25 animals that have been imprisoned or arrested

It might seem like a case of animals just being animals, but when eight donkeys in northern India ate nearly $1,000 worth of greenery in their small town, they did four days in the big house. (Perhaps part of the problem? They ate expensive saplings that were planted right near the jail. Rookie mistake.) But whether they harmed property or people, were in cahoots with human outlaws, or were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, these 25 other critters are proof that “crime” can sometimes be cuddly.

1. The pigeon that was arrested on suspicion of espionage.

In 2015, officials in India arrested a pigeon they suspected was a spy. The bird’s body was stamped with a message written partly in Urdu — Pakistan’s official language — and what appeared to be a Pakistani phone number. It had landed in a village close to the country’s shared border with Pakistan, near the Kashmir region that’s claimed by both countries and has been the subject of multiple wars between India and Pakistan beginning in 1947. Though there was a ceasefire in 1972, because both countries believe they have rights to the area, it’s frequently the site of military clashes and infiltration.

So when a 14-year-old boy found the suspicious-looking pigeon so close to Kashmir, he turned it over to authorities. The officials took it to a veterinary hospital for X-rays, and though they couldn’t find any concrete evidence of foreign fowl play, they kept the bird in custody, recording it as a “suspected spy” in their police diary.

That said, not everyone took the news as seriously as the Indian police did: In the days following the bird’s arrest, Pakistani social media was flooded with memes depicting the feathered detainee as a slick 007 type, and amused internet users coined hashtags like #PigeonVsIndia and #IfIWereAPigeon.

2. The beaver that was apprehended for a destructive Christmas shopping season.

In December 2016, a wild beaver must have decided that forest trees weren’t festive enough, because it wandered into a dollar store in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, to browse Christmas trees and decorations. Workers noticed the animal knocking items onto the floor, and called the St. Mary’s County Sheriff’s Office.

Captain Yingling of the sheriff’s office arrived on scene to prevent the “shopping” beaver from ruining the store. “The suspect attempted to flee the area but was apprehended by Animal Control,” the sheriff’s department joked on their Facebook page.

Instead of allowing the beaver to finish up its holiday shopping, the St. Mary’s County Sheriff handed the critter over to a wildlife rehab center. As for the police, they said the quirky incident just marked another day on the job: “As a law enforcement officer, you just never know what your next call may be . . . ” they mused on Facebook.

3. The foul-mouthed parrot in India that was arrested for repeatedly insulting his owner’s stepmother.

In 2015, police in the Indian state of Maharashtra taught a foul-mouthed parrot named Hariyal a lesson in politeness after they “arrested” it for swearing at an elderly woman named Janabai. According to locals, the pet bird had picked up the rude habit from Janabi’s stepson, Suresh Sakharkar. The two were embroiled in an ugly property dispute, and the latter had reportedly spent the prior two years training Hariyal to spout epithets whenever the estranged relation walked past his house.

The situation escalated, and Janabi, Suresh, and his bird were eventually called to the police station. “Police should investigate and seize the parrot,” the embittered stepmother told Indian news channel Zee News. That said, Hariyal must have known he was in hot water, because he kept his beak shut. “We watched the parrot carefully but it did not utter a word at the police station after being confronted by the complainant,” a police inspector told reporters.

Instead of locking Hariyal up, officials gave the parrot over to Maharashtra’s forestry department, where he could presumably fly — and curse — freely for the remainder of his life.

4. The Squirrel that was arrested for “stalking” a German woman.

While walking down the street in the West German city of Bottrop in 2015, a woman realized that she had attracted a furry stalker: a tiny red squirrel. The animal was chasing her and acting aggressively. Frightened and unable to flee the rodent, the woman called the police for help. Authorities captured the squirrel, “arrested” it, and brought it back to the station. There, they discovered that the critter was suffering from exhaustion.

Police helped nurse the squirrel back to health by feeding it honey, and a spokesperson said the squirrel would be sent to a rescue center instead of languishing away in a cell for its stalkerish habits.

5. The bad monkeys in India that were imprisoned in “monkey jail.”

In 2004, a rogue monkey became infamous for terrorizing residents of the city of Patiala, in India’s northern Punjab region. The monkey was guilty of multiple crimes: It stole food from homes, ripped the buttons off people’s shirts, threatened kids with bricks, and once even swiped someone’s math textbooks and calculator. To keep the marauding jungle creature off the streets, officials sentenced it to “monkey jail” — a now-defunct detainment center in Patiala that was reserved for ill-behaving primates.

The “monkey jail” — which appears to have operated from 1996 until the mid-2000s — was located in the corner of a local zoo. The 15-foot-wide barred cell was secured with chain-link fencing and wire mesh, and had a sign that read: “These monkeys have been caught from various cities of Punjab. They are notorious. Going near them is dangerous.”

Punjab is filled with countless wild Rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta) monkeys. Some of the animals have moved into cities and towns in search of food, as humans continue to destroy their natural jungle habitat. Others were once used as animal guards, or trained as performing monkeys, and were set loose by their owners once they turned violent. Particularly ill-treated or mischievous primates have been known to destroy property and pester — or even attack — humans. But since Hindus revere Hanuman, the monkey god, killing the creatures is verboten.

Wildlife officers in Punjab took matters into their own hands by opening the monkey jail. They responded to public complaints by capturing the creatures with trapping cages and tranquilizer guns. Once the monkeys were locked up, there was little to no chance of “parole.”

As of 2004, there were 13 jailed monkeys, all imprisoned for harassing people or committing petty crimes. Patiala’s primate penitentiary was eventually closed, and authorities announced it was going to be replaced by “reform school” that’s intended to train the monkeys to be less aggressive.

6. The cat who was detained for helping out with a prison break.

On New Year’s Day 2013, a cat took the heat for scheming Brazilian inmates who were likely either planning a jailbreak or attempting to communicate with outlaws on the outside. The white feline was slinking around the main gates of a medium-security prison in Arapiraca — a city in northeast Brazil — when guards noticed that its body was wrapped in tape. They apprehended the kitty, and discovered that it was carrying items including several saws and drills, an earphone, a memory card, batteries, and a phone charger.

Prison officer Luiz de Oliveira Souza told reporters that the cat had been seen entering and exiting the jail before. It had been raised by inmates, and was often in the custody of one of their families. However, officials couldn’t figure out which of the jail’s 263 prisoners had tried to use the feline for their own nefarious purposes: “It’s tough to find out who’s responsible for the action as the cat doesn’t speak,” a prison spokesperson told local newspaper Estado de S.Paulo.

Following the cat’s “arrest” and brief imprisonment, it was taken to a local animal shelter to receive medical treatment.

7. The tough prison pet that was actually a very good boy.

Unlike some animals on this list, Pep the dog was a very good boy. But in 1924, Pennsylvania governor Gifford Pinchot allegedly sentenced the dark-haired Labrador to a life sentence without parole. Pep was taken to Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary, where officials jokingly gave him his own inmate number and mug shot. Reporters nicknamed the canine “Pep The Cat-Murdering Dog,” as he was said to have killed the governor’s wife’s cat.

Thanks to all the media hype, Pep had quite the tough reputation. But a few years after the canine’s imprisonment, the governor’s wife, Cornelia Pinchot, set the story straight in an interview with The New York Times. Turns out, Pep had never murdered her pet feline; her family simply bred Labradors, and owned too many dogs. Pep, she said, was a gift to the prisoners to lift their spirits.

Today, researchers say that partisan journalists twisted the facts around, and that Pep was actually a beloved prison pet that freely wandered the hallways and was adored by all. As for the “life sentence without parole” part, the Lab was eventually moved to a newer prison; when he died, he was buried on its grounds.

8. The feisty donkey in Mexico that was locked up to settle a score.

In 2008, police in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas arrested a feisty donkey named Blacky after it bit a man in the chest, and kicked a second man trying to rescue him. Police apprehended the burro and locked it in the jail’s drunk tank. “Around here, if someone commits a crime they are jailed, no matter who they are,” said Officer Sinar Gomez.

Police said that the donkey would remain behind bars until its owner, Mauro Gutierrez, paid the injured parties’ medical bills and salary for the days they missed work. The boisterous burro served three days in jail, and Gutierrez settled the score by paying Blacky’s victims.

9. The bear that spent 15 years in prison.

In 2004, holidaymakers at a campsite in Kazakhstan found themselvesterrorized by a brown bear who repeatedly mauled visitors. Several ruined vacations later, the authorities were called in to do something about the situation. Unsure what to do with her, officials sentenced the bear to a 15-year prison term at a penal colony called Kostanay.

At Kostanay, the bear (who was given the name Katya), was the lone female among more than 700 male inmates. Life wasn’t all bad for Katya, though. In addition to her cell, she was given her own pool and was cared for by her fellow prisoners. Katya remained in custody for the entirety of her 15-year sentence. In 2019, she was finally released to a zoo, where she was reunited with others of her own kind, including a male bear named Yashka who was reported to be “very happy to see her.” While she’s gone from Kostanay, she’s certainly not forgotten. A large statue of her has been installed on the prison grounds.

10. The watch-parrot that was arrested as a member of a drug cartel.

Lorenzo, a bright green and yellow parrot living in Colombia who was prized for his speaking skills, didn’t always know when to keep his mouth shut.

In 2010, Lorenzo aroused the suspicions of Colombian detectives, who began to think it probably wasn’t a coincidence that he would squawk “Run, run, you are going to get caught!” every time police officers came near. The agents were right. In fact, it turned out that Lorenzo had been trained to shout the phrase as a warning for his owners, a group of drug traffickers, so that they could evade capture.

Wise to the lookout, detectives eventually managed to sneak past the bird without being seen. Once inside the safe-house, they found more than 200 weapons, a stolen motorcycle, and a stash of marijuana. Lorenzo was taken into custody along with four of the men he’d failed to warn.

11. The goat that was arrested for chowing down on the wrong yard.

In 2016, in the Indian state of Chhattisgarh, a goat was minding its own business and doing what goats do best: eating. There was just one problem. The petunias and cabbages the goat was snacking on belonged to a very important human — the distinct magistrate.

It wasn’t the goat’s first offense, either. The gardener who tended the magistrate’s yard and ultimately lodged the complaint against the hungry trespasser had encountered the goat many times before. He’d even witnessed the animal leap over the iron gate that guarded the property. Finally fed up, the gardener called the police to report the offense. When officers arrived on the scene, they took the goat into custody and laid charges that could yield between two and seven years in prison, plus a fine. Luckily for the goat, it made bail and was released to its owner.

12. The monkey that was arrested for crossing the border.

When an Indian monkey was spotted roaming around Bahawalpur, Pakistan, in 2011, officials were dispatched to wrangle the animal. The monkey didn’t go down without a fight, and deftly evaded the wildlife officials who tried to snag it. Eventually, the monkey was captured, and the Pakistani government was left to work out what to do with it. Was their captive an innocent traveler or something more nefarious? While some reports indicated that the monkey was suspected of spying, his capture may more likely have been motivated by India’s recent detainment of a “spy” pigeon.

Officials ultimately concluded that the monkey posed no threat, but still decided against letting it go free. While the monkey didn’t go to human jail, it was still sentenced to life behind bars by way of the local zoo, where he was named Bobby.

13. The alligator apprehended for an attempted break-in.

In May 2021, a woman in Osceola County, Florida phoned the police about “suspicious activity” in her backyard. The scene she described was an alarming one: There was someone hissing and scratching at her back door as if they were trying to get into the house.

When deputies arrived, they discovered that someone was in fact, trying to get in—or something, at least. The would-be trespasser turned out to be a 5-foot-long alligator the department later dubbed “Swampy Chomps.” A struggle between gator and deputies ensued, as the giant reptile resisted arrest. Eventually, it was “apprehended, taken into custody, and safely released into another side of the lake,” reported Sheriff Marcos R. Lopez in a Facebook video.

14. The cat that as arrested for breaking curfew.

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Thailand sprang into action, imposing strict curfews across the country and deploying police units to enforce them. Between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m., officers were sent to patrol the streets. Anyone caught outside their homes during that time could be arrested, fined, and jailed.

Apparently, news of the emergency law didn’t make it to one particular cat, who was discovered out and about one night in blatant disregard of health and safety rules. Thai police booked the unfortunate kitty and posted its mug shot as a warning to all those considering ignoring the mandate. They even hung a sign around its neck for the photo that read, “I left my home after 10 p.m. in violation of the curfew.” When it comes to public health, apparently, no one in Thailand is above the law!

15. The pig that was apprehended when he couldn’t keep his tongue to himself.

Police in Shelby Township, Michigan, received a strange complaint in the summer of 2015: A marauding pig was wandering through a residential neighborhood. His crime? Licking lawn ornaments. A woman who’d been gardening got the first glimpse of the 175-pound porker, which came running toward her and sent her scurrying into her front yard before it got distracted by the shiny decorations. “We received a couple calls about a pig at large,” said the deputy chief of police, who was on the scene. “After 25 years, just when you think you’ve seen it all, something new and exciting happens.”

Officers nabbed the trespassing pig and stuck him in the back of the squad car. Luckily for the pig, it was returned directly to its worried owner rather than spending a night in the slammer. But while the neighbor didn’t press charges for trespassing, the police were likely less than pleased about the large amount of feces they discovered in the back seat once the pig was safely home.

16. The cow that was arrested after going on the lam.

In March 2020, police in Pembroke Pines, South Florida, put out a surprising plea. The department needed help, it said, in finding a fugitive that had been evading capture for months. The slippery suspect in question wasn’t a person, however—it was a cow. The wanted poster (yes, you read that right) described the 1600-pound brown and white Heffer as “faster than it looks.” The leaflet also noted that the cow also had a penchant for jumping fences and cooling off in local pools.

A week later, authorities managed to track down the cow and put her scofflaw days to an end. Despite her antagonistic history, though, she wasn’t charged with any crimes. In fact, the officers soon made peace with the troublesome runaway. “We wish the cow well on its future adventures,” tweeted the Pembroke Pines PD.

17. The French weevils that were put on trial for their appetite.

It’s no secret that the French take their wine seriously, but in the 16th century, damaging grapes could land you in court — even if you weren’t human. That’s exactly what happened to a swarm of weevils that made the mistake of tearing through a vineyard in Savoie back in 1545.

Being short on francs at the time, the weevils were appointed representatives to advocate for them in the trial. Rather than being sentenced, the court issued only an official call for prayers to be said “to implore pardon for our sins.” The prayers seemed to be working, but 30 years later, the weevils returned.

At the second trial, a new defense attorney argued that the weevils actually had a better claim to the land than the farmers did, and refused to accept a compromise that would have put aside a separate plot of land for them. How the case was resolved, ironically, is lost to history: The last page of the records was destroyed, perhaps by insects.

18. The cow that was arrested for murder.

It isn’t uncommon to see cows wandering unchaperoned around Nigerian cities. But in Lagos in 2005, one went rogue. As a bus driver stood by the edge of a road taking a quick bathroom break, the cow approached from behind and attacked, knocking the man to the ground. The vicious attack — made with both the cow’s hoofs and long, pointed horns —proved fatal. Several additional witnesses were injured before the authorities finally managed to get the animal under control. “You know what it will take to arrest a mad cow?” asked one police officer. “We applied ingenuity.”

Some onlookers called for the cow to be shot on sight, but the police chief opted to take the criminal into custody alive. The cow was held at the station and eventually released to its owner, who was charged with negligence.

19. The donkey imprisoned for bestiality.

In 1750, a scandal rocked the town of Savigny-sur-Etang, France, when a man and a “she-ass” were accused of fornication. Like today, bestiality was a crime and the man was put on trial, during which he was found guilty and sentenced to death. Unlike today, the unlucky donkey found herself in court, too [PDF].

