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Pelosi announces plan to form a Jan. 6 select committee, blasts Republicans as “afraid of the truth”

Nearly a month after plans to establish an independent commission on the Jan. 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol were scuttled by Senate Republicans, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced on Thursday that she will form a House select committee to investigate the attack.

“The select committee will investigate and report on the facts and the causes of the attack and it will report recommendations for the prevention of any future attack,” Pelosi said. Subjects of the investigation will include not only the role that white supremacy and anti-Semitism played in inspiring the rioters, but also the security failures that allowed them to breach the Capitol’s defenses.

According to CNN, the select committee will likely give House Democrats “unilateral subpoena power,” allowing them to probe the role that former President Donald Trump, who has falsely claimed that the 2020 election was fraudulent, played in fomenting the deadly riot. Despite garnering support from 35 House and five Senate Republicans, an independent commission providing both parties equal representation and subpoena power was opposed by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and ultimately fell short of the 60 vote threshold necessary for passage in the Senate. At a press conference announcing the select committee’s formation, Pelosi dismissed concerns that the investigation could appear political in nature.

“I do think it would have been preferable to have an outside commission,” she said. “I think that has legitimacy in the public mind. But I have no intention of walking away from our responsibility.”

Various right-wing figures have attempted to float conspiracy theories regarding the deadly January 6th riot in recent weeks, with Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Republican Representatives Andy Biggs, Matt Gaetz, and Marjorie Taylor Greene erroneously suggesting that it was instigated by FBI operatives. Federal prosecutors have already charged 400 people with participating in the riot, nearly all of whom are pro-Trump activists who sought to prevent the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.

After delivering the first sentence to a January 6th rioter, U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth criticized these attempts at obfuscation, saying “This was not a peaceful demonstration. This was not an accident that it turned violent; it was intended to halt the very functioning of our government.”

Rudy Giuliani’s adult son rushes to his father’s defense following law license suspension

Andrew Giuliani, a current Republican New York gubernatorial candidate, rushed to his father’s defense on Thursday when the state suspended the law license of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani for his “demonstrably false and misleading” conspiracy theories surrounding the 2020 election. 

Listing the judges on a New York appellate court who issued the ruling, Giuliani ranted: “All five of them are Democrats – three of which were appointed by Andrew Cuomo.”

“This is just unbelievable to see how politicized all of this has become,” he continued. “I am infuriated by all of this…this is going after one of Trump’s closest allies…and any American that doesn’t believe that, they are just biased.”

The court, for its part, ruled that Giuliani’s actions threatened “the public interest and [warrant] interim suspension from the practice of law.”

“We conclude that there is uncontroverted evidence that respondent communicated demonstrably false and misleading statements to courts, lawmakers and the public at large in his capacity as lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump and the Trump campaign in connection with Trump’s failed effort at re-election in 2020,” it argued.

The judges specifically drew upon statements and actions Giuliani had made in backing various lawsuits alleging systemic election fraud in states like Arizona, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Michigan. These suits, the court wrote, “inflamed tensions that bubbled over into the events of January 6, 2021 in this nation’s Capitol.”

“This event only emphasizes the larger point that the broad dissemination of false statements, casting doubt on the legitimacy of thousands of validly cast votes, is corrosive to the public’s trust in our most important democratic institutions,” it argued.

The former mayor now faces “permanent sanctions,” though he does have recourse to challenge the move. Giuliani’s lawyers, John Leventhal and Barry Kamins, wrote in a joint statement that they “are disappointed with the Appellate Division, First Department’s decision suspending Mayor Giuliani prior to being afforded a hearing on the issues that are alleged.”

“This is unprecedented as we believe that our client does not pose a present danger to the public interest,” they continued. “We believe that once the issues are fully explored at a hearing Mr. Giuliani will be reinstated as a valued member of the legal profession that he has served so well in his many capacities for so many years.”

The announcement is just the latest legal blow Giuliani has received this year as a result of spreading baseless allegations of election fraud. 

The former mayor is also currently is facing two billion-dollar lawsuits from Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems – companies that provided ballot-counting services in the 2020 general election – for alleging earlier this year that the Dominion was in fact a “front” company for Smartmatic and that the latter was “designed to fix elections.” The two companies, however, have no affiliation with one another, and there is no evidence that either tampered with ballots or changed vote counts. 

Additionally, Giuliani faces a criminal investigation by the Southern District of New York into his 2019 communications with various Ukrainian leaders, whom he reportedly pressured to open an inquiry into the financial activities of Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden’s son, as a way to smear the Biden campaign. Back in April, federal authorities raided the former mayor’s home in search of evidence related to his communications with Ukraine – a move which Giuliani called “legal thuggery.

Don’t be fooled by parents’ “critical race theory” tantrums — they’re a part of the GOP’s strategy

White conservatives are losing their goddamn minds — again.

This time they are spun up on Fox News propaganda about “critical race theory” — which is neither taught in public schools nor is about hating white people. So mobs of white people are crashing school board meetings across the country and having loud and deeply silly tantrums over something that isn’t even real. They’re shutting down meetings, getting arrested, and generally making fools of themselves on camera in a way that, to liberal eyes, is idiotic and embarrassing. 

It’s hard not to laugh at some dude being dragged out of school board meeting half-naked, hollering about how he refuses to be oppressed on the basis of the pasty skin he is amply showing off to the world. But it would be unwise to underestimate these people, just because they act like a bunch of clowns. What they are doing has been carefully orchestrated by GOP operatives for the express purpose of stoking racism. The ridiculous behavior we’re seeing from white people across the country right now is a feature, not a bug, of this strategy. 

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In the past few weeks, much has been written highlighting how the national freakout over “critical race theory” is not organic, but complete astroturf ginned up by Republicans who are looking for a fresh new angle on the race-baiting tactics they’ve used to organize their base for decades. In a heavily reported piece, NBC News exposed how what seems to be a parent uprising is, in fact, a “coordinated movement with the backing of major conservative organizations and media outlets.” Both Media Matters and the New Yorker have taken deep dives into how much this entire movement is being propped up by Republican operatives posing as nothing more than “concerned parents.”

But it’s not just the lies about critical race theory that are deliberate here. The over-the-top antics at school boards are central to this scheme. While it’s hilarious to liberals, watching white people on a victim trip melt down, it’s actually very effective as a propaganda technique.

First and foremost, it gets attention, both on the national and local news. School board meetings are usually dull affairs, so when people are screaming and getting arrested, that tends to grab headlines and, perhaps even more importantly, get shared a lot on social media and talked about in local communities. And because everyone is talking about how nuts these people are acting, what they’re not talking about is how “critical race theory” is neither what they say it is nor being taught in public schools. 

Indeed, most of the headlines and social media messages from journalists end up reinforcing the lie that conservatives want to get out there, which is that kids are being taught something called “critical race theory.” Headlines will describe the tantrum-throwers as “opponents of critical race theory” or will describe the event with language like “critical race theory at center of heated debate,” all without indicating that what conservatives are angry about isn’t even real. Sometimes the stories will indicate deep in the text, well after most people stopped reading, that public school curricula do not include critical race theory, but often they don’t even bother to do that. Instead, readers — especially white centrists — are left with the impression that sure, these parents are perhaps overheated, but also, there is something called “critical race theory” and gosh, that sounds scary, and what if they have a point? As usual, conservatives are deft at manipulating both the news media’s need for brevity and unwillingness to “take sides” by spelling out facts that conservatives deny.

In addition, the clownish antics work to reinforce the illusion that GOP activists are trying to create: that this is a “grassroots” movement, instead of the carefully constructed astroturf campaign it is. The average person looks at these photos of badly dressed people acting like animals and thinks “what a bunch of yokels,” not “what a carefully orchestrated political campaign created by professional propagandists.” And while they may laugh at them, they are also absorbing the message the propagandists are trying to send, which is that this about the concerns of “ordinary Americans.” 

The Manhattan Institute’s materials for organizing these school board raids, for instance, are pretty clear about how acting like an ass is central to their strategy. In a pamphlet titled “Woke Schooling: A Toolkit for Concerned Parents,” the authors accept that their views may not be popular but argue that there is “rarely such a thing as a truly popular movement.” Instead, they suggest that a “small group of people who demand something will generally get the compliance of the majority who are indifferent,” especially if that small group of people “are intransigent.” 

“If you’re more stubborn than the most stubborn proponent of critical pedagogy in your school, you may win through intransigence alone,” they write. 

In other words, the biggest bully wins. And while they cover themselves by writing that “being polite and conciliatory is the correct first move,” the authors swiftly move to advising that “do not discount the effectiveness of getting angry, particularly if you find that you need to escalate past a one-on-one conversation.” Basically, it’s not about persuasion so much as being so unpleasant that they’ll give into your demands just to get rid of you. 

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None of which is to say that the people acting like boobs on camera or getting arrested aren’t, in fact, workaday Fox News junkies instead of paid operatives. They mostly are. Just like Donald Trump winding up the Capitol insurrectionists, most of the puppeteers here work by getting people wound up and then stepping back to let the yokels get arrested or otherwise embarrass themselves. Activists get the ordinary conservatives worked up this way by exploiting the widespread jealousy and resentment of liberals that fuels the modern American right. Black Lives Matter protests, in particular, drew a lot of defensive reactions from conservatives who sublimated their own guilt about not caring into a “who do you think you are” reaction to those who do. GOP activists understand how to exploit this obsessive resentment by offering opportunities to conservatives to play-act at being their own version of what they think the left is doing. So they show up and scream and act like bullies, which is what Fox News told them anti-racists do. They even get arrested, fulfilling the “see, I can do it, too” fantasies ginned up after years of being annoyed at progressives who get arrested protesting injustice. 

The “Woke Parents” pamphlet tickles this resentment urge in conservatives pretty hard. The pamphlet repeatedly justifies bullying tactics on the “liberals did it first” grounds. “Advocates of critical pedagogy have wrung huge changes out of administrations through pressure campaigns built on assertions of ‘righteous rage’ and ‘justified anger,'” they write, using scare quotes to imply that progressives merely pretend to be anti-racist for the Instragram likes. “[Y]ou should not be afraid to match your opponents’ level of being demanding—after all, it has been successful for them,” they add. 

Needless to say, liberals did not get schools to teach that slavery was bad and Jim Crow was real because a bunch of nutty people screamed at the school board until they got their way. These things are simply facts. If that makes conservatives uncomfortable, that is their own problem to deal with. Schools should not be in the business of hiding facts or even telling lies, simply because doing so flatters the egos of oversensitive Fox News addicts.

Unfortunately, the Manhattan Institute is right: Bullying all too often works.

It’s crucial not to sit back and just assume this “critical race theory” panic will burn out on its own. The left must keep pushing back and insisting that the truth about American history be taught in schools — before we are all silenced. 

So what’s a cocktail, really?

With the launch of Drinks52 is going to come myriad mentions of the word “cocktail.” Food52 has already given you summer cocktails, whiskey cocktails, nonalcoholic cocktails, but now that there’s dedicated space for all things beverage, you can expect many, many more.

* * *

So what is a cocktail, anyway?

You have an image of one in your head right now, no doubt. But is it actually a cocktail, by definition? Merriam Webster defines a cocktail as “a usually iced drink of wine or distilled liquor mixed with flavoring ingredients.” If that wasn’t vague, the secondary definition leaves us with less specificity: “Something resembling or suggesting such a drink as being a mixture of often diverse elements or ingredients.”

Here’s the bottom line: It’s likely we’ll never have a precise definition of a cocktail.

“The first and most important thing to know,” says Derek Brown, owner of the Columbia Room bar in Washington, DC, “is that nobody knows the original definition of a cocktail.” We know what’s been written about it, but when was it first created? What was the creator’s intention? These questions remain — even for Brown, who is also the author of “Spirits, Sugar, Water, Bitters: How the Cocktail Conquered the World.”

Let’s solve the cocktail equation.

Some say a cocktail must contain a spirit, bitters, sugar, and water.

Many who’ve written on this topic reference an 1806 article in a Hudson, New York paper called “The Balance, and Columbian Repository.” It read: “Cock tail, then is a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water and bitters.”

For a while, this was thought to be the first mention of the word “cocktail,” and so a true cocktail was expected to contain those four elements. An Old-Fashioned is the classic example of a proper mixed drink that follows this formula.

A martini, in other words? Not a cocktail by this definition. A vodka soda? Not! A! Cocktail!

Turns out, the first cocktail might not have been alcoholic at all.

In 2008, drinks historians Jared Brown and Anistatia Miller discovered a 1798 printing of the word in London’s The Morning Post And Gazetteer. It was a satirical piece in which a bar tab listed “cock-tail” for only three-quarters of a pence. “That turns out to be key, since it’s the second-cheapest drink on the list, and priced far below anything with spirits in it,” cocktail historian (historians on historians!) Dave Wondrich theorized in a 2016 Saveur magazine article. “If it’s a cocktail, it’s not our cocktail.”

Maybe the definition should be more inclusive and expansive, then.

