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Listen to Johnny Cash sing “Cocaine Blues” at his legendary, intimate Carousel Ballroom concert

For American music legend Johnny Cash, “At Folsom Prison” was a watershed moment. The live album, released in May 1968, changed everything for the country and western star. By that juncture, Cash was increasingly on the road to becoming a has-been. An out-of-control drug habit had left him reeling in recent years, flailing when he should have been making good on the promise of such early classic hits as “Ring of Fire” and “I Walk the Line.”

But first there was the Carousel Ballroom. With wife June Carter dead-set on helping her husband to clean up his act, Cash and his backing band, the Tennessee Three, played the San Francisco venue at the apex of the Haight-Asbury period. To say the least, Cash’s roots sound was a far cry from the psychedelic excesses of the era. With such a strange pairing in the offing — country music meets the tie-dyed set — something special was bound to happen.

For John Carter Cash, the concert proved to be a revelation: “what I believe to be one of the most intimate and connected shows I have ever heard,” according to press notes. Performed on April 24, 1968, scant weeks ahead of the release of “At Folsom Prison,” the Carousel Ballroom show has been captured in all its glory for an upcoming release by Legacy Recordings.

The concert was originally captured by audio engineer Owsley “Bear” Stanley, who frequently shared his talents with the Grateful Dead. When it came to recording Cash and his band — which featured Luther Perkins, Marshall Grant, and W.S. Holland — at the Carousel Ballroom, Stanley was determined to present the country music star in a new light.

As the engineer’s son Starfinder Stanley recalls, “Bear’s recording gives us an entirely different perspective on Johnny’s live sound during this creative peak, and is probably the closest to what it actually sounded like to be in the audience for a Johnny Cash show in 1968. There’s an idiosyncrasy to this recording; on every other Johnny Cash record you’ve ever heard, Johnny is centered in the stereo soundstage. But on this one, Johnny is entirely on the right channel, and the Tennessee Three are all on the left. That’s a bit weird until your brain adjusts, but you quickly realize that you’ve been set right between Johnny and his band.”

And once the listener’s brain makes the necessary adjustment, John Carter Cash’s words become ineluctably clear: Bear Stanley’s audio mix places you front and center, enhancing the intimacy of the concert experience in a most unusual and highly impactful fashion. Fans can check out the recordings, which have become available with such teasers as “Going to Memphis,” and, as of today, “Cocaine Blues.” With the latter song, Cash’s longstanding battle with drug abuse is on display, with the artist battling his private demons on a very public stage.

For Cash, the Carousel Ballroom show finds him on the cusp of a reinvigorated career. After “At Folsom Prison,” the artist would score his first number-one album on the Billboard pop charts on the strength of “A Boy Named Sue.” In short order, Cash would land his vaunted ABC television variety show, and his fame would never be in jeopardy again.

Unraveling the mysterious mutations that make delta the most transmissible COVID virus yet

Upon first inspection, the mutations in the highly contagious delta covid variant don’t look that worrisome.

For starters, delta has fewer genetic changes than earlier versions of the coronavirus.

“When people saw that the epidemic in India was driven by delta, they did not suspect it would be so bad or overtake other variants,” said Trevor Bedford, an evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

But those expectations were wrong.

Delta has kept some of the most successful mutations found in earlier variants, but also contains new genetic changes that enable it to spread twice as fast.

Delta is more dangerous in many ways. It has an incubation period of four days, rather than six, making people contagious sooner. When the pandemic began, people spread the original coronavirus to an average of two or three people. Today, people infected with delta infect six people, on average.

As of this week, the delta variant had caused at least 92% of the new infections in the United States, according to covariants.org, a research firm in Bern, Switzerland.

Although delta isn’t necessarily any more lethal than other variants, it can kill huge numbers of people simply because it infects so many more, said Dr. Eric Topol, founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute.

Scientists have sequenced delta’s mutations but are still trying to understand their significance, said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan’s Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization. “When we see the same mutations appearing repeatedly and independently, that suggests they’re important,” Rasmussen said.

Scientists have the best understanding of mutations on the so-called spike protein — which sticks out from the surface of the virus like a club — and which have been studied the most intensely because of its serious ramifications, Rasmussen said. The coronavirus uses the spike protein to enter human cells, and changes in the spike can help the virus evade antibodies.

Scientists believe one of the most important areas of the spike is the receptor-binding domain, the specific part of the protein that allows the virus to latch onto a receptor on the surface of our cells, said Vaughn Cooper, a professor of microbiology and molecular genetics at the University of Pittsburgh. Receptors are like sockets or docking stations that allow proteins to interact with the cell. Once the virus gains entry to the cell, it can cause havoc, hijacking the cell’s genetic machinery and turning it into a virus-making factory.

Delta’s Worrisome Mix

Delta’s rapid spread is particularly surprising given it lacks two mutations that made earlier variants so scary.

Delta doesn’t have the N501Y spike mutation found in the alpha, beta and gamma variants, which enabled them to invade cells more successfully than the original virus. That mutation changed one amino acid — a building block of proteins — in the receptor-binding domain.

Delta also lacks the E484K mutation, which has made the gamma variant so worrisome. This genetic change, sometimes called “Eek,” allows the virus to spread even among vaccinated people.

(Scientists use the Greek alphabet to name variants of concern.)

“The ‘D’ in delta stands for ‘different’ and a ‘detour‘ to a different genomic mutation path,” Topol said. “But it doesn’t mean ‘doom,'” he said, noting that existing covid vaccines remain mostly effective against the delta variant.

Vaccines protect people from covid by providing them with antibodies that attach themselves to the spike protein, preventing the virus from entering cells. By dramatically reducing the number of viruses that enter cells, vaccines can prevent people from developing severe disease and make them less infectious to others.

Delta does share mutations with other successful variants. Like all the identified variants in circulation, delta contains a spike mutation called D614G, sometimes known as “Doug,” which became ubiquitous last year.

Scientists think Doug increases the density of spike protein on the surface of viral particles and makes it easier for the virus to enter cells.

Delta also has a spike mutation called P681R, which closely resembles a mutation in the alpha variant that appears to produce higher viral loads in patients, Cooper said. People infected with delta have 1,000 times more virus in their respiratory tract, making them more likely to spread the virus when they sneeze, cough or talk.

The P681R mutation, also found in the kappa variant, is located at the beginning of a part of the genome called the furin cleavage site, Cooper said.

Furin is a naturally occurring human enzyme that gets hijacked by the coronavirus, which uses it to slice the spike protein into the optimal shape for entering the cell, Rasmussen said. The new mutation makes that sculpting more efficient, Rasmussen said.

Another delta mutation — also found in kappa and epsilon — is called L452R. Experiments suggest this mutation, which also affects the receptor-binding domain, acts to prevent antibodies from neutralizing the virus, Cooper said.

These mutations appear to be more formidable as a team than alone.

The genetic changes “are certainly doing something, but why that combination makes the delta variant more fit is not entirely obvious,” Bedford said. “Putting them together seems to matter.”

Delta also has developed genetic changes not seen in other variants.

One such spike mutation is called D950N. “This might be unique,” Cooper said. “We don’t see that anywhere else.”

The D950N mutation is different than other mutations because it’s located outside the receptor-binding domain in an area of the coronavirus genome that helps the virus fuse with human cells, Cooper said. Fusing with human cells allows the coronavirus to dump its genetic material into those cells.

This mutation could affect which types of cells the virus infects, potentially allowing it to harm different organs and tissues. Mutations in this region are also associated with higher viral loads, Cooper said.

Delta also contains mutations in a part of the spike protein called the N-terminal domain, which provides a “supersite” for antibodies to latch onto the virus and prevent it from entering cells, said Dr. Hana Akselrod, an infectious diseases specialist at the George Washington University School of Medicine & Health Sciences.

Mutations in this region make monoclonal antibodies less effective in treating covid and increases the delta variant’s ability to escape vaccine-generated antibodies, Akselrod said. That may explain why vaccinated people are slightly more likely to become infected with delta, causing mostly mild illness but allowing them to transmit the virus.

Delta’s Future Course

Scientists say it’s impossible to predict exactly how delta will behave in the future, although Topol said, “It’s going to get worse.”

Topol noted that delta outbreaks tend to last 10 to 12 weeks, as the virus “burns through” susceptible populations.

If the United States continues to follow a pattern seen in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, infections could rise from the current seven-day moving average of 42,000 cases to 250,000 a day. Yet Topol said the United States is unlikely to suffer the high death rates seen in India, Tunisia and Indonesia because nearly half the population here is fully vaccinated.

While some studies have concluded that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine stimulates strong and persistent antibodies against delta, a new report found that antibodies elicited by one shot may not be enough to neutralize delta. Authors of that study, from the New York University Grossman School of Medicine, suggested a second dose may be needed.

Two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine protect 94% of people from any symptomatic infection by the alpha variant, compared with 88% against the delta variant, according to a new study in the New England Journal of Medicine. Two doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine protect 75% of people from alpha and 67% from delta.

Cooper said covid vaccines offer remarkably good protection. “I will always celebrate these vaccines as the scientific achievements of my lifetime,” he said.

The best way to slow down the evolution of variants is to share vaccines with the world, vaccinating as many people as possible, Bedford said. Because viruses undergo genetic changes only when they spread from one host to another, stopping transmission denies them a chance to mutate.

Whether the coronavirus evolves more deadly variants “is totally in our hands,” Cooper said. “If the number of infections remains high, it’s going to continue to evolve.”

By failing to contain the virus through vaccination, wearing masks and avoiding crowds, people are allowing the coronavirus to morph into increasingly dangerous forms, said Dr. William Haseltine, a former Harvard Medical School professor who helped design treatments for HIV/AIDS.

“It’s getting better, and we’re making it better,” he said. “Having half the population vaccinated and half unvaccinated and unprotected — that is the exact experiment I would design if I were a devil and trying to design a vaccine-busting virus.”

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

Climate change is making poison ivy stronger and itchier

Poison ivy is a fixture of the landscape in eastern North America and parts of Asia. The noxious, rash-causing weed grows in rocky outcroppings, open fields, and at the edge of forests — it generally loves to take over disturbed areas. It can grow in partial shade and doesn’t give a damn about soil moisture as long as it’s not growing in a desert. The ivy is often identified in its plant form on the ground, but it can grow into a thick and hairy vine that curls around big trees and chokes out other native flora. No one knows why the ubiquitous plant causes an allergic reaction in human beings and some apes. It doesn’t affect any other animals that way, and researchers suspect that its allergenic defense mechanism may have evolved by accident. 

If you live in areas where there is a lot of poison ivy, you may have noticed that the plant appears to be thriving lately. The leaves are looking leafier, the vines more prolific. Your poison ivy rash may even feel more itchy. It’s not your imagination. Research shows that the main culprit behind climate change — increased concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — is supercharging poison ivy. 

The effect has been known since 2006, when Duke University researchers published a six-year study that showed poison ivy grew double its normal size when it was exposed to higher levels of carbon dioxide — levels on a par with the atmospheric carbon scientists anticipate seeing around 2050. The leaves on some individual plants grew by as much as 60 percent. Researchers also found that CO2 makes urushiol, the oil in poison ivy that causes the allergic reaction in humans, stronger. Plants rely on CO2 to make the sugars they need to grow, and increased concentrations of it were helping everyone’s least favorite plant thrive. The researchers surmised that increased levels of CO2 in coming decades would lead to bigger, faster growing, and itchier poison ivy plants. 

Elevated levels of CO2 might not be the only climate-related factor making poison ivy more of a threat. Jacqueline Mohan, a professor of ecology at the University of Georgia and one of the researchers who conducted that initial research on poison ivy and CO2 at Duke University, is looking into analyzing the effect that rising soil temperatures, another consequence of a changing planet, might have on poison ivy. The experiment is in early stages in the Harvard Forest — a 4,000-acre forest managed by Harvard University in Petersham, Massachusetts — and the findings have not been submitted for peer review yet. 

