Trump’s former bodyguard becomes latest from Trumpworld entangled by Manhattan DA’s probe

New York prosecutors are probing whether a former bodyguard of Donald Trump’s benefited from tax-free corporate benefits as part of the city’s broader investigation into whether the Trump Organization skirted its tax obligations.

According to The Wall Street Journal, which interviewed several unnamed sources, the inquiry is centered on Matthew Calamari, who started working for Trump back in 1981 and now holds a position as a top executive at the Trump Organization.

In his 2004 book “Trump: How to Get Rich,” the former president claimed that Calamari, then his bodyguard, “had a lot more to offer than his job title warranted.” Calamari would be promoted to Chief Operating Officer years later.

Calamari reportedly lives in an apartment at Trump Park Avenue and drives a Mercedes leased through the Trump Organization. His son, Matthew Calamari, Jr., currently resides in another Trump-affiliated luxury apartment called Trump Parc East, where his rent is subsidized by the Trump Organization. The young Calamari graduated from college in 2011 and was promoted to corporate director of security six years later.

New York prosecutors have reportedly instructed both Calamaris to retain legal services. They have since hired retained Nicholas Gravante Jr., head of commercial litigation at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP, who previously represented Hunter and James Biden, respectively President Biden’s son and brother back in 2009.

Back in 2019, Trump’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, testified in a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing that the elder Calamari knew information that would corroborate allegations that the former president deliberately overstated the value of his real estate assets for insurance reasons, as the Journal noted.

The revelations come amid similar concerns surrounding Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer, who had also fallen within the ambit of the New York probe.

In recent months, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr. has put specific focus on Weisselberg for receiving similar tax benefits from the company, including the purchase of various luxury cars as well as thousands of dollars that was used to pay for at least one of his grandchildren’s private school education. Several of Weisselberg’s school tuition checks, which totaled at least $500,000, were signed by the former president himself. Weisselberg’s son, Barry, alleged in a 2018 deposition that he also resides in Trump Parc East, where the company pays for rent on his behalf.

Late last month, Manhattan prosecutors signaled that they were nearing a conclusive indictment by announcing that they were convening a special grand jury.

Trump, for his part, has vehemently denied any alleged financial improprieties and called the probe “the greatest Witch Hunt in American history.”

“This is purely political, and an affront to the almost 75 million voters who supported me in the Presidential Election, and it’s being driven by highly partisan Democrat prosecutors,” he declared.

The special grand jury is set to convene in the coming months.

Climate change is melting Arctic ice cellars

Qaiyaan Harcharek is the harpooner of his Iñupiaq whaling crew in Utqiaġvik, the northernmost city in Alaska. “I’ve been blessed with nine whales,” he said, which is no small feat. Bowhead whales can grow up to 60 feet long and weigh 75 to 100 tons. To land one requires extensive skill, deep-rooted relationships with whales and the Arctic environment, and cooperation between all crew members.

The Iñupiat have for generations hunted bowhead whales every spring and fall. “We’re whalers. It’s who we are as a people and it’s what has sustained us to thrive in this harsh environment for thousands of years,” Harcharek said. In Alaska’s vast North Slope Borough, most of the 9,700 residents are Iñupiat, and while bowheads are not an endangered whale species, they do face environmental and human-caused threats to their ongoing recovery.

After a successful hunt, whaling crews spend hours towing the whale onto the icy shore and then butchering it into specific portions for families and feasts. “Right after a whale is caught, the very next day, we cook enough to serve the whole community,” Harcharek explained. The rest of the whale — thousands of pounds of meat and maktak, or skin with blubber — is distributed to families involved in the process or cooked during community-wide feasts on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Nalukataq, the spring whaling festival.