During her trial, the animal’s council mounted a spirited defense on her behalf. Their best evidence came in the form of several written statements signed by residents of the town in which she lived. The documents attested that she had been well-known for years and that “in word and deed and in all habits of life” she had been “a most honest creature.” Happily, the court took these character witnesses to heart, and the “she-ass” was acquitted. The court rightfully found that “she was the victim of violence and had not participated in her master’s crime of her own free will.”

20. The loyal parrot that was arrested for his loud mouth.

One couple in northern Brazil raised their brightly colored parrot to do more than repeat silly phrases. The pair, who were running a drug operation out of their home, trained their pet to act as a lookout that would tip them off if they were in danger of being busted. When the authorities came near in 2019, the loyal bird did as it had been taught and obediently raised the alarm. “He must have been trained for this,” said a police officer after the discovery. “As soon as the police got close he started shouting.”

The parrot was taken into custody but knew when to keep its mouth shut. “So far it hasn’t made a sound . . . completely silent,” said a Brazilian journalist covering the story. Eventually, accepting they’d get no pertinent information out of the feathery accomplice, the police sent the parrot to a zoo so it could be trained to fly and eventually released.

21. The bovine that was imprisoned for a break-in.

In April 1932, two police officers were alerted to a burglary in progress. But when they arrived on the scene — a home in San Jose, California — there was no burglar to be found. After hearing a loud noise, the two officers discovered the trespasser. It wasn’t a masked bandit making off with jewelry, as they might have expected. Instead, the pair discovered a large cow standing calmly in a flowerbed.

Despite the fact that the cow had no stolen goods to speak of, she was booked at the city jail and held overnight. The only problem? There were no cow-equipped cells, so the suspect was simply tied up in a vacant lot nearby. Perhaps she sensed her chance, because the next morning, she was nowhere to be found. Noted the Berkeley Daily Gazette, “Now she’s a fugitive from justice and a warrant has been issued for her arrest.”

22. The goat that was arrested for loitering.

Canadians love their Tim Hortons, and apparently, that affection is shared across species. In the early hours of a September morning in Saskatchewan in 2015, employees at the beloved coffee chain discovered a loitering customer that was disinclined to leave. The squatter in question was a goat, and he refused to go anywhere.

After being led outside several times, the stubborn goat, whose name was Goliath, returned again and again through the automatic doors. Finally, he was taken away in the back of a police car and spent the night in the local animal shelter. Goliath, who was originally from Alberta but was in town for an event with the University of Saskatchewan rodeo team, had a reputation as an escape artist (he’d gotten out three times before). This time, however, the team suspected that he’d most likely been stolen, potentially as a prank by a rival school.

23. The piglets that were imprisoned for murder.

Apparently, humans aren’t the only species with crime families [PDF]. In 1457, a mother pig and six piglets were caught red-hoofed in the murder of a 5-year-old boy in France. The killing had been gruesome, and the locals believed someone had to answer for the crime, even if that someone wasn’t human. The entire pig family was locked up and put on trial for the attack. When the verdict was handed down, only the adult sow was found guilty of the murder. Her sentence of death by hanging was hardly the first of its kind. Nearly a century earlier, another pig that had caused the death of a child was strung up for its dastardly deed — but not first before being outfitted in men’s clothing.

The sow’s six piglets were spared. The court chalked its pardon up to the innocence of the young, and to the bad example the children had been set by their mother.

24. The dog that was apprehended after a wild deer chase.

Finn the dog was on a walk with his owners in 2018 when they made a costly mistake: They let him off-leash. Not long afterward, Finn caught a whiff of a nearby deer and took off after it. Ignoring all calls to return, he tore off down the trail, along the road, through the grounds of a hospital, and beyond before Ontario police nabbed the pup and locked him in the back of a police car. Finn didn’t serve any time for his misbehavior and the family was let off with a warning, but perhaps a sterner punishment would have served him well: Rather than feel guilty, Finn’s owner reported that the dog seemed “pretty proud of himself.”

The daughter of Finn’s owner posted a photo on Twitter of the pup gazing forlornly out from behind the bars on the window of the police car. “He’s a good boy,” she said. “He just hates deer.”

25. The chicken jailed for fowl play.

In 1474, a chicken made the grievous error of being mistaken for a rooster in the Swiss city of Basel. When the unfortunate creature laid an egg, the townspeople were horrified. Rather than assume they’d simply been mistaken about the bird’s identity, the locals took it into custody and put it on trial. A cockerel laying an egg, after all, was a “heinous and unnatural crime,” the court found. Why all the fuss? The accepted belief at the time was that an egg laid by a rooster would hatch a basilisk [PDF].

After a solemn trial, the misidentified chicken was found guilty and sentenced to be burned at the stake. On the day of the execution, a large group of townspeople and local peasants gathered to witness the poor creature’s demise, no doubt relieved at having avoided disaster.

Kristi Noem’s new theocracy: No masks in schools, but she is trying to make kids pray

South Dakota’s Republican Governor Kristi Noem refuses to mandate masks for schoolchildren and teachers but she’s trying to make students pray in public. Gov. Noem, who is widely expected to run for president in 2024, has let the coronavirus run rampant in her state of just 886,667 people – a population so small New York City’s is ten times larger. And yet coronavirus is running rampant in South Dakota, which ranks number eight in the nation for coronavirus cases per capita.

Governor Noem just made clear she does not see herself as a government or political leader, but as a religious one. Speaking to Real America’s Voice personality David Brody, Noem declared she will bring back prayer in schools (even though voluntary prayer has always been legal) and thinks political leaders are supposed to “minister” to their constituents.

Complaining that the actions other government leaders are taking “are not biblical,” Noem says they are supposed to “line up with God,” which is false.

“I think that it’s really time for all of us to look at the actions of our leaders and see if they line up with the word of God,” Noem said, “see if they’re biblical and if they really are following through on those actions that God’s called us to do to protect people, to serve people, and to really minister to them.”

Protecting, serving, and ministering – but not in the fight against the deadly pandemic.

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“We’ve seen our society, our culture, degrade, as we’ve removed God out of our lives, and people become what they spend their time doing,” Noem declared. “When I was growing up, we spent every Sunday morning, every night, every Wednesday night in church, we were our church, family was a part of our life, we read the Bible every day as a family together, and spent time with each other, recognizing that we were created to serve others.”

Again, Noem makes clear she does not believe serving and protecting others has anything to do with COVID-19.

“I don’t know families do that as much anymore and those biblical values are learned, in the family, And they’re learned in church when the doors are open so people can be there and be taught.”

“We in South Dakota, have decided to take action to really stand for biblical principles. We had a bill that was passed during legislative session two years ago that put the the motto ‘In God We Trust’ in every single school building it is displayed. Now in every K-12 school building in the state of South Dakota.

“I have legislation that we’ll be proposing this year that will allow us to pray in schools, again, I really believe that focusing on those foundational biblical principles that teach us that every life has value every person has a purpose will recenter our kids and help us really heal this division that we see taking over our country.”

MSNBC’s Steve Benen notes, “given that the United States is a democracy, and not a theocracy, officials’ actions are supposed to line up with the Constitution and the rule of law, not how some people interpret scripture.”

“What the governor seemed to be suggesting, however, isn’t a system in which students pray on their own,” he adds, “but one in which school officials intervene in children’s religious lives. In the United States, that’s not legal: As my friends at Americans United for Separation of Church and State recently explained, ‘The South Dakota Supreme Court struck down mandatory recitation of the Lord’s Prayer in the state’s public schools in 1929. The U.S. Supreme Court invalidated school-sponsored prayer and Bible reading in public schools in 1962 and ’63.'”

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem says the positions taken by political leaders must "line up with the word of God" and brags about pushing for prayer in public schools. pic.twitter.com/DRd2MJaKZw

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) September 17, 2021

More than a year into the pandemic, our kids are not alright

After an all-too-brief summer respite, the trifecta of the highly contagious delta variant, low vaccination rates, and large unmasked gatherings has led us back to a place we are all too familiar with: An increase in the number of COVID-19 cases filling our ICUs once again. This time, however, children are falling ill in unprecedented numbers. Now, just as doctors, hospitals, and communities are reeling from the effects of the obvious pandemic, they threaten to be overwhelmed with a second, quieter threat of childhood anxiety and depression. With appropriate attention and intervention, however, parents can protect their children and get them the help they need.

This “second” pandemic started slowly, when kids and families were socially distanced last year. If concerns about COVID kindled it, then it caught flame as children lost the very buffers that help guard against mental illness, such as athletics, parties, graduations, and many forms of connection with extended family and friends. Families struggled not only with the complexities of online learning: they fought to get to work, take care of their kids, and plan for a now-uncertain future. Anxiety rates in children and teens have skyrocketed, as emergency room visits for pediatric mental health concerns rose by over 70%.

Even more disturbing are rates of suicidality, which has surged among the young. Mental health professionals report being overwhelmed with the numbers of patients in the system, where many don’t even have access to mental help, and inequities in care are the rule. Pediatricians are now seeing more kids with mental health issues than ever before; the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recently released a policy encouraging doctors to screen for mental health issues at every visit.

The good news is that parents can form the first line of defense between children and mental health problems, even during these times of unprecedented change.

The first step is to identify and be alert to potential signs. Being more attentive and talking with your kids can go a long way. Do they seem down? Are they less interested in their favorite activities? Are they sleeping or eating less or more? Do they complain of headaches or stomach aches? These changes can all be clues that your child or teen is struggling to adjust. Don’t assume you know how they’re feeling; ask. You may be surprised by what you hear.

Families can also take a cue from the world of business and focus on managing expectations. Remind your child that this year is likely to be full of changes. We are already seeing large-scale quarantines as kids return to school, and the delta variant is likely to cause major disruptions almost everywhere as public health officials fight its spread. It is hard to be on a seemingly nonstop rollercoaster. But understanding that change is to be expected can help anxiety.

Another tactic to promote resiliency in children is to focus on the positives. The friends they do see, the teachers they meet, the events that happen are so important — while acknowledging their feelings of loss and frustration when things don’t go as planned. Even though we all may have to adjust some of our family’s cherished traditions, we can also take this opportunity to craft new habits that may become traditions long after the pandemic has passed.

Kids, like adults, want a sense of control. Like us, sometimes they find it by obsessing on bad news, getting caught in the cycle of “doom-scrolling,” or watching the news 24-7. Help them put down their devices and limit their exposure to crisis coverage. In fact, constant exposure to bad news can even make adults feel anxious. Make sure they understand what they need to do to be safe, but make sure they take some time to just be kids.

Remember our bodies and our minds are not separate but are in constant communication. Habits that help our physical health — getting lots of exercise, sleeping the right amount at night, eating healthy foods — also help with depression and anxiety. Help your kids get outside as much as possible; exposure to nature alone can improve mental health!

And one oft-overlooked aspect of prevention of anxiety, depression, and mental health issues is self-care. Caregivers, families, and parents have been overwhelmed with the rough waters from the pandemic, and the turbulence of an ever-changing environment; make sure that there is time set aside for your own health, which includes not only exercise and sleep, but the importance of social connection. Take the opportunities to take that jog or walk, or that outdoor coffee with a few friends. When caregivers feel calm, the kids do too.

As much as parents want to fix everything for our children, it is also critical we recognize when we need more help. Be willing to contact your child’s doctor if you’re worried. The AAP has a wide variety of resources to help parents with mental health, and they can also help if you’re looking for therapy. Don’t be afraid to ask if your child has considered suicide. If the answer is “yes,” you can start by contacting the National Suicide Prevention Helpline at 800-273-8255.

If we’re lucky, everyone will pull together to get vaccinated, mask up, physically distance, and defeat this wave of COVID long before next summer. In the meantime, however, we can act right now to help our kids weather the mental health pandemic, help our families build resilience, and enjoy just being kids.

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The very best flowers to plant in the fall

Even the best cared-for yard can look a little worn by the end of the summer when many plants are covered with powdery mildew, a widespread and easily identified plant disease (for reassurance, it does not kill the plant, it’s just unsightly). Planting some fall-blooming flowers for a fresh look is a perfect remedy to perk up your yard.

Fall is also the time to plant spring-blooming bulbs that provide the color splashes we crave after a long winter.

* * *

Instant gratification: fall-blooming flowers

The obvious fall bloomers are the ubiquitous mums.There are so many varieties that it’s hard to make a choice. Plant size and color are not the only distinguishing features, in fact, the National Chrysanthemum Society divides mums into 13 classes of bloom forms.

If you want something more unusual, look for spoon mums, quilled mums, or spider mums. You can plant mums in containers, hanging baskets, or in garden soil. Don’t expect them to stick around, though. If it pains you to throw out the mums after their bloom — which is the usual fate of all those potted mums — consider planting hardy mums, also called garden mums, in the spring so they develop a good root system.

Pansies, just like mums, are cool-season bloomers. Although you can plant them in the spring, you get a better bloom if you plant them in late summer to early fall. If your winters are mild, they will bloom until there is a hard frost, and they might even come back and bloom again in the spring.

The other prolific fall bloomers are asters. Instead of an introduced Eurasian or hybrid variety, consider planting native asters such as New England asters (Symphyotrichum novae-angliae), or aromatic asters (Symphyotrichum oblongifolium), which give pollinators such as bees and butterflies a much needed late-season source of nectar.

Just like mums, asters are best planted in the spring, but you can buy fully grown plants at nurseries or garden centers in the fall. Make sure to plant them promptly so they can get rooted before the weather turns too cold for plant growth.

Eye candy for humans = nectar for pollinators

If providing pollinators with a superfood is just as important to you as aesthetics, goldenrod is another must-have fall-blooming native perennial. There are more than 100 different species to choose from. Just like with asters, what’s a native species depends on where you live (you can search for plant species here).

Goldenrod often gets a bad rap because it is associated with allergies. The real culprit, however, is ragweed, which happens to bloom at the same time. The other complaint about goldenrod is that it forms dense clumps that keep spreading. If it’s between controlling goldenrod and battling noxious invasive weeds, I’d take the native goldenrod any time.

Among the flowering succulents, Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’ is a popular, very adaptable, low-maintenance perennial. Its flowers start out bright pink and gradually fade into a copper, rust-like color.

For a more ephemeral fall bloom, there’s the autumn crocus (Colchium autumnale). Nurseries ship it in August and they should be planted promptly after arrival. Autumn crocus will bloom the same year, but keep in mind that autumn crocus is toxic, so if children play in your yard or you have pets, it might not be a safe choice.

Another crocus that blooms in the fall is the fall-blooming crocus (Crocus kotschyanus) with white or pale purple flowers. These crocuses are also planted in the late summer and bloom within a few weeks.

And lastly, they’re not flowers per se, but very decorative with their ruffled leaves in vibrant colors — flowering kale and ornamental cabbage. They make great compact plants for small spaces or container gardens.

Ahead of the curve: Pick your spring bulbs now

Mail-order nurseries specializing in bulbs are starting to send out their catalogs in late summer. If you have your mind set on a particular spring flower, it’s a good idea to pre-order it now before it sells out.

Spring crocuses, tulips, daffodils, hyacinths, irises, and all the other wonderful spring bloomers need to go through a winter chill period in order to bloom. In cooler climates, they need to be planted in the fall before the ground freezes. If you live in a warm climate and would like spring bloomers that require chilling, such as tulips, you can buy bulbs that have been pre-chilled for several months and are shipped for winter planting. There’s one caveat though: the summers in locations like Florida are too hot for the bulbs to survive so they are usually a one-season bloomer.

Tattoos have a long history going back to the ancient world — and also to colonialism

While most of us would likely care to forget the pandemic as soon as is possible, a few have opted for a permanent reminder of the health crisis – in the shape of a tattoo. Some of these tattoos are meant to serve as a reminder of the year gone by, depicting motifs around toilet paper shortages, social distancing and other pandemic-related messages. But those who lost loved ones to the disease are also using tattoos to create memorials.

This is not a recent phenomenon – tattoos have long served as a way for people to express their emotions.

