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In Cape Cod, new efforts to coexist with sharks

On a windy morning in March, two older surfers at LeCount Hollow Beach, on Cape Cod, look out at the gray Atlantic. They are scanning the water closest to shore for seals, with whom they increasingly have to share the frigid water, which can dip as low as 37 degrees Fahrenheit in winter. The seals are a growing demographic. They have been rebounding since the 1970s, after almost being hunted to extinction. They are recolonizing what was once their native habitat, migrating seasonally up and down the coast. The surfers, too, have started to migrate, with many now surfing exclusively in the winter — not to avoid the crowds in this popular summer tourist destination, but to avoid another growing demographic: great white sharks. 

One of the surfers, Charles Cole, who goes by Ch’arlie or Ch, has a long flowing beard bleached a light yellow from years of sea and sun. He has been surfing here off the coast of Massachusetts since the 1960s. “There used to be one or two sharks every summer,” he says. Now there are too many to even count. Cole has painted the bottom of his kneeboard with alternating stripes of white, black, and gray — a signal to let the sharks know he isn’t a seal. But just in case, his surf leash attached to the back of the board has a mechanical ratcheting buckle for tightening. “I bought one of these because it’s a tourniquet,” says Cole. Devices like this are usually used to stop heavy bleeding after traumatic injuries from gunfire, road accidents — and shark bites.

Even with these precautionary measures in place, Cole says he won’t go out if the water appears too “sharky” — a sixth sense he has developed to tell him if sharks are present. And from about July to October, during peak shark season for what has now become one of the greatest concentrations of great white sharks in the world, the waters are very, very sharky.

For ecologists, the return of the sharks is hailed as a cascading conservation success story. Protection of Cape Cod’s unique seashore and the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act are credited with the return of the region’s gray seals — a preferred food source for great white sharks. The seals’ main stomping ground is the eastern shoreline of the Outer Cape, which extends like a forearm from the peninsula’s southern elbow to its northern fist. Here, 3,000 miles of open ocean, wind, and waves ram into the land, forming dramatic dunes that can reach 100 feet and attract millions of visitors every year. As the seal population has grown, so has the number of sharks and shark interactions, causing the Outer Cape’s four small towns and the National Park Service to grapple with competing demands of conservation and public safety. 

Many societies have coexisted with large apex predators for centuries, but Western countries have tended to favor either eradication or separation. In Western Europe, for example, bears and gray wolves were largely exterminated by the late 19th century, and even though wolves have successfully returned, countries such as France, Norway, and Finland still routinely cull them. Separation looks a little different: In the United States, grizzly bears are largely tolerated within designated wildlife reserves and national parks, but if they go outside those boundaries, they risk being relocated or euthanized.

As one of the ocean’s top apex predators, great whites have been the target of intense management plans. Countries around the world have spent millions of dollars to install nets, barriers, and bait-lines to keep sharks away from humans, with mixed success. But now, increasingly sophisticated satellite and tracking technology might offer new, more detailed insight into how sharks behave. Among other things, researchers are creating a tool to predict the presence of sharks in the water. “Like a weather forecasting system just for sharks,” says Greg Skomal, a senior scientist at the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries and a leading shark researcher. 

That tool is what’s known as a heat map — a color-coded graphical representation of data. In this case, the goal is to map shark swimming behaviors and their relationship to environmental conditions, like water temperature, tides, and even lunar cycles. Researchers hope this heat map will give beachgoers and public safety officials the ability to predict the likelihood of a shark swimming near the shore. It’s not just a novel experiment for understanding shark behavior. Some researchers see it as emblematic of a growing shift in conservation science, as well as in Western societies, to finding more equitable ways of living with wild animals. In Cape Cod, being able to predict the presence of sharks in the water could allow beachgoers to coexist with the 2.5-ton animals whose ancestors have dominated the ocean for 450 million years.

Sharks were once abundant in the Northwest Atlantic. Almost 200 years ago, Henry David Thoreau took a series of trips from his home, about 20 miles west of Boston, to the windswept landscapes of Cape Cod. In his book about the region, he observed that no one swam on the eastern side “on account of the undertow and the rumor of sharks.” Thoreau recounts a local’s story of using oxen to drag a 14-foot “regular man-eating shark” he had killed out of the ocean. The author even spots a possible shark swimming not far from shore.

Published in 1865, the book, titled “Cape Cod,” gives a glimpse of the region before governments in New England wiped out the seal population by offering a bounty on seal noses, after inaccurately blaming them for declining fish stocks. As many as 135,000 seals were killed between 1888 to 1962, according to some estimates. By the time the Marine Mammal Protection Act was enacted in 1972, seals had been all but exterminated. Since then, though, the seals have returned in the tens of thousands to Cape Cod, a small slice of the roughly 450,000 gray seals that now live in the Northwest Atlantic.

Sharks, too, were nearly wiped out. The loss of their primary food source combined with a deadly mixture of trophy hunting, culling, and industrial fishing led to the near extirpation of coastal shark species. And as coastal development ramped up across the country and human-shark interactions increased, so did the perception that sharks were dangerous to humans. This spurred an increase in programs aimed at managing human-shark conflicts, often through lethal means. For example, the state government of Hawaii spent more than $300,000 on shark control programs between 1959 and 1976, killing almost 5,000 sharks in the process.

In the Northwest Atlantic, shark populations hit a dizzying low. By 2003, a few years after fishing for great whites was officially banned, their population had declined by as much as 75 percent in the previous 15 years. The species has since rebounded; Cape Cod has become the world’s newest hotspot, with great white sharks steadily returning since at least 2009, when the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries began to consistently tag them. “A lot of people recognize it as a conservation success story,” says Megan Winton, a research scientist at the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy, an organization dedicated to research, public safety, and conservation of great white sharks. “But now the community is really trying to figure out how to coexist, as people who like to use the water.” 

* * *

Heather Doyle looks out at the ocean from the Newcomb Hollow Beach parking lot, which is covered in sand from a late winter storm. A few miles to the south, in 2017, her friend’s paddleboard was bitten by a shark just 90 feet from shore. “That was a big eye opener for everybody,” says Doyle. The following year, a few miles to the north of Newcomb Hollow Beach, a doctor was bit in the torso and leg. He survived; but then a month later, another shark fatally wounded college student Arthur Medici. Doyle points down the shore: a small, inconspicuous cross commemorating Medici teeters at the edge of a dune. 

Medici’s death was the first shark fatality in Massachusetts since 1936. “We’re on a trajectory, right?” says Doyle. “It was three bites in 14 months.” After her friend’s paddleboard scare, Doyle co-founded Cape Cod Ocean Community, a community group that eventually became a nonprofit dedicated to increasing public safety. The group has helped connect pilots with lifeguards to alert them to possible sharks. It has raised funds for drones and giant car-sized balloons with high-definition cameras that could spot sharks, and it has advocated for devices such as the Clever Buoy, a marine monitoring and alert system that detects large marine life in the water.

But a six-month study commissioned by the Outer Cape towns and released in October 2019 looked at the efficacy of more than two dozen shark mitigation strategies, including the Clever Buoy, as well as nets, virtual barriers, electromagnet devices to deter sharks, and drones, among others. The report ultimately concluded that most either didn’t have enough evidence they actually worked, had limited efficacy, or wouldn’t work on Cape Cod’s shoreline — except one: modifying human behavior.

This has been the primary way that public safety officials have mitigated shark risk over the past eight to nine years, said Suzanne Grout Thomas, director of community services for Wellfleet, a fishing town about 15 miles from the tip of Cape Cod. Since Medici’s death, towns have stepped up their protocols, limiting how far out people can swim and closing beaches to swimming sometimes several times a day. Lifeguards and even some members of the public are trained in “stop the bleed” practices for bites, while signs warn about the presence of sharks. “Our biggest contribution to this is educating the general public as to how sharks can be anticipated to behave,” says Thomas. And she already sees signs it is working. People swim closer to shore, or don’t swim at all, and they react faster when the lifeguards blow their whistles to clear the water.

Last summer, Wellfleet had two buoys that sent a signal to lifeguards. If a tagged shark came within 200 yards, they could call swimmers out of the water. “There were hundreds and hundreds of sharks that pinged those buoys last summer,” says Thomas. Her goal is to have one at every beach.

But this approach, she acknowledges, has its limitations. Not every great white shark is tagged, and cellphone network service at the Outer Cape beaches is still spotty at best, meaning any live notification systems are difficult to share widely.

As researchers and residents consider the best mitigation strategies, one strategy — culling — has stayed off the table. That’s an approach some countries have tried. Western Australia, for example, implemented a regional policy in 2012 to track, catch, and destroy sharks that have posed an “imminent threat” to beachgoers. But according to the International Shark Attack File, a global database, shark attacks in Western Australia have been on a downward trend, but in the past couple years have spiked again. While estimating the effects is difficult, many experts still say culling projects don’t work.

Now, technological advances and a growing understanding of animal intelligence are giving researchers hope that another management option may be on the table, one that seeks to understand, rather than modify, shark behavior.

* * *

The ocean floor of the Cape is an immense patchwork of sandbars, shoals, and deep trenches. Sharks have learned how to navigate this underwater labyrinth. They now hunt in what some call “the trough,” a deep area of water that forms like the letter C between the outer sandbar and the beach. Because seals are often found in these shallow waters close to the shore, the sharks have learned how to attack laterally, rather than ambush from below. In fact, unlike in other areas of the world, sharks on Cape Cod spend around half of their time in water shallower than 15 feet, according to a recent study that analyzed data collected about eight great whites.

“It was really powerful for us to be able to come up with a number to tell people,” says Winton, the shark researcher who co-authored the study along with Skomal. “It really helps increase awareness of these animals and their presence.”

Winton and her colleagues hope to take this data point and layer it onto other data points about shark behavior and environmental conditions. The goal is to create a dynamic heat map akin to a weather forecast that can indicate the probability of a great white shark in the water, similar to maps used by commercial fishermen to indicate fish abundance. This, in turn, would help beach managers and would-be swimmers assess the risk of going in the water.

To estimate the great white shark population, Winton has already spent years following the sharks around Cape Cod in a boat, getting close enough to take videos of their unique scars and other identifiers with a GoPro stuck to the end of a painter’s pole. She and her research team have sifted through more than 3,000 videos and identified more than 400 individual sharks, often by their unique scars or fins, along with another possible 104 that require additional documentation to confirm. 

She has also collaborated with colleagues and organizations that collect data from other kinds of devices: Acoustic telemetry, pop-up-satellite tags, smart position and temperature (SPOT) transmitting tags, and underwater drones. Each device gives scientists a unique data set. Acoustic tags, for example, emit a high frequency sound that is picked up by hundreds of receivers in Massachusetts coastal waters. Researchers can then use these to study where great white sharks spend their time, when they arrive, and when they leave. The researchers can track individuals in the water, as well as where the sharks travel from year to year. And as the scientists collect more data, they can figure out not only which sharks are doing what, but also whether their behavior is changing over time. The long-term goal is to use all these devices to produce heat maps on an automated daily basis for towns and public safety officials. A hotter color around a specific beach or area would signify a higher likelihood of running into a great white.

As far as Winton knows, she and her colleagues are the first to develop this type of map of sharks’ behavior, and she hopes it will be a useful tool for public safety. “This is a way to provide science-based information to people alerting them to when sharks are likely to be present,” she says.

Or as Cole might say, the map is just a scientific way to assess whether the ocean is “sharky” or not. 

For now, residents and officials on Cape Cod interviewed for this article seem intent on figuring out ways to coexist with, rather than manage, the sharks — though not all of them used the term “coexistence.” That term has only recently gained prominence among Western academics and conservationists. At its core, coexistence describes a state in which humans and wildlife share the same landscape. And while that may sound Pollyanna-ish, scholars and policymakers don’t frame it as such. “Coexistence doesn’t require you to love your neighbor, or your enemy, or that marauding beast,” says Simon Pooley, a researcher at the University of London. “It requires you to figure out a way of existing in the same space and getting what you need.”

Pooley and other researchers maintain that promoting coexistence will be important for sustaining wild animal populations into the future. “Many of the places where these dangerous animals persist — they persist because there is coexistence in those places,” he says. This is especially apparent in Indigenous-managed lands that contain about 80 percent of global biodiversity, including vital habitats for predators like jaguars, polar bears, and lions. He himself studies communities in Western India that coexist with wild crocodile populations. And in India’s Sunderbans, a region of marshy land and mangrove forests populated by both humans and tigers, provides the largest remaining Bengal tiger habitat in the world.

Whether Cape Cod will become a model for coexistence is an open question. Currently there are no plans to put up barriers, or to bait and cull sharks, although a more heated debate has erupted around whether and how to deal with the tens of thousands of seals that have recolonized the Cape. Winton, who hopes to have beta versions of the predictive maps ready by the end of this year, is excited about the immense amount of data still out there that could be used to better understand sharks and their behavior.

“The more we learn about these animals, the more we just realize we’ve only started to scrape the surface understanding them,” she says. “I am just so excited for what the future holds — for not just shark science, for all of wildlife science.”

* * *

Sarah Sax is an environmental journalist based out of Brooklyn who writes about the intersection of people, nature, and society. You can find her on Twitter @sarahl_sax.

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

Biden gave a rousing speech — but is he the wrong president at the wrong time?

On Tuesday, President Biden delivered a rousing speech in Philadelphia, continuing to sound the alarm about the Republican Party’s escalating assaults on American democracy.

This is the same city where, during the Fourth of July holiday weekend, an organized group of white supremacist thugs marched in the street before being routed by counter-protesters and bystanders.

In his speech, Biden told personal stories of how democracy is lived through and by real people, and spoke of the long struggle for justice along the color line and America’s ugly history of white supremacy:

From denying enslaved people full citizenship until the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments after the Civil War; to denying women the right to vote until the 19th Amendment 100 years ago; to poll taxes and literacy tests, and the Ku Klux Klan campaigns of violence and terror that lasted into the ’50s and ’60s; to the Supreme Court decision in 2013 and then again just two weeks ago –- a decision that weakened the landmark Voting Rights Act; to the willful attacks — election attacks in 2020; and then to a whole other level of threat — the violence and the deadly insurrection on the Capitol on January 6th….

The 21st century Jim Crow assault is real. It’s unrelenting, and we’re going to challenge it vigorously.

To his credit, Biden expertly summarized and detailed how Republicans and their agents are systematically trying to subvert trust in the country’s democratic institutions and “free and fair elections.” He directly addressed “those who challenge the results and question the integrity of the election,” saying, “No other election has ever been held under such scrutiny and such high standards.” He continued:

This should be celebrated — the example of America at its best. But instead, we continue to see an example of human nature at its worst — something darker and more sinister.

In America, if you lose, you accept the results. You follow the Constitution. You try again. You don’t call facts “fake” and then try to bring down the American experiment just because you’re unhappy. That’s not statesmanship.

That’s not statesmanship; that’s selfishness. That’s not democracy; it’s the denial of the right to vote. It suppresses. It subjugates.

The denial of full and free and fair elections is the most un-American thing that any of us can imagine, the most undemocratic, the most unpatriotic, and yet, sadly, not unprecedented.

As others have observed, Biden’s speech in Philadelphia could have been given by Lyndon Johnson during the 1960s, in the most crucial years of the civil rights movement. Unfortunately, Biden’s speech lacks what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders in that movement described as “the urgency of now.” Biden and other Democratic leaders have spoken eloquently of an existential crisis in American democracy. But they have not offered a vision and a plan sufficient to face that crisis.

During his Philadelphia speech Biden continued to lean into “bipartisanship,” as though the Jim Crow Republican Party were capable of being a responsible partner in democracy and government:

This isn’t about Democrats and Republicans; it’s literally about who we are as Americans. It’s that basic. It’s about the kind of country we want today, the kind of country we want for our children and grandchildren tomorrow. And quite frankly, the whole world is watching.

Biden also said during his speech: “We will be asking my Republican friends — in Congress, in states, in cities, in counties — to stand up, for God’s sake, and help prevent this concerted effort to undermine our elections and the sacred right to vote.”

In the spirit of healing and in his desire to serve as father figure to a broken country, Biden continues to believe (at least in his public rhetoric) that the Republican Party is capable of shame. Some of his language, however, suggests that he knows better: 

It gives me no pleasure to say this. I never thought in my entire career I’d ever have to say it. But I swore an oath to you, to God — to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. And that’s an oath that forms a sacred trust to defend America against all threats both foreign and domestic. 

The assault on free and fair elections is just such a threat, literally. I’ve said it before: We are facing the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War. That’s not hyperbole. Since the Civil War. The Confederates back then never breached the Capitol as insurrectionists did on January the 6th.

I’m not saying this to alarm you; I’m saying this because you should be alarmed.

