Internal messages show Facebook employees fuming on Jan. 6 over company’s role in Capitol riot

Facebook employees fumed with anger and regret on an internal messaging system on Jan. 6, as they blamed the company for contributing to the Capitol insurrection.

“This is not a new problem,” one employee wrote on Facebook’s Workplace messaging system, according to a new report from the Washington Post. “We have been watching this behavior from politicians like Trump, and the — at best — wishy washy actions of company leadership, for years now. We have been reading the [farewell] posts from trusted, experienced and loved colleagues who write that they simply cannot conscience working for a company that does not do more to mitigate the negative effects on its platform.”

Another employee wrote bitterly on Workplace: “Never forget the day Trump rode down the escalator in 2015, called for a ban on Muslims entering the US, [and] we determined that it violated our policies, and yet we explicitly overrode the policy and didn’t take the video down. There is a straight line that can be drawn from that day to today, one of the darkest days in the history of democracy and self-governance. Would it have made a difference in the end? We can never know, but history will not judge us kindly.”

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A third employee recalled the anger in June 2020, after Black Lives Matter protesters had been forcibly cleared from a park next to the White House before Trump walked through for a photo opportunity during which he denounced the demonstrations, the Post reports.

“Employees have been crying out for months to start treating high-level political figures the same way we treat each other on the platform. That’s all we’re asking for,” the employee wrote. “Last we spoke, innocent protesters were tear-gassed under the orders of a political figure whose message was amplified. Today, a coup was attempted against the United States. I hope circumstances aren’t even more dire next time we speak.”

The Post’s report is based on thousands of pages of internal Facebook documents that were turned over to the Securities and Exchange Commission by whistleblower Frances Haugen.

“The SEC documents, which were provided to Congress in redacted form by Haugen’s legal counsel and reviewed by The Post and other news organizations, suggest that Facebook moved too quickly after the election to lift measures that had helped suppress some election-related misinformation,” the newspaper reports. “The rushed effort to restore them on Jan. 6 was not enough to stop the surge of hateful, violent posts, documents show. A company after-action report concluded that in the weeks after the election, Facebook did not act forcefully enough against the Stop the Steal movement that was pushed by Trump’s political allies, even as its presence exploded across the platform.”

Read the full story.

11 surprising facts about Jim Morrison

Jim Morrison was the self-styled Lizard King: A leather-pants-loving rock deity who fronted The Doors and represented the dark and druggy flipside of the utopian ’60s dream. Thanks largely to Morrison’s brooding voice and mystical poetry, The Doors’ music freaked out squares and thrilled millions of teenagers looking to break on through to the other side of consciousness. Morrison lived fast, died young, and left behind a catalog of songs that continue to inspire. Here are 11 strange facts about the music legend.

1. Jim Morrison’s father commanded the U.S. Naval fleet at a crucial moment in history

As a counterculture icon, Jim Morrison couldn’t have been less like his father, George S. Morrison, a high-ranking U.S. Navy officer who flew missions during World War II and the Korean War and retired a rear admiral. In August 1964, George Morrison was in command of the Navy’s fleet during the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, the controversial episode that became the justification for increased U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.

2. Jim Morrison told people his parents were dead (they weren’t)

Not surprisingly, Morrison didn’t get along with his straitlaced military dad. The elder Morrison utilized the “dressing down” approach to discipline, wherein he’d berate and humiliate young Jim whenever he did something wrong. Jim broke away from his parents after enrolling at UCLA in 1964. Upon learning of his estranged son’s rock career, George Morrison wrote a letter to Jim urging him to reconsider. He even called out Jim’s “complete lack of talent in this direction.” Jim and his father only spoke one more time, via telephone.

3. Jim Morrison was haunted by something he claimed to have witnessed in 1947

Throughout his life, Morrison spoke about a traumatic incident from his childhood. As he remembered it, he was in a car with his parents and his grandfather traveling through New Mexico. At some point, they came upon the aftermath of a horrific traffic accident. “A truckload of Indianshad either hit another car or something — there were Indians scattered all over the highway, bleeding to death,” Morrison said. The rocker believed the souls of “maybe one or two” of those Native Americans landed in his own soul, which was “like a sponge, ready to sit there and absorb it.”

Morrison references the grisly scene on the song “Peace Frog” — off The Doors’ acclaimed 1970 album Morrison Hotel — and in the spoken-word performances “Dawn’s Highway” and “Ghost Song,” both from the posthumously released 1977 Doors LP An American Prayer.

4. Jim Morrison got “married” in a pagan ceremony

Morrison wasn’t a one-woman man. During the band’s heyday, he was known as quite the womanizer. But that didn’t stop him from tying the knot — sort of — with Patricia Kennealy, a music journalist he met in 1969. Kennealy practiced Celtic paganism, and in 1970, she and Morrison wed via a “handfasting ceremony” involving drops of blood. Kennealy served as a consultant on Oliver Stone’s 1991 biopic “The Doors,” and she made a cameo as the priestess presiding over the marriage ceremony. However, she felt Stone’s film trivialized her role in the late rocker’s life, and in 1992, she released the memoir “Strange Days: My Life With and Without Jim Morrison.”

5. Jim Morrison didn’t leave anything to his pagan bride

Morrison may not have been the world’s most responsible person, but he did manage to make out a will before his death in 1971. The rocker left everything to his longtime girlfriend Pamela Courson, with whom he moved to Paris in March 1971. Courson was actually the person who discovered his body — in the bathtub of their shared apartment — on July 3, 1971. She herself died of a drug overdose in 1974, and since she did not have a will, Morrison’s estate went to her parents. Morrison’s parents subsequently sued, and the courts ruled to split the estate between the two families.

6. Jim Morrison was arrested twice due to onstage antics

On December 10, 1967, Morrison was arrested during a show in New Haven, Connecticut. He’d been maced by cops backstage for refusing to halt his makeout session with a woman in a shower stall, and when he took the stage, he used the opportunity to lambast the local authorities. Police rushed the stage, arrested Morrison, and charged him with public obscenity, indecency, and inciting a riot.

Morrison found himself in even deeper trouble after The Doors performed in Miami on March 1, 1969. The singer allegedly simulated masturbation during the performance and, according to some witnesses, exposed himself. The show’s promoter called off the gig after the band’s fans flooded the stage, and a warrant was issued for Morrison’s arrest. A month later, he turned himself in. He was found guilty of public exposure and profanity and sentenced to six months in jail. Morrison died before he could argue his appeal; in 2010, Florida governor Charlie Crist pardoned the rocker, citing uncertainty over what actually happened.

7. Jim Morrison wasn’t a naturally charismatic performer

In January 1966, the fledgling Doors landed a residency at the Los Angeles club the London Fog. They played five 45-minute sets per night, six nights a week. All that practice proved vital for Morrison, who wasn’t a natural performer. In fact, he’d often face the band instead of the crowd. “In the beginning, Jim wasn’t as talkative or singing as good,” guitarist Robby Krieger told Rolling Stone. “We were constantly trying to get him to turn around and engage the audience.”

8. Jim Morrison was a team player when it came to songwriting credits

Morrison wasn’t much of a musician. He could play a little harmonica, but his true gifts lay elsewhere. In recognition of what his instrument-wielding band mates brought to The Doors, Morrison suggested early on that the band evenly split songwriting credits. “That moment was pivotal,” Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek told Rolling Stone. “It produced 200 percent commitment from each of the four members.”

9. Jim Morrison’s death remains a mystery

On the morning of July 3, 1971, Jim Morrison was found dead in the bathtub of the Paris apartment he shared with Courson. According to Courson, Morrison was feeling sick the night before and decided to take a hot bath. Courson then went back to sleep — only to find him unresponsive in the water hours later. The official cause of death was listed as heart failure, and no autopsy was performed. Morrison’s body lay wrapped in dry ice and plastic for 72 hours before he was buried in the city’s famous Père Lachaise Cemetery.

Rumors and conspiracy theories have circulated ever since. One popular story is that Courson and Morrison had been using heroin, and that he overdosed on the drug. In his 2007 book “The End: Jim Morrison,” Sam Bernett — a French-born journalist and club manager who was friends with Morrison — offered a slightly different explanation. He said Morrison overdosed on heroin and died in the bathroom at the Rock & Roll Circus nightclub. Bernett alleged that drug dealers then carried the rocker back to his apartment and placed his lifeless body in the tub.

Meanwhile, some people insist that Morrison was killed by the CIA — or that he faked his own death.

10. News of Jim Morrison’s death was slow to reach fans

On July 5, 1971, The Doors’ manager Bill Siddons flew to Paris after hearing rumors of Morrison’s death. The singer was buried two days later, and on July 9, after returning to the U.S., Siddons issued a statement that Morrison had died of “natural causes.”

“The initial news of his death and funeral was kept quiet because those of us who knew him intimately and loved him as a person wanted to avoid all the notoriety and circus-like atmosphere that surrounded the deaths of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix,” Siddons said in his statement.

11. Jim Morrison is part of the “27 Club”

Morrison died exactly two years after Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones was found dead in his swimming pool and roughly nine months after Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix had succumbed to drugs. At the time of their deaths, all four were 27 — a common age for innovative musicians to expire. Other members of the 27 Club include Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse.

What if humans didn’t need to breathe? A study on algae’s ability to oxygenate cells raises eyebrows

When you think of algae, you probably picture a vague nuisance for pool-owners, or that green or red goo that blooms in the oceans periodically— not a medicine that can be injected in your brain.

Though it soon may be developed into just that.

Microalgae, as in phytoplankton which are typically found in freshwater and marine systems, could be used as a life-saving device to bring an oxygen-deprived brain back to life. And it’s not merely relegated to the realm of science fiction: scientists are actually experimenting with this, although not on live human subjects.

Microalgae are huge oxygen producers on Earth, and are responsible for what is known as the “Great Oxidation Event” that occurred on Earth some 2.4 billion years ago, when the atmosphere oxygenated over a span of 400 million years as algae converted available carbon dioxide to oxygen, paving the way for animal life. If it weren’t for microalgae, Earth might not have any oxygen in the atmosphere at all.

That same oxygen-creating ability could be a boon if it could be used in a controlled way within the human body to deliver oxygen to cells deprived of it.

In a study published recently in iScience, researchers in Germany injected green algae and cyanobacteria into the brain of African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis) tadpoles whose brains were starved of oxygen. After being injected with the microalgae, their brains showed an increase in local oxygen levels. Similar to the human brain, the vertebrate brain cannot be without oxygen for very long before irreversible damage occurs.

“In a severe hypoxic environment, when neuronal activity has completely ceased, the photosynthetic O2 reliably provoked a restart and rescue of neuronal activity,” the authors wrote. “In the future, phototrophic microorganisms might provide a novel means to directly increase oxygen levels in the brain in a controlled manner under particular eco-physiological conditions or following pathological impairments.”

In other words, this type of algae therapy could be a method to help humans recover from a stroke or traveling through an environment without oxygen. That scenario is still far off, as this study was merely a proof of concept to show that such a thing might actually work in a clinical setting. Senior author Hans Straka told Salon the idea came to him and his colleagues at a lunch in a discussion with a botanist. Previously, Straka and his team were studying oxygen consumption by the brain and the correlation with the activity of nerve cells.

“These discussions led to the idea to use plants as oxygen producer directly inside the brain,” Straka said. “All plants, including algae and cyanobacteria perform photosynthesis, whereby oxygen is produced by shining light onto the plant.”

Straka said instead of planting a tree into the brain, they chose algae.

“Thus, oxygen-producing organisms (algae) were placed directly next to the oxygen consuming cells such as the nerve cells in the brain,” Straka said. “Upon illumination, the algae then produced oxygen which was used for energy production in the nerve cells, which rather soon restarted to function again and thus the algae rescued the brain activity.”

Other scientists were enthusiastic about the results. “The authors employ an elegant and easily reproducible experimental approach to examine the effects of activation of photosynthetic organisms as a way to directly increase oxygen levels in the brain,” Diana Martinez, a neuroscientist at Rowan University in New Jersey who was not involved in the study, said in an email to The Scientist. Martinez called the study “an important first step in using natural resources to address pathological impairments” that deplete oxygen in the brain, such as heart attack and stroke.

However, Martinez noted there are reasons that such a thing might not work in humans, at least not exactly in the same way. Part of that has to do with the nature of the tadpoles used in experiments, and how they differ from humans in their physiology.