Mohan’s preliminary results show that a 5 degree Celsius (9 degree Fahrenheit) increase in soil temperature — roughly in line with the soil warming models predict under a worst-case climate change scenario — makes poison ivy grow 149 percent faster on average compared to ambient soil temperatures. “That’s just incredible,” Mohan told Grist. “Poison ivy might love soil warming even more than it loves CO2.” By comparison, the other plants she studies at the Harvard Forest only grow between 10 and 20 percent faster in warmer soil. She found that warmer soil temperatures led to larger poison ivy plants, too. Mohan did not find that the temperature of the soil had an effect on the potency of plants’ urushiol, a small silver lining.  

Mohan’s research at the Harvard Forest indicates that poison ivy is poised to do well in a warming world. “So far, poison ivy benefits from CO2, and it benefits from warmer conditions, and gosh only knows what happens when we do them both,” she said. “Which is of course what the planet is doing.” 

There’s also a much more direct way that humans are making poison ivy worse — by messing around with its habitat. “Humans are definitely making ideal poison ivy habitat,” John Jelesko, an associate professor at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and a poison ivy researcher, told Grist. He conducted some research recently while hiking along a section of the Appalachian Trail and found that human disturbance — campsites, picnic spots, well-trodden trails — increased the probability of poison ivy, because it likes to grow where other plants are scarce and there is a lot of sunlight. “It’s not very prevalent in the middle of the forest, let me tell you,” Jelesko said. “Whenever you get to disturbed habitat you find a lot more of it.” 

The takeaway is bleak: Climate change is supercharging poison ivy, and the plant likes to cohabitate with humans. Which means an extra dose of caution is in order when you’re out in nature. Even if you think you’re not allergic to poison ivy, Mohan says it’s best to keep an eye out for its distinctive clusters of three leaflets and steer clear just in case. The Forest Service found that between 70 and 85 percent of the population is sensitive to urushiol, and people are likely to become more allergic to it every time they are exposed. Tuck your pants in and watch where you walk, Mohan said. “When you’re dealing with nature, be smart,” she said. “Because nature is always going to win.”

All the signs that it’s time to repot your plant

There comes a time in every houseplant’s life when an upgrade in living accommodations is required, and it’s time for a repotting. This could be because your plant has outgrown its previous potting container or because it simply needs a soil refresh. Either way, repotting is an important part of keeping your plants happy and healthy long-term. Here’s what you need to know when it comes time to transfer your plant to a new home.

* * *

Signs it’s time to repot 

When it comes to how often houseplants should be repotted, it’s unfortunately not an exact science. It varies depending on the plant, the age of the plant, and the conditions in your home. Generally, young plants will need to be repotted more often than mature, established plants, but timing can ultimately vary.

One of the easiest ways to tell that a plant needs repotting is to check and see if the roots are growing out of the drainage hole of the pot. If so, this is an indication that the roots have run out of room and your plant needs a larger pot. Similarly, you may begin to notice that your plant is being slowly pushed upwards out of the pot by its roots, which is also a sign that your plant needs some more space to grow.

Yellowing leaves and loss of leaves, while they can be indications of lots of different problems, are also telltale signs that your plant may be rootbound. In both cases, there is not enough soil for the roots to support a strong, healthy plant so the plant begins to sacrifice foliage in order to preserve energy. Unfortunately, repotting a stressed plant can sometimes worsen its condition, so it’s important to ensure that your plant is not displaying these signs because of some other issue — like overwatering, under watering, or lack of light — before repotting.

* * *

Choosing the right soil 

Believe it or not, not all soil is created equal, and this is especially true when it comes to choosing the right soil for repotting your plant. For example, cacti and succulents are drought-tolerant, easily susceptible to root rot, and can survive in low-quality soils, so they do best in well-draining, sandy soil mixtures that are low in organic matter. Conversely, plants in the aroid family (like pothos, ZZ plants, and monsteras) appreciate nutrient-rich soil that’s high in organic matter, moist but well-draining, and provides adequate aeration to the roots. Before repotting your plant, it’s a good idea to do a bit of research about your plant’s unique needs and ensure that you have the correct soil to help your plant thrive.

* * *

All about potting containers 

When it comes to potting containers, the choices can be overwhelming. Plastic or clay? Drainage hole or no drainage hole? Deep or shallow? Small or large? The answer ultimately depends on two things: your plant’s needs, and your own personal preferences and care style.

Clay or terracotta pots are great for moisture control as they quickly absorb excess moisture in the soil, and are often chosen for plants that enjoy dry conditions. Plastic pots, on the other hand, don’t provide any moisture control benefits, so are usually chosen for plants that enjoy moist conditions. Keep in mind that if you choose terracotta for a moisture-loving plant, you will need to water it far more regularly than if you choose plastic, and if you choose plastic for a plant that enjoys dry conditions, you will likely need to water less often than if you chose terracotta or clay.

Generally, most gardeners choose pots with drainage holes for their plants to prevent water logging and root rot, but that doesn’t mean you need to pass up those cute decorative pots without drainage holes. You can simply use these decorative pots as pot covers by placing your potted plant inside to cover the plastic or terracotta pot that your plant lives in.

When it comes to choosing the correct pot size for your plant, some plants need more space than others, but as a general rule you should plan to use a potting container that is at least one to two inches larger than its previous pot.

* * *

Making the switch

Once you’ve determined that your plant needs to be repotted, prepared the correct soil, and chosen your new potting container, it’s officially time to repot!

Start by removing the old pot from the roots of your plant by turning the plant sideways and squeezing or gently twisting the pot away from the root ball. For plants that are extremely root bound this may be a bit difficult, so take your time and try to break as few roots as possible.

Once you’ve removed your plant from its old pot, loosen the root ball as much as possible — without breaking roots — to remove any old soil. Then, place the root ball in the new pot and scoop the new soil in around the plant, patting it into place as you go. Water your plant thoroughly and place it back in the same location that it was living before being repotted.

The NRA spent $22 million in legal costs over the course of the first five months of 2021: report

The National Rifle Association (NRA) spent $22 million in legal costs over the course of the first five months of 2021, according to Bloomberg News. They will likely surpass their record legal spending of $40 million in 2020.

The NRA has been fighting legal challenges from the New York attorney general over the fraud and misuse of funds that the organization endured under the leadership of President Wayne LaPierre. In their attempt to flee legal accountability, the NRA attempted to file for bankruptcy and restart the group in Texas where they’ll have protection from Republican officials.

It didn’t work.

“Legal costs were the nonprofit’s largest single expense after membership activities in the five months through May, when a judge rejected the gun-rights group’s bid to reorganize through bankruptcy,” the report said, citing documents they obtained. “While there’s no guarantee legal expenses will continue to rise at the same rate, they’ve accelerated since 2018, according to tax filings. That’s when staff members began expressing concerns about practices that have since led to costly disputes.”

The report also noted that the NRA has struggled to reach its peak donations achieved in 2016. Since that year their donations fell 21% by 2019. Unaudited numbers for 2020 show further declines.

“The NRA continues to manage its finances in the best interests of its members,” said NRA managing director of public affairs Andrew Arulanandam in a statement. “Importantly, the NRA emerged from the pandemic better situated than most nonprofits and advocacy groups.”

Read the full report at Bloomberg News.

This Democrat got big money from Big Pharma — and turned against lower drug prices

Rep. Scott Peters, a low-profile California Democrat now serving his fifth term in the House, two years ago supported a landmark bill that would have substantially lowered the cost of life-saving drugs for Americans. Now he’s the apparent leader of a group of centrist Democrats who oppose that very same bill, and who have collectively received hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the pharmaceutical industry.  

Peters’ apparent flipflop, reported by Stat last week, centers on H.R. 3, a Democratic House bill that would save American consumers billions of dollars on costly drugs for life-altering diseases like cancer, diabetes and multiple sclerosis.

Chief among the bill’s provisions is a rule that establishes what is called “international reference pricing,” effectively capping the price of a drug in the U.S. at 120% of the average price paid in Australia, Japan, Canada, Germany, France and the U.K. With that cap in place, the Secretary of Health and Human Services would then be mandated to negotiate drug prices directly with pharmaceutical companies, establishing a fixed price for a given drug that would apply to employers, private insurers and Medicare recipients.

H.R. 3 has been estimated to yield $120 billion in savings for consumers over the next decade, according to the nonpartisan Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. It’s no surprise, then, that 90% of American adults support the bill’s policy of letting the government negotiate with drug producers.

But when it comes to drug pricing in recent years, popular opinion has repeatedly been thwarted or ignored by Big Pharma, which has fought aggressively against H.R. 3 by locating and supporting sympathetic members of Congress — which now evidently include Scott Peters. 

In early May, Peters — who has represented California’s 52nd district, in and around San Diego, since 2013 and was once named “biotech legislator of the year” —  assembled a coterie of 10 moderate House Democrats to sign a vaguely-worded letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, urging her to consider a balance between “innovation and affordability.”

“As we have just seen with the lifesaving, record-breaking development of COVID19 vaccines and therapies, America benefits from the most innovative and capable researchers in the world, and from public-private partnership that encourages world-leading biomedical research and development,” the caucus wrote, adding: “To achieve this, we must garner bipartisan, bicameral support, with buy-in from a majority of Americans and stakeholders in the public and private sector.”

The letter never specifically mentions H.R. 3, but there is little doubt that’s the target. The lawmakers’ rhetoric echoes a favorite Big Pharma talking point: that government regulation of drug prices will disincentivize research and development. 

In late 2019, however, when the bill was first introduced, Peters praised the measure. He did express concerns that it might make drug development “particularly challenging for small and emerging companies in California” and introduced an amendment to support innovation, but ultimately agreed to back the bill. 

After that, the pharmaceutical industry began to flood Peters with campaign cash.

The Center for Responsive Politics found that during the 2020 election cycle Peters received nearly $230,000 from pharmaceutical and health companies, many of whose products would be directly targeted by the measure. According to FEC filings reviewed by Salon, Peters received money from Abbvie, AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Merck, Amgen, Johnson & Johnson and Gilead Sciences — an array of big-name pharmaceutical companies, none of which could plausibly be described as “small” or “emerging.”

During that same period, Peters’ emerging coalition of Pharma-friendly moderate Democrats likewise took in significant donations from companies in the sector, according to a report by Brick House. Among the major recipients were Rep. Tony Cárdenas of California ($144,735), Rep. Kurt Schrader of Oregon ($144,252), Rep. Stephanie Murphy of Florida ($120,912), Rep. Lou Correa of California ($98,125) and Rep. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey ($96,228) — all of whom had originally voted to approve the bill back in 2019. 

Just last month, Peters announced his opposition to H.R. 3, specifically objecting to international reference pricing, a provision of the bill that had not changed from 2019 to 2021. 

“I will not vote for that,” Peters said in an interview with Roll Call. “If you institute it, you won’t have cures because you’ll dry up all the private investment that does that research.”

Immediately after the letter to Pelosi from Peters and his allies, he once again received thousands of dollars in contributions from pharmaceutical interests, raking in $66,400 between May 4 and June 30 from executives associated with Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Bristol Myers Squibb, Merck and the industry trade group PhRMA, according to a Stat analysis.

None of this has gone unnoticed by advocates for patients and Social Security recipients. Over the last month, both Social Security Works and Patients for Affordable Drugs Now have run ads calling out Peters’ apparent flipflop, as well as the campaign cash he’s received from Big Pharma. 

Alex Lawson, the executive director of Social Security Works, told Salon that while the donations might help Peters get re-elected in the short term, they will damage his long-term political prospects. 

“Scott Peters’ doomed campaign to keep Americans paying the highest drug prices in the world is fully funded by the corporations who make billions off of those high prices,” Lawson said by email. “Being the paid mercenary for the corporations that profit off of withholding drugs to sick people might seem like a good way to make a lot of money, but Peters is going to learn that it is actually the best way to lose his job.”

David Mitchell, the founder of Patients for Affordable Drugs Now, echoed Lawson, saying that the Big Pharma donations were “the only precipitating event” that could conceivably have prompted Peters’ reversal on H.R. 3.

“When Scott Peters expresses strong opposition to H.R. 3, contrary to the support and proud vote he offered in 2019, he is standing with the pharmaceutical industry, which has given him a hell of a lot of money against the will of the American people,” Mitchell told Salon in an interview. “And that, to us — that’s unforgivable. Absolutely unforgivable.”