But Biden avoided directly or explicitly identifying the Republican Party as an enemy of democracy, and at no point during his speech did he say the word “filibuster.” To this point, he has refused to use the presidency as a bully pulpit to demand that the Senate filibuster — an archaic procedural maneuver not mentioned in the Constitution, with direct origins in white supremacy and slavery — be abandoned in order to save democracy from the Jim Crow Republicans.

Perhaps Biden and the Democrats do not fully understand what they are up against. Today’s Republican Party endorses right-wing political violence and other illegal or extralegal means of getting and keeping political power. Donald Trump’s coup attempt and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol were a proof of concept and a test run of sorts, pointing toward future political violence whenever Republicans lose national elections.

Today’s Republican Party is anti-democratic and neofascist. Elections, for them, are simply a tool — as they were for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis — for infiltrating the government, paralyzing and delegitimizing it and then usurping power, on the basis that democracy “does not work.” This strategy has frequently been employed by extremist organizations in failing democracies.

Today’s Republican Party has become a political cult controlled by Donald Trump. He commands the will of most Republican voters and many right-leaning Independents. “Traditional” Republicans are being purged as disloyal to Trump and his neofascist movement.

Furthermore, today’s Republican Party is a white supremacist organization dedicated to maintaining white power and control over every area of American life. Its voters and leaders are committed to the cause of white racial authoritarianism. They perceive multiracial democracy as dangerous and unacceptable

Today’s Republican Party, along with the other elements of the Trump movement, believe they face an existential struggle against Democrats, “socialists,” Black and brown people and others they view as enemies of “traditional” America. They believe victory must be achieved at all costs and by any means necessary.

A modern healthy democracy is prefaced on reason, respect for expertise and scientific knowledge, a spirit of political consensus, and compromise in service to the common good and general welfare. It relies on a shared sense of reality. It is pluralistic and respects a widening range of human and civil rights.

As the Republican Party descends into sociopathy, it has largely rejected these norms, values, behavior and institutions.

Joe Biden’s temperament, leadership style, humanity, generosity of spirit and belief in inherent human goodness are in many ways inspiring. Those traits may also be insufficient to defeat this version of the Republican Party and American neofascism. I sincerely believe that Biden possesses the potential to be a great president, but he may not be the best president for a country facing an almost unprecedented crisis of democracy, as America is now.

So the question becomes, what is to be done? If Biden and other Democratic leaders cannot act with the “urgency of now” — as Democratic state legislators in Texas have done — then the responsibility will fall on the shoulders of the American people. Yes, “leaders must lead.” But there are moments in history when mass mobilization, such as general strikes, boycotts, sit-ins and other forms of direct action, are needed to force the country’s leaders to do what is necessary.

In a new column at USA Today, former Democratic National Committee chair Donna Brazile offers this call to action:

Following the example of Dr. King, everyone who believes in voting rights needs to mobilize for nonviolent marches and demonstrations around the country to make it clear that Republican voter suppression, which President Biden has correctly likened to racist Jim Crow laws, is intolerable. We need to contact our own members of Congress to make clear that voting rights must be protected. …

In reality, it will be impossible to get 10 Republican senators to support the two voting rights bills. Their only hope is if Democrats can convince [Joe] Manchin and [Kyrsten] Sinema to create a “carve-out” to allow voting rights bills to pass with a simple majority in the Senate. President Biden should join with fellow Democrats to urge Manchin and Sinema to agree to this needed exemption in order to prevent Republicans from rigging future elections in their favor.

If the Democratic Party does not lead, patriotic Americans must force its hand. The U.S. Constitution begins with “We the People.” To save American democracy from the rising tide of fascism, those sacred words must be turned into collective action.

Michigan GOP plans “shocking” scheme to ram through voting restrictions over Whitmer’s veto

The Republican leader of the Michigan State Senate says the party will try to push through its proposed voting restrictions, using a unique loophole in state law, despite a near-certain veto by Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

Republicans have already introduced 39 voting bills in the State Senate and dozens more in the House, three of which have already passed. Whitmer has vowed to veto the proposed restrictions. Senate Republican Leader Mike Shirkey told local news outlet JTV earlier this month that Republicans do not have the votes to override the veto but would instead pursue a scheme to use the state’s citizen initiative process to circumvent the veto.

“You heard it here first, keep your eyes and ears open for the potential of a citizen initiative driven by the state party on some of these more important election laws that need to be considered,” Shirkey said.

But state Sen. Erika Geiss, a Democrat, warned in an interview with Salon that “citizens will never actually see this question on their ballot.”

Despite the name, Geiss explained, such a “citizen initiative” will never come up for a vote by the full electorate. “So it’s really disingenuous,” she said.

Michigan’s unique “adopt and amend” procedure allows the state legislature to adopt a citizen initiative and then pass it into law with a simple veto-proof majority. The scheme only requires about 340,000 signatures, or 8% of the total votes cast in the last gubernatorial election, meaning that Michigan’s heavily gerrymandered Republican majority and less than 4% of the state’s population can circumvent the governor’s power without ever putting the question before the public.

“It is really an abuse of our power as legislators,” Geiss said.

This process has only been used nine times in the last six decades, according to the state’s Bureau of Elections. Ron Weiser, chairman of the Michigan Republican Party, first floated the scheme back in March, before the state GOP forced out its executive director for criticizing former President Donald Trump’s election lies.

The plot comes just three years after Michigan voters overwhelmingly approved Proposal 3, a ballot initiative that expanded voting rights and absentee ballot access.

“It’s really unfortunate because it does not reflect the will of the voters,” state Rep. Matt Koleszar, vice-chair of the state House Elections and Ethics Committee, said of the Republican scheme in an interview with Salon. “The other option they have is letting it go to the ballot. I don’t think they would do that, because it would be defeated.”

In fact, Michigan Republicans have been trying to undo another ballot initiative that overwhelmingly passed in 2018 to create an independent redistricting commission, which threatens the party’s hold over the legislature. Nancy Wang, the executive director of Voters Not Politicians, a campaign launched to pass the redistricting initiative, said that attempt to reverse the will of the voters was a prelude to this year’s Republican power grab.

“It’s so shocking — the extremes they will go to to legislate and pass laws that only a tiny minority of Michiganders who still believe the Big Lie support, at the expense of the millions of Michiganders that voted for expanded voting rights,” Wang said in an interview with Salon. “It’sshocking because it’s such a small number of people that you need to get to sign on.”

Koleszar said that Republicans plan to use the citizen initiative process to circumvent Whitmer’s power on other issues as well. “We have already been told they absolutely will do that,” he said.

Republicans organized a similar citizen initiative scheme to collect enough signatures for the legislature to adopt the Unlock Michigan petition, which would repeal the governor’s emergency powers. That came in opposition to pandemic restrictions imposed by the Whitmer administration

Shirkey said the voting initiative would be much like Unlock Michigan. The Republican goal is for the legislature to adopt a bill the governor has no power to veto.

“There’s half a dozen bills I think are pretty important that the governor may have some difficulty signing,” he said. “So that is what will likely happen, is it will be packaged into a citizen’s initiative.”

Shirkey quietly played a big role in the Unlock Michigan campaign and a dark money group linked to the Senate leader spent nearly $2 million to fund the campaign. Ingham County Clerk Barb Byrum said she was “concerned” about Shirkey’s voting initiative scheme, given that recent history.

“The tactics that that organization used for Unlock Michigan left signers feeling deceived,” Byrum said in an interview with Salon. “What they thought they signed wasn’t actually what they signed. Frankly, it was borderline illegal.”

Byrum cited a Detroit Free Press report showing that the group’s trainer taught signature collectors “how to illegally collect voter signatures, trespass, encouraging lying under oath if they were ever called into a deposition. So that is the type of organization that Shirkey has been aligned with and I worry that’s going to be the same organization that he is going to use to push [this] new initiative.”

The State Senate has thus far passed three of the 39 restrictions proposed so far. SB 285 would require voters requesting absentee ballots to provide ID or a photocopy of the ID to their local clerk. SB 303 would require voters without an ID on Election Day to cast a provisional ballot instead of signing an affidavit to affirm their identity. And SB 304 would allow those provisional ballots to be counted only if a voter presents an ID to their local clerk’s office within six days of the election.

The State House last month inserted another provision into SB 303 allowing provisional ballots to be thrown out if poll workers — who have no training in signature verification — do not match the signature on the ballot to state records.

“What the House did is to kind of double down on voter suppression,” Wang said. “It passed a version that would be the most restrictive voter ID law in the entire country.”

Shirkey told JTV that he was “not sure that the signature part will ultimately get to the governor. Several lawmakers told Salon they expect the Senate to remove the House-added portion.

But Wang warned not to treat Shirkey’s comments as evidence of “what’s actually going to happen.”

Koleszar said even the original Senate-passed law was “redundant and quite frankly makes no sense at all,” since Michigan already requires voter ID.

“It would certainly have the potential to increase lines at polling places, create confusion,” he said, adding, “This is a solution in search of a problem and this problem doesn’t exist.”

Byrum argued that SB 285 amounts to a “poll tax.”

“I don’t have access to a photocopy machine in my house,” she said. “It costs money to get a photo ID and for many it’s not an easy document to get. Think of how long it takes to get your birth record, your marriage license. … Those are costly documents to get and it’s costly to get a photo ID as well.”

Though Shirkey has acknowledged that the pace of advancing Republican legislation has been slower than he would like, Democrats in the legislature expect all the bills coming out of the Senate Elections Committee to ultimately pass the Republican-led legislature.

One bill would require ballot drop boxes to close before polls close. “That is very, very restrictive,” Geiss said. “It creates another barrier to voting and that has been a concern for me.” 

Byrum said she expects the bill “will only lead to frustrated voters, confusion, more time taken away from from the clerk or his or her deputies trying to explain why and how to exercise the right to vote.”

Another bill would allow partisan poll watchers and challengers to record video inside polling places and counting boards, which Wang warned could result in more scenes like the “madhouse” following the 2020 election, when Republican supporters were “trying to storm absentee counting boards, trying to intimidate poll workers.”

“These bills would just inject more of this kind of toxicity and partisanship and intimidation into election administration,” she said. “There’s a whole raft of them, though, and all of them are bad.”

Many of the Michigan bills mirror those proposed or enacted in other states. In fact, the head of Heritage Action, the sister organization of the conservative Heritage Foundation, was recently caught on video bragging that the dark money group had literally drafted model legislation for state lawmakers to adopt.

“They all concern me because they all impact access to the ballot,” Byrum said. “It is quite unfortunate that the Michigan Republicans have taken a page out of the Heritage Action Fund and introduced these bills. These are the same bills that are being introduced around our country. It’s really unfortunate that the Republicans have chosen to put their party over our country and our democracy.”

The Michigan Association of County Clerks and the Michigan Association of Municipal Clerks both oppose the majority of the Republican proposals.

“This legislation was not drafted in consultation with election administrators,” Byrum said. “If they truly wanted to make our elections safer and more secure, they would have involved professional election administrators from the beginning, and they certainly did not.”

“This package of bills is nothing short of an attempt to hamper the ability of citizens to exercise the right to vote and election officials from doing our jobs any more efficiently or safely,” she added. “This legislation was introduced with one intent, and that is to make it more difficult to exercise the right to vote.”

Republicans have justified their voting restriction push by arguing that reforms are necessary to ensure “election integrity,” claiming they are responding to concerns raised by their constituents.

“They call them election reforms, I call them voter suppression,” Byrum said. “Their current claim is that people are asking for more restrictions and more safeguards. Well, the only reason people are asking for more safeguards is because they believe the lies that the same Republicans have been telling them since November.”

A report by the Republican-led state Senate Oversight Committee last month found “no evidence of widespread or systemic fraud” and rejected other Trump-backed conspiracy theories, calling out his allies for “profiting by making false claims.”

Geiss said that report “proves that these bills are unnecessary.”

 “They’re just so attached to the Big Lie and carrying the water of the former occupant of the White House that they can’t see reality,” she said. “They’re becoming incredibly divorced from reality even when the evidence is clear before them. They’re just caught up in the wave of trying to prevent people from voting and making it harder for people to exercise their right to vote because they’re upset that their candidate didn’t win.

“If your own reports show that there was no widespread voter fraud, what are you trying to accomplish?” she asked.

That State Senate report, however, has not dimmed Republican aspirations to restrict ballot access and Trump has continued to push the Big Lie, which has resulted in a flood of attacks and threats targeting election administrators.

“These attacks are the result of former President Trump providing the kindling, and others like Shirkey and some attorneys here in Michigan have been adding the lighter fluid and stoking the flames,” Byrum said. “We’re being threatened on a regular basis. We’re getting emails from people accusing us of malfeasance. It’s making people want to leave. … Professional election administrators are going to get out, they’re going to leave. Some already have — and my huge concern is that they’re going to be replaced with these conspiracy believers.”

Without safeguards in place in place to protect ballot access or election administrators in Republican-led states, and apparently some Democratic-led states with Republican legislatures, Democrats have rallied behind federal voting rights legislation and a recent proposal that would protect election officials from unjust removal and intimidation.

Democrats in the Texas House fled the state this week to block the passage of another Republican voting package, traveling to Washington to pressure Democrats in the U.S. Senate to pass the For the People Act, which has languished in the chamber, frozen by a Republican filibuster and the reluctance of “centrist” Democrats like Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona to consider filibuster reform.

“The For the People Act would absolutely cement that freedom to vote,” Koleszar said, adding that it would frustrate Republicans’ desire to create more barriers to voting.

There appears to be little lawmakers can do to prevent the Republican end-around on voting restrictions in Michigan, but activists plan to take to the streets to do everything they can.

“We’ve activated our entire infrastructure. We’ve gone door-to-door. We’ve dropped, I think, 10,000 pieces of literature. We’ve submitted more than 1,000 comments to legislators,” Wang said.

“If they do start that petition process to collect those signatures, then we’re going to be out on the streets telling people are exactly what is happening, because we think that [Republicans are] going to lie and say this is about election security. We’re going to be like, actually this is to prevent you from voting.”

William Barr resigned the day after Trump’s DOJ tried to seize journalists’ records

The Trump-led U.S. Justice Department went on a mission to retrieve email records for three Washington Post reporters just one day before former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr resigned from his post. Now, newly unsealed court documents are explaining the reason for his departure.

According to The New York Times, the Biden administration’s effort to disclose the requests led to the unsealing of the documents. The publication reports that the DOJ previously submitted a 12-page application to the court requesting the email records for the three Washington Post reporters who wrote the articles: Adam Entous, Greg Miller and Ellen Nakashima.

The request seeking journalists’ records, which was submitted on Dec. 22, was one of his last initiatives while still in office. The publication reports that the move was “part of a major escalation by the Trump administration during its final weeks in power of a yearslong campaign to crack down on leaks of classified information to the news media.”

The court documents indicated that the government said, “Congress requested access to highly classified information in 2017 as part of a congressional inquiry. The Post on two occasions subsequently published “information that was contained within the classified materials that had been made available to select congressional personnel.”

During that time frame, the Trump DOJ also requested records for New York Times reporters. Amid the disclosures, President Joe Biden has made it clear that the Justice Department will no longer be allowed to “use subpoenas and court orders to obtain such data in hunts for confidential sources.”

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland is also expected to release documentation to all federal prosecutor offices detailing the extent of the newly implemented ban. In addition to the efforts to seek reporters’ records, the Justice Department’s inspector general is also focused on uncovering leak investigations involving efforts to obtain records for Congressional members and their staff.

Trump went on profane rant about “krauts” after argument with Angela Merkel: report

CNN on Wednesday reported that a new book written by Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker claims that former President Donald Trump used an ethnic slur to rant about Germans after getting into an argument with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

While discussing the new book — titled I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year — reporter Jamie Gangel paraphrased an excerpt that detailed Trump’s “strained” relationship with Merkel, with whom he regularly clashed over foreign affairs.

“He is speaking in the Oval Office about Merkel and the Germans,” Gangel recalled. “He says, ‘That b*tch Merkel.’ Can we say that on TV? I just did. And then he goes on to say, ‘I know the effing krauts,’ very derogatory term, ‘I was raised by the biggest kraut of them all’ and points to a picture of his father.”

Gangel went on to say that while he’s heard about Trump’s rants about Merkel before, he still considered this particular outburst to be a “stunning revelation.”

Watch the video below:

“Dr. Death” on Peacock: Who was Christopher Duntsch? Where is he now?

Peacock is taking a dark turn with the release of “Dr. Death” on July 15, 2021. The eight-episode series follows the story of Dr. Christopher Duntsch. Who was he and is the show based on a true story?

Personally, I don’t believe there can ever be too many medical dramas, but they can become repetitive. Well, Peacock is about to throw a unique twist at fans with “Dr. Death.” 