Here’s how our drinks resident John deBary put it in his book, “Drink What You Want: The Subjective Guide to Making Objectively Delicious Cocktails“:

A more inclusive definition is important because it will help you to see that you’re probably already making cocktails for yourself — you just don’t realize it — and that it’s way easier than you might think.

Here is my definition: A cocktail is a drink made by mixing two or more things together.

That’s it. That’s the definition.

If you put in a specific amount of cream and sugar in your coffee, you’re literally making a cocktail. Congratulations.

Should we land somewhere In the middle?

In his next book, “Mindful Mixology,” out 2022, Brown argues that a cocktail should have slightly narrower parameters than deBary’s definition, but that a drink should require the addition of alcohol in order to be called a cocktail. “Maybe we should look at it as a set of sensory characteristics rather than a historical definition,” he says. Those characteristics, in his mind: intensity of flavor, texture, volume, and piquancy. “It just makes more sense.”

Recipes to try at home

What would America be like if Trump’s coup had succeeded? Suppressing SNL is only the start

None of this is funny.

The “revelations” continue about the Trump regime’s abuse of power, lawbreaking, crimes, corruption, general disregard for democratic norms and institutions and overall perfidy. We now know that Donald Trump wanted to use the Department of Justice, the FCC and other federal agencies to silence dissent and criticism — specifically, to clamp down on the mockery of late-night TV hosts and the venerable “Saturday Night Live.”

Trump was and is an authoritarian and a fascist who holds utter contempt for the Constitution and democracy.

On Tuesday, Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley of the Daily Beast reported that Trump had gone much further than “simply tweeting his displeasure with the late-night comedians and SNL writers’ room,” and “wanted to use the full weight and power of the U.S. government to punish his personal enemies.” According to two anonymous sources, Trump asked his advisers in 2019 whether the FCC, the federal courts or the DOJ could do anything to suppress SNL, ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel and others. He was apparently disappointed to learn that the “devastating retribution” he hoped for was not possible in a democracy, even an enfeebled one:

In early 2019, Trump had to be repeatedly advised that the “equal-time” rules to which he appeared to refer wouldn’t even apply in this situation, given that late-night shows and NBC sketch comedy are clearly staged satire, and thus not bound by the same requirements of other forms of broadcast TV and radio.

[Another source] said that when they briefly discussed this with Trump more than two years ago, they made a point of saying that the Justice Department, in particular, doesn’t handle these matters, anyway. Trump seemed disappointed to hear that there was no actual legal recourse or anything that the FCC or DOJ could do to punish late-night, anti-Trump comedy.

“Can something else be done about it?” Trump replied, according to this source, to which they responded with some version of “I’ll look into it.” (This person says that to this day, they have not, in fact, “looked into it.”)

This new information about Trump’s attempts to silence free speech coincides with recent “discoveries” that he and his allies literally tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election by ordering the Department of Justice to find ways of rejecting (or perhaps manufacturing) votes in key battleground states, and to seek a Supreme Court decision that would nullify the election of Joe Biden and return Trump to office.

Mercifully, Trump is no longer president. But the Jim Crow Republican Party‘s efforts to overthrow American democracy continue largely unabated.

Recent reporting has revealed that the Trump regime was spying on Democratic members of the House Intelligence Committee who were investigating the Russia collusion scandal — and even on their family members. This abuse of power also extended to surveillance of journalists who were investigating the Russia collusion scandal and other matters Trump and his allies were eager to suppress.

The new book “Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History,” by Washington Post reporters Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta, shows that Trump and his inner circle did in fact commit acts of democide through their self-sabotage and negligent response to the coronavirus pandemic, which has now killed more than 600,000 Americans.

Abutaleb and Paletta explain that Trump was far more concerned with winning the 2020 election and holding onto power than in ending or controlling the pandemic, even suggesting that people with COVID-19 infections should be exiled and quarantined at Guantánamo Bay or some other offshore U.S. territory.

In total, the Trump regime’s crimes are so vast that they remain difficult for many political observers, or the American people as a whole, to comprehend.

At the Atlantic, Ronald Brownstein recently described the monumental task of investigating and revealing the full truth about the Trump regime’s national crime scene:

The House Judiciary Committee announced this week that it would hold hearings on the administration’s acquisition, during a leak investigation, of communications records of journalists and members of Congress. (The Justice Department’s inspector general is also investigating.) And after Senate Republicans blocked a bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6 insurrection, House Democrats appear likely to launch their own inquiry into the attack.

But it’s an open question whether these disparate investigations, proceeding on multiple tracks and operating under divergent rules, will provide a comprehensive picture of all the ways in which Trump used, and potentially misused, his authority during his four years in office.

Noah Bookbinder, the president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a left-leaning nonprofit group that studies ethical abuses, says that a more systematic approach is needed to understand the breadth of Trump’s impact on the federal government. “As best as we can tell, this was a co-opting of the entire federal government for the political and personal advancement of one person and those around him,” he told me.

In a recent essay for Slate, Dahlia Lithwick warns that too many people in America’s political class and the general public, have made the flawed and dangerous decision to “move along” from proper investigations and potential punishment for the Trump regime’s many crimes:

They are now the folks arguing that everything that happened over the course of the Trump years was an aberration and a one-off, and that the best response to all of that is to ignore, ignore, ignore.

I don’t have any prescription for how to reason with a radicalized GOP, a post-truth electorate, or a conspiracy-addled former president, nor do I harbor any illusions that tackling the problems of minority rule, racial violence, and weaponized law enforcement head on will allay the problems of creeping illiberalism. But gritting your way through it by pretending it’s not happened or happening will continue to open a bigger and bigger chasm between what we know to be true and what we want to believe. With all due respect to those who would like to continue to lecture us about the mathematically correct ratio of concern to destabilizing danger, we’ve actually done a fairly decent job of understanding that ratio intuitively all along. This is a profoundly dangerous moment, and being told to get over it is just as jarring when it comes from inside the guardrails of democracy as it was when it came from the smirking authoritarians that have been replaced. That’s why it doesn’t feel any better. If anything, gaslighting about ongoing threats to democracy might be even scarier when it comes from the very people who were supposed to protect us.

Those who want to deny the reality of the Jim Crow Republican Party’s persistent and escalating threats against American democracy are desperately avoiding a basic question: What if the Trump regime had succeeded with its coup? What would America be like now if Donald Trump were president-emperor for life?

The professional smart people, including those hope peddlers, stenographers of current events, professional centrists and others beholden to power and desperate to retain their influence (and affluence) are afraid to ask such questions, because they know they would not like the answers. The American public is largely afraid to ponder such things because they are traumatized and still believe (or hope) that denial will save them from the horrors of Trumpism. Here’s a spoiler: It will not.

What do we see when we look into the abyss of that America which was so close to existing — and in many ways is still being born? People who dare to speak out against Donald Trump and his regime would be detained or perhaps “disappeared” in the interests of “national security.” 

Freedom of the press would become de facto illegal. Millions more Americans would likely be dead from the coronavirus pandemic. The country’s economy would be in ruins. Instead of undermining the Trump regime’s power, such suffering and misery would make Trump even more popular among his followers. Why? Because the present-day Republican Party and larger neofascist movement is a death cult.

The Trump personality cult (including the overlapping conspiracy theories of the QAnon cult) would grow in influence and control. Those who do not pledge loyalty to it would be stigmatized at best, and at worst targeted for violence.

The United States would quickly transition into a “managed democracy” on the model of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, where voting and elections continue but the system is rigged so that in important national elections only Republicans can “win.”

Through a process that the late political theorist Sheldon Wolin described as “inverted totalitarianism,” the U.S. would begin to fully devolve into a white supremacist, Christian-dominated plutocracy.

The civil and human rights of women, LGBTQ people, nonwhite people, the disabled and other targeted groups would be severely curtailed. The nation would experience widespread disruptions of public order and perhaps descend into a second civil war.

In a recent conversation with Salon, retired Harvard psychiatrist Lance Dodes issued this warning: 

Trump has already told us what he would do. When he was running against Hillary Clinton, he said that he wanted to “lock her up” in prison. That’s what Trump would try to do if he were back in power. He seeks to be the same as the leader of North Korea, imprisoning or killing people if they dare to oppose him. With more power he is only going to get worse — more enraged, more paranoid, more psychotic, more violent and more dangerous. If he could, Donald Trump would turn America into a police state.

During the Age of Trump many Americans engaged in a compulsive behavior known as “doomscrolling” — constantly returning to their phones or other electronic devices to see just what new horrors had been unleashed that day by the Trump regime and its agents.

With Biden’s election victory and Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, many Americans were temporarily lulled into a feeling of relative normalcy and safety because Trump had been forced from power. Those feelings are premature, to say the least. Trumpism and American neofascism remain on the ascent, and the Jim Crow Republican Party has become even more aggressive in its assaults on the country’s multiracial democracy.

Doomscrolling has been replaced by the feeling that we are living in the eye of a hurricane. We may experience a few moments of peace amid the rubble, but we also know that the rest of the storm is all around us — and there is no escape.

The search for the Dr. Fauci of climate change

It’s easy to think about the global climate crisis in the abstract. Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah’s death gave it a face. The 9-year-old girl’s fatal asthma attack might have passed without public notice except for the fact that, after a long legal fight, it became the first British death officially attributed to fossil fuel-caused air pollution. When she died in 2013, no doctors mentioned environmental causes. Had her mother known that their southeast London neighborhood’s air was so toxic — and could worsen with dramatic temperature change — she said she would have moved the family somewhere safer.

The question remains: Did the medical profession have a responsibility to tell her?

Preventing this kind of tragedy, most doctors and medical associations now agree, starts with better training. In the U.S., where recent research has found that one in ten premature deaths are caused by air-polluting fossil fuels, medical schools have only begun grappling with a lack of curricula focused on climate change in the last couple of years. Now, a small group of physicians are arguing that only a broader reckoning can help their profession meet the challenge posed by climate change.

“In the mind of the public, health and climate change represent different and separate realms of knowledge and concern,” laments the latest annual report on health and climate change published by the leading medical journal The Lancet earlier this year. The report, which has become the most globally respected pulse-taking of human health in a changing climate since its first publication after the 2016 Paris Agreement, shows just how high the stakes are.

The paper says that climate change is already affecting human health in every country on earth. It’s worsening the spread of infectious diseases, like dengue across South America, increasing the possibility of global pandemics in the near future. Continued reliance on fossil fuels is causing 7 million additional deaths worldwide from air pollution, and extreme heat is killing more people than ever before.

In 2018, about 280,000 people died from extreme heat worldwide, a nearly 55 percent increase from 20 years ago. Europe’s aging population remains the most vulnerable to heat exposure overall, as the continent endures heatwaves made 10 percent worse by climate change. Conditions in China and India, which lost 62,000 and 31,000 people to heat in 2018, respectively, are raising new red flags. The past five years have been the hottest on record for the planet, with 2020 being an especially hot and deadly year in the American Southwest, according to reporting by NPR. Arizona alone reported 494 heat-related deaths, its worst annual toll ever.

Americans are already showing up in emergency rooms with more surprising climate-related ailments, too — like diarrhea.

In New Jersey, over 47,000 people were hospitalized for gastrointestinal illness between 2009 and 2013. That didn’t raise eyebrows until years later, when state researchers looked at these numbers next to weather data. They found a strong link between where these patients lived, how they sourced their water, and really heavy rains. The 2017 study concluded that New Jersey’s surface water systems, like reservoirs, were being contaminated by worsening deluges.  The growing belief is that the state’s old water systems weren’t built for new extreme rain — and that this is what gave New Jersey residents, and kids under five especially, the kind of diarrhea that lands someone in the ER.

Detecting the fingerprints of climate change on local weather events is tricky, but dire climate predictions are motivating similar drinking water studies in other states that are getting wetter. In Massachusetts, ERs saw a spike of severe diarrhea cases after extreme rain fell in towns with especially vulnerable sewer system designs. In Georgia, very extreme rains since 1997 have been linked to salmonella infections. The U.S. National Climate Assessment predicts that all three of these states will see more rainfall in the coming decades as a direct result of climate change — and that will put more pressure on their municipal water systems.

Physicians can make a difference in cases like these. With the knowledge that these outcomes are increasingly likely, they could recommend potentially life-saving precautions like filtering water when heavy rains won’t relent.

But most physicians have not been trained to make the connection between disease and a changing environment — or to prepare patients for the fact that what made them sick may soon get worse.

In 2019, the American Medical Association, or AMA, called for climate education across all levels of medical training, and over 70 health care organizations declared climate change a “health emergency.” Senior physicians are debating the merits of this shift in focus, with at least one former medical school dean lambasting climate-focused medical education, aligning it with “woke” culture in the Wall Street Journal. (Multiple medical associations later rebuked him.)

The AMA’s new policy focuses on providing rising doctors with the “basic knowledge” about climate change so they can “counsel” patients about its health impacts.

“It’s not just about the patient-physician relationship,” said Dr. Jay Lemery, an emergency medicine physician and professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. He believes a doctor’s job confronting climate change is equal parts clinician and advocate. To help newly certified doctors step into this role, Lemery started the first and only climate-focused medical education fellowship in the country in 2017.

