Ask Ivanka: Washington Post editorial board calls on Democrats to subpoena Trump’s daughter

The Washington Post editorial board is calling on the Democrats’ January 6 select committee to subpoena Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.

“Top of the list is precisely what then-President Donald Trump did before, during and after the attack,” they wrote in a Tuesday op-ed. “How did he prepare his speech preceding the insurrection, in which he told the crowd to fight? What did he anticipate his audience’s reaction would be? When did he know the pro-Trump mob was threatening the Capitol?”

The board added: “Answering such questions calls for subpoenaing former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows; Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband, White House senior adviser Jared Kushner; and other White House aides with useful information.”

According to a forthcoming book by the Washington Post journalists Carol D. Leonnig and Philip Rucker, Ivanka Trump attempted to calm the former president down on the day of January 6, encouraging him to call off the violent riot – a request Trump repeatedly rebuffed.

“I’m going down to my dad. This has to stop,” she reportedly told her aides while spending “several hours walking back and forth” from the Oval Office in an effort to defuse the situation.

In their op-ed, the Post’s editorial board also called on the select committee to investigate a number of top Trump allies in Congress, including Reps. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., Mo Brooks, R-Ala., Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala, all of whom, the Post reports, may have interacted with Trump on the day of the insurrection. McCarthy, who voted in favor of overturning the 2020 election, has been adamantly opposed to the Democratic-backed select committee and has often downplayed Trump’s role in the insurgency. However, back in February, just a month after the riot, CNN reported that Trump and McCarthy had gotten into a “shouting match” over the former president’s refusal to tell the rioters to stand down.

“Well, Kevin,” Trump told McCarthy over the phone. “I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.”

“Who the f–k do you think you are talking to?” the lawmaker responded.

CNN also reported that Rep. Tuberville spoke with Trump on the day of the riot, calling the former president via phone to announce that Mike Pence, the former vice president, had been evacuated in time to avoid the violent horde.

The phone call has since come under scrutiny in the light of Trump’s tweet attacking Pence less than ten minutes after the call.

It’s not clear whether Rep. Brooks spoke with Trump on the day of the riot. However, the Alabama lawmaker did deliver a White House-approved speech during the “Stop the Steal” rally just outside the Capitol building, where he bandied Trump’s election lies and told Trump’s supporters: “Today is the day American patriots start taking down names.”

Brooks has since personally disavowed the riot, directly attributing Trump for inciting the violence on January 6.

The Post’s editorial board also argued that lawmakers should put the leaders of far-right extremists groups on the stand – particularly leaders “at the center of the violence” – as well as

Justice Department and Capitol Police officials who “failed to anticipate the riot.”

Months after the riot, it was reported in various media that the Pentagon had denied multiple requests to deploy the National Guard, even as the chaos was unfolding. Capitol Police also reportedly had extensive intelligence that there would be violence on January 6, but the former Capitol Police chief dismissed the concerns as alarmist.

The “Cyber Ninjas” mess turns into a big problem for GOP: Arizona audit liaison threatens to quit

This article originally appeared on Raw Story

Ken Bennett, the Arizona state Senate’s liaison to its review of 2020’s presidential election ballots threatened to resign from that post live on conservative talk radio on Monday, saying the Senate’s pro-Trump contractors had been hiding their results from him for months and could even be manipulating audit data.

“I cannot be part of a process that I am kept out of critical aspects,” Bennett told James T. Harris, host of The Conservative Circus on Phoenix’s KFYI. “The reason that I am that close to stepping down as liaison is that I cannot be part of a process that I am kept out of critical aspects along the way that make the audit legitimate.”

Bennett, a conservative Republican, and former Arizona secretary of state has been an accountant outside of politics. While he cited problems with Maricopa County’s handling of ballots, Bennett said that the lead contractor, the Cyber Ninjas, might be covering up mistakes made in the review’s earlier stages by falsifying data.

“We have to be very careful that the third count [of the total number of ballots] is, of course, independent from the Cyber Ninjas’ second [hand] count [of presidential votes],” he said. “We have to make sure that we are not force-balancing to their numbers or giving them something too early to allow them to force-balance back to our numbers.”

“When I asked Mr. [Randy] Pollen, [former Arizona Republican Party chair] what are the procedures for us to do this third count, so that we can make sure that we are independent from the second count, and he refused to tell me,” Bennett said. “I became very concerned that there would be this forced balancing going on.”

The collision between Bennett’s role as the Senate’s liaison and the pro-Trump contractors has been simmering for months. While the Senate’s review has been widely criticized as a pro-Trump propaganda exercise to perpetuate the “big lie” that Joe Biden was not legitimately elected, many Republicans who voted for Trump have been awaiting Bennett’s assessment as a trusted messenger.

“I’m truly alarmed by this,” said KFYI host James Harris, in the segment that followed Bennett’s interview. “In the [show’s] first segment, you actually had Ken Bennett step down because, in good conscience, he can’t continue with this if he’s been shut out and he’s thinking that these numbers are being used improperly. And we know that that might be the case because we had President Trump spouting wrong numbers on the state last Saturday.”

“I personally believe that we need to have Ken Bennett in this position [as Senate liaison],” he continued. “I know for a fact he’s well-respected all around the state. I even heard from some people who respect him greatly say, ‘Hey, what’s going on with Ken Bennett… He sounds a little bit off.’ Well, he is a little bit off, because he’s seeing things that are shady.”

“All of a sudden, this is getting convoluted,” Harris said. “And instead of us having full disclosure, [and] transparency, it sounds like we are getting a grift!”

The spark behind Bennett’s threat to resign—unless, he said, the Senate gave him full control of investigating several remaining aspects of the 2020 vote count—was a series of events that culminated last week that involved Bennett working with an outside group of retired election auditors. The team includes a longtime Arizona Republican Party election observer; the retired CEO of Clear Ballot, a federally certified auditing firm; and the retired chief technology officer of Clear Ballot.

That team has been analyzing the public data from Maricopa County’s presidential election and had been releasing findings to the Arizona media and challenging the contractors to prove them wrong. They showed, for example, that tens of thousands of Maricopa County voters voted for most of the Republican candidates on the ballot—but not Trump. The team also has been sharing its data with Bennett.

Bennett has told Voting Booth that the data from the independent auditors was the driving factor that led the Senate to recount the total numbers of Maricopa County ballots because the Ninjas’ hand count did not match the election’s official results. The auditors had accounted for virtually all the election’s ballots and presidential votes and produced the hard evidence of public records to back up their findings. (They also found and corrected many data entry errors ahead of the Ninjas.)

As Bennett explained on the radio, the Ninjas’ were not telling Bennett what their progress or results were. In many instances going back months, they promised but never provided reports of their work. In recent weeks, Bennett said that he quietly has been comparing the outsider auditors’ totals to the Ninja’s figures and seeing that the building blocks of the official presidential election results were accurate.

This reporter was on a Zoom with Bennett and the outside auditors on Wednesday, July 21, where Bennett said the conspiracy theories promoted by the Ninjas was a diversion because the pro-Trump contractors are realizing that Biden fairly won.

“The fact that they’re posing questions, or asking questions, or throwing out things about all these other things tells me they know the counts are pretty close,” he said. “They don’t have any proof that there’s any massive change in the numbers.”

After the Arizona Republic reported on July 23 that Bennett had been taking to the auditors, he was locked out of the ballot count at a Phoenix warehouse. Trump held a rally in the city the next day. Two days later, on Monday, July 26, Bennett told KFYI’s Harris that he could not continue as Senate liaison.

Bennett said there were serious election administration issues that the review has discovered that needed to be explained and addressed before future elections. Thousands of ballots from members of the military and citizens overseas had not been properly labeled when duplicated (after they came in by e-mail), he said. Some volume of mailed-in ballots that were counted did not have signatures on their outside envelopes and should have been disqualified, he said.

Bennett said that he wanted to investigate these problems and conduct another audit that compared the digital images taken of every ballot by scanners with the county’s official spreadsheet of each ballot’s votes. The interview concluded with Harris asking Bennett what needed to happen for him to stay on.

“The answer is there are key aspects of the audit that are not even part of the scope of work assigned to Cyber Ninjas,” Bennett said. “Some of those other things need to be done independently of Cyber Ninjas, and maybe I can be a coordinator of those other aspects, not done within Cyber Ninjas’ realm.”

Artificial intelligence wants you (and your job)

My wife and I were recently driving in Virginia, amazed yet again that the GPS technology on our phones could guide us through a thicket of highways, around road accidents, and toward our precise destination. The artificial intelligence (AI) behind the soothing voice telling us where to turn has replaced passenger-seat navigators, maps, even traffic updates on the radio. How on earth did we survive before this technology arrived in our lives? We survived, of course, but were quite literally lost some of the time.

My reverie was interrupted by a toll booth. It was empty, as were all the other booths at this particular toll plaza. Most cars zipped through with E-Z passes, as one automated device seamlessly communicated with another. Unfortunately, our rental car didn’t have one.

So I prepared to pay by credit card, but the booth lacked a credit-card reader.

Okay, I thought, as I pulled out my wallet, I’ll use cash to cover the $3.25.

As it happened, that booth took only coins and who drives around with 13 quarters in his or her pocket?

I would have liked to ask someone that very question, but I was, of course, surrounded by mute machines. So, I simply drove through the electronic stile, preparing myself for the bill that would arrive in the mail once that plaza’s automated system photographed and traced our license plate.

In a thoroughly mundane fashion, I’d just experienced the age-old conflict between the limiting and liberating sides of technology. The arrowhead that can get you food for dinner might ultimately end up lodged in your own skull. The car that transports you to a beachside holiday contributes to the rising tides — by way of carbon emissions and elevated temperatures — that may someday wash away that very coastal gem of a place. The laptop computer that plugs you into the cyberworld also serves as the conduit through which hackers can steal your identity and zero out your bank account.

In the previous century, technology reached a true watershed moment when humans, harnessing the power of the atom, also acquired the capacity to destroy the entire planet. Now, thanks to AI, technology is hurtling us toward a new inflection point.

Science-fiction writers and technologists have long worried about a future in which robots, achieving sentience, take over the planet. The creation of a machine with human-like intelligence that could someday fool us into believing it’s one of us has often been described, with no small measure of trepidation, as the “singularity.” Respectable scientists like Stephen Hawking have argued that such a singularity will, in fact, mark the “end of the human race.”

This will not be some impossibly remote event like the sun blowing up in a supernova several billion years from now. According to one poll, AI researchers reckon that there’s at least a 50-50 chance that the singularity will occur by 2050. In other words, if pessimists like Hawking are right, it’s odds on that robots will dispatch humanity before the climate crisis does.

Neither the artificial intelligence that powers GPS nor the kind that controlled that frustrating toll plaza has yet attained anything like human-level intelligence — not even close. But in many ways, such dumb robots are already taking over the world. Automation is currently displacing millions of workers, including those former tollbooth operators. “Smart” machines like unmanned aerial vehicles have become an indispensable part of waging war. AI systems are increasingly being deployed to monitor our every move on the Internet, through our phones, and whenever we venture into public space. Algorithms are replacing teaching assistants in the classroom and influencing sentencing in courtrooms. Some of the loneliest among us have already become dependent on robot pets.

As AI capabilities continue to improve, the inescapable political question will become: to what extent can such technologies be curbed and regulated? Yes, the nuclear genie is out of the bottle as are other technologies — biological and chemical — capable of causing mass destruction of a kind previously unimaginable on this planet. With AI, however, that day of singularity is still in the future, even if a rapidly approaching one. It should still be possible, at least theoretically, to control such an outcome before there’s nothing to do but play the whack-a-mole game of non-proliferation after the fact.

As long as humans continue to behave badly on a global scale — war, genocide, planet-threatening carbon emissions — it’s difficult to imagine that anything we create, however intelligent, will act differently. And yet we continue to dream that some deus in machina, a god in the machine, could appear as if by magic to save us from ourselves.

Taming AI?

In the early 1940s, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov formulated his famed three laws of robotics: that robots were not to harm humans, directly or indirectly; that they must obey our commands (unless doing so violates the first law); and that they must safeguard their own existence (unless self-preservation contravenes the first two laws).

Any number of writers have attempted to update Asimov. The latest is legal scholar Frank Pasquale, who has devised four laws to replace Asimov’s three. Since he’s a lawyer not a futurist, Pasquale is more concerned with controlling the robots of today than hypothesizing about the machines of tomorrow. He argues that robots and AI should help professionals, not replace them; that they should not counterfeit humans; that they should never become part of any kind of arms race; and that their creators, controllers, and owners should always be transparent.

Pasquale’s “laws,” however, run counter to the artificial-intelligence trends of our moment. The prevailing AI ethos mirrors what could be considered the prime directive of Silicon Valley: move fast and break things. This philosophy of disruption demands, above all, that technology continuously drive down labor costs and regularly render itself obsolescent.

In the global economy, AI indeed helps certain professionals — like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who just happen to be amongthe richest people on the planet — but it’s also replacing millions of us. In the military sphere, automation is driving boots off the ground and eyes into the sky in a coming robotic world of war. And whether it’s Siri, the bots that guide increasingly frustrated callers through automated phone trees, or the AI that checks out Facebook posts, the aim has been to counterfeit human beings — “machines like me,” as Ian McEwan called them in his 2019 novel of that title — while concealing the strings that connect the creation to its creator.

Pasquale wants to apply the brakes on a train that has not only left the station but no longer is under the control of the engine driver. It’s not difficult to imagine where such a runaway phenomenon could end up and techno-pessimists have taken a perverse delight in describing the resulting cataclysm. In his book Superintelligence, for instance, Nick Bostrom writes about a sandstorm of self-replicating nanorobots that chokes every living thing on the planet — the so-called grey goo problem — and an AI that seizes power by “hijacking political processes.”

Since they would be interested only in self-preservation and replication, not protecting humanity or following its orders, such sentient machines would clearly tear up Asimov’s rulebook. Futurists have leapt into the breach. For instance, Ray Kurzweil, who predicted in his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near that a robot would attain sentience by about 2045, has proposed a “ban on self-replicating physical entities that contain their own codes for self-replication.” Elon Musk, another billionaire industrialist who’s no enemy of innovation, has called AI humanity’s “biggest existential threat” and has come out in favor of a ban on future killer robots.

To prevent the various worst-case scenarios, the European Union has proposed to control AI according to degree of risk. Some products that fall in the EU’s “high risk” category would have to get a kind of Good Housekeeping seal of approval (the Conformité Européenne). AI systems “considered a clear threat to the safety, livelihoods, and rights of people,” on the other hand, would be subject to an outright ban. Such clear-and-present dangers would include, for instance, biometric identification that captures personal data by such means as facial recognition, as well as versions of China’s social credit system where AI helps track individuals and evaluate their overall trustworthiness.

Techno-optimists have predictably lambasted what they consider European overreach. Such controls on AI, they believe, will put a damper on R&D and, if the United States follows suit, allow China to secure an insuperable technological edge in the field. “If the member states of the EU — and their allies across the Atlantic — are serious about competing with China and retaining their power status (as well as the quality of life they provide to their citizens),” writes entrepreneur Sid Mohasseb in Newsweek, “they need to call for a redraft of these regulations, with growth and competition being seen as at least as important as regulation and safety.”

Mohasseb’s concerns are, however, misleading. The regulators he fears so much are, in fact, now playing a game of catch-up. In the economy and on the battlefield, to take just two spheres of human activity, AI has already become indispensable.

The Automation of Globalization

The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has exposed the fragility of global supply chains. The world economy nearly ground to a halt in 2020 for one major reason: the health of human workers. The spread of infection, the risk of contagion, and the efforts to contain the pandemic all removed workers from the labor force, sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently. Factories shut down, gaps widened in transportation networks, and shops lost business to online sellers.

A desire to cut labor costs, a major contributor to a product’s price tag, has driven corporations to look for cheaper workers overseas. For such cost-cutters, eliminating workers altogether is an even more beguiling prospect. Well before the pandemic hit, corporations had begun to turn to automation. By 2030, up to 45 million U.S. wo rkerswill be displaced by robots. The World Bank estimates that they will eventually replace an astounding 85% of the jobs in Ethiopia, 77% in China, and 72% in Thailand.”

The pandemic not only accelerated this trend, but increased economic inequality as well because, at least for now, robots tend to replace the least skilled workers. In a survey conducted by the World Economic Forum, 43% of businesses indicated that they would reduce their workforces through the increased use of technology. “Since the pandemic hit,” reports NBC News,

“food manufacturers ramped up their automation, allowing facilities to maintain output while social distancing. Factories digitized controls on their machines so they could be remotely operated by workers working from home or another location. New sensors were installed that can flag, or predict, failures, allowing teams of inspectors operating on a schedule to be reduced to an as-needed maintenance crew.”

In an ideal world, robots and AI would increasingly take on all the dirty, dangerous, and demeaning jobs globally, freeing humans to do more interesting work. In the real world, however, automation is often making jobs dirtier and more dangerous by, for instance, speeding up the work done by the remaining human labor force. Meanwhile, robots are beginning to encroach on what’s usually thought of as the more interesting kinds of work done by, for example, architects and product designers.