Instead of classifying the new series as a medical drama or heartwarming series, “Dr. Death” defines “medical thriller” perfectly. What’s the show about? When is it coming out? Who is the main character based on? Here’s what we know!

Who is Christopher Duntsch? Is the “Dr. Death” character real?

Christopher Duntsch is very much a real person! He was once a rising star in the Dallas, Texas medical community. Dr. Duntsch ran a successful neurosurgery practice when patients began to leave surgery permanently maimed or dead.

The Peacock series, titled after the podcast of the same, is based on the terrifying true story of Dr. Christopher Duntsch. The series will follow Duntsch’s crimes and the heroes who brought him to justice, focusing on how the healthcare system failed to protect Duntsch’s victims.

Where is Christopher Duntsch aka Dr. Death now?

The disgraced doctor was sentenced to life in prison and in the O.B. Ellis Unite outside of Huntsville, Texas, The Sun reports. Duntsch is eligible for parole in 2045, when he will be 74 years old.

“Dr. Death” trailer

How can you watch “Dr. Death”?

To watch, you’ll need a Peacock subscription as this series is a Peacock exclusive. The series consists of eight episode and stars Joshua Jackson, Grace Gummer, Christian Slater, Alec Baldwin, and others.

“Loki” finds its glorious purpose in the end of the MCU as we know it

Glorious purpose. Everyone contains some potential to pursue it. Few desire to do so and fewer find it, but some combination of subsets comprises people to support a multibillion dollar industry devoted to self-actualization.

“Loki,” at long last, establishes its own glorious purpose in its season finale “For All Time. Always.” It has several as it turns out, with the loftiest being its role as marking the ending of one phase and the dawn of multiple beginnings. As for how many, who can say?

One of them was announced in the credits with the confirmation that the story would continue for another season, the first Marvel Cinematic Universe show officially established as a series as opposed to a one-off narrative link between films.

Oh, but it serves that purpose, too. The hint is in upcoming MCU theatrical titles. It wouldn’t make much sense for “Loki” to introduce the concept of fractured timelines and multiverses without connecting it to 2022’s “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.” The 2023 release “Ant Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” features Jonathan Majors as Kang the Conqueror, a villain familiar to Marvel comic book fans.

Guess who showed up at the Citadel at the End of Time, the place Sylvie and Loki battled their way past the omnivorous tempest guarding it?

To those whose main base of knowledge about the multiverse comes from watching the MCU’s films, “WandaVision” and “Loki” at this point only know Majors as He Who Remains, a being who harnessed great power at some point and ceased being entirely mortal, although he can be killed.

Exhausted and very much out of his mind, He Who Remains presents Loki and the female version of himself, Sylvie (Sophia DiMartino) with a choice. They can depose him and take over the Time Variance Authority as benevolent keepers of order, or they can kill him and deal with the consequences.

“You came to kill the devil right?” He Who Remains says. “Well guess what?  I keep you safe. And if you think I’m evil, just wait until you meet my variants . . . You may hate the dictator, but something far worse is going to fill that void if you depose him. “

I’d say what ends up happening is a spoiler, except those titles were announced a long time ago, weren’t they? Even the decisive moment itself isn’t entirely shocking, given Loki’s deliberate if swift moral transformation.

Loki Laufeyson began this adventure intending to seize the TVA throne for himself, but his friendships with Mobius (Owen Wilson) and burgeoning connection with Sylvie change him.

Sylvie, on the other hand, found her glorious purpose long ago. She has always known herself. And while that doesn’t preclude her heart from softening, she remains locked onto her belief that she is the creation of a universe yearning to break free. Thus, she kisses Loki, opens a doorway and pushes him through, sending him back to TVA. Then she turns around and with little in the way of a pause, drives her blade through the heart of He Who Remains, But Not For Much Longer.

Among the three existing MCU TV shows, “For All Time. Always.” revolves around the simplest of plots solidly held together by Majors’ performance. The above recap of the action truly is that simple  – Loki and Sylvie arrive, are greeted by Majors’ grand question mark of a man who presents them with a choice.

Wilson’s Mobius arrives at a TVA already thrown off balance by the spreading knowledge that everything its agents take as canon, namely the idea that the TVA created them, is a lie. Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s Ravonna Renslayer decides she’s too far inside of that lie’s rabbit hole to abandon it entirely.

By the time Loki gets back to them it doesn’t matter, because the TVA to which he returns isn’t the one he left. Mobius doesn’t know who he is because it’s not the same Mobius, and the statues are not of the faceless, lizard-like beings once thought to be the Timekeepers, but of Kang.

Thus, “Loki” reminds us of its real-world purpose as a revenue generating gear in the MCU’s multibillion dollar machinery. The finale sets up the series and Hiddleston’s popular character at a game-changing fork in the road, a nexus event that links the next phase in the larger Avengers universe storyline and its aspirations to establish of foothold in the TV realm.

This explains why the opening hours of this six episode season devoted to his character felt much more like a regular TV series than a multipart experiment with the medium, a la ” WandaVision” or a buddy-cop action flick disguised as a show, which is what “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” tried to be.

In announcing its second season “Loki” becomes a tentpole series for the Marvel side of the Disney behemoth, likely the first of many TV spinoffs in the vein of what the company plans for the “Star Wars” universe. That it mimics any number of established shows (giving off a “Doctor Who” vibe above all) isn’t merely excusable, it’s intentional.

And that’s probably why this season ender solidly stuck the landing where the sign-offs for “WandaVision” and “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” faltered. Those series knew what they wanted to accomplish at their respective outsets, but could not match that overall intent with endings that were previously determined for them. But it certainly seems as if “Loki” received the benefit of additional free will, unfettered by any philosophical or metaphorical subtext to tease. Maybe it had that; whatever that was, the jury’s still out.

But the show nailed its job of fleshing out new characters, introducing Majors with a flourish that can only be described as Biblical. (I mean, the man was munching on an apple in the face of two Lokis with blades on him.) People who haven’t seen “Lovecraft Country” have no reason to wonder why this man is up for best actor Emmy – he commands every second of the scenes he’s in.

Establishing the backstory of the Man with a Thousand names, and this particular variant’s role in harnessing order from chaos, takes up most of the finale. For all of his monologuing though, Majors never ceases to be riveting, mainly due to his portrayal of a man who has lived for too many lifetimes, ping-ponging back and forth between craziness and sanity for millennia. To believably wrangle that level of instability into a performance you can’t look away from takes a type of skill few actors have.

And Majors keeps us guessing as to his moral alignment until the second He Who Remains slumps over lifeless, leaving the typically resolute Sylvie in a state that looks a lot like doubt.

Plenty of TV shows have spun multiple seasons out of power vacuums left by absent or derelict gods; “Supernatural,” “Lucifer” and “Lost” come to mind most easily. That “Loki” writes itself into this field speaks to its knowledge of the audience – we don’t mind shows that replicate the premises of others as long as they do it well. “Loki” fulfills that aim while promising that Loki himself won’t be held to one realm or another. Hiddleston’s trickster is nimble enough to occupy multiple corners of the entertainment universe, the face of a larger behemoth making a play to take over both worlds.

Is that a good thing? Who can say . . . but we have a few movies and at least another season to figure that out.  

All episodes of “Loki” are streaming on Disney +.

GOP Rep. on cyber committee dumped MSFT stock shortly before $10B Pentagon contract was scrapped

Rep. Pat Fallon, a first-term Republican from Texas, sold a large block of Microsoft stock just two weeks before the Pentagon announced it was scrapping a cloud computing deal with the company valued at up to $10 billion over the next decade, according to financial disclosure reports.

The previously unreported June 21 sale, listed on disclosure forms as between $100,000 and $250,000, was especially notable in light of the freshman congressman’s assignment on the House Armed Services Committee’s brand new Subcommittee on Cyber, Innovative Technologies, and Information Systems, which has oversight of the deal in question, known as the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract. The Pentagon officially announced it was terminating the deal on July 6.

If Fallon had any prior knowledge of the state of the contract through his subcommittee assignment, the well-timed sale could be evidence of criminal insider trading, according to Richard Painter, a University of Minnesota law professor and former White House ethics attorney under George W. Bush. Such charges are difficult to prove, however, because members of Congress may withhold evidence by invoking the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause, which offers legislators special protections from investigation by the executive branch.

The investments nonetheless raise concerns over the ethical problems that members of Congress create when they trade individual stocks within an industry their actions have the potential to influence. 

“Even if it is technically legal, it’s so very clearly unethical,” Painter said. “It sounds like there’s enough evidence to open an insider trading investigation, at the very least.”

Fallon told Salon via an audio recording that he had no prior knowledge of any developments concerning the JEDI deal, calling any assertion to the contrary “provably false.”

“Congressman Fallon had absolutely no prior knowledge the Pentagon intended to cancel the JEDI contract,” said Luke Ball, a spokesperson for Rep. Fallon. “Any accusation that Congressman Fallon acted inappropriately with his routine stock transactions is wildly speculative and has no foundation in truth. We challenge anyone to bring one shred of actual evidence to back up this ridiculous accusation.” 

In the audio recording, Fallon backed this up by outlining the trade as an option call in which he purchased a block of $250,000 in Microsoft shares on May 26, and subsequently sold the rights to other investors to purchase at a later date. Those other investors chose to purchase the shares on June 21, according to disclosure reports, effectively liquidating Fallon’s position in the company just two weeks before the high-profile JEDI contract fell through.

Because of the mechanism of the trade, Fallon appears to be arguing, he was forced to sell — still netting a healthy profit — and because he did not initiate the sale, the trade could not constitute insider trading.

“That’s BS — let the SEC investigate that,” Painter said in response to the argument. “He’s probably technically right that he didn’t make the decision to sell on that day, but as a member of Congress you still have a conflict of interest from the day you buy a stock until the day you sell it, options aside.”

Fallon’s prolific stock trading is already a source of intense controversy, after he failed to properly disclose at least 93 trades worth between $7.8 million and $17.53 million this year alone, according to an analysis by Insider last month. The companies included Amazon, Apple, American Airlines, Chevron, Facebook, FedEx, Microsoft, PayPal, UnitedHealth Group, Verizon Communications and Walt Disney. 

Members of Congress are only required to report the value of their trades in broad ranges, so it is impossible to measure the exact value of a purchase or sale.

Of particular concern were Fallon’s investments in Boeing, the aerospace and defense contracting giant. He bought between $300,000 and $750,000 worth of the company’s stock between January and April (and sold between $219,000 and $610,000 worth over the same period, according to Insider). As a member of the House Armed Services Committee, it is Fallon’s job to conduct oversight of the lucrative contracts handed out to contractors like Boeing. 

Ball told Insider at the time that Fallon, as a freshman legislator, was unfamiliar with Congress’ reporting requirements — though he also acknowledged that both Fallon and his staff had completed the required congressional ethics training courses.

“As a freshman member, Congressman Fallon was unfamiliar with how frequently members of Congress are required to file financial disclosures, having served in other public offices where the requirements are different,” Ball told Insider. “Upon learning of the requirement, he immediately filed a disclosure with the appropriate entities. That disclosure is available for the public to review. Congressman Fallon looks forward to remaining in compliance with future filings.”

Rep. Fallon is not the only member of Congress to run afoul of disclosure requirements recently — Rep. Tom Malinowski, D-N.J., was questioned earlier this year by the Office on Congressional Ethics about his stock market activity during the pandemic, and acknowledged through his office that he had failed to properly disclose dozens of trades.

Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina and former Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, all Republicans, drew scrutiny for their own pandemic trading last year as well. 

Prior to his election last November, Rep. Fallon made millions through a patriotic-themed apparel business and subsequently served in the Texas State Senate. He is also a former Notre Dame football player.

During the Jan. 6 insurrection, he was pictured barricading the doors to the House chamber against angry rioters seeking to stop the certification of President Joe Biden’s electoral victory, even reporting what he thought were gunshots zipping through a nearby window. 

“You cannot ever bow to the mob. You never bow to bullies,” he told WFAA-TV in Dallas from an undisclosed location that day, citing safety concerns. “The people who came in there today were bullies and cowards.”

Later that night, he joined 138 of his House Republican colleagues in voting to reject 2020 electoral votes in several states. 

Brenley Goertzen and Leah Foreman contributed reporting.

“Borat” star Sacha Baron Cohen at the center of two major lawsuits in one week

Over the past few days, “Borat” actor and satirist Sacha Baron Cohen has been making headlines for his involvement in not one but two lawsuits, involving a cannabis company and a prank on a disgraced politician, respectively.

On Tuesday, after a years-long legal battle, a federal judge finally threw out a $95 million lawsuit against Baron Cohen, filed by former Republican Senate candidate, Roy Moore. Baron Cohen, whose 2018 series “Who Is America?” followed the comedian’s usual M.O. of speaking to unsuspecting real-life people while he’s disguised as various characters. The series used this approach with numerous politicians, including Moore in one of its most popular skits, for which Moore promptly sued Baron Cohen.

In the skit in question, Baron Cohen poses as a fictional anti-terrorism expert named “Erran Morad” who claims he can detect sex offenders and pedophiles with a wand. When he waves it over Moore, the wand begins to beep. Moore had been accused of sexually assaulting and harassing several women, some when they were teenagers, decades ago during his tenure as a district attorney in Alabama.

In Moore’s defamation lawsuit, he claimed Baron Cohen had committed fraud by interviewing Moore under false pretenses with a false identity, and also inflicted extreme emotional distress on Moore. U.S. District Judge John P. Cronan’s decision dismissed Moore’s suit because Baron Cohen’s segment was “clearly a joke and no reasonable viewer would have seen it otherwise.

“It is simply inconceivable that the Program’s audience would have found a segment with Judge Moore activating a supposed pedophile-detecting wand to be grounded in any factual basis,” Cronan continues in the document found on Court Listener. “Given the satirical nature of that segment and the context in which it was presented, no reasonable viewer would have interpreted Cohen’s conduct during the interview as asserting factual statements concerning Judge Moore.”

The sexual assault allegations against Moore, investigated by the Washington Post in fall 2017, had derailed the Trump-backed, far-right Senate candidate’s once promising campaign, despite controversy when Republican Party leadership continued to financially back Moore, seeming to shrug off the allegations in favor of his extreme anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion stances. Baron Cohen’s episode featuring his prank on Moore wouldn’t release until months after Moore had already lost the special election.

Meanwhile, earlier this week, Baron Cohen himself filed a lawsuit against a cannabis company called Solar Therapeutics for copyright infringement, false advertising and misappropriation of his right of publicity, according to the Hollywood Reporter. At issue was a Massachusetts billboard depicting his famous character Borat, giving a thumbs up and exclaiming, “It’s Nice!” 

In his complaint, the actor’s lawyer David Condon writes, “Mr. Baron Cohen never has used cannabis in his life. He never would participate in an advertising campaign for cannabis, for any amount of money.”

And while Baron Cohen claims he has never taken any corporate or brand deal despite “countless offers,” being “highly protective” of his image and his credibility as an actor and social activist, he takes particular issue with his image attached to a cannabis advertisement, believing the drug is unhealthy.

The billboard in question has been taken down, but a legal battle will likely ensue as The Hollywood Reporter reports Solar Therapeutics is presently declining to pay Baron Cohen for their unauthorized use of his image. The actor seeks trebled statutory damages, and actual and punitive damages and disgorgement of profits attributable to the billboard, as his legal complaint alleges the copyright infringement was willful. 

Neither of these is the first lawsuit the controversial, influential political funnyman has faced, and knowing Baron Cohen and his line of work, it probably won’t be the last. 

Netflix’s “Gunpowder Milkshake” is another dumb fun lark about women who kill

Film historians could probably cite the first female assassin’s appearance in cinema with authority, but the average movie-loving Jill recognizes the spiritual grandmothers of “Gunpowder Milkshake.” None is the first of their make, merely the most popular.  “Kill Bill Vol. 1 & 2” is the most obvious, give that all modern celluloid hitwomen are some version of Uma Thurman’s revenge-obsessed Beatrix Kiddo.

 Another is Luc Besson’s eponymous Nikita, la femme whose essence many attempt to recreate time and again, including Besson himself.

Plenty of killers for hire came after those figures, and before, but in terms of the ones that matter most to Netflix’s algorithm – besides Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow, 2021’s top manslayer – they’re the queens.

Calling “Gunpowder Milkshake” derivative is generous, but we’re talking about an ephemeral candy-colored summertime shoot-em-up. Netflix has a hundreds of those on offer, very few of which qualify as original, so I highly doubt director Navot Papushado and his co-screenwriter Ehud Lavski would take that as a slight.

The film looks, sounds and walks like a high calculated product, though. It may exist independently of Marvel’s release calendar, but it plays like the creation of a streaming service’s “Because you watched” recommendations list, pairing “Doctor Who” and “Guardians of the Galaxy” star Karen Gillan with Lena Headey of “Game of Thrones” and, as a few folks may recall, “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.”