Salon asked Peters’ office for clarification on his evident change of heart. Peters declined an interview request, but his office provided the texts of two of his floor speeches from 2019 and his vote on an amendment to H.R. 3 that same year, saying that all three “show his longstanding concerns with the international [reference] pricing element of HR3.” 

In fact, none of those materials make clear Peters’ position on international reference pricing. Peters’ own amendment to the bill, introduced in 2019, does not address that issue.

Peters’ office further suggested that the lawmaker’s reversal on H.R. 3 was a question of political strategy and calculation: “H.R. 3 had no chance of moving through the Senate in 2019 without fixing the index pricing piece. The same is true today. Now is exactly the right time – both sides are motivated to lower drug costs and there is momentum to fix this. If we don’t make progress on this piece we run the risk of making no progress at all and that helps no one.”

Removing international reference pricing, however, fundamentally changes the nature of the bill. Without a price cap in place, the federal government is in a vastly weaker position to negotiate with drug manufacturers. 

As to the industry’s central claim that drug price controls will harm innovation, policy experts are skeptical. In a letter last month to the San Diego Tribune, Peters wrote that “accounting for failures, developing one new drug costs a company $1 billion to $2 billion.” Estimates that high, as the New York Times has reported, are generally products of abstruse corporate methodologies that account for amorphous expenses like opportunity or “time” costs. Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy nonprofit, found back in 2014 that drug companies actually spend an average of $161 million on R&D per new drug. 

Peters also claimed in his letter that “H.R. 3 would signal to potential investors that they might not be able to recoup their investment even if a product succeeds.” But the expenses associated with one truly innovative drug sometimes take only weeks for companies to recoup in profits, as The New Republic noted.  

Pro-pharma lawmakers — as Peters evidently is now — tend to frame price reductions as an unquestionable death blow to innovation. In fact, it’s “incredibly hard to predict how reductions in pricing may affect the future of drug development,” said Kristi Martin, who provides health care policy expertise to the Commonwealth Fund. 

“In the last decade we have seen a significant increase in drug costs in the U.S. and during that same period of time, generally all drugs coming to market relied on some portion of public funding for R&D,” Martin told Salon by email. “While several innovative drugs have come to market, most new patents granted are for modifications to existing drugs and not new drugs.” 

Martin directed Salon to a 2018 study by the Journal of Law and the Biosciences, which found that the vast majority of drugs introduced the global market are in fact retreads of drugs already on the market. This is largely the result of “evergreening,” a legal strategy in which drug companies make minuscule tweaks to existing drugs in order to renew their patents. In other words, most drugs introduced to the market are only “innovative” in their ability to generate endless streams of revenue.  

The solution, Martin said, is straightforward: “If we change the incentives and reward truly inventive, innovative advancements in treatments and increase funding for R&D, we can still have a robust pipeline that is driving toward effective cures and treatments.”

Scholars have also noted that pharmaceutical companies routinely spend more on lobbying and marketing than on R&D, another reflection of the fact that Big Pharma’s principal interest is in selling their products, rather than improving them. Just this month, the House Oversight Committee found that 14 pharmaceutical giants spent $58 billion more on buybacks, dividends and executive compensation than on R&D from 2016 to 2020. 

It’s definitely possible that the introduction of international reference pricing “would be a pretty significant reduction in revenue in the U.S.” for the pharmaceutical industry, Andrew Mulcahy, a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, told Salon. But Big Pharma is still “going to do very well in terms of a return,” he added, because its profits are already so immense. 

According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, between 2000 and 2018, 35 major drug companies received combined revenue of $11.5 trillion, with gross profit of $8.6 trillion. This amounts to a whopping 75% gross profit margin, nearly 10 times higher than the average profit margin found across U.S. industries, according to an NYU analysis. 

Numbers like that reflect a market dynamic that is “out of whack,” said Mitchell, the founder of Patients for Affordable Drugs Now.   

“We need both innovation and affordability, because drugs don’t work if people can’t afford them,” Mitchell said. “We believe there is plenty of room to lower prices and to ensure that we can continue to get the innovation we need and prices we can afford.” The “innovation scare tactic” used by the industry, he added, “feels like someone putting a gun to my head and saying, ‘It’s your money or your life.'”

What to expect if you get a breakthrough case of COVID-19

On July 24, Kurt Suchman, a 26-year-old freelance writer living in Seattle, started to drink a seltzer that they couldn’t taste.

“I tried another seltzer, and I was like, ‘okay I can’t really taste it,’ and then I pulled out a jar of horseradish and shoved my nose in it,” Suchman said. “I was like, ‘I guess I can kind of smell it,’ but at that point I was definitely a little freaked out.”

Suchman made an appointment for a COVID-19 test the next morning, which is when they started to feel “feverish.” Eventually, their test results confirmed what they expected: Suchman had COVID-19, despite being fully vaccinated in May with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. Suchman racked their brain trying to figure out how they got it. Suchman had not been in proximity of anyone with symptoms. Had it happened when Suchman traveled to Arkansas for a family emergency? Or perhaps at karaoke night? 

“I haven’t really been able to pin down where it’s from,” Suchman said. “The one thing I really want to know is what I can do to avoid it better next time.”

Suchman compared the experience to a cold or a “24-hour flu.” Yet contracting a virus for which they were vaccinated, and the unknowns surrounding transmission, stoked confusion and fear. Salon interviewed Suchman in the middle of their isolation.

It is likely that by now either you or someone you know has contracted a breakthrough COVID-19 case, the term for an infection that occurs despite vaccination. Breakthrough cases are becoming more frequent, particularly as the ultra-virulent delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 spreads across the globe. 

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), breakthrough cases were always expected to occur in small numbers, as no vaccine is 100% effective; the highest efficacy rate of any of the COVID-19 vaccines was 95% when they were originally studied in 2020 and early 2021. That number has diminished as more mutations have sprung up. Indeed, according to some studies, the three available COVID-19 vaccines are less effective in preventing infection from the delta variant due to its unique mutations.

Fortunately, all three vaccines are still very good at protecting against severe illness and death — meaning that if you do have a breakthrough infection, it will very likely be mild.

Still, there are no guarantees in life, nor in health. According to the CDC, 1,141 people with breakthrough cases have died; curiously, 26 percent of those deaths were asymptomatic, or the deaths weren’t entirely related to COVID-19. As of July 19, 2021, more than 161 million people in the United States were fully vaccinated against COVID-19.

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Unfortunately, there is no solid estimate of many breakthrough cases are mild, like Suchman’s was. According to ABC News, the CDC estimates 153,000 symptomatic breakthrough cases, which is still a small fraction (less than 0.1%) of the fully vaccinated population. The most common symptoms reported among those who have breakthrough cases, according to the ZOE COVID Symptom Study, are headache, runny nose, sneezing, sore throat and loss of smell.

If a vaccinated person experiences any symptoms of COVID-19 listed by the CDC, the public health agency recommends getting tested and isolating from others until a result is received. If the test is positive, an infected vaccinated person should isolate at home for 10 days. According to the CDC’s guidelines for the fully vaccinated, those infected with the delta variant can spread it to others.

The existence of breakthrough cases doesn’t mean that vaccines aren’t doing their job, experts say. In fact, merely  coming down with a mild infection rather than a severe one is often evidence that the vaccine is doing its job in helping your immune system fight the virus. Since the existing vaccines were developed to combat the alpha variant of SARS-CoV-2, it makes sense that they’re not as effective in combating the delta variant, whose mutations have shown to some extent to evade the immune response from the vaccines. Yet all the COVID-19 vaccines are mostly able to stop the infection worsening.

“In a vaccinated person, what will happen is that we already have cells that very specifically recognize an infected cell, and can aggressively target that infection so that the virus can no longer replicate,” said Dr. Nicole Baumgarth, a professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at University of California–Davis. “Even if we cannot stop the infection from happening, [the vaccine] stops it very early in its tracks; the less virus replication you have, the less symptoms you will have, the less disease and it gets easier for the immune system to mop up the little bit of virus.”

Signs of infection, like a fever, develop when the immune system has been activated to fight it.

“Some of the signs of disease are actually signs that the immune system has been activated,” Baumgarth said. “That’s one response to the body to fight the viruses, to increase the temperature.”

Baumgarth said it is in fact accurate to think of a breakthrough infection as a “booster shot.” However, Baumgarth would not advocate for people to purposely expose themselves to the virus. Yet a mild breakthrough case does build one’s immunity against the virus.

Of course, given the possibility of spreading the virus further, it is best not to get infected at all.

In mentally preparing for the possibility of breakthrough case, Suchman advised caution, even among the vaccinated. 

“Even though the symptoms have been pretty mild, you still don’t really want to be sick,” Suchman said. “It just feels extra gross now, like with all the work that we’ve been [doing] for the past year.

Fox News host Laura Ingraham: Capitol Police have no one to blame but themselves

The attacks on Capitol Police officers continued Wednesday night from Fox News’ Laura Ingrahm. Tuesday, she did her own mock award show to ridicule what she said was “acting” on the part of the cops.

Wednesday, however, she took it to a whole new level blaming Capitol Police and DC Metro cops, saying that they have no one to blame but themselves. Ingraham first incorrectly stated that they testified on Wednesday when they spoke on Tuesday, and she then claimed that police knew for “weeks” that the Capitol would be attacked.

The new GOP narrative is that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is at fault for Jan. 6 because somehow she had a death wish and wanted the Capitol to be overrun by violent Trump supporters who wanted to kill her, the vice president and other Democrats.

The House Select Committee intends to hear more about the warnings of Jan. 6. Thus far, we know that the social media site Parler had been sending the FBI warnings for weeks. Those warnings never made their way to Christopher Wray or to Pelosi. The Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley also heard that there was likely to be an attack that day. He didn’t brief Pelosi either.

The New York Times reported this week that three days before the siege on the Capitol, police were told to “stand down” and not use deadly force.

“In a 104-page document, the inspector general, Michael A. Bolton, criticized the way the Capitol Police prepared for and responded to the mob violence on Jan. 6,” said The Times. “The report was reviewed by The New York Times and will be the subject of a Capitol Hill hearing on Thursday.”

“Mr. Bolton found that the agency’s leaders failed to adequately prepare despite explicit warnings that pro-Trump extremists posed a threat to law enforcement and civilians and that the police used defective protective equipment. He also found that the leaders ordered their Civil Disturbance Unit to refrain from using its most powerful crowd-control tools — like stun grenades — to put down the onslaught,” the report continued.

The Sargent at Arms and the Capitol Police are all nominated by a series of Congressional committees. The Capitol Police chief reports to the Capitol Police Board, which three people run: the Senate and House Sergeant at Arms and the Architect of the Capitol. At the time, all three were appointed by Republicans. The former House Sergeant at Arms, Paul Irving, was appointed in 2011 when Republican Speaker John Boehner controlled the House.

Ingraham conveniently forgot to mention those facts.

You can watch the video below via Twitter: 

Kyrsten Sinema just threw an unexpected wrench into Joe Biden’s infrastructure plans

Arizona Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema was riding high on Wednesday as a group of Republicans announced their support for a bipartisan infrastructure deal, though by the afternoon, it still wasn’t clear if it had enough votes to pass. Just as momentum was building for that legislation, though, Sinema deflated hopes for Democrats’ follow-up act: a $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation bill.

The budget bill only requires 50 votes to pass, avoiding the 60-vote threshold that the Senate typically requires to enact a law. That means Democrats don’t need any Republican votes to pass a budget bill. But with only 50 Democratic lawmakers in the Senate, the party needs every member on board if it’s going to shove its spending priorities through the budget process, as has long been the plan. In a Wednesday statement to the Arizona Republic, though, Sinema announced she doesn’t want to spend $3.5 trillion in the bill.

“I have also made clear that while I will support beginning this process, I do not support a bill that costs $3.5 trillion — and in the coming months, I will work in good faith to develop this legislation with my colleagues and the administration to strengthen Arizona’s economy and help Arizona’s everyday families get ahead,” she said.