In some cases, AI has even replaced managers. A contract driver for Amazon, Stephen Normandin, discovered that the AI system that monitored his efficiency as a deliveryman also used an automated email to fire him when it decided he wasn’t up to snuff. Jeff Bezos may be stepping down as chief executive of Amazon, but robots are quickly climbing its corporate ladder and could prove at least as ruthless as he’s been, if not more so.

Mobilizing against such a robot replacement army could prove particularly difficult as corporate executives aren’t the only ones putting out the welcome mat. Since fully automated manufacturing in “dark factories” doesn’t require lighting, heating, or a workforce that commutes to the site by car, that kind of production can reduce a country’s carbon footprint — a potentially enticing factor for “green growth” advocates and politicians desperate to meet their Paris climate targets.

It’s possible that sentient robots won’t need to devise ingenious stratagems for taking over the world. Humans may prove all too willing to give semi-intelligent machines the keys to the kingdom.

The New Fog of War

The 2020 war between Armenia and Azerbaijan proved to be unlike any previous military conflict. The two countries had been fighting since the 1980s over a disputed mountain enclave, Nagorno-Karabakh. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Armenia proved the clear victor in conflict that followed in the early 1990s, occupying not only the disputed territory but parts of Azerbaijan as well.

In September 2020, as tensions mounted between the two countries, Armenia was prepared to defend those occupied territories with a well-equipped army of tanks and artillery. Thanks to its fossil-fuel exports, Azerbaijan, however, had been spending considerably more than Armenia on the most modern version of military preparedness. Still, Armenian leaders often touted their army as the best in the region. Indeed, according to the 2020 Global Militarization Index, that country was second only to Israel in terms of its level of militarization.

Yet Azerbaijan was the decisive winner in the 2020 conflict, retaking possession of Nagorno-Karabkah. The reason: automation.

“Azerbaijan used its drone fleet — purchased from Israel and Turkey — to stalk and destroy Armenia’s weapons systems in Nagorno-Karabakh, shattering its defenses and enabling a swift advance,” reported the Washington Post‘s Robyn Dixon. “Armenia found that air defense systems in Nagorno-Karabakh, many of them older Soviet systems, were impossible to defend against drone attacks, and losses quickly piled up.”

Armenian soldiers, notorious for their fierceness, were spooked by the semi-autonomous weapons regularly above them. “The soldiers on the ground knew they could be hit by a drone circling overhead at any time,” noted Mark Sullivan in the business magazine Fast Company. “The drones are so quiet they wouldn’t hear the whir of the propellers until it was too late. And even if the Armenians did manage to shoot down one of the drones, what had they really accomplished? They’d merely destroyed a piece of machinery that would be replaced.”

The United States pioneered the use of drones against various non-state adversaries in its war on terror in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, and elsewhere across the Greater Middle East and Africa. But in its 2020 campaign, Azerbaijan was using the technology to defeat a modern army. Now, every military will feel compelled not only to integrate increasingly more powerful AI into its offensive capabilities, but also to defend against the new technology.

To stay ahead of the field, the United States is predictably pouring money into the latest technologies. The new Pentagon budget includes the “largest ever” request for R&D, including a down payment of nearly a billion dollars for AI. As TomDispatchregular Michael Klare has written, the Pentagon has even taken a cue from the business world by beginning to replace its war managers — generals — with a huge, interlinked network of automated systems known as the Joint All-Domain Command-and-Control (JADC2).

The result of any such handover of greater responsibility to machines will be the creation of what mathematician Cathy O’Neill calls “weapons of math destruction.” In the global economy, AI is already replacing humans up and down the chain of production. In the world of war, AI could in the end annihilate people altogether, whether thanks to human design or computer error.

After all, during the Cold War, only last-minute interventions by individuals on both sides ensured that nuclear “missile attacks” detected by Soviet and American computers — which turned out to be birds, unusual weather, or computer glitches — didn’t precipitate an all-out nuclear war. Take the human being out of the chain of command and machines could carry out such a genocide all by themselves.

And the fault, dear reader, would lie not in our robots but in ourselves.

Robots of Last Resort

In my new novel Songlands, humanity faces a terrible set of choices in 2052. Having failed to control carbon emissions for several decades, the world is at the point of no return, too late for conventional policy fixes. The only thing left is a scientific Hail Mary pass, an experiment in geoengineering that could fail or, worse, have terrible unintended consequences. The AI responsible for ensuring the success of the experiment may or may not be trustworthy. My dystopia, like so many others, is really about a narrowing of options and a whittling away of hope, which is our current trajectory.

And yet, we still have choices. We could radically shift toward clean energy and marshal resources for the whole world, not just its wealthier portions, to make the leap together. We could impose sensible regulations on artificial intelligence. We could debate the details of such programs in democratic societies and in participatory multilateral venues.

Or, throwing up our hands because of our unbridgeable political differences, we could wait for a post-Trumpian savior to bail us out. Techno-optimists hold out hope that automation will set us free and save the planet. Laissez-faire enthusiasts continue to believe that the invisible hand of the market will mysteriously direct capital toward planet-saving innovations instead of SUVs and plastic trinkets.

These are illusions. As I write in Songlands, we have always hoped for someone or something to save us: “God, a dictator, technology. For better or worse, the only answer to our cries for help is an echo.”

In the end, robots won’t save us. That’s one piece of work that can’t be outsourced or automated. It’s a job that only we ourselves can do.

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Lessons learned from the wayward brain

When someone close to you develops signs of mental illness, you spring into detective mode. You ask questions, but the answers seem vague and incomplete. You scour your memory for any years-old signs, any warnings that might have seemed innocuous in the moment but raise red flags in retrospect.

You wonder: If anyone had noticed then, would things be different now? And if they refuse to seek treatment, you think, it doesn’t have to be this way — if only you could figure out how to break through.

If this sounds familiar, you might be interested in “Projections: A Story of Human Emotions” by Karl Deisseroth and “A Sense of Self: Memory, the Brain, and Who We Are” by Veronica O’Keane, two recent entrants in the vast arena of nonfiction books that explore both the biology of mental illness and how the brain works in general. Both authors use patient stories as conduits to talk about advancements in neuroscience, illuminating the brain’s various structures and the connections between them.

Patient narratives across both books show that not all who receive psychiatric treatment survive the storm in their minds, while others regain a sense of themselves that was lost. And though scientists may be inconceivably far away from revealing how a 3-pound fatty organ in the skull gives rise to all the complexities of mental life, at least the questions “can be well posed,” as Deisseroth puts it.

Deisseroth, a professor at Stanford University, is best known for developing new and influential technologies for studying the brain. But in this book he draws from his work as an emergency psychiatrist at a hospital in Silicon Valley, and explores how confronting people in crisis influenced the way he investigates the brain in both humans and animals, potentially laying the groundwork for future clinical treatments. It “is enthralling to consider: the experiences of suffering human beings, and thoughts about mouse and fish brains, are informing each other,” he writes.

Presenting a cast of characters encountered in the cramped, windowless Room Eight of the hospital, Deisseroth reflects on a broad swath of his psychiatry experiences, from his residency in the early 2000s to his more recent patient work. His book resembles a series of connected short stories interwoven with recent findings from research on the neural circuits that give rise to mental illness. At times it may feel like reading fiction because it partly is — Deisseroth freely uses his imagination in his portrayal of patients and their inner lives. But he pulls these threads together with his own memoir-ish voice, revealing the struggles, frustrations, and triumphs of someone driven to understand both the cold science of the brain and the hot mess of the mind.

A man loses his pregnant wife in a car accident and doesn’t know why he can’t cry. A patent lawyer believes her neighbor has installed a satellite dish to channel her thoughts. After a breakup, a 19-year-old begins cutting his arms. Deisseroth ends up in a dramatic chase when a patient slips out of the exam room, only to find she’d gone to binge-eat and vomit. Unlike Psychology 101 disease prototypes, these feel like real people. And while they’re actually “projections,” filtered through the lens of a doctor who fictionalizes details to protect patients’ privacy, they are vivid reminders that mental health can be a fragile, elusive thing.

But psychotherapy and imagination aren’t the only ways Deisseroth peers into the brain. Seeking answers to tough questions that have confounded psychiatrists for decades, Deisseroth helped pioneer a technology called optogenetics. Once patients leave the hospital, Deisseroth has no control over their behavior, let alone their brains. But with optogenetics, he and other researchers can turn on and off individual neural circuits, or even neurons themselves — at least, in laboratory animals.

In optogenetics, researchers hijack genes called microbial opsins from bacteria and algae and encode them in the brain cells of lab animals — mostly mice, rats, and fish. These exotic genes lead to the creation of proteins with a special power to convert light to electrical current. Normally, most neurons don’t turn on in the presence of light (although a 2019 study questions that assumption). But as a result of this feat of genetic engineering, scientists can activate individual brain cells by delivering light to them. With unprecedented precision, they can then investigate how different parts of the brain participate in both typical behaviors and symptoms of mental illness.

The impact of optogenetics has been far-reaching in revealing the brain’s inner workings, at least in animal models. And after more than 15 years of laboratory study, its potential is moving into the human realm. In May 2021, too recent to make it into this book, scientists reported in Nature Medicine that a blind patient regained partial vision as a result of optogenetic therapy.

But in terms of innovations in psychiatric patient care, what are the lessons from optogenetics? A lot of this work is still in its infancy. Deisseroth says his laboratory research informs the psychiatric patient care that he continues to give, yet many of the landmark studies are about causations and chemical pathways in genetically modified mice, not humans. Scientists can model eating disorders in rodents, but no one is talking about removing the skull flaps of people with anorexia, genetically modifying particular brain cells and zapping them with light to restart the drive to eat normally. Nor might it be that simple. Yet there is some hope that by understanding the fundamental mechanisms at work, new treatments could one day be developed.

One of the most direct feedback loops between Deisseroth’s hospital and lab work is a patient named Charles, who changed Deisseroth’s thinking about autism. Charles comes to Deisseroth as a young information technology specialist who, among other social impairments, consistently avoids eye contact. One morning, Deisseroth asks him what makes him look away. Charles tells him, “It overloads the rest of me.”

This introspection is so profound to Deisseroth that he says it justifies his entire career progression: “All the extra years of both MD and Ph.D. training, all the pain and personal challenges of internship, all the call nights as a single father, worrying about my lonely son. This alone was enough.”

While information overload seems like an abstract concept, it could be rooted in too much firing of excitatory cells, which stimulate other neurons, compared to inhibitory cells, which do the opposite. In 2011, Deisseroth’s team used optogenetics to increase the activity of excitatory cells in the prefrontal cortex of mice, which appeared to cause them to be less social with other mice. This part of the book is a bit technical, but the bottom line is that an imbalance in cellular activity could play a role in the asocial behaviors associated with autism.

Tantalizingly, it appears that this imbalance might be corrected. In 2017, Deisseroth’s team reversed social impairment in mice carrying genetic mutations associated with autism through opposite methods in the prefrontal cortex — making inhibitory cells fire more, or lowering the activity in excitatory cells. In fact, such experiments suggest that social avoidance can be turned on or off in adult mice, a revelation that may generate new hope for future interventions in adult humans.

Deisseroth’s most compelling narratives detail brief encounters with patients in vulnerable, distressing circumstances. Veronica O’Keane, on the other hand, describes longer-term relationships with her patients in “A Sense of Self: Memory, the Brain, and Who We Are” — although patient stories take more of a backseat to science in this book. She is a professor of psychiatry at Trinity College Dublin, and has been practicing for more than 30 years. “Like all psychiatrists, as a patient once said to me, I am like a detective,” she writes.

O’Keane draws from her clinical experiences to offer a comprehensive tour of the current state of knowledge about how memory operates in the brain. “Individuals with psychiatric illnesses have a great deal to tell neuroscience, and the larger world, about the processes involved in the organization of memory,” she writes.

“A Sense of Self” at times reads like a textbook, complete with a few diagrams. Anyone who has read a neuroscience book previously will recognize H.M., who was famously unable to form new memories after undergoing brain surgery, as well as Phineas Gage, who was impaled with an iron rod — and how the tragic circumstances of their impairments taught the fledging field of neuroscience a lot about what does what in the brain.

But what makes O’Keane’s book engaging is how she incorporates references to literature and folklore, putting a different spin on familiar stories — like Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking- Glass,” in which Alice’s adventures closely mimic feelings of psychosis.

Another is Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” about a woman trapped in the wall of her bedroom. It’s often portrayed as a tale of the oppression of women at that time, but O’Keane has a different take: It’s a perfect description of experience of what we now call postpartum psychosis, she writes.

Postpartum psychosis, a condition seldom spoken about, can make otherwise healthy new mothers lose sight of what is real and what is not. Perkins Gilman herself experienced postpartum psychosis, and years later, after her cancer treatments failed, ended her own life in 1935.

O’Keane describes a patient, Edith, who developed delusions about her baby being an imposter, as well as her own husband. With the help of antipsychotic medications, Edith heals and comes back to reality. Yet she still feels terror when she sees the gravestone that she had believed to be the site of her baby’s burial — “the memories are real,” she tells the author. This distinction “set me on a long-term pathway of inquiry about the nature of the matter of memory,” O’Keane writes.

Some who suffer psychosis are so accustomed to the voices in their heads and other delusions that they decline medicine to make them go away. They feel scared to let go of their inner lives and participate in the same reality that others share.

Like much of life, mental health can be seen as a matter of achieving some kind of equilibrium. Everyone, psychotic or not, operates by balancing one’s inner world full of thoughts, feelings, and memories with the external world and all of the stuff of society. “If there is anything that I have learned from my work with mentally ill patients it is that the achievement of an easy equilibrium between oneself and the world is what determines one’s happiness,” O’Keane writes.

As it happens, O’Keane also briefly touches on innovations in optogenetics. She focuses on an experiment by Susumu Tonegawa using optogenetics to implant false memories in mice, which I covered as a CNN reporter in 2013. By genetically altering neurons and shining blue light on them, scientists made mice believe they had been shocked in one chamber, even though they were shocked in a different chamber. The mice eventually froze up in fear even when the researchers were not activating the memory in their brains.

O’Keane’s take on this research is that artificial modification of memory is “fascinating,” but that in some sense the mouse memories aren’t “false” because “the neural matter of the experience is formed” regardless. Just as Edith regarded her hallucinations about her baby’s death as real memories, these mice have real memories of something that never occurred. “Edith brought home to me how memory is, in essence, neurally coded experience,” O’Keane writes.

As we go about our lives, according to O’Keane, we tag experiences with emotions, which are then triggered later as we are reminded of them, but we never re-live them in quite the same way. “Is there ever a boundaried memory untouched by the present, like a walled cement garden?” she writes. The answer in her view is decidedly no, for each time we recall a moment, it is colored by who we have become since it happened.

O’Keane’s book will be useful for anyone looking for a deep dive into how memory works, but it is not as much of a page-turner as “Projections.” Still, I was moved by both authors’ concerns for their patients and acknowledgement that science has only scratched the surface of learning how psychiatric illness works at a fundamental level in the brain. The double-edged sword here is that you are not alone, but also, no one really understands.

Yet, there is hope. The stories in both works reveal a range of humanity that is barely understood by people who devote their lives to the study of mental illness and is often stigmatized by those who do not. They are in some sense thank-you notes to the patients who have taught the authors about the nature of the brain and given them more to investigate in the future.

And while a person battling with delusions of paranoia may seem far removed from academic papers on genetically engineered mice, both authors argue that the gap between laboratory insights and clinical practice is narrowing. “As this science develops, psychiatric illness will become a major target of investigation, and I believe this will be the beginning of the ending of the stigmatization of psychiatric illness,” O’Keane writes.

“An important caveat here,” she adds, “is that most of my patients do not feel similarly optimistic.”

* * *

Elizabeth Landau is a science journalist and communicator living in Washington, D.C. She has contributed to The New York Times, The Washington Post, Quanta Magazine, Smithsonian, and Wired, among other publications. Find her on Twitter at @lizlandau.

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

Trump Org. witness under gag order after speaking with investigators about alleged tax fraud scheme

The former daughter-in-law of the Trump Organization’s indicted financial chief is being silenced as she fights to keep custody of her children.

Jennifer Weisselberg, the ex-wife of Trump employee Barry Weisselberg, has spoken with investigators about the alleged tax fraud scheme that landed accountant Allen Weisselberg under indictment and is willing to speak with journalists, but she’s under a judge’s gag order, reported The Daily Beast.

“Defendant, Jennifer Weisselberg, shall refrain from having any discussions or interviews whatsoever with the press about the parties’ children… the custody proceeding… or her motivation for giving interviews insofar as it concerns the children,” reads the order signed by New York County Supreme Court Justice Lori Sattler.

The gag order doesn’t prohibit her from speaking to investigators, but three sources say it’s part of a broader campaign of witness intimidation that includes demands by her ex-husband’s attorney for court-mandated mental health evaluations and drug tests intended to harm her reputation before she testifies at a potential criminal trial.

“What we have here is a concerted effort to keep my client quiet,” said her former attorney Aimee Richter at a hearing in May. “So it’s come full circle; lost her children, lost all her money, she is going to lose where she’s lived for the last year and . . . now, she’s losing her right to speak.”