Papushado’s neon noir rampage takes itself less seriously than any of those titles, or the others mentioned before them, committing its brains and brawn to a brazenly campy and tongue-in-cheek setup while aspiring to be slightly more serious than the 10 other movies it recalls. 

To its credit, the female assassins here aren’t seeking vengeance for having been violated, or hooked on junk, or scorned by a man. They’re just really good at what they do, save for a consequential mistake that leads to a full-on bullet-riddled hootenanny.

Whatever shallow world-building the script engages in matters less than the movie’s star power. Gillan and Headey may top the marquee, but aren’t you wondering why “Billions” star Paul Giamatti, reigning baddest bitch Angela Bassett, action and rom-com star Michelle Yeoh and Carla Gugino agreed to participate in this business? Perhaps not too much, honestly. Asking this question is a little like wondering, “Why ride a Ferris wheel?” or “Why inhale enough cotton candy to fill a California king-sized mattress?” You know the answer. It’s a simple one: because it’s fun, as long as you don’t vomit.

We also do it because we know what we’re getting: cotton candy tastes pretty much the same regardless of the carnival serving it. The only thing that changes with a Ferris wheel ride is the view. Same goes for this diversion in which Gillan’s killer for hire, Sam, works for an organization known as The Firm.

Said organization is entirely run by men like Giamatti’s Nathan, who raises Sam after her mother, another legendary assassin named Scarlet (Headey), vanishes when Sam was 12. The plot introduces her 15 years after that abandonment, when she botches a mission and ends up having to protect Emily, an adorable eight-year-old girl (Chloe Coleman) from getting knocked off. Capable though Sam may be, she’s also outgunned, leading her to track down Scarlet and enlist the assistance of her mother’s estranged sister slayers: the taciturn Florence (Yeoh), the hardened Anna May (Bassett) and the ladylike Mathilde (Gugino).

Pitting hitwomen sororities against controlling paternalist structures stopped being subversive back in the heyday of “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” Again, the fact we’ve seen dozens of movies like this before, including ones featuring female assassins with mother issues (hello, “Ava”), doesn’t matter.

Certainly this movie makes no apologies about emphasizing style over substance, setting encounters in places like a bowling alley called the Gutterball or an adorable 1950s-style diner, and establishing the female characters’ mystique by making them librarians. Of a sort. Their fortress of books is a true fortress where the sword is definitely mightier than the pen, and works by Jane Austen hold a different levels of power than, say, “Women Who Run with the Wolves.”

“Gunpowder Milkshake” rises to that peak-of-a-pond’s-swell level of clever, which also mean it’s still quite stupid and doesn’t get much more complex than, “Send Group A into a place where Group B is waiting, commence the barbaric yawping and the rat-a-tat-tat.” Whatever! Who doesn’t love watching elegant women get trigger happy on a bunch dunderheaded beast who underestimate them?

As such, nobody in this flick loses anything by starring in it, since we’ve all agreed that it is a frivolous, wacky and occasionally explosive substitute for boredom. Gillan does a fine job with the role, although her chemistry with Headey has more of a sisterly vibe than mother and daughter, which would matter if anyone were watching this for the acting. A more significant problem is the substandard fight choreography – balletic violence is not this movie’s strong point, as a few clunky hand-to-hand bouts wincingly prove.

All that being said, “Gunpowder Milkshake” is worth enduring for the opportunity to see Yeoh and Bassett showcase their action chops in the same film. Yeoh has been active in action cinema more or less consistently over the years, with her recurring role in “Star Trek: Discovery” serving to remind us of how great she is at playing a heavy. Watching Bassett swing a few blunt weapons is something we haven’t seen her do very much over the years; she tends to be cast as the person giving the orders. Frankly, it would be terrific to enjoy her in more of these roles.

Gugino is an under-utilized presence here, but she’s also amply established in this subgenre. In any case, it is telling that out of the two main crescendos in this movie, the performers who are over the age of 35 are the ones whose ferocity is showcased to the highest degree. The secret attraction of “Gunpowder Milkshake” are the real bad mothers in a flimsy romp whose plot revolves around an estranged mother and daughter who slay for pay. They’re the best ingredients in a tale that isn’t good enough to merit a sequel. But if it somehow leads to action encores for Bassett, Headey, Gillan and Gugino, and more for Yeoh, then it is worth the empty calories.

“Gunpowder Milkshake” premieres Wednesday, July 14 on Netflix.

“Bloody Oranges” star on playing a French political beast & “a revolution in this notion of revenge”

The caustic and provocative new film, “Bloody Oranges,” which just had its premiere out of competition in the Midnight screenings at the Cannes Film Festival, is sure to leave viewers stunned. French actor Christophe Paou plays a central role as Secretary of Finance Stéphane Lemarchand, a powerful man being threatened by a journalist planning to expose his overseas accounts. However, as that crisis is being managed, Stéphane gets caught up in a situation that is far more unsettling. 

Writer/director Jean-Christophe Meurisse’s bold drama has some very pointed thoughts about toxic masculinity, hypocrisy, and meting out justice. (A particularly sensitive subject in France these days with its sex scandals). Meurisse doesn’t just want Stéphane to be uncomfortable; he wants the audience to squirm as well. 

Paou, who has appeared in Guy Maddin‘s “The Forbidden Room,” and Nadav Lapid’s “Synonyms,” is probably best known for his role as the murderous title character in the gay thriller, “Stranger by the Lake.” He takes another daring role in “Bloody Oranges.” His entitled character shifts from being a smug politico to engendering sympathy, and Paou manages that tricky balancing act with aplomb — especially as Stéphane endures some rather extreme experiences. 

The actor chatted from Cannes with Salon about toxic masculinity and making “Bloody Oranges.”

Stéphane is a daring role that challenges viewers as much as it does you, the actor. From what I’ve seen of you on film, you are pretty fearless. What made you want to play this character?

I was interested in playing the Secretary and a political person because I’m so disappointed by what’s happening in France. I love it when I see people who want to defend the Republic and fight for democracy, because democracy is dead. The appeal for me was to play with the darkness and the comedy of power. What happens to Stéphane in the end is bad, and it was hard to go through that scene, but I was happy to play that man — a political beast. 

What I especially appreciated about your performance were your priceless facial expressions. In addition, his body language changes as he goes from a fear of one kind in the first half to a very different kind of fear in the second half, getting a breather in the steam room in between. 

I don’t think about my expressions. It’s a question of the situation. I try to live what is occurring for the character. I don’t pre-imagine what I’m going to do. The fear is not the same fear, it’s about what’s happening when he’s going through it. He’s going through some extreme situations. It’s a tragedy, even if it’s self-created.

He’s got 300,000 Euros in Switzerland, and he doesn’t have the right to do that, and someone is calling him on that. It was true that in France we had an affair like that. Suddenly, a journalist called him on his cell, and says, “We know you have money in Switzerland.” There is some real pressure on him. Then there is the pressure [in the second half] with his attacker, who forces him to do things. In contrast, the scene in the steam room is a release, because he thinks things are over. His body is letting go. 

The film is addressing the emasculation of the characters — a man who cannot provide for his family, a teenage girl who exacts revenge on her attacker, and your character who is victimized. What are your thoughts on our culture of toxic masculinity? This film is a real response to that as France, in particular, seems to be grappling with this topic presently.

That’s what I like. The society we have been living in since the beginning of the 20th century is a patriarchy. And this power has been growing until today very strongly. The film’s characters — the serial killer, the politician, and the lawyer — have big balls and have to show themselves to society. I liked in the script, that it’s like a revolution — now we might do something else. There is something like a revolution in this notion of revenge. For me, the best scene is in the end with the lawyer and the victim, because you are in front of all that masculinity. You are with the characters, and you think as well, we are living in this society that is very violent for women and poor people. It’s not a political movie — I mean, it is — but it is not being done for that reason; it is political in the Greek sense of “politic,” that we make our society. This film talks about that. Each character must determine: What is our place in society?

Stéphane is a man who has power, but he is, in fact, really always powerless. He can’t do much for himself. 

He has a power because society is moving in a new direction. He has to use his power by lying to his wife and children or secretly hiding money in Switzerland. He has small power. 

The film has a wicked, acidic sense of humor. You don’t get to perform much comedy here, but Stéphane does talk about laughing at unhappy accidents. What observations do you have about the absurdities of life? 

In my life, it’s something that I have to accept. I try to be aware of things that might change my destination. I like it, but it is hard to be aware of that. I try to accept it, because when you do, you discover something unknown. 

You’ve had an interesting career having made “Stranger by the Lake” which exposed you to American audiences. You’ve worked with Guy Maddin and Nadav Lapid and even appeared in a Hilary Swank film, “The Affair of the Necklace.” What direction do you want to take in your career?

We were talking about the unknown! [Laughs] I read scripts, and if it’s Africa or America or France and if the script is good for me, why not? I’m open to reading new scripts and go wherever the shooting takes me. I’d like to work with American directors. But I don’t know if I will. I’d like to play in comedy or do a Western. It was my dream as a kid to be an actor because I used to watch Westerns. I love Clint Eastwood‘s “Unforgiven” and Sergio Leone.

What are your thoughts about the film’s title? 

I like it because it has something to do with the vitamin — it has a lot of energy and it’s also bloody. It’s something you can squeeze, which might be very good. 

What about the film’s concept of justice?  

That’s why I like the final scene. I was trying to say earlier — in the final scene, between the lawyer and the [victim], he tells her, “You have to know to lie to save yourself because no one will save you. You have to save you.” It’s not that you have to make your own justice, but you need to take care of yourself because no one will take care of you.

Fox News host, cornered by fleeing Texas Democrat, refuses to admit Donald Trump lost the election

During a prickly Tuesday night interview on Fox News, a Texas Democrat asked host Pete Hegseth point-blank whether he believed that Donald Trump won the 2020 election, prompting Hegseth to dodge the question and accuse the lawmaker of ​​being a "prop or puppet" for the Democrats in Washington.

The segment was ostensibly based on recent developments in the Texas legislature, which is currently on the brink of passing a sweeping GOP-backed restrictive voting rights bill. On Tuesday, after voicing a whole host of concerns about the bill's potential to suppress minority voters, over 50 Texas Democrats staged a walkout, denying their Republican colleagues the necessary quorum to advance the bill. The state Democrats, who in fact fled to Washington, D.C., are now facing the threat of arrest upon their return to the Lone Star State by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a strong proponent of the bill. 

During the interview, Hegseth, a staunch supporter of Trump, challenged Texas Democratic Rep. James Talarico on whether the restrictive voting bill is discriminatory in nature. 

"Have you found someone in your district that can't get identification?" Hegseth asked. 

Talarico responded: "You have made a lot of money personally and you have enriched a lot of corporations with advertising by getting on here and spewing lies and conspiracy theories to folks who trust you." 

"So what I'm asking you to do is to tell your voters right that Donald Trump lost the election in 2020," Talarico continued as Hegseth attempted to talk over the lawmaker. "Did Donald Trump lose the election in 2020? Can you answer the question?"

"I think I'm answering the questions," Hegseth fumbled. "I don't really feel the obligation to answer anything from you."

He did not proceed to answer Talarico's question.

Another scuffle came earlier in the interview, when Hegseth tarred Talarico "as a prop or puppet" for Democrats in Washington.

"I'm an eighth-generation Texan," Talarico clapped back. "I've only been in DC twice in my life … I'm a former middle-school teacher who ran for office just to try to make my community better and I swore an oath when I first got elected two years ago to uphold the constitution."

"Why are you not in Texas," Hegseth later inquired, "and why are you in Washington DC doing press conferences with federal officials?"

"What I was saying," Talarico responded, "is when President Trump lost the election he told Republicans across the country that he didn't lose the election, and this caused Republican legislators in state capitals from Georgia to Austin to start putting forward bills that would make it harder to vote.

After Hgseth aired out concerns of alleged electoral fraud, Talarico continued, exasperated: "Do you remember a second ago when I talked about the big lie? This is exactly what I'm talking about. The reason so many folks believe it is true is because folks like you get on television every night and repeat the lie over and over again."

Back in mid-November, Hegseth may have tipped his hand during a Fox News broadcast after the host read a report about the demonstrations Trump supporters planned ahead of President Biden's inauguration. 

"The demonstrations are in support of the president's effort to reveal voter fraud and count all the legal votes," Hegseth said. "So far, state election officials have not reported serious irregularities with the vote that would affect the outcome of the race."

He then quickly added: "That was in the teleprompter. I read it. I don't know even know if I agree with it, but that happens sometimes."

Just a week prior, Hegseth was casting doubt over the results of the 2020 election, saying in a broadcast: "I don't have trust in institutions and I want to verify. I just want to make sure that all of this is on the up and up."

There continues to be no widely accepted evidence of election fraud in any state throughout the country.

In the gripping “La Civil,” a daughter is kidnapped as the fallout of Mexico’s ongoing drug wars

Premiering in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival is director and cowriter Teodora Ana Mihai’s auspicious feature debut, “La Civil.” 

In the opening scene, Cielo (Arcelia Ramírez) tells her daughter Laura (Denisse Azpilcueta), “Don’t come home too late tonight,” as she heads out to meet her boyfriend, Lisandro (Manuel Villegas). Cielo is unaware this may be the last time she may ever see her daughter. 

“La Civil,” set in contemporary Northern Mexico, quickly plunges Cielo into every mother’s worst nightmare — that of their child being kidnapped. (See “Madre” as another variation). While out driving, Cielo is stopped by a cherry SUV, and El Puma (Daniel Garcia, of “I’m No Longer Here”), demands the delivery of 150,000 pesos — “If you want to see your daughter again.” Cielo is, naturally, unnerved, and reconnects with her ex-husband, Gustavo (Álvaro Guerrero), to pay the ransom. They do not report the kidnapping to the cops or soldiers who patrol the streets. 

Of course, what should be a quick resolution is not, and Cielo quickly decides to take matters into her own hands. As a result, she encounters a fair amount of danger, shifting from victim to vigilante over the course of the story. Ramírez captures Cielo’s nervous energy, especially when she weighs the decision to shoot someone she believes is responsible for her daughter’s disappearance.

Mihai’s film is as relentless as Cielo; it takes its protagonist and viewers into a dark world and recounts stories that are inspired by true events. As news reports describe unidentified, decapitated bodies being dumped on the streets, Cielo meets a morgue attendant who ends up footing the bills for the funerals, while another woman discloses that she pays a monthly protection to the local cartel. 

When Cielo seeks assistance from the police, they can’t, or won’t, help her. She connects with Lieutenant Lamarque (Jorge A. Jiménez), after Cielo’s stakeout efforts produce some leads — and her house is shot up and a car is set on fire. They must be discrete, Lamarque says, as he warns her, “This could get very ugly.”

The strength of “La Civil” is that it shows the ugly without overdoing it. Cielo is a proxy for the audience to learn about the insidious practice of capture and torture. One brutal scene depicts Cielo visiting a space where victims were being held, with bloodstains all around and meat hooks hanging empty. Another scene takes place at a mass grave, where Cielo digs furiously hoping (not) to find her daughter. The reality of the violence born out of the drug war effectively permeates every frame of the film.

Mihai takes her time telling the story, which can cause the film to drag in places. After the rush of the setup, the stakeout scenes provide a slow second act. A subplot involving Gustavo’s much younger girlfriend, Rosy (Vanes Burciaga), whom Cielo suspects is involved in her daughter’s disappearance at one point, could have been cut. The film also gives Lamarque the space to tell a not unwelcome story about Mexico and how folks can get everything from broccoli to washing machines for free — as such these items are always falling off trucks, especially on dangerous roads. 

“La Civil” is strongest when it engages in action. Watching the soldiers storm a house to capture a possible informant is exciting. That Cielo knows the individual adds a layer of complexity to the scene. In a great throwaway moment, Lamarque puts his hand on Cielo’s shoulder to comfort her at what must be a difficult moment of betrayal, and she shrugs it off, seething in anger.

Ramírez is exceptional in the lead role. She burns with rage and disbelief as she encounters ineffectual cops, her passive ex-husband, and others whose lack of urgency or concern infuriates her. Mihai does give Cielo a cleansing shower and an impulsive haircut to signal her life change after a particularly devastating moment, but these symbolic moments also give viewers a breather. The tension ramps up in the latter half of “La Civil” as Cielo gets closer to finding some kind of closure. 

When the aforementioned informant is interrogated, he confesses to the hard choices he had to make. His remarks explain, but do not excuse, his behavior. While they may provide Cielo with some understanding, what he says may also not even be true. The ambiguity here is terrific. Likewise, when Cielo has a confrontation with El Puma, the scene crackles as she’s determined to break him, imploring him to have some shred of decency or humanity, and he remains fiercely uncooperative. Another exchange, between Cielo and Lisandro, who has ended up in jail, impacts her as well. But when he tells her, “I’ve seen and done terrible things,” she may feel pity, but she also has had her share of tragedy, beyond just the possible loss of her daughter. 