Lemery is a self-described “climate doctor” who came into the work by getting out of the hospital and into nature. While in medical school, he took a class where he spent five days at 10,000-foot altitudes in the Rocky Mountains and then three weeks on the Colorado River, learning what it takes to treat patients in remote locations.

After the class, Lemery was hooked on wilderness medicine. In 2004, he approached the president of the Wilderness Medical Society about spearheading a new committee that would train more young doctors like himself. “I developed this self-proclaimed dual mandate,” he said, “taking care of people in remote places, but also as an advocate for the beauty of those remote places.” Lemery’s “aha moment” in advocacy came while ascending the leadership ranks at the Wilderness Medical Society in the early 2000s.

As he became more involved in wilderness medicine, he envisioned its doctors, with their singular science communication training, as the perfect advocates for “the facts of science.” Their wilderness workplaces already showed the visible marks of human-caused climate change. But when Lemery became the Society’s president in 2012, members did not rally around his doctors-as-advocates vision.

 “A lot of the clinicians were like, ‘You know, I’m in this to learn how to take people off scary mountain ledges. And this other stuff — advocacy — I’m not so into,” recalled Lemery. “That was kind of a bummer.”

Lemery’s tenure as president of the Wilderness Medical Society ended in 2014. But, for him, wilderness medicine became a model for what he started calling “climate medicine.” Wilderness medicine itself is fairly new. It only coalesced as a clinical practice in the 1980s from previously piecemeal medical knowledge.

“Wildness medicine pulled in disparate, almost orphaned concepts: survival in the Arctic, snakebites, and providing care on submarines,” said Lemery. “Common concepts began to emerge from there.” He envisions climate medicine similarly uniting siloed concepts like “disaster medicine” and “treating vulnerable populations.”

Treating climate medicine as an umbrella concept that has currency among medical professionals might begin to solve its funding dilemma. Currently, the U.S. has no major money pot for developing a climate and health workforce. The National Institutes of Health, or NIH, has a $40 billion budget but less than 0.025 percent goes to climate-related efforts. (President Joe Biden hopes to change that: His recent budget proposal calls for directing $110 million to climate-related health research at the NIH, as well as an additional $110 million for similar purposes at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.)

To overcome this hurdle, Lemery and his faculty partner at the University of Colorado turned to private money. Lemery took a Denver-based benefactor with a small group to Greenland’s Ilulissat ice fjord for a formative moment in a remote and endangered place. Melted ice dumped dramatically into the sea below. According to Lemery, that’s when the benefactor said simply, “Okay, how do we work together?”

That underwriting, from the Living Closer Foundation, led to the country’s first climate and health training fellowship for physicians. The fellowship has annually funded the salary and training of one emergency medical doctor who does rotations in the ER, treating patients with an eye to the climate-related issues they face, like the state’s historic wildfires. Fellows also receive frontline climate disaster training by visiting hurricane-hit communities. Others experience the “sausage-making” of climate policy consensus-building: One fellow co-authored the country’s leading climate change report, the U.S. National Climate Assessment. The program’s goal, as Lemery and his colleagues wrote in a recent article for the journal Science Diplomacy, is to create “physicians proficient and credible in climate and health science to assume leadership, disseminate knowledge, and influence policy.”

Think Dr. Anthony Fauci — but for climate change.

The first graduate of the program, Cecilia Sorenson, works as a New York City-based ER doctor but also spends time in the sugarcane fields of Guatemala. Last year she co-authored two studies that linked a mysterious kidney disease plaguing sugarcane workers to rising temperatures in the region. Her path responds to one of Lemery’s key teachings: Climate change is a disease of vulnerability.

A new fellowship class starts next month. It will support five doctors instead of just one, and the focus on policy has grown, thanks to the Biden administration’s interest in climate-focused policy. The administration has invited these University of Colorado medical fellows into the federal government: Each fellow will now be embedded not in the ER but instead within a different federal agency focused on climate change, including the Environmental Protection Agency. These young doctors will be advocating for their patients in the very rooms (for now, Zoom rooms) where climate policy gets made.

Medical students are starting to call for changes to their future profession, too. According to George Washington University medical student Harleen Marwhah, “we can uniquely advocate for future patients and future problems.”

Marwah co-founded Medical Students for a Sustainable Future, or MS4SF, in August 2019 with just four students. By October, there were ten members; by New Year’s Day, there were 10 times that many. MS4SF now has organizational chapters at over 50 medical schools, receiving local press attention across the country for climate curriculum advocacy.

Nevertheless, physician advocacy is often treated as taboo — despite the fact that it’s what made tobacco control and municipal sanitation possible in the U.S. By the 1970s, the scientific evidence that smoking kills was clear. But it was not until two decades later, when physicians engaged with policymakers, waving evidence in the air and wielding white-coat credibility, that tobacco controls gained traction at the policy level.

The authors of The Lancet’s latest report on health and climate, who represent United Nations agencies and 35 of the world’s leading research institutions, see this as a model for what can happen with climate change: “Just as it did with advancements in sanitation and hygiene and with tobacco control, a growing and sustained engagement from the health profession … [fills] a crucial gap in the global response to climate change.”

Perry Sheffield, a New York City-based pediatrician, punctuates this kind of statement with an asterisk: The “engagement” must be upstream, with people in power.

Sheffield is a pediatrician at Mount Sinai Hospital who works on communicating the risk of threats made worse by climate change. One tool she uses are “vocalized prescriptions.” These are, essentially, questions pediatricians can ask parents — like “is mold a problem in your home?” — which can then lead to actionable solutions. (Mold-growing moisture levels will likely become more common in northeastern U.S. cities because of climate change.) Sheffield has improved on these scripts so that New York City-based doctors can answer follow-up questions that might help their patients take action: “Who do they call? What are their rights as a tenant?”

The case of nine-year-old Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah exemplifies Sheffield’s thinking. The landmark struggle to list “air pollution” as the cause of death was, in a sense, a mother’s attempt to legally shift a burden of proof from the patient to doctors and public health officials.  

“I think that’s where doctors sometimes go wrong,” said Sheffield, “laying the burden back on the individuals who are experiencing the brunt of the environmental impact.”

Things could have been different for the young British girl with dimples and a wide smile: had the family known about the quality of their air, had they been able to leave their toxic surroundings, had London officials acted on the knowledge that the city’s particulate matter levels were much higher than World Health Organization recommendations.

A mother and her teenage daughter living in Paris suffered in a similar way and, perhaps by luck, their doctor knew enough about air pollution. “He advised me to move,” the mother said in a 2019 interview with The Guardian. They moved 80 miles away to Orléans, a small city that embraces another teenage girl, Joan of Arc, as its savior. 

After that, the mother’s lung infections cleared, and her daughter’s asthma went away. Then, they successfully sued the French government. France’s failures to carry out its own air pollution standards are now recognized by its courts, and the country must act or pay. It’s a precedent for doctors making sure that the enablers of climate change are accountable for its unhealthy fallout. American doctors might want to take note.

Sick of dangerous city traffic? Remove left turns

To reduce travel times, fuel consumption and carbon emissions, in 2004, UPS changed delivery routes to minimize the left-hand turns drivers made. Although this seems like a rather modest change, the results are anything but: UPS claims that per year, eliminating left turns – specifically the time drivers sit waiting to cut across traffic – saves 10 million gallons of fuel, 20,000 tons of carbon emissions and allows them to deliver 350,000 additional packages.

If it works so well for UPS, should cities seek to eliminate left-hand turns at intersections too? My research suggests the answer is a resounding yes.

As a transportation engineering professor at Penn State, I have studied traffic flow on urban streets and transportation safety for nearly a decade. Part of my work focuses on how city streets should be organized and managed. It turns out, restricting left turns at intersections with traffic signals lets traffic move more efficiently and is safer for the public. In a recent paper, my research team and I developed a way to determine which intersections should restrict left turns to improve traffic.

Why are left-hand turns so bad?

Intersections are dangerous because they are where cars, often moving very fast and in different directions, must cross paths. Approximately 40% of all crashes occur at intersections, including 50% of crashes involving serious injuries and 20% of those involving fatalities. Traffic signals make things safer by giving vehicles instructions on when they can move. If left turns did not exist, the instructions could be very simple: For example, a north-south direction could move while the east-west direction was stopped and vice versa. When drivers make left turns, they must cross oncoming traffic, which makes intersections much more complicated.

One way to accommodate left turns is to have vehicles wait until a gap appears in oncoming traffic. However, this can be dangerous as it relies entirely on the driver to make the left turn safely. And everyone knows how frustrating it is to be stuck behind a car waiting to make a left turn on a busy road.

Another way to allow left-hand turns is to stop oncoming traffic and give cars turning left their own green arrow. This is much safer, but it shuts down the entire intersection to let left-turning vehicles go, which slows traffic considerably.

In either case, left turns are dangerous. Approximately 61% of all crashes that occur at intersections involve a left-hand turn.

How would eliminating left turns improve traffic?

Traffic researchers have proposed a variety of innovative signal strategies and complex intersection configurations to make left turns safer and more efficient. But a simpler solution might be the best: Restrict left-hand turns at intersections.

Some cities have already started limiting left turns to improve safety and traffic flow. San Francisco; Salt Lake City; Birmingham, Alabama; Wilmington, Delaware; Tuscon, Arizona; numerous locations in Michigan; and dozens of other cities in the U.S. and around the world all limit left turns in some way. It’s typically done at isolated locations to solve specific traffic and safety problems.

Of course, there is a downside. Eliminating left turns would require some vehicles to travel longer distances. For example, if you wanted to turn left off a busy street to get to your house, you might instead have to take three consecutive right turns. However, research I published in 2012 using mathematical models and in 2017 using traffic simulations showed that eliminating left turns on grid-like street networks would, on average, require people to drive only one additional block. This would be more than offset by the smoother traffic flow.

Which left turns need to go?

Getting rid of left turns would be difficult to implement across an entire city – and at some intersections, left turns don’t cause problems. But if a city did want to remove left turns from some intersections, how should it choose which ones? To answer this question, my research team and I recently developed algorithms that use traffic simulations of a city to identify where restricting left turns will improve safety and traffic flow the most.

The exact answer for each city depends on how streets are laid out, where vehicles are coming from and going to and how much traffic is on the street during the busiest times. But, according to our models, there is a general theme: Left-turn restrictions are more effective at busier intersections in the centers of towns or cities than at less busy intersections farther from the town center.

This is because the busier the intersection, the more people will benefit from smoother traffic flow. These central intersections also tend to have alternative routes available that minimize any additional distance traveled due to the restrictions. Lastly, fewer cars tend to turn left at these central intersections to begin with so the negative impact of removing left turns is relatively small.

So the next time you are sitting stuck in traffic behind someone waiting to make a left turn, know that your frustration is justified. There is a better way. In this case, the answer is simple – get rid of the left turn.

Vikash V. Gayah, Associate Professor of Civil Engineering, Penn State

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

The “pulse” of the Earth: Disastrous geologic events happen every 27 million years, study finds

Are catastrophic geological events, like massive volcanic eruptions, random— or do they follow a specific cycle?

It’s a question geologists have long asked, but one that’s been difficult to answer because scientists often don’t know precisely when specific geologic events happened in the past. Thanks to improvements in radio-isotopic dating techniques, which are used to date rocks and carbon, the barriers to age-dating geologic events are becoming less of an obstacle. Now, according to a new study published in Geoscience Frontiers, evidence suggests that events like volcanoes, plate reorganizations, sea levels rising — in other words, the geological events known to cause mass extinctions — follow a 27.5 million year cycle.

“Many geologists believe that geological events are random over time,” said Michael Rampino, a New York University geologist and the study’s lead author. “But our study provides statistical evidence for a common cycle, suggesting that these geologic events are correlated and not random.”

In the study, Rampino and his colleagues conducted a new analysis of 89 well-known geological events from the past 260 million years.

“These events include times of marine and non-marine extinctions, major ocean-anoxic events, continental flood-basalt eruptions, sea-level fluctuations, global pulses of intraplate magmatism, and times of changes in seafloor-spreading rates and plate reorganizations,” the researchers wrote in the paper. “Our results suggest that global geologic events are generally correlated, and seem to come in pulses with an underlying ~27.5-million-year cycle.”

In a phone interview, Rampino analogized these kinds of huge geological changes to a heartbeat — as if Earth has a “pulse,” and these events are part of that pulse. Put that way, Earth has a 27.5 million year heartbeat.

“They all seem to be beating to the same cycle,” Rampino said. He noted that in the early 20th century, some geologists suspected this was the case, but the idea wasn’t taken seriously. “These ideas were not popular, and they were sort of pushed to the side because there was no good, accurate dating of geological events back then.”

Rampino said he and his colleagues used the most recent and accurate dates to do a formal statistical analysis and identify any periodicity. There was never a guarantee that a particular pattern would surface. But one did.

Ken Caldeira, an atmospheric scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Department of Global Ecology, calculated the statistics for Rampino. Caldeira told Salon he started out skeptical, but is now closer to believing that Earth operates on a 27.5 million year pulse.