As a tattoo historian, I often enjoy asking people where they think tattoos originated. I hear the mention of countries such as China, Japan, “somewhere in Africa or South America,” or Polynesia. What is interesting is that in the past five years of holding these conversations, no one thus far has answered that tattoos could have originated in Europe or North America.

What geographical areas these answers include, and what they miss, speak to a deeper truth about the history of tattoos: What we know and think about tattoos is heavily influenced by oppression, racism and colonialism.

History of tattoos

Tattooing practices were common in many parts of the ancient world.

There were tattoos in both ancient Japan and Egypt. The Māori of New Zealand have been practicing sacred Ta Mōko tattooing for centuries as a way to indicate who they are as individuals as well as who their community is.

However, no one culture can lay the claim to first inventing the art form. Tattooing practices were known in Europe and North America since times of antiquity. The Greeks depicted their tattooed Thracian neighbors, the Indo-European-speaking people, on their pottery. The Picts, the indigenous people of what is today northern Scotland, were documented by Roman historians as having complex tattoos.

The oldest preserved tattoos come from Ötzi the Iceman, a 5,300-year-old mummified body frozen in ice discovered in the mountains of Italy in 1991. In 2019, researchers identified 2,000-year-old tattoo needles from southeastern Utah’s Pueblo archaeological sites. The cactus spines bound with yucca leaves still had the remnants of tattoo ink on them.

Colonization and tattoos

Tattoo historian Steve Gilbert explains that the word “tattoo” itself is a combination of Marquesan and Samoan words – tatau and tatu – to describe these practices. The sailors who explored these Polynesian islands combined the words as they traded stories of their experiences.

The question then arises, if tattoos existed in Europe and North America since times of antiquity, why did Western cultures appropriate and combine these two words instead of using words that already existed in their own?

As I found in my research, somewhere around the 1400s tattoos became an easy way to draw a line between European colonizers and those colonized, who were seen as “uncivilized.”

Tattooing was still being practiced in Europe and North America, but many of those tattooing practices had been driven underground by the time European colonization was in full swing.

That was in part the result of attempts to “Christianize” parts of Europe by purging towns and villages of “pagan” and nonconformist, nonreligious practices – including tattooing. As Catholic churches expanded their influence via missionaries and campaigns of assimilation beginning in A.D. 391, tattoos were frowned upon as “un-Christian.”

Not like us

As Western colonizers pushed into places like Africa, the Pacific Islands and North and South America in the 1400s and 1500s, they found entire groups of native peoples who were tattooed.

These tattooed individuals were often pointed to as proof that the “untamed natives” needed the help of “good, God-fearing” Europeans to become fully human. Tattooed individuals from these cultures were even brought back and paraded through Europe for profit.

A tattooed Indigenous mother and son, kidnapped by explorers in the late 1600s from an unknown location in Canada, were two such victims. An advertisement handbill of the time read: “Let us thank Almighty God for this beneficence, that he has declared himself to us by his Word, so that we are not like these savages and man-eaters.”

People would pay to gawk at these enslaved human beings, making their captors a healthy profit and reaffirming in the minds of the audience the need for European expansion, whatever the human cost.

This kidnapping of tattooed persons had destructive effects on the cultures they were taken from, as often the most tattooed individuals, and therefore the most likely to be taken, were the leaders and holy persons.

It is worth noting that most captives did not live longer than a few months after arriving in Europe, succumbing to foreign illness or malnourishment when their slavers did not feed them.

This “tattooed savage” narrative was pushed even further as tattooed individuals began to display themselves in carnival and circus “freak shows.”

These performers not only pushed the narrative of tattoos being “savage” or “othering” by performing as freaks, they also invented tragic backstories. The performers claimed they were attacked and forcibly tattooed by marginalized people, such as Native Americans, whom the public at large regarded as “savages.”

One such performer was the American Nora Hildebrandt. Nora weaved an account of being captured by Native Americans who forcibly tattooed her.

This was a more harrowing tale than the reality that her longtime partner, Martin Hildebrandt, had been her tattoo artist. Her tale was particularly baffling, as Nora Hildebrandt’s tattoos were mostly of patriotic symbols, like the American flag.

The voices of colonizers echo into the present. Tattoos carry a certain amount of stigma in Western societies. They can often end up being called a “poor life choice” or “trashy.” Studies as recent as 2014 discuss the persistence of the stigma.

I see tattoos as art and a way of communicating identity. In answering the question “where do tattoos come from?” I would argue that they come from all of us, regardless of what early colonizers may have wanted people to believe.

Allison Hawn, Instructional Faculty, Arizona State University

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

Bill Maher’s defense of low tax rates for the rich falls flat on ‘Real Time’ panel

HBO “Real Time” host Bill Maher’s critiques of a “tax the rich” dress worn to the Met Gala did not go over well with his panel.

Maher said that in New York City, the “richest 65,000 New Yorkers, out of eight million people, pay 61% of taxes.

“So it’s not like we don’t tax the rich at all,” Maher said.

“We’ve been slashing taxes on the rich for for fifty years, though,” sex columnist Dan Savage noted.

“The rich are richer now than they’ve ever been,” he continued as Maher failed to interject. “And the lie we’ve been told the whole time we’ve been cutting taxes on the rich, is that if the rich have the most money they can possibly have, we will all benefit, we will all have jobs and it’s a lie and it hasn’t come true.”

“And we need to go back to the high tax rates we used to have,” Savage concluded.

Gillian Tett, the chair of the editorial board at the Financial Times, also rebutted the host.

Tett noted that “the gap between rich and poor has been rising and rising, so it’s not surprising that the rich are paying a large percentage of the tax.”

Watch:

Evangelical theology is what made the Texas abortion outrage possible

During my undergrad years at U Mass Dartmouth I had the great privilege of being mentored by Dr Juli Parker, who was director of the Women’s center, now called the Center for Women, Gender, and Sexuality. It was there, more than 20 years ago, that I was shown a small piece of what so many women face in this country. As the only football player volunteer at the center, I observed two very different worlds. The football locker room, with men saying some pretty awful things, and Dr Parker explaining the truth around sexual assault, abortion rights and the regular fight for equality that women face every day.

I felt a strong calling to ministry and I attended seminary, which, oddly enough, was an environment that sounded a little like the football locker room. I was hoping to change minds within the evangelical church. I failed, and 20 years later the evangelical church is stronger and more committed to prohibiting women the most basic right to decide what happens to their own bodies.

Evangelicals won a great and terrible victory with the recent Texas abortion law, but the plan was started more than 50 years ago. Millions if not billions of dollars have spent, and hundreds if not thousands of Republican politicians have come along as supporters, and the goal has been achieved: Tearing down Roe v. Wade. The plan was basic enough: Pack the Supreme court with enough judges who would be willing to ignore the rights of women. To do this, the evangelical church needed to support any politician who was willing to condemn abortion as murder, and willing to promise they would appoint anti-abortion judges.

And when I say evangelicals were willing to support anyone who said those things, I mean anyone. That means Clarence Thomas, a man credibly accused of sexual harassment. It means Brett Kavanaugh, a man credibly accused of attempted rape, as well as of being too unstable for a post on the Supreme Court. It means supporting Donald Trump, a pig who has been accused of sexual assault by numerous women. Nothing could stop evangelical support for Republican politicians, as long as they were willing to attack Roe v. Wade.

Defending things like the rights of the poor, welcoming the foreigner, healing the sick and promoting peace were all ignored for this one purpose. Now the evangelicals have won what I hope is a temporary victory, but a terrible victory nonetheless. In the words of Christ, “You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel!” These modern-day hypocrites have won a victory for themselves while ignoring everything it means to be a follower of Christ. I am disgusted. If Christ did return, it would be these evangelicals who would hang him on the cross again. They are the evil that Christ warned his followers about long ago.

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Their unhealthy teachings have hurt this country’s progress towards equality and manipulated generations of Christians. Their influence has been harmful all along, but this is different. The law has changed, and I can promise you that in church after church, congregations are gathering to celebrate this “victory” on abortion rights in Texas. And Texas is just the beginning. More states will follow this blueprint, and the Supreme Court appears willing to turn a blind eye to the rights of women.

Evangelicals are celebrating with no concern for the lives this law will affect or the message it communicates. This isn’t just Trump saying another stupid thing, or an offensive proposal, or another display of ignorance on display. This is an enacted law denying the rights of women to control their own bodies — and it was dreamed up and strategized by the evangelical church. Without evangelical theology this entire thing would be a non-issue.

Evangelical churches certainly aren’t fighting to make their believers take the COVID vaccine. Pastors are adamant that this is a free country and we can all determine what happens to our own bodies. Unless, of course, you are a woman, in which case the church stops talking about fundamental American rights.

Whether I watch Fox News or CNN, everyone agrees that the Taliban’s severe crackdown on the rights of women in Afghanistan is a terrible thing. The U.S. promotes itself as a democracy not a theocracy like the Taliban regime. I understand that evangelicals will see this comparison as unfair, but it is still a matter of people of faith using that faith to limit the rights of a group of people, using the strong arm of government.

I have no words of affirmation as I would normally when discussing other political and religious issues. These evangelicals have simply gone too far. I feel compelled to encourage those outside the evangelical church to stay away from it. If you are caught up in that mess, get out. Leaders of the evangelical church are blind guides leading you into the devil’s trap. I thank God for a guide like Dr. Parker and her years of commitment to the fights that need to fought. I try to honor the time she spent with me by doing what I can to change some minds, and through them perhaps some. Politics is not my expertise, but my advice to President Biden is simple: Pack the court! Never mind precedent and tradition, or how it looks to your enemies. Just do the work to protect your nation’s citizens.

All signs point to bust for D.C. “Justice for J6” rally as TrumpWorld says “stay away”

WASHINGTON — With officials warning Washington D.C. to brace for potential violence this weekend, all attention turns to a pro-Trump rally slated to occur on the grounds of the United States Capitol Saturday dubbed “Justice for J6,” organized by a little-known former Trump campaign aide.

The organizer of the Saturday rally, which is intended to spotlight those who are serving time for participating in the failed insurrection on Jan. 6, is a former Trump campaign aide by the name of Matt Braynard. He also leads the right-wing nonprofit, “Look Ahead America.”

A few weeks back, while the rally was in its earlier stages, Braynard told Salon that the event has “a permit,” just as two previous events he held in Washington did. Both “occurred without incident,” he said.

Braynard furthermore said the goal of the Saturday’s event following the deadly Capitol riot is to “raise the profile of the abuse of the non-violent political prisoners” and “demand equal treatment of the 500 plus protestors who are being politically persecuted.” He also said he plans to promote the conspiracy theory that the FBI was involved in the planning of Jan. 6.

And though Braynard’s ties to Trump are well-publicized, in mid-August he added the rally “is not about the election, about any candidates, about any outside organizations (other than LAA). We are asking everyone who comes to not wear or bring anything with any organization/candidate/party logos. Just the American flag/patriotic symbolism and signs that are on message with the abuse of these political prisoners.”

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Despite these assurances, over the past week almost all TrumpWorld royalty has made a point to call on their own followers not to attend the rally in D.C. and distance themselves from the event.

“Do not attend the FBI rally in DC on the 18th,” Ron Wakins, the former administrator of 8chan who has long been rumored to be behind the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory, wrote on Telegram. Earlier this week, longtime GOP operative Roger Stone also urged all Trump supporters of good faith to stay away from the Saturday rally in D.C. “I don’t know a single person in the MAGA movement who’s going. It’s a setup,” he said. “No, patriots, stay away from Washington!”

Even Trump himself called the event a “setup” in an interview with The Federalist Thursday.

“On Saturday, that’s a setup,” Trump said. “If people don’t show up they’ll say, ‘Oh, it’s a lack of spirit.’ And if people do show up they’ll be harassed.”

Though he did signal support for the march’s overarching theme in a later statement.

“Our hearts and minds are with the people being persecuted so unfairly relating to the January 6th protest concerning the Rigged Presidential Election,” Trump wrote in a press release. “In addition to everything else, it has proven conclusively that we are a two-tiered system of justice. In the end, however, JUSTICE WILL PREVAIL!”

Jared Holt, a resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s DFR Lab, who researches and tracks right-wing social media posts and conversations told Salon in a phone interview there isn’t any evidence to suggest that the Saturday rally will be a Jan. 6 repeat.

“The fact of the matter is, the Capital Police response to this event has elevated it into something important, regardless of what ends up happening on the ground Saturday,” Holt said. “From our analysis, we are not seeing any of the usual tale telltale signs of a mass mobilization towards the Washington D.C. area. We have seen a few passing comments or individual remarks that do suggest that there may be some bad actors that show up to DC, but certainly nothing that even holds a candle to Jan. 6.”

That said, The Department of Homeland Security said that there had been a “small number of recent online threats of violence” stemming from the event.

Asked about the remarks made by Stone and others who are not going anywhere near the rally, Holt said it’s not in their best interest to aid in such an effort following Jan. 6.

“I think a lot of these groups don’t have an interest in coming to DC for this kind of event — that they’re willing to put themselves on the line, and particularly in regards to figures like Roger Stone and The Proud Boys, because their name has come up so many times in conversations about Jan. 6.”

Holt believes that those pro-Trump figures that have been caught up and/or connected to the Jan. 6 Capitol siege might be seeking to get out ahead of the rally this time around. “I think they have a little bit of extra motivation to try to get out ahead of it, and put some public distance between whatever does happen on Saturday and themselves,” he added.

Despite there being little evidence of a massive rally on the horizon, Capitol Police are taking precautionary measures to ensure things don’t get out of hand, including re-assembling fencing around the perimeter of the building. “The decision to put fencing back up around the U.S. Capitol strikes me as perhaps even overly cautious, but I certainly understand where Capitol police are coming from,” Holt said.

NEW: The U.S. Capitol fence is back!

Just two months after the removal of the last post-Jan. 6 barriers, workers begin re-installing them ahead of the “Justice for J6” protest on Sept. 18.

Capitol Police say it will come down “soon after” the event “if everything goes well.” pic.twitter.com/fRWagvuG3Z

— Andrew Solender (@AndrewSolender) September 16, 2021

“They do not want to give the perception or any leeway to suggestions that they are underprepared for this event,” he added. “So it strikes me as kind of a better safe than sorry decision.”

The fence is back at the Capitol in advance of this Saturday’s pro-insurrectionist protest. pic.twitter.com/XWO8MjczcF

— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) September 16, 2021

In a Monday statement, the US Capitol Police outlined that they have been tracking “online chatter about a demonstration planned for September 18,” adding that “the Capitol Police Board approved a plan to temporarily put up a fence around the Capitol Building. When the inner-perimeter fence was taken down in July, USCP leaders noted that from time to time, they may exercise the ability to enhance security around the Capitol Complex.”

As for Braynard himself, Holt said the former Trump campaign aide lacks credibility in pro-Trump circles, and that turning out a substantial crowd for the event will be a struggle due to a lackluster network of allies.

“Above all, Matt Braynard is a low-rent propagandist. And as far as organizing goes, he simply doesn’t have the kind of network on his own that he would need to pull off a really massive event by himself,” Holt said. “He’s the kind of guy that has to rely on the people that he does have in his network, which includes people like Steve Bannon, to try to get a lot of that work done for him.”

On Friday morning, during an appearance on C-SPAN, Braynard argued that there is a lot of “misinformation out there” about the rally and that his organization “condemn[s] all violence,” despite advocating on behalf of individuals who committed violence on Jan 6.

A robust and noteworthy police presence and countless dump trucks — acting as barricades — were on scene early Saturday morning in the district. As of an hour before the event, it appeared there were more journalists than attendees present.

Morning Glory days: “Oasis Knebworth 1996” revisits a watershed event in Britpop concert history

If there were ever such a thing as Oasis Mania, then it reached its zenith on the record-setting weekend in August 1996 when 250,000 fans flocked to see the Manchester band perform a pair of shows at the Knebworth Festival.