The budget bill includes spending on major Democratic priorities, including elder and disability care, climate change, and pre-Kindergarten education. With Sinema’s opposition to the current structure of the bill, it will have to be scaled back. She indicated that she supports some of the proposals but objects to the size.

Sinema has already irritated many of her Democratic colleagues and voters with her aggressive centrism. Unlike West Virginia Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin, Sinema comes from a swing state, rather than a deep red state, so it’s less explicable why she is such a frequent opponent of her party’s priorities.

And her announced opposition to the budget package comes at an awkward and tense time. Many progressives in Congress have been deeply frustrated with the interminable negotiations over the bipartisan infrastructure deal — in which Republicans haven’t been forced to make real substantive concessions. It was the centrists like Sinema and Manchin who insisted on carrying out the protracted negotiations with Republicans, even though the justification for the process was less than compelling. Progressives have gone along with the process and largely held their tongues because they saw the budget deal as the place where they could really achieve their priorities.

Now Sinema has announced that she’s not done using her leverage to control the process. She wants to slice up or contract the budget deal to suit her own preferences.

President Biden and the rest of the Democrats are highly motivated to pass something big, both to pursue their values as legislators and to prove to the voters that they’re worth keeping in power. But by making this play at a crucial point in the bipartisan negotiations, Sinema risks sparking a backlash from progressives who feel they’ve had the rug pulled out from under them. That could cause further turmoil within the ranks, and for no clear reason. Sinema gave no justification for scaling back the bill’s ambitions.

How Cinderella lost its original feminist edge in the hands of men

In the words of its publicity department, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new production of Cinderella offers audiences nothing less than “a complete reinvention of the classic fairy-tale.” Written by Emerald Fennell (Oscar-nominated for “Promising Young Woman”), the production promises a feminist revision of the classic fairy tale, updating the well-known story to reflect contemporary attitudes towards gender.

But Cinderella has always been a feminist text. You might have heard of figures like Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm and Walt Disney, each playing a key role in popularising the folk story for a new generation. But behind their versions of the classic fairytale lies an untold story of female storytellers like Marie-Catherine D’Aulnoy and the Comtesse de Murat.

Before the Grimms, these pioneering women were drawn to Cinderella not because they felt the story needed updating or revising, but because they were attracted by the culture that birthed it – a storytelling network created by and for women.

Cinderella’s origins

Cinderella began its life as a folk tale, passed orally from household to household. The earliest recorded copy dates back to China in 850-860. This version of the story probably entered into European society by the women working on the great Silk Road.

At a time when only men could be writers or artists, women used folk tales as a means of expressing their creativity. Female labourers and housewives passed the stories onto one another to dispense shared wisdom, or else to break up the boredom of another working day as they toiled away from the prying eyes of men.

These storytelling traditions echo to this day. It is where we get the notion of the old wives’ tale. According to feminist writers like Marina Warner, it is also why we have to come to associate gossip with women. Cinderella reflects these customs. It is a story about domestic labour, female violence and friendship, and the oppression of servitude. Perhaps most significantly, it is a story about female desire in a world where women were denied any role in society.

The precise story of Cinderella has always been in flux. In some, she still has a mother. In others, the stepsisters resort to slicing off their heels to win the heart of the prince. But whatever incarnation, Cinderella has historically been a story about women and for women. So what happened to poor Cinders to make her so powerless?

Well, men. As the story became increasing popular, male writers and artists became interested in adapting the tale. But in doing so, they found in Cinderella not a story of female wish-fulfilment but a more general sense of escapism.

It was Perrault who introduced the famous pumpkin and the glass slipper, giving the tale its two most iconic features. The Grimms turned the stepsisters ugly, as well as removed the fairy godmother in favour of a magical wishing tree. These adaptations reflected unconscious misogyny, stripping the story of much of its feminist potential and making it instead about enchantment over representation.

Cinderella goes to the cinema

These traditions continue in Cinderella’s cinematic adaptations. The first person to adapt Cinderella for the big screen was the French magician turned film director Georges Méliès. In his hands, the character became little more than a passive, frightened waif, her job seemingly to stand in the corners of the shots and look amazed at the latest special effect appearing on screen.

Decades later, Walt Disney used Cinderella as part of the studio’s strategy of mining European folk tales for popular entertainment, a tradition begun with “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (1937).

Released in 1950, Disney’s “Cinderella” reflected the conservative values of U.S. society at the time. The figure of the wicked stepmother took on a supervillainesque quality in the form of Lady Tremaine. While the figure of the stepmother had been the antagonist in most versions of the folk story, Disney’s Tremaine was a villain to rank among the studio’s many infamous examples of monstrous women. In Disney’s hands, an often nuanced character within the original tale was turned into a vivid caricature of feminine power and greed.

The most recent live-action remake starring Cate Blanchett as Tremaine did little to change these preconceptions of the folk tale, as Cinderella became a nostalgic symbol not only for childhood storytelling but for Disney as its most popular storyteller. The role of women in the creation of Cinderella as we know it was lost to animation and special effects.

So what is the moral of the story of this particular fairy tale? If anything, it’s that Cinderella is not a story that needs a complete reinvention. Instead, the story needs reclaiming from the hands of those who would dismiss it as just a fairy story or would use it as a vehicle for spectacle at the expense of the story buried beneath.

Alexander Sergeant, Lecturer in Film & Media Studies, University of Portsmouth

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

Report: Parkland survivor’s dad, radicalized by MTG, now thinks shooting was a hoax

According to an intriguing but unverifiable report in Vice News, the father of a survivor of the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, later developed the belief that the massacre was a “hoax” and the shooter was a “commie actor.” 

The story in Vice News chronicles a former Parkland student identified only as “Bill,” who says his father was gradually radicalized during the coronavirus pandemic by conspiracy theories spread by QAnon believers and prominent far-right figures like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. Bill claims his father went from being an anti-masker to a full-blown conspiracy believer. 

“It started a couple [of] months into the pandemic with the whole anti-lockdown protests,” the former Parkland student told Vice News. “His feelings were so strong it turned into facts for him. So if he didn’t like having to wear masks, it wouldn’t matter what doctors or scientists said. Anything that contradicted his feelings was wrong. So he turned to the internet to find like-minded people, which led him to QAnon.”

Vice reports that Bill was a member of the “final graduating class of survivors of the 2018 shooting,” and that nine of the 17 people killed were his classmates. Bill initially shared his story on a Reddit board, writing, “Back in January [his father] saw the video of Marjorie Taylor Greene harassing David Hogg (another student) about the shooting being a false-flag operation, and while my dad was already into Q, he’d never gone down that particular rabbit hole, and now he’s convinced everything was a hoax and it breaks my fucking heart.”

The father further believed, Bill told Vice News, that shooting suspect Nikolas Cruz was “a radical commie actor,” and scolded Bill over his perceived reaction to the shooting. “You’re a real piece of work to be able to sit here and act like nothing ever happened if it wasn’t a hoax,” the son recounted his father telling him. “Shame on you for being part of it and putting your family through it too.”

Bill is now 18 and has graduated from high school, he told Vice News, and now hopes to end his relationship with his father, writing in his Reddit post that the father he used to know “is completely gone and I miss him so fucking much.” He told Vice News he sees no hope of repairing their relationship once and for all, saying, “He’ll never stop on his own because there are always new theories and goalposts being moved. … I don’t know how to help someone that far gone.” 

Vice News says it spoke to Bill and “confirmed [his] claims about being a survivor of the school shooting,” but has not clarified how that confirmation was obtained. Salon and other news outlets have been unable to verify Bill’s identity or the authenticity of his story.

The reaction to Simone Biles shows our culture is getting better at talking about mental health

American gymnast Simone Biles is withdrawing from the individual all-around competition at the Tokyo Olympic Games. Biles did so after putting in a disappointing performance and, in her own words from earlier this week, realizing that she needs to focus on her mental health.

“I have to focus on my mental health and not jeopardize my health and well-being,” Biles explained. “It just sucks when you’re fighting with your own head.”

In the past, it would have been difficult to imagine anyone competing in the “toughness is its own reward” culture of athletics and openly taking time off for mental health reasons. When NFL quarterback Kerry Collins benched himself in 1998 because he realized his mental health issues were inhibiting his ability to play (he later admitted to struggling with alcoholism), the press reacted with befuddlement. The stigmas associated with mental health are not limited to sports: In 1972, Democratic vice presidential candidate Thomas Eagleton was revealed to have been hospitalized multiple times for depression and even received electroshock therapy. The news was a death sentence for the Democratic national ticket that year — even after Eagleton was replaced.

Thankfully, there are already signs that our culture is becoming more informed and progressive in its views on mental health. This was recently demonstrated by the ongoing movement to liberate pop star Britney Spears from an allegedly oppressive conservatorship, one that she entered after suffering from public mental health issues in 2008. For many years, Spears’ breakdown was the butt of jokes, mocked everywhere from tabloid magazines to popular movies like “Meet the Spartans.” Over time, however, attitudes toward mental illness have evolved. And as that has happened, the public began to question the assumption that someone with a mental illness automatically should lose basic freedoms.

Biles, thankfully, is receiving a somewhat healthier public response than what Spears, Eagleton and Collins faced in years past. HuffPost senior wellness editor Lindsay Holmes, for instance, tweeted, “No one would bat an eye if Simone Biles had to leave the Olympics because of a broken ankle. There should be no line drawn between a ‘mental’ or ‘physical’ health issue. They’re the same and they should be treated like it.” Chirlane McCray, New York City’s First Lady and a mental health advocate, posted on Twitter that “mental health challenges are a part of the human condition and can’t be ignored. I am proud of [Simone Biles] for showing the world you can prioritize your mental well-being above all else — even at the Olympics. You are a champion Simone, in so many ways, and we love you!”

“I’m glad that there’s athletes willing to talk about the mental aspect of sports,” sportscaster Dan Patrick told his audience. Dr. John Whyte, the chief medical officer at WebMD, offered his appreciation: “Thank you #SimoneBiles for reminding us there is no physical health without mental health. #mentalhealth,” he tweeted. Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., tweeted that she stands by Biles and Naomi Osaka, who withdrew from the French Open in May after officials would not allow her to protect her mental health by skipping press conferences.

“Your health and peace matters,” Bush wrote. “You’re reminding Black women that we can take the space we need for ourselves.”

Given the culture war in the United States today, which consigns everything and everyone to one of the two sides of the political aisle, it is not surprising that Biles’ announcement was not received with universal equanimity. Indeed, Biles has been outspoken in her criticism of former president Donald Trump and support for Black Lives Matter, and thus many right-wing types view her as an indelible line on their bulleted list of irredeemable public enemies. “Football players risk severe physical injury every time they take the field,” conservative commentator Matt Walsh tweeted. “You people are desperately trying to justify an Olympic athlete quitting on her team, and your arguments get dumber by the second. Just cut your losses here.” Breitbart’s Joel Pollak rhetorically posed: “How about the mental health of the gymnast who missed the Olympics by one spot before Simone Biles decided this was the time to take a mental health break?”

There are unique pressures facing black athletes that adversely impact their mental health, as Salon’s Kylie Cheung wrote after Osaka withdrew from the French Open. Cheung points out as example the racist epithets hurled at NBA players, writing, “this mistreatment of basketball players by fans may seem separate from the French Open rules that pushed Osaka out of the tournament, but it’s not. Rather, it’s an extension of the same, dehumanizing sports culture that often treats disproportionately Black athletes as objects of entertainment that owe media and racist fans unlimited access to their performances.”

Actor Graham Greene on how fear & golf relate: “It’s a game where you get to play against yourself”

Graham Greene often plays a wise First Nations character; his tribal cop roles in “Thunderheart” and “Wind River” are classic examples of that trope. But he can also send up that image, as he did in “Maverick.” He is one of only two Native American actors to be nominated for an Academy Award (for “Dances with Wolves“). His decades-long career includes playing a love interest in “Transamerica,” and a cop in “Die Hard with a Vengeance,” as well as a prisoner in “The Green Mile.” He also has appeared in popular TV series including “Longmire” and “Goliath.”  