“For me, the periodicity is still a hypothesis to be tested, and that we have been trying to test,” he said via email. Caldeira said that he has a few concerns; first, “could there be some bias: If two events are close together, might they be counted as one event? If two events are far apart, might people look for some other event to fill the gap? Could this introduce a bias that would have a quasi-regular occurrence of events?”

His second concern is that they are testing the “likelihood of getting a period of 27.5 million years.”

“This kind of periodicity has been showing up in enough different records to make me think it is not random and there is a causal explanation,” said Caldeira via email. “The question is whether the causal explanation is something about our planet, solar system or galaxy, or something about human psychology and the construction of lists of events.”

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The analysis raises the obvious question: if true, could knowing about this cycle help us better understand when another geological catastrophe is due?

“The last time we see a pulse like this in the geologic record was about 7 to 10 million years ago,” Rampino said. “If this follows what’s happened in the past, I would say that the next pulse of activity would be 15 or 20 million years in the future.”

But that’s just a rough estimate.

“I guess what we would tend to see is an increase in geologic activity that’s related to extinctions as it appears to be, then we probably could see a mass extinction sometime around that time in the future,” Rampino said. “But you can’t say exactly this year there’ll be an extinction, but you can sort of think about when the geological activity should increase.”

Rampino said he’d like to extend the timescale to further investigate this pulse, and get a better understanding of the cause of previous mass extinction events.

Notably, this isn’t the first time researchers have identified some sort of cycle to predict an extinction. Previously, astrophysicists hypothesized that periodic comet showers occur in the Solar System every 26 to 30 million years, producing periodic impacts that resulted in mass extinctions. Rampino believes that the astrophysical and geological cycles could be connected.

“There are certainly possible physical connections between astrophysical cycles and cycles of the Earth’s activity,” Rampino said.

5 unexpected ways to make Coca-Cola extra *extra* special

Mix This With That is a new series on Drinks52, where we show you creative ways to level up any sip you please — from Coca-Cola to cold brew and beyond.

* * *

Like the best aperitivi, the recipe for Coke is closely guarded. And, also like the best aperitivi, the recipe for Coke likely involves many more ingredients than you’d want to buy and work with at home: vanilla, lime, orange, lemon, cinnamon, coriander, nutmeg — the list goes on. (Oh, and you’ll need a siphon.)

This inherent complexity means that Coke plays nice with a surprising set of mix-ins. Here are five different directions that showcase the compatibility of this American classic.

1. Add herbs and spices

When Raleigh-based chef and restaurant owner Cheetie Kumar was last in India, “all the hip restaurants were serving masala Coke,” cola enhanced with cumin, black salt, lime juice, and fresh cilantro and mint. This is a great one for those for whom soda alone is too sweet: cumin and sulphurous black salt bring a savory quality, lime juice adds tartness, and the green herbs give grassy notes. You might not see chopped herbs on top of a soft drink often in the United States, but “yeah . . . Indians don’t really mind chewing on bits of things,” Kumar says with a chuckle. As the saying goes: Don’t knock it till you try it.

2. Make it sweeter and saltier

To save you the shock when you click through to this recipe, this drink contains cola, lemon juice, maple syrup, and soy sauce. Yes, it sounds absolutely bonkers, but these three ingredients turn up the dial on Coke’s natural acidity, sweetness, and salinity. Served over crushed ice and topped with a grating of cinnamon, this is a killer pairing for a burger or barbecue.

3. Fix a Proteau ‘N’ Coke

“In case you were wondering, yes this actually is delicious and it’s equal parts Cherry Coke Zero and Ludlow Red,” resident drinks expert John deBary shared on his Instagram recently. DeBary is the founder of an alcohol-free botanical beverage line called Proteau, and he considers this mixture of his Ludlow Red — an apéritif made with blackberry juice, fig vinegar, licorice, and dandelion roots with notes of chrysanthemum, black pepper, rose, and hibiscus — a riff on one of Spain’s most popular cocktails, the calimocho (sometimes spelled kalimotxo), a mixture of red wine and cola. “The cherry brightens and rounds it out a bit, but regular cola would be great, too,” he says. “The spices in the Ludlow Red get picked up by the Coke.”

4. Supercharge it

When you really need a decadent treat (or when you have room in your calendar for a sugar buzz followed by a crash-nap) this is the drink to make. For bartender Lainey Collum, it represents the melting pot that is Houston: Vietnamese-style iced coffee inspired the use of sweetened, condensed milk; Mexican café de olla inspired the cinnamon; and, of course, there’s good old American cola. The experience of drinking it is just what you might imagine: It’s sweet, it’s creamy, it’s fizzy, it’s got depth, and it shouldn’t be consumed in multiples. One will do you. (Promise.)

5. Spike it

If all else fails, stick to the classic pairing: rum. While the Cuba Libre cocktail features a mixture of rum and Coke brightened with a hit of fresh lime, chief food critic for Eater New York Ryan Sutton prefers his highball sans citrus juice. “Coke is heavily carbonated and therefore has a good amount of acidity to it,” he says, “and I find that the lime detracts from the core ingredients.” Sutton says yes to the zest, though. “That way, you get those floral notes on the nose, but there’s no juice diluting the drink.”

As for his go-to rum? Eight-year-old Barbancourt. “It’s dark, dry but not bone dry, it doesn’t have the super high funk that some of the agricole rums do, and the alcohol lets you know it’s there but it won’t end your night, so to speak.” On the weekends, he might use a Smith & Cross rum, which has “a little more action to it,” he says. In general, for Sutton, the rum and cola is an any-season, all-the-time drink: “There’s the thread of caramel interweaving between both the rum and the Coke, and so it’s a sweet, refreshing beverage that takes the edge off — highly quaffable.”

“No evidence” of fraud: Michigan GOP committee rejects Trump’s “ludicrous” claims

A Republican-led election investigation in Michigan that was pushed by former President Donald Trump found no evidence of widespread fraud and called on the Democratic attorney general to investigate those that have pushed false claims “to raise money or publicity for their own ends.”

The Michigan Senate Oversight Committee released a report by Chairman Ed McBroom, a Republican, on Wednesday that debunked numerous claims pushed by Trump and his allies about the state’s election, which President Joe Biden won by more than 150,000 votes.

“The Committee found no evidence of widespread or systemic fraud in Michigan’s prosecution of the 2020 election,” the 35-page report says, adding that voters “should be confident the results represent the true results of the ballots cast by the people of Michigan.”

Trump had pushed for the report for months, falsely claiming in a statement as recently as May that Biden “miraculously” received a dump of nearly 150,000 votes that swung the state overnight after the election.

“Has the Michigan State Senate started their review of the Fraudulent Presidential Election of 2020 yet, or are they about to start?” he said last month. “If not, they should be run out of office.”

In fact, the committee launched its investigation in November, and found no evidence of any “ballot dump,” nor any support for TrumpWorld claims that dead people had voted, that hundreds of thousands of unsolicited ballots were mailed to voters, that some counties had more than 100% voter turnout, that counting machines in Detroit were connected to the internet or that a machine error had switched votes from Trump to Biden in rural Antrim County.

“The committee finds those promoting Antrim County as the prime evidence of a nationwide conspiracy to steal the election place all other statements and actions they make in a position of zero credibility,”  the report said, noting that human error initially caused an incorrect result in that county, showing Biden in the lead, before the final result correctly identified Trump as the winner. The committee urged Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel to consider investigating people who pushed the conspiracy theory the county to “raise money or publicity for their own ends.”

“If you are profiting by making false claims, that’s pretty much the definition of fraud,” McBroom told The Detroit News.

The committee investigated two claims of deceased individuals voting, finding that one instance was a clerical error while the other person cast their ballot before their death, concluding that “none of these constituted fraudulent election activities or manipulations.” The committee also found “no anomalous number of votes cast solely for the President, either in Wayne County or statewide.” In response to Trump’s claim of a late-night ballot dump, the report simply explained that large precincts “took much longer to complete [counting] and then reported all their results at once.”

“As is often the case, the truth is not as attractive or as immediately desirable as the lies and the lies contain elements of truth,” McBroom said in a statement. “We must all remember: ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof’ and ‘claiming to find something extraordinary requires first eliminating the ordinary.'”

The investigation reviewed thousands of pages of subpoenaed documents and spent “hundreds of hours” conducting “countless interviews.”

“The committee is appalled at what can only be deduced as a willful ignorance or avoidance of this proof perpetuated by some leading such speculation,” the report said. The committee cited pro-Trump attorney Matt DePerno, who has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for an “election fraud defense fund” and filed a lawsuit alleging that voting machines were hacked, which was rejected last month by a Republican-appointed judge.

“The committee closely followed Mr. DePerno’s efforts and can confidently conclude they are demonstrably false and based on misleading information and illogical conclusions,” the report said.

It also cited former Republican state Sen. Patrick Colbeck, who raised more than $20,000 for a legal defense fund after he was threatened with legal action for a “disinformation campaign” targeting Dominion Voting machines, a favorite conspiracy theory of Trump supporters like MyPillow founder Mike Lindell.

McBroom told Bridge Michigan that there is “good reason” to conclude that these conspiracy theorists are “purposely defrauding people” for money.

“The claims have become so ludicrous when compared to the actual facts. And yet people persist, such as Mr. DePerno,” McBroom said, adding that a state investigation could find “criminality.”

DePerno and Colbeck have been among the Trump supporters calling for a “forensic audit” of Michigan’s election similar to the dubious procedure now underway in Arizona’s Maricopa County, which even Republican county officials have blasted as “insane just from a competence standpoint.”

McBroom told Bridge that the calls are fueled by “fears or misunderstandings of what happened in Antrim County,” which the report thoroughly debunks.

“If you’re basing your drive for an audit off of Antrim County, then right away you can already say there’s no point,” he said.

But McBroom said he is watching the Arizona audit closely, writing in the report that if it finds “genuine issues” he would “not hesitate to ask the committee to consider recommending an audit or amending this report.”

The report was adopted by every Republican on the committee, But state Sen. Jeff Irwin, the committee’s Democratic vice chair, voted against a motion to adopt the report, arguing against the voting restrictions that the report proposes.

Despite finding no evidence of fraud, Michigan Republicans have introduced 39 bills aimed at restricting voting access and the committee’s report cited “glaring issues” that it called on the legislature to fix. The report urges new training standards for poll challengers, banning the unsolicited mailing of absentee ballot applications, creating new signature verification requirements for absentee ballots and restricting ballot drop boxes.

“Citizens should demand reasonable updates and reforms to close real vulnerabilities and unlawful activities that caused much of the doubt and questionability to flourish and could, if unchecked, be responsible for serious and disastrous fraud or confusion in the future,” the report said.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, said the report shows there is “not a scintilla of evidence that there was a fraud issue or other issue with the election” and questioned the Republicans’ logic in continuing to push voting reforms regardless.

“The fact that anyone could author this report and still move forward with changes that aren’t substantiated or aren’t necessary is kind of mind-boggling to tell you the truth,” she told The Detroit News.

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a fellow Democrat, told NBC News the report only showed what “Michiganders already know to be true: our 2020 election was secure and the results are accurate.”

While the report included “some strong recommendations,” she said, it “also contains inaccuracies that further misinformation and will likely be used to press for partisan and nefarious election audits and legislation that needlessly harms election administration and restricts voting rights.”

Benson continued: “My hope is that lawmakers and leaders change course and use the report as rationale to do what they should have done long ago: Affirm the security and integrity of our elections, cease their attempts to deceive citizens with misinformation, and abandon legislation based on the lies that undermine our democracy.”

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott vetoes slate of Democratic-led bills

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott shot down a total of 20 bills over this year’s legislative session, including a number of Democratic-led legislative priorities with bipartisan support: two criminal justice reform bills, a bill that would have banned the use of heavy chains to keep dogs tethered and a bill that would have required middle school students to learn about how to identify domestic abuse in their family and dating lives. 

According to the Texas Tribune, Abbott, a Republican, vetoed 13 bills sponsored by Democrats and seven sponsored by Republicans — a record veto low for Abbott since he took office in 2015. 

Among the two criminal justice measures Abbott shot down was H.B. 686, which according to the Tribune, would have taken into account special considerations when it comes to youth inmates vying for parole. Specifically, the bill aimed to weigh “the diminished culpability of juveniles, as compared to that of adults” and “the greater capacity of juveniles for change, as compared to that of adults.”

The bill, sponsored by a Democrat and supported by a bipartisan caucus, was ultimately vetoed by Abbott over fears that it would conflict with the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure, “which would result in confusion and needless, disruptive litigation.”

Also vetoed was criminal justice measure S.B. 281, which would have prohibited in court the admissibility of statements made under hypnosis. Over the past several decades the practice, termed “forensic hypnosis,” has been widely criticized for its unreliability. 

As one Texas judge said back in 1987: “The problem with hypnosis … is that it tends greatly to facilitate not only the retrieval of genuinely remembered data, but also construction of false but nevertheless plausible data to fill in gaps in true memory.”

According to a Dallas Morning News investigation from last year, forensic hypnosis has been employed by Texas law enforcement 1,800 times over the past 40 years. 