No part of the whale goes to waste. Or it didn’t until recently. It’s common for Iñupiat families to store whale meat and other subsistence foods in icy cellars deep underground, but in recent years, many people have reported that their cellars are either becoming too warm and causing food to spoil, or failing completely due to flooding or collapse. For instance, a 2014 inventory of ice cellars in the coastal village of Wainwright conducted by the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium found that 19 out of 34 cellars had been abandoned.

Traditional siġluaqs, or ice cellars, are made by digging a tunnel 10 to 20 feet into the earth’s surface and creating a small room deep inside the permafrost. A heavy cellar door, three to four feet wide and made of wood, covers the entrance. To reach the crisp earthen room, which should remain approximately 10 degrees Fahrenheit year-round, one must descend a long ladder — and bring a light.

“Now, we will lose all our siġluaqs very soon because of the ocean and flooding . . . They are melting, too. It’s getting warmer inside,” said a Point Hope resident named Macy, as quoted in the 2020 book “Whale Snow” by Chie Sakakibara. “Now, we have to haul up water by buckets from siġluaqs because the permafrost is thawing out. Otherwise, our whale meat will all go bad. . . . Will we need a big freezer in the future?”

The Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the world, causing permafrost to degrade “extensively, persistently, and rapidly,” according to new research published in the journal “Advances in Climate Change Research.” While permafrost thaw is a major issue affecting ice cellars, they can fail for a variety of reasons, including other impacts from climate change, poor maintenance, and ground disturbances from urbanization.

Despite the risks, Harcharek plans to build a new ice cellar on a plot of land that will one day be the site of his family home; he is married with four kids, including twin babies. He said he will establish the cellar in an area with low soil salinity (since saltwater melts quicker than freshwater), dig deeper on higher ground, reinforce the tunnel with sturdy materials, and carefully monitor and maintain the cellar. Harcharek is not ready to give up on the siġluaq, because it’s not just a place for storing and preserving food — it’s considered the terrestrial home for the bowhead whale, an animal at the center of Iñupiat culture.

The Iñupiat take great care to prepare their cellars for a new whale’s arrival — chipping out old blood, oil, and dirt and lining the floor with fresh snow — because they believe whales know which crews have a clean home waiting for them.

“There’s a lot of hard work and pride” in cleaning the ice cellar, Harcharek said. “When you’re doing it, you try not to have negative thoughts. It’s a humbling and kind of cleansing process . . . and it’s that connection that we have with the whale and how we’re going to take care of it that allows us to be potentially successful [in the hunt].”

When the last ice cellar is no longer usable, a piece of Iñupiat culture will be gone. But the people, Harcharek said, will figure out new ways to live — just like they always have. “You need to adapt to your environment because if you don’t, you die.”

Adapting to a changing Arctic

Indigenous Alaskans have adapted to cycles of climate change in the past, said Meda DeWitt, a Tlingit traditional healer. “However, when you start looking at how fast it’s coming about, then that’s where [this time is] different. We’re going into a situation that we actually haven’t fully been in before.”

Many Indigenous Alaskans — not just the Iñupiat — are facing food insecurity as rapid environmental collapse is upending natural cycles, including caribou migration patterns, berry season, and salmon runs. This poses a threat to their survival. “In some of our communities, there is an 80 or 90% reliance on subsistence foods” that are foraged, fished, hunted, or grown through small-scale agriculture, said Tikaan Galbreath, the Intertribal Agriculture Council‘s technical assistant specialist for the state of Alaska and a member of the Mentasta Traditional Tribe.

It’s not feasible for people in rural communities, many of which are only accessible by bush plane or boat, to depend on grocery stores because of the extremely high cost of importing food. “It’s an incredible strain when a gallon of milk is $10 or a loaf of bread is $8,” Galbreath said.

Sudden environmental change also causes immense grief for Indigenous Alaskans because it disrupts their cultural and spiritual relationships with the land and other living beings. DeWitt, who in February spoke at the Democratic National Committee Environment and Climate Crisis Council’s Alaska Listening Session, said “everybody overall is experiencing the grief of not having access to our traditional practices because of the changing climate. This climate grief is also known as solastalgia, and that’s something that Indigenous people have been trying to express for a very long time.”

