh had arrived at his apartment for their date with an 18-pack of Coors Light and turned on the TV to watch NASCAR.

“I thought, ‘This obviously is not going to work out,” Penn writes. “I have one day off from the White House and this dude is unironically watching cars go around and make left turns? Next thing you know, it’s been a couple months and we’re watching NASCAR every Sunday. I’m like, ‘What is happening?’ I wanted the reader to enjoy the love and the humor through all of those stories.”

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Penn also talked about discovering his sexuality and coming out relatively later in life, and why he felt “supported by everyone” among his close friends and South Asian family. “I know this sounds jokey, but it’s true: When you’ve already told your Indian parents and the South Asian community that you intend to be an actor for a living, really any conversations that come after that are super easy,” Penn explained. “They’re just like, ‘Yeah, okay.'”

With Penn’s family and close friends now on board, the couple is in the midst of planning their wedding, and finding a way to compromise on the actor’s desire for a big and traditional Indian wedding with Josh’s preference for a “quick 20-minute thing with our families and that’s it,” he tells People.

As “You Can’t Be Serious” hits bookstores this week, Penn hopes his stories and candor will allow readers to “feel like we’re having a beer together.”

“I want to take you into my stories and I want you to experience them with the same joy that I’ve experienced them,” Penn said. “That was the way that my friends have met my parents and Josh, as they’ve gotten to know them over the last 10 years.”

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The “Squid Game” critique is also a love letter to a unified Korea

“Squid Game” first came to my attention via Korean friends astonished at seeing their childhood games (if horrifically perverted) onscreen as a central plot point in a blockbuster Netflix series that seemed it could be as big a Korean crossover as last year’s Oscar-winning “Parasite.” It would go on to be Netflix’s most successful original series ever, reaching 111 million viewers around the world only a month into its debut.

But chatter online from non-Koreans made it seem like the series’ main draw was a combination of absurdity and gratuitous onscreen violence. As Variety opined, “Murder is fetishized as a way to raise the stakes in a hazily political conversation,” giving viewers a voyeuristic look into the brutality of a highly unequal Korean society where death and cruelty to a putatively unemotional people is a mere cinematic style: “It’s impressive that the series found a way to be even more affectedly direct and unbothered about showing ways the human body can come apart.”

This variety of critique (as opposed to an approvingly auteur-gore-splattered Tarantino film that ironically takes if not steals much from Asian films) contains pungent whiffs of the racist “Life is cheap in the Orient” trope; i.e., the words of General Westmorland famously broadcast to the public to normalize American slaughter of women and children in the Korean and Vietnam wars. “The philosophy of the Orient expresses it: Life is not important.”

I tend to not tolerate onscreen violence well, making a point to avoid it if it is gratuitous or leans into rape culture (e.g., “Game of Thrones”), and thus came close to almost missing “Squid Game.” Its shocking originality and deeply Korean style of cinematography, the dialogue that’s a mix of pathos/bathos/humor only made me feel prouder to be Korean. It also underlined how if there is a villain, it’s seated in the root wound of the Korean people: the partitioning of the peninsula by the U.S.

Most non-Koreans seem to accept there is and always has been, somehow, a North Korea and a South Korea. Koreans, however, know the peninsula as a unified nation, intact despite constant invasions including in the 20th century, its violent colonization by Japan. Historians I know even subscribe to the shocking misapprehension that it was the Korean War the split the peninsula in two, and don’t realize that after Japan surrendered during World War II, an unwanted U.S. military occupation, as the late Professor Chong-sik Lee, has written, took a Korea that “has been an integral unit, politically, culturally and economically” but in the post war rush of divvying up the spoils and ongoing anxieties over the possible spread of communism in Asia, made Korea a pawn in the burgeoning Cold War.

Two young officers, Dean Rusk and Charles Bonesteel were given 30 minutes’ deliberation – without even a map – to split the country at a place that would keep Seoul in the south but leave enough land to appease the Soviets, who were threatening to invade, anyway. As professor Lee has described it in Journal of International Affairs, the rushed officers ultimately chose an “arbitrary line of partition at the 38th Parallel,” a line that literally amputated families, with “the Korean people playing no part in the decision.” Years later, Rusk, himself admitted, “Division along the parallel made no sense . . . as far as Korea was concerned.”

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So even though George W. Bush famously labeled North Korea part of the “Axis of Evil,” he omits the fact that this state the U.S. so vigorously condemns was originally created by the U.S. itself.

The U.S.’ 75-year presence lurks everywhere in “Squid Game.” Sometimes quietly, as in the opening scenes featuring the boy-man protagonist Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), a divorced father with a gambling addiction, eking out a living with his elderly mother who makes pennies selling vegetables on the street. When not on one of his minor moneymaking gigs, he lollygags in their gloomy half-basement room. The same kind sunken moldy habitation is a shared motif in “Squid Game” and “Parasite”: the half-basement dwellings, called banjiha, prominent in Seoul, are actually not intended as dwellings but were mandatorily build in the ’70s as bunkers in case of North Korean attack, but now with the widening gulf of inequality, have been retroactively legalized to house the poor.

The U.S.’ post-World War II division of Korea into north and south has consequences of which were negligible for most Americans, especially the elites, but for Koreans meant life and death, families and a country in a constant state of rupture and grieving, embodied in the tragic North Korean migrant character Sae-byeok (Jung Ho-yeon). We first meet her sitting on the floor of Seoul’s version of Off Track Betting, an urchin wandering the streets not unlike the scores of orphans crying in the gutters of Seoul after their families were killed in American bombings during the Korean war. Sae-byeok picks Gi-Hun’s pocket, directly resulting in him being tortured by loan sharks (the violence of his “real” life shown to be as hellish or even more than that of Squid Game life). But later we learn Sae-byeok and her brother are marooned in Seoul as a kind of marginal class mostly invisible in society, in debt if not swindled by the gangsters who helped them out (their elder brother already dead of plague, their father shot and killed by border guards, their mother caught and repatriated back to the DPRK) and needing even more money in order, as she promises her little brother as he waits in an orphanage, to reunite what’s left of their family. The suspended Squid Game piggy bank filled with billions of won is her moon-shot.

Lee Yoo-mi as Ji-yeong and Jung Ho-yeon as Kang Sae-byeok in “Squid Game” (YOUNGKYU PARK/Netflix)

Sae-byeok is young, a teen girl, but shows herself to be as tough and resourceful as the physically strongest (and cruelest) gangster. Her alliance with Ji-young (Lee Yoo-min), another teen, is one of the most poignant in the series. Most of the players are in their 40s; the girls’ gender and age makes them unfavorable to be picked for the various games, and so they seek each other out. The sinister outsized candy-colored play structures emphasize the losses for those two, barely out of childhood themselves: Sae-byeok, being North Korean, has never played any of these classic games, and one wonders from her closed, unsmiling face if she has ever played childhood games at all. Ji-young, the child of a horrific domestic abuse situation, has never had a childhood, either. The two of them have an easy trusting rapport starkly set against the brutality not just of the games but of the partition. Sae-byeok’s name “Dawn,” makes a mockery of her impossible, lightless situation, not unlike how in the giddy days following Japan’s Koreans celebrated the “Day of Return of the Light,” which they thought meant their country being returned to Koreans. This illusion lasted however many months before both U.S. and Russian military forced their way onto the peninsula.

One meticulous detail lost to English speakers, but that has also gone unremarked upon by Korean speaking critics is how Sae-byeok is a distinctly North Korean name, in that it is a pure Korean word, not a combination of Sino-Korean syllables. Pre-partition and in South Korea, still, Koreans use a complex generational system of yoked Chinese characters (for example my name, Myung-Ok, means clear + jade; my sister’s is Chung-Ok is righteous + jade, connecting us as siblings but also within a 12-year generation). Sae-byeok literally is the word for dawn, her younger brother’s name is Cheol, iron, and indeed a character comments on what a “strong” and manly name he has, whereas for traditional names, it’s often unclear what they mean without seeing the underlying Chinese characters, which are printed on a second line on business cards.

North Korean language tried to purge itself of Sino-Korean words altogether, something I learned as an official visitor to North Korea in 2008, where my guides explained North Korea has been purposefully keeping its language “clean.” Foreign import words, which abound in South Korea, not just English phrases and words like “beer,” “elevator” and “thank you,” but the German word “Arbeit” has come to mean “part time job.” In North Korea they no longer use the Sino-Korean word for Korea, hanguk, means People of the Han, so North Koreans call themselves People of the Joseon (after a Korean dynasty); even the North Korean word for “Korean language,” hanguk-mal, is an arch neologism: Joseon-mal, referring to the basically the same language that, when speaking with other Koreans, is casually and habitually just called woori nara mal, “our country’s language.”

Ji-young’s name thus provides the South Korean contrast. Not only classically made (wise + flower), but for artistic purposes also has a generic ring to it. It was the most popular name in Korea in 1970, and thus is a kind of demographic signifier, a Korean “Jennifer” for young women who came of age during the ’90s IMF financial crisis, exemplified by popular novel “Kim Jiyoung Born 1982” – about a young woman who can’t catch a break, no matter how hard she works (and could easily be a “Squid Game” contestant herself).