Abbott specifically took issue with a provision in the bill that would have barred the use of statements made after the hypnosis had already taken place, claiming that the line item “would dramatically expand [the bill’s] scope in an unacceptable way.”

In addition, an anti-animal abuse law – S.B. 474 – met its end at the tip of Abbott’s pen. The measure, known as the Safe Outdoor Dogs Act, would would have criminalized the use of heavy chains or short lines to tether dogs and made two violations of the restriction a Class B misdemeanor, punishable by a $2,000 fine and up to three months in jail. 

Abbott vetoed the bill on the grounds that Texas law already had measures addressing animal cruelty against dogs, claiming S.B. 474’s provisions were too extreme.

“Texans love their dogs, so it is no surprise that our statutes already protect them by outlawing true animal cruelty,” he wrote. “Texas is no place for this kind of micro-managing and over-criminalization.”

Shelby Bobosky, the executive director of the Texas Humane Legislative Network, told the Guardian that the network was “devastated” by Abbott’s move.

“Governor Abbott says that the current Texas statute already protects dogs, but this bill – which was carried with active support from sheriffs, law enforcement and animal control officers – would have clarified the vague language that makes the statute completely unenforceable.”

Last week, Abbott also vetoed another Democratic-backed bill that would have required public middle and high school teachers to provide their students with guidance on how to identify signs of abuse in their families and relationships. According to the San Antonio Express-News, lessons would be given at least once in middle school and twice in high school. 

In vetoing the bill, Abbot said that it “fails to recognize the right of parents to opt their children out of the instruction.”

“I have vetoed similar legislation before on this ground, because we must safeguard parental rights regarding this type of instruction.”

The bill’s sponsor, state Sen. Royce West, D, expressed dismay at the outcome but was hopeful a solution could be found in the next legislative session.

Corporations like Amazon pay big bucks for “union avoidance” — and it all happens in the dark

Over the past year, we’ve seen Amazon, the e-commerce Goliath which employs 1.3 million people (roughly equivalent to the entire population of Dallas), launch one of the most aggressive anti-union campaigns in modern corporate history, successfully quashing a months-long employee-led organizing effort at a company warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. 

That saga began early in 2021, when Amazon learned that its 5,800 warehouse workers in Bessemer were considering a contract with the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. That prompted the company to roll out a series of union-busting tactics that varied in effectiveness and sophistication. 

Amazon inundated its Alabama employees with sometimes-confrontational text messages and posters preaching the ills of unions, and forced them to attend “captive audience” meetings, where representatives delivered sober lectures on the downside of an organizing drive. In some cases, workers were compelled to have to one-on-one sitdowns with managers, where they’d be cajoled into voting against the effort. Amazon even coordinated with Bessemer city officials to change a traffic signal so union organizers couldn’t get too close to the warehouse. 

It worked. In April, after months of political buildup, Amazon’s Bessemer workforce overwhelmingly voted against forming a union. Labor activists accused the company of coercive tactics designed to scare its workers into submission, but many of them didn’t mention — and perhaps didn’t even realize — that Amazon management didn’t come up with that strategy all on its own. Hardly anyone discussed the role of Morgan Lewis, the “union avoidance” law firm that almost certainly designed and directed a detailed plan to defeat the organizing drive in Alabama.  

We don’t know for certain what role Morgan Lewis played, because everything about the union-avoidance business happens in the dark, and firms like Morgan remain almost invisible to the public and the mainstream press. They are believed in legal and business circles to wield immense influence in union-busting campaigns — but there’s not much reliable public information by which to gauge the scope of that influence, or to put a price tag on these firms’ campaigns. 

According to a 2019 estimate by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), U.S. employers spend nearly $340 million per year on union avoidance services. The EPI also found that by the early 2000s, about 75% of all employers facing union elections involving 50 or more voters retained a union avoidance consultant. It appears there are four big law firms that dominate the business: Littler Mendelson, Ogletree Deakins, Jackson Lewis and Fisher Phillips. 

Firms like these specialize in delivering advice to their client companies employers on how to extinguish union efforts and push the envelope of labor law without violating it, says Catherine Fisk, a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley.

“There are these fine distinctions in what can be said and not be said” when it comes to employers discouraging employees from joining a union, Fisk told Salon. “The law has essentially incentivized companies to walk right up to the line of threatening their workforce.”

Employers “pay lawyers a great deal of money to tell them how to threaten without ‘threatening,’ coerce without ‘coercing’ and, above all, make sure that employees only hear one side of the story,” she explained. 

In recent years, labor advocates have railed against many of the questionable practices involved in “union avoidance,” in which employers observe the letter of labor law while coming right to the edge of outright “coercion,” a practice forbidden by the National Labor Relations Act. 

One such method involves the “captive audience” meetings mentioned above, where employers force workers to attend mandatory “informational” sessions designed to dissuade them from unionizing. (Since such meetings occur on the clock and workers are paid their normal wage to attend, they don’t violate labor laws.) Virtually all such meetings take place in private without union representatives present, and in some cases can leave workers feeling threatened.

Michael J. Lotito, co-chair of Littler Mendelson’s Workplace Policy Institute, told Salon that such meetings can fairly be considered “informational,” because sometimes “the union has not provided the individuals with a copy of its constitution.”

Worker testimonies have suggested a markedly different story. 

In 2014, a leaked recording of one of Target’s captive audience videos (originally released by Gawker) offered a glimpse into the subtle wording employed by company representatives that sought to discourage employees from unionizing. The video explains: “If Target faced rigid union contracts like some of our competitors, our ability to serve our guests could suffer dramatically — and with fewer guests, what happens to our team?” If employees voted to unionize, the video continued, “chances are [it] would change our fast, fun and friendly culture, with their way of doing business.” 

According to an EPI study from 2009, about 90% of employers facing union election campaigns used captive audience meetings between 1999 and 2003. The study also found that about 70% of employers held “supervisory one-on-ones,” where employees would sit down individually with managers to discuss their union efforts. 

Rebecca Kolins Givan, an associate professor at the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers University, told Salon that union avoidance law firms have “perfected” a “convoluted application of labor law where the difference between saying something legal and illegal is essentially impossible to discern for anyone except highly, highly trained lawyers but keeps the clients on the right side of the law.”

She provided a run-of-the-mill example: “If you say, ‘If you vote in a union, the plant will close,’ that’s illegal. But if you say, ‘If you vote in a union, the plant could close,’ that would be legal. To the workers, those two statements are indistinguishable.”

As previously mentioned, a large part of what keeps the union avoidance industry running is the fact that corporations are able to retain legal services quietly and with almost no public scrutiny. That’s possible, at least in part, because of lobbying efforts that curtailed the “persuader rule,” a legal requirement that could compel union-avoidance law firms to publicly disclose the details of their services to corporate clients.

In 2016, the Obama administration fought for an expanded version of the persuader rule — and encountered stiff opposition from the American Bar Association and several major law firms, who lobbied against the rule, writing to Congress that it would “seriously undermine both the confidential attorney-client relationship and employers’ fundamental right to legal counsel.”

A coalition of 23 law professors wrote a letter to Congress, however, to argue precisely the opposite, contending that the Obama-era persuader rule could “exist comfortably within the lawyer’s obligations” under the ABA’s rules of professional conduct.

Though that rule was never actually applied, it was informally shot down later that year by a federal judge, who called the rule “defective at its core.” That judge heavily drew on talking points provided by the union-avoidance industry and the ABA, writing that the Obama-era rule “contains reporting requirements that are inconsistent with and undermine the attorney-client relationship and the confidentiality of that relationship,” as Bloomberg Law noted. In 2018, the rule was officially axed by the Department of Labor under then-President Trump. 

Perhaps most controversially, the rule would have required law firms to disclose advice they provided to employers about union-busting, even if the law firm did not have direct contact with employees. Labor rights advocates have argued that merely providing “advice” should not create an exemption from the reporting requirement. 

“When lawyers are providing legal services in connection with certain kinds of activity,” Fisk said, “they can be required to disclose the fact of their representation. For example, they have to register as lobbyists if they’re engaged in lobbying activity. The persuader rule does no more than that.”

Givan echoed that sentiment, observing that there are many “federal regulations around transparency and reporting, and this doesn’t seem to be out of the ordinary.” She continued, “It just seems to be closing a loophole in a regulation that’s been on the books for decades. It seems overly dramatic to say that closing a loophole compromises something as significant as attorney-client privilege.”

Union-avoidance lawyers, unsurprisingly, have responded by claiming that the Obama-era rule would have imposed a substantial burden on both them and their clients. Lolito told Salon that rule would have created a “massive reporting obligation.” 

That does seem to overstate the case. The Obama-era reporting requirements would have involved making public a client’s name, the nature of the legal services provided and the fees charged. Givan observed that the real issue here might be public relations, meaning that if such details were widely known, union-avoidance firms and their clients could face significant blowback, which may be why they’re so intent on fending off the persuader rule. 

The ABA, for its part, has insisted it “is not taking sides on a union-versus-management dispute” by lobbying against the persuader rule, only taking a principled stand  in support of “defending the confidential attorney-client relationship and right to counsel.” 

Fisk called the bar association’s position “wrong as a matter of law,” noting that “the fact of representation is not privileged under the attorney-client privilege.” She continued, “Lawyers never like to disclose anything they don’t want to disclose. The ABA has long advocated for lawyers to be exempt from various disclosure requirements because the ABA is controlled by lawyers.”

Givan agreed, saying that the ABA seems to have “engineered a justification to protect their business.”

Lolito, the attorney with union-avoidance firm Littler Mendelson, essentially tried to flip the script in an interview with Salon, saying that avoidance services are necessary and important because unions are often dishonest about what they’re offering to employees. “If unions were under an obligation to be completely transparent about what it is they provide employees with respect to information before someone signs a card or submits to a union,” he said, “the [pro-union] argument may have some validity to it.”

There have certainly been cases of prominent union leaders being charged with corruption, including racketeering, bribery and fraud. So it’s not unreasonable to argue that unions are sometimes less than forthcoming about how members’ dues are spent. Earlier this month, former United Auto Workers president Gary Jones was sentenced to 28 months in prison for his part in a $1.5 million embezzlement scheme — and his predecessor, Dennis Williams, was sentenced on related charges in May. But it would be profoundly unfair to suggest that such betrayals of trust are representative of the union movement as a whole.  

Democrats in Congress have recently tried to revive the persuader rule as part of the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act), which expands protections granted to workers under the National Labor Relations Act. This new bill, which proposes stiff penalties on companies that try to coerce workers to oppose a union drive or that retaliate against workers who support one, would ban forced attendance at “captive audience” meetings, and would reinstate the persuader rule and require union-avoidance firms to disclose more information about their services. 

The bill passed the House last year, but faces a steep uphill battle in the Senate, given the dearth of GOP support and the unbreakable wall of the filibuster. Various lobbying efforts against the PRO Act’s persuader rule portion have emerged from predictable sources, as the Daily Poster has reported. 

Union advocates haven’t given up the fight. As Vox reports, dozens of unions have lined up in support of the bill, along with such progressive advocacy groups as MoveOn, Indivisible, Democratic Socialists of America, the Working Families Party and the Sunrise Movement.

If passed, the PRO Act would establish the fundamental principle that knowing about union-avoidance practices is a matter of public interest. Although the entire issue is by definition legalistic and wonky, Fisk insists that it’s important. “The public has a right to know that Amazon has retained Ogletree or Littler and paid them X million dollars in connection with persuading workers to vote against a union,” she said, because in such instances a major corporation is “spending company money in ways that affect the public interest.”

Televangelist Jim Bakker ordered to pay $150K for hawking fake COVID-19 “cure”

Longtime televangelist Jim Bakker and his Missouri-based ministry on Tuesday were ordered to pay $156,000 in restitution to listeners duped into purchasing a phony COVID-19 “cure” hawked by the prominent Trump supporter.

“The lawsuit alleged that Bakker and Morningside Church Productions, which does business as Jim Bakker Show Ministry, hawked a product called ‘Silver Solution’ that they claimed could kill or deactivate the coronavirus and boost people’s immune systems,” KCUR, the local NPR affiliate in Kansas City, reported on Wednesday. 

The settlement stems from a lawsuit filed in March 2020 by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt’s office over the sale of the product “Optivida Silver Solution.” Court records indicate that the settlement requires Bakker to refund those who purchased the product — and he still has nearly $90,000 to go.

At the height of the pandemic, viewers were doling out “donations” of either $80 or $125 in exchange for the fake COVID-19 cure, which Bakker shipped directly to their homes.

“During a broadcast of the show that aired on Feb. 12, 2020, Sherill Sellman, who was identified as a ‘naturopathic doctor’ and ‘natural health expert,’ said, ‘Silver Sol has been proven by the government that it has the ability to kill every pathogen it has ever been tested on, including SARS and HIV,'” according to KCUR, despite there being no medical or peer-reviewed data to suggest there a cure for COVID-19 exists. The Food and Drug Administration send Bakker a letter following the February segment asking him to cease advertising the product, which it stressed was not a legitimate cure for COVID-19.