DeWitt often turns to Tlingit elders for advice on navigating this time on Earth. “They say that we have to go back to the old ways. In Western thinking, when you say ‘tradition,’ people think, ‘Oh, everybody has to go back into a sod house and wear fur clothing and do this thing this way,’ because in the Western sense, culture in large part is physical.”

Instead, she explained that elders are referring to a transition back to a worldview that values balance and reciprocity between humans and the rest of nature. “Climate change [means] we have to change our culture as a human race—not just how much carbon we take out of the air,” DeWitt said. “We have to return to being good stewards of the Earth.”

Being good stewards entails changing our relationship with food, said Dune Lankard, founder and president of the Native Conservancy and an Eyak Athabaskan. He believes industrial food producers and factories will go out of business as the climate crisis worsens, and that “we’re going to be dealing with less and less food products and less and less food sources.” As the current commodity-based food system collapses, Lankard said, local agriculture and mariculture, artisanal products, and subsistence foods will become more valuable than ever. And so will the act of preserving food safely and reliably for longer periods of time.

That’s why the Native Conservancy has been piloting the use of an advanced, portable freezer system that should allow communities to freeze food long-term at a high quality. Initial results are promising, and if the ultimate plan comes to fruition, it could be a boon for Indigenous Alaskans — and beyond.

High-quality food preservation for an uncertain future

In 2018, Lankard, looking for ways to improve cold storage for Indigenous Alaskans, flew to Japan for a first-hand look at a wave energy freezer system made by DENBA that was advertised to preserve food long-term without freezer burn and with minimal loss of taste, moisture, and texture. At the DENBA facilities, he was offered an oyster that had been frozen for two years. Skeptical, he took a bite.

“The texture was like it was just pulled from the sea. It was bursting with the original flavors — that taste of the ocean,” Lankard said. “As an Indigenous person who has historically had to preserve foods, this was exciting to me.”

Conventional freezers chill food slowly from the outside in, a process that causes water molecules in the cell tissue to form large, spiky ice crystals. These crystals damage the tissue, reducing the food’s shelf life and quality. On the other hand, a freezer using DENBA’s wave energy system freezes food from the inside out. In this process, the water molecules form small, round crystals that cause minimal harm to the cell tissue.

Lankard saw the potential for DENBA technology — which requires little energy to operate — to be installed in community cold storage throughout Alaska, including walk-in freezers (such as in a community kitchen), large chest freezers, or portable units to process fish or game on-site after a hunt (such as those within boats, CONEX boxes, and trucks). “The goal of a community cold storage system is to encourage small rural communities to plan and build for food security by changing their relationship and handling of their traditional food sources,” Lankard said.

The Native Conservancy started a pilot program in 2018 to test-freeze subsistence foods such as fish, vegetables, spotted shrimp, and kelp in a 30-cubic-foot, minus-21-degree Fahrenheit chest freezer equipped with DENBA technology. They found that the addition of the wave energy system extended the “quality, taste, texture, and food nutrients” of frozen foods.

Read more Civil Eats: Have Restaurants Really Had a Racial Reckoning?

“While nothing is better than fresh, we found consistency in its freshness and texture and that the flavor of the food was excellent even after being frozen over a year,” Lankard said.

The Native Conservancy is planning a second pilot this summer to test the DENBA system in a different kind of freezer: a commercial blast freezer, which is more effective than a regular freezer in cooling food quickly thanks to fans that blow chilled air around the space. They will install three discharge plates in a 1,000-cubic-foot blast freezer at a cannery in Cordova and test-freeze salmon, halibut, shrimp, kelp, and moose for the Native Elders Subsistence Foods program. Lankard is expecting that the blast freezer combined with the DENBA system will achieve the best-possible quality of frozen foods: “I know it’s going to be over the top.”