The Trump Organization and its chief financial officer were charged June 30 with criminal tax fraud, falsifying business records, and scheming to defraud the government, based in part on Jennifer Weisselberg’s testimony in her divorce proceedings and in follow-up conversations with law enforcement.

Karen Rosenthal, a court-appointed attorney who’s independently representing the children’s interests in the custody case, asked the judge to prevent Jennifer Weisselberg from discussing the couple’s living arrangements and other details after she gave interviews about her knowledge of the Trump Organization.

“It’s a silencing tactic,” said Zoe Applbaum, who’s been monitoring the case as a volunteer for the nonprofit STEPS to End Family Violence. “They’re bullying her and they’re being completely one-sided. They’re putting her in the hot seat so Barry doesn’t have to be.”

Democrats have a massive opportunity with Capitol riot committee: Shove it down the GOP’s throat

Democrats have the opportunity of a lifetime when they open hearings of the House select committee on the Capitol insurrection Tuesday morning, but they can miss that opportunity by making three mistakes: If they fail to prominently show videos of the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, if they fail to announce that hearings of the committee will resume immediately following the August recess and continue until the committee has completed its work, and if they turn Rep. Liz Cheney into a rock star.

Let’s put the Cheney matter away first. Sure, she was one of 10 Republicans to vote to impeach Trump the second time around for his role in provoking the assault on the Capitol, and her statements about Trump’s culpability are helpful. But every time she starts running her mouth about the Constitution, I take a moment to consider her abject opposition to constitutional rights like abortion and marriage equality. This is a woman who picks and chooses the battles she wants to fight, and her late-blooming anti-Trumpism may have less to do with preserving our democracy and the Constitution than it does with her ambition. Democrats aren’t fooling anyone with Cheney and the recent appointment of Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois. They aren’t the loyal opposition. Among Republicans, their opposition to Trump is as convenient as it is rare, but that doesn’t deserve excessive thank-yous from Democrats.

This committee is about as nonpartisan as Trey Gowdy’s Benghazi committee. You remember that wonderfully principled inquiry, don’t you? Formed in May of 2014, the Benghazi committee managed to string out hearings over two years and did not shut down until December of 2016, after spending more than $4 million on its spurious “investigation” of the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi and the Obama administration’s response.

The Benghazi committee wasn’t intended to be nonpartisan. No less a figure than Kevin McCarthy went on Sean Hannity’s show, halfway through the committee’s lifespan, and said, “Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable.”

Along with coining brand-new words like “untrustable,” McCarthy and the Benghazi committee accomplished every one of the Republicans’ goals. They dragged out the process right through the entire 2016 presidential election cycle, through the primaries, through both the Republican and Democratic national conventions, right through the November election itself. They held hearings. They leaked. They exaggerated. They lied. They put Hillary Clinton at the witness table for eight hours on Oct. 22, 2015, almost exactly a week after the first Democratic primary debate in Nevada, and three weeks before the second and much more important debate in Iowa. They did everything they possibly could to drag her through the political mud. They didn’t try to hide it. They just did it.

If Democrats don’t do the same thing with their Jan. 6 select committee, they will be missing the chance to tar and feather not only Donald Trump but the entire Republican Party. Everybody knows what happened on Jan. 6. Everybody knows who assaulted the Capitol. It was a violent mob of Trump supporters. They didn’t try to conceal who they were. They waved Trump flags. They wore MAGA hats. They chanted Trump slogans. They filmed themselves with their cell phones and immediately posted the clips on social media. They tweeted. They Facebooked. They Instagrammed. They gave interviews to whoever from the mainstream media was present. And then they went home and bragged about it.

Everybody knows that some 550 of the Trump supporters present at the Capitol on Jan. 6 have been arrested and charged with federal crimes. Several have already pled guilty and at least one has been sentenced to jail. Everybody knows that 165 of them have been charged with assaulting or impeding law enforcement officers.

And everyone knows that the man who incited the riot at the Capitol, Donald Trump, has been on a tour of rallies bent on lying his way out of culpability for the insurrection. Trump and his Republican acolytes have been characterizing the assault on the Capitol as just another day of “tourist visits” by a “loving crowd.” Everybody knows they’re attempting to pull off the old “who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?” scam. Trump is the past master of that one. Nobody in American politics has told so many lies or repeated them as often as Donald Trump. He’s good at wielding the Big Lie, but he is also the master blaster of the Blizzard of Lies. He knows he can’t insult the intelligence of his base. Hell, they’re out there believing every lie that gets thrown at them about how vaccines are responsible for more deaths than COVID and masks don’t prevent the disease, they spread it. They’ll believe his lies that pipe-wielding Proud Boys were just showing the Capitol police some love.

The problem faced by the House select committee is this: What do you do in the face of such blissful ignorance? Well, so far Democrats have been winning the insurrection-commission wars because they have Nancy Pelosi leading them. She has outmaneuvered McCarthy every time he’s tried to throw up a Trump-licking roadblock. He thought he could beat her by getting together with Mitch McConnell to cancel the truly nonpartisan 9/11-style commission Pelosi proposed to investigate the attack on the Capitol. Pelosi fired back with the select committee. McCarthy thought he could turn her committee into a clown car by appointing the two Jims, Ohio Republican Jordan and Indiana Republican Banks, to the committee. Pelosi rejected both of them. Then McCarthy announced Republicans would boycott the committee entirely, apparently thinking Pelosi would wilt under charges that her committee was too partisan. Pelosi shot back by appointing Cheney and Kinzinger.

What the Lickspittle Caucus is now looking at is a committee entirely controlled by the toughest Democratic speaker of the House to come along since … who? Sam Rayburn? Tip O’Neill? Neither of those glad-handers could carry Nancy Pelosi’s purse. If McCarthy and the Republicans had gone along with the nonpartisan commission originally worked out between the parties in the House, they would have had veto power over subpoenas and at least some role in which witnesses to call and how long the commission would last.

Gone. Republicans won’t be able to stop Democrats on the committee from subpoenaing key witnesses to Trump’s behavior during the insurrection, including Ivanka Trump and even McCarthy, who spoke with the instigator in chief on the phone that day. If Pelosi wants to call Trump himself to testify before the committee, she can do it. If Republicans contest the subpoenas, Pelosi can order House lawyers into court to fight, and if the court cases drag out, so will the term of the committee. Pelosi will be free to have the committee hold hearings through the fall and winter, right into the middle of the 2022 campaign season if she so chooses.

And why shouldn’t she? Trump is going to stay out there on the rally circuit spreading his lies, but Democrats will have the select committee to counter them. If Pelosi wants to schedule a hearing for the day after every one of Trump’s rallies, she can. If she wants to call witnesses to rebut specific lies he blathers, she can. Best of all, there are enough hours of videos from the assault on the Capitol that the select committee will be able to play a couple hours of video every time they hold a hearing and hardly make a dent in the supply. The video of the murder of George Floyd is what convicted Derek Chauvin. Videos of the Capitol insurrection present the same sort of damning evidence.

I lost track years ago of the number of times I’ve wished Democrats would learn to fight as hard as Republicans. Nancy Pelosi is, thankfully, as principled as she is tough, and she’s exactly what we need right now. As for Kevin McCarthy, he can make all the pilgrimages he wants to Bedminster and Mar-a-Lago or wherever else Trump is holed up with his golf clubs and his Diet Cokes and his burgers. He can huff and puff all he wants, but he won’t be able to blow Nancy’s House down.

Joe Biden’s relapse: Can the president shake off his fantasies about Republican leaders?

For a while, President Biden seemed to be recovering from his chronic fantasies about Republicans in Congress. But last week he had a relapse — harming prospects for key progressive legislation and reducing the already slim hopes that the GOP can be prevented from winning control of the House and Senate in midterm elections 15 months from now.

Biden’s reflex has been to glad-hand his way across the aisle. On the campaign trail in May 2019, he proclaimed: “The thing that will fundamentally change things is with Donald Trump out of the White House. Not a joke. You will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends.” A year and a half later, the president-elect threw some bipartisan bromides into his victory speech — lamenting “the refusal of Democrats and Republicans to cooperate with one another,” contending that the American people “want us to cooperate,” and pledging “that’s the choice I’ll make.”

But the notion of cooperating with Republican leaders like Sen. Mitch McConnell and Rep. Kevin McCarthy was always a fool’s errand. That reality might as well have been blinking in big neon letters across the Capitol dome since January, as Republicans continually doubled down on complete intransigence. By early March, when the landmark American Rescue Plan squeaked through Congress, Biden had new reasons to wise up.

Passage of the $1.9 trillion measure, Biden said, “proves we can do big things, important things in this country.” But passage also proved that every Republican in the House and Senate is dedicated to stopping this country from doing “big, important things.” The American Rescue Plan got through Congress without a single Republican vote.

As David Dayen, executive editor of the American Prospect, pointed out at the time, many of the major gains in the rescue package were fundamental yet fragile. While purported “free-market solutions” had been set aside, crucial provisions were put on a timer to sunset: “We have the outline of a child allowance but it expires in a year. The [Affordable Care Act] subsidies expire in two years. The massive expansion of unemployment eligibility for a much wider group of workers is now done on Labor Day weekend. There’s a modicum of ongoing public investment, but mostly this returns us to a steady state, with decisions to make from there.”

Whether progress can be sustained and accelerated during the next several years will largely depend on ending Republican leverage over the Senate via the filibuster and preventing a GOP congressional majority from taking hold in January 2023. The new temporary measures, Dayen notes, could all be made permanent, “with automatic stabilizers that kick in during downturns, and Federal Reserve bank accounts for every American to fill when needed. We could ensure that federal support sustaining critical features of public life remains in place. We could choose to not build a pop-up safety net but an ongoing one.”

The obstacles to enacting long-term structural changes will be heightened, to the extent that Biden relapses into a futile quest for “bipartisanship.” This year, the GOP’s methodical assaults on voting rights — well underway in numerous states controlled by Republican legislatures and governors — could be somewhat counteracted by strong, democracy-oriented federal legislation. That simply won’t happen if the Senate filibuster remains in place.

Yet Biden, even while denouncing attacks on voting rights, now seems quite willing to help Republicans retain the filibuster as a pivotal tool for protecting and enabling those attacks. During a CNN town hall last week, Biden said he favors tweaking the Senate rules to require that a senator actually must keep talking on the floor to continue a filibuster — but he’s against getting rid of the filibuster. Eliminating it, Biden said, would “throw the entire Congress into chaos and nothing will get done.” On voting rights, the president said, he wants to “bring along Republicans who I know know better.”

Many activists quickly demolished those claims. “This answer from Biden on the filibuster just doesn’t make sense,” tweeted Sawyer Hackett, executive director of People First Future. “Republicans aren’t going to wake up and ‘know better’ than suppressing the vote. The filibuster encourages them to obstruct and our reluctance to end it emboldens them to do worse.”

The response from the president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Sherrilyn Ifill, was aptly caustic: “What are their names? Name the Republicans who know better. This is not a strategy. The time for magical thinking is over.”

As Biden slid into illogical ramblings on CNN to support retaining the filibuster, the implications were ominous and far-reaching. In the words of the Our Revolution organization, Biden “refused to support doing what must be done to secure voting rights. Despite all evidence to the contrary, he continues to entertain the possibility of getting 10 Republican votes for voting rights. Back here, in reality, precisely zero Republicans voted in support of the For the People Act, and there is no reason to expect that to change.”

When Biden became president, the Washington Post reported that he had chosen to place a portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the most prominent spot inside the Oval Office, as “a clear nod to a president who helped the country through significant crises, a challenge Biden now also faces.” But Biden’s recurrent yearning not to polarize with Republican leaders is in stark contrast to FDR’s approach.

Near the end of his first term, in a Madison Square Garden speech condemning “the economic royalists,” Roosevelt said: “They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.” But now, in his recurrent search for cooperation, Biden seems eager for his Republican foes to like him. It’s a ridiculous and dangerous quest.

Does Eric Trump’s recent silence suggest that he is in legal trouble?

Queerty editor Graham Gremore made an observation Monday that could say a lot about Eric Trump’s involvement in pending lawsuits involving Allen Weisselberg and the Trump Organization.

As Gremore noticed, the middle Trump son hasn’t posted anything to his social media for about 10 days, the longest stretch he’s ever gone in the past 5 years. The last thing he posted was a photo of he and his wife on a yacht. That could mean that the couple is outside of cell service on an extended vacation, but it begs the question of why his wife Lara is still tweeting and doing interviews.

“It comes at literally the exact same time two of his dad’s closest allies–Tom Barrack, chairman of Trump’s 2017 inauguration committee, and Allen Weisselberg, former CFO of the Trump Organization–were indicted for unrelated crimes,” wrote Gremore.

Ivanka Trump is keeping a low profile as well, under the claim that she and her family are “distancing” themselves from the former president. Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio believes that the truth is that Ivanka is also in legal “peril” for doing some of the same things Weisselberg is accused of.

Eric may have finally gotten the memo, said Gremore, though it appears Donald Trump Jr. has not.

The FAA just redefined the word “astronaut” so that Jeff Bezos doesn’t qualify

Last week, Amazon founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos completed his first suborbital flight on his own spacecraft made by his company Blue Origin. Coverage of the spaceflight, including in the Bezos-owned Washington Post, referred to him and the other rocket passengers as “astronauts.” The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) disagrees with that assessment.

The FAA’s new policy order, which went into effect on July 20 — the same day the billionaire blasted into space (coincidence?) — states that in order for a person to qualify for the FAA Commercial Space Astronaut Wings Program, a person must meet a new specific set of requirements. First, they must reach an altitude higher than 50 miles above the surface of the Earth during flight, and they must also participate in activities during the mission that were “essential to public safety, or contributed to human space flight safety.” The vehicle used to travel to space must be FAA-licensed or permitted by the FAA to launch and re-enter Earth’s atmosphere.

Technically, only three agencies in the U.S. can designate people as astronauts: The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the U.S. military and the FAA. Each agency has a different definition determining who qualifies, but when it comes to NASA and the military, only their employees can qualify for the designation eliminating commercial crews who aren’t NASA or military employees. This leaves the FAA as the final contender to designate a person as an astronaut, and its updated guidelines make it so space tourists are ineligible — unless they are performing an essential task.

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As reported by NBC News, Bezos is ineligible for this very reason. Bezos flew with his brother, Mark, 82-year-old former pilot Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old from the Netherlands. Of the entire four-person crew, it is possible that Funk, who was once denied the opportunity to go to space with NASA in the 1960s because of her gender, could be awarded honorary astronaut wings. The FAA awards these to “individuals whose contribution to commercial human space flight merits special recognition.” Funk is now the oldest person to fly into space.

As space tourism becomes a feasible hobby for the super-rich, it is worth clarifying precisely who can call themselves an astronaut. Despite the newly-clarified definition, space historian and author Andrew Chaikin told NBC News he doesn’t think the new rules will affect enthusiasm for the industry.

“I think the motivation for space tourism is that people just want to have that experience,” he said. “I don’t think the wider world pays that much attention to whether or not the FAA awards astronaut wings to one person over another.”

Notably, Chaikin speculated that it could open doors for a new title.

“I like the term space traveler,” Chaikin said. “Anybody who flies in space, whatever their capacity, is a space traveler. In years to come, people might go up to space not for science but just as a requirement to do their job. Maybe it’s a manager of an orbiting hotel. I don’t know that you would call that person an astronaut. But you would call them a space traveler.”

The FAA noted in its policy change that “in order to maintain the prestige of Commercial Space Astronaut Wings, the FAA may further refine the eligibility requirements at any time as it deems appropriate.”

Clearly, not all space travelers will be considered astronauts.

Why is it was so easy for Donald Trump to sucker Americans into his cult?

In his column for the Daily Beast, conservative commentator Matt Lewis made a case that Donald Trump’s rise was the inevitable result of a country that has become filled with lonely people who have lost any connection to their community and just want to feel like they belong.

As the conservative columnist notes that, at the heart of “Trumpism,” is an appeal to those suffering from social isolation which, in turn, makes them susceptible to appeals such as “Make America Great Again” as promised by the former president.

Explaining, “lack of communal ties may be killing us at the micro level, on the macro level this phenomenon has contributed to numerous societal ills, including the rise of Trumpism,” Lewis added that the new book by the Wall Street Journal’s Michael Bender (“Frankly, We Did Win This Election”) makes clear Trump’s early appeal.

Writing that Trump’s fans “followed his rallies like they were on tour with The Grateful Dead,” he added, “Instead of tie-dyed shirts, they donned red ‘MAGA’ hats. Instead of being young adventurers running away from their parents, these ‘front-row Joes’ (as he calls them) tended to be people who were ‘retired or close to it’ and ‘estranged from their families or otherwise without children’; they also had ‘plenty of time on their hands.’ What they found was that ‘Trump had, in a surprising way, made their lives richer.’ His rallies gave them a ‘reason to travel the country, staying at one another’s homes, sharing hotel rooms and carpooling. Two had married — and later divorced — by Trump’s second year in office.'”

As Lewis explained, humans who live in isolation tend to want to belong to something and the pull of the communal feel of Trump’s rallies was — and remains — a seductive lure.

To illustrate his point he notes the Manson family and those who followed cult leader Jim Jones to their deaths.