With Britpop in vogue and lording over the charts, Oasis was truly poised to bring the long-running festival to new heights. The recurring event had its roots in 1974, when some 60,000 fans made their way to the grounds of the Knebworth House to see The Allman Brothers Band and the Doobie Brothers top the bill.

By the summer of 1996, Oasis was riding high with a pair of chart-topping albums under their belts in “Definitely Maybe” and “(What’s the Story) Morning Glory.” From the beginning of their career through 2009, the band would score 25 consecutive Top 20 singles in their homeland — a positively Beatlesque stat to be sure.

As the “Oasis Knebworth 1996” documentary demonstrates, the Gallagher brothers were firing on all cylinders, powering the band with Liam’s distinctive whining lead vocals and Noel’s grungy guitar working at full bore. But the film, directed by Jake Scott, proves to be far more than standard rock doc fare, highlighting the fan experience at every turn.

While the attendees’ sporadic voiceovers border on cornball platitudes at times, there’s no mistaking their pre-concert frenzy as wannabe concertgoers surrender their hopes to the whimsy of dial-up ticket services. Indeed, during those pre-Internet days, fans managed to scrounge up 250,000 tickets in the space of a single day. At one point, some two percent of the entire British population was gumming up the telephone lines in search of tickets.

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Scott devotes considerable effort to capture the state of UK life in the mid-1990s, with unemployment and a decade-long recession having exerted an awful toll. At the same time, Great Britain was enjoying a renewed artistic vigor in the face of harrowing economic news.

But when it comes to concert films, a documentary lives and dies by the music, and “Oasis Knebworth 1996” doesn’t disappoint. With only a pair of LPs to their name, Oasis reels off one high-energy tune after another. With songs like “Live Forever,” the band falls into a powerful swagger driven by unmistakable youth and panache.

Watch “Live Forever” from Oasis Knebworth 1996:

In addition to performing such hits as “Wonderwall” and “Roll with It,” the documentary is rife with such Britpop classics as “Champagne Supernova,” Noel Gallagher’s show-stopping anthem-like dirge. At Knebworth, the band was joined on the song by John Squire, lead guitarist for the Stone Roses, signaling a changing-of-the-guard of sorts. The Knebworth shows came to a powerful close with Oasis serving up a triumphant cover version of the Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus.” For the Gallagher brothers, the Fab Four were the be-all and end-all of British rock, as revealed by their gusto-laden take on John Lennon’s psychedelic masterpiece.

Love a deep dive into a legendary musician’s career? Subscribe to Ken’s podcast “Everything Fab Four.”

While the Knebworth grounds have been quiet since 2014, fans won’t soon forget Oasis’ bravura performance — a fact that “Oasis Knebworth 1996” makes resoundingly clear.

Watch the “Oasis Knebworth 1996” trailer:

Why we still need the Women’s Prize for Fiction

Every year since 1996, one of the most heralded of awards for women writing in English is announced annually. The prize formerly known as the Orange Prize, the Orange Broadband Prize, and Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, has – since 2018 – been anonymously supported by a “family” of sponsors, and known simply as the Women’s Prize for Fiction. And the 2021 winner is Susanna Clarke, with her second novel “Piranesi.”

Clarke’s latest book was described by this year’s chair of judges and former Booker winner, Bernardine Evaristo, as a book that “would have a lasting impact.” It comes 17 years after Clarke’s first novel, “Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell,” which blends historical fiction with imaginative fantasy.

Every year, there is some discussion in parts of the press, and on social media, on the point of a prize for women writers. After all, the argument goes, Anglophone women writers have won such awards as the Booker – Hilary Mantel and Margaret Atwood, for example, while many of those shortlisted are also women. Meanwhile, Doris Lessing and Alice Munro have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Do we need an award specifically for women?

Ever since the prize was first mooted in the early 1990s, many have wondered whether the prize is necessary, patronising, or even fair. A common position amongst its detractors is that the prize is sexist and discriminatory. English journalist and novelist, Auberon Waugh, (the eldest son of the novelist Evelyn Waugh) famously called it the Lemon Prize.

These debates about women writers have their origin, however, in the longstanding concerns and debates about the relationship between women, reading and writing: debates which are nearly as old as the history of the novel in English.

The dismissal of women writers

For example, the poet and priest Thomas Gisborne’s 1797 conduct manual, “An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex,” recommends to every woman “the habit of regularly allotting to improving books a portion of each day.” But Gisborne does not include novels among his “improving books” — like many of those who have written on the possible dangers of reading fiction for women.

This policing of the woman reader — and it is a short skip and jump here to the woman writer — is far from an isolated occurrence. In January 1855, the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote to his publisher that, “America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash — and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed”. Hawthorne was concerned with the subject matter of women writers — quite simply, it was not to his taste.

This dismissal of women writers continues today. In an interview at the Royal Geographic Society in 2011, the British writer, V.S. Naipaul, was asked if he considers any woman writer his match, to which he replied “I don’t think so.” He claimed that he could “read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.” Naipaul was clear that part of this recognition was because writing by women is “unequal” to him and his writing. Key to this is that the subject matter of women’s writing is often perceived as frivolous and unimportant.

Separation and segregation

This separation or segregation of women’s writing should be understood as part of the patriarchal control of what and who matters – and, historically, women have not. The Women’s Prize for Fiction was set up in response to the Booker Prize of 1991 when none of the six shortlisted books were by women, despite 60% of the novels published that year by women writers.

Not all potential entrants welcomed the new prize. A.S. Byatt (winner of the 1990 Man Booker Prize) refused to have her fiction submitted for consideration for the new award, and trivialised the Women’s Prize for the assumption that there is something that might be grouped together as a “feminine subject matter.” But it is an indisputable fact that women have often been excluded from or dismissed by the literary establishment, by reviewers, and by the prize system.

This is not to say all women’s writing experiences are the same. There are challenges to the notion of awards for women’s writing – since they can still discriminate against different races, ages, types of education, classes, disability and trans women,among others. But what cannot be disputed is that all women (writers or not) are united by living in global and local societies that value, promulgate and prioritise the voice, identities and experiences of men over women.

The positions offered by Gisborne, Hawthorne and Naipaul are indicative of the expectations placed upon women in the literary marketplace and are very much tied to issues around the relationship between worth, taste and power. Who decides what text has “worth,” and how this worth has been arrived at, are questions that we might think are something for English literature students to grapple with at university.

But these are important questions for us all to consider. The humanities is broadly the study of what it is to be human and reading is a key marker of being human. We tell stories to ourselves, about ourselves, over and over again. We have entire industries built on reading, and on storytelling (whether books, films, games or more). We all need to think about who reads, and whose stories are told and re-told. The Women’s Prize for Fiction is one way of ensuring that women’s stories are among those that are told and re-told.

Stacy Gillis, Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture, Newcastle University

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

My life among the unvaccinated

Up until a few weeks ago, when New York lifted its “COVID-19 state of disaster” emergency, I was volunteering as a COVID vaccinator at various FEMA sites across New York City. Knowing how vital our volunteer work was to ending the pandemic, my fellow vaccinators and I developed an esprit de corps, something that our (mostly) grateful patients likely sensed. Yet not every shift went smoothly.

Back in April, I was face-to-face with a patient who, moments after going over the consent form, looked me in the eye and said, “I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to be the government’s f**king guinea pig.” She then rose from her chair and stormed out of the room, shaking her head. There was no more conversation to be had.

On a separate occasion, an undocumented construction worker politely declined the vaccine after we went over the possible list of post-injection side effects — mild fever, body aches, arm soreness (not unlike a flu shot) — that would go away in a few days. But he was an hourly wage worker, and a single dad; and thus the possibility of losing days meant losing valuable income which, he explained, was “just not an option for my kids and family right now.” He also worried about the implications of vaccine records on his documentation status. “Would you trust the government if you were me?” he joked as he packed up his belongings.

In the broader public health and political arena, these individuals constitute “the unvaccinated.” They formulate the class with whom, as President Biden recently said, “we’ve been patient. But our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us.” They engender the bracket that Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the CDC’s Director, alluded to when she said, “this is becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated.”

People undoubtedly harbor a certain stereotype about who those unvaccinated people are. But I discuss these specific patient encounters to illustrate that “the unvaccinated” class is not a monolith; that not every one of the roughly 80 million eligible-yet-unvaccinated Americans at the time of this writing is a science-defying, freedom-of-choice touting, faith enforcing anti-vaxxer. But at the end of the day, the virus does not discriminate based on reasons for vaccine hesitancy or refusal, and the outcome, unfortunately, is the same.

Recent data from hospitals across the country continue to confirm that it is the unvaccinated who harbor the virus longer; are more likely to transmit to others; have severe cases of the disease requiring hospitalization and intensive care; and are 11 times more likely to die of COVID-19. These outcomes can be prevented, or at least risk-mitigated, by a buffet of effective (and free) vaccine options. But while an increase in vaccination rates is the eventual goal and pretty much the only way of ending this pandemic, our latest public health strategy appears to have fixated on developing an aggressive vaccination roadmap alone. And where the power of persuasion has failed, vaccine mandates have been introduced.

Beyond vaccines, healthcare agencies have waffled back and forth between mask requirements, leaving the public distraught and confused. And there are only occasional mentions of safer socializing measures anymore, let alone innovating any new ideas or expanding the toolkit of non-vaccine–based COVID-19 prevention strategies. There is no plan B, so to speak, as we seem to have anchored every second of airtime on plan A alone: the vaccine.

Compared to April 2021, daily vaccination rates have significantly decelerated over the past several weeks, going from nearly 3.4 million shots per day to about 1.5 million — a greater than 50% reduction. As a result, the eligible-yet-unvaccinated cohort, comprising nearly 75-80 million people, has emerged to enter the political spotlight.

An imperfect dissection of unvaccinated people’s motivations reveals some common themes around vaccine hesitancy. Safety and efficacy concerns as well as short- and long-term side effects — despite the FDA’s full approval — continue to serve as significant deterrents to vaccine acceptance; many people have (mistakenly)latched on to the condensed timeline of vaccine development and emergency use authorization as red flags. Some of my patients have also alluded to holding perceptions of Operation Warp Speed as potentially bypassing safety measures for political and financial gain. Fundamental distrust in the government, as well as healthcare institutions, seem to further catalyze a strong resistance to accepting the vaccine — something I have repeatedly heard in outpatient clinics and the emergency room. And many people continue to feel that their likelihood of being exposed to the virus is extremely low — and often believe erroneously that the vaccine poses bigger risk to them than COVID-19 itself.

Demographic differences are also evident in who declines the COVID vaccine. For example, studies consistently show that Blacks and Hispanics are significantly more likely than white Americans to hesitate to get the shot, even though individuals from these racial and ethnic backgrounds have suffered significantly higher COVID-19–related morbidity and mortality rates. Likewise, there are stark geographic differences in vaccine hesitancy, with Southern states, the Great Plains and Alaska significantly trailing behind West coast and Northeastern states. Other factors like highest level of education attained and urban versus rural residence have also impacted disparities in vaccination rates.

While these vaccine misperceptions and uptake differences might appear surprising, they are not new. They mirror a pattern of slow pharmacotherapy adoption that public health experts, healthcare workers, activists and others have been grappling with and fighting for to curb another viral epidemic: pre-exposure prophylaxis (or PrEP) for HIV.

Approved by the FDA in 2012, PrEP — a once-daily pill with injectable formulations in the pipeline — is almost 100% effective in preventing HIV infection from sex and over 70% effective in preventing infections among people who inject drugs. And yet, over nine years out, less than 20% of nearly 1.1 million individuals who could benefit from PrEP are currently taking it. Additionally, only about 30% of PrEP users live in the South, even though over 50% of new HIV diagnoses each year are made in that region.

Compared to COVID-19 vaccines, there are certainly unique barriers to wider PrEP adoption. For example, the vaccine comprises one or two shots (with a possible third booster). In contrast, the logistics of taking PrEP once a day can dilute optimal adherence. As another example, access to PrEP has often come with a hefty price tag. In contrast, the vaccines are free. Importantly, many have reported taking PrEP for HIV prevention to be stigmatizing by peers as well as healthcare providers, associated, in part, with concerns around directly (or indirectly) revealing sexual and gender minority status. This is not a concern for COVID vaccines. And more fundamentally, a droplet infection like COVID-19 spreads much more rapidly and impacts millions more people than a sexually or parenterally transmitted infection like HIV.

However, there is remarkable similarity among reasons why people — including some of my own patients — decline to use PrEP and take the COVID-19 vaccine. Concerns around near term and long-term side effects abound. Both are complacent in their perceived low likelihood of contracting the viruses. Distrust in governments and medical institutions feed both cohorts. Even the racial and ethnic breakdowns are similar where studies show that Black and Hispanic people are much less likely to take PrEP—even though CDC studies in 2016 estimated that 1 in 2 black men who have sex with men (MSM) and 1 in 4 Latino MSM will be diagnosed with HIV during their lifetime.

The slow uptake of PrEP undercut its early promise to rapidly reduce the number of new HIV diagnoses — which could, in theory, bring new HIV infections to zero. It is the closest we have to an HIV vaccine; but it never became the singular strategy that everyone fixated on — being wary of and anticipating the many reasons people wouldn’t want it.

Instead, the approach to curbing new HIV diagnoses continues to be flexible, community-tailored, and multi-pronged. While expanding PrEP access and adoption continues to be a priority for public health advocates and government programs such as Ending the HIV Epidemic in the US, other tools in the toolkit garner adequate emphasis including continued research and development in HIV vaccine and antiretroviral therapy, linking newly diagnosed people to care, having contingency management programs for medication adherence to maintain undetectable viral loads (which essentially makes the virus untransmissible), syringe services programs, continued emphasis on condom use with free access to condoms, as well as social services to avoid HIV infection in the first place.

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In a recent tweet, Dr. Oni Blackstock, primary care and HIV physician in New York City who is also the Founder and Executive Director of Health Justice, mirrored this sentiment when she wrote, “The same way that PrEP alone cannot end the HIV epidemic and we must use the full HIV prevention toolkit and address the structural drivers of HIV transmission, COVID19 vaccines won’t be enough and we’ll need to use the full toolkit of non-pharm interventions and address structural drivers.”

Yet, the national strategy on the future of COVID containment appears to be vaccination alone — now inching toward the realm of mandates.

To be clear, there is no doubt that vaccines are serving their intended purpose of significantly reducing infectivity, disease severity, hospitalization, and death. Additionally, COVID vaccine mandates are also successfully serving their intended purpose of raising inoculation statistics—with the eventual goal of reaching herd immunity. For example, since the Pentagon announced in August 2021 its immunization requirement among active-duty military personnel, the percentage of military members with at least one COVID shot jumped from over 76% to nearly 83%. And vaccine mandates are certainly not a novel phenomenon, as exemplified by pre-K and K-12 schools requiring vaccination against several infectious diseases including hepatitis B, diphtheria, and polio.

At this point in the pandemic, however, vaccine mandates have spilled over from being merely a healthcare and safety issue to a polarizing, political fiasco. For those vehemently opposed, not only will mandates erode trust in government, but will likely exacerbate mistrust in science and medicine, impacting healthcare-seeking behaviors in the long term. Also, many people are already finding workarounds by going to healthcare professionals who are monetizing on vaccine or mask exemptions. Others still are accessing counterfeit vaccination cards. Numerous others — including many healthcare workers — are quitting their jobs, putting unsustainable strain on many workplaces.

Anticipating the Biden administration’s vaccine mandates, Dr. Uché Blackstock, Founder and CEO of Advancing Health Equity, recently tweeted, “We can’t vaccinate our way out of a surge without implementing other mitigation measures. Vaccine mandates will help, but they won’t be the solution, in the short-term, to ending this current surge, without additional loss of more lives.” Some of those strategies, she suggests, include more structural elements such as “extending unemployment benefits and the eviction moratorium.”