Outside of Asia, the financial crisis in Korea barely registers. I happened to be living in Seoul as a Fulbright Fellow, and the IMF and Bill Clinton “intern” scandal dominated the Korean news for months, often thrown together, like Sae-byeok and Jiyoung. Too long to go into here, the financial crisis was a consequence of geopolitical manipulations, a “dawn” of global neoliberalism, a closed market pried open, with the U.S. and other Western countries flooding Korean financial markets with speculative capital, then, for political leverage, abruptly withdrawing it, upending the Korean economy, cutting off other lending sources, forcing South Korea to accept IMF loans with strict conditions that, of course, would be advantageous to the west. This included moving to a more western-style (versus a paternalistic company that is expected to care of the worker for life in exchange for loyalty) corporate climate that led to the gutting many worker protections and benefits, which in turn led to strikes, like the one Gi-hun was in (a fictional reference to several real auto company strikes), his first step on his downward spiral from worker to desperate, loan-laden gig worker after the strike is violently suppressed. But in contrast to how the American 2008 financial crisis was experienced as American homeowners individually at fault for taking bad loans (while the actual lenders who came up with the idea of sub-prime loans, and their investment banks, got the bailouts), that year in Korea there were heartbreaking stories on the news of scores mothers giving up their babies’ dol-panjis, traditional gold rings commemorating a child’s first birthday, in hopes that this collective action could help the country’s economy, not unlike how some “Squid Game” participants abandon their self-interest for possibly futile collective action.

Wi Ha-jun in “Squid Game” (Noh Juhan/Netflix)

The largest ghost presiding over the series is the cost of the partition turning brother against brother. The western elite wear gilded masks and amuse themselves watching the Squid Game participants battle – and kill – each other, orchestrated at a remove. VIP No. 4 is so bored by the spectacle of lethal hand-to-hand combat, he takes what he thinks is a waiter, Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon), the police detective who has infiltrated the group to search for his missing brother, away to rape him, only for Jun-Ho to pull out his gun and turn the tables on him.

But this kind of resistance against the powers of the west can only go so far. The U.S. left Korea the way it entered; arbitrarily and weary of a drawn-out war that was seemingly unprofitable, unwinnable. Again, not thinking of Koreans, U.S. military left behind not peace but a shaky, hastily created ceasefire agreement, leaving the country cleaved in two and the South Korean president so frustrated that he wasn’t even invited to the signing for fear he wouldn’t sign the document. Appropriately, the U.S. military signed it for him. There was no official declaration of war going in, and now the U.S., after bombing more than 90% of both North and South Korea’s infrastructure, left the two Koreas still fighting war that it hadn’t started.

The filmmaker spares no subtlety in the climactic scene when the Squid Game’s fixer, the English-speaking Korean “Front Man” (and previous winner of the games) pursues the police detective. In a standoff at a cliff with guns drawn, both unmask we see it’s two loving brothers facing off. The same way Sae-byeok accepts it is unlikely she will 1) win the money, and 2) reunite her family, in the two brothers, there is sorrow and recognition – and resignation – in both their eyes. In real life, given the constant conscription via kidnapping of both sides during the war it was not uncommon for brothers to find themselves inadvertently facing off as mortal enemies.

In “Squid Game,” even the lulls, like when the contestants are lining up for their meal, can turn into a bloodbath in the blink of an eye; similarly, in this civil war not of Koreans’ own making, there is no “everything will be all right” to strive for: in order for one brother to live, the other will have to die. And then the one who lives sees himself and his brother as a literal ghost in his mirror. As viewers we see Jun-ho shot and falling over a cliff that seems to mean certain death, but we don’t see him die; the filmmaker also leaves the story open, just like the armistice could continue to bring peace . . . or more war. This constant anxiety for Koreans, especially since Seoul is within shelling distance of the DPRK, is immaterial to the world, as the U.S. has moved on. Indeed, the Forbes critic called this fratricide scene “a totally pointless subplot that achieves nothing and only serves to confuse us in the end.”

But no matter: one of the things that struck me about “Squid Game” is its audacious attitude that it doesn’t need the world’s (especially the west’s) approval to exist. This a bold move, even if not consciously digested by western audiences, to reclaim Korean history as written by Koreans.

My parents came to the U.S. in 1953, as kind of refugees from the Korean war. My late father refused to talk about his experiences during the war, only to repeat the Korean proverb, “When the whales fight, the shrimp gets hurt.” I think he’d agree, then, that “Squid Games”‘ sickening and over-the-top violence is seated less in individual Koreans and springs more from its history of outside forces using this small but strategically placed country for its own ends.

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The ultraviolet light most effective at killing coronavirus is also the safest to use around people

Scientists have long known that ultraviolet light can kill pathogens on surfaces and in air and water. UV robots are used to disinfect empty hospital rooms, buses and trains; UV bulbs in HVAC systems eliminate pathogens in building air; and UV lamps kill bugs in drinking water.

Perhaps you have seen UV wands, UV LEDs and UV air purifiers advertised as silver bullets to protect against the coronavirus. While decades of research have looked at the ability of UV light to kill many pathogens, there are no set standards for UV disinfection products with regard to the coronavirus. These products may work to kill SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, but they also may not.

I am an environmental engineer and expert in UV disinfection. In May 2021, my colleagues and I set out to accurately test various UV systems and see which was the most effective at killing off — or inactivating — SARS-CoV-2.

How does UV light kill a virus?

Light is categorized by wavelength — the distance between peaks of a wave of light — and is measured in nanometers. UV wavelengths range from 100 to 400 nanometers — shorter in wavelength than the violet hues in visible light — and are invisible to the human eye. As wavelength shortens, photons of light contain higher amounts of energy.

Different wavelengths of UV light work better than others for inactivating viruses, and this depends on how well the wavelengths are absorbed by the virus’s DNA or RNA. When UV light gets absorbed, the photons of light transfer their energy to and damage the chemical bonds of the genetic material. The virus is then unable to replicate or cause an infection. Researchers have also shown the proteins that viruses use to attach to a host cell and initiate infection — like the spike proteins on a coronavirus — are also vulnerable to UV light.

The dose of light matters too. Light can vary in intensity — bright light is more intense, and there is more energy in it than in dim light. Being exposed to a bright light for a short time can produce the same UV dose as being exposed to a dim light for a longer period. You need to know the right dose that can kill coronavirus particles at each UV wavelength.

Making ultraviolet lights safe for people

Traditional UV systems use wavelengths at or around 254 nanometers. At these wavelengths the light is dangerous to human skin and eyes, even at low doses. Sunlight includes UV light near these wavelengths; anyone who has ever gotten a bad sunburn knows just how dangerous UV light can be.

However, recent research has shown that at certain UV wavelengths — specifically below 230 nanometers — the high-energy photons are absorbed by the top layers of dead skin cells and don’t penetrate into the active skin layers where damage can occur. Similarly, the tear layer around eyes also blocks out these germicidal UV rays.

This means that at wavelengths of UV light below 230 nanometers, people can move around more freely while the air around them is being disinfected in real time.

Testing different wavelengths

My colleagues and I tested five commonly used UV wavelengths to see which work best to inactivate SARS-CoV-2. Specifically, we tested how large a dose is needed to kill 90% to 99.9% of the viral particles present.

We ran these tests in a biosafety level three facility at the University of Arizona that is built to handle lethal pathogens. There we tested numerous lights across the UV spectrum, including UV LEDs that emit light at 270 and 282 nanometers, traditional UV tube lamps at 254 nanometers and a newer technology called an excited dimer, or excimer, UV source at 222 nanometers.

To test each device we spiked a sample of water with millions of SARS-CoV-2 viruses and coated a petri dish with a thin layer of this mixture. We then shined UV light on the petri dish until we achieved a specific dose. Finally we examined the viral particles to see if they could still infect human cells in culture. If the viruses could infect the cells, the dose was not high enough. If the viruses did not cause an infection, the UV source at that dose had successfully killed the pathogen. We carefully repeated this process for a range of UV doses using the five different UV devices.

While all of the wavelengths we tested can inactivate SARS-CoV-2 at very low doses, the ones that required the lowest dose were the systems that emit UV light at a wavelength of 222 nanometers. In our experiment, it took a dose of less than 2 millijoules of energy per square centimeter to kill 99.9% of viral particles. This translates to needing about 20 seconds to disinfect a space receiving a low intensity of short wavelength UV light, similar to that used in our test.

These 222-nanometer systems are almost twice as effective as conventional UV tube lamps, which are often used in ultraviolet disinfecting systems. But importantly, the winning lamp also happens to be the safest for humans, too. At the same UV light intensity it takes to kill 99.9% of SARS-CoV-2 in 20 seconds, a person could be safely exposed to 222-nanometer light for up to one hour and 20 minutes.

What this means is that widely available types of UV lamp lights can be used to safely knock down levels of the coronavirus with people present.