“If you are surrounded by friends and family or are otherwise well-adjusted, this probably won’t resonate. But if you are lonely and marginalized (or think you are, like so many of today’s MAGA fans), it will resonate,” he wrote. “There’s a reason vulnerable people are drawn to street gangs. There’s a reason Charles Manson preyed upon teenage runaways, and there’s a reason why so many poor Black women died in Jonestown. When you are down-and-out and lonely, you cling to the people who care enough to give you hope.”

He concluded, “Make no mistake. What Trump did was amazing, and it should serve as a warning for us to address these societal problems before a more competent demagogue comes along and fully leverages this opportunity. Trump grew a cult following by casting himself as an outsider (like you!) and saying that those in power were trying to take him down (like you!). He became their fighter and savior, and these mega-fans pilgrimaged to his concert-like rallies. He created a nationwide fandom that is unprecedented in American history.

You can read more here (subscription required).

With Elliot Page, increased visibility of transmasculine identity can be “both great & awful”

With Netflix’s superhero series “Umbrella Academy” slated to end filming its third season by August, many fans are curious awaiting what the show has in store for Elliot Page’s character Vanya Hargreeves, one of the most powerful supernatural beings at the Academy. In December 2020, Page came forward as a transmasculine non-binary individual using masculine pronouns, and his honesty, authenticity, and advocacy for LGBTQ communities have since made him a celebrity face for trans communities in the media.

Consider Page’s March TIME magazine cover, or his release of fun photos in swim trunks, to wide celebration and joy in queer and trans communities. As a guest on Apple TV+ series “The Oprah Conversation” and Oprah Winfrey and Prince Harry’s series on mental health, “The Me You Can’t See,” Page described his conflicting feelings about his transition, which he saw as both “the most miraculous, amazing thing,” while also being frustrated that “society [had] made getting to this place in my life” so difficult.

Despite the challenges Page faces, the visibility he brings as a transmasculine individual is especially refreshing. With the popularity of “Pose,” “Transparent” and even Caitlyn Jenner, pop culture is more familiar with transfeminine identities than transmasculine ones. Even Chaz Bono doesn’t have the familiarity with younger audiences that Page has.

However, even with the increased media representation and discourse around transgender health and identity, erasure of transmasculine people and other problematic portrayals of transmasculine identity have persisted. As Slate’s Evan Urquhart has pointed out, transmasculine folks often face infantilization, stemming from people holding onto feminized perceptions of them. Additionally, their experiences with pregnancy, seeking reproductive health care, or not being able to medically transition and seek gender-affirming care are often used to invalidate and erase them.

The visibility brought on by celebrity stories and media representation can help with the unique loneliness and isolation of being a transmasculine person, especially in rural areas where gender-affirming care may be less available, or there may be greater stigma around transgender identity, Kara Mailman told Salon.

But, of course, this level of visibility can have its drawbacks, and can be “both great and awful,” says Mailman, a transmasculine non-binary person, and senior research analyst at the reproductive justice organization Reproaction

“What tends to happen with these moments is allies will show up in the moment to express their support, and opposition will also come and start with new anti-trans legislation, like the surge in anti trans bathroom bills, locker room bills and sports bills,” they explained. “A lot of the time, once the moment kind of dies down and isn’t as new, you’ll see a lot of people who have been very vocal about their support kind of drop off, and we’re on our own.”

Page’s story means a lot to Mailman on a personal level, as “there’s not a lot of openly non-binary transmasculine people in media,” and Page “consistently shows up for other trans people.” But they’re also concerned with too much representation of transmasculine folks as “very thin, able-bodied and white.”

“That leaves a lot of transmasculine people without representation and without community support, community understanding,” Mailman said. “Trying to access gender-affirming health care as a transmasculine person who doesn’t fit that archetype of thin-ness, whiteness, able-bodied, is drastically different and drastically more difficult.”

Oliver Hall, the trans health director at Kentucky Health Justice Network (KHJN), told Salon that while they celebrate Page and are “happy for them, and them getting to step into themselves,” Hall has never really “connected with trans celebrities.”

“That feels like a completely different experience of trans-ness than what most of us experience,” Hall said.

KHJN, a Kentucky-based and community-sourced gender and reproductive health fund, is one of the first abortion funds across the country to also fund callers’ access to gender-affirming trans health care. Hall has directed this program since 2016.

“Being trans is expensive: legal name changes, binders, gaffs, packers, as well as HRT [hormone therapy] and gender affirming surgeries, for those that medically transition, are prohibitively expensive,” Hall said. These costs and barriers can vastly separate the experiences of wealthy or onscreen trans folks, from those of poor or ordinary trans folks. And as transmasculine identities and experiences begin to gain more visibility, Hall says we can look to the experiences of trans women and femmes, which have generally been more represented in media, to see “that visibility doesn’t always come with improved rights or access.”

The power of storytelling

“I don’t think I’ve watched as many trans movies or shows as maybe I should have,” Mailman concedes. But they have only positive words for Netflix’s now-canceled “Sense8,” a science fiction series that saw eight supernatural beings around the world connected by their senses. Among these eight dynamic protagonists is a trans woman, Nomi Marks, played by Jamie Clayton. The show received wide praise for its portrayal of Nomi as a trans person “being allowed to simply exist,” as NBC put it.

Other recent shows that have garnered critical acclaim for thoughtful portrayal of trans identity include Amazon Prime’s “Transparent,” following the life of a divorced parent who reveals to her kids that she’s always identified as a woman, despite once being their father, and the FX drama “Pose,” starring Emmy-nominated Mj Rodriguez, a Black trans woman.

As for representation of transmasculine characters and actors, Hall says they enjoy Theo Germaine, a transmasculine non-binary person, as James Sullivan on “The Politician,” the Ryan Murphy-produced dramedy of a student at a posh high school’s bid to become student body president.

“[‘The Politician’ is] not positive representation because the character is wholly positive, the character has his flaws as we all do,” Hall said. “But it’s a positive representation because it doesn’t rely on stereotypes.”

Hall believes “most representation” of trans folks “is still negative,” and “many representations rely on harmful stereotypes or one-note representations that reduce trans people to their gender and dehumanize them in the process.”

Still, Mailman thinks representation of trans and transmasculine identities in media can help people struggling with feelings of isolation. “If there’s one thing the increase in abortion storylines in media has shown me it’s that while representation won’t solve everything it definitely helps,” they said. “It’s hard if you live in a rural area to find other trans people.”

In particular, Mailman, who’s shared their story of having a self-managed abortion as a trans person, wants to see onscreen stories of this common transmasculine experience. “It can be hard to find people whose experiences look like yours, so reflecting those in media and portraying transmasculine people going through things transmasculine people go through all the time, like pregnancy and abortion, would be incredible,” they said.

But Mailman has concerns about “media’s tendency to let cis people play trans characters.”

“It ends up done in a way that sensationalizes being a trans person, which isn’t helpful because no trans person trying to get pregnant is going to see a cis person playing a trans person on TV and be able to relate,” they said.

Back in 2018, Scarlett Johansson, at one point the highest paid actress in Hollywood, gave up a role playing a transgender man — but only after facing significant backlash, and being highly defensive of taking the role. “As an actor I should be allowed to play any person, or any tree, or any animal because that is my job and the requirements of my job,” she said at the time. A year later, Johansson admitted she’d “mishandled” the situation.

Hall agrees that they’d like to see storytelling “address the erasure of trans folks who experience pregnancy,” but they also think it’s “important that the media is nuanced and not sensationalized.” That means seeing trans characters and stories that are about more than suffering, more than gender, more than glossy celebrity magazine covers — stories that are real, that capture the full spectrum of trans experiences, and certainly, stories that depict authentic transmasculine experiences with pregnancy and the health system.

What glowing celebrity stories struggle to capture

In a 2020 Medium post recounting the story of their abortion, Mailman admits that “the most surprising thing . . . after my abortion” was that all they “felt afterwards was relief.”

Trans people’s experiences seeking reproductive and gender-based health care can come with significant barriers, from exorbitant costs, all while trans people are significantly more likely to cis people to experience poverty, to intolerance and transphobia in the medical system. “We know medical fatphobia is rampant, and medical racism is rampant, and medical transphobia is rampant,” they said. “So when you combine those things, and you have a fat, Black, transmasculine person trying to access care, doctors are going to do everything they can to make it hard to get the gender affirming care you need.

“You’re going to have to be ready to justify yourself and advocate for yourself at every turn, and it’s frustrating to think about. It’s stopped me from really looking into gender-affirming care, because I know trying to access that care as someone who is bigger, and not able-bodied, isn’t going to be easy.”

At a time of tremendous barriers to reproductive care, even for cis people, and distrust of the medical system among trans folks, Mailman says it’s not uncommon for transmasculine people experiencing pregnancy or in need of pregnancy-related care to seek it “outside the medical system.” That includes self-managing and inducing their own abortions. Today, about a third of abortions are carried out through medication rather than surgical abortion, which can be done from the comfort of one’s own home. But trans folks who may fear even going to clinics or talking to providers to get the medication, will often resort to other means.

And it’s experiences like this — of transmasculine folks going it alone because of stigma and marginalization in the health system — that we don’t often see in upbeat celebrity stories, or one-dimensional onscreen trans characters.

“It’s important for cis folks to understand that trans people know self-managed abortion with alternative methods may not be the ideal scenario — but we’re doing it because it’s what we have access to, and shaming people who have turned to theses methods is not helpful,” Mailman said. “It’s harder to include trans people in the reproductive justice movement, when a lot of trans people who have had abortions don’t feel they have a space.”

In advocacy spaces and health care, the past several years have seen crucial progress around acknowledging and including trans experiences with pregnancy and abortion — for starters, with gender-neutral and gender-inclusive language about who experiences pregnancy, and who seeks birth control and abortion. Gendered language about reproductive care persists, however. Consider frequent references to reproductive rights as “women’s reproductive rights,” or “women’s right to choose” in political media. But when well-meaning people encounter language like “pregnant people,” or “pregnant-capable people,” or “people who give birth,” they begin to ask questions and learn more.

Oliver Hall may have their criticisms of limited and un-nuanced media representations of trans and transmasculine identities and health experiences — but ultimately, it’s not all bad, and has contributed to meaningful cultural change in recent years.

“I think in the long-term, greater cultural understanding of the needs of trans people is net good. We are just at the start of this cultural shift, so you’re seeing systemic changes in some areas,” Hall said. But that cultural progress isn’t necessarily equally distributed, for example, in places like “the south, red states, and rural areas,” where “change around trans health is not happening as quickly at a systemic level.”

Rather, in these aforementioned spaces, change to support trans folks is happening more so “at a community-level with mutual aid and support being the source of expanded access to health care,” Hall says. Storytelling and media coverage about trans and transmasculine experiences can’t just be limited to an individual story of a wealthy celebrity here and there. As inspiring and joyous as stories like Elliot Page’s may be, in real life, trans identity, trans survival, and trans people thriving, all rely on the power of community — and that’s why Hall thinks we can all “learn from the strong support and aid networks we form in the south.”

Fish fraud is rampant — and Subway’s tuna scandal is just the tip of the iceberg

Subway’s tuna sandwiches may not be their most famous product, but some (including this author) would argue they are one of their tastiest. Needless to say, it was alarming to read a report that a New York Times investigation into the sandwich’s tuna found “no amplifiable tuna DNA,” suggesting that the so-called tuna sandwich was not, in fact, tuna fish. Subway later questioned the reliability of the DNA tests, claiming in a statement that it “is simply not a reliable way to identify denatured proteins like Subway’s tuna, which was cooked before it was tested.”

The viral “fake tuna” debacle has undoubtedly hurt Subway’s brand, and heightened a popular perception of corporations as shifty and untrustworthy. Yet regardless of the mystery meat’s provenance, the saga highlights a larger industrial supply chain problem — namely, that fish fraud, as it is known, is prevalent. That means that if indeed some of Subway’s tuna is “fake,” it may not entirely be their fault.

“On Subway specifically, I would say that they are probably better than average, as far as companies of their size,” John Hocevar, marine biologist and director of Greenpeace’s oceans campaign, told Salon. “There are so many problems with the tuna industry that it is very difficult for companies sourcing as much tuna as Subway to be confident that they know their fish wasn’t caught with forced labor, or in ways that are very harmful to our oceans.”

Tuna isn’t the only fish that has fraud problems. Oceana, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit ocean conservation group, began to investigate seafood fraud in 2011 and has since uncovered troubling patterns. In 2016 the group released a report about the worldwide scope of seafood fraud that detailed a pervasive, stomach-churning cheat of unsuspecting consumers. On average, one out of five of the more than 25,000 samples of seafood that they tested from 55 countries were mislabeled, with the trend occurring at every stage of the supply chain.

In the United States, studies released since 2014 found the average fraud rate (weighted by sample size) to be 28 percent. Worldwide, Asian catfish, hake and escolar were the fish most commonly substituted; more than half of the replacement fish (58 percent) were from species that could get certain consumers sick. In Italy, 82 percent of the 200 swordfish, grouper and perch samples tested were revealed to have been mislabeled; nearly half of the substituted fish have been labeled “threatened with extinction” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

“Overall, what we found is that seafood fraud can happen anywhere both geographically and in the supply chain,” Oceana deputy vice president for US campaigns Beth Lowell told Salon by email. Lowell explained that the supply chains which move aquatic food from the ocean to your table are “often opaque,” making it easy for incompetence or unscrupulousness to lead to a bait and switch at consumers’ expense.

Lowell added, “Oceana found that nearly one out of every three fish tested in the United States — in grocery stores and restaurants alike — were mislabeled.” Often the mislabeling meant customers were spending more money than the fish was worth, or potentially put consumers at risk from fish that could endanger them. In one instance, Oceana found that high-mercury fish, for which the FDA warns against consumption by young children and pregnant women, were mislabeled and sold as “safe” fish that are low in mercury.

So why is fish fraud prevalent? The answer boils down to lack of regulation, poor regulatory bodies, and the profit motive — in other words, capitalism behaving as usual.

“In addition to the fact that we import a lot of seafood that was caught illegally, once it gets to a supermarket or a restaurant, we can’t be confident that the legal seafood that is being sold is actually what it’s being labeled as, and there are several reasons for that,” Hocever explained. Indeed, very few businesses seriously follow their responsibility to trace the origins of their fish, and they can get away with it because their business is difficult to observe.

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He added, “Another big challenge is something called trans-shipment at sea. Your average person would assume that a boat goes out, catches fish, and then comes back into port, sells those fish, and then goes back out, catches more fish. Instead, tuna vessels often handover their catch to another boat at sea and just keep fishing.”

Hocevar advocates for a few specific solutions to the fake fish problem. We can ban or heavily regulate oceanic trans-shipment, increase third party coverage of boats that exchange products, improve transparency over who owns fishing vessels and more effectively implement existing regulations.

“All seafood sold in the U.S. should be safe, legally caught, responsibly sourced, and honestly labeled,” Lowell told Salon. “Until then, honest fishermen, seafood businesses, consumers and the oceans will pay the price. Consumers have a right to know more about the seafood they eat, including what species it is, where it is caught and how it was caught so they can make their own decisions whether that be for health, sustainability or other reasons.” She argued that the United States should expand the number of seafood types covered by the Seafood Important Monitoring Program (SIMP) and make sure that all seafood is traceable from the fishing boat to when it is consumed.

The Subway tuna sandwich scandal is not the first one to draw attention to the problem of fish fraud. The New York attorney general issued a report in 2018 revealing that a significant percentage of the fish purchased in New York City was mislabeled. Among other things, Letitia James found that farmed salmon samples were sold as “wild” 27 percent of the time, 87 percent of lemon sole was mislabeled, and 67 percent of red snapper fillets were mislabeled.

“I’m very happy to see law enforcement getting involved,” Larry Olmsted, author of “Real Food/Fake Food: Why You Don’t Know What You’re Eating and What You Can Do about It,” told Salon at the time. “Mislabeling is rampant in the seafood industry, and if you can’t reliably get the fish you want in a port city like New York, just imagine what levels of fraud are like further inland. This business has had a fraud problem for years and years and the only people tracking it have been public interests groups.”

Without regulation, us consumers may spend our lives worrying that the purveyors of succulent fish steaks, flavorful sushi rolls and moist crab cakes may be lying to us. That leaves us with a choice: take an informed risk, or avoid seafood altogether — even if that means, in my case, giving up on delicious Subway tuna hoagies.

The myth that meat is essential for human health could harm us all

Bacon and eggs for breakfast, a turkey sandwich for lunch, and roasted chicken for dinner are some of the go-to meal choices in America where meat is considered an essential part of the everyday diet.

Historically, Americans have been led to believe that eating meat and other animal products is necessary to be strong and healthy. This belief was ingrained in most Americans from the moment they were born. The food industry has continuously pushed consumption of these products through ad campaigns that proclaim, “Beef. It’s what’s for dinner,” and “Milk. It does a body good.” An article in Nourish by WebMD raves about chicken’s supposed health benefits, and poultry has appeared in every food guide by the United States Department of Agriculture since the 1940s. Americans have been led to believe that if they forgo these staples of the Westernized diet, they will dissolve into anemic zombies.