Beyond these, we need to continue research and development efforts to find COVID-19 prophylaxis medications and treatment options. We ought to revisit masking policies and improve access to testing. A simple policy change could be governments, employers or insurers covering the cost of at-home test kits to ensure frequent and accessible testing. We also need to engage community champions to continue conversations around the benefits of vaccination in a relatable, non-punitive way.

One of the biggest takeaways from the low — yet slowly up trending — PrEP adoption rates is that no matter how effective a therapy may be, people have different thresholds for accepting it in their lives. For this reason, HIV prevention efforts have been incredibly varied, providing different options to people with different risk tolerance levels. While HIV and COVID-19 are very different viruses, many of the lessons learned from HIV prevention efforts accumulating over the past 40 years can help inform community buy-in. And while the COVID-19 vaccine is undoubtedly lifesaving, we need many more culturally sensitive tools in the toolkit to successfully end this pandemic.

Is the U.S. Supreme Court now a Roman Catholic institution?

Silent assent is insidious – and cowardly. In civilized societies, the rule of law ensures that cogent rules, based in law, apply equally to every member of society.

The rule of law protects us from each other, too; that is, from the worst behaviors toward fellow human beings that humans can be given to.

As Aristotle wrote: “It is more proper that law should govern than any one of the citizens.”

The unprecedented structure of the new Texas law

A majority of the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) demonstrated “in the dead of night” on September 1, that it does not stand by that basic principle of the rule of law.

The prevailing political culture in Texas has not understood that principle for some time. Ironically, the state that wants to enable all of its people to exercise a weird sense of “freedom” in rejecting public health and refusing Covid vaccinations, also wants to deny women the freedom of their most personal choices.

Both Antonin Scalia and Donald Trump remain influential

Texas has managed to do so through a bill devised by a former law clerk of the late Justice Antonin Scalia of the United States Supreme Court. That is noteworthy.

The Texas law circumvents normal judicial review at the federal level by employing a strange twist. Its provisions would not be enforced by the state, but rather by individual citizens.

That encourages vigilantes, putting people of differing opinions at each other’s throats. It thus stokes the fire of culture wars in the United States.

Taking responsibility for laws

Chief Justice John Roberts called the law “not only unusual, but unprecedented” and joined the Court’s three liberals in recommending that the law be stayed, until “the courts may consider whether a state can avoid responsibility for its laws in such a manner.”

Increasing use of SCOTUS’s “shadow docket”

The Texas case came through what SCOTUS watchers call its “shadow docket,” that is, the Court’s practice of ruling on issues without full briefings, legal analyses or oral arguments.

SCOTUS has allowed Texas to remove the constitutional rights of women in the state – without explanation, argument or accountability.

What can be the reason for five justices blindly stoking the already flammable culture wars? What can possibly be the reason for defying the established system of judicial review?

One reason stands out: The five are conservative Roman Catholics. The most recently appointed one, Amy Coney Barrett, was, like the author of the Texas law, Jonathan Franklin Mitchell, a clerk for and remains a great admirer of Justice Antonin Scalia, also a Roman Catholic.

I emphasize conservative Roman Catholic, for two of the dissenters are Roman Catholics (Sonia Sotomayor and John Roberts).

WASPs no more

The earlier times when Americans were gravely worried about falling under the spell of Roman Catholic rule through the Vatican have been long gone.

The fear at that time was at least somewhat surprising in a country which, by tradition and especially as expressed in its economic and political power structure, has always been predominantly Protestant.

Viewed in that light, it is all the more surprising that the U.S. Supreme Court now features a total of six Catholics on the bench, accounting for two-thirds of its total number of justices.

There are seven with Neil Gorsuch, whose affiliation is listed as Anglican/Catholic.

Meanwhile, even after decades of strong inward migration from largely Catholic Latin America, Catholics only account for 20% of the total U.S. population.

That is less than the number of those who declare themselves “unaffiliated” (26%). Meanwhile, 43% are Protestant and 2% Jewish.

Goodbye to proportionality

The new imbalance favoring Catholics serving on the Supreme Court is more surprising, as it has been a feature of U.S. society to see that ethnic and religious proportions are observed when making appointments to representative bodies.

And if there were an imbalance, then the presumption has been that the tilt would be in favor of the dominant culture, not toward a minor one.

The religious composition of the court

This is evident in the fact that, after its inception in 1789, justices on the court were almost uniformly Protestant.

And of the 114 justices who have been appointed to the court, 91 have been from various Protestant denominations, 13 have been Catholics and eight have been Jewish.

In view of the new personnel structure of the U.S. Supreme Court, it is important to note that, until the beginning of the 20th century, only three Catholics had been appointed to serve on the court.

The first very prominent – and proudly – Catholic Justice was Antonin Scalia, appointed in 1986.

Following the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, there are now two Jewish Justices serving on the court, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan, both appointed by Democratic Presidents.

But far more shocking against the backdrop of the strongly Protestant traditions of the court, not a single Protestant is now serving on the Supreme Court (although one, Neil Gorsuch, raised as a Catholic, now attends Episcopalian church services).

Progress from the Kennedy times?

On the surface, one could be tempted to argue that all of this represents major progress in the evolution of American society. After all, why should religious affiliation matter at all?

That, notably, was very much a core issue in the 1960 U.S. presidential election when John F. Kennedy, an Irish Catholic from Boston, ran against Richard Nixon, the Republican and until then Vice President of the United States (under Eisenhower).

A U.S. governed from the Vatican?

As very seriously argued at the time, if Kennedy were to be elected, that would be akin to the United States being governed from the Vatican (Those opposing Kennedy on religious grounds asserted that “In the Pope, We Hope” would replace “In God We Trust.”). Such was the degree of religion-fused dismay about the rise of the Irish Catholics.

John F. Kennedy himself offered assurances that, as President, his views and actions would not be governed by the Vatican.

Whatever the concerns about Coney Barrett or others on the court, nobody is seriously arguing that they are steered directly by the Vatican in Rome.

The two chief problems with the majority of conservative Catholics on the Court are, however, the influence of conservative Catholic ideology and their proximity to the arch-conservative Republican party.

Why Republicans choose conservative Catholics

Except for Justice Sotomayor, who was a strong dissenter in the Texas decision, all six Catholic Justices were nominated by Republican Presidents.

Which gives rise to the question: What are the characteristics that Catholic Justices provide which makes them so appealing to Republicans – and to the de facto Republican Party organizations, such as the Federalist Society, which groom and pre-select judicial nominees?

Doctrinaire thinkers

Any person’s personal faith is ideally unassailable, and in and of itself should not be a factor in their being chosen or not chosen for public service.

However, the structures of religious bodies can, indeed, have an effect on a believer’s way of regarding governance in their country and, in the case of judges and justices, on their judicial – and political – reasoning.

To begin with, the structure of Roman Catholicism is widely known to be hierarchal as well as patriarchal.

While the general teachings of the Church often are admirably Christian in essence, the Catholic Church certainly does not shy away from offering firm positions on temporal, earthly matters of governance and behavior as well.

To an astonishing degree, considering that this is the 21st century and that the Reformation happened over 500 years ago, the structure still prevailing inside the Church teaches Catholics to be obedient to a hierarchy of men.

These, often elderly, men, from the local priest to the Pope, have major influence on people’s lives and life choices.

Doctrinal statements on many subjects are issued, in a top-down fashion, by the Vatican. There, it is largely formulated by the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, one of the most important – and conservative – parts of the Roman Curia.

Despite ever stronger murmurs at the grass roots, there is no effective form of democratic input, nor is there a real opportunity for appeal of its decisions.

Why Catholic Supreme Court Justices are so comfortable with constitutional originalism

It is no coincidence that a strong leaning toward originalism
and textualism is espoused by the most conservative Catholic Supreme Court Justices.

To date, this applies especially to Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, following in the footsteps of Judge Barrett’s “mentor,” Anthony Scalia.

In this way, they achieve a curious result: Catholic Supreme Court justices treat the U.S. Constitution – a temporal document composed by human beings in all their wisdom as well as in all their human faults – as if it were some mystical holy scripture, divinely inspired.

If nothing else, going the next step and vesting the “correct” reading of the U.S. Constitution in a strict originalist frame, at best betrays an overwrought adherence to authority.

As with all religions, Roman Catholicism’s ecumenical and fundamentalist branches intensify belief in the Church’s current structures.

The apparently fervent participation of Judge Barrett in such a group as “People of Praise” is indeed relevant to her service as a justice.

In addition, recent scandals associated with that group’s schools, on which Justice Barrett served as a board member after the abuse was well documented, show how ideology can overshadow reason.

U.S. Republicans’ and Catholics’ very similar structures

The contemporary Republican Party resembles the male-dominated and elite-driven structure of the Roman Catholic Church.

The party eschews participatory democracy and does not trust participation by common people in any significant manner.

It excels in luring them with mellifluous promises as well as ideologies of security (particularly against change), but it does not encourage their independent thought.

Unsurprisingly then, what the Republican Party expects from their nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court is basically to follow authority and party dictates.

Just follow the party dictates

More directly put, this translates into voting for the outcomes the Republicans need politically from their nominees to the court.

For instance, in recent months, SCOTUS has used the shadow docket on cases about Covid restrictions on religious groups, the Trump Administration’s “remain in Mexico” policy and the emergency ban on evictions.

Other more mainstream issues are indeed litmus tests for Republican appointed justices, including campaign finance, the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms, and – quite salient these days – voting rights.

The practices of Protestantism

The basic reason why Republicans evidently don’t want to rely any longer on justices of protestant faith lies in the structure of Protestantism.

In contrast to Roman Catholicism, it has far more democratically governing bodies. From the earliest days of the Reformation onward, they are at least conceptually based on a bottom-up approach.

Indeed, the Protestant denominational structures had at least an indirect influence on the structure of the U.S.’s political governing bodies themselves.

Though Protestant denominations were for centuries also male-dominated, they admitted women both to the clergy and to governing bodies many decades ago.

Further, Protestant religious practice rests on the idea of the “priesthood of all believers,” that is, each person must exercise their independent conscience and make their own decisions.

This is, in many ways, a heavier burden than having one’s opinions and decisions handed down from above. In the context of the U.S. Supreme Court, that burden is more likely to guarantee a more independent judicial thought process.

Why one’s personal religion and service as a justice are deeply intertwined

For all these reasons, questions about how a nominee thinks judicially do indeed relate to their religious preferences and practices.

For that same reason, their past decisions at lower courts should be read for evidence of religious thinking and what they might mean to a democratic society.

Effectively undercutting the separation of church and state

The separation of church and state has been a governing concept in the United States since its founding. The Establishment Clause is the first provision in the Bill of Rights, assuring that Congress “shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

Even having a two-thirds Catholic majority on the U.S. Supreme Court does not by itself constitute Congress establishing a religion.

However, the influence that such a majority can attain serving on the Supreme Court – an overly powerful body in the U.S. system of governance – can be exercised in a subtle, at least somewhat veiled but nevertheless very effective manner.

Railing against judicial “activism”: A code word

That is precisely what we are seeing now with the Court’s majority supporting a trick state law instead of the constitutional rule of law.

The Republicans have railed against “activist” judges, meaning those appointed by Democrats, whereas the Republican appointed justices are demonstrating activism pure and simple.

The “shadow five” in the recent Texas abortion law decision have acted against all Enlightenment principles of the rule of law.

Wielding their “shadow docket,” they bear a striking resemblance to the secretive Vatican Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith. The people of the United States, whose self-rule is seriously jeopardized, are the potential losers.

U.S.: An increasingly secular society

Finally, U.S. society is increasingly a secular society. That should extend to the rule of law. A secular society based on laws will protect all religions better than one based on any one set of doctrines.

Secular thought, too, is free of the constraints of specific doctrines that divide a modern nation.

It is thus well-suited to unite a diverse nation, in which individuals may choose whatever religion they wish to practice, but they may not impose any element of that religion on others.

Conclusion

Rendering justice ultimately calls for a secular view of the judicial branch in modern democracies.

On September 7, the Supreme Court of Mexico, a largely Catholic country, ruled that criminalizing abortion is unconstitutional.

As Ana Margarita Rios Farjat, one of three female justices on the court, wrote, “I’m against stigmatizing those who make this decision, which I believe is difficult to begin with, due to moral and social burdens. It shouldn’t be burdened as well by the law.”

Martin Luther King said, “Justice is love in calculation.” Viewed in that frame, justice is not based on Christian, Judaic, Islamic or Buddhist love – it is human love, “in calculation”.

And that calculation is the process of judicial thinking that must, as the U.S. founders intended, remain free of any “established religion.”

Within that freedom, the rule of law should prevail in a secular society whose government at every level, unlike that of Texas, takes responsibility for its actions.

This article is republished from The Globalist: On a daily basis, we rethink globalization and how the world really hangs together. Thought-provoking cross-country comparisons and insights from contributors from all continents. Exploring what unites and what divides us in politics and culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter. And sign up for our highlights email here.

Why has Republican rhetoric gotten so unhinged? It’s pure projection

Some Republicans have dialed up the hyperbole to express their indignation about President Biden’s vaccine mandates. Here are two tweets from South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster:

The American Dream has turned into a nightmare under President Biden and the radical Democrats. They have declared war against capitalism, thumbed their noses at the Constitution, and empowered our enemies abroad.

Rest assured, we will fight them to the gates of hell to protect the liberty and livelihood of every South Carolinian.”

Hearing Republican politicians speak about the American dream while voting against a livable minimum wage and undermining unions and consumer protection, is always, well, a little rich.

In this little tirade, McMaster was merely piling on while reacting to the supposed tyranny of Biden’s recently announced mandates for vaccinations or testing in the workplace and in school.

So: You will fight sensible policies in an ongoing global health crisis — one that has already taken at least 660,000 lives of your own countrymen — to the gates of hell? Beyond the obvious morbid jokes that statement naturally elicits (e.g., Trevor Noah: “Normally, that statement is hyperbole, but with COVID you might actually get the chance.”), where can McMaster now go if he wants to further ratchet up this rhetoric?

Before I listen to you, you’ll see me do-si-do with Satan himself!
Do so, and you’ll be up the River Styx without a paddle, pardner!
I’d rather traverse down all nine levels of Dante’s Inferno, with a poet, than be bipartisan with the likes of you!

And how about that use of “thumbing their noses”? With that aged locution, the good governor is, without doubt, speaking directly to his demographic.

If one wanted to use old-fashioned phrases or words, one might ask: What is it with this ceaseless perfidiousness from the right? Merriam-Webster defines “perfidious” as “untrue to what should command one’s fidelity or allegiance.” Synonyms include faithless, false, disloyal, treacherous and traitorous.

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One need only consider the Republican votes during the two impeachment trials of Donald Trump, or their Trumpian adherence to the Big Lie about the 2020 election, or their whitewashing of the deadly insurrection at the Capitol, to understand the word. It might be a fun game to connect the most apt synonym with specific members of the House or Senate.

For decades the Republican game has been to claim that liberals and progressives are out to ruin the country with their unholy desire to see a bit more sharing of wealth and resources. But the rhetoric they’re employing lately seems truly biblical, end-times unhinged, of the “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore” variety. And it all seems to be a psychological projection of their own desire to bring the American experiment as a democratic republic to an end.

The left now understands (let us hope) that like the British aristocracy of the 18th century, the GOP is going to war to retain power by any means. We need a modern-day Paul Revere (and a William Dawes, who didn’t get a mention in the famous Longfellow poem) to raise the alarm. Their signals in the Old North Church today might be: “One if by gerrymandered land, and two if by voters put out to sea.“

Our modern-day Revere, Stacey Abrams, can see those three lanterns glowing, day and night. Even with her eyes shut.