Another clause in the settlement bans Bakker and his firm from continuing to sell the “Silver Solution” to “diagnose, prevent, mitigate, treat or cure any disease or illness.”

Bakker wasn’t the only one who saw an opportunity to cash in on the pandemic by selling dubious “cures” to his audience.

Far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, also sold similar products, including “SuperSilver Whitening Toothpaste” and “SuperSilver Wound Dressing Gel,” which were billed as fast-track COVID-19 cures in a bottle. The Federal Trade Commission and the FDA both ordered Jones to halt sales of the products from his website, though, notably, neither ordered the far-right Sandy Hook school shooting denier to pay back those victims.

Ohio Republican official charged with felony for voter fraud

According to NBC News, Edward Snodgrass, trustee in Porter Township, has admitted to committing voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Court records show that Snodgrass is said to have forged his deceased father’s signature on an absentee ballot and, later, voted again himself.

While the 57-year-old refused to say which candidate he cast ballots for, he argued that “it would not be accurate to characterize what he did as “just Trump voter fraud.” Making a futile attempt to justify his actions, Snodgrass claimed he “was simply trying to execute a dying man’s wishes.”

Morrow County Assistant Prosecutor David Homer, the veteran Ohio prosecutor handling Snodgrass’ case, revealed just how rare this occurrence is. Although he has more than three decades of professional experience, he admitted that this is a first even for him. “I’ve been doing this since the 1980s, and this is the first one I’ve seen like this,” Homer said.

Although Snodgrass was initially hit with a fourth-degree felony charge for illegal voting and faces the possibility of a minimum six months behind bars and a fine, the publication has confirmed that he has not agreed to any form of a deal.

“It ain’t over till the guy pleads guilty and that’s July the 9th,” Homer said.

The charges brought against Snodgrass come months after Republican lawmakers’ repeated claims of voter fraud despite having very little evidence to submit their arguments. Amid former President Donald Trump’s post-election legal battle, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose (R) released the details of an audit conducted in the state which confirmed election results were 99.98% accuracy rate.

In an email, he also pushed back against Trump’s baseless claims.

“In fact, what is typical about this crime is that it is so at odds with the typical claims of voter fraud that we hear from Donald Trump and other (usually Republican) politicians,” he said in an email. “The fact is, very few people commit voter fraud and when they do it usually looks like this: one person casting an additional vote through a strange series of circumstances that gave him an opportunity he shouldn’t have taken. And he got caught.”

Charges may be near for Roger Stone over Jan. 6 Capitol riot, legal expert says

Longtime Republican operative Roger Stone, who allegedly owes nearly $2 million in back taxes, is reportedly still on the Justice Department’s radar for his purported role in organizing the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

Alongside right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, Stone is now being investigated by federal prosecutors over his role in organizing and inciting the attempted Jan. 6 insurrection — an allegation he refutes.

News that was previously reported by The Washington Post near the end of February found new life on Twitter early this week when former United States Attorney-turned-Los Angeles Times legal affairs columnist Harry Litman tweeted, “Just wouldn’t be a real scandal and outrage without the presence of, you guessed it, Roger Stone, whom DOJ now investigating for his role in 1/6 insurrection.” 

Litman followed up his statement Monday on MSNBC, where he discussed the ongoing DOJ investigations into Stone and Jones. 

“I think they are leaving no stone unturned to kind of portray and determine the color of what happened here,” he said. “Were the insurrectionists influenced by staff, members of Congress, Trump loyalists like Roger Stone and Alex Jones?”

While Jones and Stone didn’t actually enter the Capitol building themselves, according to footage circulating online, Litman said investigators could be looking into whether the provocateurs incited Trump superfans ahead of the deadly events that day. 

“They were not just there. They made really incendiary comments and, look, we already do have a conspiracy,” he said. “Nine people have been charged, so anyone, including Stone, Jones, [Ali] Alexander who adopted that unlawful purpose and did any overt act would be guilty of conspiracy.

“In the case of a Stone, we know from previous conduct that the [Justice] Department isn’t spoiling generally to go after him and former Trump people, but the paramount goal here is to really leave, forgive the expression, no stone unturned with respect to Jan. 6.”

The longtime Republican strategist strongly dienes any wrongdoing stemming from the events that day. 

“I have no involvement whatsoever in the illegal events of Jan. 6,” Stone told Salon Monday night.

Litman finished his segment on MSNBC by speculating that charges could be in the pipeline for Stone and Jones over the radicalization of their followers. “Could it progress to potential charges? You bet,” he said.

In a Tuesday afternoon appearance on the right-wing cable network Newsmax, Stone hinted at the U.S. Secret Service possibly being behind the Capitol riot carried out by Trump supporters — while also giving air to the baseless theory that the FBI was behind the attempted insurrection. “The Secret Service does not do political chores. [They] do not perform logistical tasks. I find it rather suspicious,” Stone said. 

Defense secretary rips Matt Gaetz over ‘spurious’ critical race theory claims

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Wednesday disputed Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) after he suggested that the U.S. military is practicing critical race theory.

Gaetz confronted Austin about the academic theory during a hearing before the House Armed Services Committee.

According to the Florida Republican, critical race theory is the “number one concern” of military officers.

“I’ve heard those sentiments most frequently from units that are majority-minority,” Gaetz claimed. “How should the Department of Defense think about critical race theory?”

“I don’t know what the issue of critical race theory is,” Austin replied. “We do not teach critical race theory. We don’t embrace critical race theory. And I think that’s a spurious conversation. We are focused on extremist behaviors and not ideology, not people’s thoughts, not people’s political orientation.”

“And thanks for your anecdotal input,” he continued. “But I would say that I’ve gotten ten times that amount of input — 50 times that amount of input on the other side that has said, ‘We’re glad to have had the ability to have a conversation without ourselves and our leadership.'”

Gaetz interrupted: “It may be that you’re receiving that input in the ratios you describe because it was your directive. It may be people are concerned about criticizing your decision.”

The congressman then accused Austin of “hiring a critical race theorist” as an adviser.

“This is the first I’ve ever heard [Bishop Garrison] being described as a critical race theorist,” Austin responded. “Let me just share one thing you brought up, Congressman, about the input that comes to me. I trust my leadership from top to bottom that they will give me fair and balanced and unvarnished input.”

“And for you to say people are telling me what I want to hear, I get it,” he added. “You know, maybe they are telling you what you want to hear.”

Watch the video below:

George R.R. Martin regrets not staying ahead of “Game of Thrones”

“A Song of Ice and Fire” author George R.R. Martin was back in Chicago earlier this week, getting an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, Northwestern University. While he was visiting, he gave an interview to local station WTTW, where he talked about writing, fame, and more.

Naturally, WTTW asked him what he thought about “Game of Thrones” — the tremendously popular HBO series adapted from his books — two years out from the ending. “It was the popular television show in the world for a time. It won more Emmys than any other show in television history,” he said. “I’m very pleased to be associated with it. It also made me famous, which I have mixed about feelings about. I think it was Bill Murray who said if you dream of fame and fortune, try just fortune first. There is something to say for that. Fame is definitely a double-edged sword.”

That said, Martin has no plans to leave that story behind. “I’ve been writing stories about Westeros and the people who live there, the Seven Kingdoms, since 1991,” he said. “It’s such a huge part of my life at this point . . . It’s transformed my life, for good or for ill. It is where I am. And I do love Westeros, I love telling stories about it, so there’s a lot more stories to tell.”

Those stories include a number of “Game of Thrones” prequel series that Martin is helping develop — he thinks that the first, House of the Dragon, will “probably be on next spring” — and the next, long-awaited book in this series, “The Winds of Winter.” Fans have been waiting over a decade for that one, and Martin is as frustrated as they are. “[L]ooking back, I wish I’d stayed ahead of the books,” he said.

When they began [“Game of Thrones”], I had four books already in print, and the fifth one came out just as the series was starting in 2011. I had a five-book head start, and these are gigantic books . . . I never thought they would catch up with me, but they did. They caught up with me and passed me! That made it a little strange, because now the show was ahead of me and the show was going in somewhat different directions. I’m still working on the book, but you’ll see my ending when that comes out.

When that comes out.

How George R.R. Martin’s Chicago experiences inspired “Game of Thrones”

The whole interview is pretty cool, as Martin discusses his days as a writer and how some experiences at Northwestern made their way into his stories, like how Chicago’s infamous blizzard of 1967 inspired life at the Wall. “They had to dig trenches from the door [of the dorm] to the doors of other buildings,” Martin remembered. “It was like the trench system in World War I, except instead of mud, it was made of snow. You would be in this trench with the walls higher than your head!”

You can watch the full interview here.

Impossible Burgers, pea protein and cricket flour: How Silicon Valley changed what we eat

At least a few times a week, I’ll open my email to find a press release that illustrates the ever-growing overlap between food and technology. Restaurants are releasing non-fungible tokens in the form of videos of food being prepared. Companies are betting that artificial intelligence can grocery shop for you. Plus, there seems to be a new nut or seed milk company launching at every turn.

The industrialization of what’s on our plates has been a big topic among chefs, environmentalists and food access advocates for decades. And it has increasingly been in the spotlight as products from Beyond Meat and Impossible Burger go mainstream. In her book “Technically, Food: Inside Silicon Valley’s Mission to Change What We Eat,” author Larissa Zimberoff examines what it means when start-ups and scientists working in futuristic labs create new food categories, such as milk made without cows and eggs developed without chickens. 

Zimberoff spoke with Salon Food about what inspired her to write this story, the promise (and ultimate downfall) of cricket protein and what the tensions between whole foods and technology mean for the average home cook. 

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length. 

You discuss it some in the introduction to “Technically, Food,” but what was the impetus for writing this book? 

There are sort of two pieces to why I finally wrote this book. The first was because I was covering food tech for the last five to seven years, and during that time, everyone was asking me about what I was eating and what I was writing about. They wanted to know, “Was it delicious? Was it healthy? Was it good for them? Good for the environment?” It wasn’t just my family and friends asking — it was strangers. 

I was in New York at the time when I initially sold the book proposal, but I was also spending time in the Bay Area and [food tech] was really starting to get bigger, right? The investment was starting to become a bigger thing. 

Secondly, I have Type 1 diabetes, which I talk about in the book, and that makes me look at food differently. My expectations from food are different, and I have much higher expectations. I don’t like things that are too sweet. I don’t like things that have high glycemic carbohydrates. I have more questions for my food. You know, I have to look at the nutrition facts panel religiously. 

So, I felt like these two things — people wanting to know more, and I was a person who had questions — led me to be like, “I’m going to do this book.” 

There is so much happening in the world of food technology. How did you determine what facets of the market you wanted to focus on? 

Yes, that is such a good question. One of the chapters that’s not in this book is about bugs — insects. It was a conversation that I had with my agent, and we went back and forth. It was one of the areas in food tech that I had started covering early on. Crickets were really a thing for a bit. There was cricket flour, food bars, protein bars. I was so interested in crickets, and I was pitching crickets to publications. And — you’ll get this — for some reason, I was either too advanced or too behind. Like, I’d pitch, and they’d be like, “Meh.” Or I’d pitch, and they’d be like, “We just did a cricket article.” 

I felt like I just kept missing out on crickets. I never wrote a story about it, even though I had done so much research on it. This is easily like seven years ago. I didn’t write about it, and then I really felt like it fizzled out. I just didn’t see it being food at scale for humans. Of course, it’s culturally in our diets in different places in the world, but that “ick factor” just never went away. I just felt like people weren’t going to eat bug-based flour-based cereal. I think that as a solution for feeding fish and aquafarms or animals, that sounds great. There are investments picking up that sector of insects. 

So, really for this book, I had to ask, “What is going to be big? What are consumers actually eating? What do we want to be eating?” 

In Chapter 2, there is a line in the “Burger Competition” section where you write, “Beyond’s burger has millions of dollars invested in its formulation and an assurance to investors that it was technology, not food, that made it better than the real thing.” Do you see that attitude play out elsewhere in Silicon Valley?

Oh, absolutely. These companies aren’t food companies. They’re all technology. That is how they bring investors in. Investors want to know that they have technology, that they’re applying for patents, that there’s a reason this company exists or a reason that someone can’t just come and knock it off. There are a few companies that feel more “food forward” or have a sort of culinary edge, but predominantly, it was about getting investors. 

You need technology to prove that you’ve got something different. 

I want to talk about pea milk [laughs]. First off, I haven’t tried it yet. What is it like? 

Oh, gosh. It’s delicious. It’s so creamy and thick. I grew up drinking non-fat milk, which is terrible and thin. 

White water. 

Yes, white water. It was the worst. I also grew up eating margarine, and I think that experience — well, I eventually stopped drinking cow’s milk entirely long ago. You know, non-dairy milk is like the gateway to getting people to go plant-based because it’s so easy, right? I think that I first converted to soy milk. Then it was rice milk, which is too sweet. Then almond milk, which is, again, too thin and doesn’t work in coffee or tea. So, [the pea milk] Ripple — I don’t know why it doesn’t have the Oatly cred. 