In truth, not only is meat consumption not necessary for humans to stay healthy, but it’s also potentially quite harmful. Consider meat’s links to heart disease, diabetes and certain cancers. Or the millions of people who fall sick from listeria, E. coli, and salmonella each year due to the consumption of contaminated meat. Or the more than 2.8 million Americans who contract antibiotic-resistant infections—which is a result of a nasty upshot of the rampant use of antibiotics on factory farms.

Americans eat more meat per capita than any other country, according to the World Economic Forum—which referred to the 2016 figures of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development-Food and Agriculture Organization Agricultural Outlook 2017-2026—but meat consumption hasn’t been a boon for the health of Americans. There is a high prevalence of obesity and diabetes and one of the highest rates of cancer among the American population. In light of these numbers, saying meat is essential makes about as much sense as saying cigarettes are essential.

Unfortunately, the notions that we can’t live without meat and that our meat supply is sacrosanct have been even further entrenched during the COVID-19 global pandemic. Thanks to intense lobbying by industrial meat producers in 2020, the U.S. government had deemed meatpacking and slaughterhouse workers “essential.” While many small businesses were crippled or had to shut down in order to stem the virus’s spread during the peak of the COVID-19 outbreak in the U.S. in 2020, the federal government forced slaughterhouses to stay open—this was despite the soaring coronavirus infection rates and employee deaths. A single Smithfield plant in Sioux Falls was linked to at least 1,294 coronavirus cases and four deaths in the spring of 2020, according to an article in National Hog Farmer. In Louisa County, Iowa, which is home to a Tyson plant, 1,301 of the 11,223 residents contracted the virus by July 2021.

Indeed, an insistence on consuming copious amounts of meat poses a grave threat to the very survival of our species. In our mad dash to curtail the virus and develop vaccines at warp speeds, we’ve overlooked—perhaps intentionally—one foundational, inconvenient fact: COVID-19—the source of which has been traced to a live animal market in Wuhan, China—is only the latest in a long line of pandemics that have arisen from our insistence on eating meat:

Measles, which was responsible for the deaths of millions “[b]efore the introduction of [the] measles vaccine in 1963,” according to the World Health Organization, is believed to have originated from a virus in cattle that spilled over to the human population through the process of domestication.
The H1N1 strain of swine flu is a combination of viruses from three different species—pigs, birds and humans—that evolved when a bird flu virus infected farmed pigs. The resulting 1957-1958 so-called “Asian flu” and the 1968 “Hong Kong flu” each caused 1 to 4 million human deaths. The 2009 H1N1 swine flu epidemic killed almost 300,000 people.
HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, was first identified in chimpanzees in West Africa in 1989 and is suspected to have jumped to humans through the hunting, butchering and consumption of HIV-infected primates. To date, AIDS has killed more than 32 million people, according to the WHO.
In 1998, the Nipah virus jumped to humans from fruit bats via intensively farmed pigs in Malaysia and killed more than half of the humans infected.
Ebola, which has claimed more than 11,000 human lives in West Africa between 2014 and 2015, has been traced to fruit bats and primates butchered for food.
The 2003 SARS epidemic—which originated from civet cats, via bats, from a wildlife market in Guangdong, China—infected more than 8,000 people, killed 774, and cost the global economy an estimated $40 billion during that year. At the time this amount was considered staggering, but the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic could be as high as $8.8 trillion, according to the Asian Development Bank.

In short, nearly every epidemic or pandemic in human history has been caused by animal-origin pathogens spilling over to people, usually as a result of the myopic quest for meat by humans.

The proliferation of industrial farms—which often cram tens of thousands of chickens into a single shed—has only made things worse. “If you actually want to create global pandemics, then build factory farms,” says Dr. Michael Greger, in his book “Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching.” The situation has become so dire and the threat to public health so acute that in the spring of 2020, a group of Chicago doctors called for a “global moratorium” on the consumption of meat. Given the facts before us, who can blame them?

As we ponder ways to enhance our well-being in the years ahead, it’s crucial to acknowledge with clear eyes the detrimental effects that consumption of meat has on our bodies and even our species at large. A plant-based diet (which, thankfully, is in higher demand these days) can deliver all the protein, fat, and calcium we need, while also reducing the risk of cancer, heart disease and diabetes—three of America’s leading causes of death, and which have all been connected to meat consumption. If adopted broadly, it could even preclude the next global pandemic.

The myth that meat is essential is a deadly one. To bring about a future that’s healthier and safer for everyone, it’s time to leave chicken, beef, fish and other animal products off our plates.

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

It’s time for a new international space treaty

Space is much busier than it used to be. Rockets are launching more and more satellites into orbit every year. SpaceX, the private company founded by Elon Musk, blasted more than 800 satellites into space in 2020 alone. Extraterrestrial tourism is about to take off, led by space barons Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson, two of whom have already taken their first private space outings. The frenetic activity of space agencies and space companies around the world will extend beyond Earth’s atmosphere, too. Within a few years, the moon will see many more landers, rovers, and even boots on the lunar ground. So will Mars and eventually, perhaps even some asteroids.

It’s an exciting time, but also a contentious one. An arena once dominated by the U.S. and Russia has seen the arrival of China and numerous other countries, with several nations establishing both a scientific and military presence in space. A burgeoning space industry, mostly led by U.S.-based companies, is angling for opportunities to monetize Earth-observing satellites, expensive visits to the edge of space, and trips to the moon with robotic and human passengers. Space junk clutters the atmosphere. Rival countries and companies hurtle satellites through the same orbits, and they eye the same key spots on the moon where water could be harvested from ice. Anti-satellite weapons tests by China and India that have flung debris into orbit illustrate just how precarious space is.

All that is to say, things have changed considerably in the more than half century since international space diplomats hammered out the Outer Space Treaty, the agreement that continues to serve as the world’s basic framework on international space law. Before space conflicts erupt or collisions in the atmosphere make space travel unsustainable — and before pollution irreversibly tarnishes our atmosphere or other worlds — we need a new international rulebook. It’s time for the Biden administration to work with other space powers and negotiate an ambitious new space treaty for the new century.

The Outer Space Treaty was deliberately written ambiguously. It outlaws nukes and other weapons of mass destruction being deployed in space, but makes no mention of lasers, missiles, and cyber weapons. The accord appears to ban private property in space and states that no nation can claim a piece of space or lunar territory as their own, but it does not explicitly restrict the extraction of resources like water and minerals.

The Moon Agreement, which went into force in 1984, went further. It states that countries are required to inform others if they have spacecraft entering the same orbit. It declares that the exploration and use of the moon must be done for the benefit of everyone. Under the agreement, Moon explorers have to take care of the lunar environment as well. And importantly, it forbids the claiming of extraterrestrial resources as property. However, only 18 countries are party to the sweeping treaty, none of them space-faring nations.

In recent years, policies on space law have taken an industry-friendly turn, particularly in the U.S. The Obama administration signed the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015, also known as the Space Act, which, in theory, allows American companies to mine the moon and other celestial bodies however they wish and to keep the resources. Other countries, like Luxembourg, have followed suit. In 2020, the Trump administration went further, proposing the industry-friendly Artemis Accords, an attempt to further push the case for granting companies property rights in space. The accords comprised bilateral agreements with just 12 countries — notably without Russia and China, and without the involvement of the United Nations or any other international institution — putting them outside international space law. More than half a century after humans first set foot on the moon, there remains no clearly established, agreed-upon rules governing space activity.

In the absence of such a framework, the U.S. has embraced a de facto “launch first and ask questions later” strategy. The lack of international cooperation is one reason engineers were so caught off guard in 2019, when satellites launched by SpaceX and the European Space Agency nearly crashed into one another. Experts in space law can’t even agree on major questions such as what kind of responsibility space actors have to keep space clean and uncontaminated with debris, as there’s really no framework in place.

The Biden administration has so far focused its space policy not on treaties but on “norms,” non-legally binding principles that they hope will evolve into international agreements with teeth. But it’s hard to imagine that enforceable international space policies will be adopted unless Biden explicitly and enthusiastically calls for them, while urging Russian and Chinese leaders to do the same. More likely, whatever endeavors the space industry and military decide to pursue will retroactively become policy. This is already playing out in debates about the private harvesting of resources from the moon and asteroids, the types of spacecraft companies can put in orbit, and the kinds of space and anti-satellite weapons militaries can develop.

If we were to design a new space treaty that would preserve space primarily as a place for exploration and collaboration rather than for war and commercial gain, what would it look like? It would coordinate travel and limit traffic in busy orbits in the atmosphere while also taking steps to limit the creation of space debris. (Cleaning up the mess already clogging low-Earth orbit is another story entirely.) It would also build on the Moon Agreement, prohibiting the deployment and testing of weapons — including electronic weapons — in the atmosphere. And it would prohibit deploying and testing any weapons in space, not just on the moon or other celestial bodies. It would create an independent, international organization to review proposals for mining resources and establishing colonies on the moon, Mars, and beyond.

This sounds ambitious — and it is — but it’s achievable. The Antarctic Treaty of 1961 enshrines many of the same principles for activity on Antarctica, and it still works six decades later. Public opinion on space seems to be shifting, too, with growing calls to jettison colonialist views of space exploration in favor of more egalitarian approaches. If scientists, non-governmental groups, space environmentalists, and other stakeholders put pressure on the Biden administration, it could become politically feasible for the president to take a stand and jumpstart space diplomacy with the U.S.’s rivals. To the extent that it would help make space exploration sustainable, peaceful, and beneficial to all humanity, it would be worth the cost in political capital. We only have one atmosphere, one moon, and one night sky to cherish.

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

How to carve a turkey, according to knife experts

You’ve roasted the bird, it’s absolutely perfect, and now all your guests are waiting for you to carve it. How to carve a turkey — the right way — depends entirely on whom you ask. But one thing’s for sure: There’s a subtle art and science to it, and unless you’re Alton Brown on Turkey Day, then this guide might be useful to peruse before you tackle the beast.

I have a recurring nightmare every year around this time about carving a turkey for Thanksgiving. It starts out as more of a fantasy: My friends and family are gathered around an elegant, sophisticated living room, sipping some sort of festive cocktail and nibbling on perfect two-bite gougères I was organized and technically skilled enough to whip up with no drama.

“It’s almost time to eat!” I call out from the kitchen, where I’m stationed in a tasteful outfit and matching linen apron, spooning fluffy mashed potatoes into an appealing pile that guests will henceforth call “mashed potato cloud-mountain,” and transferring extra-crispy Brussels sprouts over to a beautiful white ceramic serving platter. (My hair looks perfect, if you were wondering.)

“Just have to carve the turkey, then we’re all set!” I shout — except it’s really more of a gentle, confident announcement than a shout. And then, I turn to the cutting board. Here’s where things take a turn: My gorgeous, glistening roast turkey is as rested as can be, its delicious juices collected in the deep trivets of my favorite cutting board. I pick up my knife and get started carving the Thanksgiving turkey, step by step. I cut through the skin side of the turkey breast meat. I remove the wings, pull the legs apart, and remove the drumstick from the thigh.

At least, that’s what’s supposed to happen. Before I know it, I’ve ruined everything. The meat ends up in dry, shreddy piles. The skin’s frayed and nowhere near its corresponding meat pieces. The drumsticks look like something the Flintstones’ pet dinosaur took for a spin, mouth-wise. And before I can do anything to fix it — urgent herb garnish?? — I awake, speechless.

This is no way to live. This year, I decided to put an end to the madness, and learn once and for all how to carve a Thanksgiving turkey. To aid me in this pursuit, I called in the masters: specifically, professionally trained chefs Jacqueline Blanchard and Brandt Cox, who are the knife experts behind Coutelier. Here are their top tips:

1. Give It A Rest.

Just like you after you’ve prepared the entire Thanksgiving meal, your bird needs a quick nap.

“Before cutting into the turkey, you must allow the meat to rest,” says Cox. “For at least 20 to 40 minutes, depending on the size of the bird. This resting allows for the internal juices of the turkey to redistribute. If you don’t give the bird time to rest, the juices will run out of the meat and the meat will appear to be dry.” There’s no need to wrap the turkey in aluminum foil, either. Doing so will create a miniature oven that may cause the meat to overcook. After spending nearly 3 hours in the oven, the turkey will stay plenty warm throughout the meat, even after you’ve carved it.

In addition to maximizing juiciness, this step serves as insurance that you won’t burn your hands during the carving process.

2. Have A Blueprint.

Ready to carve a turkey? First things first: Know your objective. You want to end up with eight main pieces initially, before you get into creating smaller slices. There are two turkey breasts, two thighs, two legs or drumsticks, and two wings. No matter what size turkey you have or how many guests you are feeding, these are the cuts you’re looking to make. Of course, the size of each piece will vary based on the size of the Thanksgiving turkey.

3. Follow The Order Of Operations.

When you’re beginning to carve a turkey, the first thing you want to do is to break it down into those eight main pieces, starting with the legs, according to Cox and Blanchard. “Removing the legs and joints should be the first step in carving your turkey,” they say. “Also, when removing the thigh and leg from the bird, don’t forget about the oysters!”

Once you’ve carved the legs from the turkey’s body, you can cut through the joint to separate the drumsticks from the thighs between them. Then, break down your bird into the remaining pieces in any order: Slice off the wings, cut between the breasts to split them, remove the breasts, and then carve the meat from the carcass to separate the two breasts.

“After the turkey is broken down into eight pieces, I usually leave the wings and the drumsticks whole with the bone still in,” he says. Then, he recommends slicing the turkey breasts, and removing the bones from the thighs and slicing those as well. “You can also simply pull apart the thigh meat, but I find that nice consistent slices make for a more beautiful presentation. Slices are also easier for people to grab and put onto their plate.”

We should add that these steps are for carving a traditional roast turkey. Want to learn how to carve a spatchcock turkey? Here is our go-to recipe. This is a method that calls for removing the backbone of the bird and flattening it, which cuts the cook time nearly in half.

4. The Nitty-Gritty Of Carving: Tools.

Even if you know the proper steps to carving a turkey, it’s just as important to have the proper tools. So what is the best knife to use for carving a Thanksgiving turkey? According to Cox, the best knife for the initial carving is one where the blade is thicker near the handle, then slowly thins out to the top. “The thicker and more durable heel allows for easy removal of the leg from the thigh as well as other places where bone contact is more prevalent as well as gives the overall blade a lot of stability during use,” he says. Meanwhile, the thinner tip allows for carvers to clean off skin, fat, or small bones, as well as to get a thin slice when dividing up the breasts and thighs. “The Honesuki is the Japanese shaped blade specifically for boning poultry,” he says.

For slicing meat, and especially roast turkey, a good rule of thumb is the thinner the blade, the better. “Thinner blades perform better and cut better, but can be more fragile,” says Cox. “A super thin and super sharp blade does less damage to cooked meat, and damages less cellular structure in vegetables. Thinner blades will also help keep the cooked meat together instead of it ‘shredding’ while being sliced.”

A tour of Ina Garten’s garden (naturally, it’s thriving)

If you’ve ever watched an episode of Barefoot Contessa, you’ve caught a glimpse of Ina Garten’s beautiful barn in East Hampton, New York, as it’s where she films every episode. The internet-famous chef also has a stunning farmhouse-style home on the property, where she’s lived since the ’90s. Well, it turns out that Garten’s outdoor living space is every bit as dreamy as her interiors, and somehow we’re not surprised.

Yesterday, Garten offered her Instagram followers a tour of the property’s lush gardens, and to say we’re smitten is an understatement. Here’s everything we spotted growing and will be adding to our planting list next year.

* * *

Lush Greenery In The Shade Garden

The tour starts walking along a gravel path in what Garten calls her “shade garden,” which is packed with bright greenery and ample ground-covering plants. I’m definitely taking notes for a few shady areas of my yard.

Ferns

The first thing Garten points out is the abundance of ferns, whose fronds are stretching out into the path. There are lots of different varieties of ferns that will thrive in the shade, and many of them are quite hardy, making them ideal for a low-maintenance ground cover.

Hostas

We also spotted several large hostas toward the back of Garten’s beds. These lush plants are happy to grow in the shade, and they come in lots of colors, too, making them a great addition to any garden.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CGhzqMzJ4YI/

Crepe Myrtle Trees

Garten says the trees in this area of her garden are crepe myrtles, which often get pink, purple, or white blooms in the summertime

Lily Of The Valley

It also looks like there’s lily of the valley growing along the side of the path in the shade-filled oasis. These plants thrive in the shade, and their tiny bell-shaped white flowers are one of my favorites in the spring!

* * *

Vegetables And Herbs In The ‘Secret’ Garden

From the shade garden, our tour guide turns down onto a path with large stone pavers, which leads to what she calls her “secret garden.” It’s easy to see how it got its name — the space is surrounded by towering concrete walls, and you have to open a massive arched door to get inside. (Not only does it add mystery to the whole experience, but I bet it’s perfect for keeping out deer and other hungry critters.) Here’s what she keeps inside.

Tomatoes

The first thing you see inside the inner garden is a big, beautiful tomato plant supported by a tomato teepee — essentially several wooden poles tied together at the top to form a cage for the plant. She has both full-sized tomatoes and cherry tomatoes, which she says will be used in tomato salads, and interestingly, both plants are surrounded by small, calf-height hedges.

https://www.instagram.com/p/COYcMk8rLQ6/

Lavender

As the internet sensation pans the camera across her garden, we see several lavender plants in full bloom, and Garten says she loves the smell of it. As an added bonus, lavender also helps to repel fleas, moths, mosquitoes, and many other insects — in case you needed another reason to plant it around your yard.