Gun manufacturers quietly target young boys using social media

When Nikolas Cruz, a then-19-year-old from Parkland, Florida, stormed the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018 with a semi-automatic rifle, gunning down fourteen students and three staff in roughly six minutes, those unfamiliar with Cruz’s personal history felt like the tragedy came out of nowhere. Cruz, like so many mass shooters, had exhibited all of the signs of someone to watch out for long before. Prosecutors found that Cruz had a well-documented affinity for guns and violence. He started playing violent video games as a middle school student, and sought to be a U.S. Army ranger, allegedly telling a family friend that he “wanted to join the military to kill people.” Cruz was described by friends and family as being a highly impulsive teen prone to emotional outbursts often ending in violence. He was also known as an avid user of social media – particularly Instagram – which for years provided a him platform to boast about his gun collection as well as his proclivity for animal cruelty.

In February of 2017, just three days after withdrawing from Stoneman Douglas High, Cruz purchased a Smith & Wesson M&P 15 – an AR-15 style semi-automatic assault rifle that bears similarities the the military’s M-16. Somehow, he’d passed a background check that included a mental health component, despite being referenced in at least 45 calls to law enforcement spanning back to 2008. A year later, shortly after the FBI was anonymously warned about his potential to carry out an act of mass violence, Cruz brought his rifle to Stoneman Douglas High and executed the deadliest high school shooting in U.S. history.

Gun reform advocates have worked to understand why an adolescent like Cruz – who had a long history of behavioral issues – was able to legally obtain such a lethal weapon. Companies like Smith & Wesson market their firearms to young men – a demographic that represents a disproportionate amount of mass shooters. So Everytown for Gun Safety and Brady – arguably the two foremost gun control groups in America – renewed their request for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate the marketing practices of Smith & Wesson. Their plea, which stems from a complaint jointly filed to the FTC last year, airs out a litany of ways in which the gun giant allegedly attempts to connect with younger audiences, often pushing the envelope of consumer protection law or at times even flouting it altogether.

“It doesn’t take a marketing expert to understand what they’re trying to appeal to,” Kris Brown, President of Brady, said of Smith & Wesson’s marketing practices in an interview with Salon. “They’re trying to market the gun as a totem – a substitute for masculinity to teenagers.”

One of the ways that Smith & Wesson imbues its firearms with a sense of machismo, Brown said, is by creating a sense that its products are in some way affiliated with the U.S. military and law enforcement. Indeed, the company has regularly used such imagery on its website and Instagram, sporting pictures of camo-clad military soldiers as well as police officers serving in the line of duty. Smith & Wesson even offers its own line of firearms called “M&P” specifically devoted to military and police use. (As it so happens, an M&P gun was also used in the Parkland shooting.)

But by and large, the company sells its products to regular consumers, who have no military or police affiliation. In fact, according to a Freedom of Information Act request issued by Everytown and Brady, Smith & Wesson has secured just one small contract with the military over the last decade – a 250-unit supply of revolvers sent to Thailand back in 2012.

Despite this, Smith & Wesson has repeatedly emphasized the need to impart a “halo effect” around its products by associating them with military and law enforcement. In fact, Smith & Wesson went so far as to cite the effect as one of its key “growth drivers,” per an investor presentation from 2012, and continued to do so in subsequent presentations. Asked about the effect during a 2016 earnings call with investors, the company’s CEO said: “It certainly gives your product a lot of credibility if it is used, adopted and well-regarded by that professional community because the consumer does pay attention to that.”

Apart from its potential to mislead buyers, the company’s halo effect is especially concerning because it’s “attractive to a certain subset of young men who are fixated on law enforcement and military,” Alla Lefkowitz, Director of Affirmative Litigation at Everytown and a signatory of the group’s complaint, said in an interview.

“You find examples of that in someone like the Parkland [school] shooter, someone like the Kenosha [unrest] shooter, someone like the Poway [synagogue] shooter,” told Salon. And when it comes to consumer protection law, she said, “we see that as a real problem…because it doesn’t appear to be true that Smith & Wesson’s M&P line assault rifles are used by the military.”

The gun lobby’s alleged effort to foist guns onto young men and adolescents is not a novel phenomenon. For decades, gun manufacturers have sought to sustainably capture the interest of younger buyers, using new methods of marketing and merchandising to give their products a more youthful appeal.

The Violence Policy Center (VPC) detailed this strategy in a comprehensive report from 2017. It notes, for example, how the gun lobby mass-produces light-weight “tactical” rifles designed for shooters with smaller frames, often colored-coded with respect to gender. VPC specifically found that Smith & Wesson at one point offered its M&P 15 – the same gun used by Cruz – in “Pink Platinum, Purple Platinum, and Harvest Moon Orange.”

In the past, some gun producers, like Thompson/Center, have been staggeringly candid about their bid to appeal to younger consumers. For instance, in a review of Thompson/Center’s child-friendly gun “Hotshot,” the company’s director of marketing quoted back in 2014: “We’re targeting the six- to 12-year-old range and feel that with the inclusion of the one-inch spacer in the box, there will be a longer period that the child can use the rifle, potentially out to 15 years old.”

Meanwhile, youth-centered trade publications, like NRA Family or Junior Shooters, heavily feature guns tailored for kids and adolescents, often framing them as family-oriented purchases that preserve American values, like freedom.

“Each person who is introduced to the shooting sports and has a positive experience is another vote in favor of keeping our American heritage and freedom alive,” wrote Andry Frink, editor of Junior Shooters, in a 2012 editorial. “They may not be old enough to vote now, but they will be in the future. And think about how many lives they will come in contact with that they can impact! Each of us affects others, and it is up to us how we make an impact on the future.”

While federal law prohibits anyone under eighteen years old from owning a handgun, it’s fair to say that the gun lobby has, for better or worse, deeply embedded itself into parts of American youth culture. According to a 2015 survey by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, about 72 percent of gun owners started hunting between the ages of six and fifteen. About 1 in every 18 high school students go to school armed with a gun, the American Academy of Pediatrics found in 2019.

The Washington Post observed that many states throughout the south and midwest have no age restriction on long guns (rifles and shotguns) to begin with. Given the wide swathe of literature that correlates gun ownership with household deaths and injuries, we should be especially concerned about more guns getting into the hands of kids and adolescents, Josh Sugarmann, Director of VPC, told Salon.

“We know from decades of research that bringing a gun into a home increases the risk of homicide, suicide and unintentional injury. That’s just a fact,” Sugarmann stated in an interview. “And the answer to that is ‘let’s introduce children to it as early as possible?’ We don’t apply that same standard to things like alcohol.”

Over the past several decades, gun manufacturers have largely marketed toward younger audiences through traditional modes of print advertising, like magazines and catalogues. But more recently, they’ve drastically narrowed their focus on one channel in particular: social media.

This largely appears to be the case with Smith & Wesson, which now heavily relies on its Instagram page in particular to promote its products. While Smith & Wesson engages in many of the tactics discussed above – that is, posting pictures of teens shooting guns and drawing dubious associations between its products and the military – Smith & Wesson also apparently employs its own “influencers” and “sponsored shooters” to connect more intimately with younger audiences.

The phenomenon, Everytown’s complaint alleges, is especially controversial because these personalities routinely fail to disclose their financial linkages to Smith & Wesson, despite promoting the company’s products. The result, Brown told Salon, is that the company’s influencers are able to pass off their paid promotions as authentic opinions – and in the process, avoid a relationship with youngsters feels “transactional.”

“If someone tells you, ‘Hey, I’m being paid to do this,’ it changes [the relationship] from an individual connection to ‘I’m dealing with a sales person,'” Brown told Salon. “But that’s not how the law is supposed to work. That’s not how disclosure is supposed to work. There are people selling things every single day who are influencers. And typically, the way it’s supposed to work is: a disclaimer…and a statement.”

Smith & Wesson’s apparent brand ambassadors include shooting instructor Ava Flanell, trick shot artist David Nash, digital marketer Nikki Boxler, former chief of police Ken Scott, as well as professional competition shooters Jerry Miculek and Julie Golob – all of whom respectively have thousands of Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube followers. These influencers often use subtle ways of disclosing their relationship to Smith & Wesson, like naming the company hidden hashtags or putting it in “More” or “About Me” sections. However, according to the FTC Endorsement Guidelines, such admissions are a far cry from the gold standard, which demands recurring disclosures throughout each new post with simple and clear language. Salon reached out to the aforementioned influencers, but none responded to requests for a comment. Smith & Wesson also failed to respond to Salon’s inquiries. Asked whether Instagram had any responsibility to moderate poorly-disclosed endorsements of firearms, a Facebook spokesperson told Salon: “Branded content that promotes weapons are not allowed on Instagram and we remove posts that we find to be violating.”

While the apparent lack of disclosure by the named influencers is legally questionable, it’s also concerning with regards to Instagram’s user demographics, Brown said. According to Statista, nearly 30% of Instagram’s users fall into the 18-24 age range. A 2017 AP-NORC survey found that 73% of American teens use Instagram, with 66% on Facebook.

“Adolescents are more susceptible to advertising and especially advertising that endorses or simulates risky behavior, right?” Lefkowitz said. “And that’s why alcohol companies, cigarette companies, and car companies have to be careful about the way that they market it.”

Sugarmann suggested that it’s only a matter of time before the gun lobby is held to account for its adolescent marketing efforts.

“The industry has just sort of been operating under the radar for a very long time on this front,” he said. “And it’s…an area that deserves very close scrutiny.”

James Webb Space Telescope: An astronomer explains how to send a giant telescope to space and why

The James Webb Space Telescope is scheduled to head to space on Dec. 18, 2021. With it, astronomers hope to find the first galaxies to form in the universe, will search for Earthlike atmospheres around other planets and accomplish many other scientific goals.

I am an astronomer and the principal investigator for the Near Infrared Camera — or NIRCam for short — aboard the Webb telescope. I have participated in the development and testing for both my camera and the telescope as a whole.

To see deep into the universe, the telescope has a very large mirror and must be kept extremely cold. But getting a fragile piece of equipment like this to space is no simple task. There have been many challenges my colleagues and I have had to overcome to design, test and soon launch and align the most powerful space telescope ever built.

In order to detect the most distant and oldest galaxies, the telescope needs to be huge and kept extremely cold. NASA/Chris Gunn, CC BY

Young galaxies and alien atmospheres

The Webb telescope has a mirror over 20 feet across, a tennis-court sized sun shade to block solar radiation and four separate camera and sensor systems to collect the data.

It works kind of like a satellite dish. Light from a star or galaxy will enter the mouth of the telescope and bounce off the primary mirror toward the four sensors: NIRCam, which takes images in the near infrared; the Near Infrared Spectrograph, which can split the light from a selection of sources into their constituent colors and measures the strength of each; the Mid-Infrared Instrument, which takes images and measures wavelengths in the middle infrared; and the Near Infrared Imaging Slitless Spectrograph, which splits and measures the light of anything scientists point the satellite at.

This design will allow scientists to study how stars form in the Milky Way and the atmospheres of planets outside the Solar System. It may even be possible to figure out the composition of these atmospheres.

The NIRCam, seen here, will measure infrared light from extremely distant and old galaxies. NASA/Chris Gunn, CC BY

Ever since Edwin Hubble proved that distant galaxies are just like the Milky Way, astronomers have asked: How old are the oldest galaxies? How did they first form? And how have they changed over time? The Webb telescope was originally dubbed the “First Light Machine” because it is designed to answer these very questions.

One of the main goals of the telescope is to study distant galaxies close to the edge of observable universe. It takes billions of years for the light from these galaxies to cross the universe and reach Earth. I estimate that images my colleagues and I will collect with NIRCam could show protogalaxies that formed a mere 300 million years after the Big Bang —when they were just 2% of their current age.

Finding the first aggregations of stars that formed after the Big Bang is a daunting task for a simple reason: These protogalaxies are very far away and so appear to be very faint.

Webb’s mirror is made of 18 separate segments and can collect more than six times as much light as the Hubble Space Telescope mirror. Distant objects also appear to be very small, so the telescope must be able to focus the light as tightly as possible.

The telescope also has to cope with another complication: Since the universe is expanding, the galaxies that scientists will study with the Webb telescope are moving away from Earth, and the Doppler effect comes into play. Just like the pitch of an ambulance’s siren shifts down and becomes deeper when it passes and starts moving away from you, the wavelength of light from distant galaxies shifts down from visible light to infrared light.

The five layers of silvery material underneath the gold mirror are a sunshield that will reflect light and heat to keep the sensors incredibly cold. NASA/Chris Gunn, CC BY

Webb detects infrared light — it is essentially a giant heat telescope. To “see” faint galaxies in infrared light, the telescope needs to be exceptionally cold or else all it would see would be its own infrared radiation. This is where the heat shield comes in. The shield is made of a thin plastic coated with aluminum. It is five layers thick and measures 46.5 feet (17.2 meters) by 69.5 feet (21.2 meters) and will keep the mirror and sensors at minus 390 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 234 Celsius).

The Webb telescope is an incredible feat of engineering, but how does one get such a thing safely to space and guarantee that it will work?

Engineers and scientists tested the entire telescope in an an extremely cold, low-pressure cryogenic vacuum chamber. NASA/Chris Gunn, CC BY

Test and rehearse

The James Webb Space Telescope will orbit a million miles from Earth — about 4,500 times more distant than the International Space Station and much too far to be serviced by astronauts.

Over the past 12 years, the team has tested the telescope and instruments, shaken them to simulate the rocket launch and tested them again. Everything has been cooled and tested under the extreme operating conditions of orbit. I will never forget when my team was in Houston testing the NIRCam using a chamber designed for the Apollo lunar rover. It was the first time that my camera detected light that had bounced off the telescope’s mirror, and we couldn’t have been happier — even though Hurricane Harvey was fighting us outside.

Rehearsals and training at the Space Telescope Science Institute are critical to make sure that the assembly process goes smoothly and any unexpected anomalies can be dealt with. NASA/STScI, CC BY

After testing came the rehearsals. The telescope will be controlled remotely by commands sent over a radio link. But because the telescope will be so far away — it takes six seconds for a signal to go one way — there is no real-time control. So for the past three years, my team and I have been going to the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore and running rehearsal missions on a simulator covering everything from launch to routine science operations. The team even has practiced dealing with potential problems that the test organizers throw at us and cutely call “anomalies.”

To fit inside a rocket, the telescope needs to fold into a compact package. NASA/Chris Gunn, CC BY

Some alignment required

The Webb team will continue to rehearse and practice until the launch date in December, but our work is far from done after Webb is folded and loaded into the rocket.

We need to wait 35 days after launch for the parts to cool before beginning alignment. After the mirror unfolds, NIRCam will snap sequences of high-resolution images of the individual mirror segments. The telescope team will analyze the images and tell motors to adjust the segments in steps measured in billionths of a meter. Once the motors move the mirrors into position, we will confirm that telescope alignment is perfect. This task is so mission critical that there are two identical copies of NIRCam on board — if one fails, the other can take over the alignment job.

This alignment and checkout process should take six months. When finished, Webb will begin collecting data. After 20 years of work, astronomers will at last have a telescope able to peer into the farthest, most distant reaches of the universe.

Marcia Rieke, Regents Professor of Astronomy, University of Arizona

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

“These are my people”: The 5 most shocking revelations from Woodward and Costa’s new Trump book

Astounding claims about former President Donald Trump are being highlighted in Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s new book, “Peril.” Here are five of the most shocking revelations from the book.

1. Trump was angry with Paul Ryan for criticizing protestors in Charlottesville because “these are my people.”

According to “Peril,” as reported by HuffPost, the former president was not pleased when Ryan spoke out against white supremacy after the “Unite the Right” rally that took place in Charlottesville, Va., back in 2017.

At the time, Ryan described white supremacy as “repulsive” after Trump suggested there were good people on “both sides.” Ryan also insisted that Trump had “a moral leadership obligation to get this right and not declare there is a moral equivalency here.”

A furious Trump reportedly phoned Ryan and chastised him for not being “in the foxhole” with him.

“These people love me. These are my people,” Trump reportedly told Ryan. “I can’t backstab the people who support me.”