Ramirez makes viewers feel the weight of Cielo’s struggle throughout “La Civil,” which is why the film is so powerful. And Mihai shoots her protagonist in intense close-ups throughout the film that scrutinize her as she goes on this harrowing emotional journey. But more importantly, Mihai gives voice to the individuals — the criminals, the victims, and the innocent bystanders — to show the ripple effects of the cartel violence in Northern Mexico, and, by extension, elsewhere. It is an authentic portrait of this dangerous world. 

“La Civil” may not traverse new ground, but it is gripping, nonetheless.

 

Beyond Chicken parmesan? Notes on alt-milks and vegan cheese from an Italian kitchen

My relationship to dairy products is complicated. 

As a late-80s baby who grew up in the 90s, I was ensconced in “Got Milk?” era, but raised by a mother who was vehemently opposed to the drink. In my small elementary school in suburban New Jersey, we literally had mid-morning “milk breaks,” perfectly between breakfast and lunch. As my classmates feverishly drank from their little milk cartons, I would tepidly sip on water bottles — or, if my mother was in a generous mood that week, chocolate milk or maybe even skim milk. 

My beastly classmates would bellow, “Michael’s drinking ‘skin’ milk!” and I would strategically hold my carton to hide the label. As an elementary school kid, I wanted to drink regular, whole milk like my classmates, but it certainly wasn’t like I had developed a taste for it. Fast-forward 25 years and I can count on one hand the amount of times I’ve chugged a glass of milk. 

Heavy cream, however, is a different story. 

It’s really all that I add to my coffees, cold brews, and espressos. Other dairy products have an invaluable place in my home kitchen, too. Yogurt, sour cream, fromage blanc and creme fraiche add body and levity to numerous dishes and are also delicious on their own. Cheese is, unquestionably, my favorite food; when I make chicken parmesan, I like to add “heaps and heaps of cheese” and savor those almost-burnt shards as a chef’s treat. 

Around me — and around all of us, actually — is a growing tension between Big (Traditional) Dairy and a legion of alt-milks looking to take over supermarket shelf space. According to a report from LiveKindly , in 1975, Americans drank 247 pounds of milk per person. In 2018, that number shrank to 146 pounds. Lancaster Farming notes that fairy farmers “will likely have to get by on razor-thin margins this year,” while USDA data shows that the last three years’ numbers “larger year-over-year declines than any other decline in the last 13 years” for dairy farmers. 

Put another way: While you may have once asked “milk or cream?” when making coffee for someone, the question isn’t nearly as neatly binary in 2021. But how did we get here? And what does it mean for conscious consumers and home cooks like me? 

***

For decades, dairy milk was touted as a wonder-drink that would give kids strong bones and enable them to grow into Olympians. However, in recent years, environmental and animal welfare concerns have tarnished milk’s health halo. There’s the question, too, of whether humans were even meant to consume dairy milk; a fact that has always resonated with me is that human beings are the only mammal that drinks the milk of another species and the only mammal that consumes milk after childhood (I would insert the ‘thinking’ emoji and maybe even the ‘side eye’ emoji at this point, if I could). 

Ninety percent of adults of East Asian ancestry actually have trouble digesting lactose and LiveKindly notes that the American Medical Association actually “called for an amendment of the federal law that mandates children must be served cow’s milk for school lunch,” which is directly correlated to the millions of Americans suffering from lactose intolerance — many of whom are Black, Asian American and Native American.

While Outside  notes that many still regard cow’s milk as a superb post-workout recovery drink, they also report that “a single glass of cow’s milk uses more land and three times the greenhouse-gas emissions of any of the plant-based alternatives.” 

The combination of environmental and ethical qualms, personal intolerance and a growing cultural awareness of veganism sparked the industrial plant-based milk revolution. The market is now flooded with options: soy, almond, macadamia, rice, oat, coconut, pea, banana and seemingly endless combinations of the available varieties. 

Are they healthier? That’s a complicated question. As Good Housekeeping notes, many plant-based milks secretly boast copious amounts of added sugar, while dairy milks also contain more protein. There’s also been debate about the relative healthfulness of Oatly, the lead oat milk producer, using canola oil to produce a cream-like lushness in their products. 

The production of plant-based milks isn’t totally devoid of environmental concerns, either. The now-feverish demand for almond milk has had dire effects on our planet, especially wreaking havoc in California . Outside’s reporting, bolsters this claim, noting that “80% of nuts used in almond milk are grown in drought-prone California, yet it takes over a gallon of water to produce a single almond.” 

In a recent Food52 article, Rebecca Firkser laments that there is truly no milk option that is entirely sound: whether due to allergens, animal welfare, environmental concerns, or nutritional perspectives. Of course, many non-dairy options are also very expensive. Firkser also notes that beyond animal welfare concerns within the dairy industry, issues like almond harvesting and cultivating and even oat growing can also bring up a whole slew of other questions – not to mention the treatment of the laborers who are tasked with growing, planting, and cultivating these plants, oftentimes in heinous conditions.

It’s a veritable culinary whack-a-mole when it comes to what to pull out of your refrigerator. 

***

All that said, the surge in alt-milks coincides with some breakthroughs in other plant-based products. Alicia Kennedy’s stunning feature for Eater chronicling the history — and potential future — of vegan cheeses in Eater could single-handedly make you say “Hm, maybe I should try it?” 

As Kennedy writes, “the last decade has been nothing short of a vegan cheese renaissance.” The offerings have gone from tasting like melted crayons to “small-batch artisan vegan cheese, the kind that oozes, stinks, and blooms as convincingly as its dairy counterparts.” 

And consumers are responding. A recent study notes that “the global vegan cheese market size was valued at USD 1.01 billion in 2019 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.8% from 2020 to 2027.” 

In April, I gave up all red meat and am now flirting with the idea of all-out veganism. In 2021, the amount of plant-based alternatives is wide-spread, not exorbitantly expensive and surprisingly delicious. If my skipping out on some dairy helps a few cows live a better life, helps reduce greenhouse gases from furthering the damage to our planet and potentially aids in my own health “journey,” then what’s to lose? 

Maybe I’ll move on to mastering Beyond Chicken parmesan, smothered with vegan mozzarella. 

 

Why autistic people are less likely to get a fair trial

Autism advocate Haley Moss is many things: an author, a pop artist, a social justice advocate. She is also, notably, the first openly autistic female attorney in Florida history, which means that she is in a position to advocate on behalf of other people who are neurodivergent. (“Neurodivergent” is a neologism means that your neurological makeup is not typical, and is an antonym of the neologism “neurotypical.”) In speaking with her, it is clear that she views her career successes as a responsibility, one to which she devotes a large portion of her substantial intelligence.

And she knows that if she were not a lawyer, she would struggle to be heard. 

“I think that a lot of the reason that I do get to educate attorneys and judges is because I’m also an attorney,” Moss told Salon. “I think the fact that I am seen or perceived as an equal educationally is a huge privilege. And I think sometimes it’s the only reason that I might get to take up space in that conversation. I don’t know if judges would give it the same weight or attorneys would give it the same weight benefit.”

Research has shown that being autistic is akin to speaking a different language. Those on the spectrum are more likely to commit faux pas, to not properly read a social situation or figure out how to effectively interact with it, or in general be uncomfortable because of external stimuli. Even though we would like to imagine that our court system is impartial and focused on facts, the reality is that cases are decided as much by unwritten social rules as everything else in our lives. This means that neurodivergent individuals are here, as elsewhere, more likely to run into bad situations.

And indeed, our purportedly impartial justice system is often biased against the neurodivergent.

“Stereotypes about neurodiversity that are grounded in the old ‘deficit’ view of the brain work against the individual,” Thomas M. O’Toole, Ph.D., the president of and consultant at Sound Jury Consulting, LLC, told Salon by email. “We live in a post-truth world where our beliefs and experiences serve as powerful filters for what we accept as true, and unfortunately, this means those stereotypes could work against a neurodiverse party in a lawsuit if the stereotypes give jurors a shortcut to doing the hard work of sorting through the case details.”

“Judges and attorneys are everyday people with everyday biases as well, so I think the challenges remain the same with all three audiences,” he added.

O’Toole gave an example in which this happens: If there is a lawsuit that centers around two sides claiming the other made poor decisions, jurors may find it easier to question a neurodivergent person’s choices based on “deficit” stereotypes. Even though the jurors would think they are being impartial, they are essentially deciding that the non-neurotypical person is less reliable because of their neurodivergent traits. (There are studies which have found that jurors, judges and the legal system in general often don’t know how to interact with autistic people.)

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Elizabeth Kelley, a criminal defense lawyer who specializes in representing people with mental disabilities, described the challenges facing neurodivergent people in our legal system as “a tremendously involved question largely based on the type of neurodiversity” at play. You have criminal defense lawyers who will need to factor a client’s mental disability or illness into account when determining what advice to give on taking the stand, impressing the jurors and interacting with the judge. If a client laughs at inappropriate times, or doesn’t show emotion during upsetting testimony because of a flat affect, or takes a medication that makes them feel tired, or reacts poorly to being overwhelmed with the stimuli present during a trial, they could wind up making a bad impression on the judge and jurors.

“All of the things that I mentioned earlier about the defendant’s demeanor while sitting at trial table may be manifested while that defendant is on the stand: flat affect, not being able to look people in the eye, laughing at inappropriate moments, saying things that are completely inappropriate, and the jurors and the judge may take offense at that,” Kelley told Salon.

Another part of the problem, as Dr. Michael Kiener of Maryville University wrote to Salon, is that ordinary people are often ignorant about the spectrum of disabilities.

“Often people with disabilities experience prejudice from others due to the perceived ambiguity of disability. Many individuals are unaware of the different types of disability,” Kiener explained. “For example, hidden or visible and congenital or acquired disabilities. In addition, there are physical, sensory, cognitive, and learning disabilities; all of which add to misunderstanding by individuals with little experience interacting with people with disabilities. As a result, many individuals have a limited understanding of the diversity within the disability community.”

Moss elaborated on the challenges facing neurodivergent individuals when they interact with our legal system.

“Think about how your average person or reasonable person hears narratives about neurodiversity,” Moss explained. “They see what they see in the media and how media sometimes gets it wrong. They might hear somebody testify and they think that this person isn’t acting in the way that they should.” Whether they don’t get their words straight, they fidget and get nervous, they stim (engage in self-stimulating behaviors) on the stand or have a flat affect, “a juror might think, ‘I think they’re lying,’ even though they’re just trying to regulate their attention.”

O’Toole said there are a number of things that can be done to fix this situation. For one thing, attorneys with neurodiverse clients should directly and immediately address the issue in their opening statements if they believe it could become an issue. Simply raising awareness to the judge, jury and other lawyers can make a difference.

“Essentially, the lawyers needs to offer a 101 on neurodiversity and try to dispel common stereotypes,” O’Toole explained. “Similarly, judges can give jury instructions to raise awareness. A common jury instruction already given by judges is about how corporations and individuals should be treated the same at trial, so there is already a foundation for giving instructions about treating both parties equally. Unfortunately, judge instructions are not always effective, but it would certainly help raise jurors’ awareness about this bias.”

O’Toole also suggested that lawyers explore potential anti-neurodiversity biases in the jury pool.

“Jurors may not necessarily openly admit to a bias like this, but there are other ways to identify indicators of bias through questioning,” O’Toole argued. “At the end of the day, a diverse jury is best. Diversity does not necessarily eliminate this kind of bias, but it certainly has a quieting effect on the bias in the deliberation room.”

Pandemic disruptions highlighted importance of local food system in Hawai’i

When COVID-19 hit the United States, areas all over the country saw their supply chains go haywire. School cafeterias, restaurants, airlines and conference centers lost their customers. Farmers, ranchers and fishers were forced to figure out how to reach people where they now were: at home. In the Hawaiian islands, where tourism makes up nearly a quarter of the economy, the disappearance of visitors meant that local growers, who had fought so hard for their piece of the food economy, had to scramble to connect with locals when their resort and hotel customers disappeared.

Facing empty grocery shelves, consumers also scrambled to connect with local producers. Despite Hawai’i being very well suited to grow a wide variety of foods, roughly 90% of the state’s food is imported. Agriculture on the islands focuses on export business, commodity crops like corn seed and forestry. Local farmers, who have struggled to compete and had little governmental support in the past, suddenly found themselves a vital part of the food system. The COVID-19 pandemic brought the island’s supply chain challenges to the forefront, and showcased how some farmers and local food advocates have been working to make the local food system in Hawai’i more resilient.

Seeing into the future

Since the mid-19th century, when Americans began planting sugarcane and pineapple plantations on the Hawaiian islands, the people there have relied more and more on the mainland for their food and grocery items. By 1936, only 37% of Hawai’i’s food was grown locally.

Today, everything arrives through the central port in Honolulu, and much of the food is stored there before distribution, leaving it vulnerable to the threat of hurricanes, tsunamis and other weather-related problems that could wipe out access to the port. The closest neighboring port is more than 2,000 miles away, making speedy emergency deliveries difficult. The coronavirus pandemic only exacerbated the situation.

“What was unique about COVID was, there’s 3,000 something counties across the US, there’s 19,00 cities across the US and every city, every country, every state, was having a tsunami or a hurricane of their own,” Chad Buck, the owner of Hawaii Foodservice Alliance, explains in the documentary “Climate for Change“. States like Arizona and California, which could typically send surplus goods to Hawai’i in the case of a disaster, were dealing with their own food chain supply problems, and chain stores were wiped out across the US. “For the first time in Hawai’i’s history, we found ourselves completely stripped of support,” says Buck.

Looking at new models

At the same time that food distributors like Foodservice Alliance’s Buck were worried about supply chain shortages from shipments to the islands, local farmers were starting to see their business dry up when tourism to the islands stopped. “Our farmers were having an excess of thousands of pounds of produce because that food was originally going to feed the tourism economy and to feed all of the restaurants and the hotels,” says Kea Keolanui, co-owner of Hawai’i Eco, an agricultural tour company based in Hilo on the Big Island. When tourism dried up, they worked with their partner farm, O.K. Farms, and neighboring producers, to offer a weekly CSA box direct to local consumers.

“We had over 30 different CSAs operating in the state of Hawai’i, whether they were operating prior to the pandemic or they popped up in response, similar to how we did,” says Keolanui, explaining that customers were purchasing twice as much local produce as they had pre-pandemic. “It was clear that people wanted to support local more than ever, because they felt like it was a more guaranteed option than waiting for things to arrive in the grocery store.”

When COVID-19 hit, the Kahumana Farm Hub, based in Wai’anae, O’ahu, was primed to help get local food to the community. Just as other food hubs in the US grew exponentially early in the pandemic, Kahumana’s CSA subscriber list jumped from 10 to 500 in about two weeks. “We ended up bringing on almost 50% more suppliers, we became an inter-island network, and we basically got a lot more of our logistics in place, got refrigerated cars and trucks and more refrigerators,” says Saleh Azizi, the farm hub’s manager.

The farm hub had originally opened to provide a retail outlet for home growers and backyard pickers. “We have this sort of narrative of being a food desert here [in Hawai’i] and at the same time, us who are farmers and have connections with other farmers, know that it’s just an abundant kind of place,” says Azizi, who helped open Kahumana in 2017. “We felt that one of the things that was missing was an enterprise that would help small farmers, and even backyard growers, share the things that they grow with other people in our food system.”

The farm hub gained trust in the community by pre-paying farmers and local growers — who bring items like apple bananas and pineapple growing in their backyard — in cash. “People share their resources in these rural communities, especially in the Indigenous Hawaiian community where there’s fairly large trimmings. It’s not always the person who owns the fruit trees that gets permission to pick them. It might be a grandmother that lets one of her grandsons pick her tree and make an income from that,” says Azizi, who explains that growing food is an important part of the Hawaiian Indigenous culture. “We really ground our hub in the Indigenous world as well, because those are the kinds of practices we want to promote. We didn’t create them, but we’re super excited that we’re promoting them through our enterprise.”

Focusing on local product

Farmers like Keolanui and Azizi, and the networks of farmers they connect with, see the inherent sustainability and potential of traditional crops — foods like taro (called kalo in Hawaiian), breadfruit, coconut and banana that the Polynesians originally brought to the islands —  as well as other tropical crops, including lychee, rambutan, papaya and mango.

Through sales at his food hub, Azizi has seen high demand for traditional Hawaiian goods, but says familiarity can be limited. “The traditional thing people did with taro was make poi, and not everybody knows how to do that,” he says, explaining that in the modern-era of city living, traditional cooking knowledge has been lost. A traditional Polynesian dish, poi is made by mashing the taro plant and can be eaten as a sweet dish, or fermented and enjoyed as a savory, sour side dish. “When we have farmers that grow taro and then make poi, [the farmers are] even more popular,” he says.