In addition to using the DENBA technology as-is in existing freezer systems, the Native Conservancy is aiming to find a company that is willing to make a “chest freezer for the future” that combines -21 degrees Fahrenheit blast freezing with the wave energy system. They are interviewing potential partner companies this year. He hopes the price of the new chest freezer will be affordable enough for small community enterprises — $4,000 to $5,000 — but it’s yet to be seen whether that will be possible.

“Once done, this chest freezer will serve as its own independent food security system,” Lankard said. It could also create more value for frozen food products sold at market.

When asked whether he thinks this technology could be valuable in his whaling community, Qaiyaan Harcharek said: “It’s fascinating. You want to be optimistic. If [the Native Conservancy] wants to try it on some of the foods up here, sign me up.”

Harcharek said he’d love to have access to one of the new chest freezers, and that the DENBA system would be a great addition to large walk-in freezers if whaling crews are one day forced to use electric freezers instead of ice cellars. The biggest question is, without ice cellars, will bowhead whales still give themselves to the Iñupiat?

“Is it gonna affect our success [with hunts] if we lost all of our ice cellars? I don’t know. It’s out of our control,” Harcharek said. But one thing is certain: “We’re going to continue on hunting and whaling regardless of the environmental changes that are around us. We will adapt because that’s who we are — we’re whaling people.”

“As a Woman” author Paula Stone Williams: I was “unaware of my male privilege” until transition

“I know how to control a room,” says Paula Stone Williams. “I’m an alpha.” It’s a confident statement, the kind of thing that women — especially older women — aren’t often heard to say. What’s her secret? A long life of leadership, as a pastor, speaker and educator, no doubt. And also, by her own admission, male privilege.

In her candid memoir, “As a Woman: What I Learned about Power, Sex, and the Patriarchy After I Transitioned,” Williams writes about her evangelical upbringing, her decision to come out as transgender in her 60s and what she discovered about masculinity when she began showing herself to the world as a woman. It’s a frank exploration of one individual’s journey to authenticity, and a hopeful case for a kinder version of Christianity. Williams appeared on “Salon Talks” recently to talk about God, testosterone and the calling she couldn’t ignore.

You can watch the “Salon Talks” interview here or read a transcript of it below.

The following interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Your book speaks to everyone, but it has a very special resonance for those of us trying to walk a spiritual path while also holding true to our progressive values. This has been a real story of your own journey. You open the book with a very beautiful poem by your friend Nicole Kelly Vickey. Tell me about that poem.

I had asked Nicole to help me. She wrote that poem for me, and when I first began reading the book for the audio version, I just wept all the way through it. I just kept weeping and weeping, because it’s so beautiful and poignant, and for me it produced within me such a deep desire to get upright.

I think that there is often an understandable need in our culture often to be respectful of a trans person’s identity and to not refer much to the person’s past gender expression. You go in a different direction. This book is about what it felt like to walk around the world being seen as and treated as a man. Why was it so important to you to tell the story that way, and to not just close that door?

I was well-known in the evangelical world, and I couldn’t just disappear into the night. I also felt a strong sense of setting right what I had not set right in my previous life. I was totally LGBTQ+-affirming in the 1980s, but I remained within an evangelical denomination because I thought it was okay to change it from within. When I look back on it now, that was an awfully convenient position to take for a powerful white male and I wish I had come out sooner in terms of being LGBTQ+-affirming. I don’t think I was ready to come out as transgender sooner, but I recognize that there’s a need to just tell my story.

I’m also terribly concerned about the incredibly difficult divide that we’re facing in our nation right now. How do we bridge that divide? I’m convinced that the only way we truly bridge the divide is one story at a time. We’re a narrative-based species. You don’t sleep without dreaming and you don’t dream in mathematical equations. We dream in stories. So I thought, if I tell my story beginning to end, maybe some of the people from that world will read it because right now it’s actually that evangelical world that is the strongest against the transgender community. 84% of evangelicals think gender is immutably determined at birth, and that’s actually pretty frightening. They’re the ones driving the several hundred anti-transgender bills that are pending in various states right now.