2. Trump’s claim that there were good people “on both sides” was fueled by “Unite the Right” rally goers’ overwhelming support of him.

At one point during his call with Ryan, he admitted that there were “some bad people,” but because of their support for him, many of them were also “good people.”

“I get that. I’m not for that. I’m against all that,” Trump reportedly said. “But there’s some of those people who are for me. Some of them are good people.”

3. General Mark Milley had defense officials take a secret oath when Trump became too unpredictable following the Capitol riots.

General Mark Milley had great concerns about Trump’s mental health following the insurrection on the U.S. Capitol. In fact, he was so concerned about the president’s impulsiveness that he secretly had top defense officials take a private oath. They were to report to him first if Trump ordered them to launch nukes.

“No matter what you are told, you do the procedure. You do the process. And I’m part of that procedure,” Milley told the officers, according to the book. The top-ranking military advisor is also said said have “went around the room, looked each officer in the eye, and asked them to verbally confirm they understood.”

4. Trump threw tantrum when Pence refused to help him overturn the presidential election.

According to the book, Trump reached an unprecedented point of desperation when he wanted former Vice President Mike Pence to aide him in his effort to overturn the election. According to Vanity Fair, Woodard and Costa detailed one encounter where Trump whined and told Pence they wouldn’t be friends anymore if he didn’t participate.

After relentlessly pressuring Pence despite him having no real authority to do his bidding, Trump resorted to threats.

“You don’t understand, Mike,” Trump said. “You can do this. I don’t want to be your friend anymore if you don’t do this.”

“If you don’t do it, I picked the wrong man four years ago,” adding, “You’re going to wimp out.”

5. Trump believed Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) betrayed him.

Trump was enraged when McCarthy condemned January 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol. According to Trump, it was the ultimate betrayal. The book sheds light on Trump’s reaction to McCarthy’s words.

“This guy called me every single day, pretended to be my best friend, and then, he f****d me,” Mr Trump reportedly said of tthe top-ranking Republican lawmaker back in February. “He’s not a good guy.”

“Peril” Is set to be released on September 21.

Trump’s kids kept their free limo access after he left office — and it cost taxpayers $1.7 million

Former president Donald Trump issued a “highly unusual order” before leaving office — awarding six months of extra Secret Service protection to his four adult children and three top administration officials.

The Washington Post reported Friday that the total cost for the additional protection was $1.7 million.

Although this represents only a fraction of the the Secret Service’s $2.4 billion budget, one government watchdog said the charges represent a “moral choice” for the Trump children — “whom the agents trailed to ski vacations, weekend houses, a resort in Cabo San Lucas, and business trips abroad,” according to the Post.

Jim Helminski, a former Secret Service executive, said Trump appears to have given “a public service as a private benefit to his inner circle.”

“Who wouldn’t enjoy continuing their free limo service and easy access to restaurant tables?” Helminski said. “Even if there was a credible risk to family and associates of Trump these people are now private citizens who can afford to hire some very talented private security firms for their personal protection.”

Jordan Libowitz, a spokesman for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said Trump’s children failed the “moral choice” test when they declined to write off at least one portion of the Secret Service charges.

“The patriotic thing would obviously be, not charging the government to stay at your properties, and not profiting or profiteering off the government,” Libowitz said. “It is just so easy for them to write off the rooms. And we’re not seeing that.”

LeVar Burton’s next move after “Jeopardy!” could be his own game show involving his love of books

As the long and much-publicized saga of the search for a new full-time “Jeopardy!” host continues, it looks like fan-favorite LeVar Burton might have dodged a bullet. And it sounds like he might even agree.

In an interview with Trevor Noah on “The Daily Show” on Thursday, Burton revealed he has his sights set on a better fit than the “Jeopardy!” host position.

Since the search for a replacement for the late, great Alex Trebek began last November, Burton, who formerly hosted “Reading Rainbow,” emerged as a leading fan pick, propelled by his legions of loyal followers. A change.org petition for Burton to succeed Trebek has more than 300,000 signatures

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“I discovered then that the generation of adults now, who grew up on ‘Reading Rainbow’ — they were down with whatever it is I wanted to do, and the same was true with this ‘Jeopardy!’ thing,” Burton told Noah. “I made it public that I wanted it for myself, that it made sense to me, and they were all about it. It made as much sense to them as it did to me. And, so, they wanted it for me as much as I wanted it.”

Of course, for reasons unknown, the “Jeopardy!” search committee, which included Mike Richards, had other plans, initially selecting Richards and actress Mayim Bialik as co-hosts. The show has since been mired in scandal over choosing Richards, when previous lawsuits against Richards and sexist, racist comments he made on a 2014 podcast came to light.

Richards parted ways with the show, but Burton made it clear to Noah that he’s no longer interested in being considered.

“The crazy thing is that when you set your sights on something, you know, they say be careful of what you wish for, because what I found out is that it wasn’t the thing that I wanted after all,” Burton explained. “What I wanted was to compete. I mean, I wanted the job, right, but then, when I didn’t get it, it was, like, well, okay, what’s next?”

Since not being chosen by “Jeopardy!,” Burton revealed he’s received numerous “opportunities that have come my way as a result of not getting that gig” — opportunities that he “couldn’t have dreamt up.”

“If you had given me a pen and paper and said, ‘Well, so what do you want this to really look like?’ If it doesn’t include ‘Jeopardy!’ I wouldn’t have been this generous to myself,” he said.

In other words, as Noah put it, for Burton, “Jeopardy!” was really just “the shipwreck that leads you to the magical island.”

When Noah then suggested Burton start his own game show, the “Star Trek: Next Generation” star – who produces his own podcast “LeVar Burton Reads” – seemed open to this idea. “There’s got to be some sort of game show in and around books. There’s got to be something in that world,” said Noah.

“We are working on creating exactly what that is,” said Burton. “I never thought about hosting any other game show outside of ‘Jeopardy!.’ But now, they went in a different direction with their show, which is their right, and now I’m thinking, well, it does kind of make sense, let me see what I can do. So we’re trying to figure out what the right game show for LeVar Burton would be.”

This week, “Jeopardy!” announced that as it continues its search for a full-time co-host for Bialik, Ken Jennings, a former contestant and the guest host who received the highest ratings this past season, will co-host on an interim basis through the rest of 2021. The trivia show clearly has a lot to figure out these days — but Burton, on the other hand, sounds like he’s exactly where he needs to be.

You can watch Burton’s full “Daily Show” interview with Trevor Noah below.

Negotiations on the rocks: Bourbon giant Heaven Hill faces strike as workers demand “respect”

A group of 10 men and women wearing ball caps and carrying picket signs reading “Keep Calm and Be Union Strong” and “Heaven Hill on Strike, Support Local” gathered Wednesday on a steep, grassy knoll in Bardstown, Ky. About once a minute, their conversations were punctuated by the horns of rumbling pick-up trucks and semis speeding down the state highway — a response to the group’s hand-painted sign urging passersby to “Honk for Support.”

“There’s some gray areas in the contract that we don’t like,” Mike Corbitt, one of the strikers, said. “Basically, it’s going to end up making us work seven days a week with no overtime. We just feel like Heaven Hill has always preached to us that we’re family-oriented.”

“You see my family, if you turn around,” he added after pausing and gesturing up the hill. “It’s these guys and gals sitting on this picket line.”

The nearly 420 employees of Heaven Hill who have been on strike since Sept. 10 are represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 23D. The bourbon distillery “signaled that it wanted to assign new hires to nontraditional schedules that would include weekend work,” Local 23D President Matt Aubrey told the Associated Press.

Current employees claim that the company has not been transparent about how the new weekend shifts would impact their work schedules. They voted overwhelmingly to reject a new five-year contract offer, according to Corbitt.

“We’re not here to bankrupt them by no means,” he said. “We just feel that the last contract — it was pretty much a smack in the face. We want to get back to work, but we’re determined to strike as long as it takes.”

Heaven Hill — which produces legacy bourbon brands like Elijah Craig, Evan Williams, Henry McKenna, Larceny, Parker’s Heritage Collection and Old Fitzgerald — isn’t the only food and spirits producer that has faced strikes in recent months. As Salon previously reported, about 200 Nabisco workers represented by the Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers (BCTGM) union went on strike in Portland last month. They were followed by workers in Colorado, Virginia, Illinois, and most recently, Georgia.

That strike is still ongoing.

In July, as the Pacific Northwest faced historic, sweltering temperatures, workers at the famed Voodoo Doughnuts went on strike after attempts to mitigate the effects of the heat — wet towels, chilled Gatorade and shifting production hours to cooler times of the day — were unsuccessful. Some employees reported feeling nauseous and shaky, especially when working by fryers, where ambient temperatures reached nearly 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

And in February, fast food workers in 15 cities, including Atlanta, Chicago and Detroit, held a Black History Month strike to demand that chains like Burger King, McDonald’s and Wendy’s increase minimum wages to $15 an hour.

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These strikes highlight the growing tensions between food industry workers and corporations, which have only been further illuminated by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. While many industry workers’ jobs were deemed “essential” by the government last year — and many Americans realized for the first time how precarious the nation’s supply chains are as they faced empty supermarket shelves — workplace conditions didn’t necessarily improve.

Food industry workers have had to navigate new health and safety issues, irate maskless customers, and in some cases, the discontinuation of “hero pay.” Meanwhile, many food corporations saw record profits.

Nabisco, for instance, reported more than $5.5 billion in profits in the second quarter of 2021; the company’s CEO, Dirk Van de Put, received almost $17 million in total compensation in 2020. In contrast, the median employee compensation is $31,000. To keep up with the increased demand, Nabisco’s parent company, Mondelēz, began moving some workers from traditional 9-to-5 work schedules, sometimes to 12- and 16-hour shifts.

Heaven Hill is in a similar position. Kentucky has been in the midst of a “bourbon boom” for over a decade, which has served the distillery well. In June of this year, the company opened a new $19 million expanded visitor’s center in anticipation of post-pandemic tourism.

However, the distillery recently terminated employee healthcare coverage and benefits due to “the union contract expiration and resulting strike between U.F.C.W. Local 23D and Heaven Hill,” according to a Sept. 11 letter from the distillery obtained by Salon.

“Your current coverage will be reinstated as soon as the work stoppage has ceased, concurrent with the ratification of the new contract, and you have returned to work,” the letter said.

At the same time, the bourbon community has begun to apply pressure on Heaven Hill. Numerous bars across the state have taken Heaven Hill products off their shelves, including Buffalo Wings and Rings in Bardstown. District manager Jessica Raikes told local TV station WHAS that she supported the union workers.

“Without us and them, who are they?” she said.

Bourbon enthusiasts have also taken to Twitter with a message for the distillery.

As a @HeavenHill1935 consumer, I support its workers on strike against healthcare cost hikes & drastic changes to their schedules, including overtime cuts.

Heaven Hill Distillery: give your workers a FAIR contract that keeps America's distillery jobs good jobs! #StepUpHH

— Steve Arnold (@datadaddy) September 17, 2021

“As a @HeavenHill1935 consumer, I support its workers on strike against healthcare cost hikes & drastic changes to their schedules, including overtime cuts,” Steve Arnold tweeted. “Heaven Hill Distillery: give your workers a FAIR contract that keeps America’s distillery jobs good jobs!”

Corbitt, meanwhile, is eager to get back to work; however, he plans to be on the picket line until the situation changes.

“We come together, and we’re gonna stay together,” he said. “We need respect, and it’s high time we get it.”

More from Salon Food:

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp keeps mentioning failed AIDS vaccine mandates. But there is no AIDS vaccine

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, keeps mentioning the failed campaign to vaccinate Americans against the AIDS virus as an example of the pitfalls of healthcare mandates.

Except the AIDS vaccine doesn’t exist. And there sure wasn’t a failed campaign to mandate it.

He made the comments most recently on an episode of the right-wing commentator Erick Erickson’s podcast, emphasizing that as a result of his knowledge of the nonexistent AIDS vaccine, he believes that education is a more effective tool than mandates.

“That is basically how the AIDS vaccine worked. People wouldn’t take it early on because it was mandated, they started educating people and now it is doing a lot of good out there,” Kemp told Erickson. “Same scenario, different year that we are dealing with right now.”

A fact check from Atlanta TV station 11 Alive rated Kemp’s claims “false” — and noted that the governor has made similar comments about AIDS vaccines at least two other times over the past year.

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When reached for comment by the station, Kemp’s office said he meant to mention the human papillomavirus, or HPV, vaccine. But even this statement raises eyebrows — the HPV vaccine is also mandated in a number of states to attend public schools (among other inoculations), a campaign that has been largely effective in getting school-age children vaccinated, 11 Alive reported.

The governor has been a vocal opponent of recent public health efforts to tamp down on the spread of COVID-19. Kemp has repeatedly said that he will never sign off on mask or vaccine mandates while in office, drawing the criticism of public health experts.

In fact, the state’s public health commissioner, Dr. Kathleen Toomey, even had her lawyer write up a formal letter last year stating that she thought the governor’s plans to reopen live entertainment venues was a bad idea, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It ultimately did not stop Kemp from doing so.

“It’s one thing to say you’re following the science; it’s another thing to shoehorn the science into what you want it to be,” Amber Schmidtke, a public health researcher who taught at Mercer University’s medical school in Macon, Georgia, told the paper. “A lot of people were hurt, and a lot of people died when they didn’t need to.”

Kemp acknowledged the difficulty of his decisions in a press conference during the brouhaha, saying: “We had to make some very tough choices during extraordinary times, and there is no playbook for this.”

“Looking back one year, every day is a reminder of the things that we went through, the tough decisions that we made.”

He’s also been a supporter of former President Donald Trump — but earned a very public bout of anger from the ex-commander-in-chief when he resisted Trump’s attempts to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results.

Since then, however, Kemp has pushed voting laws that not only restrict access to the ballot for many Georgians but also allow state officials to stage hostile takeovers of local election boards — raising concerns about Republican efforts to subvert future elections.

“Just pray for me please”: Laura Loomer suffers “brutal” symptoms after hoping she would “get COVID”

Far-right anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer said Thursday that she tested positive for COVID-19 and feels like she got “hit by a bus” after dismissing concerns about infection.

Loomer in December wished to get infected so that she can show people it was not dangerous.

“I hope I get COVID just so I can prove to people I’ve had bouts of food poisoning that are more serious and life threatening than a hyped up virus,” she wrote in a post on the right-wing social network Parler. “Have you ever eaten bad fajitas? That will kill you faster than COVID.”

But Loomer said in a new post on the TrumpWorld social network Gettr that she tested positive and is suffering from severe symptoms.

“Yesterday I was feeling ill. I had a fever, chills, a runny nose, sore throat, nausea and severe body aches that made my whole body feel like I got hit by a bus, and after sleeping for a few hours, my symptoms started to remind me of how I felt when I had a bad case of the flu a few years ago,” she wrote. “So I took a COVID test and it came back POSITIVE.”

Loomer wrote in another message on Telegram that she can’t begin to describe how terrible the symptoms are.

“Just pray for me please,” Loomer wrote. “Can’t even begin to explain how brutal the body aches and nausea that come with covid are. I am in so much pain. This is honestly the worst part about it.”

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Loomer went on to push more conspiracy theories about the vaccine, which has repeatedly been shown to be safe and highly effective, and said she would never get vaccinated. Instead, she wrote, she is taking the antibiotic azithromycin, which has been touted by former President Donald Trump but has not been shown to reduce Covid symptoms and could result in gastrointestinal side effects, according to a recent study published in the medical journal JAMA. Loomer said she is also taking hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug that was also promoted by Trump but has not been found to be an effective treatment and could result in “serious heart rhythm problems and other safety issues, including blood and lymph system disorders, kidney injuries, and liver problems and failure,” according to the Food and Drug Administration.

But Loomer is also receiving a Regeneron monoclonal antibody treatment, she wrote, an effective but costly (to taxpayers) treatment that she credited Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for promoting. In fact, President Biden and the White House have repeatedly pushed the treatment for sick patients as well.