“Xenopus laevis tadpoles are transparent and light can easily pass through the skin to activate photosynthetic machinery to produce oxygen. Use in more complex animals would . . . be difficult, as light does not easily traverse the skin and may not reach the vasculature to activate the photosynthetic organisms,” she said.

Indeed, algae are photosynthetic, meaning they require the presence of light in order to photosynthesize carbon dioxide into oxygen. The human brain — or really, the inside of the human body in general — is not exactly known for being well-lit.

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Likewise, as Martinez noted, too much of a good thing is not a good thing: excess oxygen in the brain can also cause brain injuries.

“Thus, the inability of oxygen levels to be controlled properly through the use of these photosynthetic organisms would therefore be just as detrimental as the hypoxia itself,” she adds.

Straka said other potential adverse effects to consider are a potential “immune reaction of the algae in the host.” Plus, as Straka noted, “during plant photosynthesis, oxygen is only one ‘byproduct.'” Sugar is another one, which “might also be used to provide energy to the host.”

However, if some kind of futuristic “algae therapy” does become a medical reality, it opens up all kinds of sci-fi avenues for humans — particularly, the idea of being able to receive oxygen in one’s cells without breathing.

“Over the last decade, there are quite a few projects where people have been trying to set up artificial symbiotic associations with algae, in order to augment in some way or manipulate vertebrate physiology, which is really radical,” Ryan Kerney, a biologist at Gettysburg College, told The Scientist.

“But the potential implications are also just fascinating to speculate about: Can we get away from breathing as a way to keep our brains going?”

A pancake for when I’m too lazy to make pancakes

Big Little Recipe has the smallest-possible ingredient list and big everything else: flavor, creativity, wow factor. That means five ingredients or fewer — not including water, salt, black pepper, and certain fats (like oil and butter), since we’re guessing you have those covered. This month, we’re sharing sneak peeks from the Big Little Recipes cookbook, all revving up to its release on November 9 (blasts airhorn, throws confetti in the air).

* * *

The hardest part about buttermilk pancakes is standing at the stove. Dolloping, waiting, flipping, waiting, again, again, again. The good news is: If you skip a few ingredients, you can also skip this step.

Today, you won’t need sugar, buttermilk, baking powder, or baking soda. In fact, you won’t need all-purpose flour either. We’re making a totally whole-grain pancake — yep, just one — to feed two people. And it’s just as suited for a sleepy brunch as it is a speedy dinner.

You might recognize this recipe as a Dutch baby. It also goes by Bismarck, German pancake, and, my favorite, puff pancake. Inspired by German pfannkuchen, the Dutch baby as we know it “is commonly ascribed to Manca’s Cafe, a Seattle restaurant that existed in the early 20th century,” according to Eater. Similar to a popover or Yorkshire pudding, this pancake bakes instead of pan-fries, going into the oven as a suspiciously thin batter, and coming out as — whoa.

Like a soufflé, the dramatic poof is all thanks to eggs. These make up the bulk of our puff pancake, giving it structure and lift and flavor. And bonus: Because we’re already using eggs in the batter, why not fry up a couple more and throw them on as a hearty topping?

Many Dutch baby recipes turn to milk as the liquid. But substituting crème fraîche brings a few big perks. Tangy and buttery, this ingredient adds depth and richness to the batter — and, when thinned with a splash of water, acts much like milk. Another bonus: More crème fraîche becomes the world’s most glorious pancake topping. (If you can’t find, sour cream is a great understudy.)

Because the eggs and dairy are already doing so much hard work, flour isn’t as important as it is in other baking recipes. This is a good thing. Because while doing a one-to-one swap of all-purpose to whole-grain in, say, a pound cake wouldn’t go well (don’t do it), in a puff pancake, which needs such a small quantity of flour, anything goes. That means we can use all rye flour and not have to dilute its nutty, malty flavor.

To go with the sunny eggs and creamy swirls on top, I like to sauté some ruffly kale until it relaxes, becoming silky and supple. But no one puts puff pancake in a corner. With a crispy, brown-buttery crust and fluffy, tender middle, it gets along with everyone. Swap out kale for another sautéed vegetable, like spinach, scallions, or mushrooms. Or go rogue with bacon or prosciutto, or smoked salmon or trout.

What’s most important is that you do something fun while the pancake bakes in the oven for 20-something minutes. Tell me, what strikes your fancy? Shall we turn on some tunes and dance?

***

Recipe: Rye Puff Pancake with Greens and Eggs

Prep time: 10 minutes
Cook time: 30 minutes
Serves: 2

Ingredients

Puff Pancake

3 large eggs
1/4 cup (60 grams) crème fraîche
1/2 cup (65 grams) rye flour
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
2 tablespoons unsalted butter

Fixings

1 tablespoon unsalted butter
1 bunch Tuscan kale, stems removed, leaves chopped
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 large eggs
Crème fraîche

Ingredients

Turn on the oven to 450°F and immediately stick a 9-inch or 10-inch cast-iron skillet inside. Now work on the pancake batter. Combine the eggs, crème fraîche, and 1⁄3 cup water in a bowl and whisk until smooth. Add the flour, salt, and pepper and whisk again.
Use oven mitts to transfer the skillet to the stove over medium heat. Add the butter, swirling the pan for full coverage. Once the butter has melted, whisk the batter, then pour it into the pan. Turn off the stove and get the skillet into the oven. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, until the pancake has dramatically puffed.
While the pancake is baking, work on the greens. Melt 1/2 tablespoon of the butter in a large nonstick skillet over medium heat until it just starts to brown, then add the kale and toss a couple of times. Cover the pan and cook for 1 minute, until wilted. Uncover, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and cook for another 3 minutes or so, tossing occasionally, until tender. Taste and adjust the seasoning as needed, then transfer the greens to a bowl and lower the heat to medium-low.
Add the remaining ½ tablespoon butter to the emptied skillet. Once that’s melted, crack in the eggs, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and cover the skillet. Cook for 2 to 3 minutes, checking frequently, until the whites are set but the yolks are still runny. Turn off the heat, uncover the skillet, and let the eggs hang out until the puff pancake is ready.
Serve the hot puff pancake with the greens, eggs, and spoonfuls of crème fraîche: You can arrange everything in the cast-iron skillet, or cut the pancake into pieces, transfer to two plates, and divvy up the toppings there.

Snag a copy of the Big Little Recipes cookbook in our Shop, or a slew of other places, like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, Bookshop.org, Hudson Booksellers, IndieBound, Powell’s, or Target.

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Lego’s return to gender neutral toys is good news for all kids. Our research review shows why

Lego announced this week it would work to remove gender stereotypes from its brand, including no longer marketing toys distinctly to boys or girls and ensuring products are gender-neutral.

This move by one of the world’s most powerful brands comes in response to research the Danish toy manufacturer commissioned to understand how parents and children think about creativity.

The survey of nearly 7,000 parents and children across seven countries found strong endorsement of traditional gender roles among both boys and girls, with 78% of boys and 73% of girls agreeing “it’s okay to teach boys to be boys and girls to be girls”.

71% of boys were worried about being judged or made fun of for playing with toys gendered for girls and 54% of parents worry their sons will be made fun of if they play with toys associated with girls, compared to only 26% of parents worrying about the reverse.

Overall, the results suggest boys feel more pressure to conform to gender roles and norms for creative activities than girls. But the perceptions and beliefs of others may also be holding girls back. When toys are gendered, all children pay the price.

We recently conducted a systematic review of gender stereotypes and biases in early childhood.

Awareness of gender as a social category develops early in life, and insight into some gender stereotypes begins early. For example, preschool-aged children can hold beliefs such as only boys can be policemen and only girls can be teachers or nurses.

Gender and racial stereotyping and prejudice can be observed in children as young as three to four years of age, as children take on cues from around them to decode and understand the world.

Shopping and “fixing things”

When children observe different toys and tasks for different groups, they can learn stereotypes and prejudices, such as viewing shopping as an activity for girls and “fixing things” and using tools as activities for boys. This can reinforce rigid binary views of gender.

Such stereotypes and prejudices can be carried throughout life, making early childhood critical for setting the foundations for lifelong attitudes.

The Lego research found parents were more likely to encourage their daughters to engage in activities that are more cognitive, artistic and performative (dressing up, dancing, colouring, singing and arts and crafts), and more likely to encourage their sons to engage more in digital activities, science and building.

Beliefs and expectations about what types of toys and play are appropriate for girls and boys can compound over time.

Some studies show that play with some stereotypical girls’ toys, such as princess toys, is associated with more female gender-stereotypical behavior among children.

Not engaging in play with construction toys may mean girls miss opportunities to develop spatial skills and mechanical reasoning skills necessary for careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics: fields in which women continue to be under-represented.

Rigid gender lines

Toys are only one way in which children learn gender roles and stereotypes: they also learn from who they see around them in their daily lives, from the books they read and the TV shows they watch.

Parents and caregivers have a key role in encouraging children of all genders to engage with a wide range of activities and toys.

But since the 1970s, toys have become increasingly and rigidly demarcated along binary gender lines.

Even Lego’s own marketing history demonstrates this: compare the gender neutral advertisements from the early 1980s to more recent gender specific marketing with pink bricks and heart shapes.

The prevention of potentially harmful gender attitudes and stereotypes in childhood — before they become entrenched — is a key element in moves to achieve gender equity and to support health and wellbeing throughout life.

Efforts to reduce the gendered nature of toys and their marketing is one step we can take to give all children more equitable options for how they see themselves, the world, and their future.

Naomi Priest, Professor, ANU Centre for Social Research and Methods, Australian National University and Tania King, Research Fellow, The University of Melbourne

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

Trump’s new social media platform could face legal issues after allegedly ripping off code

Before his stint as ruler of the free world, former President Donald Trump made a fortune slapping his name on buildings other people had built.

Now, he’s being accused of doing the same thing with his social media platform.

Users who were able to access and create accounts on a beta version of Trump’s “TRUTH Social” through a backdoor immediately noticed that it bore an uncanny resemblance to Mastodon, an alternative social network known for its focus on privacy and “free speech” values.

The company’s founder and lead developer, Eugen Rochko, pointed out to VICE News’ Motherboard that the error message on Trump’s new social platform used his site’s elephant mascot. In fact, one user even snapped a screenshot of the site’s HTML code that explicitly mentioned Mastodon, leading many to surmise that it had lifted the company’s code directly.

This isn’t necessarily unusual — Mastodon is an open-source software (with an AGPLv3 license, specifically) which allows other sites to create modified versions of its technology, called “forks,” provided that they abide by a specific set of rules . This is where Trump’s latest venture appears to have gone wrong: TRUTH Social’s terms of service claim that “all source code” is proprietary, despite the fact that Mastodon requires anyone using its code base to acknowledge where its software came from and make any copied code public.

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Rochko later told political news site Talking Points Memo that he plans to lawyer up, and left the door open to suing Trump and his new media venture if they did not comply with his company’s rules of service.

“I do intend to seek legal counsel on the situation,” he told the outlet. “Compliance with our AGPLv3 license is very important to me, as that is the sole basis upon which I and other developers are willing to give away years of work for free,” he added.

The former commander-in-chief announced the venture Wednesday in particularly Trumpian terms, writing in a statement that he hoped to create a “rival to the liberal media consortium” and “fight back against Big Tech.”

It was immediately clear that Trump’s ban from other, more established social media sites played a role in pushing him to create a new platform — especially Twitter. The former president at one point had more than 88 million followers on the site, regularly moving markets and influencing foreign policy through his pithy musings on current events. But he was booted from Twitter — and Facebook — in the wake of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, and never quite regained his online following despite several failed attempts to create workarounds and even a short-lived blog.

“We live in a world where the Taliban has a huge presence on Twitter, yet your favorite American President has been silenced,” Trump said in a statement announcing TRUTH Social. “Everyone asks me, why doesn’t anyone stand up to Big Tech. Well, we will be soon!”

Read more about TRUTH Social and Trump’s new media venture:

Neoliberalism vs. the planet’s future: It’s a decisive moment — and there are signs of hope

In country after country around the world, people are rising up to challenge entrenched, failing neoliberal political and economic systems, with mixed but sometimes promising results.

Progressive leaders in the U.S. Congress are refusing to back down on the Democrats’ promises to American voters to reduce poverty, expand rights to health care, education and clean energy, and repair a shredded social safety net. After decades of tax cuts for the rich, they are also committed to raising taxes on wealthy Americans and corporations to pay for this popular agenda.