Better use of existing tech

Many places or organizations — ranging from the U.S. Air Force to the Space Needle in Seattle to Boeing — are already using or investigating ways to use UV light in the 222 nanometer range to protect public health.

I believe that our findings are important because they quantify the exact doses needed to achieve various levels of SARS-CoV-2 control, whether that be killing 90% or 99.9% of viral particles.

Imagine coffee shops, grocery stores, school classrooms, restaurants and concert venues now made safe by this technology. And this is not a solution for just SARS-CoV-2. These technologies could help protect human health in public spaces in future times of crisis, but also during times of relative normalcy, by reducing exposure to everyday viral and bacterial threats.

Karl Linden, Professor of Environmental Engineering and the Mortenson Professor in Sustainable Development, University of Colorado Boulder

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Paul McCartney’s “The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present”: A visual feast, if flawed, for Beatles fans

Let’s be ineluctably clear from the outset: Paul McCartney stands alone as the finest singer-songwriter and most accomplished musician of the rock ‘n’ roll era. Sporting an impressive vocal range throughout the heart of his career as both a member of the Beatles and as a solo performer, he was arguably his industry’s most gifted singer from the mid-1960s through the early 1980s.

Working with John Lennon, his compositions, which include scores of Top 40 hits, will stand the test of time as the crème de la crème of the pop music songbook. As a writer and performer, McCartney is at home in virtually any style, from rock and country through jazz, R&B, and beyond. In terms of his musicianship, he is simply virtuosic, distinguishing himself time and time again as an inventive, often groundbreaking guitarist and perhaps the most innovative and melodic bass player to ever pick up the instrument.

And perhaps the best part? His talent has hardly begun to ebb. Witness last year’s “McCartney III,” one of his most compelling albums in decades, reminding us, as I wrote at the time, that at age 78, his musical chops were as exquisite and profound as virtually anyone’s. Ever.

In short, McCartney’s legacy and commanding influence are secure. Full stop.

Which is why his two-volume retrospective, “The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present,” is somewhat mystifying. For one thing, we’ve been down this road before with the excellent “Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now,” the 1997 biography penned by Barry Miles in close consultation with the former Beatle. A valuable and exhaustive study — especially in terms of McCartney’s songwriting practices — “Many Years from Now” has aged well, easily eclipsing the vast number of other biographies devoted to Beatle Paul.

Love the Beatles? Listen to Ken’s podcast “Everything Fab Four.”

That said, “The Lyrics” has its own ace in the hole. Edited by celebrated Irish poet Paul Muldoon, the anthology is a feast for the eyes. Dyed-in-the-wool Beatles fans will be bowled over by the sheer profundity of unpublished photographs, previously unseen lyrics sheets, journal entries, paintings, and the like. Indeed, “The Lyrics” easily represents the finest collection of illustrations associated with McCartney’s life and work. And it’s beautifully rendered, to boot. Drop-dead gorgeous as books go, “The Lyrics” rivals the finest art imprints, including the handsome limited editions from the likes of Taschen and Genesis.

Readers will enjoy the deep dives into more than 150 songs, and I, for one, was thrilled with the choices. All of the requisite Beatles tunes are in evidence, and diehards like myself will be pleased with McCartney’s attention to a bevy of Wings-era favorites, including somewhat less famous numbers as “Mrs. Vanderbilt,” “Café on the Left Bank,” and “Old Siam, Sir,” to name but a few.

If “The Lyrics” has an overarching weakness, it exists in the margins. For one thing, Beatles tunes are credited in the anthology to “Paul McCartney and John Lennon,” eschewing the “Lennon-McCartney” brand that ensured that Liverpool’s favorite sons were household names the world over by their mid-twenties. This has been a long-standing issue for McCartney, dating back to the Beatles’ first two LPs. The liner notes for their 1963 debut album “Please Please Me” credited their original compositions to “McCartney-Lennon,” only to be reversed later that same year on “With the Beatles.”

McCartney has blamed Lennon and Beatles manager Brian Epstein for engineering the shift, remarking in “The Beatles Anthology” (2000) that “I wanted it to be McCartney-Lennon but John had the stronger personality, and I think he fixed things with Brian before I got there. That was John’s way. I’m not saying there is anything wrong with that; I wasn’t quite as skillful. He was one-and-a-half years older than me, and at that age it meant a little more worldliness.” Since the days of “Wings Over America” (1976), McCartney has taken to crediting his Beatles compositions to McCartney-Lennon, at one point even entreating Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono to consider officializing “Yesterday” as a McCartney-only composition — he composed the song in its entirety, after all — but she held fast.

And then there are a series of moments in “The Lyrics,” often literary in nature, that might seem like — dare I say it? — overreaching. As an English major, I couldn’t be more chuffed. But as a student of Beatles history, I am skeptical about these sorts of twilight attributions. Take, for example, the suggestion in the “She Loves You” entry that likens the song’s speaker to the protagonist in L.P. Harley’s novel “The Go-Between.” Or the notion that McCartney might very well have gleaned the phrase “let it be” from Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” — but mercifully, not from the bad quarto, it turns out. To put it another way, McCartney’s contributions are plenty substantial in their own right — they don’t need any help from the Bard from Stratford, thank you very much.

That’s not to say that the attendant anecdotes and off-the-cuff musings are not powerful and affecting. As always, McCartney’s asides about his parents are simply lovely. And let’s face it: Jim Mac’s influence upon his son’s musical upbringing looms as large as virtually anyone’s — including Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley, the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll himself.

Any and all references to McCartney’s late wife Linda are also welcome and profuse, underscoring the incredible imprint that she left on his personal and creative lives. In all of our lives, if you really pause to consider the singular place that she held in his world. In its finest moments, “The Lyrics” brings these key relationships to the fore, emphasizing the role that McCartney’s family has always played in his life — and yes, this most definitely includes his created family with the other Beatles and their circle.

At this late date in mapping the group’s story while two Beatles still walk among us, it’s time to put an end to historical revision and embellishment. The Beatles’ story, which is awe-inspiring and significant all by itself, simply doesn’t need it. Virtually every minute of every day, some lucky kid is discovering McCartney and the Beatles’ musical bounty for the first time. I envy them to no end, knowing, as many of us already do, that they are poised to embark upon a lifetime’s journey seasoned by a soundtrack of unparalleled quality and renown.

So, to purchase or not to purchase “The Lyrics?” That is, indeed, the question. For music aficionados, McCartney’s anthology is a must-buy — if merely for the illustrations. Prithee, dear Reader, and fetch me a more exquisite anthology this holiday season? I dare say you won’t find one.

In spite of its flaws, “The Lyrics” is a worthy addendum to “Many Years from Now.” And readers everywhere — regardless of their musical persuasions — will want to have “The Lyrics” resting comfortably on their coffee tables when the youngsters in their lives inevitably begin their Beatles journeys. Because they no doubt will, mark my words, and you’ll want to be good and ready when the time comes.

Deep Dives Into the Beatles with “Everything Fab Four”:

Turn your Halloween candy into this 3-ingredient granola

Strap in because this is one of those “how the sausage gets made” conversations.

In case you didn’t already know, granola is not a health food. Those afternoon bars you munch on are convenient, and they have some fiber I guess, but your average supermarket brands also have plenty of sugar and calories. As for the breakfast stuff, well, Consumer Reports notes that plenty of your favorite brands are “loaded with sugars, fat, and calories.” (I’ll break the news about muffins some other day.)

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That doesn’t mean granola’s got to be off the table forever, just don’t kid yourself. There’s nothing wrong with an indulgent, sweet treat some days — you like cinnamon rolls, right? You know those Cocoa Puffs aren’t made of lettuce, I assume? You’ve eaten pancakes? So if you’re craving a granola hit, go ahead and lean in to its decadent and satisfying nature. What I’m getting to here is, why not throw in some of that leftover Halloween candy you’ve got?

Homemade granola is one of my favorite things to make, because it makes the kitchen smell amazing and it tastes incredible. You know what makes it taste even better? Candy. I always add raisins and chocolate chips to my granola, but recently, I had an epiphany. Raisins and chocolate is just… Raisinettes. And some Raisinettes or some similar goodies that won’t be missed are probably lurking in your family’s Halloween haul right now, so go pillage some.

For this recipe, I’ve taken Smitten Kitchen’s “magical” oat brittle, made of just two ingredients, and amped it up with chocolate. “That’s not real granola,” you scoff. “That’s just candy and oats.” Technically, you are correct. You’re welcome. Enjoy.

***

Chocolate almost granola
Inspired by Smitten Kitchen Every Day and Pinch of Yum
Makes approximately 4 servings

Ingredients:

1 cup of rolled oats (not quick)
1/4 cup of maple syrup
1/2 cup of chocolate covered raisins, roughly chopped peanut butter cups, or chopped chocolate miniatures like Mr. Goodbar, Krackle, or Crunch
A few pinches of sea salt

Directions:

Line a sheet pan with parchment and preheat your oven to 350°F.
In a medium bowl, stir together your oats, syrup and salt until everything is well coated.
Spread your mixture out on your pan. You want the oats close enough so they’ll stick together when they bake, but not lumpy, does that make sense?
Bake for 10 – 15 minutes. Check after 10 — you want this to look golden on the edges but not too brown.
Remove from the oven and then scatter your candy evenly on top.
Now leave it alone to cool thoroughly. The chocolate will melt just enough into the oat mixture to stick to it but not coat it. This is ideal.
Break up your oat clusters and store in a jar. Enjoy for breakfast or a snack.