Loomer, a far-right conspiracy theorist who has worked with Project Veritas and Infowars, drew national headlines in 2018 after she was banned from Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, PayPal, Uber, Lyft and other services for spreading hateful messages about Muslims. But her brief moment of fame drew Trump’s endorsement in her campaign for a House seat in Florida, which she ultimately lost by 20 points.

Since her loss, Loomer has largely focused on spreading debunked conspiracy theories about life-saving vaccines on far-right platforms where she hasn’t been banned.

“I believe when a few years pass, we will see that the vaccines will have killed more people than COVID,” she previously wrote.

In another post, she wrote that COVID was the “biggest hoax of our lives besides the 2020 election,” echoing Trump’s Big Lie.

On Thursday, she complained that she could not get a doctor to prescribe her ivermectin, a drug used to treat parasites in humans and deworm livestock. The FDA says there is no existing data to show that the drug is effective against COVID, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have warned doctors against prescribing it. Some Southern states have seen spikes in poison control calls after people resorted to using the animal version of the drug, which can result in severe side effects.

“A lot of doctors are really weird about prescribing it,” Loomer complained. “This is the insane world we live in.”

Jared Kushner’s family firm set to unleash eviction wave amid pandemic

Properties owned by former White House adviser Jared Kushner’s family company have filed at least 590 eviction lawsuits since the start of the coronavirus pandemic and more than 200 in 2021 alone, putting “countless tenants” at risk of losing their homes in parts of the U.S. where Covid-19 transmission levels remain dangerously high.

That’s according to a detailed analysis conducted by the government watchdog group Accountable.US, which examined public eviction filings submitted largely by properties under the control of Westminster Management, a subsidiary of Kushner Companies. In his 2020 financial disclosure, Kushner—former President Donald Trump’s son-in-law—reported $1.65 million in income from Westminster Management, the only item listed in the “Employment Assets & Income” section of the filing.

In a report (pdf) provided exclusively to Common Dreams, Accountable.US compiled the publicly available eviction suits submitted by Westminster properties, including 2021 filings that have not been previously reported. The group emphasized that its list of filings is likely incomplete, given that many lawsuits may not yet be available to view online.

The analysis comes less than a month after the conservative-dominated U.S. Supreme Court struck down a nationwide moratorium that protected millions of people from eviction for non-payment of rent—a decision that housing advocates warned could spark a devastating wave of evictions and worsen the pandemic.

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“Jared Kushner is the poster child for ultra-rich landlords clamoring to boost their bottom line by kicking families to the curb, even if it comes at the expense of public health,” Kyle Herrig, president of Accountable.US, told Common Dreams. “By siding with big rental companies, the Supreme Court veered even further to the right and welcomed a homelessness crisis that will fan the flames of the once-in-a-lifetime pandemic.”

“With eviction protections gone,” Herrig added, “corporate landlords like Kushner are relishing the soonest opportunity to evict the vulnerable, but it’s still a choice: is it worth making themselves a little bit richer in the short term while making communities where their tenants reside far less healthy? We hope they put people before profits.”

According to Accountable’s report, Westminster properties and other companies in which Kushner holds investments have filed at least 96 eviction-related lawsuits in New Jersey since the pandemic began, and more than 40 this year alone. All of the New Jersey filings “were in counties that appeared to be covered by the extended CDC moratorium as of August 26, 2021,” the group found.

The same was true of Westminster-owned properties in Maryland and Virginia, Accountable.US noted.

The Washington Post reported last November that throughout the pandemic, “Westminster has been sending letters to [Maryland] tenants threatening legal fees and then filing eviction notices in court―a first legal step toward removing tenants.”

“Those notices are now piling up in local courthouses as part of a national backlog of tens of thousands of cases… as eviction bans expire and courts resume processing cases,” the Post noted at the time. “Those facing eviction proceedings once courts begin hearing cases again include a nurse who struggled financially during the pandemic, healthcare administrators, and a single mother who is currently unemployed.”

The Supreme Court’s ruling against the CDC eviction moratorium on August 26 removed the last line of defense for many at-risk tenants who have struggled to pay rent amid the pandemic-induced economic downturn. A dashboard produced by the National Equity Atlas and Right to the City shows that more than 5.8 million households are currently behind on rent, holding a combined total of $15 billion in rental debt.

Kushner Companies is hardly the only corporate firm rushing to evict tenants who have been stuck waiting for federal rental assistance that’s been infuriatingly slow to arrive. According to the latest data from Princeton University’s Eviction Lab, landlords across six U.S. states and 31 cities have filed for 510,453 evictions since mid-March of 2020.

As Bloomberg recently reported, “owners of large apartment complexes have filed the lion’s share of evictions against tenants” throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, which has exacerbated the nation’s preexisting housing crises.

“Across a dozen cities and counties where data are accessible, evictions at just a small number of apartment buildings contributed between one-fifth and one-half of all pandemic eviction filings,” Bloomberg noted, citing figures from the Eviction Lab. “If the evictions to come in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision follow the same course as the evictions that persisted while the moratorium was still in place, then they will disproportionately fall on Black and immigrant families living in class-B or class-C apartment complexes owned by large landlords.”

Following the Supreme Court’s decision to scrap the CDC eviction moratorium—which corporate landlords sued over and lobbied hard against—members of Congress faced growing pressure to enshrine emergency tenant protections into federal law. Hours after the Supreme Court’s ruling, Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) and dozens of other House Democrats sent a letter imploring their party’s leadership to “act with the highest levels of urgency to advance a permanent legislative solution… to extend the life-saving federal eviction moratorium for the duration of the deadly global health crisis.”

Weeks later, Congress has yet to act. Earlier this week, Bush introduced legislation to expand access to rental aid during the pandemic, but it’s not clear when—or even if—the bill will get a vote in the House.

“So how are renters expected to stay afloat amid a nationwide housing shortage and crumbling federal protections from evictions?” Sabiha Zainulbhai, senior policy analyst at New America’s Future of Land and Housing program, asked in a CNN op-ed on Tuesday. “Unfortunately, the answer is not clear.”

“Given the logjam in the distribution of rent relief, there’s diminishing hope that aid will reach renters’ doorsteps before eviction notices will,” Zainulbhai wrote. “Despite federal guidance, the distribution of this aid has been too slow and ineffective to meet the scale and the pace of the need. Meanwhile, the Delta variant is still a threat, hiring has slowed to its lowest rate since January, and to top it all off, pandemic unemployment benefits have expired. The outlook for renters is not good.”

“The Morning Show” shifts to cover the pandemic, but still needs a shot in the arm to find its soul

If you enjoyed “The Morning Show” in its first season, why? Seriously, please consider that question and answer honestly. Did you love Jennifer Aniston? Wasn’t Reese Witherspoon fantastic? Put them together and . . . wow, right? Better than “Big Little Lies“! Then there’s the #MeToo of it all with the usually likable Steve Carell channeling his finest version of a creep in sheep’s wool into disgraced news man Mitch Kessler. It’s soapy and torrid, but it has a relevant theme.

Now ask yourself: what was the larger point of whatever was happening behind all that celebrity glow and Billy Crudup’s vaguely Sorkinian monologues? Not the theme – “The Morning Show,” adapted from Brian Stelter’s 2013 bestseller “Top of the Morning,” announces that as loudly as a Times Square billboard. But the point of it, if there is one, is supposed to illuminate that theme in a way that transcends the plot’s basic motions.

Beyond its fictionalized rehashing of Matt Lauer’s sexual misconduct and the allegations of management’s cover-up of his behavior at the “Today” show, it never definitively lands on one. That makes it a box of truffles that look luxurious but prove hollow once you bite into one.

Still, to some folks chocolate is chocolate, and the combined presence of Aniston and Witherspoon can make any empty calories taste like a five-star dessert.

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This show’s main saving grace is that people see Aniston as a type, so showrunner Kerry Ehrin writes her star co-anchor Alex Levy in a way that allows the actor to play against type. Aniston is a spokesperson for a skincare brand associated with wholesomeness; Alex is a backstabber.

Witherspoon’s Bradley Jackson is a more familiar fit, in that she’s a reporter from a conservative Southern family who Alex plucked out of cable news obscurity for entirely self-serving reasons. Through moxie and charm, Bradley bucks the odds to legitimately earn her spot on national TV. But there is a plain purpose to Bradley’s role within her show’s ecosystem, in the same way Crudup’s driven executive Cory Ellison designates himself as the heart of its network home UBA. Witherspoon’s Bradley is the small fry who joins forces with Alex, the bigger fish, to bring down a great white shark. The catch is that once Jaws sinks, so does Bradley’s Q score.

Aniston’s and Crudup’s performances keep the action interesting even when the larger story isn’t. And the dialogue really is the thing for Crudup, who inserts the cruel laugh of a master of the universe into tight spaces before he cuts someone off at the knees.

Little of this changes in the second season. Instead, the show serves up more of what was already a lot, setting the action in the year that was far too much for most: 2020.

Tossing in a few more popular actors such as Julianna Margulies amplifies the celebrity magnetism while still neglecting to effectively connect its slew of concepts until the very end of the season. Another common argument in favor of the first season is that it got better in its back half, but it’s a shame the writers didn’t continue that momentum.

Indeed, the second season’s clunky initial developments further expose the show’s habit of treating supporting characters like wheeled devices, incorporated to symbolize a moment, represent a certain point of view or cart foreshadowing detail from one episode to another. Few if any of them ever benefit from worthwhile character development.

Before I’d chalk this up to laziness, but now I’d toss some that blame on the very real factor that’s still ruining our lives: the pandemic.

Season 2 only spans the earliest days of the slow-moving nightmare, asking us to look backward at a period that seems like another life, and at a New York from another plane of existence. Although it sets us down for the briefest moments right after Alex and Bradley’s live broadcast T-boning of UBA’s sexist pustule of a network president Fred Micklen (Tom Irwin), it then leaps eight months ahead to the turning of the New Year.

In January 2020 nobody feared COVID-19. The Morning Show, however, receives earliest warning that its arrival is imminent. Nevertheless, no one takes it seriously. Bradley is fussing about her career. Alex abandoned her, retreating to a woodland hideout to write a memoir she hopes will deflate an impending tell-all about the show, and specifically Alex and Mitch, written by her nemesis Maggie Brener (an icy, serpentine Marcia Gay Harden).

In the same way “The Morning Show” doesn’t spark without Witherspoon and Aniston near one another, the show within a show isn’t working with Bradley apart from Alex. This leads Cory, now UBA’s version of Fred, to lure Alex out of her self-imposed exile with a sweetheart deal that brings her scapegoated producer Chip (Mark Duplass) back into the fold.

But it also resumes a version of the status quo that ensures other people like weekend host Daniel Henderson (Desean Terry) probably won’t ever get their shot. Bradley and Alex’s relationship is back on ice, only now the more seasoned anchor has to worry about Maggie, who circles ever closer, and Margulies’ Laura Peterson, who does not harbor warm feelings for Alex.

Meanwhile, as these rivalries ramp up (again) coronavirus rises from a background player to the season’s star. “The Morning Show” carelessly jams it along with other defining themes of 2020 into an overstuffed grab bag with “cancellation” written on it, with the purpose of examining how unimportant so much of this scheming is when the specter of mass illness and death suddenly threatens to definitively cancel everything. That reads more coherently than it plays, and rolls out clumsily, starting with placing characters in international locations where the virus hits hardest and earliest.

With Mitch, we get it; he’s excused himself to a locale where he can lament his loss of stature in luxury, style and, he presumes, relative anonymity. Another character pops up in Wuhan just as it’s shutting down, and it is implied the person has been there for some time with a news crew. Awfully convenient, isn’t it? But if the series mentions why UBA sent that person to that exact spot, out of all the places it could be – the point of the assignment, in other words – it doesn’t state it plainly enough to bolster an answer that’s more explicit than, “Because . . . the pandemic.”

The second season similarly mechanizes Margulies’ Laura to serve as a way in to examining the UBA workplace culture’s enduring subtle bigotry. The difference is that since Margulies has a sizable role in another major character’s storyline we get to know her far better than others who have been part of this show since the first episode.

Daniel, for instance, is a gay Black man, making him and Karen Pittman’s weary, poker-faced producer Mia Jordan convenient vehicles for the writers to make statements about the pervasive racism and misogynoir dominating the TV news industry. But the show defines Daniel by his frustration and anger, and Mia by her perseverance in the aftermath of Mitch’s betrayal, and not much else beyond those depressing factors. Worse, Daniel gets subjected to one of the most unrealistic and cringeworthy TV sequences you may sit through this year.

That beats being one of the many doorstops around the place, which describes just about everyone who isn’t one of the main stars.

Still, the actors who made “The Morning Show” worth watching in Season 1 haul it to a place in the second season where it actually shows signs of figuring itself out. Regrettably, and again, that doesn’t happen until the eighth episode, easily one of the series’ best, and the two that come after it.

Before that the writing pushes the show’s indulgent choices to orgiastic extremes.

Some of this works in Crudup’s favor, what with Cory’s penchant for forced optimistic, enthusiastically bungled metaphors and misinterpreted aphorisms. Cory is wrapped up in launching a streaming service nobody believes in and figuring out how to navigate the network’s youthful new president Stella Bak (Greta Lee) who’s mostly ticked off at not being taken seriously.

There’s a charm in the way Cory lures doubters under his sway with inspirational speeches that are one part Coach Taylor from “Friday Night Lights,” one part “Ted Lasso,” and two parts steer manure. Sometimes he achieves the perfect balance with this mess, such as when he coaxes Alex back into the “Morning Show” grinder by selling her on the image of being “Venus rising from the ashes.” Or when he critiques Stella’s empathetic management style while spewing confident noise about circles.

“Let the circle be unbroken,” she offers through a tense smirk, making his eyes brighten to a laser hotness. “Exactly!” he hisses through bleached teeth, excited that she seems to get him, and unaware that she’s paraphrasing a lyric from a dirge.

Aside from these trappings, the new season makes the curious choices to map out a possible pathway to redemption using Mitch, one of the show’s most despicable figures, to do so. Carell’s affability makes it possible to pull off. The vileness of what he and the real-life scumbag Mitch is modeled upon did makes this humanizing subplot tough to swallow. But it also prepares the audience to watch another character’s fall from grace and appreciate the comparative care with which that transpires.

“The Morning Show” certainly gets the most bang for the big bucks Apple TV+ paid its stars. But behind those names, the gleaming sets, beautifully cut clothing and chic Manhattan hotel rooms and luxury condos, it remains disappointingly devoid of feeling or intellectual weight. It wants us to be content to marvel at its framework of aspiration and drive, along with loving its two co-stars. After a point, though, the performances aren’t enough of a reason to continue ignoring the story’s lack of substance, guts and a soul.

The second season premiere of “The Morning Show” is currently streaming on Apple TV+ with new episodes dropping weekly.

Pentagon admits drone strike in Afghanistan killed 7 kids — and no ISIS-K fighters

General Kenneth Franklin McKenzie Jr., the current commander of the United States Central Command, now admits that a drone strike launched on August 29th in Kabul did not kill any ISIS-K fighters.

According to Fox News’ Lucas Tomlinson, McKenzie acknowledged that the only people who died in the strike were “10 civilians killed, including 7 children,” despite the fact that the U.S. military had justified the strike as needed to foil an ISIS-K terror plot.

McKenzie said that the U.S. had good intelligence about an ISIS-K operative using a vehicle near the Kabul airport to carry out a terrorist attack, but that the drone strike targeted the incorrect vehicle.

No disciplinary action will be taken against those who carried out the strike, McKenzie said.

Additionally, McKenzie praised the officials who carried out the strike for what he said was a carefully planned decision that simply happened to go wrong.

Nonetheless, McKenzie expressed regret for the strike’s end result and offered condolences to family members of the people who died as a result.