Germany has elected a ruling coalition of Social Democrats, Greens and Free Democrats that excludes the conservative Christian Democrats for the first time since 2000. The new government promises a $14 minimum wage, solar panels on all suitable roof space, 2% of land for wind farms and the closure of Germany’s last coal-fired power plants by 2030.

Iraqis voted in an election that was called in response to a popular protest movement launched in October 2019 to challenge the endemic corruption of the post-2003 political class and its subservience to U.S. and Iranian interests. The protest movement was split between taking part in the election and boycotting it, but its candidates still won about 35 seats and will have a voice in parliament. The party of long-time Iraqi nationalist leader Muqtada al-Sadr won 73 seats, the largest of any single party, while Iranian-backed parties whose armed militias killed hundreds of protesters in 2019 lost popular support and many of their seats.

Chile’s billionaire president, Sebastian Piñera, is being impeached after the Pandora Papers revealed details of bribery and tax evasion in his sale of a mining company, and he could face up to five years in prison. Mass street protests in 2019 forced Piñera to agree to a new constitution to replace the one written under the Pinochet military dictatorship, and a convention that includes representatives of indigenous and other marginalized communities has been elected to draft the constitution. Progressive parties and candidates are expected to do well in the general election in November.

Maybe the greatest success of people power has come in Bolivia. In 2020, only a year after a U.S.-backed right-wing military coup, a mass mobilization of mostly indigenous working people forced a new election, and the socialist MAS Party of Evo Morales was returned to power. Since then it has already introduced a new wealth tax and welfare payments to four million people to help eliminate hunger in Bolivia.

The ideological context

Since the 1970s, Western political and corporate leaders have peddled a quasi-religious belief in the power of “free markets” and unbridled capitalism to solve all the world’s problems. This new “neoliberal” orthodoxy was a thinly disguised reversion to the systematic injustice of 19th-century laissez-faire capitalism, which led to gross inequality and poverty even in wealthy countries, famines that killed tens of millions of people in India and China, and horrific exploitation of the poor and vulnerable worldwide.

For most of the 20th century, Western countries gradually responded to the excesses and injustices of capitalism by using the power of government to redistribute wealth through progressive taxation and a growing public sector, and to ensure broader access to public goods like education and health care. This led to a gradual expansion of broadly shared prosperity in the United States and Western Europe through a strong public sector that balanced the power of private corporations and their owners.

The steadily growing shared prosperity of the post-World War II years in the West was derailed by a combination of factors, including the 1973 OPEC oil embargo, Richard Nixon’s freeze on prices and wages, runaway inflation caused by dropping the gold standard, and then a second oil crisis after the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

Right-wing politicians led by Ronald Reagan in the U.S. and Margaret Thatcher in the U.K. blamed the power of organized labor and the public sector for the economic crisis. They launched a neoliberal counterrevolution to bust unions, shrink and privatize the public sector, cut taxes, deregulate industries and supposedly unleash “the magic of the market.” Then they took credit for a return to economic growth that really owed more to the end of the oil crises.

The U.S. and Britain used their economic, military and media power to spread their neoliberal gospel across the world. Chile’s experiment in neoliberalism under Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship became a model for U.S. efforts to roll back the “pink tide” in Latin America. When the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe opened to the West at the end of the Cold War, it was the extreme, neoliberal brand of capitalism that Western economists imposed as “shock therapy” to privatize state-owned enterprises and open countries to Western corporations.

In the U.S., the mass media shy away from the word “neoliberalism” to describe the changes in society since the 1980s. They describe its effects in less systemic terms, as globalization, privatization, deregulation, consumerism and so on, without calling attention to their common ideological roots. This allows them to treat its impacts as separate, unconnected problems: poverty and inequality, mass incarceration, environmental degradation, ballooning debt, dark money and corporate influence in politics, disinvestment in public services, declines in public health, permanent war, and record military spending.

After a generation of systematic neoliberal control, it is now obvious to people all over the world that neoliberalism has utterly failed to solve the world’s problems. As many predicted all along, it has just enabled the rich to get much, much richer, while structural and even existential problems remain unsolved.

Even once people have grasped the self-serving, predatory nature of this system that has overtaken political and economic life, many still fall victim to the demoralization and powerlessness that are among its most insidious products, brainwashed to see themselves only as individuals and consumers, instead of as active and collectively powerful citizens.

In effect, confronting neoliberalism — whether as individuals, groups, communities or countries — requires a two-step process. First, we must understand the nature of the beast that has us and the world in its grip, whatever we choose to call it. Second, we must overcome our own demoralization and powerlessness, and rekindle our collective power as political and economic actors to build the better world we know is possible.

We will see that collective power in the streets and the suites at COP26 in Glasgow (which opens Oct. 31 and runs through Nov. 12), when the world’s leaders will gather to confront the reality that neoliberalism has allowed corporate profits to trump rational responses to the devastating impact of fossil fuels on the Earth’s climate. Extinction Rebellion and other groups will be in the streets in Glasgow, demanding the long-delayed action that is required to solve the problem, including an end to net carbon emissions by 2025.

While scientists warned us for decades what the result would be, political and business leaders have peddled their neoliberal snake oil to keep filling their coffers at the expense of the future of life on Earth. If we fail to stop them now, living conditions will keep deteriorating for people everywhere, as the natural world our lives depend on is washed out from under our feet, goes up in smoke and, species by species, dies and disappears forever.

The COVID pandemic is another real-world case study on the impact of neoliberalism. As the official global death toll reaches 5 million — with many more deaths unreported — rich countries are still hoarding vaccines, drug companies are reaping a bonanza of profits from vaccines and new drugs, and the lethal, devastating injustice of the entire neoliberal “market” system is laid bare for the whole world to see. Calls for a “people’s vaccine” and “vaccine justice” are challenging what has now been termed “vaccine apartheid.”

Conclusion

In the 1980s, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher often told the world, “There is no alternative” to the neoliberal order that she and Reagan were unleashing. After only one or two generations, the self-serving insanity they prescribed and the crises it has caused have made it a question of survival for humanity to find alternatives.

Around the world, ordinary people are rising up to demand real change. The people of Iraq, Chile and Bolivia have overcome the incredible traumas inflicted on them to take to the streets by the thousands and demand better government. Americans should likewise demand that our government stop wasting trillions of dollars to militarize the world and destroy countries like Afghanistan and Iraq, and start solving our real problems, both here and abroad.

People around the world understand the nature of the problems we face better than we did a generation or even a decade ago. Now we must overcome demoralization and powerlessness in order to act. It helps to understand that the demoralization and powerlessness we may feel are themselves products of this neoliberal system, and that simply overcoming them is a victory in itself.

As we reject the inevitability of neoliberalism and Thatcher’s lie that there is no alternative, we must also reject the lie that we are just passive, powerless consumers. As human beings, we have the same collective power that human beings have always had to build a better world for ourselves and our children — and now is the time to harness that power.

Between the measles and COVID, “You” makes a bizarre creative decision that doesn’t make sense

Incorporating real-world events into existing pop culture is not a decision that should be taken lightly. And yet shows everywhere, from “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Superstore” to “This Is Us” and “Big Sky,” have felt the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic (or name-dropped them) in some way or another over the last year.

While the decision to include the pandemic makes sense in some cases — medical dramas like “The Good Doctor” have reason to address a significant real-world event that affects healthcare workers — most shows do not and thus can skate by without ever addressing it. And yet, some simply refuse to do so.

One of the strangest offenders of this is Netflix’s addictive thriller “You.” In Season 3, Joe (Penn Badgley) and Love (Victoria Pedretti) — who is just as dark and twisted as her new husband — live in Madre Linda, a fictional Bay Area suburb built from tech money with what appears to be an updated and darker blueprint for Wisteria Lane. The season follows the couple as they attempt to navigate the waters of parenthood and marriage behind a white picket fence despite the fact neither has a frame of reference for a comforting or well-adjusted home.

While the pandemic doesn’t play a major role in this overarching narrative, it is referenced a few times, the first instance coming in the season premiere. When Joe and Love attend a party at the home of their neighbor Sherry (Season 3 newcomer and scene-stealer Shalita Grant), Joe mentions the time their host — an influencer in the mommy blogger space — had to post an apology video after it was discovered she’d hosted a massive party in August 2020 while everyone else was at home “clutching hand sanitizer.” Joe also mentions in his trademark voice-over that there was a rumor the elite of Madre Linda had gotten their hands on a secret vaccine “manufactured for the Queen of England” and were thus “immune to COVID.”

It’s a quick aside that exists to tell us more about Sherry and the people who call Madre Linda home. But it also speaks to the unfair advantages of being rich and the division between the haves and the have nots that has existed in some form each season, whether the former are wealthy hipsters in Brooklyn, wellness gurus in Los Angeles, or tech entrepreneurs in the Bay Area.

Joe’s comment is one way “You” attempts to position its dark and violent antihero — who still considers himself the ideal romantic partner — as an outsider in his new home despite the fact viewers know that he fits in perfectly with all the liars who put on happy fronts to cover up what goes on behind closed doors. But it’s also a perfect call-out of a gap that has only grown wider and become more evident as the pandemic has disproportionately affected low-income earners as the wealthy have remained unaffected. However, it also creates unnecessary problems for the show.

By acknowledging the pandemic, even in passing, “You” has effectively shattered the barrier between viewer and subject, a barrier that has — until now — allowed fans to comfortably view the deliciously demented exploits of the show’s morally compromised lead from a relatively safe and manageable distance. It’s this barrier that has allowed viewers to “root” for Joe despite his undeniably horrific actions.

This change now positions him (and Love for that matter) as someone who exists in our reality and could be our neighbor rather than an exaggerated character from a television show carefully constructed by piecing together dangerous personality traits with the goal of providing entertainment and tearing down romantic tropes in surprising ways. While men like Joe almost certainly do exist, no one watches “You” expecting dramatic realism — it is, like so many other TV shows, a form of escapism. So to suggest that the pandemic has occurred in this reality doesn’t just break the barrier. It actually threatens to take viewers out of the story and force them to engage with trauma unnecessarily. This is a problem if the ultimate goal of any Netflix show is to keep viewers bingeing until they run out of new episodes. However, there are narrative issues at play as well.

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It’s clear even without Joe’s cues that the third season of “You” takes place in a post-pandemic world; men and women gather together without worry and masks are absent from the streets of Madre Linda. So why, then, does the show bother acknowledging the pandemic at all? It has no direct effect on this season’s storyline as it unfolds, so why have the writers chosen to reference it and open this box unnecessarily?

One could forgive them if this were part of a larger, targeted attempt to engage with or make a pointed statement about anti-vaxxers and the harmful ways in which misinformation and inaction have the potential to affect everyone. A storyline like that is tailor-made for a season-long send-up of excessive wealth and pseudo-health in Silicon Valley. And “You” does, in fact, tackle vaccination this season. But it swaps out COVID-19 for the measles in a storyline involving baby Henry and Joe both contracting the disease from an unvaccinated family in town.

The development quickly sends Love down another dangerous path while Joe unlocks more of his traumatic past. It’s a thinly veiled commentary on the anti-vaccination movement that has set the U.S. back dramatically in its ongoing fight against COVID-19. But including the measles after weaving the pandemic into the fabric of this world just underscores how unnecessary it was for the show to acknowledge COVID at all. Perhaps if the writers had committed fully to the inclusion of the pandemic with the vaccine storyline or further integrated it into the narrative by addressing the psychological effects the experience had on its characters, who are already laden with trauma, the story might have been more effective. As it is, the pandemic matters very little to “You,” its universe, and the story it’s telling.

This stands in contrast to a show like Apple TV+’s “The Morning Show,” which after tackling #MeToo in Season 1 has incorporated COVID-19 into its second season. For reasons that remain unclear, the show is taking all of its cues from HBO’s much-derided Aaron Sorkin drama “The Newsroom.” But at least it has the proper tools to address the pandemic. “The Morning Show” is a series about a morning talk show, so incorporating newsworthy real-world events fits within its narrative structure even if there’s no obligation for the show to actually be topical. The same cannot be said for “You” (or the majority of other TV shows) as it has no perceived responsibility within the narrative to protect or inform the public as part of its story.