The valuable character actor’s latest role in “A Dark Foe” has Greene playing a serial killer named The Cradle, who scalps and skins women. The Cradle is being hunted by FBI agent Tony Cruz (Oscar Cardenas, who cowrote the film) who is out for revenge ever since The Cradle killed his mother and kidnapped his sister decades ago. 

Greene brings a gravitas to his role and steals every scene in this ambitious thriller, which is why his performances are always so welcome. The actor chatted with Salon about his career and “A Dark Foe.”

It was interesting to see you play a serial killer in “A Dark Foe.” Was the opportunity to play against type appealing to you?  

Playing a psycho killer was a juicy role. I saw the script and thought, I gotta do this. My agent said, “I don’t think you want to get into this whole bloodbath psycho thing.” I said, “Are you kidding? It’s a great role, I want to do it.” 

Did you prepare for the character?

I went out around about midnight . . . just kidding. I just read script and fed off the other actors. The fear The Cradle lived off — I don’t think he fed off fear as much as he used it. It was something that helped him. In a genre film, there has to be laughter, a valve to turn to let pressure off. You can put things here and there, but you can’t take it too far, or it’s too much and it won’t work. 

I’m curious if you were consulted on the script given the discussion of spirit journeys and tribalism and the Native American themes and how accurate is it?

It was all there, and I said, “All this stuff is wrong, and it would never happen.” But it’s part of the character — [Tony’s] agenda was protecting his family, and unfortunately, he has to take the vehicle of using Native American religion to do that. He needed it as an excuse for what he was doing. The film is about Tony, Oscar’s character, and his psychosis of what he went through. He spent his life looking for The Cradle because of what he did to Tony’s mother and sister. 

The Cradle has a speech in the film about blaming White people for ruining things. I am curious about your thoughts on incorporating these issues into the film given your character’s motivations for killing. 

He used that as, not an excuse, but the ideals of irradiating the land, and poisoning the air and the water, as a motivation to get these victims rather than the excuse to save his daughter’s life. The skinning of these women and doing other nasty things were a motivation. Whatever role I take, people are going to ask, “Is this a Native issue?” No, it’s a horror genre. The issues are an excuse for him to do what he’s doing. Ruining the earth is giving him power to commit these acts of violence.  

There are scenes of torture, especially when he teaches Cruz to withstand pain. Do you think they perpetuate Native stereotypes?

Well, it’s only a movie. What I do look for is something that I want to do. Someone can go dig a meaning behind a film and there is nothing there; there is no meaning behind it. These elements he used as a vehicle to drive himself forward to commit these heinous acts for an end reason is why he’s doing all this stuff. It has nothing to do with Native culture, or what’s going on in the planet. It’s happening everywhere. It’s just something he glommed onto as an excuse.

Was it fun to play the torture scenes? 

Yeah, it’s like pulling wings off flies! I’m just kidding! It’s interesting thing to watch the psychology behind somebody’s fear and feeding off that fear. It’s like watching a mongoose and a cobra. The mongoose has the power to take that cobra, but the cobra is always up and watching the mongoose. Who is stronger and who will win in the end or not win in the end? Defeat is flighty, and victory is flighty too. It’s like I always say about golf. It is the only sport where momentum is equally balanced by fate. Such is life.  

Are you a good golfer?

The other day, I shot a 58 . . . And on the back 9, I shot a 60. Did you know that only 5% of all golfers break 100? I just want to go and play. I don’t care who’s looking. It’s a game where you get to play against yourself. 

What thoughts do you have about your career and the opportunities you are given as an actor?

I tend to move along in my career and take roles that are unique and different. I’ve played God twice. I’ve played judges, lawyers, doctors, police officers, and detectives. The diversity of roles is what I like to play. I don’t like to be pigeonholed as one thing because you get stuck in one role. Jack Nicholson is hired to be Jack Nicholson. I don’t want that, and not being able to experience the other workings of what’s going on in a writer’s head and taking a script and lifting a story off the page and telling it your way. 

Are there roles you want to play that you haven’t done yet?

Oh, I always get asked that question. The one that pays the most money. That’s being honest.

I first saw you in films like “Running Brave,” Powwow Highway,” and “Clearcut.” You became known as an actor with “Dances with Wolves.” Did you find your options for roles limited? Did you feel your career options were limited? 

No. I sat my agents down and told them I don’t want to be dressed up in feathers and long hair and stand around and say nothing. I want to be diverse in roles and do other things. I did that once and it was fine. Let’s move on. You don’t drive the same car for 50 years or live in the same place — unless that’s what you want. But it’s boring to do one thing all the time: work in an assembly line for eight hours day, five days a week, 52 weeks of the year, with some time off for 40 years doing the same thing over and over. It’s mind-numbing. 

I was a welder because once you put your helmet down and struck the arc, no one would look at you because the light was too intense. They wouldn’t bother you. You could hide behind it. No one bothered you if you did high steel work. I was an iron worker and welded fabrication in a shop. I welded hopper cars. I didn’t last very long in that. It was the middle of winter and 10 below inside the plant. They didn’t have heat. You had to crawl inside the hopper and weld in there. And there was a fear of getting laid off when the contract runs out. If I’m going to be looking for work, I’d rather be acting.

So, you went to the very secure business of acting!

Acting is far more fun and educational than people give it credit for. You do things that people sit back on the couch with a beer and a bag of chips and say, “Geez, look at that! I can do that!” They do it in their head, but they can’t do it. We [actors] are an extension of people’s lives. All the things I do in films, I’d never do in real life. And if it was dangerous, I’d turn to the director and say, “Let that guy over there, dressed just like me, let him do it!” 

What observations do you have about the progress that is being made regarding Indigenous actors in cinema and television now? 

It’s much higher right now. When I started, it was low. I am by no means the first to be in it. Harry Smith, you probably know him as Tonto in “Lone Ranger” series, he lived in Los Angeles. Then Dan George, August Schellenberg, who worked in classical theater, Gary Farmer, and others in the old gray hair club.

We plowed the road for these kids. They come up and do their own writing and say, “Why can’t we do it?” They formed their own theater and film companies and are doing TV. They are getting criticized for hiring non-Native people for coming on board to work with them. “They shouldn’t be doing this.” But they don’t know how! OK, let’s go way up North and I’m going to leave you in bush with just a knife and a stick and see you in the month and see how long you last — if you can survive in the business up there while these kids survive in the business down here.

There are pitfalls everywhere. You have to learn how to look at things from two different perspectives and use the energy and wisdom accumulated by each party and share that energy and know how to transfer it and ask a question without looking stupid. You share the knowledge. That way movement ahead can take place. How do we sustain ourselves? Just be steadfast. Don’t let anything bother you. If you are afraid of it, ask questions. It might impart some knowledge to you. Perhaps you can help it or them. It’s all giving and understanding. And listening. That’s rule number one for a good actor. Listen to what the other person is doing. Pay attention. 

Yes. Social media is the death of critical thinking. 

Technology has just run me over. I have hard time with my iPad. I just get my mail. I finally figured out how use Zoom on my iPad. There’s one thing wrong with all this technology — you can’t hide anymore.

You talked about fears. “A Dark Foe” deals with Cruz’s nyctophobia. What are your fears? 

What scares me personally? I don’t know. If you don’t have fear of anything that’s the time to stay home. When I was an iron worker, they said, “When you aren’t afraid to go up 10 floors on the steel, go home.” Because you’ll make a mistake. You have to be on your guard and wary. You also have to be able to find a balance between the fear and acceptance at the same time. I accept a lot of things, but I also fear a lot of things. I fear a lot of things I accept. There’s a little bit fear in everything. Everyone should have a little fear, even walking across the street.

“A Dark Foe” is available on demand on July 30.

Susan Sarandon leads protest against the Squad at AOC’s office: “We’re losing hope”

Actor Susan Sarandon organized a demonstration outside the Bronx office of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., on Monday, reminding the progressive lawmaker that she had made “a lot of promises” to her constituency but has failed to pull out all the stops achieving her healthcare agenda. 

“I’m here to say to The Squad, and especially AOC, who, you know, did make a lot of promises, that we still have faith in you and we would like to see if you have a better plan than we’ve been able to see, please share it,” Sarandon said to a crowd. “If there’s a pathway you’ve got that we’re not aware of, please share it. Because we’re losing hope here that you represent us.”

The crowd specifically gathered to protest against the apparent lack of action shown by The Squad in expanding Medicare forAll when roughly 30 million Americans lack access to healthcare. 

“You campaigned on Medicare for All. But you didn’t demand a floor vote on it when you had the power to leverage the Speaker vote. You didn’t demand that single-payer be included in the pandemic recovery bill,” the petitioners wrote online, adding: “You moved the introduction of the House bill till after the stimulus bill passed reducing your own leverage. You have never demanded that Biden use Section 1881A of the Social Security Act to expand Medicare to every American by executive action.”

For remedy, the petition demands that President Joe Biden – who last year said he’d veto Medicare for All – declare a pandemic health emergency and “expand Medicare to every American using Section 1881A of the Social Security Act.”

Back in 2019, Rep. Pramila Jayapal introduced H.R.1384, dubbed the “Medicare for All Act of 2019,” which would have offered a single-payer health care system to all Americans, who would effectively be enrolled upon birth or residency. The plan also bars cost-sharing (e.g., deductibles, coinsurance, and copayments), putting the onus on the government to cover all health expenses.  

The bill – which Ocasio-Cortez co-sponsored – was referred to a number of committees that same year, with subcommittee hearings held in December. However, the measure failed to see a floor vote, preventing it from getting to the Senate.

“It’s so difficult for people that are independent to get elected in the first place,” Sarandon said, “and then to see the very people that sponsored the bill not stand up for it, is very disheartening.”

Throughout 2020, Congress passed a number of COVID-19 relief bills aimed at helping Americans struggling under the weight of the pandemic, though none of these bills comprehensively expanded Medicare

Charlie Kirk, Piers Morgan slam Simone Biles as a “selfish sociopath” and “shame to the country”

Charlie Kirk is under fire after launching a harsh attack on American gymnastics legend Simone Biles after she withdrew from the women’s all-around team final at the Tokyo Olympics on Tuesday.

The conservative activist blasted the four-time Olympic gold medalist calling her “a selfish sociopath” and a “shame to the country” after she withdrew from the event, later citing mental health issues that led her to exit the competition.

Biles told her coach and a team doctor that she was afraid of injuring herself because she was not in the right “headspace” and also didn’t want to jeopardize Team USA’s chances of winning a medal.

“I’m still struggling with some things,” Biles said after the event. “It just sucks when you are fighting with your own head.”

“This Olympic Games, I wanted it to be for myself. I came in and felt like I was still doing it for other people. That just hurts my heart that doing what I love has been kind of taken away from me to please other people,” Biles also told reporters.

While Biles has received widespread support from prominent figures such as Michelle Obama and Sarah Hirshland, CEO of the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee, Kirk slammed the 24-year-old gymnast on his podcast The Charlie Kirk Show.

“We are raising a generation of weak people like Simone Biles,” he told listeners. “If she’s got all these mental health problems: don’t show up.”

He continued: “She’s an incredible athlete, of course, she’s an incredible athlete, I’m not saying that — she’s probably the greatest gymnast of all time. She’s also very selfish, she’s immature and she’s a shame to the country.”

Biles’ decision to step back from the Olympics also upset former Good Morning Britain host Piers Morgan, who suggested Biles dropped out over a “poor performance.”

“Are ‘mental health issues’ now the go-to excuse for any poor performance in elite sport? What a joke,” Morgan tweeted. “Just admit you did badly, made mistakes, and will strive to do better next time. Kids need strong role models not this nonsense.”

Morgan’s criticism of Biles comes after the presenter has deliberately singled out another female athlete and woman of color: tennis phenom Naomi Osaka.

Now many critics are accusing Morgan of targeting Black women struggling with mental health.

Beyond Biles and Osaka, the British host has a history of taking digs at Meghan Markle after she expressed similar experiences with mental health.

Writer David Gardner, tweeted that the TV presenter has defended some public figures dealing with mental health struggles, like footballer Paul Gascoigne, but has called Osaka an “arrogant spoiled brat” when she withdrew from the French Open in May.