Note: Obviously, you can make this year round with your favorite quality chocolate. I am all about the Ghiradelli 60% bittersweet chips.

More of our favorite breakfast recipes:

A potential “biothreat agent” pathogen is being spread by a $4 aromatherapy spray sold at Walmart

We’re accustomed to hearing about bacterial outbreaks, usually of E. coli or salmonella, in foods like onions (in 2021) and lettuce (in 2018). But a dangerous bacteria in an aromatherapy spray?

This bizarre scenario is playing out right now, after Walmart recently recalled a Better Homes and Gardens aromatherapy room spray that had been on the market for nearly eight months. Fifty-five stores across the country sold 3,900 bottles.

The recall occurred after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suspected that a bottle of the spray contained a dangerous bacteria called Burkholderia pseudomallei, which is known to cause a fatal condition called melioidosis. The CDC started their probe after a cluster of four melioidosis cases surfaced in the United States. The first infection was identified in March, in an adult in Kansas who eventually died from it. Two additional cases were confirmed in June. In early August, a fourth case was confirmed — in a child in Georgia, who, sadly, died.

Each year, there are an estimated 12 cases of melioidosis reported in the U.S., though they are typically linked to recent travel to an area where the bacteria can be naturally found, usually in the soil or water in a subtropical climate. South Asia, Northern Australia, Central, South America, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands are places where the bacteria is known to occur naturally.

“Melioidosis is caused when this bacterium enters a person’s body through cuts or skin lesions, is inhaled with contaminated dust or aerosol, or is consumed via contaminated food or water,” Apichai Tuanyok, an assistant professor in the Department of Infectious Diseases and Immunology at the University of Florida, told Salon. Without treatment, the mortality rate of this disease approaches 90%; but with rapid response and proper antibiotics, this can be reduced to 40% or less.

When infected, melioidosis can spread from the skin to the bloodstream affecting the heart, brain, liver and kidneys. Symptoms include fever, weight loss, stomach or chest pain, muscle or joint pain, headache, and seizures. Peculiarly, in the case of the recent outbreak, none of the recently-infected had traveled to any of those places, raising questions as to the source. Thanks to whole-genome sequencing, investigators discovered that the strains in each of the four cases matched. That lead led them to the real source: Investigators found a bottle of the spray in the home of one of the four infected; the bottle of the product, whose full name was “Better Homes & Gardens Lavender & Chamomile Essential Oil Infused Aromatherapy Room Spray with Gemstones,” tested positive for Burkholderia pseudomallei.

Yet questions remain as to how such a bacteria could have infected an aromatherapy spray marketed by Better Homes and Gardens.

“When you think about the thousands of things people come in contact with around their homes, it’s remarkable we were able to identify the source and confirm it in the lab,” said Inger Damon, MD, PhD, director of CDC’s Division of High-Consequence Pathogens and Pathology, in a news statement. “CDC scientists and our partners found the proverbial needle in the haystack.”

According to the CDC, the spray was manufactured in India. CDC officials have contacted the manufacturer to determine whether ingredients from the spray were used in any other products, while working to assess the extent of contamination in other bottles.

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“In my opinion, however, it is best to wait to be sure what component of the spray bottle (e.g., the gemstones, the scents, the water, the essential oils, the bottles themselves and any other components in the bottle) were the source of the bacteria and where exactly each component originated prior to the final manufacture site in India,” Daniel R. Lucey MD, MPH, FIDSA, said in a statement issued by the The Infectious Diseases Society of America. “To my review of these 56 stores, only one of the four patients lived in a state that did not have any of these stores listed; unless this patient’s infection can be documented to an online purchase of one of these contaminated spray bottles, then how he was infected is still an enigma requiring investigation.”

The matter is complicated by the fact that the bacteria is classified as a potential biothreat agent, which raises the possibility that the pathogen was put in intentionally.

“Burkholderia pseudomallei is classified as a potential biothreat agent because it can cause a severe illness with high mortality rate if untreated; even in treated patients, the mortality rate remains high (approximately 40-50% in patients in Southeast Asian countries),” Tuanyok of the University of Florida told Salon. “Deliberately releasing the melioid pathogen into the environment would be a very effective way to infect people and animals; the result would be an outbreak of very serious, life-threatening illnesses.”

When asked if this specific instance could have been intentional, Tuanyok admitted “it is possible.”

“The CDC will need to investigate this outbreak further,” Tuanyok said. “Since B. pseudomallei is classified as a Tier 1 (top-tier) select agent in the US, the CDC should take this case to the federal law enforcement and investigate further if the outbreak is intentional.”

According to Stat News, the case has been brought to federal law enforcement agents. The CDC believes contamination in the factory is a more likely cause.

Annette Davis, president of the National Association for Holistic Aromatherapy, told Salon that the retail price of the bottle — $4 a bottle — suggests that the fragrance of the spray was “synthetic” and not “genuine essential oils.”

“Without testing, we have no way to know if these room sprays contain genuine essential oils or synthetic fragrances,” Davis said. “It’s unusual to have ‘gemstones’ included in a water-based product; the stones themselves may have been contaminated with bacteria, and then the mineral composition inactivated the preservative system.”

Tuanyok said such an outbreak shouldn’t have occurred in the first place, and could be prevented in the future.

“The manufacturers should be more careful about adding non-sterile natural ingredients from countries where melioidosis is endemic into the fragrance, cosmetics, skin care products, or other household products,” Tuanyok said.

The CDC is urging consumers not to use or open the recalled spray. Instead, consumers are advised to wear gloves and double bag the bottles in zip-top clear resealable bags, and place them in a small cardboard box. The bagged bottles should be returned to a Walmart store— they should not be poured down a drain or thrown in the trash.

“If the spray bottles end up in landfills, the bacteria could become established and cause future melioidosis cases in the U.S.,” the CDC warned. “CDC is working with Walmart to ensure the returned bottles are disposed of properly and safely.”

G20 summit is an “abysmal and total failure” on climate action

Leaders of the world’s richest nations wrapped up the Group of 20 Summit in Rome on Sunday after taking virtually no concrete action to tackle the coronavirus pandemic and the intensifying climate crisis, drawing condemnation from human rights advocates who deemed the gathering’s outcome an “abysmal and total failure.”

“G20 leaders could have taken urgent action to dramatically scale up manufacturing and access to COVID-19 vaccines around the world, promote a fair economic recovery, lower dangerous greenhouse gas emissions, and help the poorest countries adapt to the climate change already happening,” Jörn Kalinski, senior adviser at Oxfam International, said in a statement. “The bottom line is that this summit failed to deliver much of anything for people, planet, or prosperity.”

The weekend summit drew to a close as the global death toll from COVID-19 topped a staggering 5 million, a figure that’s likely to continue growing by thousands each day as billions of people worldwide are denied access to lifesaving vaccines.

G20 nations constitute 62% of the global population but have used 82% of the world’s COVID-19 vaccines, according to the London-based advocacy group Global Justice Now. Just 3.6% of people in low-income countries have received at least one coronavirus vaccine dose — inequity that threatens to prolong the pandemic and leave the door open to devastating new variants.

A recent analysis by the science data firm Airfinity showed that G20 countries have received 15 times more coronavirus vaccine doses per capita than countries in sub-Saharan Africa. The United States, the European Union, Britain, and Canada are currently hoarding roughly 240 million surplus COVID-19 vaccines as they begin offering booster shots to certain segments of their populations, ignoring the World Health Organization’s pleas for a moratorium on boosters.

“It’s an absolute scandal that the G20 has wasted a year ignoring a proposal, backed by the majority of its members, to break vaccine monopolies and ensure the lifesaving vaccines can be made around the world to save countless lives,” said People’s Vaccine Alliance policy lead Anna Marriot, referring to a stalled patent waiver at the World Trade Organization.

At the end of the two-day Rome summit, G20 leaders adopted a declaration pledging to “enhance our efforts to ensure the transparent, rapid, and predictable delivery and uptake of vaccines where they are needed” and endorsed the WHO’s modest goal of “vaccinating at least 40% of the population in all countries by the end of 2021.” The document does not mention vaccine-related intellectual property rules, which activists view as key barriers to ramping up production, closing distribution gaps, and ending the pandemic.

Tamaryn Nelson, a health adviser at Amnesty International, said Sunday that the “vague promises” issued by the heads of the richest countries in the world are “an affront to those who have died, and to everyone still living in fear, of COVID-19.”

“With just two months left of this year, only a radical change in approach will close the shameful vaccine gap,” Nelson argued. “If we continue down our current path, the end of the pandemic will remain a glimmer on the horizon.”