With several episodes still to air, it remains to be seen how “The Morning Show’s” COVID-19 storyline will eventually play out and whether the series will add something of substance to the cultural conversation or become a quickly forgotten footnote in TV history. But at least it affects the characters and the overarching narrative and thus has a purpose. As it stands, “You” has incorporated COVID to such an odd degree — a reference in the finale to people fleeing New York feels even more silly in light of the season’s arc — that one can only hope the days of TV shows including the pandemic will soon be behind us. Because for a show about obsession and murder, “You’s” COVID storyline was dead on arrival.

More stories that you might like:

How Netflix affects what we watch and who we are — and it’s not just the algorithm

Netflix’s dystopian Korean drama “Squid Game” has become the streaming platform’s biggest-ever series launch, with 111 million viewers watching at least two minutes of an episode.

Out of the thousands of programs available on Netflix globally, how did so many people end up watching the same show? The easy answer is an algorithm — a computer program that offers us personalized recommendations on a platform based on our data and that of other users.

Streaming platforms like Netflix, Spotify and Amazon Prime have undoubtedly reshaped the way we consume media, primarily by massively increasing the film, music and TV available to viewers.

How do we cope with so many options? Services like Netflix use algorithms to guide our attention in certain directions, organizing content and keeping us active on the platform. As soon as we open the app the personalization processes begin.

Our cultural landscape is now automated rather than simply being a product of our previous experiences, background and social circles. These algorithms don’t just respond to our tastes, they also shape and influence them.

But focusing too much on the algorithm misses another important cultural transformation that has happened. To make all this content manageable, streaming platforms have introduced new ways of organizing culture for us. The categories used to label culture into genres have always been important, but they took on new forms and power with streaming.

Classifying our tastes

The possibilities of streaming have inspired a new “classificatory imagination.” I coined this term to describe how viewing the world through genres, labels and categories helps shape our own identities and sense of place in the world.

While 50 years ago, you might have discovered a handful of music genres through friends or by going to the record shop, the advent of streaming has brought classification and genre to our media consumption on a grand scale. Spotify alone has over 5,000 music genres. Listeners also come up with their own genre labels when creating playlists. We are constantly fed new labels and categories as we consume music, films and television.

Thanks to these categories, our tastes can be more specific and eclectic, and our identities more fluid. These personalized recommendations and algorithms can also shape our tastes. My own personalized end-of-year review from Spotify told me that “chamber psych” — a category I’d never heard of — was my second-favourite genre. I found myself searching to find out what it was, and to discover the artists attached to it.

These hyper-specific categories are created and stored in metadata — the behind-the-scenes codes that support platforms like Spotify. They are the basis for personalized recommendations, and they help decide what we consume. If we think of Netflix as a vast archive of TV and film, the way it is organized through metadata decides what is discovered from within it.

On Netflix, the thousands of categories range from familiar film genres like horror, documentary and romance, to the hyper-specific “campy foreign movies from the 1970s.”

While “Squid Game” is labelled with the genres “Korean, TV thrillers, drama” to the public, there are thousands of more specific categories in Netflix’s metadata that are shaping our consumption. The personalized homepage uses algorithms to offer you certain genre categories, as well as specific shows. Because most of it is in the metadata, we may not be aware of what categories are being served to us.

Take “Squid Game” — it might well be that the way to have a large launch is partly to do with the algorithmic promotion of widely watched content. Its success is an example of how algorithms can reinforce what is already popular. As on social media, once a trend starts to catch on, algorithms can direct even more attention toward it. Netflix categorises do this too, telling us what programs are trending or popular in our local area.

Who is in control?

As everyday media consumers, we are still at the edge of what we understand about the workings and potential of these recommendation algorithms. We should also consider some of the potential consequences of the classificatory imagination.

The classification of culture could shut us out to certain categories or voices — this can be limiting or even harmful, as is the case with how misinformation is spread on social media.

Our social connections are also profoundly shaped by the culture we consume, so these labels can ultimately affect who we interact with.

The positives are obvious — personalized recommendations from Netflix and Spotify help us find exactly what we like in an incomprehensible number of options. The question is: who decides what the labels are, what gets put into these boxes and, therefore, what we end up watching, listening to and reading?

David Beer, Professor of Sociology, University of York

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

Bill Maher explains how he thinks America can stop Trump’s “slow-moving coup”

Two weeks after his warning about former president Donald Trump’s “slow-moving coup” went viral, comedian Bill Maher on Friday offered some advice about how Americans can stop it.

“A lot of people hit me up after that editorial and said, ‘You know what, you scared the sh*t out of me,'” Maher said on his HBO Real Time program. “Good. Because now the question they’re asking is, ‘What can we do about this slow-moving coup?’ Great question, and here’s the answer many will not like: If we want to halt this descent into civil war, we have to stop hating each other.”

Maher went on to say that that act of hating people has become “ingrained” and “normalized.”

“We don’t even notice how often someone online is wishing someone dead,” he said. “Anyone we disagree with about anything is evil incarnate, and every argument goes form zero to homicide. It doesn’t even have to be about anything important or consequential: ‘You insulted Gossip Girl? Prepare to die!'”

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During his standup act, Maher said, he asks the audience what should happen to people who enabled Trump, and about half the time someone in the audience yells out that they should be killed.

“Besides the fact that wishing people dead is a terrible place for your mind to be, if you’re wishing them dead, you can be sure they’re wishing you dead,” Maher said. “You want a real war, liberals? Really? You think you’re going to win the ‘I want you dead’ war? You’re not, you’re going to lose. They have way more guns and they know how to use them, and with all due respect, no one can do hate like a right-wing conservative.”

Maher said he was recently driven from the airport by a man from Bosnia who was in Sarajevo before it became “a war-torn hellscape.” The driver told him, “What I’m seeing here now is exactly what I saw in Bosnia — next-door neighbors who despise each other.”

“He was telling me that hate on this level can only be sustained for so long before becoming actual war,” said Maher, who also mentioned a recent dispute over an investigation into a warehouse explosion in Beirut that devolved into a street fight with automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades.

“When people despise each other, it doesn’t matter what the issues are. When someone hates you, they don’t hear what you’re saying, let alone want to work with you on an issue,” Maher said, noting that Republicans today don’t even care about the policy issues they once claimed to — such as a balanced budget.

“They care about that about as much as they care about the new season of RuPaul’s Drag Race. Owning the libs is the only issue,” he said, adding that they opposed Obamacare even though it was a good policy because “it came from the people they hated.”

“Democrats keep thinking they can win over voters who hate them with better policies,” he said. “We’re dreaming. Democrats are always asking, ‘Why do Republicans vote against their economic interests?’ Because they hate you.”

“So how do we stop Trump and the coup? Take it down a notch,” Maher said. “Can we start with that? Is that really so hard? I know it would be easier if everyone bad would just die, but that’s not a plan, and they’re not going to. It’s up to all of us — left, right and center — to fix this by de-escalating.”

He said America’s “first assignment” was to “just enjoy” William Shatner’s recent trip to space aboard the Blue Origin rocket, rather than complaining about how we need to tax the super-rich or that we still have problems on Earth.

“Not everything has to be political,” Maher said. “You want to heal America? Shut the f*ck up for a while.”

“Facebook went down for six hours a couple of weeks ago,” he concluded. “We need to make that happen more.”

Watch it below:

Ed Begley, Jr. on helping “SNL” try to reunite the Beatles and saving George Harrison’s guitar

Actor and activist Ed Begley, Jr. joined host Kenneth Womack to talk about his decades-long career, Beatles stories, extensive environmental work and more on the Season 3 premiere of “Everything Fab Four,” a podcast co-produced by me and Womack (a music scholar who also writes about pop music for Salon) and distributed by Salon.

Begley, known for his roles in many popular TV shows and movies, including “St. Elsewhere,” “This Is Spinal Tap” and “Better Call Saul,” says he first became aware of the Beatles as a boarding school student in 1963. And as a drummer in the marching band (and later a garage rock band), he became “obsessed” with being like Ringo and insisted on getting Ludwig drums.

He was soon devouring every song and album the Beatles put out, and following the ever-evolving trajectory of their musical journey. “They were doing something amazing,” he tells Womack. And, as he later discovered personally, “they were amazing people. All four of them.”

Indeed, Begley’s career and friendships would lead him to meeting all the members of the band at different times. Notably, he tells Womack, a night out in New York City with legendary musician Harry Nilsson in the 1970s ended with dinner at John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s home, which at one point put Begley in a position to “assist” with Lorne Michaels’ famous Beatles reunion plea on “Saturday Night Live.”

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He’s also still friends with Ringo Starr to this day, and has maintained a close relationship with the Harrison family, even helping to return George’s famed Rosewood Telecaster guitar to them. Much like Begley himself, he says George “cared deeply about the environment,” and the two worked together on several planetary projects.

His own passion for conserving and saving started with his father, actor Ed Begley, Sr., who passed away right before the first Earth Day. And what started as a way to save money, turned into ways to save the planet. “People always talk about what they can’t do,” says Begley,” and I always say, do what you can do.” In terms of inspiring hope for the world, much like he agrees the Beatles did, he definitely believes “we’re headed in the right direction.”

Listen to the entire conversation with Ed Begley Jr. on “Everything Fab Four,” and subscribe via Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.

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“Everything Fab Four” is distributed by Salon. Host Kenneth Womack is the author of a two-volume biography on Beatles producer George Martin, the bestselling book “Solid State: The Story of Abbey Road and the End of the Beatles,” and most recently “John Lennon, 1980: The Last Days in the Life.”

More “Everything Fab Four” conversations:

How the 1% tricks you into thinking climate change is your fault

Africa has 54 countries, more than one-quarter of the 195 nations on the planet today. The continent is also home to roughly 1.3 billion souls, more than one-sixth of the human population. And despite comprising a large chunk of the community of Homo sapiens, Africa is responsible for less than four percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions.

Life being unfair, that isn't going to spare Africans from suffering as a result of man-made global warming. A recent study revealed that Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, the Rwenzori Mountains in Uganda and the Mount Kenya massif in Kenya are going to lose their glaciers — the only ones on the entire continent. Losing these iconic natural landmarks isn't the worst thing that will happen to Africa because of climate change — there will be extreme weather events, rising sea levels, economic devastation and more — but there is a melancholy symbolism to their impending disappearance.

Climate change isn't a problem caused by all people equally; it is caused mostly by the rich, and since we live in a capitalist world, the suffering will fall disproportionately on the poor. Climate scientists, sociologists and economists are largely in agreement on this point. And it presages the way that things will need to change in order to stave off the extinction of humanity.

"The problem is structural and systemic," Dr. David Fasenfest, an American sociologist and associate professor at Wayne State University, told Salon by email. "Capitalist society is geared towards waste and destruction in order to promote consumption while producing at the lowest cost. That requires power and that means without strict restrictions most of the time we use 'dirty' forms of energy like coal that pollutes and promotes climate change."

In this sense, there is no individual or group of individuals who can be accurately described as the single "culprit" behind climate change. Everyone is acting according to their self-interest within the system of incentives established by our neoliberal economic system. Cumulatively, these led to social developments that exacerbate climate change. For example, if a business uses a more expensive form of energy rather than a green one, their production costs will rise and consumers will probably respond to the likely price increase by rewarding their competitors.

"We are all both culpable and not," Fasenfest observed. People who can afford and use air conditioning during hot weather, or continue to eat beef even though it exacerbates climate change, all contribute to a system that is destroying the planet. As Fasenfest observed, most people have no practical alternatives to participating in this system on a day-to-day basis; they can adopt lifestyle alterations which make teensy dents in the greater problem, but that is about it. If you are fortunate enough to live in a society that prospers under capitalism (relatively speaking), the chances are that you fall into the category of major climate perpetrator in one way or another.

One cannot discuss this problem without also mentioning industrialization. An advanced energy technology expert, Dr. Martin Hoffert of New York University, broke down the history by email for Salon.

"The agriculture-based civilization of the eighteenth-century using water and animal power to augment human muscle emitted few greenhouse gases," Hoffert explained. Once humanity became reliant on technologies that burn fossil fuel, they kicked off "an unprecedented transfer of carbon from the lithosphere (rocks) to the atmosphere [that] was taking place with no precedents geologically."

"It took two hundred million years for the hydrocarbon energy reserves (coal, oil, and gas) to form, whereas at the current mining and oil pumping rates fueling civilization and supporting global GDP growth, we will have depleted them in a few hundred years," Hoffert added. "We're using fossil fuels a million times faster than nature made them."