But I think Ripple has kind of little hints of vegetal, and it’s still peas. They just weren’t able to get cool and hip like oats. Oats lend themselves to morning and breakfasts. But it’s creamy — it’s got a great mouthfeel, and it has a great protein profile. So, if someone is plant-based and they asked me what to drink after working out, I think Ripple chocolate milk is a great solution for that because it’s going to have everything you need. 

When you visited Adam Lowry, the CEO of Ripple Foods, you had jokingly envisioned a headline like, “Are you prepared to drink pea milk?” As you said, there’s kind of a “prepping for a bomb shelter” sense to it. How do you think food items shift from that to becoming part of an average, daily shopping list? How do they shed the “bomb shelter vibe”? 

Oh, my gosh. “Shedding the Bomb Shelter.” That’d be such a good headline. You know, when Impossible first launched, it was with chefs. It was very “foodie,” and it was very elite, right? People were tracking it down to taste it, and when they got into fast food, it was kind of a done deal. They went to fast food. They went into supermarkets. They now have direct-to-consumer on their website. They’re really part of everybody’s life when grandmas know Impossible Foods or Beyond Burger. 

You know, it’s interesting because Beyond Meat came out with chicken. But [Beyond Meat CEO] Ethan Brown went the supermarket route, and I think it took longer to get onto everyone’s tongue than Impossible because Impossible started with the chefs, the trendsetters. 

So, I think companies are looking like, “Do I go to trendsetters? Or do I go direct-to-consumer like Prime Roots, whose koji bacon is only direct-to-consumer?” They occasionally have stuff at Whole Foods, but they’re really focused on direct-to-consumer. Younger people, younger founders – they’re starting businesses on Instagram. 

All the companies look to Impossible and Beyond, though, and thank them for sort of paving the way. But they are starting to veer off into new forms of consumer shopping. 

I wanted to pose your own final question from the pea milk chapter to you: In 20 years, do you think this “pea technology” will be considered a good thing for humans? 

You know, we can just compare it to soy protein isolate. Soy has been in our diet since like the 40s, 50s, 60s and is a complete mainstay in our diet. While I don’t think that fractionated plants are still whole plants — I don’t see them as being as beneficial for us — we have been using soy protein isolate in foods for so long, for decades and decades. I haven’t seen anything that proposes it’s bad for us. I think a whole foods diet is what’s best for us, but I don’t think having these isolates or this protein from plants is necessarily a bad thing. 

It’s just like the volume of what you’re consuming. I think peas, you know, because it’s not GMO and because it isn’t a monocrop yet — although it’s widely grown — I do think that there are things that make it, in my mind, a little bit better. 

I know that the pandemic threw off conference schedules and such, but in the chapter “Milk & Eggs,” you mention visiting the Future Food Tech conference in 2016 — before it had really blown up. How have conferences like that changed in the ensuing years? 

They’ve gotten a whole lot bigger, and they’re happening constantly. Where it used to be, I could attend all of them and attend them in single days. They’re not happening over multiple days and more frequently. I have one coming up called the Alternative Protein Conference, so they’re also niching down, right? You know, you might see a conference that’s just on seafood or just on mycoprotein, which is mycelium fungi. I can’t even keep up with it — that’s what’s happening. 

I think that chapter, in particular, really captures what I see as a main tension in this book between what most people would classify as “natural” and “synthetic” foods. How do you think that tension impacts everyday home cooks and eaters? 

While I have an opinion about food or what I want from food — that is, my expectations are much higher — I think that many home cooks are just looking for things like convenience, ease and things that are delicious. They want inexpensive — they’re looking for price parity and things that are easy-to-find and good. Like, that hasn’t changed. 

The sooner that any of these food tech companies can get to that, the more they’ll grow. So, Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat have really come down in price. Sometimes they’ve just dropped prices to drop prices, sort of like the Amazon model, right? They’re making things cheap just to get the consumers. 

That’s one of the things that I wanted the book to spotlight and be like, “Let’s talk about this.” Let’s think about this before it’s just happened — the industrialization of our food system, which happened after World War II. We wanted food untouched by humans. We wanted Wonder Bread that lasted for weeks and weeks and weeks. We wanted technology. 

Then we shifted to wanting more transparency, farm-to-table. There’s a tension because we’re losing that because technology is so exciting. And everyone is worried about the climate and the planet and saving the animals and there are almost too many things juggling for our attention. We each, as individuals, are going to be making decisions like, “What’s most important?” And that’s complicated. What’s going to win out? We don’t know. 

Larissa Zimberoff’s Technically Food: Inside Silicon Valley’s Mission to Change What We Eat is now available for purchase. 

DeSantis signs bill requiring survey of Florida students, professors on their political views

Public universities in Florida will be required to survey both faculty and students on their political beliefs and viewpoints, with the institutions at risk of losing their funding if the responses are not satisfactory to the state’s Republican-led legislature. 

The unprecedented project, which was tucked into a law signed Tuesday by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, is part of a long-running, nationwide right-wing push to promote “intellectual diversity” on campuses — though worries over a lack of details on the survey’s privacy protections, and questions over what the results may ultimately be used for, hover over the venture.

Based on the bill’s language, survey responses will not necessarily be anonymous — sparking worries among many professors and other university staff that they may be targeted, held back in their careers or even fired for their beliefs. 

According to the bill’s sponsor, state Sen. Ray Rodrigues, faculty will not be promoted or fired based on their responses, but, as The Tampa Bay Times reported Tuesday, the bill itself does not back up those claims.

The only details on the survey come via a passage over its purpose, to discover “the extent to which competing ideas and perspectives are presented” at public universities, and whether students “feel free to express beliefs and viewpoints on campus and in the classroom.”

“It used to be thought that a university campus was a place where you’d be exposed to a lot of different ideas,” DeSantis said at a press conference following the bill signing. “Unfortunately, now the norm is, these are more intellectually repressive environments. You have orthodoxies that are promoted, and other viewpoints are shunned or even suppressed.”

Republicans have long held that universities promote left-wing ideologies and discriminate against conservative students and staff.

Though the bill does not specify what the survey results will be used for, both DeSantis and Rodrigues suggested that the state could institute budget cuts if university students and staff do not respond in a satisfactory manner.

“That’s not worth tax dollars and that’s not something that we’re going to be supporting moving forward,” DeSantis said.

When pressed by reporters, the governor did not offer any specific examples of repression and discrimination faced by conservative students, simply saying that he knows “a lot of parents” who worry about their children being “indoctrinated” on campus.

Florida Senate President Wilton Simpson was more pointed in his criticism Tuesday at a meeting of the state university system’s Board of Governors, calling the institutions “socialism factories” — again without much detail on what makes the schools so left-wing. 

“We always hear about the liberal parts of the university system, and we don’t hear so much of that from the college system,” he said, according to The Tampa Bay Times.

In addition to the survey, the bill also prevents officials from limiting campus speech that “may be uncomfortable, disagreeable or offensive” — a measure that, as Democrats in the state Legislature pointed out, will also make it easier for groups like the KKK or the Proud Boys to hold events on campus. 

In a conversation with the Miami Herald this April, Barney Bishop, one of the top lobbyists pushing the bill in Florida’s state legislature over the past year, shone a light on the justifications behind such measures — which he said were less about “intellectual diversity” and more concerned with maintaining the country’s conservative Christian identity in the face of younger, more diverse generations that share a dimmer view of religious right-wing orthodoxy.

Bishop also told the paper he “certainly hopes” the effort will expand into the K-12 system over time.

“I think the problem isn’t just in higher ed. The truth of the matter is that kids are being indoctrinated from an early age,” he said.

“I think that those of us who have diverse thinking and look at both sides of the issue, see that the way the cards are stacked in the education system, is toward the left and toward the liberal ideology and also secularism — and those were not the values that our country was founded on. Those are the values that we need to get our country back to.”

A Trump supporter could be the first Floridian prosecuted under Ron DeSantis’ new anti-protest law

A Florida man was arrested and charged with multiple felonies last Thursday after intentionally performing a “burnout” with his car over a Pride-themed mural painted on an intersection in Delray Beach, opening him up to become the first person charged under the state’s controversial new “anti-riot” bill pushed by Republicans.

Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed the bill meant to crack down on protests in the wake of the George Floyd uprisings earlier this year, just as the trial against former Minneapolis police officer Derick Chauvin was wrapping up. The legislation was heavily opposed by first amendment activists and Black lawmakers in the state. Now a young Trump supporter may be the first person entangled by the new law. 

Alexander Jerich, 20, is accused of deliberately making skid marks across a mural meant to commemorate the 2016 Pulse Nightclub shooting, in his Chevrolet Silverado. According to WPBF, Delray Beach Police have since charged Jerich with criminal mischief, reckless driving, and evidence of prejudice. Just prior to the incident, Jerich was allegedly participating in a pro-Trump rally in celebration of the former president’s birthday that was put together by the Palm Beach County Republican Executive Committee.

A witness told the police that heard someone holler “tear up that gay intersection” before Jerich shortly defaced the mural with his car. The incident was also caught on video, which allowed the police to identify Jerich, who turned himself in, through a license plate search. 

Rand Hoch, founder and president of the Palm Beach Human Rights Council, told WFOR that Jerich carried out “a deliberate act of violence against the LGBTQ community. We’ve made such progress here in the last 30 years on LGBTQ issues. To see someone do something like this took me by surprise.”

“Kudos to the Delray Beach Police Department for swiftly identifying and arresting this hateful criminal,” Hoch added. 

The city had just unveiled the mural two days before the incident, according to law enforcement, and paid north of $16,000 for its creation.

Jerich could now be subject to heightened penalties imposed by Florida’s new GOP-backed “anti-riot” law signed back in April. As WPEC’s Sam Kerrigan noted: “When it comes to this case, the key here is that this new anti-riot law also stops someone from damaging historic property or a memorial. And under the law, this new Pride mural in Delray Beach, here, qualifies as a memorial because it’s dedicated to the lives lost in the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando.” 

Hoch, too, suggested that Jerich could be charged under the new GOP measure.

“Jeopardy!” apologizes for using offensive, “misogynistic” nickname for medical condition

“Jeopardy!” has apologized for its use of an offensive nickname for a medical condition, used in one of its questions seen on Monday’s show. In the episode, guest-hosted by NBC journalist Savannah Guthrie, one category was “Plain-Named Maladies,” and asked a question about postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, or POTS, with the hint, “Postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome is also known as Grinch syndrome because this organ is too small.”

POTS affects blood circulation and can result in lightheadedness, fainting, and rapid heartbeat, and can be debilitating. The correct answer to the aforementioned question is, “What is the heart?”

But beyond what the clue was actually asking, its use of the dated, offensive nickname the “Grinch syndrome,” drew immediate attention and backlash. Some doctors had called POTS the Grinch syndrome, as a reference to the heartless antagonist of the classic “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” but actual people with POTS, who are more likely to be women, have called this comparison both inaccurate and offensive.

In a Tuesday tweet, the show has since apologized, writing, “Yesterday’s program included a clue about postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS). After hearing from the community, we found we used an outdated and inaccurate term for this disorder, and we apologize.”

Social media users called the term “bizarre” and “inaccurate,” noting no one really even uses the term, or ever has used it. Dysautonomia International, a nonprofit that promotes awareness of nervous system disorders like POTS, also criticized “Jeopardy” for calling POTS the “Grinch syndrome, noting the inaccuracy and “misogyny” of this term.

“Promoting outdated misogynistic terms to describe a debilitating autonomic nervous system disorder that impacts millions of Americans is not cool. We request an apology on behalf of our community. Do better,” Dysautonomia International tweeted on Monday evening. 

In a follow-up tweet, the organization added, “Grinch syndrome is an offensive term. Can you imagine Jeopardy making light of cancer or MS [multiple sclerosis] patients with a ‘funny’ name for their debilitating health condition? Not acceptable.”

The organization has since accepted the trivia show’s Tuesday apology, and called on “Jeopardy” to include more “autonomic nervous system clues in the future.”

How period jokes and stories are changing the world on “the quintessential intersectional issue”

Bestselling author and award-winning journalist Anita Diamant still remembers the 2019 Oscars, when “Period. End of Sentence,” now streaming on Netflix, won for best documentary short film. As one might surmise from the title, the short chronicles women’s and girls’ struggles to access menstrual hygiene products around the world.

“I was watching the Oscars when it won, and I jumped off the couch,” she recounted to Salon. “The women who got it, and the director, who’s like 27, raised the award and said, ‘I can’t believe a movie about periods just won an Oscar!'” 

In that moment, Diamant was especially inspired by how the documentary’s director, Rayka Zehtabchi, didn’t whisper her joy that a period-focused project had won an Oscar, but rather, “said it loud and proud.”

Shortly after the film’s critical triumph, Diamant, who had previously reported on menstrual health and barriers to access menstrual hygiene products, says she was invited to write a “book companion” for it. Her book “Period. End of Sentence.: A New Chapter in the Fight for Menstrual Justice” (Scribner) was released in May.