Environmentalists offered similarly scathing rebukes of the climate rhetoric and commitments that emerged from the G20 gathering, which concluded just ahead of the pivotal COP26 talks in Glasgow, Scotland.

In their final communique, G20 leaders — whose countries are responsible for more than 75% of global greenhouse gas emissions — “acknowledge the close link between climate and energy and commit to reduce emission intensity, as part of mitigation efforts, in the energy sector to meet timeframes aligned with the Paris temperature goal.”

The declaration also includes a vow to “put an end to the provision of international public finance for new unabated coal power generation abroad by the end of 2021.” However, to the dismay of climate campaigners, G20 leaders did not agree to a specific target date to end the use of coal as Australia and other countries stood in the way.

“Heads of state from the world’s richest — and therefore most powerful — countries had the opportunity to radically reset multilateral politics and generate the commitments necessary to keep global heating below 1.5°C,” said Namrata Chowdhary, chief of public engagement at 350.org. “Instead, they’ve made a contradictory and empty statement on climate: they’ve restated their commitment to keeping global heating below 1.5°C, but failed to commit to any action themselves, not even agreeing that their national climate plans must be improved. Right now, they have us on a path to nearly 3 degrees of heating. These so-called leaders need to do better.”

Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International, echoed that sentiment, saying in a statement that “if the G20 was a dress rehearsal for COP26, then world leaders fluffed their lines.”

“Governments must respond to the deadly warnings the planet is giving us and cut emissions drastically right now to stay in line with 1.5°C, and that requires stopping any new fossil fuel development,” said Morgan. “At COP26, we will not let up and continue to push for more climate ambition, as well as the rules and actions to back it up. We need to stop all new fossil fuel projects immediately.”

Joe Manchin throws last-minute wrench in Democrats’ infrastructure negotiations

Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia — who has, along with Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, emerged as one of the two most prominent Democrats to hold up President Joe Biden’s legislative package — signaled on Monday that he may not be ready to back the already-watered down agenda. Despite offering hope to Biden supporters last week, Manchin now claims that he has serious doubts about the cost of the social safety net expansion bill.

During a news conference, Manchin accused his fellow Democrats of using “gimmicks” to obscure the true cost of their plan and insisted that more time was needed to study the economic effects of the $1.75 trillion social safety net expansion bill.

“As more of the real details outlined in the basic framework are released, what I see are shell games and budget gimmicks that make the real cost of this so-called $1.75 trillion dollar bill estimated to be twice as high if the programs are extended or made permanent,” Manchin told reporters. He also warned his fellow Democrats that “I’m open to supporting a final bill that helps move our country forward, but I am equally open to voting against a bill that hurts our country.”

Manchin repeatedly emphasized that, although he is not opposing the bill, he will not come out in favor of it until the text has been more thoroughly reviewed.

“Simply put, I will not support a bill that is this consequential without thoroughly understanding the impact that it will have on our national debt, our economy and most importantly all of our American people,” Manchin told the reporters. He later added, “To be clear, I will not support the reconciliation legislation without knowing how the bill would impact our debt and our economy and our country. We won’t know that until we work through the text.”

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If Manchin should decide against supporting the current incarnation of the social safety net plan, it would imperil Biden’s entire legislative agenda. There is a $1 trillion infrastructure bill with bipartisan support that would pass in the House of Representatives except that a group of progressives refuse to back it. They have taken this position because they are concerned that once the bill is passed, centrist Democrats will renege on their promise to work in good faith on passing the other legislation. Since Democrats control the Senate by the slimmest of margins and therefore need every Democratic senator to support their bills for them to pass, Manchin and Sinema need to agree to a social safety net package with the rest of the body. At that point, votes for both that bill and the $1.75 trillion bill can be held concurrently, which the progressive faction says is their prerequisite to supporting the infrastructure bill.

Manchin attempted to convince those progressives to agree to pass the infrastructure bill during his Monday press conference.

“For the sake of the country, I urge the House to vote and pass the bipartisan infrastructure bill — holding this bill hostage is not going to work in getting my support for the reconciliation bill,” Manchin remarked.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki seemed unconcerned about Manchin’s position.

“The plan the House is finalizing meets those tests—it is fully paid for, will reduce the deficit, and brings down costs for health care, child care, elder care, and housing,” Psaki said in a written statement. “Experts agree: Seventeen Nobel Prize-winning economists have said it will reduce inflation. As a result, we remain confident that the plan will gain Senator Manchin’s support.”

Manchin has emerged as one of the most controversial figures in the Democratic Party since Biden took office, thanks to his ability to single-handedly kill many of Biden’s progressive policy items. He cut unemployment relief in the March stimulus bill, opposed raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and continues to support the racist filibuster, which has historically been used by conservative to circumvent democratic procedures that would advance progressive reforms.

How the gun lobby might help overturn Texas’ abortion ban

The Supreme Court heard arguments on Monday on the Texas law that effectively bans most abortions. Questions from two of Trump’s appointees, Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, signal a skepticism of the law’s constitutionality.

The Texas law has a novel means of enforcement. The state does not enforce the law, but rather allows private citizens to sue anyone who abets an abortion and for them to collect $10,000 if they win, effectively placing bounties on abortions. The enforcement mechanism allows the bill to dodge judicial review. Anyone who wishes to challenge the constitutionality of the law would usually sue the state, but because private citizens are the enforcers, the law intentionally leaves it a legally gray area. Justice Kavanaugh took issue with that particular provision and pressed Texas on it.

“Can I ask you about the implications of your position for other federal rights?”

Kavanaugh referred to a brief from the Firearms Policy Coalition, which said that the law might have unintended consequences and backfire on conservatives. The firearm rights group said that gun control advocates might be able to copy the language of the abortion law and apply it to Second Amendment rights.

Texas Solicitor General Judd Stone represented Texas and told Kavanaugh that Congress would be able to pass laws bolstering rights to protect them, such as free speech rights and Second Amendment rights. Kavanaugh responded, “Well for some of those examples, I think it would be quite difficult to get legislation through Congress.”

Kavanaugh also asked Stone about a hypothetical law that would allow private citizens to sue anyone that sells an AR-15 for $1 million. But Stone dodged his questioning and responded “whether or not federal court review is available does not turn on the nature of the right.”

Barrett also took issue with the enforcement mechanism. The law leaves in the air whether or not citizens can bring new lawsuits against abortion providers.

“You cannot get global relief,” Barrett said to Stone. She then asked him if the law was “on an individual by individual basis.” Stone said Barrett was correct and that there was no limit to how many private citizens can sue.

Meanwhile, Barrett showed sympathy to the abortion providers’ arguments, asking Marc Hearron, who represented the abortion providers, if the law allows a “full airing” of the providers’ constitutional rights. The law forbids providers from using the right to an abortion as a defense until they have been sued.

In September, the Supreme Court denied an injunction filed by abortion providers to stop the Texas law from going into effect, which anti-abortion activists cheered. But Mary Ziegler, a law professor at Florida State University, told The New York Times that because the court agreed to listen to arguments, “someone who was not on the fence is probably back on the fence.”

“Feminist AF” author on hip-hop and feminism today: “We’re not playing nice anymore”

The future — and present — of hip-hop music is feminist. Just take a page from Lizzo, the singer-rapper behind “Truth Hurts,” which contains one of the most iconic feminist lyrics in modern history: “I just took a DNA test; turns out I’m 100% that b**ch.”

Similarly, in “Good as Hell,” Lizzo sings to women who have been played by men: “Boss up and change your life / You can have it all, no sacrifice.” And in “Like A Girl,” she raps: “Only exes I care about are in my f**king chromosomes.” Talk about an empowering biology lesson!

Meanwhile, one of Lizzo’s hip-hop contemporaries changing the game, Megan Thee Stallion has built her career around sex positivity and reclaiming traditionally male narratives about the kind of fun only straight men have been allowed to boast about for years. She is, after all, the architect of “Hot Girl Summer,” a joyful movement encouraging women to have fun and embrace who they are, no matter what that may look like for them.

It’s with artists like these, and the women who paved the way for them, like Missy Elliott, Lil’ Kim, and others, that co-authors Brittney Cooper, Susana M. Morris and Chanel Craft Tanner wrote “Feminist AF: A Guide to Crushing Girlhood.” The self-described handbook helps young, Black women navigate smashing the patriarchy through a lens of hip-hop music, pop culture and lived experiences. The authors were inspired to write the book as they asked themselves what an intergenerational, multi-racial conversation between feminists could look like.

Cooper and Morris founded the Crunk Feminist Collective more than a decade ago to create a supportive space for feminists of color who were able to find themselves and their feminist identities with the help of the female hip-hop legends of their generation. Their handbook continues this work, demystifying feminism for the generations growing up with the body- and sex-positive soundtracks of female hip-hop artists of today like Lizzo, Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion, Nicki Minaj and Doja Cat.