Along with needing the cooking knowledge, customers who are used to the supermarket’s have-everything-you-need shelves need a mindset switch when it comes to shopping from the farm hub or CSA, which depend on what the farmers have grown.

“It’s harder to grow things like celery and broccoli and cauliflower [here]. Sometimes we do get those and provide them in the boxes, but it’s rarer than items that are more fit to the tropical environment,” says Keolanui, explaining that their CSA produce box is not customizable, but rather a mix of whatever the farmers have on hand. “So part of the produce box is an educational component, teaching people how they use the items that they get and how to substitute. If you don’t have celery available and your recipe calls for this crunchy celery, substitute it with heart of palm or kohlrabi, which provides that same kind of crunch.”

Another Native crop seeing a resurgence is breadfruit, which the Hawaiians call ‘ulu. “It’s farmers really putting their nose to the grindstone and saying, ‘We need more ‘ulu because ‘ulu is going to feed our entire island and it will feed all of the Hawaiian islands if we have enough,'” says Keolanui. There are breadfruit festivals, recipe contests and a farmers cooperative for small-scale breadfruit farmers.

Breadfruit is a nutritious, versatile fruit. Unripe fruit is firm and starchy, and can be cooked into soups, stir fries, curries and similar dishes, while ripe fruit becomes soft and sweet, and is used in pies, custards and other sweet dishes. Diane Raggone, director of the Breadfruit Institute at National Tropical Botanical Garden, calls it the “most ecological carbohydrate in the world;” one tree can produce 300 pounds of fruit annually and its strong root system helps strengthen the soil and store carbon.

Other positives about breadfruit and taro: the starchy vegetables can be substituted for rice and other staple carbohydrates that are not grown in Hawai’i, reducing the state’s dependence on mainland crops. They also have lower glycemic indexes, making them better options for the significant population of Hawaiians struggling with diabetes.

“The most amazing thing about the Hawaiians, is back in the olden days they had more people living there and living off the land,” says Keolanui. “And how were they doing it? They were doing it with ‘ulu, kalo, and a few other crops.”

What’s still needed

The Hawai’i state government has recognized a need for support in the past: they set up the Hawaii Agribusiness Development Corp 25 years ago to help convert former pineapple and sugarcane plantations to more economically viable farms. In the 1960s, Hawai’i was responsible for 80% of the world’s pineapple, today it’s 2%. While both crops are still grown on the islands, with cheaper products coming from Central and South America, it is no longer economically profitable to grow either pineapple or sugarcane. But a scathing audit done earlier this year, as Civil Beat reported, found that the development corp has accomplished little in the past two-plus decades, leaving more than $250 million unaccounted for.

For the local food system in Hawai’i to grow, Azizi says government support is vital. “It’s important that the government recognizes what we would like to do, and then invest in that type of activity, instead of constantly trying to focus on building these farmers that want to be large-scale and export,” he says, explaining that food hubs in Hawai’i have largely developed on their own. “It’s sort of like [the government is] missing where our real skill and focus and priority should be.”

One area that the government could quickly help is within institutional purchasing in the state. “We see institutional purchasing as sort of the next level of the food system, hospitals, schools, even the hotels for that matter,” he explains. “They’re big institutions and their only mandate is to buy 10% local.” In April, Hawai’i’s House and Senate signed a bill that required that 10%, with an increase every five years until it’s up to 50% in 2050. The bill is currently waiting for signature by Hawai’i’s Governor David Ige. This bill would be both a sign of support and increase revenue for the local producers.

Along with government support, the community also has to be on board with a shift in food production. As Civil Beat recently reported, a proposed grassfed dairy operation in Kauai gave up attempts to win regulatory approval after five years; one of the many hurdles they faced were concerns about foul odors and flies bothering a nearby resort’s beachfront pools. “I feel that as we become a more suburban and urban society, we’ve become more eco-hypocritical or eco-imperialistic,” Bruce Mathews, the dean of the College of Agriculture, Forestry and Natural Resource Management at University of Hawai’i, Hilo, told them. “In other words, we don’t want noise, pesticides, pollution in our own backyard — but we don’t mind so much paying for food imported from other places.”

Azizi agrees that more public support is needed, citing the theory of voting with your dollar. “The more people that vote [for] and purchase local food, the better and the stronger the movement will get,” he says. “[More public support of local food will allow for] more farmers that make a good salary, and that feel like being a farmer is not necessarily sacrificing their other life goals, whether it’s getting good health insurance or sending their children to the best schools.”

Republican outrage campaign causes Tennessee to end all vaccine outreach to youth: report

The Tennessee Department of Health is set to discontinue its outreach programs for vaccinations amongst adolescents, marking a decisive win for state Republicans who have repeatedly sowed vaccine hesitancy amongst residents of the state. 

According to an internal report and leaked agency email obtained by the Tennessean, the department will halt all vaccine-related events at schools, which were previously used as coronavirus vaccine drives. 

In a number of rural towns throughout the state, school gymnasiums are one of the few sites able to host indoor vaccine drives because they are air-conditioned and provide ample space for social distancing. 

Additionally, the Tennessee Department of Health is now prohibited from sending teenagers postcards that remind them to receive their second dose. Instead, vaccine-related mail will be sent to their parents over fears that doing otherwise would constitute “solicitation to minors.” Health Commissioner Dr. Lisa Piercey told staff to remove the department’s logo from any materials that disseminate information regarding vaccinations. 

“Tennessee is on solid footing when it comes to childhood immunizations and will continue to keep information and programming in place for parents,” a department spokesperson told The Tennessean.

However, these changes, first outlined in a department report on Friday, come amid a recent surge in infections. Over the past two weeks, the average number of new daily cases jumped from 177 to 418, as the Tennessean noted. Additionally, the average test positivity rate has leapt from 2.2% to 5.4%. According to state health data, the incidence of the delta variant rose in the Volunteer State from 27 on June 24 to 125 as of last Thursday.

Meanwhile, the rate of vaccination in Tennessee is hovering around 38% – a whole 14% less than the national average. 

The department’s new directives come on the heels of a long-simmering battle between state conservatives and the department’s former medical director for immunization, Dr. Michelle Fiscus. 

Fiscus, who fought for a higher rate of vaccination amongst teens, was mysteriously fired on Monday, though she alleges that her ouster was a “reprehensible” attempt to appease Republican lawmakers. 

“This is a failure of public health to protect the people of Tennessee and that is what is ‘reprehensible,'” Fiscus said Monday. “When the people elected and appointed to lead this state put their political gains ahead of the public good, they have betrayed the people who have trusted them with their lives.”

She added: “It was my job to provide evidence-based education and vaccine access so that Tennesseans could protect themselves against COVID-19. I have now been terminated for doing exactly that,” she wrote in a statement.

Her firing comes just after an acrimonious hearing back in June, in which the department’s health commissioner was chided by state Republicans for its vaccine outreach programs to youths in the state. During the hearing, Republicans also threatened to shut the entire department down, prompting it to quickly pull its social media vaccination campaigns.

Biden’s $3.5 trillion spending bill is great — but spending alone won’t stop Trump’s return

With great fanfare late Tuesday, Senate Democrats announced that they have reached a semi-tentative agreement on a $3.5 trillion spending bill that would meet a large number of the priorities that President Joe Biden outlined in his address to a joint session of Congress in April. Unlike most bills, which require 60 votes to overcome a filibuster, this bill is slated to be passed through the budget reconciliation process, which only requires the votes of a simple majority.

So the bill is a true dream of how much Democrats can get done — when they’re not hamstrung by the anti-democratic historical accident that is the filibuster. Here are some of the bill’s best items, according to Politico:

  • Free lunch for all public school kids
  • Tax breaks for working people and parents
  • Lower drug prices
  • Clean energy incentives
  • Broadband expansion
  • Medicaid and Medicare expansions 

It is all paid for by taxing wealthy people and corporations, no less. And it’s all incredibly popular stuff with voters. No doubt Donald Trump will love taking credit for all of it — starting the second he’s inaugurated on January 20, 2025. Yes, even as he gets right to work with his Republican majority in Congress to take it all away. 

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Such a dire outcome is likely, no matter how many voter-pleasing goodies Democrats cram through the budget reconciliation process, for one simple reason: Voters can’t reward Democrats with re-election if they aren’t able to cast ballots with confidence that those ballots will be counted. 

At the same time that Senate Democrats were announcing their breakthrough bill, another, more compelling, drama was playing out in D.C. with the arrival of a few dozen Democratic state legislators from Texas who fled the state to deny Republicans, who control the legislature, the quorum necessary to pass an anti-voting bill. The Democratic legislators snuck out of the state in a mad scramble and under threat of arrest by Republicans. As Vice President Kamala Harris said, it’s a show of “extraordinary courage and commitment” in the fight to protect the right to vote against an absolute wave of anti-voting laws being passed by Republicans who control statehouses across the country. 

It is also, as the Texas Democrats admitted, a futile gesture if Democrats in the Senate don’t overturn the filibuster to pass a national voting rights law. 

“We can’t stay here indefinitely,” Democratic state Rep. Rhetta Bowers told reporters Tuesday, stressing that “we need Congress to act now” to pass federal voting rights legislation, or Republicans will eventually be able to get their anti-voting bill passed through the Texas legislature. 

The situation in Texas is just a microcosm of what Democrats across the country are facing. 

Republicans who control state governments are reacting to Trump’s attempted coup after the 2020 election by passing laws that will make the next election easier to steal. As Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt explained in a recent piece for the Atlantic, the “greatest threat to American democracy today is not a repeat of January 6,” but that “mainstream Republicans will ‘legally’ overturn an election” through efforts to keep voters from the ballot box and to take over elections offices so that they can throw out any result they find unfavorable. 

It’s why Republicans, who put up some half-baked efforts to stop the $3.5 trillion bill, ultimately aren’t too worried about Democrats passing broadly popular bills. Their future path to victory simply doesn’t go through winning over support beyond what they currently have, which is the 42-43% of American voters who are Trump-loving diehards. Bills like the Texas one — or the one in Georgia, which suppresses the vote and makes it possible for Republicans to flat-out nullify elections — set up Republicans nicely to “win” without actually winning majority support. Republicans are also poised to take back the House of Representatives in 2022 without winning a single new voter, simply by gerrymandering new seats in states like Texas.  

Facing not just the end of his own party, but the destruction of American democracy, Biden sounded the alarm again Tuesday in a speech in Philadelphia, calling the anti-voting moves a “21st-century Jim Crow assault” and “unrelenting.” Speaking to Republicans who are using Trump’s Big Lie as cover to justify these attacks on democracy, Biden asked plaintively, “Have you no shame?”

The answer, as one hopes Biden has learned by now, is that no, they have no shame. There is only a will to power. Republicans are steadfast in their authoritarian march to permanent one-party minority rule and getting Trump back into the White House. They believe, correctly, that they need no more than their rock-solid 42% support to get there, so long as Senate Democrats allow the filibuster to stand, so that voting rights bills have no chance of being put up for a majority vote in Congress. 

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As has been noted ad infinitum, most Democrats in the Senate understand the dire nature of this situation and are willing to end or at least seriously reform the filibuster to pass voting rights legislation. But two Democratic senators, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, have decided that they value the filibuster over voting rights, democracy, and even, in Sinema’s case, an opportunity to get re-elected. Those two are needed, however, so that Democrats have enough votes to end the filibuster. So unless they wise up and change their minds, the future is looking quite gloomy indeed. (Manchin, at least, has agreed to meet with the Texas Democrats who are trying to save democracy and hear them out.) 

Without that, all that Biden and the other, more sensible Democrats have left is this hope that, by passing popular and generous bills like this $3.5 trillion package, they will get enough grateful voters to overcome the GOP assault on voting rights. But that plan is almost certainly bound to fail, for a couple of reasons. First, that 42% of voters that Republicans feel is enough to steal elections is immoveably loyal to the GOP. These folks don’t care, for instance, about Biden’s efforts to end the COVID-19 pandemic. Biden’s vaccination push has reduced the daily caseload and death toll by several factors and allowed most people’s lives to return to normal, which should be a huge political victory. But Biden’s approval ratings haven’t budged over 55%, where they were when he took office. Instead, huge percentages of Republican voters are refusing to get the vaccine, preferring to get sick and risk death than let Biden have a political win. 

“Do popular things and win over voters” is the sort of advice that sounds like common sense, and in a sane demoracy, it would work. But ours is not a sane democracy. Ours is a nation in thrall to an authoritarian minority that worships a man who attempted to overthrow the U.S. government. That 42% is more worried about imaginary threats like “critical race theory” or “Dr. Seuss getting canceled” than they are real threats, like COVID-19. Those folks don’t have a majority and probably never will, but it doesn’t matter, so long as Republicans can continue passing laws on the state level that gut the right of Americans to free and fair elections.

Texas Democrats are right: America is running out of time.

Unless the filibuster is ended and democracy reform is passed, it doesn’t really matter how many awesome spending bills are passed. You can’t be rewarded by voters at the ballot box if the ballot box doesn’t matter anymore. 

How to cook a turkey perfectly

There are a thousand and one ways to cook a turkey. Just google “how to cook a turkey”; you’ll find that some swear by a wet brine while others insist on a good dry brine. Here at Food52, 500°F is a favorite oven temperature for roast turkey (hi, Judy), though others vouch for a lower, steadier heat, closer to 350°F or 375°F. Regardless of how you choose to roast a turkey this Thanksgiving, Eric Kim is here to show you his favorite way to do it — from a home cook’s perspective — and it’s a lot simpler than you’d think.

Growing up in Georgia, Thanksgiving for me meant driving a couple hours south to my Aunt Joy’s house, in Augusta. We’d arrive Wednesday night and stay up late playing video games with the cousins. First thing the next morning, at around 4 or 5 a.m., my mom and aunt would put the bird in the oven and roast it low and slow for 8 hours, basting it every 30 minutes and watching it like hawks. It was such an ordeal.

Because of this ritual, for years I thought turkey was the absolute hardest thing to cook in the world because anything that takes 8 hours to become edible must be an impossible feat of black magic, right?

I also thought that turkey was, on principle, meant to be dry.

The thing is, roasting a great, juicy turkey isn’t as complicated as people make it out to be. I imagine there’s a lot of hullaballoo over it because many of us have been raised on dry Thanksgiving turkeys, mostly as a result of our overcooking them. We’re terrified of undercooked poultry (and rightfully so!), but with this fear comes an overcompensation in roasting time.

So how do you cook a turkey in the oven?

That’s like asking someone how they tie their shoes or take their coffee or boil their eggs. You may be a wet-briner or a dry-briner, and both certainly have their merits. A turkey brine is like insurance; the former produces meat that’s wetter and a touch squishy — kind of like what you’d get from a deli counter (which isn’t necessarily bad; many prefer it). The latter means the entirety of the bird is salted through and through (no huge bucket of salmonella water to deal with).

Our most popular turkey recipe is, after all, the “Judy Bird,” a Genius recipe that lets you dry-brine (that is, apply kosher salt all over) a frozen bird while it’s thawing. Excavated from the greatest culinary depths by Kristen Miglore, this very smart recipe won a turkey taste test over at the L.A. Times back in 2006. And who’s to argue with its four-star rating and hundreds of reviews?

For me, after much soul searching (and many tests in my tiny N.Y.C. kitchenette), I’ve found that the best method is to just roast the darn thing. Like a chicken. No brining, no hair dryer, no black magic. Just a bird and a boy and an oven.

* * *

How to cook a turkey in the oven

Easy Roast Turkey Recipe

  • One turkey (frozen is fine; just account for about 1 pound per person, unless you want leftovers, in which case you should account for about 1 1/2 pounds per person)
  • Unsalted butter, room temperature or melted
  • Kosher salt
  • Freshly ground black pepper
  • Kitchen twine
  • Instant-read meat thermometer

1. Defrost your turkey (if it’s frozen)

Ideally, you’d let this happen gradually, over the course of a few days before Thanksgiving (or whenever you’re serving the turkey), in a 40°F refrigerator. The golden rule is about 24 hours of thawing for every 4 to 5 pounds.

But sometimes that doesn’t happen! And sometimes it’s Thanksgiving morning and your bird is still hard as a rock. In that case, the water thawing method can save lives…or, at the very least, a lot of stress. To thaw a turkey quickly, place your frozen turkey (still in its packaging) in a bucket and cover with cold tap water, weighing it down with a can or something to ensure that it’s fully submerged. The golden rule here is 30 minutes per pound of turkey. Don’t forget to replace the water every 30 minutes.