Fig Trees

Along the walls of the garden, there are two absolutely huge fig trees covered with budding fruit. Common fig trees tend to prefer warmer climates, but there are some cold-hardy varieties that can survive in hardiness zones 6 and 7. Figs are one of my favorite fruits, and I’m jealous of all the delicious dishes she’s sure to be making with them. (Fig and bacon grilled cheese, anyone?)

Herbs Galore

As you’d expect from a world-renowned chef, Garten’s garden is bursting with fresh herbs that she uses in her cooking. She points out sage, chives, thyme, and tarragon, mentioning that these plants can easily be grown on your windowsill if you don’t have an outdoor space.

Who’s really protected by the “safety plan” created for Olympic fencer accused of sexual assault

Team USA fencing alternate Alen Hadzic is under investigation for at least three accusations of sexual misconduct reported to the U.S. Center for SafeSport, a nonprofit agency tasked with protecting athletes from abuse. These investigations of Hadzic were brought to the attention of the IOC back in May, when six women fencers including two Olympic athletes wrote a letter describing Hadzic’s selection as a “direct affront” to those accusing him, which they said could put fellow athletes at risk.

In a bombshell Friday report, Buzzfeed also found a long history of allegations against Hadzic for sexual misconduct targeting drunk women at parties during his time at Columbia. In one specific case, after a woman at a party accused Hadzic of assaulting her at a party, he was suspended from Columbia for a year, and expelled from the school’s fencing team.

Yet, Hadzic continued to compete in fencing at the national level. Buzzfeed also found Columbia’s head fencing coach Michael Aufrichtig had ignored several complaints about Hadzic’s alleged abusive behaviors for years, and as a member of the USA Fencing board of directors, Aufrichtig hadn’t reported these complaints about Hadzic to several board members.

Rather than bar Hadzic from the Olympics because of the long history of allegations of abuse made against him, USA Fencing created a “safety plan,” which put him on a separate flight to Tokyo from other Olympic athletes, as well as a separate hotel from the Olympic Village. Hadzic is also prohibited from practicing with female fencers, yet Hadzic’s attorney Michael Palma has complained that this so-called safety plan does not allow Hadzic to “participate in the Olympic experience that he has rightfully earned.”

Hadzic’s spot in Tokyo despite these allegations and ongoing investigations has sparked heated controversy, especially as several disproportionately Black women athletes from around the world have been barred from competing for reasons that don’t include allegations of harming others. The controversy is especially difficult to ignore amid the first Olympic games since revelations about Larry Nassar’s predation of young gymnasts rocked the sports world, and highlighted the prevalence of sexual abuse in sport. The “safety plan” has also drawn skepticism and ridicule, speaking to how, as one woman who says Hadzic harmed her put it, Hadzic has been “protected again and again.”

Another fencer told Buzzfeed that Hadzic had “made my life a living hell at Columbia,” but that, no matter what they did to seek accountability or protect themselves, “he just continues to get what he wants because he is a really fantastic fencer.”

“We are pissed off that this is even a thing we had to deal with,” an Olympic fencer who filed a complaint against Hadzic, alleging predatory behavior, told the outlet from Tokyo. “He’s been protected again and again.”

And another fencer told Buzzfeed that because complaints about Hadzic weren’t taken seriously, it’s been left to Olympic athletes to “deal with the consequences of having a predator on the team while simultaneously competing in the biggest event of our lives.”

Buzzfeed’s report also found the U.S. Center for SafeSport, created in 2018 following details about Nassar, has been widely criticized by athletes for being ineffective and underfunded. SafeSport had originally suspended Hadzic from competing in international competition, only to overturn the suspension after an arbitration process. Instead, Hadzic is competing with a “safety plan” that feels all too familiar in a culture that often gives men accused of abuse chance after chance.

Kevin McCarthy under mounting pressure to punish Republicans who join January 6 commission

House Republicans are calling on Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to punish Reps. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., and Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., for joining the committee investigating the January 6 Capitol riot.

Pelosi, who already added Cheney to the committee earlier this month, announced on Sunday that she would also appoint Kinzinger, one of the few Republicans who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump after the riot, in response to McCarthy pulling all of his choices from the committee when Pelosi blocked two of his picks.

“I’m a Republican dedicated to conservative values, but I swore an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution—and while this is not the position I expected to be in or sought out, when duty calls, I will always answer,” Kinzinger said in a statement, criticizing members of his own party for spreading “lies and conspiracy theories.”

A growing number of House Republicans, nearly all of whom voted against creating an independent bipartisan commission to investigate the riot, responded by calling on McCarthy to strip Cheney and Kinzinger of their committee assignments.

“Kevin McCarthy should be stronger in taking action against Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney,” Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., who is facing a federal investigation into alleged child sex trafficking, said on Twitter. “If they’re going to take Nancy Pelosi appointments to committees, we should probably remove them as Republican representatives on the House Armed Services and Energy & Commerce committees.”

Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, called on Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., who replaced Cheney as the chair of the House Republican Conference, to call a “special GOP conference” to “address appropriate measures” in response to the committee appointments.

Many House Republicans, particularly members of the Freedom Caucus, have echoed that sentiment behind the scenes, according to CNN.

“There’s a lot,” an unidentified House Republican told the network. “Supporting Pelosi’s unprecedented move to reject McCarthy’s picks was a bridge too far.”

“Plenty of people wondering the same things,” added another Republican. “If they are accepting appointments from Nancy Pelosi rather than the GOP, haven’t they already effectively left? Perhaps they should ask Speaker Pelosi for committee assignments?”

But it’s unclear whether the GOP effort would even work.

“While McCarthy could remove Cheney and Kinzinger from their other committees, Pelosi ultimately controls committee membership. She could theoretically just re-appoint them to their current posts,” CNN reported.

McCarthy earlier this month threatened to strip GOP members of their committee assignments if they accepted Pelosi’s offer to sit on the committee. Cheney defied McCarthy and accepted Pelosi’s invitation at the time while Kinzinger scoffed at the ultimatum. “Who gives a shit?” he told Politico.

“It would speak volumes if he took away their committee assignments to ‘punish them’ for upholding their oath to protecting our democracy,” a spokesperson for Kinzinger told CNN on Monday.

Despite his earlier threat, McCarthy was noncommittal on Monday, telling reporters that “we’ll see” if he decides to punish the two members. McCarthy did, however, label Kinzinger and Cheney as “Pelosi Republicans,” a notion House Democratic Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., blasted as “absurd” given Cheney’s and Kinzinger’s extensive conservative voting record.

“These are the people who come from conservative Republican districts who have represented Republican values,” Hoyer told MSNBC. “The difference is, and this is key, they both believe in the truth. That ought not to be a partisan issue.”

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., a member of the January 6 committee, told CNN that the blow-up over Republican additions to the panel shows that the GOP has become an “anti-truth party.”

“It just shows how hollow that party has been,” he said, “how much it has been hollowed out by the former president and it’s really more of a cult of his personality now.”

Donald Trump rallies the troops in Phoenix: Unfortunately, that’s not a metaphor

Thousands of members of the Trump cult waited outside for hours in the summer heat of Phoenix on Saturday, before gaining entrance to a Turning Point USA event where their personal god and savior appeared as part of his 2021 revenge tour. It was a political rally, a gospel revival, a rock concert, a carnival and a family reunion all in one.

As a show of loyalty to the Trump death cult, most of the attendees refused to wear masks to protect themselves and others from the coronavirus pandemic and its new, even more contagious delta variant. The Trumpists even went so far as to heckle the news media with chants of “No masks!”

These are the people described in a recent Washington Post essay by Michael Bender, who has spent considerable time among Trump’s most diehard followers:

They were mostly older White men and women who lived paycheck to paycheck with plenty of time on their hands — retired or close to it, estranged from their families or otherwise without children — and Trump had, in a surprising way, made their lives richer. …

In Trump, they’d found someone whose endless thirst for a fight encouraged them to speak up for themselves, not just in politics but also in relationships and at work. His rallies turned arenas into modern-day tent revivals, where the preacher and the parishioners engaged in an adrenaline-fueled psychic cleansing brought on by chanting and cheering with 15,000 other like-minded loyalists.

Trump and his neofascist movement inspires such extreme loyalty that his followers are willing to kill or die for him. No one feels that way about Joe Biden and the Democrats.

During his speech in Phoenix, Trump played his familiar roles: bully, mob boss, preacher, public menace, demagogue in waiting and former president who expects to be returned to power by any means necessary. As Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reportedly warned in the weeks after Trump’s defeat last November, Trump has channeled the energy and grandiose false claims that propelled Adolf Hitler to power in Germany.

On Saturday night, Donald Trump captivated his audience with a truly Orwellian performance. The event was officially titled, “Rally to Protect Our Elections.” But of course the 2020 presidential election only required “protection” from Trump and his allies — protection against voter suppression, widespread lies and subterfuge, an attempted coup, and other efforts to undermine democracy and subvert the people’s will.

Trump repeatedly claimed that his “patriotic” movement had been betrayed by the Democrats, President Biden, the news media, social media platforms and other assorted “enemies.” He made masterful use of doublespeak, saying, “I am not the one trying to undermine American democracy — I am the one trying to save American democracy.”

He even added a new wrinkle to the Big Lie narrative, claiming that votes were supposedly rigged, stolen and otherwise manipulated in Biden’s favor — and the truth is to be found in “the routers.” Adding new details to a conspiracy theory is an effective way of keeping one’s audience engaged, ensuring that the conspiratorial mind finds new clues to follow and new mysteries to be solved.

Trump ramped up his use of stochastic terrorism:

“Like it or not, we are becoming a communist country. That’s what’s happening, that’s what’s happening. We are beyond socialism.”
“The survival of our nation depends on holding these responsible. … We have to hold those that are responsible for the 2020 presidential elections scam. It was a scam, greatest crime in history, and we have to hold these people accountable.”
“These people are crazy. Whatever happened to cows, remember they were going to get rid of all the cows? They stopped that, people didn’t like that. Remember? You know why they were going to get rid of all the cows? People will be next.”
“The Biden administration’s action is an outrageous insult to the American people and to our country. The United States of America is the most just and virtuous nation in the world in the history of the world. And I’ll tell you, you’re not going to have a country very much longer. You’re not going to have a country.”
“Our country is being destroyed by people who have no right to destroy it. People that won an election illegally. People that should not have been elected. They lost in a landslide. Joe Biden and the radical Democrats are wrecking our nation. I don’t even believe it’s him. I honestly don’t believe. I don’t think Joe knows where the hell he is. I don’t think it’s him. Crime is surging. Inflation is soaring. The border is gone. We went from the strongest border ever to the weakest border ever. The border is non-existent. Illegal aliens are pouring in, in record numbers. Critical race theory is being forced into every facet of our society. Free speech is being crushed.”

In all, Trump’s Phoenix rally was a celebration of lies, white victimology, paranoia and threatened acts of “patriotic” revenge and political violence. Such threats or possibilities are a key attribute of fascism, which proposes scorched-earth tactics to destroy the old social order and create a new one in the image of the leader and the followers.

How did the public respond to Trump’s Phoenix rally? The same public voices who have been sounding the red alert continued to do so. In most important ways, the events of Jan. 6 were just a trial run or harbinger for worse political violence in months and years ahead.

It seems conceivable that the 2022 midterms may be the last “free and fair” national elections in the United States — and given the Jim Crow Republicans’ accelerating war on multiracial democracy, that prediction is generous.

Too many voices in the media continue to downplay the dangers to democracy represented by Donald Trump, his movement and the Republican Party. When voices in the mainstream media do speak out, they often lack credibility because they were so late to face the truth about the Trump movement. They may express alarm now, but it’s not clear that has much if any impact on public consciousness.

The house has been on fire for several years and now the professional smart people and others with a prominent public platform are finally screaming for help. It is far too late for such belated sounds of alarm to have a real impact on the public’s consciousness.

Liberal schadenfreude was in full bloom on social media, which saw a torrent of mockery directed at Trump and his followers, often describing them as ignorant rubes or losers. But laughter will not save America from Trumpism.

In a recent conversation with Salon, physician and psychoanalyst Dr. Justin Frank, author of “Trump on the Couch,” described this kind of laughter in the face of Trumpism as “unhealthy humor” and “defensive in nature.”

It’s defending against anxiety and fear. Specifically, it is a defensive use of contempt. Through it, people can demean and insult Donald Trump, which in turn means they don’t have to be afraid of him. One of the ways a person can express contempt is through laughter. Thus it is a denial of one’s vulnerability, because contempt means the other person is harmless, therefore he or she cannot hurt you. In that way, Trump is made into a pathetic fool. “If I laugh, it’s not going to hurt me.”

Ultimately, defensive contempt is a way of dismissing Trump’s dangerousness. However, that type of contempt toward Trump is really an attack on reality. It is also an attack on one’s own perception because you have actually undermined your own ability to understand just how dangerous Donald Trump is.

Six years into the Age of Trump, the American people cannot claim ignorance of Trump and his movement as a type of defense. They have been warned repeatedly. They have witnessed the consequences. On Twitter, former Republican strategist Steve Schmidt offered these observations after Trump’s Phoenix rally:

Ignoring Trump is not an option. Looking away is not an option. Trump is the 2024 presumptive nominee of the GOP. His insanity, conspiracy theories, rage, grievance and lying are dangerous. His words tonight teemed with menace and intimations of violence. Yet, he remains unchallenged except @Liz_Cheney and @RepKinzinger will defy him. He is in complete and total command of the Republican Party and he is waging war on the idea of American democracy. We are at the most dangerous moment in this nations history since the Civil War. Trump is unstable, unfit and addled yet he could be the 47th President. If that happens, we lose the country. We lose our democracy.

Famed Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein told CNN’s “Reliable Sources” on Sunday that Trump exhibits “a kind of delusional madness — such as Gen. Milley was talking about — that’s on a scale and a scope that we have never experienced in an American president in our history. I think we need to calmly step back and maybe look at Trump in a different context. He is our own American war criminal, of a kind we’ve never experienced before.”

All Donald Trump has to do to command more political violence is to tell his followers the place, date and time. The rest of the American people would be shocked. The mainstream news media would tell readers and viewers that this was “unprecedented” and that no one could have imagined such a thing in America. Democratic leadership would bray on about “bipartisanship,” “democratic institutions,” “norms” and “rules.” Such reactions are a choice, born of willful ignorance and learned helplessness — a choice that may well doom American democracy.

GOP’s race to the bottom: Who can be the most obnoxious troll?

J.D. Vance is getting desperate. The author of a book now famous for being adapted into the worst Netflix movie of all time is running for Senate in Ohio, hoping to use the same down-home country boy cosplay that effectively fooled both country club Republicans and the Hollywood liberals who bought “Hillbilly Elegy” to gain the trust of actual Ohio Republican voters. So far, however, the Yale law school-educated venture capitalist with a campaign bankrolled by one of the most sinister Silicon Valley financiers, Peter Thiel, has not received the open-armed welcome he clearly expected. The fight between Vance and the other Republican candidates, Josh Mandel and Jane Timken, has turned into a battle of who can be the Trumpiest. Vance’s air of being a try-hard — compared to the more authentic racist pandering that emanates from Mandel — has left him falling way behind in the polls. Even moves like apologizing abjectly for past Trump criticism just end up being a reminder that, even though Vance is every inch the hardline authoritarian, he is bad at hiding what political science professor Scott Lemieux described as “his disdain for members of the Appalachian working class who have not shared his good fortune.” And so, to gain ground, Vance has turned to a tactic that has become the primary form of discourse in the GOP, post-Donald Trump: trolling.

Largely, the competition takes place on Twitter, where Vance says dumb and annoying stuff in an attempt to attract liberal outrage and mockery, and ideally, get journalists to write pieces framing him as a pre-eminent triggerer of the liberals. So far, Vance has pretended that he wasn’t familiar with New York City and wondered if it was “like Walking Dead Season 1 or Season 4.” (He ended up staying in the Hamptons.) He has tried to frame support for universal adult suffrage in the U.S. as a matter of “global oligarchy,” an unsubtle head nod to racist conspiracy theories fueling the most fascist fringes of the GOP. And he pathetically joined in on the right-wing dunking on Gen. Mark Milley for his comments suggesting that racism is bad.

Now Vance, grasping for headlines, has started to argue that childless adults should not have the right to vote. The excuse for this is that the childless have “no physical commitment to the future of this country.” He targeted Vice President Kamala Harris, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, and transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg as people who, because they are childless, should be blocked from the franchise. Notably, three of the four are people of color and one is gay, underscoring how much this gambit is about appealing bluntly to the MAGA belief that only people that are like them deserve to have a say in government.

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This move is unlikely to bolster Vance’s chances, in no small part because he just is bad at hiding how much he doesn’t believe his own B.S. (Like most in his elite social class, Vance waited until his early 30s to have children.) But the fact that he went there is troubling in and of itself because it illustrates just how much Republican politics have turned into a trolling contest. The result is the rapid decline into authoritarianism and even fascism among the GOP base.