More bills than ever before. Despite more visibility, more representation, we also have more pushback, more oppression, more anti-trans bills than we have ever had.

It’s fascinating to me that everyone just assumes that these are all Republican legislatures and so this is a Republican issue. Actually it’s not. A study done of Trump voters in 10 swing states asked, “Should transgender people have the same civil rights as everyone else?” 60% of them said yes. It’s not so much a conservative issue as it is primarily an evangelical issue.

You talk about “the call,” and many of us who are familiar with the vocation aspect of that word. You also talk about the call to identity. How do you see those parallels in your life, having been called to ministry and having been called to be your most authentic self?

I’m not sure what the origin of a call is. In fact, I say that in the book. It was my call from God. I don’t know. I know it came from a place so deep that it frightened me. I think that is the universal call. I love the way Joseph Campbell identified it as the hero’s journey. An ordinary citizen is called on an extraordinary journey on the road of trials. Initially, they reject that call because hey, it’s the road of trials. Then a spiritual guide, a Yoda, comes into their life and finally gives them the courage to answer that call. I believe a call is inherently spiritual, but I would separate spirituality out from any particular religion. I think we are spiritual beings and I think we do during our lives experience multiple calls, which is a deeper voice speaking to us.

If you’re Jungian, you might call it the collective unconscious. If you’re Christian, you would call it the Holy Spirit. But I think whatever the source is, there is a voice that speaks to the deepest part of ourselves that both terrifies us and calls us forward. I know I have clearly felt that voice heard that voice only three times in my life.

There’s a phrase you use in the book, a more expansive view of Christianity. How do you see your relationship with God, with faith now? It would be very easy, given what you have been through, given what you have heard from other people, to say, “I’m out, God, thanks.”

A lot of people find that fascinating. I speak all over the world, primarily on issues related to gender equity, usually to corporations. When we come to Q & A, you would expect the questions to be related to gender equity, and the majority of them are. But always someone says, “Why are you still in the church after the church treated you the way it treated you?” I always love answering that question, because religion is not fundamentalism. If you take a look at the fundamentalist expressions of all three desert religions — Christianity, Judaism and Islam — all three are still religions of scarcity. The way all three of those religions began is, “There’s not enough resources to go around and we’re going to take care of our own.” But if you look at the more generous expression of all three of those religions, you find that they are not religions of scarcity.

For me, working out spirituality is better done in community. We’ve been doing it in community for eons. I was reading Jonathan Haidt’s book, “The Righteous Mind,” not terribly long ago. He was talking about the development of our species, and said that we really did not take off until we left the level of blood kin and moved into the level of tribe or community.

He said that what it is that brought us together into communities was not the need for safety, but it was man’s search for meaning. I think it’s better when we search for meaning and community. I think we were designed, if that’s an appropriate word, to search for meaning in community. For me to come back into the religion in which I was born and try to work out my spirituality in this new body is appropriate. I didn’t think it would be to lead a church; that was another one of those things. It was a sense of call, first back to the church and then to lead a specific church.

I think what a lot of us return to is this sense of higher and unconditional love.

I really believe that’s exactly what it’s all about. I say this in our church all the time. In Jesus’s very last day of public ministry, he’s asked which of the laws is the greatest, he says, “Hey, it’s just three things, loving God, loving neighbor, loving self.” And then it says, “From that day on no one dared to ask him any more questions.” They realized it really was that simple and also that impossible. Love all of our neighbors, and maybe the hardest of all, love ourselves. And I don’t think you can love others if you don’t love yourself.

There is a difference between feeling female on the inside and being treated female on the outside. What was that like? What has surprised you about the female experience?