News surfaced today that Biles has withdrawn from the final individual all-around competition that was set to take place on Thursday. Her decision means she will not be competing again at the Tokyo Olympics.

“Better Call Saul” star Bob Odenkirk “stable” after collapsing on set

Early Tuesday, Bob Odenkirk, reportedly collapsed on the set of “Better Call Saul,” the “Breaking Bad” prequel series, in New Mexico and was rushed to the hospital, according to TMZ. 

[UPDATE] As of Wednesday afternoon, representatives for Odenkirk say he is in stable condition, and had suffered from a “heart-related incident.”

TMZ sources said Odenkirk “went down,” and was then surrounded by crew members who called for an ambulance. It’s not yet clear what his condition is, or the cause of his collapse. Odenkirk was in New Mexico shooting AMC’s “Better Call Saul,” which is currently in post-production for its sixth and final season. In the beloved “Breaking Bad” prequel, he plays Saul Goodman, who eventually becomes the criminal defense attorney to Walter White (Bryan Cranston).

Odenkirk has already received an outpouring of support from celebrities including Michael McKean, who plays his onscreen brother Chuck on “Better Call Saul.” In a tweet, McKean wrote, “Sending huge love to our [Odenkirk.] You got this, brother.” David Cross, who worked with Odenkirk on the late ’90s HBO sketch comedy series “Mr. Show with Bob and David,” said in a tweet of Odenkirk, “He WILL get through this.”

“Breaking Bad” star Bryan Cranston wrote in an emotional Instagram post on Wednesday, “Please take a moment in your day today to think about him and send positive thoughts and prayers his way, thank you,” and described feeling “anxious all morning.”

https://www.instagram.com/p/CR3-S72pFCy

TV personality Ben Mankiewicz tweeted out his support for Odenkirk, and added if “you’ve ever felt like an outsider excluded from something you wanted to be a part of, then you identify deeply with Bob Odenkirk.”

Odenkirk has remained in the New Mexico hospital since he was checked in before noon on Tuesday. In his team’s Wednesday statement, they thanked fans and supporters “for the outpouring of support… and ask for their privacy at this time,” as well as the “doctors and nurses looking after [Odenkirk].”

House Republican who described Capitol riot as a “normal tourist visit” grilled by Dem colleague

One Republican lawmaker wasn’t thrilled about being interrogated for his decision to vote against medals being awarded to the Capitol police officers who stood against rioters on January 6.

Speaking to Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.), Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) made it clear that the Capitol rioters were anything but “tourists” despite how they were previously described. The Democratic lawmaker reminded Clyde that more than 140 people were injured during the insurrection while others were hospitalized.

Raskin also noted that individuals suffered a wide range of injuries including lost fingers, eye gauging, and traumatic brain injuries. However, Clyde attempted to push back against Raskin’s argument. “I stand by that exact statement as I said it,” Clyde said in reference to his remark about the insurrection being a “normal tourist visit.’

The intense conversation escalated when Clyde became irritated with Raskin’s line of questioning. At that point, Clyde exploded as he attempted to pivot and shift the conversation back to the amendment. Clyde said, “We are here to discuss this amendment… and you are obviously not interested in that. You want to make this another Jan. 6 hearing, and it’s not! This is the rules committee!”

Following a hearing back in May, Raskin spoke to Forbes as he shared his scathing opinion of Republican lawmakers, their belief systems, and their handling of key issues.

“They’re all starting to act like Donald Trump: He’s all over the map,” Raskin said. “One day they concede it was outrageous mob violence, the next day it wasn’t so bad. They were hugging and kissing police officers,” he added, accusing them of “pandering to the mob.”

 

5 tips for buying better butter at the grocery store, according to an expert

If butter had a patron saint, it would have to be Julia Child. The beloved cookbook author and TV host once famously quipped, “With enough butter, anything is good.” But how good is the butter that’s currently sitting in your refrigerator? 

I was thinking about this the other day as I rolled my cart past the dairy section of my local grocery store. There were rows and rows of pastel-hued boxes, paper-wrapped rolls and plastic tubs containing butter — and they ranged from basic commodity butter to artisan varieties. 

To get a handle on what makes a better butter, I reached out to Venae Watts, a fifth-generation buttermaker who is the co-owner of Minerva Dairy in Ohio. Minerva Dairy, which has been in business for 125 years, is America’s oldest family-owned creamery. 

“We do everything we can to give customers a creamier, richer butter,” Watts said of the creamery’s products. This is achieved by paying attention to everything from the butterfat content to the diet of the cows whose milk is ultimately used to make the butter. 

Here are the five tips you should consider before picking up your next batch of butter at the grocery store: 

Check out the butterfat content

Your average supermarket stick of butter is going to have about 80% butterfat. The butter made at Minerva Dairy, however, contains 85% butterfat — and those few percentage points make a big difference when it comes to flavor and texture. 

You’ve likely heard the phrase, “Fat is flavor.” It’s certainly true when it comes to butter. Butters with a higher level of butterfat tend to have a fuller, richer taste. They also have a softer, smoother texture, which make them ideal for spreading on toast. 

Some butter brands list the butterfat content on their packaging, but there are also industry terms that denote the present amount. American butter contains a minimum of 80% butterfat, European butter contains at least 82% butterfat and Amish butter contains between 84% to 85% butterfat.

The fewer ingredients, the better

“We’ve been doing this for five generations, so we know how to make butter,” Watts said with a laugh. “And we keep it very simple — we just use sea salt and cream.” 

As with many foods, fewer ingredients often signal a higher level of quality here. Keep an eye out for additives on the nutrition panel, plus sneaky additions like canola oil, which increase spreadability in lower butterfat butters.

Pay attention to the color of the butter

When I’m grocery shopping, I — like many people — am immediately drawn to the most vibrant piece of fruit or vegetables on display. A ruby red tomato is naturally more appealing than a rust-colored and bruised tomato. The color is an indication of the quality and freshness of the produce.

Similarly, you can learn a lot about butter by its color, as it can be an indicator of the diet of the cow whose milk was used to make the butter. Pasture-raised cows who eat a grass-fed diet rich in plants and greens yield milk that ultimately creates a more yellow butter. This is because those plants are naturally rich in beta-carotene (the red-orange pigment that’s found in many vegetables like carrots). 

However, do be sure to take a look at the ingredients list on your butter box. Some manufacturers add beta-carotene or artificial coloring to their products to give them a sunny yellow color.

Churn down for what 

At high-volume butter factories, air can become trapped in butter as it’s churned in large batches at high speeds. “When air is trapped in the butter, it loses texture and flavor,” Watts said. 

When butter is made in smaller batches and churned slowly, it maintains its flavor and a richer, more velvety texture. Look for butters advertised as “small batch” or “slow churn” on your next trip to the grocery store or farmer’s market. 

Check out the creamery that made your butter

This may feel like homework, but I believe it would be better for all of us if we paid more attention to where our food comes from and how it gets to us. Before you purchase your next stick or roll of butter, do a little research on brands you like — or brands that are local to you — and find out more about the creameries that make them. 

What techniques do they use to make the butter? Where do they source their milk? What kind of relationships do they have with their farmers? For instance, Minerva Dairy works with about 50 family farms with pasture-raised cows. 

“A lot of them, we’ve known for generations — my grandpa knew their grandpa,” Watts said. “There’s not a lot of people who ‘get into dairy farming.’ Usually, it’s a family farm that’s passed down for generations. Northeast Ohio is very unique in the sense that we have the most concentrated amount of small family farms in the country.” 

Through the years, there’s been a huge amount of consolidation taking place at farms across the country, according to Watts.

“I don’t know why, but we didn’t get the memo here in Northeast Ohio,” she said. “And we just continue doing everything the same way from one generation to the next. I mean, we’ve introduced modern technology, of course, for cleanliness and logistics, but there’s something to be said for doing it how it’s always been done.”

Elton John schools DaBaby after rapper’s homophobic HIV/AIDS comments

LGBTQ rights icon and legendary singer Elton John has a few words for DaBaby.

Complex reports that when the rapper took the stage Sunday at Rolling Loud Miami, he made widely criticized homophobic comments to the audience: “If you didn’t show up today with HIV, AIDS, or any of them deadly sexually transmitted diseases, that’ll make you die in two to three weeks, then put your cellphone lighter up . . . Fellas, if you ain’t sucking d**k in the parking lot, put your cellphone lighter up.” 

In a Wednesday morning Twitter thread, John, who isn’t usually particularly active on social media, condemned DaBaby’s homophobia and misinformation. The first tweet shares a graphic from the Elton John AIDS Foundation that reads, “HIV misinformation and homophobia have no place in the music industry. We must break down the stigma around HIV and not spread it.”

John’s subsequent tweets note that “HIV has affected over 70 million people globally: men, women, children, and the most vulnerable people in our communities,” as well as the disproportionately high HIV rates among gay Black men.

“Stigma and shame around HIV and homosexuality is a huge driver of this vulnerability,” John adds. “We need to break down the myths and judgments and not fuel these.”

Further, he corrected one of DaBaby’s false claims that HIV and AIDS “make you die in two to three weeks.” John tweeted that “you can live a long and healthy life with HIV. Treatment is so advanced that with one pill a day, HIV can become undetectable in your body so you can’t pass it onto other people.

“Homophobic and HIV mistruths have no place in our society and industry and as musicians, we must spread compassion and love for the most marginalized people in our communities.”

On Tuesday evening, shortly after John shared his Twitter thread, DaBaby finally apologized for the homophobic and inaccurate tirade, despite previously lashing out in an Instagram Live earlier that day. In his apology tweet, DaBaby said, “Anybody who done ever been effected by AIDS/HIV y’all got the right to be upset, what I said was insensitive even though I have no intentions on offending anybody. So my apologies… But the LGBT community . . . I ain’t trippin on y’all, do you. y’all business is y’all business.”

DaBaby also criticized the people discussing his comments online by claiming what happened at his shows was between him and his audience members, and adding, ​”​I wasn’t going on a rant. That’s called a call to action. That’s what that’s called, cause I’m a live performer. I’m the best live performer.”

John isn’t the only celebrity or music icon to speak out about DaBaby’s Rolling Loud comments. Dua Lipa, whose hit “Levitating” features a verse from DaBaby, shared in an Instagram story on Tuesday, “I’m surprised and horrified at DaBaby’s comments. I really don’t recognize this as the person I worked with. I know my fans know where my heart lies and that I stand 100% with the LGBTQ community. We need to come together to fight the stigma and ignorance around HIV/AIDS.” Lipa has performed and collaborated with John on numerous occasions, and is also widely beloved by LGBTQ fans.

It seems DaBaby has been stepping in controversy often these days. His set at Rolling Loud notably directly followed beloved fellow rapper Megan Thee Stallion, and he brought artist Tory Lanez on stage to perform with him despite how Lanez faces charges for having shot Megan in the foot last summer. 

Nonetheless, DaBaby’s homophobic comments at the festival have drawn the most attention — now, all the more so, with an icon like Elton John shining a light on the harmful inaccuracies of his words. Certainly, mocking and belittling victims of the HIV/AIDS pandemic while performing before a maskless crowd of thousands in a state where COVID-19 has been on the rise is . . . an interesting choice from DaBaby. 

Pelosi goes off, calls McCarthy a “moron” after he objects to mask mandate

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., had a heated exchange over the reimplementation of a mask mandate in the House of Representatives, prompting Pelosi to call McCarthy “a moron.” 

The mandate was restored Tuesday night by the Capitol physician Brian Monahan for the lower chamber to mitigate the spike in cases due to the delta variant of COVID-19. Monahan’s move was met with praise by Pelosi, but, across the aisle, McCarthy criticized it for being a part of the liberal agenda.

“Make no mistake — The threat of bringing masks back is not a decision based on science, but a decision conjured up by liberal government officials who want to continue to live in a perpetual pandemic state,” McCarthy tweeted Tuesday night.

On Wednesday morning, Pelosi returned to wearing a mask. Talking to reporters on Capitol Hill, she cited the science behind Monahan’s rationale.

“That’s the purview of the Capitol Physician … the mandate from him. I have nothing to say about that except we honor it,” Pelosi said outside the Capitol. 