2. Bring your turkey to room temperature

Leave the turkey out on the counter for an hour or so before roasting. A fridge-cold bird will not cook as evenly as a room-temperature bird. Once the turkey has come to room temperature, dry with paper towels. Patting the skin thoroughly with towels will absorb any excess moisture on the exterior of the bird, which will ensure that the skin gets extra crispy and golden brown as it cooks in the oven.

3. Truss your turkey

This isn’t as complicated as it sounds. Just take a few inches of kitchen twine, wrap it around the body of the bird, and tie the legs together, which will ensure even cooking. After the turkey has cooked fully, simply cut the twine with kitchen shears and discard it.

4. Season your turkey in the sink

“In the sink?” you ask. This is a weird “me” thing. Most people season their turkeys straight in its roasting pan, but I find that this leads to excess salt at the bottom, and since I like to use the drippings to make a gravy later — often straight in the pan itself — this can also lead to an oversalted gravy. Another issue is that if you’re applying melted butter and some of that drips off into the pan, the milk fats can burn, and the one thing we don’t want on Thanksgiving Day is for the smoke alarm to go off.

Which is why I like to place my bird on a cutting board and place that cutting board in a very clean, very empty sink. That way you can:

  • Butter the turkey. (I think melted butter is easier to massage over the skin, but you could use softened room-temperature butter here if you’d like.)
  • Salt to your heart’s content. And since we’re not brining here, it is essential that you go absolutely heavy with your salting hand. First, salt the inside of the turkey (all sides of the cavity, but especially where the breast is). Then, cover the entire surface area of the bird with salt. This is the point at which you should also grind over some fresh black pepper.

I don’t stuff my bird for good reason: It will cook much faster, not to mention that I just really don’t think it makes much of a difference in the turkey’s overall flavor.

5. Roast the turkey (Yup, that’s it!)

Many recipes call for a high start and a low finish (i.e., 450°F for the first few minutes, then 350°F until it’s done). But I like to roast a turkey in the oven from start to finish at a moderate 350°F. No need to cover the bird in aluminum foil either — just cook it in a deep aluminum or stainless-steel pan lined with a roasting rack. If you don’t have a roasting pan to cook a turkey in, use a deep sheet tray or baking dish lined with a wire baking rack, so the heat is distributed evenly and the turkey cooks properly. This is the best way to cook a turkey so that it stays juicy.

6. How long to cook a turkey

You should account for about 13 to 15 minutes per pound. This means that the ideal cooking time for a 12-pound turkey is about 2 1/2 to 3 hours. But since all ovens differ vastly, I highly recommend that you don’t go by time, but rather by internal temperature. The golden rule is 165°F in the innermost part of the thigh and the thickest part of the breast. I like to pull the turkey out of the oven once it has reached 160°F because it will continue to cook as it rests, which you should absolutely let it do.

6. Let the turkey rest

Let the turkey rest for at least 30 minutes before carving, but an hour is best in my book. Even after all of this time, the turkey will still be plenty hot all of the way through. Better yet, the juices will have redistributed and you’ll be looking at the tenderest, moistest turkey of your life.

* * *

10 ways to roast a turkey

If you’re looking for more ways to roast a turkey, here are some of our top recipes through the years:

1. Slow-Roasted Turkey

“It requires a lot of time and a very low oven temperature, so it’s a good method for those with kitchens with two ovens (lucky!) or for when you’re cooking the turkey ahead of time and reheating gently before the big meal,” says recipe developer Erin Jeanne McDowell. But hey, if you’ve got the oven space and the time, then there’s no reason not to try this method for cooking turkey.

2. Torrisi’s Turkey

This roast turkey recipe is adapted from Torrisi Italian Specialties, an Italian restaurant in the heart of Manhattan’s Little Italy, which sadly closed for good in 2014.

3. Butter and Herb Roast Turkey

If you’re in search of a classic, crowd-pleasing roast turkey recipe, this is it.

4. Bacon Bird with Turkey Neck Gravy

Okay, now we’re talking. For the most savory, succulent, fatty, flavorful, irresistible, and incredible turkey ever, layer the bird with individual strips of bacon while it roasts in the oven. Frankly, we can’t imagine why we haven’t been cooking a turkey in the oven like this all along.

5. ​​Herbed Turkey Roasted in Parchment

This foolproof method for cooking roast turkey for Thanksgiving may just become your new favorite method.

6. Very Lemony Brined Turkey

Three types of lemony products — the zest and juice of fresh lemons, lemongrass stalks, and lemon thyme — perk up this otherwise traditional roast turkey recipe, which cooks in the oven on a roasting rack.

7. Gin Brined Turkey

When you think of Thanksgiving, your mind probably doesn’t immediately go to the bottle of gin on your bar cart (or hey, maybe it does and that’s okay, too). But you’re going to view this aromatic liquor in a whole new way when you brine a 12- to 14-pound turkey in an entire liter of it.

8. Honey and Sage Brined Roast Turkey

Instead of a spicy dry brine made with tons of salt and cracked pepper, try this sweeter, more aromatic turkey brine using fresh sage leaves, thyme, honey, and garlic.

9. Spatchcocked, Braise-Roasted Turkey with Herb Butter

Learn how to spatchcock a turkey with this quick-cooking method. A combination of apple cider and turkey stock help to create the most flavorful pan sauce, which also keeps the turkey extra-moist.

10. Paul Virant’s Make-Ahead Roasted Turkey with Smothered Gravy

Short on time, or simply want to save yourself some prep work on Thanksgiving morning? Prepare this make-ahead roast turkey recipe, so that all you need to do is reheat the meat and gravy day-of. We promise it’s just as good as if you made it fresh.

Cocoa espresso muddy buddies are Puppy Chow for grownups

One of the best things about traveling again is travel snacking again.

I realized this recently while I perused the beef jerky and pretzel options at a decrepit rest stop not far from the Catskills. I mean, mountains and lakes are nice but have you ever tried Bark Thins? At home, I eat sensibly and keep regular hours. On the road, I will gladly overpay for an impossible to open bag of pulverized trail mix. What happens in Krumville stays in Krumville.

Lately I’ve been thinking about how to hang on to those summer feelings a little longer — not with burgers and ice cream cones, but with the salty, sweet detritus of long car rides spent singing along with my kids to Olivia Rodrigo. With Puppy Chow.

I came late to Puppy Chow, entirely because I long believed it was really was dog food. It is not, which makes sense, because it involves things which would terrible for puppies. According to The Kitchn, the name derives from the fact that its key ingredient is Chex — a product initially manufactured by Ralston Purina. Like its cousin Chex Mix, Puppy Chow is one of the greatest repurposing of breakfast cereals ever created. It also now sometimes goes by the name of Muddy Buddies, which is less fun.

The classic formula involves peanut butter, chocolate and a generous coating of powdered sugar. But I like my Puppy Chow with a bigger bark, and my sweet things balanced with a bracing hit of bitterness. So I’ve scaled back the powdered sugar and added cocoa powder and espresso powder, and topped everything with flaky salt. I’ve also used Corn Chex because I believe that is the supreme Chex, but follow your heart here. 

###

Recipe: Cocoa Espresso Puppy Chow (Muddy Buddies)

Inspired by The Kitchn’s Grace Elkus and Brown Eyed Baker

Serves 4 – 6

Ingredients:

  • 5 cups of Corn Chex (or the Chex of your choice)
  • 1 cup (175 g) bittersweet or semisweet chocolate chips, or roughly chopped bar chocolate
  • 1/2 cup of peanut butter (I’m Team Chunky, but it’s your preference)
  • 2 tablespoons of butter
  • 1 cup (more or less) of powdered sugar
  • 2 tablespoons of cocoa powder of your choice (I use 1 tablespoon of regular cocoa and 1 of black cocoa)
  • 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract
  • Flaky sea salt
  • Optional: 2 teaspoons of instant espresso powder

Directions:

  1. In a medium saucepan, melt together the butter, chocolate, vanilla and peanut butter over medium heat. If you prefer, you can microwave them together in a microwave-safe bowl at high for one minute, stirring and then microwaving for 15 second intervals until everything is smooth ad well blended.
  2. In a gallon Ziploc bag, mix the powdered sugar, cocoa powder and espresso powder.
  3. Pour the Chex into a large bowl, and then gently stir in the chocolate peanut butter mixture. You want the Chex coated, but don’t overdo it or you’ll crush your cereal.
  4. Let the mixture cool 10 minutes or so, so the warm chocolate mixture doesn’t suck up all the sugar mixture.
  5. Add the cereal to the bag, and shake until well coated. If you don’t have large Ziploc bags, don’t sweat, just mix the sugar and cocoa in a large bowl and then toss into your coated cereal and mix. It’ll be lumpier but who cares?
  6. Pour the mixture onto a large cookie sheet lined with parchment and sprinkle with sea salt. Stick it in the fridge to firm up for a few minutes, then pour into a big bowl and pass around to your loved ones while you watch action movies.

More Quick & Dirty: 

Salon Food writes about stuff we think you’ll like. Salon has affiliate partnerships, so we may get a share of the revenue from your purchase.

 

The power of the Big Lie: Why do 30% of Americans cling to Trump’s dark fantasy?

There is the Big Lie — Donald Trump’s false claims of election fraud that are driving all manner of anti-democratic beliefs and behavior. But that Big Lie is supported and reinforced by all the little lies that make it real. In a highly polarized society where one political party is attacking the foundations of democracy and the neofascist movement continues to grow, public opinion is no longer a basic matter of collective beliefs about matters of public concern. Public opinion is now a function of personal identity, existential core values and the understanding of reality itself.

As political scientists and other researchers have shown this dynamic is especially true for Republicans and other “conservatives.”

In that way, the Age of Trump and its aftermath resemble a science fiction dystopia where people exist in their own personal realities, through a type of experience machine that connects them to others who believe the same things — however untrue or fantastical they may be. That hive-mind has taken shape around us in the form of TrumpWorld and the MAGAverse.

The Big Lie that unites the Trump political cult — and unfortunately a large number of other Americans as well — is that Trump is still the legitimate president and that the 2020 election was “stolen.” As seen on Jan. 6, this Big Lie and its associated little lies are a way of encouraging political violence and legitimating the Jim Crow Republicans and their war on multiracial democracy.

How many Americans have been willingly seduced by the Big Lie in its various forms? It appears the number is around 30 percent. Philip Bump of the Washington Post reports that since no credible evidence of widespread election fraud has ever emerged, we might have assumed “that the burst of speculation that the election had somehow been stolen might fade over time. That Americans predisposed to assume that President Biden had taken office only after a massive effort to steal the vote would consider the collapse of every effort to prove that point as evidence that perhaps that wasn’t what happened.” As we now know, such was not the case. Bump continues:

On Monday, Monmouth University released polling showing about a third of Americans think Biden won only because of voter fraud — the same fraction of the electorate that held that view in Monmouth’s polling in March, in January and in November.

Despite the lack of credible evidence for the claim and the amount of time that has passed during which such evidence could have emerged, Americans are as likely to ascribe Biden’s victory to unfounded claims of fraud as they were seven months ago.

That’s driven by Republicans, as you might expect. Six in 10 Republicans think Biden won only because of fraud. That number is down from January, but Monmouth’s pollsters explain the apparent drop is largely a function of more respondents identifying themselves as Republican-leaning independents. Among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, about two-thirds have consistently said they think Biden won only because of fraud.

To this point, belief in the Big Lie shows little sign of dissipating. The negative implications are many: Democracy is undermined when there is no shared understanding of basic facts and empirical reality; political violence becomes seen as acceptable when a Democratic administration is viewed by Trumpists and neofascists as illegitimate; any notion of the common good and shared public interest becomes impossible, which in turn makes the neofascist movement and its “solutions” more attractive to potential followers.

In total, the 30 percent of Americans who have been propagandized by the right-wing have abandoned the critical thinking skills and decision-making abilities required of responsible citizens in a healthy democracy.

How did this happen? The primary explanation is that decades of exposure to the right-wing disinformation news media conditioned conservative viewers to believe that lies are truth, and that right-wing dogma is equivalent to empirical evidence and proof.

There are other causes as well. These include individual and collective narcissism; a neoliberal regime of economic uncertainty and extreme wealth and income inequality; social atomization, loneliness and the culture of cruelty; a broken public education system that increasingly produces human drones and not critical thinkers; a debased culture in which people increasingly define themselves as consumers or even “brands”; white racial resentment and white supremacy; fear of social change; anti-intellectualism and anti-rationality, manifesting in such social forces as conspiracy theory and right-wing Christian fundamentalism; and a hollowing out of social democracy.

In search of further explanations, I reached out by email to Texas A&M communications professor Jennifer Mercieca, an expert on political rhetoric and author of the recent book “Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump.” She responded:

There are several things going on here that prevent Republicans from believing that Biden legitimately won the election: first, is the “filter bubble” effect — the news conservatives trust tells them that Biden did not win legitimately and the news that they don’t trust tells them that he did. It’s easy to ignore the news that they distrust, they may never even hear the correct facts. Second, the “illusory truth” effect, which says that if something is repeated enough that people will believe it. Conservatives have heard since 2016 that Democrats cheat at elections, that they can’t be trusted and Trump could only lose if they cheat. Third, the “self-sealing” nature of conspiracy in general. Once a conspiracy takes hold it can never be disproven. Fourth, motivated reasoning. Conservatives want to believe that they won, so that means that Biden had to cheat. Fifth, the issue falls into what persuasion theorists call the “latitude of rejection.” When people have their minds made up about something, then they aren’t open to persuasion — especially if they have their minds made up against something.

This is still an open issue on conservative news channels. Every day there is a new update to the story of how the election is still being litigated and investigated. People who consume that media have reason to hope that the proof will be found, and Trump will still win. That hope is being nurtured by the media they consume. Others may prudently decide not to make up their minds until all the facts have come out, which means they’ll continue to entertain the possibility that Biden cheated.

But what of the remaining 70 percent of Americans, and their relationship to propaganda and disinformation more generally? How are the 30 percent of Americans who have succumbed to the Big Lie and the MAGAverse different from others?

Writing at the Daily Beast, David Rothkopf offers a sobering observation:

Six months after the attack on the Capitol triggered by that lie, commentators, political scientists, and families around the dinner table still struggle to come to grips with perverse reality. It is natural to want to understand how we got here. The fate of our democracy turns on not just what our electorate believes but why they believe it. Why are a third of us such gullible rubes? …

We were raised on lies — including many lies that are much, much bigger than the big one that troubles us today.

That’s the problem. We are as a society — and by “we” I mean virtually all of us on the planet — brought up to believe howling absurdities, ridiculous impossibilities, and insupportable malarkey from our very first moments on Earth. We have massive lie-delivery systems that are the core institutions of our society. And we have created cultural barriers to even questioning those fabrications which are most deserving of skeptical scrutiny.

TrumpWorld will not magically disappear even if policies are put in place that protect the right to vote, rein in the right-wing disinformation machine or otherwise inhibit the neofascist assault on democracy and freedom. As historians, political scientists, philosophers, social psychologists and other experts have repeatedly warned, fascism is as much a cultural problem as a political one.

Solving America’s democracy crisis will require a broad strategy of renewal and reckoning. To that end, if American society is to be made immune to fascist demagoguery, the country’s people and leaders must ask and answer hard questions about their values and behavior. Trumpism and neofascism are much more than a question of whether our “institutions” will hold. They are a fundamental test of national character — one it is not yet clear whether America will pass or fail. 

Donald Trump’s angry at Brett Kavanaugh — but this court is a huge win for the far right

According to “Landslide,” Michael Wolff’s new book about the final days of the Trump administration, former President Trump is very disappointed in his handpicked Supreme Court justices, particularly Brett Kavanaugh. As Axios reports:

There were so many others I could have appointed, and everyone wanted me to. Where would he be without me? I saved his life. He wouldn’t even be in a law firm. Who would have had him? Nobody. Totally disgraced. Only I saved him.

He did? Kavanaugh had a lifetime appointment on the D.C. Court of Appeals when Trump nominated him and would have sailed through the nomination process for the Supreme Court if Christine Blasey Ford hadn’t stepped forward with her accusations of sexual assault when they were high school students. Trump has reportedly claimed that Republican senators begged him to pull the nomination saying, “Cut him loose, sir, cut him loose. He’s killing us, Kavanaugh.” Trump supposedly responded, “I can’t do that,” telling Wolff, “I went through that thing and fought like hell for Kavanaugh — and I saved his life, and I saved his career. At great expense to myself … okay? I fought for that guy and kept him.”

Yes, this sounds so much like Trump. Everyone knows his word is his bond and he’s loyal as the day is long. Wolff also quotes Trump as saying:

I don’t want anything … but I am very disappointed in him, in his ruling. I can’t believe what’s happening. I’m very disappointed in Kavanaugh. I just told you something I haven’t told a lot of people. In retrospect, he just hasn’t had the courage you need to be a great justice. I’m basing this on more than just the election.