Diamant’s book is a wide-ranging collection of essays, research, reporting, and personal stories on the burgeoning, young people-led menstrual equity movement, which strives toward bridging social and economic barriers to menstrual hygiene products, as well as dismantling period stigma and shame. 

Can period jokes change the world?

Yes, Diamant’s book is enlightening, demonstrating how the lack of access to hygiene products can push young girls out of school, and the lack of menstrual products in many prisons and jails. But it’s also undeniably funny.

“I’m a huge fan of humor to poke holes in stigma,” Diamant said. More recently, she points out, women writers and comedians have been reclaiming men’s sexist period jokes with their own menstrual humor on screen. 

“‘Broad City’ is a great example of this, those women just went to town on menstruation and broke all the taboos,” she said. “And ‘Big Mouth,’ which is a cartoon show — there’s a whole episode about a girl getting her period at camp, and it’s hysterically funny. It doesn’t apologize, it’s just about a girl trying to figure out how to put a tampon in, and the tampons talk to her, she has this fantasy that when she goes swimming, the menstrual pad becomes the size of a whale.”

This kind of humor, Diamant says, “happens when [women] get to tell our own stories, not only in books and academia, but also popular culture. . . . It’s really powerful, and comedians, women comedians, have been at the forefront of this.”

Amid more and more onscreen representation and storytelling around sexual and reproductive health care like abortion — think: HBO’s “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” and “Unpregnant,” or Hulu’s “Plan B” — Diamant also thinks her book has come out at a time of increasing normalization of menstruation in media.

“I turn on shows of any description and people mention menstruation and then move on, and it’s no big deal,” she said. “Nobody snickers, nobody goes, ‘Oh, are you relieved because you’re not pregnant?’ So, that’s what it used to be, any mention of menstruation was either a PMS joke or a pregnancy question. Now it’s much more matter of fact.”

Storytelling, media representation, and cultural change around narratives of menstruation are so important, not just for the sake of entertainment and undeniably hilarious jokes, Diamant says. They can also be a catalyst for meaningful policy change, and progress for menstrual equity.

“I don’t think any one story changes the world,” she said, “but rather, it’s the cumulative effect of women telling women’s stories, and people who are not in the center of history telling their own stories — people in the working class, people of color, queer people.

“Once we start telling our stories, and they reach the public so it’s not a niche thing, that’s how change is made,” Diamant continued. “Not by any one book, not by any one author. It takes more than a village — it takes a lot of voices.”

How cultural change has paved the way for policy change

The cultural progress we’ve seen around menstrual health in recent years has gone hand-in-hand with progress in our policies, too. For example, several states have recently passed legislation to slash the sales tax on menstrual products, which has been widely protested for its implication that period products are non-essential — not to mention the fact male sexual health products like Viagra don’t have this tax.

“In Texas, you don’t have to pay sales tax on buying a gun license, and in Louisiana, you don’t pay tax on mardi gras beads, but [in both states] you do have to pay sales tax on pads and tampons,” Diamant said. 

The sales tax might seem small, but Diamant points out that it can add up, and can be as much as 9% on top of the sticker price of a box of pads and tampons.

“If your family household has to make a choice between food and menstrual products, it has to be food,” she said. “That means women and girls have to fend for themselves. That means stuffing toilet paper down your pants, trying to spend your day at school or work or life always worried you’re going to bleed through.”

While recent activism to end what’s popularly known as the “tampon tax” has excited Diamant, in “Period. End of Sentence,” she also explores how much more work remains to be done on the local, federal and even global levels. For example, while federal law requires federal prisons to ensure period products are available, many state and city-run prisons and jails aren’t required to abide by this. Diamant’s book comes one year after nationwide protests against police violence erupted across the country, and she examines how widespread arrest and jailing of protesters subjected many to discomfort and embarrassment from lack of access to clean menstrual products.

Some incarcerated folks earn just $0.75 or less from prison labor per day, and in some prisons that offer menstrual products, costs of these products can range from $2.63 for 24 pads to $4 for eight tampons. 

Access to clean menstrual hygiene products doesn’t just affect someone’s physical comfort, self-esteem, and ability to go to school or work. It can also increase your likelihood of dangerous infections, cervical cancer, and other health conditions. “If you’re a woman of color and have a menstrual problem with your body, getting adequate medical care, and physicians and personnel to take your pain seriously, is historically and to this day, dismissed as less-than,” Diamant said. “There’s a whole lot of medical gaslighting about, ‘Oh, it’s just cramps, you just have to deal with it.’ Women suffer for years, some of them with serious endometriosis and other things.”

“A quintessential intersectional issue”

Diamant’s book focuses heavily on lack of access to menstrual products in prisons, immigration detainment centers, refugee camps, and among people experiencing homelessness, because, she notes, menstrual health justice “is the quintessential intersectional issue.”

“I know people hate that word, because they don’t understand it, but this is a place where all kinds of issues intersect to create pain and discomfort,” Diamant explained.

And yet, she also points out menstrual health issues pose a “problem in every zip code,” and not just prisons and poorer countries. “It’s not just ‘over there’ — there are people around the block from you wherever you live who are dealing with one issue or another around menstruation,” Diamant said. As “Period. End of Sentence” explores, people of all walks of life and even those with considerable privilege can face menstrual health inequities, if they unexpectedly get their period and are in a setting that doesn’t carry menstrual products.

The menstrual health justice movement resonates on a global scale, Diamant says, because all women and people who menstruate can see themselves in each other’s period stories. When the pandemic exacerbated barriers to get menstrual health products for many, and especially students who relied on their school campuses for access, Diamant recalls being inspired by the wave of community activism to support medical personnel in a hospital in Wuhan that was being overrun by COVID.

“[Medical personnel] were told menstrual products weren’t an essential product and they had to fend for themselves,” Diamant said. “Someone caught hold of this from the internet, and it became a big cause célèbre. They shipped an enormous number of pads to [the hospital], and it made the news. So, of course the government responded, because it was embarrassing for them — the government was shaming women for having these bodies that bleed.“

“Period. End of Sentence” isn’t Diamant’s first book exploring the complexities and politics of menstruation. Her 1997 novel “The Red Tent,” which offers a fictionalized account of the biblical character Dinah, daughter of Jacob and sister of Joseph, explores the community women build while they must take refuge in a tent for menstruating and giving birth. It’s in this tent that the women find support and community from their mothers, sisters and aunts. Unlike “Period. End of Sentence,” “The Red Tent” is a work of fiction — but both books show the community and power women and people who menstruate can find together, whether they’re sharing a physical space, or a movement for social change.

Period stories are unifying, whether from the perspective of a young girl in the global south who struggles in school without menstrual hygiene products, or a detained immigrant woman who’s denied these products, or even a woman in a corporate setting whose office bathroom doesn’t offer tampons and pads. “If you’ve ever had a period, you feel it, and it’s an outrage,” Diamant said. “I think that’s why those stories are so powerful. It’s easy to put yourself in those shoes — or rather, those underpants.”

“Period. End of Sentence” is now available at Bookshop and other booksellers. You can watch the documentary on Netflix or on YouTube.

First Capitol rioter to be convicted tells judge she learned from “Schindler’s List,” avoids jail

The first person convicted for participating in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol was sentenced on Wednesday. Anna Morgan-Lloyd, a 49-year-old Indiana grandmother, avoided jail time after she told the judge that she’s learned from watching films like “Schindler’s List” that her involvement in the attempted coup was wrong. 

Morgan-Lloyd’s attorney Heather Shaner appeared on CNN’s “New Day” on Wednesday to further explain that her client now has a library card and regrets her participation in the attack in Washington D.C. But CNN host John Berman pressed attorney Shaner to explain how Morgan-Lloyd’s participation and education from watching movies and reading books has absolved her client of her alleged crimes.

“What does that matter here?” Berman asked.

“What matters is from agreeing and being interested in getting a library card, reading books, taking civics courses online,” Shaner responded. “Anna acknowledged both to herself and to the court that there was a lot to learn about her individual responsibility and the relationship between a citizen’s rights and a citizen’s responsibility.”

“Was she suggesting that because she didn’t know enough about the Holocaust, that’s why she stormed the Capitol?” Berman pressed.

“No, of course not,” Shaner said. “I presented Anna and a number of my clients with a book list and they could choose to read.”

Morgan-Lloyd was pictured inside the Capitol on Jan 6, and according to a federal complaint visited the Capitol with her friend Dona Bissey, who has also been federally charged. Morgan-Lloyd even posted on Facebook, “I’m here. Best day ever. We stormed the capital building me and Dona Bissey were in the first 50 people in.”

“What does she believe is the truth about what happened at this point?” Berman asked.

Shaner explained that Morgan-Lloyd believes she was “uninformed and misinformed” and now understands that “her presence at the Capitol possibly empowered others who had more intentional ideas about what they were doing to behave violently and that was never her intention.”

Prosecutors, however, did not ask for incarceration, noting that Morgan-Lloyd already spent an “eye-opening” two days in jail. She was instead sentenced to three years of probation. She must also perform 40 hours of community service and pay $500 in restitution. 

A stunning “Strawberry Moon” will rise Thursday. Here’s what that means (and how to see it)

If you’ve ever seen a full moon in June, you may have noticed something a little off about it. The moon usually glows a bright snowy white. Yet the full moon during this month generally appears with an orange tint, as though it were made of stale cheddar. 

This is a phenomenon known as the “Strawberry Moon” and, in the year 2021, it is scheduled to happen on the night of Thursday, June 24.

But why the moniker “strawberry?”

The Strawberry Moon, specifically, generally refers to the full Moon in June — which is the last full Moon of spring, or the first of summer, depending on when it lands. Since the summer solstice landed on June 20 this year, this year’s Strawberry Moon is the first of summer. 

As for the orange tint, there’s an astronomical explanation. When the moon sits low in the sky, it appears redder, similar to how the sky in general appears red towards the horizon at sunset. 

“The color of the full moon depends on location,” Harvard University theoretical physicist Dr. Avi Loeb wrote to Salon. “At high latitudes, the full moon nearest the summer solstice shines through more atmosphere than at other times of the year, making it more likely to have a reddish color as a result of scattering. For this reason, the moon may appear red or pink when it is low in the sky, and is the same reason sunsets and sunrises have these colors.”

A full moon always appears in the sky almost directly opposite the sun — meaning that towards the solstice, when the sun is highest in the sky, the moon rises low in the sky just as the sun set, and thus appears reddish tinted by the atmosphere, as Loeb noted. 

The origins of the term Strawberry Moon date back about a hundred years. It became traditional to refer to this June full moon as the “Strawberry Moon” after the Maine Farmer’s Almanac began publishing Native American names for the moons during the Great Depression. Prior to that, it was often known to Westerners as the Mead Moon or the Honey Moon because the popular alcoholic beverage mead (which uses fermented honey) was associated with its appearance. That said, as the astronomy editor of The Old Farmers Almanac told Salon by email, it is important to understand that this is not an official scientific term.

“Each Native American tribe had their own name for each month’s Full Moon,” Bob Berman explained. “The Algonquin called the year’s sixth full moon the Strawberry Moon, as did some American colonists, though most termed it ‘The Rose Moon.’ But the Laguna tribe called this moon, ‘The Corn Moon,’ the Lakota Sioux called it ‘The Moon of Making Fat,’ while the Cheyenne labeled it ‘The Moon When the Bulls Are Rutting,’ et cetera.”

He added, “For astronomers (and NASA) there are only two accepted full moon names,” namely September’s Harvest Moon and the Hunter’s Moon in October.

Astronomically speaking, this particular Strawberry Moon is also a big deal because it will also arguably be the last supermoon — an occasion when the moon is at its closest point to Earth in orbit — to occur in 2021. Curiously, dubbing this moon a “supermoon” is debatable: Some authorities, such as the Farmer’s Almanac, regard a moon as “super” only when it is closer than 224,000 miles away from Earth. Tomorrow’s Strawberry Moon will be around 224,662 miles away, meaning it is 662 miles shy. (The moon is in an elliptical orbit around the Earth, and varies between being 252,700 miles away and 221,500 miles away. 224,662 miles is certainly on the closer end of that range, meaning it will appear in the sky larger than average).

In any case, the Strawberry Moon has been associated with people getting hitched, chickens laying basket upon basket of eggs, and harvests being particularly bountiful for “sweet” agricultural staples like strawberries. Throughout history, and in cultures from the indigenous Americas to the west, the Strawberry Moon has been linked to the most important and fundamental aspects of human life: farming and fertility. Indeed, the term “honeymoon” may even originate from the Strawberry Moon, either because of the popularity of June weddings or because it is a moon associated with sweet foods.

If you’re worried about missing the Strawberry Moon, you’ve got time to see it. It is expected to be visible in some form or other for roughly three days. Moon-tracking websites like timeanddate.com can help you figure out when and how to best view it in your area. Should that fail to pan out, take comfort in the knowledge that there are six more full moons scheduled for 2021: Buck Moon, Sturgeon Moon, Harvest Moon, Hunter’s Moon, Beaver Moon and Cold Moon. Each one is scheduled to occur once a month within that month’s final two weeks.

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