When asked about McCarthy’s comments, she had some choice words before getting into a vehicle and leaving the Capitol:

“He’s such a moron,” she quipped. 

Elizabeth Warren cornered by billionaire: “I shouldn’t get Social Security”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and billionaire Home Depot founder Ken Langone locked horns on Monday when the business magnate demanded that the lawmaker explain why he receives social security checks despite his $5.8 billion net worth. 

“How do you rationalize giving me [sic] $3,000 a month check every month with all my wealth?” Langone asked the lawmaker in a Squawk Box interview. “Why don’t you people have the courage to address entitlements as to what should no longer be an entitlement? I shouldn’t get Social Security.”

Langone, riding on a wave of apparent magnanimity, seems to be forgetting the fact that his social security checks are a far cry from government handouts. Social Security is in fact financed primarily by payroll taxes, which he claims he’s paid for decades. 

“Social security is… structured as an insurance policy,” Warren explained to the Republican donor. “And you paid in year after year after year.” 

The progressive lawmaker added: “It’s not somebody’s welfare. It’s not somebody’s charity. Surely, you wouldn’t want to be the person who would go on national TV and say: After a contract has been negotiated, and someone has paid into it for forty years, that the federal government should turn around and say, ‘Oops, we changed our mind. We’re not going to give you the payout that you earned by making those payments all those years.'”

Numbering his bones to pick, Langone moved onto his second point, asking Warren why corporations haven’t yet been slapped with a minimum tax. 

“Actually, I’ve proposed something very much like that,” Warren retorted. “It’s called a Real Corporate Profits Tax.” 

According to the senator’s website, the law would require that corporations making over $100 million in yearly profits would pay a 7% tax on any money made after the $100 million cutoff. 

These corporations, she told Langone, “should have to pay a tax on what they report. Not on what happens after they’ve done a zillion loopholes and excuses and not paid their underlying taxes.”

Last year, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy reported that 55 of the largest corporations in America collectively paid $0 in federal corporate income taxes as a result of various tax avoidance schemes. 

When it comes to Home Depot in particular, the home improvement giant has used an aggressive loophole to skirt around paying high local property taxes by appraising its properties as vacant shells rather than high-demand assets. According to the New York Times, the scheme has hollowed out hundreds of millions in potential municipal revenue that would otherwise go to public services like infrastructure, parks, schools. 

Toward the end of his questioning, Langone – once a vocal supporter of Donald Trump – took to outright grandstanding, launching into an unsolicited spiel about how Home Depot paid its fair share of taxes.

“Take all the corporate taxes paid in America last year as told by the government, what they got in. Home Depot paid 1% of all those taxes,” he said. “One company that didn’t exist 42 years ago. We take good care of all our associates, our vendors love dealing with us.”

Home Depot has donated roughly $465,000 to federal lawmakers who supported Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election, according to CNN Business. Salon reported earlier this year that the company also donated thousands to numerous Georgia Republicans, including Gov. Brian Kemp, who supported the GOP’s restrictive voting bill passed after Democrats swept federal elections in the Peach State for the first time in decades.

Republicans, too cowardly to openly defend January 6 insurrections, continue to gaslight Americans

Morally, of course, the worst part about the Republican response to the House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection is that they’re trying to undermine the group’s work at the behest of Donald Trump, the man who incited the violent riot in a last-ditch effort to throw out the results of his 2020 election loss. But I fully admit that, on a purely personal level, I’m deeply disgusted by just what sniveling cowards Republicans are being as they go about this.

Perhaps the most grating fact is that not one person in the party, not even the loudest mouthed jackasses or most shamelessly fascistic Republicans, will just come right out and say it: They don’t like the January 6 commission because they disagree with the committee’s basic premise that fascist insurrections are bad. Instead, Americans are being treated to a whirlwind of deflection, gaslighting, victim-blaming, and even victim-mockery — all in an attempt to fill the discourse with noise meant to give Republicans the space to back Trump while pretending that doesn’t include backing his attempted coup of the 2020 election or any coups he may attempt in the future. 

Republican leadership in the House of Representatives kicked off the efforts to undermine the hearing early on Tuesday, with a bizarre press conference that involved Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York playing the your-fault-for-wearing-a-short-skirt card against Rep. Nancy Pelosi, accusing the San Francisco Democrat of bearing “responsibility as Speaker of the House for the tragedy that occurred on January 6th.”

Pelosi, of course, was actually one of the primary targets of the insurrectionists, who were braying for her blood and ransacking her office in a frenzy of misogynistic loathing for one of the highest-ranking woman in the federal government. 

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But once the hearing itself got underway, the evidence presented exposed the GOP’s gambit as the pathetic grasping that it was.

Metropolitan police officer Daniel Hodges — the victim of a vicious assault as rioters attempted to crush him in a door that day — reminded observers that there “were over 9,000 of the terrorists out there with an unknown number of firearms.” It’s a joke to argue, as Republicans are, that some minor tweaking of Capitol security was going to overcome what Capitol Police officer Aquilino Gonell memorably described as “a medieval battlefield.” 

After the powerful hearing, the deflections from Republican leaders got even dumber.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio both pretended to reporters that they were too busy to watch the hearing, the Washington Post reported, and Stefanik refused to say if she watched it. She somehow still had opinions about the thing she won’t say she watched. Stefanik went on Fox News to complain that the hearing is about “trying to shame over 70 million Americans who were standing up for constitutional and election integrity,” which is, of course, Republicans’ code for Trump’s Big Lie.

The shamelessness of Stefanik is breathtaking. She’s defending conspiracy theories meant to bolster the belief that Trump is entitled to stay president despite losing an election, but doesn’t have the courage to come right out and admit it, hiding instead behind voters who supposedly believe those conspiracy theories. Words like “integrity,” in Stefanik’s mouth, simply mean the opposite of their commonly held definition in American English. Stefanik and other Republican leaders continue to make apologies for the Big Lie and minimize the insurrection, but like cowards, they are pretending this somehow isn’t the moral equivalent of supporting Trump’s efforts to overturn the election or the violence that resulted from it. This is really one of those rare moments in life where there’s no nuanced middle ground. Continuing to support Trump means supporting fascist insurrection, and no rhetorical games played by Republicans can change that. 

Still, the dumb games go on, and not just with Republican leadership.

On Fox News, the networks’ top primetime hosts rolled out more sleazy rhetorical techniques to signal support for Trump’s Big Lie and the insurrection, all without having the courage to come right out and say what they meant bluntly. Instead, they mostly mocked the police officers who testified. Tucker Carlson sneeringly suggested the officers were exaggerating the trauma of January 6, while Laura Ingraham called the hearing “performance art.” They’re counting on viewers not watching the hearing in the first place. If they had, they would have heard that one of the police officers suffered a heart attack and traumatic brain injury, another had an emotional breakdown, another was seen on video being crushed in a door, and another provided photos of his extensive injuries from that day. 

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The most overtly fascist fringe of the Republican party is, it must be said, gliding closer to coming right out and saying they think that January 6 was a good thing.

As Zachary Petrizzo of Salon reported Tuesday, Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-GA, Matt Gaetz, R-Fl, Louie Gohmert, R-Tx., and Paul Gosar, R-Az., attempted to hold a press conference as counterprogramming to the hearing, in which arrested insurrectionists were portrayed as “political prisoners.” The presser fell apart, however, when protesters made a mockery of the situation. But while these folks are generally treated as a “fringe” of the party, it’s important to remember they are on exactly the same page as Trump himself.  And he has been spouting the same talking points painting the insurrectionists as the good guys. 

But even Trump is too much of a coward to come right out and say that he thinks violent insurrection is good. Instead, he’s been in full gaslighting mode for months, denying that the riot was even a riot, instead saying, “it was zero threat” and that the insurrectionists were “hugging and kissing the police and the guards.” For his part, officer Gonell directly retorted during the hearing Tuesday, “I’m still recovering from those ‘hugs and kisses’ that day that he claimed that so many rioters, terrorists, were assaulting us with.” 

Trump’s attempted coup failed. But Republicans in state governments across the country are lining up to make sure, next time he tries to steal an election, he succeeds. What’s going on here is not mysterious. All these Republicans are betting that Trump will soon ascend to the dictatorial powers he aspires to, and they want a piece of the pie when that happens. But, until the day comes that a newly inaugurated Trump is declaring January 6 a federal holiday of the glorious revolution, they continue to fear that it’s bad politics to just come out in favor of fascist insurrections. So here we are, in a sea of gaslighting and deflection and victim-blaming. Because Republicans aren’t just villains — they’re cowards. 

Do you actually need to salt eggplant in advance?

In The Kitchen Scientist, The Flavor Equation author Nik Sharma breaks down the science of good food, from rinsing rice to salting coffee. Today: everything you ever wanted to know about eggplant.

* * *

Eggplant is both a fruit and a vegetable. Botanically and technically speaking, it’s a fruit (eggplants are considered berries because they arise from flowers and contain several seeds). But most of us eat eggplants in savory dishes, so by that rule of usage, it becomes a vegetable (tomatoes and peppers also fall into this confusing category). Eggplant is also an emoji with naughty implications.

What’s in a name?

This vegetable goes by various names. In India (and in many countries in South Asia) where I grew up, they’re called brinjals. In the U.K., the term is aubergine. And in America, we call them eggplants. The name is based on the white cultivar — a plant variety that’s been selected by plant breeders because it displays certain characteristics that make it valuable (for example, in this case, a speckled purple eggplant that resembles an egg and lasts longer after harvesting).

How many varieties are there?

There are more than 10 varieties of eggplants, in several colors and shapes. Colors range from white to green to purple, with varying degrees of intensity. Some are solid in hue; others have speckled skin. There is variation in shape, too: bulbous globe eggplants, skinnier Japanese and Chinese eggplants, and plum-sized Thai eggplants.

Are eggplants actually . . . toxic? 

Eggplants belong to the nightshade family (Solanaceae) that also includes tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, etc. All members in this plant family were originally toxic to eat because they naturally produce toxic substances called alkaloids. Perhaps you’ve heard some of these chemical names before, especially when talking about eating green tomatoes. Most of these toxic substances are destroyed upon cooking with heat and, in some cases, selective breeding (where plants are grown and picked for their positive traits). In eggplants, there are two toxic substances. Alpha-solanine and alpha-chaconine protect the plant from a host of attackers like bacteria. Alkaloids are famous for their bitter taste, and this is why you’ll often see eggplant described as bitter. Can you eat raw eggplant? Well, it won’t taste as nice as when cooked. And from a toxicity standpoint, an eggplant contains about 11 milligrams of solanine, and you would need to consum

How do I reduce eggplant’s bitterness? 

You’ve probably read that salting eggplant removes the bitterness. This is not accurate. For one, the alkaloids that taste bitter in eggplants are a bit large and can’t simply come out via osmosis when salt is added. Instead, salt masks and reduces the perception of the bitter taste (salt mostly draws out liquid from the eggplant).

Both salty and bitter tastes have the ability to interact with each other when present in the mouth, with salt muting the taste of bitterness. Sweetness is another taste that can mask bitterness, which is why a lot of bitter pills are coated with something sweet. (Taste physiologists and scientists have determined that the five basic tastes — salty, sour, bitter, sweet, and savory — can interact with each other producing different outcomes.)

So, do you still need to salt eggplant in advance? To mask bitterness, not really. For the most part, farmers have selectively bred eggplants and picked varieties that tasted less bitter over the years. For most recipes, I just cut the eggplant and get cooking.

But what about frying?

This is the one occasion when I take the time to salt eggplant in advance. The two major components of an eggplant are water and air, so it makes sense to get rid of that water when you want to get a firmer, less soggy texture. I sprinkle a generous amount of salt over sliced eggplant and let it sit in a bowl for 45 minutes. Then I discard any drawn-out liquid, rinse the eggplant under cold tap water to get rid of any excess salt, pat it dry, and then proceed with the recipe.

How do I prevent browning? 

Just like apples that turn brown after slicing, eggplants also contain the enzyme polyphenol oxidase. Sprinkling a few drops of lemon juice (or a different cooking acid like vinegar) will help prevent the slices from browning. This type of browning doesn’t affect taste, and you won’t notice it after cooking.