In a sense, then, global warming is the story of how industrialized nations put humanity on a collision course with disaster in a capitalist system. It is a global problem, albeit one that wealthier nations have exacerbated the most. To quote Howard Beale from "Network": "We're just the most advanced country, so we're getting there first."

This is reflected in the nation-by-nation statistics that serve as the backdrop for the melting of the African glaciers.

"Most of the world's total greenhouse emissions have come from the world's rich countries—basically the members of the OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development]," Dr. Naomi Oreskes, an American historian of science at Harvard University, wrote to Salon. "Climate change is driven by greenhouse gases, which are produced by economic activity, so the countries with the most economic activity are most responsible for climate change." For most of modern history this included the United States, Japan and industrialized European countries like France, Germany and the United Kingdom. Now that China is experiencing an economic boom, it has become the world's top annual emitter. Moreover, Oreskes noted that national annual emission statistics are somewhat misleading "since the climate doesn't care when the emissions were emitted."

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If you look at per capita carbon footprints by country — that is, ascertaining how much carbon is emitted by the average individual in a given nation — the list is consistently topped by the affluent states.

"We are talking about people in nations that are either very rich, very inefficient, or both," Oreskes explained. In 2011, for instance, the top nations in terms of per capita emissions were Luxembourg, the United Kingdom, the United States, Belgium and the Czech Republic. In lectures to students, Oreskes explains that the average American has the same carbon footprint as 1.3 Koreans, 7 Brazilians, 9 Pakistanis, 35 Nigerians and 52 Ugandans. Even so, those national statistics are also misleading in the sense that they can dupe someone into believing the problem is about border rather than money.

"This reflects consumption, which reflects wealth," Oreskes told Salon. "A rich person in India might have a carbon footprint similar to an average American. So basically, the answer is rich people."

If you're reading this and are among the global affluent, you should pause before starting to feel too guilty. As mentioned earlier, few outside the tiniest sliver of the billionaire class have the power to single-handedly make massive changes to the socioeconomic order. Even if you live a middle class lifestyle in an industrialized nation, that does not mean you chose the economic infrastructure you inhabit. There is a reason why our economy has not adapted to mitigate climate change, even though the world's nations acknowledged they had to do so by signing the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992. It isn't everyone's fault: It's the lobbyists from industries that, in one way or another, depend on climate change to make their profits.

Dr. Riley Dunlap, a sociologist at Oklahoma State University who specializes in environmental sociology, described how the fossil fuel industry — including oil, coal and natural gas corporations — have undermined the planet's future.

"They sign pledges and advertise their commitment to reducing carbon emissions, but continually oppose (via PR campaigns, lobbying, and campaign contributions) efforts to achieve reductions — such as their current attempts to undermine [President Joe] Biden's climate agenda," Dunlap wrote to Salon. He identified a number of major actors in this campaign, from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Manufacturers Association to industry groups like the American Petroleum Institute and the National Coal Association.

"All of these actors rely heavily on PR firms to design and deliver their messages to the public," Dunlap explained. "Opposition to climate change mitigation policies from these economically motivated actors was strengthened considerably in the 1990s when key segments of the U.S. conservative movement—conservative philanthropists such as the Koch Brothers and their foundations, the conservative think tanks they support, and conservative media and commentators—committed to a 'free-market' ideology began promoting denial and skepticism among the public, policy-makers and mainstream media out of fear of the regulatory implications of reducing carbon emissions."

In addition to casting doubt on the indisputable science proving the planet is warming, conservative groups also try to convince people that individual behaviors are more important than the consequences of their industries. Since Earth Day 1970, Dunlap pointed out, industries have tried to manipulate the public dialogue so that individual consumers believe their choices can save or destroy the planet, such as stopping littering and helping clean up green spaces. This obscures the systemic issues that are actually causing this problem, guaranteeing that they'll only get worse.

So what is the solution? Simply put: Acknowledge that capitalism is the problem, and tailor one's political solutions accordingly.

"The only way forward is political — challenging the very forces and structures that permit this degradation," Fasenfest told Salon. He noted how people continue to bitcoin mine even though it uses more energy than many small cities, or how corporate interest groups and economic fears overrode self-preservation after humanity began to make strides for the environment in the 1960s and 1970s.

"Today we debate social spending and the senator from a coal producing state [Joe Manchin of West Virginia] insists that alternative energy supports be dropped from those plans," Fasenfest wrote. "Consider that the gap between the 1% and 99% is smaller than the gap between the 0.1% and the 1%, and consider that those people are both insulated and indifferent to a whole range of problems, and you get the reason there has to be a mass intervention that aggressively forces changes."

In addition, people need to become more aware of the exact nature of the political forces that threaten humanity's future. While the elites are responsible for manipulating the masses, that doesn't mean there aren't millions and millions of ordinary people who are complicit through their political choices.

"A big issue is the GOP's tribal nonacceptance of inconvenient scientific truths, as Al Gore first observed," Hoffert wrote to Salon. "The Trump-led Republican Party is in full opposition to science: Whether it's anti-covid vaccinations, universal health care, unequal application of laws by police, Democrat-leaning Black vote suppression, or denying fossil fueled climate change — in many cases opposing their own economic interests. This looks increasingly unlike loyal opposition and more like visceral hatred of 'coastal elites' and prioritizing 'owning the libs' over other policy alternatives."

He added, "Perhaps because they perceive themselves as dismissed by better educated 'progressive elites' as a bunch of ignorant hillbillies. Humiliation is an unappreciated factor in politics. They may not easily give up their gasoline powered pickups with gun racks and Confederate Battle Flags to environmentally friendly cars and trucks."

Trump’s Big Lie is the new Lost Cause — and it may poison the country for decades

Perhaps the biggest of many imponderables about Donald Trump has always been the question of what playbook was he following? His 2016 campaign didn’t have a plan beyond questioning the manhood of his male primary rivals and ceaseless yapping about Hillary Clinton’s “emails.” His 2020 campaign never found a focus until October, when he seized upon his victory over his own case of COVID-19 as evidence of his manhood. Remember his return from Walter Reed Medical Center to the White House? Trump was ripping off his mask on the Truman balcony! That’ll show ’em!

In between campaigns, Trump’s presidency seemed aimless, stumbling vaguely forward from one indictment to another until the time came to issue pardons, which we soon learned was his “favorite” presidential power — not being commander in chief, not ordering up Air Force One to fly him off on his many golf weekends, not even being able to pick up his bedside phone in the middle of the night and order a Big Mac and a Diet Coke. The pardon power was it.

Losing the election in November and having to move out of the White House has given him something to focus on, however. He never cared about governing and didn’t have much of an ideology to guide him, but he’s finally found something he can believe in and a playbook he can follow: his very own Lost Cause. Trump has embraced with gusto the South’s strategy after losing the Civil War: Tell your own people that you didn’t really lose, and double down on the nobility and honor of what they still believe in. In the case of the Civil War, it was slavery and the inherent superiority of whiteness and inferiority of blackness. The new Lost Cause is of course Trump himself, to whom his followers attach the same kind of gauzy metaphors that came into use after the Civil War: flags (Trump campaign flags, the Confederate flag and the “Don’t Tread on Me” banner are in heavy rotation) songs (“I’m Proud to be an American” by Lee Greenwood and — perhaps not so ironically now — “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” by the Rolling Stones are played at all his rallies) and symbols (Mar-a-Lago has become a kind of antebellum shrine to the garish excess Trump represents).

And of course, most important of all are the lies. The lies told to support the South’s Lost Cause were as outrageous as they were numerous: Slaves were well treated by their kind and understanding masters and were far better off than they would have been had they remained with their savage tribes in Africa. The war wasn’t fought over slavery, it was fought for the cause of “states’ rights.” Gender roles were preserved in revanchist amber: Men were the protectors of Southern white women’s “honor” and “purity,” and women returned the favor by forming the Daughters of the Confederacy and charging themselves with erecting the monuments to Confederate war heroes and the Confederate dead which became ubiquitous throughout the South.

It’s hardly necessary to delve into Trump’s lies about the election: They have been well documented and confirmed by more than 60 losses in his lawsuits contesting the election’s outcome in battleground states. Trump has now launched himself into an adjunct of the Big Lie — the lie that the violent assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6 wasn’t violent and wasn’t an assault, but merely a “tourist visit” by Trump supporters, while outside agitators and antifa infiltrators committed all the violent acts to tarnish the Trump cause. Trump has turned Ashli Babbitt, killed at the head of a mob as she broke through a door into an area of the Capitol where members of Congress were sheltering, into a martyr. And his minions on Capitol Hill have done everything in their power to stymie and tarnish the work of the House committee investigating the assault, including voting en masse against a nonpartisan commission to investigate the Capitol assault and now opposing the move by the House to hold Steve Bannon in contempt for defying a subpoena to provide documents and testify before the House committee.

Bannon is in the process of transforming himself into a latter-day Robert E. Lee, talking about commanding a 20,000-strong army of “shock troops” he plans to use to intimidate “enemy” voters during the 2022 and 2024 elections.

The centerpiece of Trump’s personal Lost Cause is nursing his grudge, and the collective grudge of his followers, against the “elites” they blame for bringing down the dream. Which involves, of course, whipping up the festering sore of resentment and hate that is the Trump “base.” The South used the KKK and later the so-called Citizens Councils. Trump has the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. I am certain we’re going to learn from the House committee that Trump himself was involved in their deployment on Jan. 6 in the violent assault on the Capitol.

Perhaps the most important way the South promoted its Lost Cause after the Civil War was through electoral and legislative means. The rebellion of Southern states against the Reconstruction laws and the 14th and 15th amendments is instructive. Major figures of the Confederacy took prominent roles in the Democratic Party. The Confederate raider and first Grand Wizard of the KKK, Nathan Bedford Forrest, and other Confederate veterans attended the Democratic convention of 1868 in New York where one of Forrest’s friends, Frank Blair Jr., was nominated as the party’s candidate for vice president on a ticket with a former governor of New York. Their campaign slogan was “Our Ticket, Our Motto, This Is a White Man’s Country; Let White Men Rule.” Speeches against emancipation of the slaves given by Blair were said to contribute to Ulysses S. Grant’s comfortable electoral victory.

Later, Southern states would virtually nullify the 14th and 15th amendments by passing the Jim Crow laws, stripping Black citizens of the right to vote and consigning them to subservient roles in the Southern economy and society little better than those they had held as slaves. The South separated itself from the rest of the country by its continuing adherence to the doctrines and practices of white supremacy in its legal and social systems.

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Something very similar is going on right now in Republican-controlled states, including all of those that comprised the Confederacy, with state laws being passed to suppress the votes of minorities and gerrymander legislative districts to limit representation by minorities and the Democratic Party in general. It’s a kind of legalized second secession by Republican states and the Republican Party, which has remade itself as the Trump Party, parroting Trump’s racism and lies about the election and following his lead in Jan. 6 denial.

The words constitutional crisis and slow-motion Civil War have entered the lexicon. Former Republican writers like David Frum, Robert Kagan, Charlie Sykes, David Brock and Max Boot are all over the op-ed pages, warning that Trump and his allies are preparing to “ensure victory by any means necessary.”

“The stage is thus being set for chaos,” Robert Kaplan wrote recently in a widely shared op-ed in the Washington Post. “Partisans on both sides are likely to be better armed and more willing to inflict harm than they were in 2020. Would governors call out the National Guard? Would President Biden nationalize the Guard and place it under his control, invoke the Insurrection Act, and send troops into Pennsylvania or Texas or Wisconsin to quell violent protests? Deploying federal power in the states would be decried as tyranny. Biden would find himself where other presidents have been — where Andrew Jackson was during the nullification crisis, or where Abraham Lincoln was after the South seceded — navigating without rules or precedents, making his own judgments about what constitutional powers he does and doesn’t have.”

Donald Trump had to be handed a loss in 2020 in order to begin championing his new Lost Cause. There won’t be another one. If he runs and wins in 2024, we will not recognize the smoking ruins left by a second Trump victory. It won’t take them long to begin erecting statues to Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson and renaming public squares after the “Great Replacement.” The only question is, what will the Daughters of the New Confederacy call themselves? The Mistresses of Mar-a-Lago?

More on the Republican Party’s efforts to reanimate the Confederacy:

Scientists search for cause of mysterious COVID-related inflammation in children

Like most other kids with COVID, Dante and Michael DeMaino seemed to have no serious symptoms.