The feminism presented in “Feminist AF” isn’t just a social, political and economic movement, but also one that’s intimately connected to the personal lives — and certainly music tastes — of young women and girls of color. Through an intersectional lens that includes queer and trans youth and a wide range of marginalized experiences, “Feminist AF” poses and offers answers to questions that include: What’s the difference between being kind and being nice, and why are girls of color always expected to be “nice” at the expense of their own needs? Why is it problematic to assume Black girls and girls of color will always be “strong” and resilient? What does it look like to have fun and set boundaries as you begin dating? Where do colorism, fatphobia, and “personal preferences” in dating and sex come from?

Cooper told Salon that she and her co-authors center girls of color, and especially Black girls, in their writing, but invite all young people to read it, and understand why when it comes to challenging rape culture and patriarchy, “we’re not going to play nice anymore.”

“Is there space for white girls to read and enjoy this book? What we hope for is a generational feminism that is multi-racial and inclusive, and so white girls can come to this, and everyone can learn another set of ideas about leadership, dating, friendship, bodies, sex, all of the stuff that matters for all of us,” Cooper said. “It still has broad relevance even beyond the experiences of girls of color.”

In an interview with Salon, Cooper talked today’s leading ladies of hip-hop, why we shouldn’t be teaching young girls to be “ladies,” the feminist reasons young people should consider polyamory and more.

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How did you first connect with your co-authors, Chanel and Susana? Did you all bond over choosing the music, movies and shows you include in the book?

We know each other because for the last 11 years we’ve been part of the Crunk Feminist Collective, which Susana and I co-founded in 2010 and [of which] Chanel is a member. We’ve been previously known for our Crunk Feminist Collective blog, and we put out a book together, Susana and I and another collective member, called the “Crunk Feminist Collection,” which came out with the Feminist Press. And then we had this opportunity to continue the work we’ve been doing over the past decade by putting out this book, which is really our attempt to have an intergenerational conversation with young feminists.

We’re absolutely all friends, we certainly came together both for a shared love of smashing the patriarchy and loving hip-hop music, and wanting to figure out a way to coexist with music that can also be problematic, with movements like feminism that are sometimes seen as no fun, or taking the joy out of everything.

Both the definitions in your introduction and the concepts introduced throughout the book are written in such an accessible way and are insightful even for people who have been feminists for years. One concept that really stands out is the difference between being kind versus being nice. What experiences in your life might have inspired you to draw that distinction, and why is it important for young women of color to learn?

That’s a section we talked a lot about. We’re not the kind of women who are invested in being “ladies.” One of the things that’s super interesting, particularly growing up as girls of color, is no one ever sees us as sweet or nice or kind, or any of those words. We’re always seen as a problem. But the challenge is you can then overcompensate for that, where there’s an imposition on all girls to be nice that’s very much about not respecting their own boundaries, trying to accommodate other people and make others feel good even at your own expense.

For me, that shows up in the challenge of having a problem saying no, because I never want anyone to think I’m mean or I’m a b***h. So, I’ll go out of my way to accommodate other people. Some of my personal journey and for many women navigating these things, is recognizing you can be kind — which is to say, compassionate, empathetic, caring — without having to be nice to people or have the responsibility to sacrifice yourself to make everyone else feel good all the time.

That’s something we expect of girls, we expect them to be nice, to not be outspoken, to not speak up for their needs or wants or desires, and it starts when little girls are very young: “Be sweet.” We never say to little boys, “Be sweet.” It’s a thing we say to girls, and it has long-term consequences that play into many things. So we wanted to disrupt this by saying we don’t owe anyone niceness at our own expense. What we owe to everyone in a world that’s about justice is a commitment to being kind.

That reminds me a lot of the recurring conversation about “civility” in political protests.

Right, we’ve come through the era of Black Lives Matter when I was an active participant in the first iteration of Black Lives Matter in 2013, 2014, and that call for civility is absolutely used in an oppressive way. You also saw this in feminist movements in the 2010s, like the Slut Walk, which I loved. There were conflicts about this reclaiming of “slut” like all of us could do it in the same way, since Black girls can’t necessarily call themselves sluts without consequences. But I loved the idea that women all over the world said we’re not going to play nice anymore with rape culture, and we will defiantly protest how it shows up in the world. That’s the kind of thing you get when women are not invested in the idea that they owe anyone niceness. Nice protests? I don’t know what a nice protest actually looks like.

In one chapter of your book, you and your co-authors address the burden of being expected to be resilient all the time as Black women. What are ways that stereotypes and tropes about strong Black women or women of color have actually been harmful? Why is it important to protect future generations from these expectations?

We talked a lot about this, as adult feminists who spent a lot of time talking to women of color and particularly Black women about going off the trope of strong Black womanhood, because it’s false. None of us is strong all the time. The world is really hard right now, it has been especially hard over the pandemic and it’s always been hard if you’re a Black woman. We’ve never felt like there are any soft places to land, and the challenge of that is, we then recreate that with girls.

I specifically talk about being a young girl who lost a parent early to violence, struggled with suicidal ideation because no one in my life knew how to help me process that grief, and I didn’t know how to process it. And so I just kept going, and because I was doing so well in school, people thought I was just exceptionally resilient, when really, school had become my coping mechanism to deal with the grief, and it’s a thing we miss a lot in girls of color. It’s very much a part of our social discourse, where we continue to say girls are more resilient than boys, they don’t act out as much.

Meanwhile, when girls of color actually do say all is not well – here I’m thinking of Ma’Khia Bryant, a 16-year-old Black girl who was killed in Columbus, Ohio, earlier this year – when she called the police because she was being harassed and bullied by some folks in her neighborhood, she got shot four times and killed. That is incredibly heavy, and that is the conundrum. We’re forced to be resilient even when our worlds are falling apart, and if we’re not sufficiently resilient, sometimes we can lose our actual lives over our inability to suck it up and take it.

What we wanted to do for girls in this book was to name that set of circumstances, and say, “You are not alone. We don’t have all the answers, but you deserve to know it’s not your responsibility to carry the weight of the world.”

Gender identity, chronic illness, ability, weight and other aspects of our identities have always shaped beauty standards. How did female hip-hop artists, both from today and earlier generations, help you address these beauty standards in the book?

We wanted to make sure we were as inclusive of all experiences as we possibly could, because we’re intersectional feminists, so we want to talk to girls who have disabilities or chronic illnesses. I’m a fat girl, Susana identifies as a fat person as well, and we definitely wanted to shout out big girls. We came up in an era where Missy Elliott was a superstar. She was a big, big girl, and she has since lost weight, but when we were girls, Missy Elliott was this iconic big girl who embraced it in her art, and whose career wasn’t constrained by body image.

Today, big Black girls are out here shining. Megan Thee Stallion is a stallion — she’s not a fat person, but she’s certainly very tall and embodies it, and we have hip-hop icons all through this book, quoting them, citing them. We’re talking about Cardi B, we’re talking about Nicki Minaj, Lizzo, who also is a fat, feminist chick, a rapper and singer who embraces her body and is unapologetic about doing so.

That’s what’s super exciting about hip-hop and feminism in the hip-hop space these days. We came up in an era where there were big female emcees, and it’s really nice to see their rebirth again. That’s one of the things we’re trying to suggest, that feminism is fun. It has a beat you can bop to, and when you bring women to the party, whether we’re talking about hip-hop or feminism, it does become a more inclusive conversation. We’re nicer and kinder about bodies than our broader world is. We give girls who have all kinds of bodily experiences, including trans girls, nonbinary folks, a space to be themselves, however they experience and understand their bodies.

You also address colorism and preferences for some physical attributes in such a thoughtful way. As your book points out, there’s this idea that individuals just have personal preferences for people with certain appearances that’s long been used as an excuse for colorism, fatphobia, and white supremacy. Why has this been so widely allowed?

People just want an excuse to not interrogate themselves. There’s this broader idea that desire is personal and it’s not socially constructed like absolutely everything else. But just like hundreds of years ago during the Renaissance era, women with bigger bodies were seen as beautiful. We are the products of the social era in which we live. When we were little girls, big butts weren’t it. Now they’re all the rage. We’ve lived long enough to see the cultural attitudes around even that particular body part and type shift.

Colorism is similar in that it’s rooted in a history of racism and white supremacy, and we felt it was a feminist issue that would often not be addressed in mainstream feminism because mainstream feminism tends to work from the experiences of white women and move outward. But you can find this experience happening in Black communities, brown communities, South Asian communities, all kinds of communities of color. If you listen closely, folks talk about the way that dark-skinned women, or dark-skinned girls are seen as less beautiful than light-skinned girls, and that’s about politics. That’s not actually about personal preferences.

We want to name that for girls who might be experiencing it from any side of the equation to give them the language to talk about it, and then to help them to understand that once we name the social conditions we live under, then we can actually begin to change those social conditions. Now you have a project to undo any ideas you might have had that darker skin means you’re less beautiful, or worthy, even of protection and safety. That’s our goal. Even for white girls who may be reading this book, and we do say the book is inclusive of all girls, it can help them to be better allies to their friends who are girls of color.

In the section of your book about relationships and love, you raise concepts like polyamory, having multiple significant relationships in your life, as well as concepts like setting boundaries, and gaslighting. How important is it for young people experimenting with dating to have this language and these ideas in their arsenal, to take care of themselves and also have fun at the same time?