Since the election seems to literally be the only thing Trump can think about it’s hard to know what else he might be referring to. It’s likely that there has been some grumbling, among those who have made pilgrimages to kiss the ring, that Kavanaugh has not voted with the far-right justices in every case, as they appointed him to do. Trump doesn’t care about that unless it affects him personally, of course, but he considers “his justices” to have been placed on the court to do what they’re told and he doesn’t like it when they are perceived to have deviated from their orders.

But let’s face it, his carping is really about the election. Back in September, Trump made his expectations clear:

His rationale for pushing through Amy Coney Barrett so close to the election was to ensure there were enough votes to decide the contest for him, as he made even clearer a few days later:

I think this [election] will end up in the Supreme Court. And I think it’s very important that we have nine justices. This scam that the Democrats are pulling — it’s a scam — the scam will be before the United States Supreme Court. And I think having a 4-4 situation is not a good situation, if you get that. I don’t know that you’d get that. I think it should be 8-0 or 9-0. But just in case it would be more political than it should be, I think it’s very important to have a ninth justice.

He assumed “his justices” would take up any election case and would naturally vote in his favor, regardless of the facts or the circumstances. They owed him.

None of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s post-election lawsuits made it up the ladder to the court, because they were all garbage. But before the election Kavanaugh was notably amenable to Trump’s arguments about mail-in votes being counted after the election, in a Wisconsin case in which the court affirmed a lower court ruling that the state Supreme Court could not extend the deadline. He also looked favorably on an idea percolating in right-wing legal circles for some time about who gets to decide election cases. Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern raised the alarm about a footnote in Kavanaugh’s concurrence, in which he endorsed a notoriously extreme argument from the Bush v. Gore case:

William Rehnquist, joined by Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas — tried to overturn the Florida Supreme Court’s interpretation of the state’s own election law. As a rule, state Supreme Courts get final say over the meaning of their own state laws. But Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas argued that SCOTUS must review their decisions to ensure they comply with the “intent of the legislature.” In other words, the Supreme Court gets to be a Supreme Board of Elections that substitutes state courts’ interpretation of state law with its own subjective view of a legislature’s “intent.” 

Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O’Connor refused to sign on to that at the time, and Chief Justice John Roberts didn’t go along with it this time around either. But it’s fair to ask if the new Trump majority of Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett would. Considering Roberts’ hardline views on voting rights, he might, in the end, throw his lot in with them on this too.

There was a lot of chatter around the election about whether or not state election officers and courts have the authority to administer elections. We’ve recently seen state legislatures take action against the secretaries of state and nonpartisan election officials. If the Supreme Court sees fit to make itself the final arbiter of the states’ election laws, it’s entirely possible that this court would be open to letting GOP legislatures capriciously change the laws to their advantage — or even overturn elections. It’s almost certain that any new voting rights laws passed in this Congress will find a hostile majority when cases make their way through the court. It would not be surprising if this Supreme Court was very good for Trump and his movement over the next few years.

Not that it matters, as far as the right-wing justices and their backers are concerned. They wouldn’t actually be doing it for Donald Trump, even if he might benefit from it — and even though he inspired all this drastic action based upon the Big Lie in the first place. The Republican legal community always saw the big opportunity it had in Trump, and ruthlessly exploited it. Former White House counsel Don McGahn, Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society and their most cynical ally, Sen. Mitch McConnell, recognized that they could remake the federal courts and use them to secure power, even as a declining electoral minority. Little did they know that Trump’s loss and the Big Lie that followed would supercharge that plan the way it has.

Trump may be unhappy with “his justices,” but that’s because he never understood that he wasn’t using them. They were using him, and they are perfectly happy with how it’s turned out so far.

Delta variant surges in Colorado as the bands play on

GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. — Dr. Rachel LaCount grasped a metal hoop at a playground and spun in circles with her 7-year-old son, turning the distant mesas of the Colorado National Monument into a red-tinged blur.

LaCount has lived in this western Colorado city of 64,000 nearly her whole life. As a hospital pathologist, she knows better than most that her hometown has become one of the nation’s top breeding grounds for the delta variant of covid-19.

“The delta variant’s super scary,” LaCount said.

That highly transmissible variant, first detected in India, is now the dominant covid strain in the United States. Colorado is among the states with the highest proportion of the delta variant, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Mesa County has the most delta variant cases of any county in Colorado, state health officials report, making the area a hot spot within a hot spot. A CDC team and the state’s epidemiologist traveled to Grand Junction to investigate how and why cases of the variant were moving so quickly in Mesa County.

At her hospital, LaCount has put in orders for more rapid covid tests as the caseload has grown. She’s seen the intensive care unit start filling up with covid patients, so that hospital officials are placing two in a room against normal practices.

Despite these alarming signs, many in Mesa County have let down their guard. The rate of eligible residents fully vaccinated has stalled at about 42%. LaCount has noticed that few people wear masks anymore at the grocery store. Thousands of people recently flocked to Mack, 20 miles from Grand Junction, to attend the Country Jam music festival, which could accelerate the variant’s spread to the concertgoers’ hometowns.

“We’re making national news for our covid variant and the CDC is here investigating, but we have a huge festival where people aren’t masking,” said LaCount. “Are we going to get herd immunity over here just because everyone’s going to get it? I mean, that’s probably going to happen at some point, but at what cost?”

LaCount’s worries aren’t necessarily for herself or her spouse — they are both vaccinated — but for their son, who can’t be vaccinated because he is under 12. She is uneasy about sending him to school in the fall for fear of exposure to the variant. She is reluctant to take him to birthday parties this summer knowing there’s a good likelihood he’ll be teased for wearing a mask.

A few yards away from LaCount and her son on the playground, a man fished in a still pond with his 10-month-old daughter in a backpack. Garrett Whiting, who works in construction, said he believes covid is still being “blown out of proportion,” especially by the news media.

“They got everybody scared really, really fast,” said Whiting, slowly reeling in a sparkly blue lure from the water. “There’s no reason to stop living your life just because you’re scared of something.”

Whiting tested positive for covid about three months earlier. He said he doesn’t plan to get vaccinated, nor does his wife. As for the baby on his back, he said he’s not sure whether they’ll have her vaccinated when regulators approve the shot for young children.

The delta variant is one of four “variants of concern” circulating in the U.S., according to the CDC, because the delta strain spreads more easily, might be more resistant to treatment and might be better at infecting vaccinated people than other variants.

The delta variant has raised alarms around the world. Parts of Australia have locked down again after the variant leapfrogged its way from an American aircrew to a birthday party where it infected all unvaccinated guests, health officials said, and after it also jumped between shoppers in a “scarily fleeting” moment in which two people walked past each other in a mall. Israel reissued an indoor mask requirement after a spate of new cases linked to schoolchildren. A leading health official there said about a third of the 125 people who were infected were vaccinated, and most of the new infections were delta variant.

A rise in delta variant cases delayed the United Kingdom’s planned reopening in June. But public health officials have concluded after studying about 14,000 cases of the delta variant in that country that full vaccination with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is 96% effective against hospitalization. Studies around the world have made similar findings. There is also evidence the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines are effective against the variant.

Los Angeles County recently recommended that residents resume wearing masks indoors regardless of vaccination status, over concern about the delta variant. The World Health Organization is also urging vaccinated people to wear masks, though the CDC hasn’t changed its guidelines allowing vaccinated people to gather indoors without masks.

The variant arrived in Mesa County this spring, when it accounted for just 1% of all cases nationwide, said Jeff Kuhr, executive director of Mesa County Public Health.

“We were winding down just like everyone else. We were down to less than five cases a day. I think we had about two people hospitalized at one point,” Kuhr said. “We felt as if we were out of the woods.”

He even signed off on Country Jam, which bills itself as the state’s “biggest country music party.”

But in early May, the delta variant appeared in a burst, with five cases among adults working for the school district.

“It started to hit the children, those that were not of the age to be vaccinated,” Kuhr said. “That was telling me that, you know, wearing masks in school was not providing the protection with this new variant that it had previously.”

The county then started to see breakthrough cases in fully vaccinated elderly residents in long-term care facilities. The hospitals began to fill once more. Nine vaccinated people died, seven of them since the delta variant’s arrival, though it’s still unclear whether the variant is to blame. All were at least 75 years old, and seven lived in long-term care facilities. Now, Kuhr estimates, “above 90%” of cases in the county are delta variant.

The county is seeing the same trend as the state: The vast majority of people testing positive for covid, and people being hospitalized with it, are unvaccinated. “It’s a superspreader strain if there ever was one,” Eric Topol with the Scripps Research Institution told Scientific American. But he said people fully vaccinated with Pfizer or Moderna shots “should not worry at all.” There is less information about the protection offered by Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine.

Mesa County health officials considered canceling the music festival, but “it was really too late,” Kuhr said. After the announcement that the festival was on, about 23,000 people bought tickets.

Officials weighed banning alcohol or trying to get attendees a Johnson & Johnson single-dose vaccine in the weeks leading up to the festival. In the end, they settled on messaging: signs warning people online and at the venue that the area was a covid hot spot.

According to CDC guidance, outdoor events were low risk. A sporting event at the end of May in Grand Junction that filled a baseball stadium had resulted in only one known case, which made Kuhr optimistic.

“We put messaging on Country Jam’s website, and then in their social media pages, saying, you know, ‘Mesa County’s a hot spot. Be prepared,'” Kuhr said.

A stormy Friday dampened concert attendance at Country Jam. But on the last day of the festival, the sun was out and throngs of cowboy boot-clad concertgoers stepped around prairie dog burrows and kicked up gray-yellow dust on the path to the venue entrance.

Many reveled in being able to attend a summertime event like an outdoor festival, taking it as another sign that the pandemic was waning.

“Covid is over in Colorado,” said Ryan Barkley, a college student from Durango who was playing beer pong in an inflatable pool at his campsite outside the gates.

That day, 39 people in the county were hospitalized with covid, and a CDC investigative team had arrived just four days earlier.

Inside the gates, an open field was filled with stages, concession stands, and vendors selling cowboy hats, coffee mugs and hunting clothes — and crowds of people. Chelsea Sondgeroth and her 5-year-old daughter took in the scene.

“It’s just nice to see people’s faces again,” said Sondgeroth, who lives in Grand Junction and previously had covid. She described it as one of the mildest illnesses she’s ever had, though her senses of taste and smell have not returned to normal. Watermelon tastes rotten to her, beer tasted like Windex for a while, and her daughter said Sondgeroth can’t smell certain flowers anymore.

Sondgeroth said she’s holding off on getting vaccinated until more research comes out.

Waiting in line at the daiquiri stand, Alicia Nix was one of the few people in sight wearing a mask. “I’ve gotten people that say, you know, ‘That stuff is over. Get over yourself and take that off,'” said Nix, who is vaccinated. “It isn’t over.”

Amid the music, beer and dancing, a bus turned into a mobile vaccine clinic was empty. A nurse on duty played Jenga with an Army National Guard soldier. Just six people of the thousands attending were vaccinated on the bus.

“You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink,” Nix said from behind her blue surgical mask.

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

School boards’ unscientific response to COVID-19 is nothing new

In March of 2020, as the pandemic ramped up, schools closed across the United States. Students switched to virtual learning and the medical community began its crash course on a new virus. The following summer, Covid-19 rates stabilized or decreased in parts of the country, and some people expected a form of in-person school to resume in the fall. But many school boards weren’t so sure, with some adamantly against the idea.

As a pediatrician who worked at a hospital since the pandemic began, I could see a path for children to return to school. In employee meetings, we were told the outbreaks at my hospital mainly happened with prolonged unmasked contact, for example, when adults took their masks off to eat in breakrooms. The evolving science suggested if children remained masked and followed other mitigation measures, while also taking into account community transmission rates, the spread of Covid-19 in schools could be minimal.

But my local school district, Ann Arbor Public Schools (AAPS), with guidance from our school board, only offered a virtual option for the fall of 2020. Although the board consulted the county health department, they still set rather unachievable Covid-19 metrics for re-opening in-person school — benchmarks like fewer than 9 new cases per 100,000 people over 14 days. In contrast, last summer, the Harvard Global Health Institute said elementary and middle schools could return to in-person school if community transmission rates were under 25 daily new cases per 100,000.

It wasn’t clear why the board didn’t prioritize reopening elementary and middle schools earlier, and instead went with HGHI’s more conservative metrics for reopening high schools. We never met the metrics before they decided to partially reopen anyway. Instead, other factors influenced the later decision to return, including significant community and local government pressure for in-person school and, most notably, vaccine availability for teachers and staff. While pre-kindergarteners, kindergarteners, and small groups of students with special needs came back to school for hybrid learning at the end of March 2021, the older children didn’t return until May 2021.

The reaction to Covid-19 in Ann Arbor isn’t the first time the school board has ignored scientific advice while making key policy decisions that affect students’ health and wellbeing. And other school boards across the country have had similar issues over the years. Although school boards do need to accommodate for other matters — from logistical to financial to cultural — they are mainly tasked with putting children’s needs first. As a consequence they should be required to seek out and act on expert scientific advice in order to make informed decisions.

I first began to question how school boards function at an AAPS Board of Education meeting in the fall of 2018. On the agenda: lead contamination of the drinking water. Ann Arbor’s water system does not contain lead pipes, but until 1986, its copper pipes were joined with lead-based solder, and there was lingering concern that the lead was leaching into the school district’s water. I was not asked to speak at the meeting, but volunteered out of concern for the direction the board was taking in managing the problem; the remediation plan wasn’t in line with guidance from the American Academy of Pediatrics or the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, which advised interventions at lower lead levels than what AAPS called for. Additionally, at the time, AAPS wasn’t testing all water sources used for drinking and cooking, going against guidelines from the Environmental Protection Agency. This was four years after the start of the Flint water crisis, a mere 55 miles away.

As I stood reading aloud the guidance on prevention of childhood lead toxicity from the American Academy of Pediatrics to the Board of Education and Superintendent, I wondered: Why should I need to be there reading a policy statement that wasn’t new, was freely available to the public, and was widely accepted by the scientific and medical community? Shouldn’t the board seek out this sort of information on its own?

But instead of forming a committee with topic experts and stakeholders from the beginning, the AAPS board of education mostly seemed to rely on guidance from the public. And the only way to get the board to pay attention to the scientific evidence on safe drinking water was to put more scientists into the public conversation. A colleague and friend of mine — a medical anthropologist at the University of Michigan and fellow AAPS parent — reached out to board members and spoke at board meetings. We also co-authored a petition urging AAPS to follow the scientific recommendations on lead, which garnered more than 1,000 signatures. Ultimately, AAPS responded, working with community members and local experts to complete testing and install lead filters.

Comparable stories about lead exposure are found throughout the country, but with many districts not faring as well. And Covid-19 and lead aren’t the only health issue all school boards have had to wrestle with. For instance, many boards are trying to address pediatric medical concerns such as healthy sleep practices and obesity. Both of these topics have required experts to weigh in and strongly advocate for change. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that middle and high schools start the day at 8:30 a.m. or later to give students the opportunity to get the correct amount of sleep, but for the majority of American adolescents, school still starts earlier. (Rather than relying on science, this deviation is likely related to the potential conflicts with starting school late: transportation concerns, less time after school for sports and jobs, and a delay in parents getting to work in the morning.) In terms of childhood obesity, school boards have needed federal involvement in the form of programs, policies, and laws to assist them in providing a healthier environment for children.

It should not come as a surprise that not all school boards are equipped to handle, at least on their own, a crisis such as organizing in-person school during a pandemic or other medically-focused issues. School boards are typically made up of publically-elected officials with varied occupational backgrounds. Most board member campaigns are focused on local school issues, with an emphasis on support from the local teacher’s union. It is, in fact, the union that often decides an election. While teachers should certainly have a voice in school matters, including those decided by the board, their influence in elections may bias board members to vote in favor of teachers’ preferences instead of students’ needs. And a board member’s background and teacher’s union support doesn’t always translate into knowledge of how to perform the job successfully. Given the various number of topics and critical decisions a board member will participate in, it is difficult to understand why there aren’t more widely accepted procedures for situations where topic experts are needed.

It doesn’t have to be this way. In North Carolina in the summer of 2020, while school districts were trying to sort out how to respond to the ongoing pandemic, a Board of Education member contacted a parent named Danny Benjamin. Benjamin is a pediatric infectious disease physician and epidemiologist at Duke University, but he was known to the school board through his community service as head coach for the middle school baseball team. The conversation led to a science-based collaboration between the medical and public school systems: the ABC Science Collaborative.

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Kimberly K. Monroe, M.D., M.S. is a clinical assistant professor of pediatrics at C. S. Mott Children’s Hospital, University of Michigan Health, Michigan Medicine.

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