Vance is doing this because he’s running well behind Mandel, whose platform can basically be summed up as “Gilead was actually a utopia.” That sounds hyperbolic, but no, for real, he’s been arguing that we “need a Judeo-Christian revolution in this country” and that a belief in God should be enforced “in the classroom, in the workplace, and throughout society.” Mandel’s got a leg up, however, because he comes across as more sincere in his fanaticism.

But even though Vance’s strategy won’t work for him, it still injects real poison into the political bloodstream.

Fox News picked up on Vance’s idea and had a segment where they pretended to “debate” this notion, but really, the point was to gin up jealousy in their audience of supposedly hedonistic childless liberals who are living it up while you, Fox News viewer, had the hard life of diapers and paying for band camp. It was more grist for the spite mill that has become the whole of right-wing politics these days.

Vance, of course, is just part of the larger Republican troll-industrial complex, in which Republicans attract attention and money from the base by competing to see who can be the worst. Recent examples include Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas (and, of course, Trump himself) whining that Cleveland’s baseball team dropped a racist mascot, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis selling anti-vaccination gear at his campaign website, and Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene calling Air Force veteran Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., a “traitor” because of his outspoken opposition to the fascist insurrection on January 6.

These kinds of tactics work to get support from the GOP base. DeSantis has become a favorite for Trump’s running mate if/when he runs for president again in 2024. Cruz is both one of the most hated men in D.C. and one of the strongest fundraisers, filling his coffers with eff-the-liberals dollars. And Taylor Greene, whose bug-eyed ravings regularly attract liberal dunks and outrage, is one of the biggest fundraisers in the House.

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The problem, of course, is that constantly upping the ante in a shitbird contest means spreading political ideas that have real impacts on real people. For instance, Republicans like DeSantis got into a contest over who could be the most hostile to efforts to end the COVID-19 pandemic. The result was that Republican voters decided the best way to show their right-wing bona fides was to refuse the vaccine. Now COVID-19 rates are soaring — and Florida is leading the pack with new infections.

Vance’s rhetoric contributes to the larger push of Republicans getting increasingly radical in the belief that people who aren’t like them have no right to vote. It really amped up during Trump’s drawn-out, failed coup after the election, which he repeatedly justified by insinuating that voters in cities like Philadelphia and Detroit were inherently illegitimate. Unfortunately, long after Vance is gone from the political scene, his “helpful” illustration of who doesn’t deserve the right to vote — three politicians of color and one gay politician — will linger in right-wing rhetoric, having been validated by his status as a member of GOP elite and, sadly, a best-selling author. As Republicans in state government continue to look for ways to kick people off voter rolls and declare urban voters illegitimate, people like Vance help justify their efforts.

Here, of course, is where readers will ask, “What can I do to fix this?”

I wish I had better answers. Because this is mostly about intra-Republican politics, it’s hard for outsiders to do much. The only thing liberals can do is strive to not reward these tactics by providing the outrage or the dunks that someone like Vance is using to burnish his liberal-triggering credibility. If you must draw attention to it (as I’m doing here), the only approach is to go meta — explain what he’s doing and why, instead of simply arguing back or getting angry, which is what he’s trying to bait progressives into doing. But outside of this, the Republican race to the bottom may have to be something we’re stuck with until it plays itself out, which could get very ugly indeed.

Donald Trump won’t let his election fight go. Democrats shouldn’t let him

Over the weekend, Donald Trump held a huge indoor rally in Arizona, called “Rally to Protect Our Elections,” which in all likelihood will end up being a super-spreader event since so many of his followers are anti-vaccine and anti-mask. They showed up in great numbers, dressed in their flamboyant MAGA gear, excited and thrilled to be in the presence of their leader.

Outside the Phoenix, AZ rally that Donald Trump will headline, attendees are yelling at us, “No masks.”
We are indeed wearing masks. This will be an hours-long indoor rally as the Delta virus has led to an increase in #COVID19 cases. pic.twitter.com/1DQA5yT5vg

— Kyung Lah (@KyungLahCNN) July 24, 2021

Trump made passing reference to the vaccines in his endless speech, taking credit for them and telling people he thinks they should get them but then going out of his way to say he respects those who choose not to do it. Of course, the crowd really only cheered the latter.

But the rally was billed as really about “election integrity,” which in Trumpworld translates to the Big Lie about 2020. And he delivered. He went on and on about the so-called “fraud” spreading bogus details along the way, reinforcing his determination to organize the party around his lost cause. In the context of January 6th and Trump’s ongoing Big Lie, there was a darker message as well.

“Our nation is up against the most sinister forces…This nation does not belong to them, this nation belongs to you,” Trump said.

He wasn’t talking about a foreign enemy. And the reference to 1776 was, as you’ll no doubt recall, one of the insurrectionist rallying cries on January 6th, even pushed by GOP members of Congress on that day:

Today is 1776.

— Lauren Boebert (@laurenboebert) January 6, 2021

Let’s just say that Donald Trump is not distancing himself from the insurrection. In fact, he is using code words and conspiracy theory signals to suggest that he’s still as happy about it as he reportedly was when it happened.

Meanwhile, in Washington, we have seen the Republican Party do everything in its power to bury any investigation into that day. They’ve waged an ongoing tantrum over Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s various attempts to put together a commission or select committee to gather a full account of what happened on that day. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy insists that no investigation that doesn’t include Republicans who are pushing the Big Lie and are, therefore, complicit in the insurrection, can possibly be fair. (Would he would have wanted members of Al Qaeda on the 9/11 commission as well?)

While there’s little doubt that a few GOP members of Congress are true believers, this is really all about one thing: the 2022 elections. And the last thing Republicans want to be talking about in that campaign is the trainwreck of January 6th. But even if they had been able to derail a congressional investigation, they can’t shut up Donald Trump, and he can talk of nothing else — and the Republican establishment is increasingly worried about it.

CNN’s Manu Raju asked South Dakota Republican Senator John Thune… about the former president’s claim that the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6 was a “lovefest.””That’s not what any of us here experienced,” he responded. “Trying to rehash and revisit and re-litigate the past election is not a winning strategy for trying to get the majorities back in 2022.”

Raju asked the South Dakota senator if Trump’s claims of widespread fraud will hurt the party’s chances in the 2022 midterms. “I mean, he’s gonna keep saying it. There’s not anything we can do about it,” Thune said. “But like I said, anytime you’re talking about the past, you’re not talking about the future. And I think the future is where we’re gonna live.”

Trump spoke to this at the Arizona rally this past weekend:

I tell this to people. I tell it to Republicans and a lot of them are very good people and they say, “Well, sir, we have to get onto the future.” Let me tell you, you’re not going to have a future. First of all, our nation is being destroyed, but you’re not going to have a future in ’22 or ’24 if you don’t find out how they cheated with hundreds of thousands and even millions of votes, because you won’t win anything. You won’t win anything.

Whether they like it or not, the GOP strategy in 2022 is going to be about relitigating 2020. Trump is out there endorsing candidates who defended him and nixing anyone who may have balked, creating even more anxiety among Republican leaders. He is still in charge.

You might wonder why they are so nervous since Trump does get out their base and in the midterm that could be decisive. Well, they are probably aware that Trump continuing to dominate will also help Democratic turnout. And while it is very true that much depends on the Democrats’ ability to deliver the material benefit they promised, negative partisanship is a very powerful motivator and nobody brings it out like Donald Trump.

CNN political analyst Ron Brownstein has written about this, noting that Democrats were able to produce exceptional turnout in 2018 and 2020 among people who don’t always vote because of the deep antipathy to Trump. They have all the contact numbers for these folks and will be sure to let them know exactly what Trump is up to, even if they aren’t paying close attention.

Michael Podhorzer, political director of the AFL-CIO, has said that the 7.7 million voters who didn’t vote in 2016 but came out in the next two elections, along with the 18 million first-time voters in 2020 are key to success in 2022. According to the Catalyst election analysis, half of those first-time voters who cast a ballot for Biden, did so to vote against Trump. If he’s out there talking his usual trash, the Democrats will likely have a much easier time persuading those voters to come out in 2022.

Beyond that, Mitch McConnell is almost certainly concerned about Trump’s ongoing disparagement of the voting system. After all, he knows there’s a good chance he lost the Senate because Trump’s accusations of rampant electoral corruption resulted in Georgia Republicans failing to vote in the runoff that elected two Democratic senators. Trump has a very loyal base but there may be more than a few who figure it just isn’t worth it when they hear the constant refrain about corrupt election systems.

Whether Democrats are able to take advantage of this opening remains to be seen. The official line is that they are going to depend upon a good economy and the proverbial “kitchen table issues” to get out the vote. But last week the president himself seemed to indicate that he understands that Democratic voters are still highly motivated by their loathing of the man who still insists he won the election. At a campaign rally for Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe, Biden threw down the gauntlet, calling McAuliffe’s Republican opponent a “Trump acolyte.”

Biden added: “I whipped Donald Trump in Virginia and so will Terry.” He trolled Trump in a way designed to thrill the crowd, which it did:

Lol pic.twitter.com/hXbXUWmObg

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 24, 2021

He knew what he was doing. It was a subtle, but effective jab at the former president who famously had to hold his glass with two hands. Don’t be surprised to see more of this. If Trump won’t go away the Democrats wouldn’t be fools not to take advantage of it.

No, the rich aren’t like the rest of us: Michael Mechanic on the secret worlds of wealth

Last Tuesday, Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, soared into space in a rocket many observers compared to a penis. A week or so before that, Richard Branson also blasted himself to the edge of space in a “spaceplane” designed by his company, Virgin Galactic.

After his history-making feat, Jeff Bezos gave $100 million to CNN commentator Van Jones, and another $100 million to chef José Andrés, who has dedicated himself to providing free meals to frontline workers and others in need during the pandemic. They were asked by Bezos to use the money for charitable purposes. This beneficence was a type of “apology” for his grotesque act of hubris and ego: he and most others of his class have no sincere sense of social obligation.

In so many ways these billionaires and their space adventures, during a time of human misery and rising neofascism in America and the world, is like bad science fiction turned to life. It is as if Paul Verhoeven, Mike Judge and Roger Corman collaborated on a film and then found a way to replace reality as we once understood it with their elaborate simulation.

Bezos and Branson’s antics are further evidence that America is a plutocratic pathocracy that is cannibalizing itself. In this new Gilded Age, millionaires and billionaires have enriched themselves through a political and economic system in which social parasitism and social Darwinism rule largely uncontested.

In this new world — that in many ways is an old world, with echoes of feudalism and debt peonage — neoliberalism means “socialism” for the rich and “free markets” for everyone else. Even worse, the poor, working classes and middle class directly subsidize the wealth and greed of the very rich, because the latter largely do not pay federal and state taxes.

With the billions of dollars Bezos and Branson collectively spent on their rocket rides to space, they could instead have chosen to provide vaccines for the poor around the world, rid the human race of a deadly disease, help uplift the poor and other vulnerable people worldwide, create a project to address the global climate emergency, or done other good works that would have simultaneously soothed their egos and desperate need for attention while also helping others.

With the money spent on his rocket ride and his gifts to Jones and Andrés, Bezos could have instead chosen to provide a true living wage for his employees (the very people who helped him to obtain his vast wealth) or given each of them a substantial cash bonus.

As seen with the Biden administration’s new Child Tax Credit it does not take large sums of money to substantially improve the life chances of poor and working-class people in America. Bezos and Branson could easily choose to do the same.

In response to these billionaire space flights, Deepak Xavier, who heads Oxfam International’s global inequality campaign, said this:

We’ve now reached stratospheric inequality. Billionaires burning into space, away from a world of pandemic, climate change and starvation. 11 people are likely now dying of hunger each minute while Bezos prepares for an 11-minute personal space flight. This is human folly, not human achievement.

The ultra-rich are being propped up by unfair tax systems and pitiful labor protections. US billionaires got around $1.8 trillion richer since the beginning of the pandemic and nine new billionaires were created by Big Pharma’s monopoly on the COVID-19 vaccines. Bezos pays next to no US income tax but can spend $7.5 billion on his own aerospace adventure. Bezos’ fortune has almost doubled during the COVID-19 pandemic. He could afford to pay for everyone on Earth to be vaccinated against COVID-19 and still be richer than he was when the pandemic began.

Billionaires should pay their fair share of taxes for our hospitals, schools, roads and social care, too. Governments must adopt a much stronger global minimum tax on multinational corporations and look at new revenues. A wealth tax, for example of just 3 percent, would generate $6 billion a year from Bezos’ $200 billion fortune alone ― a sixth of what the US spends on foreign aid. A COVID-19 profits tax on Amazon would yield $11 billion, enough to vaccinate nearly 600 million people.

What we need is a fair tax system that allows more investment into ending hunger and poverty, into education and healthcare, and into saving the planet from the growing climate crisis ―rather than leaving it.

Bezos and Branson command such vast financial resources and power that they can engage in acts of global spectacle for their own ego gratification. Why are the super-wealthy flying off to space? For reasons of personal glory, or perhaps out of collective narcissism and greed, and perhaps to flee a ruined planet — or just because they can.

In the final analysis we may all share planet Earth, but the very rich live in their own reality. Michael Mechanic, a senior editor at Mother Jones, knows this well. His new book “Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live — and How Their Wealth Harms Us All” explores that private and exclusive world.

In this conversation, Mechanic explains what the wealthy and super-rich understand about money that other people do not. He shares how the lives of the wealthy and super-rich are indeed very much outside the lived experiences and reality of all other human beings. Mechanic also explains how the wealthy engage in sociopathic or antisocial behaviors, while suffering few consequences — other than their own rootlessness and unhappiness. He warns that no society with such extreme levels of wealth and income inequality is stable and that a healthy democracy needs a more balanced economy with a flourishing middle class.

This conversation has been edited, as usual, for length and clarity.

As the saying goes, there’s a class war in America and the rich won. Why don’t we see any mass resistance or pressure to change this unjust system?

This can partly be explained by an American ethos which emphasizes the myth of upward mobility. So many Americans actually believe, “We can be in the mansion someday, and when we get there, we don’t want to be taxed too much.” This pervasive wealth fantasy exists much more in America than in other countries. As compared to Europeans, for example, Americans are overly optimistic about the prospects for upward mobility. American politicians are constantly telling these rags-to-riches stories as well. Such stories ignore the structural realities of American society and the fact that upward mobility is more mythical than real. Family circumstances are the biggest predictor of a person’s own economic circumstances, unfortunately.

What does the average American not understand about the very rich? What is their world like?

Here is one example. White men have much greater access to a network of people in the worlds of finance, venture capital and other lucrative industries that they can rely upon when they need a step up. If you have a friend who works in finance, you can use that relationship to get funding for your business. Even to get in the room with a venture capitalist you usually need to have a friend or other contact to arrange it. If you don’t have access to that network, you are at an extreme disadvantage. Most women, in general, do not have such financial networks. Black people in America tend not to have access to those networks either. If you are a working-class Black person looking for funding for a company, good luck — whereas if you come from a wealthy white family, your dad likely knows somebody who can get you that access.

Wealth is intergenerational. There are many among the rich who actually believe that they “earned” their money through “hard work” as opposed to family money, luck and access to other resources. Donald Trump is one of the most notable examples: he received millions of dollars from his father yet brags about being a “self-made” man who got a “small loan” to start his business. Do the wealthy really believe such things?

It varies. Donald Trump is the least self-aware person on earth. He probably believes these myths about self-reliance and that he did it himself. I believe there are wealthy people who appreciate how lucky they are. When you come from a wealthy family it is easy to downplay all of the structural and institutional factors which helped you and your family and that hurt others in terms of accruing intergenerational wealth.

What is the average day like for one of the super-rich?

There are many different types of the super-rich. There are those people that don’t work, who are just socialites and go around to events and so forth. There are people who are in industry and are workaholics. But either way, people tend to travel a great deal. They have massive social calendars and many things of that nature to plan. Super-rich families actually have something called a “family office.” This is a private company that handles all their personal affairs and investments, and manages all the properties and household employees, and pays the bills. But mainly, the purpose of the family office is to make you richer and to protect your wealth. The family office also helps them to avoid taxes by whatever means necessary. These family offices just perpetuate a dynastic system.

What is it like to live a life without fears or worries about not having enough money?

Many of the super-rich still care about money a great deal, even though they have a ton of it. They don’t need more of it, but they use money as a scorecard for their success. It becomes a big game, a competition when you can buy anything you want and have anything you want. That is a quite surreal experience. It is spending money on stupid things. It creates a mindset of “I don’t care about money, I don’t need it, I can just do what I want.” I believe this hurts the children of the wealthy even more because it allows them to flounder through life, never having to stick with anything.

They just wander through life aimlessly. Many children of the wealthy end up getting into the family business or doing something else to maintain a lifestyle that they do not really care about – and that makes them unhappy. To me, that is a bad way to live.

Because they travel so much, the wealthy are often away from their kids for long periods of time. These very wealthy families outsource everything. There are people who do the cooking, the cleaning, the yard work, who take care of the children, etc. There are also consultants for everything. As one of my sources told me, “I meet these super-wealthy people and they don’t do anything. They just sort of live in this bubble where everything’s being done for them.” I believe this explains why we see the super-wealthy engaging in crazy, high-risk, high-priced adventure activities.