Having fun is so key. We wondered if being pro-polyamory in this book would be mildly controversial. I don’t think it’s controversial for young people, but there are adults who might be reading it who might be like, “What are y’all doing?” Part of what we’re saying is, have fun, and be ethical in how you’re dating, but you don’t have to do it in these traditional ways. For us, it’s really the ethical non-monogamy piece. You can’t just be out here running people and playing folks and not being honest about it, but if this is an open set of conversations, then by all means, have at it.

Part of the reasoning for that is a culture of radical consent means we need to understand that none of us owns any one person. Nobody belongs to us. We don’t belong to anyone but ourselves. It may be the case that one person can’t fulfill all of your needs, or conversely, even if you’re in a monogamous situation, what you still need is boundaries to respect everyone’s individual needs.

As for the concept of boundaries, that’s huge for us. Any woman, girl or femme person can recognize that part of the way patriarchy works in our everyday lives is by just letting people continually breach our boundaries, when you’re on the train or someone is touching your body inappropriately, you’re at work and have caretaking duties at home and someone is insisting that you stay later even though you said you had a hard out at a particular time, or you’re at school and men are sexually harassing you. So, we’re saying to girls very early, your boundaries are sacrosanct. The people who are in your life, whether as friends, partners or family, need to respect those boundaries, and we need to build a world that respects those boundaries.

We want to bring home this idea that feminism is not some political movement solely outside of ourselves that doesn’t affect our everyday lives. It’s also about why we feel so uncomfortable sometimes when we tell other people no. This means quite often we are not respecting our own boundaries, putting other people’s needs or concerns or wishes above our own, and that needs to stop.

“Feminist AF” emphasizes the importance of girls and young women of color preserving their intellectual labor, and not being obligated to teach other people at all times. Did this come from personal experience for you at all? Have you experienced or witnessed a lot of men feeling entitled to “debates” that treat a woman’s lived experiences as intellectual hypotheticals?

Because we’re both Black folks and women, this section about whether to teach or not teach, what kind of labor do you want to do, the terms and how you do it — that all comes out of the way we’re asked to explain racism to our well-meaning white counterparts who want to be allies, but who are being problematic. It’s also a thing that happens at the party for us, saying something like “I’m a professor,” and having a dude come up and just interrogate you about your research, your work, as if he’s the expert.

Even my mother said this to me when I was a younger person dating, “Have you noticed that when men approach you, sometimes they come up and just start asking you a bunch of questions about yourself even before you can get a question in?” And it’s this mode of interrogation that is very masculinist in its approach, and she’s like, “What happens in that moment is, they walk away with lots of information, and you walk away with very little.” It helped me begin to think about those kinds of dynamics.

Also, Susana is a queer person, a queer femme, and she talks about what it means to always be teaching straight people about queer experiences, or queer lives and why queer folks don’t actually owe that to straight folks. That also means trans folks don’t owe cis folks teaching all the time. We hope as a group of writers who are all cisgender writers, we can emerge as teachers getting our people and giving them tools and access, so they’re not always asking problematic questions of trans and nonbinary folks. We really do try as cisgender people to be good allies in this book, precisely for this reason.

You recommend some great shows and movies at the end of the book, like “Never Have I Ever,” “Big Mouth,” and “Sex Education.” Have you watched all of these shows? Do they give you hope about the future of sex positive or diverse storytelling?

I haven’t watched all these shows. It was really Chanel who was keeping us in the know! They’re all in my Netflix queue, and I’ve read about them all. I do think this revolution in young adult television, and really pushing boundaries and saying the things all of us needed to hear as young people but adults in previous generations weren’t willing to say. It all really matters. And to be quite honest, part of our posture in this book is knowing young people are ahead of us in many of these conversations.

We don’t see ourselves as the experts who are telling people things they don’t already know. What we’re really saying is, there are some experiences we’ve had that might be useful to you as you’re figuring out what feminism is going to look like for you in your life right now. Mostly we’re saying we see you, and we’re in the struggle with you. This is our offering to you to say we want to be in conversation, with young people who are already in the streets, already figuring it out, or young people who are like, “I don’t know what feminism means, but I’m interested in these girls of color on the cover of the book.” It’s a wide open, “Come to the table and let’s talk about it.”

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Larry Summers slams Democrats for failing to tax the wealthy

When Lawrence Summers tweeted on Sunday that he is “certainly no left wing ideologue,” it wasn’t a Halloween joke.

Summers is a famous academic who served as Chief Economist of the World Bank and President of Harvard University. He was influential in crafting the economic policies for two center-left Democratic presidents — Bill Clinton (serving in various Treasury Department roles) and Barack Obama (serving as Director of the National Economic Council). Summers’ resume is what makes his recent remarks so noteworthy.

“I think something wrong when taxpayers like me, well into the top .1 percent of income distribution, are getting a significant tax cut in a Democrats only tax bill as now looks likely to happen,” Summers explained on Twitter. He went on to criticize President Joe Biden’s current legislative package for “no rate increases below $10 million, no capital gains increases, no estate tax increases, no major reform of loopholes like carried interest and real estate exchanges but restoration of the state and local deduction explain it.”

He added, “We don’t need radical new ideas, just determination to implement old good ones.” Summers then included a link to a paper he co-authored last year with University of Pennsylvania professor of law Natasha Sarin and research assistant Joe Kupferberg. It calls for stronger measures to make it harder for people to legally avoid taxes and to crack down on illegal tax evasion, which could generate hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue.

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Biden’s bill is currently being criticized by progressives because — in order to win support from moderate senators like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, as well as many moderate House Democrats — the president has agreed to remove a number of tax increases that would have compelled the wealthy to pay a fairer share. They protected President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, kept in a loophole that helps wealthy heirs avoid taxes on their inheritances and jettisoned a proposed tax increase on income accrued from wealth that would have taxed it like ordinary income. They also refused to raise taxes on corporations or eliminate a tax break that mainly helps private equity firm managers and hedge fund managers.

This is not the first time that Summer has openly disagreed with Biden and the Democratic Party, even though he continues to characterize himself as a supporter. What makes this public dissent notable, though, is that Summers is approaching his criticism from the left this time rather than from the right.

When it was revealed last year that Summers was advising Biden’s campaign, progressive groups protested until he promised that he would not work for a future Biden administration. In June, The New York Times reported that Summers’ political clout remains so significant that the Biden administration felt compelled to address Summers’ claim that the president’s March stimulus bill would overheat the economy and cause a spike in inflation. At the time Summers described it as “the least responsible macroeconomic policy we’ve had in the last 40 years,” blaming both the Democratic Party’s left wing and the entire Republican Party.

The concern about rising inflation coming from excess spending would seem to put Summers more in the Manchin/Sinema wing of the Democratic Party than the more progressive one. This makes his recent policy statement all the more striking, as it potentially signifies that moderates as well as progressives are unhappy with some of the changes to the original proposed legislation.

Summers has also attracted headlines for reasons unrelated to economic policy — and not always in flattering ways. He stepped down as President of Harvard University in 2006 partially because of comments he made about women in STEM fields that were criticized as sexist. He has been broadly critical of political correctness, referring to it as a “creeping totalitarianism.”

Surge in GOP’s war on free speech should sound alarms

The right’s desire to suppress any speech they don’t like is metastasizing.

Look no further than Donald Trump’s latest effort to create his own social media network for the perfect example of the Orwellian way in which conservatives use the term “free speech.” The authoritarian right is always claiming to defend against allegedly censorious liberals, but eagle-eyed readers of the terms of service noticed straight away that Trump’s “free speech” network forbids users from hurting his snowflake delicate feelings in any way with a rule against users who “disparage, tarnish, or otherwise harm, in our opinion, us and/or the Site.” In other words, no making fun of Trump’s fingers or mentioning the “pee tape” in this “free speech” paradise!

On the right, “free speech” tends to mean freedom from speech, specifically any speech that contradicts conservative beliefs. It’s basically the “right” of conservatives — and only conservatives — not to be exposed to any speech that might offend, startle, or upset their tender feelings in any way. As Trump’s terms of service indicate, it means a belief in the “right” of conservatives to be free of criticism. Thus “free speech,” in Republican circles, becomes a justification for blatant censorship — and even, in violation of the constitution, using government power to suppress any speech that makes them uncomfortable. To make the situation even more dire, Republicans are increasingly championing their “right” to use violence to silence political dissent.

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The national war on what has been misleadingly described as “critical race theory” in public schools is, in reality, of course, a right-wing attempt to censor any discussion of racism, historical or otherwise. This has been perfectly illustrated in the Virginia governor’s race, in which the GOP candidate, Glenn Youngkin, has been running ads calling for schools to censor materials that tell the historical truth about slavery. The ad, which features a woman telling a maudlin story about her son having “night terrors” from an assigned high school reading, is oblique about what book, exactly, Youngkin thinks should be censored. Of course, Youngkin is embarrassed to admit it because the answer is “Beloved,” a canonical novel by Nobel prize winner Toni Morrison. It’s not a mystery why conservatives want to censor this classic novel about the evils of racism. It’s for the same reason that Texas Republicans are circulating lists of other books to censor, the vast majority of which are about racism being bad or LGBTQ people being normal. As I noted in last week’s newsletter, this is the same fascist urge to suppress free thought that led to the Nazi book burnings, and there’s no reason to sugarcoat it or play the “can’t happen here” games. It can happen here, and is happening, as evidenced by a Republican running for statewide office on a pro-censorship platform in Virginia.