What flavors go well with eggplant? 

If the eggplant you’re working with happens to taste bitter, you can still hide it by adding a splash of lemon juice, lime juice, or vinegar. Fish and soy sauces also mask bitter flavors, and build umami along the way. Palm sugar, unrefined brown sugar, or a sweetener like maple syrup or honey will also help cover up any bitterness. And even if your eggplant isn’t bitter to start out with, all of these ingredients beautifully complement the mild vegetable.

Why are eggplants often used as meat substitutes? 

Eggplant is often described as meaty, and you’ll frequently see it incorporated with meat to build up that textural profile. Think: eggplant stuffed with ground lamb or eggplant sautéed with beef.

But if you don’t eat meat, eggplant can provide that chewy texture all on its own. Like tofu, this vegetable is essentially a sponge, effortlessly absorbing flavors. This makes it the perfect vehicle for savoriness.

Because of its shape and meatiness, eggplant is a popular substitute for vegetarian bacon. Is it a perfect replica? My honest answer is no. But it gets very close to the real thing — and is a delightful dish all its own, subtly smoky and super savory. Serve it in a tomato sandwich with lots of zhoug and mozzarella.

***

Recipe: Eggplant Bacon

Prep time: 15 minutes
Cook time: 55 minutes
Serves: 4

Ingredients

  • 2 Japanese eggplants or 1 globe eggplant
  • 1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
  • 2 teaspoons liquid smoke (optional)
  • 1 tablespoon maple syrup
  • 1 teaspoon smoked paprika
  • 1 teaspoon chipotle powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
  • Kosher salt (fine sea salt also works)

Directions

  1. Heat the oven to 325°F. 
  2. Using a sharp knife, cut the eggplant lengthwise into slices 5 millimeters thick (a bit thinner than 1/4 inch). 
  3. In a small bowl, mix the olive oil, liquid smoke (if using), maple syrup, paprika, chipotle, and black pepper. 
  4. Brush each side of the eggplant with the olive oil mixture and season generously with salt. 
  5. Place oven-safe wire racks over two sheet pans. (If you don’t have an oven-safe wire rack, see the Author Notes.) Spread out the eggplant slices on the racks. Bake for 35 to 55 minutes, rotating the pan after 20 minutes, until the eggplant turns light brown and crisp at the edges, with slightly tender centers. Check in frequently toward the end: If the eggplant starts to turn dark and burn, remove it from the oven, or lower the temperature if it needs more time to cook.
  6. When the eggplant is done, transfer it to another wire rack to cool slightly. Eggplant “bacon” is best eaten warm, and can be rewarmed at 300°F if needed.

 

Expert roundtable on Jan. 6 and Trump’s Big Lie: “Fascism in its pure ideological form”

On Jan. 6, Donald Trump attempted a coup to nullify the results of the 2020 presidential election. Thousands of his followers attacked the U.S. Capitol with the goal of preventing the certification of the Electoral College votes, a ceremonial procedure that would formally make Joe Biden the next president of the United States.

Five people died as a result of the Capitol attack. Capitol Police and other law enforcement fought bravely before being overrun by Trump’s cult members, political goons and right-wing street thugs and paramilitaries. If not for the valiant efforts of those officers that day, the halls of Congress could have been turned into a bloodbath. Vice President Mike Pence, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and others deemed by Trump and his followers to be traitors could easily have been murdered.

Trump’s attack force made no attempt to hide their faces. They carried white supremacist flags and other regalia. They assembled a gallows in the park across the street from the Capitol. They carried a Christian nationalist cross and participated in group prayers before attacking the Capitol. The MAGA flag was viewed as a substitute for the American flag, if not as something superior. These terrorists believed themselves to be “patriots” who were defending the “real America” and of course the man they viewed as its true leader.

As we saw that day, fascist movements claim a special love for the police and military but will eagerly purge them for acts of “disloyalty” to the cause.

Only 543 or so members of Trump’s attack force have been arrested by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies so far. Most will not be charged with serious crimes, and very few will face felony charges that could result in substantial prison time. The coup plotters and enablers — most notably Donald Trump and Republican members of Congress — will likely never be arrested or otherwise held properly accountable.

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On Tuesday, the House select committee held its first hearings on the events of Jan. 6. Sgt. Aquilino Gonell, Officer Michael Fanone, Officer Daniel Hodges and Sgt. Harry Dunn shared their experiences of fighting to defend the Capitol from Trump’s attack force.

They told the committee and public how they were attacked and beaten by rioters. They were clubbed, tased, crushed, blinded with pepper spray and other irritants, verbally abused (in Dunn’s case, with racial slurs) and forced to confront the fear of death, overwhelmed and alone. The unifying theme in their testimony was that various kinds of fanaticism and rage, fueled by white supremacy, conspiracy theory, religious fundamentalism and cultlike devotion to Donald Trump propelled his attack force forward.

Despite the heroism of those officers and others, the coup continues. Jan. 6 was but one stop in a journey by Trump supporters, the Jim Crow Republicans, and the larger neofascist movement aimed at overthrowing multiracial democracy.

Donald Trump himself spoke at a rally in Phoenix on Saturday. He continued to threaten political violence against the Democrats and others who “stole” the 2020 election from him and his followers. The “Big Lie” was reinforced with a new conspiracy theory about “routers.” Trump channeled numerous tropes of white victimology; his thousands of devoted followers basked in their collective sociopathy. The rally was clearly invigorating for Trump’s broken and alienated followers, if only for a few hours. Such is Trump’s power over his cult following, for whom he acts as a human intoxicant.

The mainstream media largely chose to treat Trump’s rally in Phoenix as a sideshow not worthy of extensive coverage. This reflects a logic where if Trump and his neofascist movement are ignored, the danger to the country will go away. It will not. In hopes of better understanding Donald Trump’s escalating threat to American democracy and the growing power of his fascist cult and movement, I asked several experts from a range of backgrounds for their thoughts on his speech in Phoenix.

Jennifer Mercieca is a professor of communication at Texas A&M, and the author of “Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump.”

Former President Donald Trump is America’s first “pretender to the presidency.” We’ve never had a president claim to be president when he is not. We’ve never had a former president insist that he won the election when he did not. His speech in Arizona was for his partisans only, it wasn’t meant to persuade anyone who doesn’t already agree with his view of reality. It was awash in conspiracy theories. Trump’s main message is “politics is war and the enemy cheats.” That claim informs Trump’s whole view of politics, including his election conspiracy claims. Trump’s “pretender to the presidency” speech was dangerously anti-democratic.

Norm Ornstein is an emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a columnist and contributing editor for The Atlantic and co-author (with E.J. Dionne Jr. and Thomas E. Mann) of “One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet Deported.”

Donald Trump has tried to overturn a legitimate presidential election ever since last November. He incited a violent and deadly insurrection at the Capitol. He has lied every day, and is a traitor to his own country. Trump’s speech in Arizona took the next step by trying to get the state’s Republicans to decertify their 2020 election results, another step to undermine our system and divide us further. And of course, Trump is thoroughly corrupt. He does not belong in civil society.

Federico Finchelstein is a professor of history at the New School for Social Research, and the author of several books including “A Brief History of Fascist Lies.” His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Politico and the Guardian.

The Arizona speech made clear that Trump desires to be a fascist. He represents a return to the key elements of fascism: a style and substance steeped in political violence, a leader’s cult, dictatorial aims and practices (remember the coup), a politics of hatred, religious fanaticism, militarization of politics, denial of science and totalitarian propaganda. Trump lies like a fascist. Fascists believe their lies and try to transform reality to resemble their lies. This is what Trump expected of his public in Arizona.

Dr. David Reiss is a psychiatrist, expert in mental fitness evaluations and contributor to “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.”

People are expressing the opinion that Donald Trump is deteriorating, be it emotionally and/or cognitively. I have not evaluated him, so I have neither a clinical baseline nor an acute clinical opinion. But I know what I see and what I hear. This all leads me to one conclusion: As a person and regarding any possible “diagnoses,” Trump is mostly unchanged.  Unhappier? Almost certainly. Angrier? Without a doubt. He also appears to be vengeful, vindictive and sadistic to a dangerous level. What is new about that?

Trump has always relied on inventing reality extemporaneously to fit his mood and to connect with his audience. He has always had an expertise in that area, such that by now it comes naturally and without planning. He has always been very “strategic” in the moment — but not much further down the road than a few minutes into the future.

CNN recently featured a headline that read “This is the most unhinged Trump rant about the 2020 election yet.” Trump is lying more, but Trump is not “more unhinged.” Trump has always responded to being uncomfortable with reality by inventing his own reality to meet his needs. He is more uncomfortable with objective reality since Nov. 4, so of course he is increasingly inventing different “realities” that are even less grounded in reason and reality than the ones previously. 

Jean Guerrero is an investigative reporter and author of “Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda.” Her writing and other work has been featured by the New York Times, PBS and NPR. She is currently an opinion columnist at the Los Angeles Times.

Trump’s speech was pure gasoline on the flames of white extremism. While much of it sounded like incomprehensible and presumably improvised gibberish, the speech also included the trademark pseudo-intellectualism of his former speechwriter Stephen Miller, with the latter’s mastery of white supremacist talking points.

The most disturbing element was Trump’s calculated and deliberately vague promise that Democrats plan to “get rid of” certain people, dog-whistling a meme that has been spreading on far-right social media called “Ten Stages of Genocide,” which implies that liberals are plotting to exterminate Trump supporters. Trump began his presidency persecuting Mexicans, Muslims and Central Americans while conjuring false visions of their violence to justify that persecution, then expanded to target Black Lives Matter protesters and anti-fascists with the same strategy. Trump is now making it clear that if he returns to office he will be going after all liberals and encouraging his supporters to do the same.

He is inciting political persecution against his critics by promoting delusions of persecution among his armed, white supremacist, violence-loving base. It can be tempting to write off white grievance politics as a joke, but as Trump’s own DHS acknowledged, it remains among the top threats to homeland security, as embodied in conspiracy theories about white genocide that Trump is openly embracing.

Trump’s claim that “woke politics takes the life and joy out of everything” speaks to the fact that his happiness appears to hinge on the ability to freely scapegoat and persecute others without accountability. We can’t be complacent about the threat that Donald Trump continues to represent to democracy and the American people’s collective grip on reality.

Jason Stanley is a professor of philosophy at Yale University, and author of “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them” and “How Propaganda Works.”

Trump’s speech in Arizona brilliantly structured the themes in American politics that are gradually coming into greater clarity as a fascist social and political movement centering on Trump as leader. In fascist ideology, communists are supposedly seeking to destroy the nation by opening the borders to immigrants who will dilute the majority population and give power to ethnic and sexual minorities (currently, transgender persons are the most vilified by the far right worldwide, and Trump’s speech was no exception). Fascism requires minorities to vilify to create panic and fear among the dominant majority. The fascist leader represents himself as the nation’s savior and only hope against these threats. In the case of the United States, fascist ideology has always taken the form of exaggerating threats to the dominant white Christian population. The fascist leader presents the options as total loyalty to him or subservience to the communist agenda. All of these fascist themes were front and center in Trump’s speech.

The Democrats are supposedly controlled by communists and are letting crime and nonwhite immigration run rampant. Cities run by Democrats, such as New York and Chicago, are “worse than any war zone in the world”; “it’s a crime wave the likes of which we’ve never seen before.” The Biden administration is controlled by “the extreme left” and nepotistic and corrupt. Immigration is supposedly out of control. The themes of white supremacy are front and center here (“they’re coming in from Yemen. They’re coming in from all over the Middle East. They’re coming in from Haiti. Large numbers are coming in from Haiti. They’re coming in from all parts of Africa.”). The communists with their “critical race theory” are threatening our children at their most vulnerable, in schools. And most of all, of course, there was fascist projection — the “big lie” was not that the election was stolen, it was that the election was fair. 

In reality, of course, the election was fair. New York City in July had one of its lowest homicide rates in history. Violent crime is not sharply up, and certainly not high given historical trends. None of this relevant in Trump’s world, where loyalty to his version of reality is the only possible way of expressing American patriotism. This is fascism in its pure ideological form.