There is much research which suggests that the rich, especially the super-rich and the plutocrats, are more likely to be sociopaths than the average person. Did you encounter any people who fit that profile?

Psychologists have studied these questions and have shown that wealthier people, on average, are less empathetic. They are more prone to antisocial behaviors. They are less socially oriented. On the other hand, there’s no data that shows the same person before and after getting these large sums of money. Thus, the question: Is it more that these types of personalities are the ones that pursue wealth, or that wealth actually has these negative impacts on a person’s behavior?

Does money change people? I asked that question of many people who are sources for the book. Some of them said, “If you have $50 million and you were a jerk, you’re going to be a bigger jerk. And if you are a great person, you’ll have opportunity to do greater.” Essentially, it amplifies your personality. One thing we do know is that children of wealthy families are at high risk for drug addiction and low-level criminal behavior. The risk is similar for very poor kids. People who are from middle-income families are at much lower risk of such behavior.

What of the children of the very rich? Do they just learn that there are no rules for people like them? Poor and working-class people can’t claim that they are sick with “affluenza” when they get drunk and run over people, for example.

I do believe that is the case. There is a sense of entitlement that the rules don’t apply. We see this among those who are rich but not super-wealthy as well. It is just the idea, “Oh, I can just do this thing and who cares, right? I can cut in line, whatever.” It manifests across a range of small behaviors.

What do we know about new money versus old money?

Professional athletes are a classic example. It’s actually getting harder and harder for poor kids to make it into the NFL and the NBA. But there is still a pretty sizable number of people who make it in professional sports and come from financially challenging circumstances. They are extremely talented and have focused like a laser beam on being successful in their sport. Then, all of a sudden, they are getting paid $2 million a month. These are crazy amounts of money. I talked with a business manager whose clients are mostly MLB and NBA players. He told me about the following: “This one kid, he’s making a million or two a month. He had to hire a housekeeper. Someone to go fold his clothes, do his laundry. Because this kid had never done his own laundry. He never folded his own clothes.”

Many of these professional athletes do not know how to function in normal life. They have lived in a bubble. There are all these hangers-on and others in their orbit who are trying to get money from them. It can be the coaches from before they went pro, family members and others who are trying to get these young athletes to take care of them financially.

There are a lot of athletes who fall victim to that. And if you’re a big superstar like a Pat Mahomes or Steph Curry, then you can afford to behave in such a way. But as my contact told me, “If you’re a backup point guard for the Grizzlies, you can’t support a bunch of family members for very long or you are going to go broke.” It happens. They get in serious financial trouble. If you come into all those millions of dollars without any sophisticated knowledge about what to do with it, the whole thing can be really disconcerting.

Many people fantasize about wealth. But when you get that wealth, especially all of a sudden, it really changes your relationships with people – including old friends, your middle-class friends. You want to enjoy the money, and you may also want your friends to enjoy it too. “Can I invite my middle-class friends on this fancy trip where I’m going to pay for everything?” Sure, maybe you can do it once. But what’s it going to be like if you keep treating your old friends to these super high-end things? It’s going to get weird. Pride’s going to get in the way, or maybe you’ll feel like they are freeloaders. All that money can create very weird dynamics. Family tensions get involved. Children squabble about inheritances. It can become a total mess.

What are the informal rules about wealth that old money understands and new money does not?

Put that money away to make it last. Preserve it, and do not do what the young athletes do. You do not want to be flashy. Old money? it wants nobody to know it exists. The big wealth dynasties with their family offices generally do not want to be big public figures.

Some years ago, I was acquainted with a husband and wife who won the Lotto. It was a modest sum after taxes, perhaps only $150,000. Everyone knew about it because their names were in the newspaper. I asked them a few years later about what they spent the money on. The husband told me he wished they had never won the money, because all they did was pay off some bills and buy a new pickup truck. That was it. But everyone in their family, friends, the neighborhood, their co-workers, all thought they were rich. He told me it was so much stress with everyone asking him and his wife for money that they wished they had never won it to begin with. Is that a common experience?

Yes it is. The conventional wisdom about winning the lottery is that it ruins your life. And in some cases, it really does. I interviewed a guy who was a hedge fund manager. He had a house on Lake Tahoe right next to Larry Ellison’s house. And the neighbor on the other side, it was this young guy in his 20s. It turned out, the guy had won a big lottery and bought this $4 million house on Lake Tahoe. He was always up there, just partying with his friends. He didn’t seem to have anything else going on in his life. One day the rich guy pulls up in his driveway and he sees the coroner’s van next door. He goes over there and asks, “What happened?” They told him, “The person is deceased. This young guy killed himself.”

When you have a lot of money there are issues with trusting other people. You do not know who’s coming at you. There are going to be people trying to get you involved in business partnerships, pitching ideas to you or trying to become your friend. But you don’t really know whether they’re there for some other reason. This includes potential romantic partners.

There was a documentary a few years back about lottery winners, that showed how they got all this money and moved into a new neighborhood, and the people there did not accept them. The interviewer asked one of the Powerball winners, an older Black man who came from a working-class neighborhood, what it was like to have all this money. The man was miserable. He and his wife almost started crying. He told the interviewer, “Look around. All we have is a house full of stuff. I don’t want to buy anything because I got everything. The neighbors here don’t talk to us because they don’t think we belong. We were poor in the projects but now we don’t trust anyone. We don’t have those friendships or family relationships anymore. All we got is a whole bunch of money and a house full of stuff.” Then the interviewer asked the obvious follow-up and the man said, “You know what? I was happier when I was poor.”

It’s true. If you don’t have something to give your life meaning, and if you think money is the meaning of life and you pursue that path, forget it. You are going to be miserable.

So what’s the magic number in terms of income and happiness?

There is research that looked at millions of people and their self-reported happiness. Positive emotions peak at incomes over 65 grand. Your negative emotions are minimized at about 95 grand. And then there is what is known as “life satisfaction,” which is a type of measure of how you view yourself relative to your peers. That maxes out at $105,000, a modest amount of money.

Once you get above the satiation point where a person knows that their needs are met, it is all just creature comforts and other bonuses in life. As you go past the satiation point, your life satisfaction starts to decrease in wealthy nations. We still do not know why that is. But one of the speculations is that in order to maintain this high-end lifestyle, a person has to work all the time and they lose their social connections. If you take a high-paying job and you’re just on-call all the time and have too many responsibilities, there is less time to enjoy your life and your relationships. What good is it, right? You have a large bank account and no friends.

We know a great deal about the poor and the “underclass,” but we know very little about the very rich. They are under-researched because as a rule they do not talk to outsiders. How did you get access to them?

It was a very laborious process. I had many rejections. In fact, the billionaires wouldn’t talk to me at all. They’ll talk to you about other things. But they are not going to talk to you regarding their feelings about wealth. But the wealthy also have lots of middlemen, the PR people and the like, who said no. I got a lot more rejections than I got acceptances, I would say. So I had to fill in the gaps by talking to people who are on the periphery of the billionaire class, people who work with them closely, in financial management, of course, but also in such varied roles as building safe rooms for hedge funders, for example. I spoke to a woman who works security for billionaires and trains their nannies in physical combat. I also spent time hanging out with luxury realtors and luxury car dealers and all manner of people who interact with these incredibly wealthy clients.

What do you want the American people to understand about the super-rich?

By and large they are not bad people. The point of writing “Jackpot” was not to disparage the wealthy, but to point out how flawed our system is in America that allows people to amass such wealth at the expense of others. The policies that enable such an outcome is driving us apart as a society. It’s really tearing at the social fabric, because as the rungs of the economic ladder get wider and wider apart, we are losing empathy for the people on the other side. There is now a situation where we are a society of extreme winners versus extreme losers. A healthy society has a thriving middle class. That’s what really lifts all boats.

Looking back at the founding of FAIR — 35 years of giving mainstream media hell

It was 35 years ago this month that I left my beloved Venice, California, to move to New York City to launch FAIR. Not many progressive nonprofits endure 35 years, but FAIR has survived and thrived.

I wanted to launch FAIR from Venice, but friends and advisers insisted, correctly, that a national media group would lack credibility if not based in New York or DC. Given the Reaganite stench permeating our nation’s capital, NYC was the obvious choice.

Welcome to NYC

The answer to Time’s question (7/7/86): He wasn’t (Extra!, 3–4/89).

It’s easy to forget that corporate liberal media back then were as soft on the declining Reagan — and his smilingly vicious brand of politics and terror wars in Central America — as they are today on Joe Biden. That media deference to Reaganism was a major reason I launched FAIR; my arrival in New York was greeted by Time magazine’s unironic North Korea–like cover of Reagan, haloed by colorful fireworks.

At the beginning we couldn’t afford to rent an office, so we launched FAIR out of the cramped Upper West Side apartment of FAIR co-founder/author Martin Lee and lawyer Pia Gallegos. Since any half-awake journalist would know that our West End Avenue address was no office building, we thought putting “Suite 7C” with that address on FAIR’s stationery was an open joke, rather than a lie. “Accuracy,” after all, was literally our middle name.

Later we moved into our first office at 666 Broadway — a building we were proud to share with such organizations as the Center for Constitutional Rights, Harper’s magazine and Lambda Legal. It’s there we launched our newsletter, Extra!, in June 1987, with Martin Lee as editor. Luckily for FAIR, Martin had just finished “Acid Dreams,” his opus on LSD, the CIA and the 1960s.

Amerika the beautiful

ABC’s 1987 miniseries “Amerika” envisioned a Soviet takeover of the United States by 1997.

Without luck, a genuinely progressive and anti-corporate group won’t survive far beyond birth. We got key grants at key times (thanks to the late David Hunter), key volunteers (like comedy writer Dennis Perrin; Steve Rendall, who later became FAIR’s research director; and the “two Lindas”: Linda Valentino and Linda Mitchell) and key stupidity from the ABC TV network.

Despite Reagan’s blather about an “evil empire,” the Soviet Union was on its last legs in 1986-87. But in Hollywood’s feverish Cold War imaginings, the Russians were still coming — hell-bent on conquering and ruling us. ABC took the honors in the paranoia pageant with “Amerika,” a 14-hour dramatic miniseries proposed to ABC by a right-wing columnist (New York, 1/26/87). It depicted the U.S. under the thumb of a vicious Soviet occupation, in league with a bunch of conspirators: the United Nations, internal traitors, Cubans, etc.

FAIR learned early on that we needed mainstream media allies to survive. During the filming of “Amerika,” a whistleblower inside ABC leaked us the entire shooting script. We shared it with the UN. Every mainstream journalist who covered the erupting “Amerika” controversy needed us to get a look at the script. The miniseries put FAIR on the map as critics of conservative or Cold War media propaganda. I was quoted in the press referring to “Amerika” as a “14-hour commercial for Reagan’s Star Wars scheme.”

During this period of “Red Dawn”/”Rambo”/”Amerika,” I debated ultra-right “Accuracy In Media” journalism-basher Reed Irvine. Irvine joined the Reaganites in attacking anyone who compared U.S.-supported right-wing “authoritarianism” (aka fascism) to Communism. That was the dreaded “moral equivalence.” Unlike right-wing dictators who could be overthrown, Irvine insisted, Communist states were eternal. Within a few years, the Soviet Union and a half-dozen other Communist regimes were gone.

From margin to mainstream

Jeff Cohen debating Pat Buchanan on CNN.

One of FAIR’s main goals was to take what had been a marginalized progressive media critique (found in the then-undercirculated books of Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman, or in Alex Cockburn‘s columns) and push that critique into the faces of mainstream journalists. “Amerika” helped us get known. I soon appeared in national TV debates.

When we launched Extra!, our friends who worked inside national news outlets put dozens of copies inside bathrooms. We mailed copies free to hundreds of mainstream journalists — whether they subscribed or not (which might be called spam today).

For PR heft, we quickly assembled an “Advisory Board” that included prominent journalists, media critics and activists such as Chomsky, Ben Bagdikian, Jessica Mitford, Studs Terkel, Adam Hochschild, Allen Ginsberg, Dolores Huerta, Frances Moore Lappé and the Rev. Joseph Lowery.

In the 1990s, FAIR would gain acclaim for taking on Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, but right-wing media were far less powerful in the mid-1980s. Our focus in the early years was on “prestige” news outlets — those seen as sanctuaries of objective, fact-based journalism.

Shaming elite media

FAIR’s study of ABC’s “Nightline” (Extra!, 1–2/89) found that Ted Koppel’s four most frequent guests were Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, Elliott Abrams and Jerry Falwell.

In October 1987, we devoted a 16-page special issue to elite media’s Reagan-friendly distortions about the Sandinista revolution, followed a few months later with a devastating 18-point “Questionnaire for the New York Times on its Central America Coverage” (Extra!, 1–2/88). The chapter-and-verse document, which was special-delivered to Times editors, exposed systemic bias — asking why, for example, assassinations of progressive leaders in El Salvador or Honduras received far less prominent coverage than the brief detention of right-wing oppositionists in Nicaragua.

In a written response and in a public debate at Columbia University, Times editors referred to our questionnaire as an “indictment.” That was one Times assessment whose accuracy we couldn’t challenge.

In our efforts to budge mainstream news outlets, it soon became clear to us that shaming them (especially in other mainstream forums) was often a more effective tactic than persuasion. When FAIR launched, the most prestigious U.S. TV news show was Ted Koppel’s “Nightline” on ABC. In the first of many systematic and impactful studies, FAIR published an analysis of 40 months of “Nightline’s” guestlist (Extra!, 1–2/89), which exposed blatant pro-conservative and pro-militarist biases, and the exclusion of female guests and people of color.

Our study received strong coverage in hundreds of dailies. A mainstream African-American columnist took to referring to Nightline as “Whiteline.” A Pennsylvania daily published a photo of Koppel interviewing Kermit the Frog, with the sarcastic caption: “Ted Koppel makes a rare appearance with a member of a minority group on ‘Nightline’.”

Still critiquing after all these years

It’s been more than two decades since I left FAIR’s staff. Every day, I beam like a proud papa at the brilliant work FAIR churns out — online, in Extra!, on CounterSpin. When I’m on the road lecturing, I still run into activists who boast of having “every issue of Extra! from the beginning.”

To this day, people still mistakenly thank me for the latest first-rate critique from FAIR. Sometimes I correct their misimpression that I have a hand in FAIR’s great work 35 years later. Sometimes I don’t. But all the time, I tell FAIR’s many fans to do three things: Spread the word, join the battle, and donate.

Vaccine conspiracies are tearing American couples apart

It’s no secret that the COVID-19 vaccine has led to opposition among lawmakers from both sides of the aisle. But now the vaccine opposition has invaded the homes of many Americans and is causing a rift between married couples.

In fact, according to Huffpost, the COVID opposition is so damaging, couples are on the brink of divorce as a result of it. The publication detailed the problems some married individuals are facing as a result of their spouse’s opposition to the COVID vaccine.

One account in particular focused on the marital problems plaguing a couple only identified as Shane and Lucy. At the onset of the pandemic, the couple was on the same page when it came to taking the proper steps to stay safe. They prioritized, mask-wearing, social distancing, and sanitizing. But as time progressed, Shane’s views began to shift.

According Lucy, Shane “did a 180” as he reportedly became engulfed in the belief systems of conspiracy theorists.

Per the publication:

“Shane spent months cooped up inside on YouTube and Facebook, where a vortex of coronavirus conspiracy theory videos was waiting for him. Many declared that the virus was nothing to fear — that it was the vaccines he should really be afraid of. Before long, he was also tuning into the increasingly malicious disinformation networks Newsmax and OAN, which regularly rehashed the lies he’d been fed online.”

As for the COVID vaccine, Shane reportedly believes “that those who’ve been vaccinated can ‘shed’ deadly toxins onto unvaccinated people in their vicinity.”

Lucy, on the other hand, is described as “a 59-year-old metastatic breast cancer patient.” While her husband has such warped beliefs about the efficacy and safety of the vaccine, Lucy sees being vaccinated a matter of life and death due to her condition.

Although she did opt to get vaccinated, that decision is one that her husband is unaware of.

“Everything fell apart last year,” said Lucy, who now hides her COVID vaccination card in a safe deposit box. “I don’t even know who he is anymore.”

Then, there is Anthony and Carrie. Not only are they clashing on aspects of the pandemic but also other controversial issues like QAnon conspiracy theories which have shaped his seemingly warped belief system.

Their marriage took a disturbing turn when Carrie revealed she had been vaccinated and that she’d also taken her eligible children to be vaccinated also.

In fact, he has even threatened to divorce Carrie if she vaccinates their 8-year-old daughter.

“He thinks I’m murdering our kids. He believes it hook, line and sinker — I don’t know how he makes it through the day,” said Carrie, who also sarcastically said, “At least you’ll be alive for the remaining children.” At that point, Anthony began to embrace the conspiracy theory about “shedding.”

“We’ll all be dead, too,” he replied.

As the pandemic continues, more misinformation is being circulated which only contributes to the types of conspiracy theories that are dividing homes. In fact, a number of Republican leaders and lawmakers this week sounded off about misinformation and how it sows fear and doubt about the COVID vaccine.

Although many states had taken steps to ease COVID mitigation restrictions, the Delta variant has many concerned about what lies ahead as states are reporting alarming uptick in coronavirus cases.