Infected in mid-February, both lost their senses of taste and smell. Dante, 9, had a low-grade fever for a day or so. Michael, 13, had a “tickle in his throat,” said their mother, Michele DeMaino, of Danvers, Massachusetts.

At a follow-up appointment, “the pediatrician checked their hearts, their lungs, and everything sounded perfect,” DeMaino said.

Then, in late March, Dante developed another fever. After examining him, Dante’s doctor said his illness was likely “nothing to worry about” but told DeMaino to take him to the emergency room if his fever climbed above 104.

Two days later, Dante remained feverish, with a headache, and began throwing up. His mother took him to the ER, where his fever spiked to 104.5. In the hospital, Dante’s eyes became puffy, his eyelids turned red, his hands began to swell and a bright red rash spread across his body.

Hospital staffers diagnosed Dante with multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, or MIS-C, a rare but life-threatening complication of COVID-19 in which a hyperactive immune system attacks a child’s body. Symptoms — fever, stomach pain, vomiting, diarrhea, bloodshot eyes, rash and dizziness — typically appear two to six weeks after what is usually a mild or even asymptomatic infection.

More than 5,200 of the 6.2 million U.S. children diagnosed with COVID have developed MIS-C. About 80% of MIS-C patients are treated in intensive care units, 20% require mechanical ventilation, and 46 have died.

Throughout the pandemic, MIS-C has followed a predictable pattern, sending waves of children to the hospital about a month after a COVID surge. Pediatric intensive care units — which treated thousands of young patients during the late-summer delta surge — are now struggling to save the latest round of extremely sick children.

The South has been hit especially hard. At the Medical University of South Carolina Shawn Jenkins Children’s Hospital, for example, doctors in September treated 37 children with COVID and nine with MIS-C — the highest monthly totals since the pandemic began.

Doctors have no way to prevent MIS-C, because they still don’t know exactly what causes it, said Dr. Michael Chang, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Children’s Memorial Hermann Hospital in Houston. All doctors can do is urge parents to vaccinate eligible children and surround younger children with vaccinated people.

Given the massive scale of the pandemic, scientists around the world are now searching for answers.

Although most children who develop MIS-C were previously healthy, 80% develop heart complications. Dante’s coronary arteries became dilated, making it harder for his heart to pump blood and deliver nutrients to his organs. If not treated quickly, a child could go into shock. Some patients develop heart rhythm abnormalities or aneurysms, in which artery walls balloon out and threaten to burst.

“It was traumatic,” DeMaino said. “I stayed with him at the hospital the whole time.”

Such stories raise important questions about what causes MIS-C.

“It’s the same virus and the same family, so why does one child get MIS-C and the other doesn’t?” asked Dr. Natasha Halasa of the Vanderbilt Institute for Infection, Immunology and Inflammation.

Doctors have gotten better at diagnosing and treating MIS-C; the mortality rate has fallen from 2.4% to 0.7% since the beginning of the pandemic. Adults also can develop a post-COVID inflammatory syndrome, called MIS-A; it’s even rarer than MIS-C, with a mortality rate seven times as high as that seen in children.

Although MIS-C is new, doctors can treat it with decades-old therapies used for Kawasaki disease, a pediatric syndrome that also causes systemic inflammation. Although scientists have never identified the cause of Kawasaki disease, many suspect it develops after an infection.

Researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital and other institutions are looking for clues in children’s genes.

In a July study, the researchers identified rare genetic variants in three of 18 children studied. Significantly, the genes are all involved in “removing the brakes” from the immune system, which could contribute to the hyperinflammation seen in MIS-C, said Dr. Janet Chou, chief of clinical immunology at Boston Children’s, who led the study.

Chou acknowledges that her study — which found genetic variants in just 17% of patients — doesn’t solve the puzzle. And it raises new questions: If these children are genetically susceptible to immune problems, why didn’t they become seriously ill from earlier childhood infections?

Some researchers say the increased rates of MIS-C among racial and ethnic minorities around the world — in the United States, France and the United Kingdom — must be driven by genetics.

Others note that rates of MIS-C mirror the higher COVID rates in these communities, which have been driven by socioeconomic factors such as high-risk working and living conditions.

“I don’t know why some kids get this and some don’t,” said Dr. Dusan Bogunovic, a researcher at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai who has studied antibody responses in MIS-C. “Is it due to genetics or environmental exposure? The truth may lie somewhere in between.”

A Hidden Enemy and a Leaky Gut

Most children with MIS-C test negative for COVID, suggesting that the body has already cleared the novel coronavirus from the nose and upper airways.

That led doctors to assume MIS-C was a “postinfectious” disease, developing after “the virus has completely gone away,” said Dr. Hamid Bassiri, a pediatric infectious diseases specialist and co-director of the immune dysregulation program at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Now, however, “there is emerging evidence that perhaps that is not the case,” Bassiri said.

Even if the virus has disappeared from a child’s nose, it could be lurking — and shedding — elsewhere in the body, Chou said. That might explain why symptoms occur so long after a child’s initial infection.

Dr. Lael Yonker noticed that children with MIS-C are far more likely to develop gastrointestinal symptoms — such as stomach pain, diarrhea and vomiting — than the breathing problems often seen in acute COVID.

In some children with MIS-C, abdominal pain has been so severe that doctors misdiagnosed them with appendicitis; some actually underwent surgery before their doctors realized the true source of their pain.

Yonker, a pediatric pulmonologist at Boston’s MassGeneral Hospital for Children, recently found evidence that the source of those symptoms could be the coronavirus, which can survive in the gut for weeks after it disappears from the nasal passages, Yonker said.

In a May study in The Journal of Clinical Investigation, Yonker and her colleagues showed that more than half of patients with MIS-C had genetic material — called RNA — from the coronavirus in their stool.

The body breaks down viral RNA very quickly, Chou said, so it’s unlikely that genetic material from a COVID infection would still be found in a child’s stool one month later. If it is, it’s most likely because the coronavirus has set up shop inside an organ, such as the gut.

While the coronavirus may thrive in our gut, it’s a terrible houseguest.

In some children, the virus irritates the intestinal lining, creating microscopic gaps that allow viral particles to escape into the bloodstream, Yonker said.

Blood tests in children with MIS-C found that they had a high level of the coronavirus spike antigen — an important protein that allows the virus to enter human cells. Scientists have devoted more time to studying the spike antigen than any other part of the virus; it’s the target of COVID vaccines, as well as antibodies made naturally during infection.

“We don’t see live virus replicating in the blood,” Yonker said. “But spike proteins are breaking off and leaking into the blood.”

Viral particles in the blood could cause problems far beyond upset stomachs, Yonker said. It’s possible they stimulate the immune system into overdrive.

In her study, Yonker describes treating a critically ill 17-month-old boy who grew sicker despite standard treatments. She received regulatory permission to treat him with an experimental drug, larazotide, designed to heal leaky guts. It worked.

Yonker prescribed larazotide for four other children, including Dante, who also received a drug used to treat rheumatoid arthritis. He got better.

But most kids with MIS-C get better, even without experimental drugs. Without a comparison group, there’s no way to know if larazotide really works. That’s why Yonker is enrolling 20 children in a small randomized clinical trial of larazotide, which will provide stronger evidence.

Rogue Soldiers

Dr. Moshe Arditi has also drawn connections between children’s symptoms and what might be causing them.

Although the first doctors to treat MIS-C compared it to Kawasaki disease — which also causes red eyes, rashes and high fevers — Arditi notes that MIS-C more closely resembles toxic shock syndrome, a life-threatening condition caused by particular types of strep or staph bacteria releasing toxins into the blood. Both syndromes cause high fever, gastrointestinal distress, heart muscle dysfunction, plummeting blood pressure and neurological symptoms, such as headache and confusion.

Toxic shock can occur after childbirth or a wound infection, although the best-known cases occurred in the 1970s and ’80s in women who used a type of tampon no longer in use.

Toxins released by these bacteria can trigger a massive overreaction from key immune system fighters called T cells, which coordinate the immune system’s response, said Arditi, director of the pediatric infectious diseases division at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

T cells are tremendously powerful, so the body normally activates them in precise and controlled ways, Bassiri said. One of the most important lessons T cells need to learn is to target specific bad guys and leave civilians alone. In fact, a healthy immune system normally destroys many T cells that can’t distinguish between germs and healthy tissue in order to prevent autoimmune disease.

In a typical response to a foreign substance — known as an antigen — the immune system activates only about 0.01% of all T cells, Arditi said.

Toxins produced by certain viruses and the bacteria that cause toxic shock, however, contain “superantigens,” which bypass the body’s normal safeguards and attach directly to T cells. That allows superantigens to activate 20% to 30% of T cells at once, generating a dangerous swarm of white blood cells and inflammatory proteins called cytokines, Arditi said.

This massive inflammatory response causes damage throughout the body, from the heart to the blood vessels to the kidneys.

Although multiple studies have found that children with MIS-C have fewer total T cells than normal, Arditi’s team has found an explosive increase in a subtype of T cells capable of interacting with a superantigen.

Several independent research groups — including researchers at Yale School of Medicine, the National Institutes of Health and France’s University of Lyon — have confirmed Arditi’s findings, suggesting that something, most likely a superantigen, caused a huge increase in this T cell subtype.

Although Arditi has proposed that parts of the coronavirus spike protein could act like a superantigen, other scientists say the superantigen could come from other microbes, such as bacteria.

“People are now urgently looking for the source of the superantigen,” said Dr. Carrie Lucas, an assistant professor of immunobiology at Yale, whose team has identified changes in immune cells and proteins in the blood of children with MIS-C.

Uncertain Futures

One month after Dante left the hospital, doctors examined his heart with an echocardiogram to see if he had lingering damage.

To his mother’s relief, his heart had returned to normal.

Today, Dante is an energetic 10-year-old who has resumed playing hockey and baseball, swimming and rollerblading.

“He’s back to all these activities,” said DeMaino, noting that Dante’s doctors rechecked his heart six months after his illness and will check again after a year.

Like Dante, most other kids who survive MIS-C appear to recover fully, according to a March study in JAMA.

Such rapid recoveries suggest that MIS-C-related cardiovascular problems result from “severe inflammation and acute stress” rather than underlying heart disease, according to the authors of the study, called Overcoming COVID-19.

Although children who survive Kawasaki disease have a higher risk of long-term heart problems, doctors don’t know how MIS-C survivors will fare.

The NIH and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have launched several long-term trials to study young COVID patients and survivors. Researchers will study children’s immune systems to uncover clues to the cause of MIS-C, check their hearts for signs of long-term damage and monitor their health over time.

DeMaino said she remains far more worried about Dante’s health than he is.

“He doesn’t have a care in the world,” she said. “I was worried about the latest cardiology appointment, but he said, ‘Mom, I don’t have any problems breathing. I feel totally fine.'”

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Trouble piles up for Postmaster General Louis DeJoy

U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy faced over a dozen conflicts of interest during his tenure due to his refusal to divest family stakes in companies tied to the policies of his own agency.

According to documents newly obtained by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) via a Freedom of Information Act, Dejoy reportedly recused himself from agency decisions that might have affected the performance of his former freight transportation company XPO Logistics. However, the postmaster general opted out of divesting from the firm altogether, opening him up to a blatant conflict of interest.

Back in August, CNN reported that, despite his role in heading the USPS, DeJoy’s stake in XPO fell between $30 million and $75 million – an apparent conflict that came as a complete “shock” to many outside experts.

“If you have a $30 million interest in a company, of course it’s going to impact you,” Stuart Gilman, a former assistant director at the Office of Government Ethics, said. “I would assume that there is a problem here. It certainly doesn’t pass the smell test.”

XPO routinely carries out contracts with both the USPS and other government agencies, like the Defense Department. During the first two months of his tenure last year, XPO signed onto at least two new contracts with the USPS.

“There was a period of time where the head of the Postal Service was making decisions when there could have been a conflict, and he could have been thinking about his own financial interest, rather than the interest of the Postal Service and the country,” said Noah Bookbinder, the president of CREW. “That’s significant.”

Last year, by October, DeJoy had announced that he would formally divest from XPO in order to preclude any conflicts of interest from arising. At the time, CREW suggested that the nature of the divestment might be a “sham,” largely because DeJoy transferred his assets to his adult children, who could then return those assets to their father after he leaves government.