A similarly chilling situation is playing out in Florida, where three political science professors at the University of Florida have been barred from testifying or otherwise offering expert opinion in an ongoing court case over voting rights in the state. The school isn’t even trying that hard to conceal that their reason is to placate Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who signed the racist voting restrictions, citing “a conflict of interest to the executive branch of the state of Florida.” DeSantis has been quite open out his eagerness to cut funding to punish schools that allow any speech that he disagrees with, so it’s not surprising that the university administration is fearful. But, as the New York Times noted, universities typically allow “academic experts to offer expert testimony in lawsuits, even when they oppose the interests of the political party in power,” and legal experts say “the action was probably unconstitutional.” Indeed, the school’s accreditor has already opened an investigation into this issue, which could threaten the university’s access to federal student aid.

To make the situation even more troubling, the right is increasingly embracing the view that they should be allowed to use violence to silence political opponents. Many red states have basically legalized the use of cars as weapons for conservatives who wish to violently attack protesters, especially Black Lives Matter protesters. Laws allowing people to run over protesters — so long as they pretend, in the aftermath, to be afraid — have resulted, according to the Boston Globe, in “scores of people hit, dozens of injuries, at least three deaths, but precious little justice, much less sympathy, for the demonstrators injured, killed, or just plain terrified.”

It’s the moral equivalent of siding “with Bull Connor’s firehoses over the Black children of Birmingham,” or “with the cops with clubs over the brave, battered souls who traversed Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge,” Jess Bidgood writes.

Last week, court proceedings revealed that the police in San Marcos, Texas, similarly sided with a group of motorists who used threats of violence to force Democratic organizers to cancel a campaign event for Joe Biden last year. After Trump supporters chased down and menaced a Biden campaign bus, threatening to run it off the road, police appear to have ignored multiple calls for help. The police made fun of the Democrats instead of doing their job. Afterward, Trump and other Republican politicians cheered on the threats of violence used to forcibly shut down what was supposed to be a mundane Biden campaign event.

This week, the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse also begins. Rittenhouse is alleged to have shot three Black Lives Matter protesters last year, killing two. His case has become a cause célèbre on the right. Not that conservatives think Rittenhouse is innocent, really. It’s quite clear that he loaded up with bullets and went out to the protest looking for trouble. No, the situation — as with the laws legalizing car attacks on protesters — is quite clearly about reinforcing this authoritarian view that progressive speech should be suppressed, by any means necessary.

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That the right is the true threat to free speech should have always been obvious, starting with the way that Trump and his allies waged war on Black athletes and their allies who protested police violence by kneeling during the national anthem. It became even more obvious when Trump ordered the police to tear gas peaceful protesters so that he could walk to a photo-op without having to endure public criticism. Trolling gestures like Trump doing the “tomahawk chop” during the World Series, in this light, aren’t really about free speech in the traditional sense. It’s about asserting that racists are the only people free to express their views, and that anti-racists are obliged to shut up. Most importantly, the right should be empowered to use both the law and violence to silence their critics.

Sadly, a gullible press has allowed the right’s fake panic over “cancel culture” to muddy the waters and create the illusion that it’s the left that is somehow the real threat to free speech. There are, unfortunately, situations where overeager leftists harass and abuse people — usually people on their own side, however — for perceived and often inconsequential heresies, and it would be foolish to deny it. But on the whole, as writer Michael Hobbes has persuasively argued, most “cancel culture” stories aren’t really about censorship at all, but the exaggerated anxieties of older centrists who don’t like being yelled at by young people on Twitter. Certainly, it has no relationship to the right’s campaign for overt censorship of progressive opinions or even uncomfortable facts. While it would be good for some on the left to get a little more measured and thoughtful in responding to folks they disagree with (or think they do, anyway), when it comes to actual censorship, the far more pressing concern is what the right is up to.

As countless examples show, there’s a nationwide movement by Republicans to use whatever tools they have — including government power and even violence — to silence political opponents and rewrite history. Mean tweets are but a faint shadow of the overt threat of censorship coming from the increasingly fascist right.

As violence broke out on Jan. 6, Donald Trump’s lawyer lashed out at Mike Pence

A new report reveals that, while Vice President Mike Pence hid in the bowels of the Capitol out of fear for his life on Jan. 6, President Donald Trump’s lawyer castigated him for not helping the administration illegitimately stay in power. Eastman’s logic was straightforward: If Pence had helped Trump pull off his coup, the angry mob assembled by the president would not have turned to violence.

“The ‘siege’ is because YOU and your boss did not do what was necessary to allow this to be aired in a public way so that the American people can see for themselves what happened,” John Eastman, who represented Trump at the time, wrote to Pence aide Greg Jacobs, according to a report by The Washington Post. Eastman sent his email while Pence, Jacobs and many other public officials were under guard from rioters who had been egged on by Trump to “never concede,” “show strength,” “fight” and show “our Republicans” how to display the “pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.” As the rioters laid waste to the Capitol, some called for Pence to be executed.

In an opinion article that Jacob later wrote about his experience, but chose not to publish, he observed that Eastman’s email “displayed a shocking lack of awareness of how those practical implications were playing out in real time.”

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He also noted that Eastman and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani bombarded Trump’s legal team with an incorrect interpretation of the Constitution in a desperate bid to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.

“Now that the moment of immediate crisis has passed, the legal profession should dispassionately examine whether the attorneys involved should be disciplined for using their credentials to sell a stream of snake oil to the most powerful office in the world, wrapped in the guise of a lawyer’s advice,” Jacob wrote in his draft.

Eastman confirmed to The Post that he had sent those emails but denied that he was defending the violence, instead repeating the debunked claim that there was voter fraud. It is expected that Eastman will be subpoenaed by a House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 coup attempt, and a bipartisan group of prominent legal professionals and former government officials has asked the California bar association to investigate Eastman for passing off blatantly incorrect interpretations about the Constitution as sound legal advice.

Eastman and others in Trump’s legal circle attempted to convince Pence that the 12th Amendment allows the Vice President to decide if Electoral Votes are valid; from there he offered a range of options for Pence to invalidate the election, the most extreme of which would have had him outright reject enough votes from states that went to Biden in order to declare Trump as the winner. In fact, the 12th Amendment does not empower the president to nullify electoral votes, as doing so would allow any incumbent party to thwart democracy and stay in power if it loses a national election. The Vice President’s role in counting electoral votes is merely to preside over the proceedings, read the results and maintain order.

This is not the first account to chronicle how Pence, who cultivated a close relationship with Trump, fell out with the president by not supporting his coup attempt. In addition to overwhelming Pence and his advisers with a multitude of legal arguments to overturn the election, Trump also berated Pence personally on the day before the riots. According to one report, he screamed “I don’t want to be your friend anymore” after Pence refused to budge on helping Trump with his coup.

Despite Trump’s claims, he and his team failed to prove widespread fraud. Roughly 60 courts and 90 judges — as well as Trump’s own attorney general and the entire Supreme Court — unanimously agreed that Trump did not provide any evidence of having been robbed of victory in the 2020 election. (This group included dozens of Republicans.) No case alleging significant voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election has ever been supported by any legal institution in the United States. Even more, Trump has a long history of falsely claiming to have been cheated after losing in a contest, from being snubbed at the Emmys when he hosted “The Apprentice” and accusing Ted Cruz of cheating in the 2016 Republican primaries to his spurious claims about the 2016 and 2020 general elections.

Cruz himself went to bat for Trump on the day of the riots, delivering a speech in which he urged Congress to lend credibility to the president’s phony fraud claims through a commission modeled after the one following the contested 1876 election — one that helped cement the Jim Crow white supremacist governments in the South. While there had been other disputed elections in American history, Trump is the only president to flat-out refuse to leave power after being defeated. His actions were even anticipated by America’s first president, George Washington, who worried that an aspiring despot would manipulate partisanship to convince supporters to end democracy so they could win.

“Cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men,” Washington warned, might one day manipulate partisan sentiments to “subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”

In June Salon spoke with one of the survivors of Jan. 6, Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., about his memories of that day.

“I was on the floor and there are not many windows or vantage points outside the chamber,” Swalwell recalled of that day. “I’ll never forget the uncertainty and terror of knowing there was a violent mob seeking to stop us from doing what we were doing, who were chanting that they wanted to kill members of Congress and that they were armed in a variety of different ways.” When pipe bombs were discovered, he texted his wife and asking her to kiss their young children.

“It was traumatizing,” Swalwell told Salon. “There was the duality of not just being a witness but of having a job to do and just being so angry that we had to leave.”