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Also under scrutiny are a series of trades made by DeJoy last June, just a month after he joined the administration. The postmaster general specifically bought $50,000 and $100,000 in stock options for Amazon.

“It’s another conflict. He’s got the option to buy. That means he’s gambling that Amazon’s value is going to go up,” Marcus Owens, a former top IRS official, told CNN. “Why is he investing in a competitor to the enterprise that he’s supposed to be managing? This is a classic case for investigation by an inspector general.”

The USPS’s Office of Inspector has reportedly reviewed DeJoy finances and concluded he has complied with the necessary ethical requirements. Still, CREW noted, the review did take into account a full picture of the postmaster general’s finances.

Over the two years, DeJoy has also come under fire for his gross management of the agency, which last year entailed a series of “cost-cutting” measures, such as the removal of mail sorting machines, that would drastically slow transit times. The move earned the Trump-appointee accusations of attempting to sabotage the election in Trump’s favor by undermining the mail-in-ballot process. Many Democrats have called for his resignation.

This month, DeJoy again announced a set of policies that would “result in serious delays and the degradation of service for millions,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. The agency is expected to apply steep price hikes on commercial and domestic retail packages, as well as slow first-class mail transit by 30%.

Nevada “voter fraud” case hyped by Trump campaign exposed as criminal hoax by prosecutors

On Thursday, The Nevada Independent reported that Donald Hartle, who last year alleged that his deceased wife’s ballot was fraudulently cast, has been charged with voter fraud by prosecutors for allegedly casting that ballot himself.

“At a November press conference, Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Consevative Union, named Rosemarie Hartle as one example of the ‘hundreds of dead people’ he said had voted in the election in Clark County. The Nevada Republican Party also cited Hartle’s interview with KLAS Channel 8 in their voter fraud allegations,” reported Megan Messerly. “Hartle told the TV station, which first reported the lawsuit, that his wife died at 52 from breast cancer in 2017 and that no ballot ever came to his house, despite a ballot for her being issued and received by the county. ‘That is pretty sickening to me to be honest with you,’ Kirk told the TV station at the time.”

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According to prosecutors, however, Hartle himself was the one who illegally submitted his wife’s ballot. He has been charged with two D felonies and faces up to four years in prison for each count if convicted.

Nevada was one of several states targeted by former President Donald Trump’s legal team as they sought to overturn the results of the election — although they failed to prove fraud on a level that would alter the outcome of the election.

One lawyer who helped Trump file litigation against Nevada, Jesse Binnall, is also behind the former president’s suit against Congress and the National Archives to try to block White House communications from being released to the House committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack.

“Tucker Carlson effect”: Swalwell shares death threat from Fox News viewer

Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) recently shed light on the damaging effects of Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s rhetoric. On Thursday, October 21, the Democratic lawmaker took to Twitter with an audio clip of a Trump supporter attacking him for his remarks praising the U.S. Capitol Police officer who killed Capitol rioter Ashli Babbitt.

With the disturbing audio clip, Swalwell discussed what he describes as “the Tucker Carlson effect. “Listen to this. It’s the Tucker Carlson effect,” Swalwell explained. “Tucker attacks me. His fans respond with threats to kill my family. And Tucker knows exactly what he’s doing.”

The unnamed man leveled a disturbing verbal attack toward the California lawmaker in a lethal, racist rant. “Here’s some intelligence motherf***er. They just showed you on Fox News on Tucker Carlson saying Babbitt, that unarmed veteran, that white woman that was shot by a cop… You said he was a brave officer shooting a serious threat. He was a coward b**** who shot an unarmed white woman. If she would have been some black n***** crackhead, you guys have had that cop’s head on a stick.”

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“You people are a disgrace to God, our country, and our people. You are the enemies of the United States people, motherf***er. You atheist, Communist faggots are the threat to our democracy, our Constitution, and our way of life,” he said.

Listen to this. It’s the Tucker Carlson effect. Tucker attacks me. His fans respond with threats to kill my family. And Tucker knows exactly what he’s doing. pic.twitter.com/PsSLYbctXa

— Rep. Eric Swalwell (@RepSwalwell) October 22, 2021

The irate man went on and seemed to level a threat toward Swalwell and his family as he concluded with praises to former President Donald Trump. He added, “As for these foreign invaders you’re lettin’ into this country, I hope they chop you, your family up and feed them to their dogs. You did you fucking b****. There’s your free speech for today, a**hole, from Trump Nation!”

Almost immediately after Swalwell shared the audio clip, Twitter users quickly sounded off. With a link to a similar case, former federal prosecutor Chris Alberto quickly noted that these types of verbal threats are considered a violation of federal law.

“These threats against Mr. Swalwell & his family violates federal law,” Alberto wrote. “The [FBI] should visit this guy ASAP. While expressing disagreement and nonviolent dissent are protected speech, threats of violence fall into the scope of federal criminal statutes.”

Others also weighed in with their concerns.

It’s like clockwork. Well familiar with how this goes. Yup. They all know exactly what they’re doing—especially Tucker Carlson. He’s radicalizing Americans & endangering lives but he doesn’t care. None of them do.

— Olivia of Troye (@OliviaTroye) October 22, 2021

Jan. 6 rioter’s “offensive” argument to judge lands him harsher sentence than prosecutors asked for

A judge on Thursday slapped a Trump supporter with a harsher sentence than what the Department of Justice asked for after making what the judge described as an “offensive” argument.

BuzzFeed News reports that Troy Smocks, a Black Trump supporter who encouraged his fellow Trump fans to “prepare our weapons” and “go hunting” for Democrats on right-wing social media website Parler, was sentenced to 14 months in prison by US District Judge Tanya Chutkan.

Smocks tried to argue to Chutkan, who is also Black, that he is being treated unfairly due to the color of his skin.

“Smocks told Chutkan that he believed he had been treated more harshly than white Trump supporters who were charged with misdemeanor crimes for going into the Capitol,” writes BuzzFeed. “He claimed to be the only Black person charged in connection with Jan. 6 to face pretrial detention, but Chutkan noted that wasn’t true.”

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Smocks travelled to Washington D.C. on January 6th but was not charged with taking part in the Capitol riots.

Smocks then compared himself to civil rights protesters in the 1960s who were arrested for protesting against segregation — and at this point, Chutkan stepped in and said his arguments were “offensive.”

“People died fighting for civil rights, people were gassed, they were beaten, they were tortured mentally and physically,” Chutkan told him. “For you to hold yourself up as a soldier in that fight is really quite audacious.”

More stories like this:

Watch a very stylish new teaser for “Cowboy Bebop”

Netflix is taking a risk creating a live-action remake of “Cowboy Bebop,” a beloved anime series from the turn of the century, about a group of outer space bounty hunters who jet across the solar system hunting down criminals, battling organized crime syndicates, and occasionally getting high out of their minds on mushrooms; and they look very, very stylish while they do it.

That’s one of the reasons the live-action remake is a risk: the original show is known for its distinctive visual flair; can you replicate that in live-action? Netflix is gonna try, and a new teaser gives us an idea of how:

The teaser shows lead characters Spike (John Cho), Jet (Mustafa Shakir) and Faye (Daniella Pineda) on the job, and there’s definitely a lot of style here. The team is clearly having fun incorporating the split screen bar into the action, and the lead trio has a nice banter going. And on a more serious note, we get our first line of dialogue from Alex Hassell as a the villainous Vicious, who will probably have a bigger role in this show than he did in the anime, which was mostly made up of standalone episodes.

“Cowboy Bebop” drops on Netflix on Nov. 19.

Republicans rush to mock Alec Baldwin in wake of tragic film set accident

Less than 24 hours after a tragic New Mexico film set accident involving Alec Baldwin claimed the life of a cinematographer and injured the movie’s director, Republicans were already making light of the incident and cracking jokes about Baldwin, a longtime right-wing boogeyman.

The A-lister was reportedly rehearsing for a scene in the western, “Rust,” when he fired a prop gun that was loaded with a “live single round.” The shot killed the film’s 42-year-old director of photography, Halyna Hutchins, and injured director Joel Souza, 48, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) Local 44 said in an email to its members.

Just hours after news of the incident broke, Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance was already online and gloating about the situation.

“Dear @jack,” he wrote, tagging Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. “Let Trump back on. We need Alec Baldwin tweets.”

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The message was not received well, and drew criticism from Vance’s prospective Democratic opponent, Tim Ryan, who replied: “Someone died, you assh*le.”

But he wasn’t the only one deriding Baldwin in the wake of the tragedy — conservative commentator Candace Owens added in a since-deleted Tweet that “what has happened to Alec would be poetic justice if it weren’t for the actual innocent people that were murdered by him.”

She later added: “Will correct that last tweet to say Alec Baldwin *killed* someone— not murdered someone, as murder carries a different legal definition.”

A number of other pundits and right-wing personalities also jumped on a tweet of Baldwin’s from the first round of Black Lives Matter protests, in 2014, which read: “I’m going to make bright, banana-yellow T-shirts that read: “My hands are up. Please don’t shoot me.” Who wants one?”

Even Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., got in on the action, posting a screenshot of Baldwin’s tweet with the caption: “@AlecBaldwin are these still available? Asking for a movie producer…”

The comments horrified a number of Twitter users, who flooded the Congresswoman’s replies with admonitions.

“Have you no shame? Remove this tweet. It’s utterly disrespectful to the victim & her family,” one person wrote.

“I’m sorry you are so broken inside,” another added.

Baldwin released his first statement Friday since the incident occurred, saying the he was cooperating with authorities and that he has spoken with Hutchins’ family.

“There are no words to convey my shock and sadness regarding the tragic accident that took the life of Halyna Hutchins, a wife, mother and deeply admired colleague of ours,” he tweeted.

“I’m fully cooperating with the police investigation to address how this tragedy occurred and I am in touch with her husband, offering my support to him and his family. My heart is broken for her husband, their son, and all who knew and loved Halyna.”

From Hasselbeck to McCain, “The View” needs the “right” hook when casting its conservative co-host

Dunking on Meghan McCain may be this week’s national pastime since, as ever, she makes that easy to do. Even Bravo’s Andy Cohen got his licks in during a “Watch What Happens Live!” conversation that might as well have been a mouth full of sour sweets to her haters.

Despite all that, she’s right about one thing. “My take on the show is that working at ‘The View’ brings out the worst in people,” she said in an excerpt from her audio memoir “Bad Republican” published by Variety. She goes on to opine that the staff and hosts are working under conditions “where the culture is so f**ked up, it feels like quicksand.”

Only the people who work there and folks with trustworthy inside goss know whether that second part is true, but the truth in that leading take is obvious. One point of clarification, though. “The View” doesn’t necessarily bring out the worst in all people, only some of them. This is precisely why we watch.

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Before McCain joined the show Whoopi Goldberg, Joy Behar, Sunny Hostin and their rotating selection of co-hosts still sparred. Emotions flared. But it only occasionally got truly nasty.

McCain’s addition in 2017 kicked up the tension, and Behar’s blood pressure, on a more regular basis. She came to the show from a short-lived tenure on Fox’s “Outnumbered” (ironic, no?) and immediately ruffled feathers by defending then-Vice President Mike Pence’s pandering stunt of walking out of a football game in response to players kneeling to protest in defense of Black lives.

McCain offered that because of her deep patriotism the moment gave her solace, adding that she believed it was possible to “have a conversation about both things” – as in, the righteousness of protests against police brutalizing Black citizens and respecting “what the national anthem and the American flag mean to people like me.”

This was the first of countless times that McCain derailed conversations with false equivalency, offering misinformed Fox News talking points as the counterweight to whatever her co-hosts were saying and then appearing dismayed when they clapped back.

She’s right to blame some of the adversity she faced on being the show’s sole Republican representative during the Trump years but neglects to mention that the reason she took so many on the chin is because she often parroted some skew of the administration’s stances in the name of representing a “real conservative” viewpoint.

“They want someone who is not a real conservative because they will be easier to get along with — you don’t fight as much,” she told “Ladies Who Punch” author Ramin Setoodeh in a related Variety interview. “What they need is someone who’s actually representing people in Kentucky and Arizona.”

How well did that work out for her?

“The View” mimics gatherings of women where conversation turns from the purported business at hand to opinionated dish about whatever is top of mind. Its rotating salon wouldn’t naturally occur in the wild, and viewers understand that. Barbara Walters designed the show to be a carefully curated aquarium filled with telegenic, aggressive personalities drawn from a wide spectrum of age, backgrounds and political differences.

Headlines drive its famous “Hot Topics” segments, and unlike the freewheeling buzz Hoda Kotb and Kathie Lee Gifford calibrated and maintained over 11 years of co-hosting on “Today,” there’s no wine on that table to lubricate the inevitable social friction that arises.

Every time we peer into this closed ecosystem we watch Darwinian forces at work. A few members have managed to thrive over its 25 season reign; with Behar being the longest tenured co-host among the current cast and Goldberg coming in second. Anyone else who enters is obligated to assert themselves as best they can or lose some scales and fins.

Stalwart conservative Elisabeth Hasselbeck made it a full 10 years before deciding she’d had enough. And she outlasted a number of contenders including Rosie O’Donnell, who joined the cast in 2006 and lasted a year.

It’s worth bringing this up in the context of McCain’s famous self-description as the show’s “sacrificial Republican” and her recurring theme of victimhood in the various preview excerpts of her memoir circulating right now. O’Donnell and Hasselbeck shared that table during the early days of the Iraq War and the second administration of George W. Bush. That made the comedian, not Hasselbeck, the sacrificial figure.

At that time a certain orange game show host busied himself with instigating a feud with O’Donnell in the media by disparaging everything about her. The Republican establishment and right-wing pundits also smeared O’Donnell for speaking out against the war, falsely accusing her of not supporting American troops. This was at the heart of that famous 2007 blow-up between Hasselbeck and O’Donnell that brought the performer’s time to the show to an abrupt end after a year. (O’Donnell gave “The View” another go in 2014, but this time she butted heads with Goldberg. This tank can only sustain so many alphas.)

That ferocious Hasselbeck-O’Donnell on-air brawl remains one of daytime TV’s most iconic 10 minute-plus stretches and did its part to redefine “The View” as we know it. Producers refused to throw to commercial, splitting the screen to ensure nary an iota of the furious exchange escaped the audience’s sight.

It also sparked gossipy buzz and conversation. Loud, passionate disagreements between women often do. As such, producers recreated this acidic chemistry in hiring McCain who obviously failed to understand she was coming in as the heel.

Hasselbeck rebukes the “sacrificial Republican” designation with her actions in that 2007 scene, by the way. The lasting image of Hasselbeck is that of a woman who represented the conservative white woman constituency, for good or ill, whether sensible or irritating, and gave as well as she got.

Her refutation of O’Donnell’s assertion at the time, which was that the media would spin whatever she said as “big, fat, lesbian, loud Rosie attacks innocent, pure, Christian Elisabeth” wasn’t to break out in tears or retreat into her silent scowl. “Poor little Elisabeth is not poor little Elisabeth” she shot back, reminding the world that she wasn’t some withering flower.

This isn’t to say that Hasselbeck didn’t ply the timeless conservative tactic of claiming victimhood and playing that “innocent, pure, Christian” card. But she knew how to debate and maintain the illusion of cordial disagreement on that set, landing her hits on a regular basis.

McCain never figured out how to do that. She approached her seat with the tactic that the only way to win respect was to haphazardly assert her dominance. Maybe that’s the only move one has in a no-win situation like “The View,” which is stacked with liberals and moderates.

Nobody asked McCain to win anything, simply to represent a conservative paradigm realistically and honestly. Instead, she established a habit of talking over her co-hosts while saying little to nothing of substance and expecting them to accept her unmoored drivel as a legitimate point of view.

Even when her co-hosts gave her the floor – well, consider this instance she cites in the first excerpt from “Bad Republican,” which she shares as an example of Goldberg’s supposed meanness in her final days.

Another time she answered something I said by blurting out ‘O.K.’ in a tone that declared she was both baffled and disgusted by what I had just said. This reaction also went viral and left a scar on our relationship.

Nobody has a right to tell McCain how she should feel about Goldberg’s reaction. But the very fact that it went viral means that millions of people saw the “something” she said – i.e. some babble about Meghan Markle and Oprah Winfrey “single-handedly finishing what George Washington and our revolutionary counterparts did” – and agreed that Goldberg’s “O.K.” was the most politic reaction she could make.

Still, when one scans the various “View” co-host rosters it’s easy enough to land on why the show has such problems replicating the success it had with Hasselbeck and why McCain, although publicly detested, is likely to be the bar by which future contenders for her vacated slot will be evaluated.

In that same Variety interview McCain adds that producers assured her they were looking for a “real conservative,” which raises the question of how one defines such a thing in 2021. Does being a “real conservative” mean clinging to the lie that the 2020 election was rigged, as two-thirds of Republicans do despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary? One can safely guess that a lot of Americans would say yes.

But that person cannot engage in informed good faith debate. She can only lob the verbal equivalent of mud pies only to visibly retreat when her cohorts return fire with heavy artillery, and then weep when the cameras are off at the meanness of her liberal co-workers.

Honestly, it’s impossible to imagine Goldberg and Behar agreeing to work with a MAGA nut of that caliber or how such a hire would serve the show’s purported intent to contribute to the culture’s dialogue.

Without conflict or combat, “The View” becomes “The Talk.” The short-lived stints of the very reasonable Nicolle Wallace and Hallmark Channel-wholesome Candace Cameron-Bure prove that. Steady-to-boring doesn’t work here, because total agreement is dull.

There’s no danger of the show losing out to its CBS rival, which is still a mess despite recently hiring the very likable Natalie Morales from NBC’s news division. The audience for “The View” is down from where it was last year, but that’s true of nearly every TV show in daytime.

Nor does ABC appear to be in a rush to fill McCain’s chair, which is as it should be. Finding someone who has a decent right hook and works well with the others is not going to be easy.

As for McCain’s “Bad Republican” ride, lots of folks are getting a kick out of watching the princess of Arizona take her bruises on tour, even if most of the mediasphere doesn’t seem terribly bothered by what she’s selling.

That’s probably because she isn’t telling the public anything it doesn’t already know and accept about “The View”: Discord beats level-headed discourse every time.

More on Meghan McCain:

Investor in Trump’s new social media venture backs out: “Makes me want to throw up”

The launch of Donald Trump’s new social media company “TRUTH Social” has hit another bump in the road as some early key investors are pulling out after discovering he is one of the principals behind it which they were unaware of at the time they put money into the start-up.

As the New York Times reported, “The details of Mr. Trump’s latest partnership were vague. The statement he issued was reminiscent of the kind of claims he made about his business dealings in New York as a real estate developer. It was replete with high-dollar amounts and superlatives that could not be verified.”

According to a report from the Huff Post’s Ed Mazza, one hedge fund manager lashed out when he found out about Trump’s involvement.

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As Mazza reports, “[Boaz] Weinstein’s Saba Capital had been a major investor in Digital World, a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) formed for the purpose of acquiring another company. As is common in SPAC arrangements, investors put their cash in before the acquisition target was chosen. When Weinstein learned it would be with Trump’s firm, he bailed.”

“I knew that for Saba the right thing was to sell our entire stake of unrestricted shares, which we have now done. Many investors are grappling with hard questions about how to incorporate their values into their work. For us, this was not a close call,” he explained.

Another unnamed investor, who reportedly held a 10 percent stake in the company, was considerably more graphic when talking about being taken in by Trump’s latest venture and he “sold everything as soon as he could,” reports Mazza.

“The idea that I would help [Trump] build out a fake news business called Truth makes me want to throw up,” they said.

You can read more here.

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Trump blasts Meghan McCain as “lowlife” — and says he gave John McCain “world’s longest funeral”

Donald Trump hasn’t tired of ribbing his old rival, the late Sen. John McCain — or his daughter for that matter.

In a statement released Friday, the former president attacked Meghan McCain, calling her a “lowlife” and “a bully,” adding that he gave her father “the world’s longest funeral.”

The statement was apparently in response to McCain’s new book, in which she claims that she was bullied off of The View by her co-hosts while dealing with postnatal anxiety.

Trump also took the opportunity to say that he had won Arizona “by a lot” in 2016, and by “even more” in 2020, continuing his long-running crusade to overturn the results of last year’s election by nodding at nonexistent reports of widespread voter fraud.

A Republican-backed review of the Arizona election found no proof that the election was fraudulent.

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Trump also attacked Sen. McCain’s choice to hand over the now-infamous Steele dossier, an intelligence report on then-candidate Trump compiled by the former British spy Christopher Steele, to the FBI. More than four years and a presidential administration removed from the incident, Trump wrote Friday that Sen. McCain only made the move to stop “the Trump Train.”

Trump concluded the statement by saying that Meghan McCain should “fight the Communists” rather than fellow conservatives.

“She should fight back against the Losers of The View the way she fights against very good and well-meaning Republicans.”

McCain responded to the statement on Twitter with a plug for her book, writing, “Thanks for the publicity boomer.”

Thanks for the publicity boomer.

My new @audible_com memoir #BadRepublican is out now:https://t.co/X2Bzvbr63f https://t.co/wCDR9lVafc

— Meghan McCain (@MeghanMcCain) October 22, 2021

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Sotomayor, in scathing dissent, explains why Supreme Court is wrong on Texas abortion ban

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued a lone dissent on Friday as her colleagues once again refused to block the Texas abortion ban, even under a request from the Department of Justice.

The court did agree to take up the matter for oral arguments swiftly. On Monday, Nov. 1, the court will hear from both sides in the case on the question of whether the U.S. administration can intervene and temporarily block the law from going into effect as the cases proceed.

But Sotomayor, as she has previously, argued that the court should have issued an injunction blocking the abortion ban from being enforced immediately. The law is already having massive effects on the constitutionally protected right to obtain an abortion in Texas, she argued, and yet a majority of the justices is allowing the state to use procedural loopholes to undermine the court’s own ruling precedents.

“The State’s gambit has worked,” she wrote. “The impact is catastrophic.”

To circumvent existing law protecting the right to get an abortion, Texas legislators enacted a scheme the prohibits abortion after six weeks — well before a pregnancy may have even been detected — but outsources enforcement to the courts and citizens. The ban, known as S.B. 8, allows anyone to sue those who assist in an abortion for $10,000. Because of this unique enforcement mechanism, a majority of the Supreme Court’s conservative justices have said that the issues are too complex to warrant an immediate injunction against the law.

This decision, Sotomayor argued, is a betrayal of the court’s authority — and it is having the practical effect of infringing on the rights of people seeking abortions. She explained:

On a human level, the District Court relied on credible declarations that described the threat of liability under S. B. 8 as “nothing short of agonizing” for abortion care providers. … Providers are “seriously concerned that even providing abortions in compliance with S. B. 8 will draw lawsuits from anti-abortion vigilantes or others seeking financial gain.” … Patients are “devastated” to learn they cannot access care, and the “turmoil” caused by the Act leaves them “panicked, both for themselves and their loved ones.” … Even among the few women who are able to receive abortion services in Texas, S. B. 8 pushes patients “to make a decision about their abortion before they are truly ready to do so.”
To be sure, the court agreed, “[p]regnant people from Texas are scared and are frantically trying to get appointments” in other States. … The court found, however, that many patients are unable to seek out-of-state care based on financial constraints, dangerous family situations, immigration status, or other reasons. Id., at *42. These individuals “are being forced to carry their pregnancy to term against their will or to seek ways to end their pregnancies on their own.” …
The court also found that patients who are able to leave Texas have encountered restrictions and backlogs exacerbated by S. B. 8, citing evidence of the Act’s “stunning” and “crushing” impacts on clinics in Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada. … An Oklahoma provider, for example, reported a “staggering 646% increase of Texan patients per day,” occupying between 50% and 75% of capacity. … A Kansas clinic similarly reported that about half of its patients now come from Texas. Id., at *44. The District Court found that this “constant stream of Texas patients has created backlogs that in some places prevent residents from accessing abortion services in their own communities.

“I cannot capture the totality of this harm in these pages,” she continued. “But as these excerpts illustrate, the State (empowered by this Court’s inaction) has so thoroughly chilled the exercise of the right recognized in Roe as to nearly suspend it within its borders and strain access to it in other States.”

Most legal observers expect that the court is well on its way to formally overturning Roe and Casey, the precedents recognizing a right to get an abortion, or to so drastically alter the interpretation of this right that they may as well have been overturned. But it’s widely believed the court will use an upcoming case about a Missippi abortion law if it truly does intend to make major changes to its precedent. It’s much less clear how the court will handle the Texas case after oral arguments.