The thing that surprised me the most was really just being unaware of my male privilege. I brought a lot of privilege with me when I transitioned, a lot of decades as a minister. I know how to control a room. I’m an alpha personality. And yet in just seven years as a woman, I cannot believe how much confidence I have lost, how often I now say, “I’m sorry, but . . .” when I know I’m right. I end up apologizing for it. In my very first TED talk, I said, “You don’t have to apologize for being right,” yet I find myself doing that all the time.

I wonder though if you do, or else the person on the receiving end of that message won’t hear the rest of it.

Somebody asked me about that not long ago. I think that’s a wonderful point. I said, “You know, sometimes it’s just easier to get by. You can’t always be the voice that is fighting against injustice. Sometimes you just have to let it go.” I wish that I was strong enough to consistently say, “No, I know what I’m talking about.” It’s so frustrating to me to be treated as if I don’t know what I’m talking about.

I think one of the most frustrating was when I was dealing with a lot of liberal-minded people, all LGBTQ+, and we’d hired a new CEO for the organization. We have a large national conference and they were talking about having the CEO speak for the keynote. I said, “Well, she’s never really done much public speaking. It might be better if we just interviewed her. I’d be happy to do that, but if you want her to give a speech, I’ll be happy to coach her.” The well-meaning white male in the room said, “If we’re going to do that, why don’t we get a real coach?” I waited for someone to speak up and no one did. And what I wanted to say was, “Oh, okay, wait. I’ve done four TED Talks. I have coached TEDx speakers. I’m a speaker’s ambassador for TED. I’ve taught speech in three universities, two in the United States and one in Europe. Just help me understand what part of that does not make me a real speaker’s coach?” But I didn’t say anything because if I did, now I’m that woman. It was so aggravating to me.

You’ve also experienced a change in what it feels like to be intimate, and what maybe cis men don’t know about that.

I think testosterone is an incredibly powerful substance. I don’t care how thoughtful, how good, how caring a man you are, when it comes to sexuality, a little bit too much of your body wants to focus on that 10 seconds. It is in fact, a huge driver of human males.

As a woman, you realize actually it’s about the other 23 hours, 59 minutes and 50 seconds. It’s everything. Did we spend time together today? Was that deep conversation? It doesn’t have to even be really good conversation. That can be a huge disagreement, but it’s deep and intimate. What are the smells in the room? Are flowers involved? There are all of these things that create desire that have nothing to do or little to do with that biological drive that just seems so great for men.

I live not far from Rocky Mountain National Park and when I’m up there in the fall, you’ll watch the elk. You have an alpha male who’s always protecting his harem, and you see younger males come up and challenge him. I’ve watched it so often, I don’t watch the elk anymore. I watch the people watching the elk. It’s always so funny, because you see the men invariably start rooting for one or another with the alpha males, and their wives are hanging back chuckling like, “Oh, have we really evolved all that far as a species?”

It is fascinating to watch, and yet that was my biological drive. Thank God there’s a wonderful thing called civilization, so we teach our sons that you actually have agency and you don’t act on the fact that you want to have an entire harem that’s only yours that you will fight every other male for. It’s incumbent for us to help our sons understand that this is a natural biological tendency, so we have to be taught that we have agency regarding that. Now we have external things to help us do that, like the #metoo movement.

We live in a culture that is deeply sexualized and also deeply and profoundly shaming. You talk about all of the sexual obstacles you had to overcome from your own evangelical upbringing and you get to this place where you can see sexuality as this beautiful, transcendent, spiritual thing.

My friend Linda Kay Klein wrote a book called “Pure” about growing up in an evangelical subculture that shames your sexuality, and how much more shaming it is toward women than it is toward men. I certainly experienced shame in growing up in the evangelical world, but I did not experience it in the same way that my wife experienced it or that so many other women of that generation, even until just recently. There was such shame tied to sexuality, and I feel like it’s one of the greatest injustices that’s been perpetrated upon evangelicals by their purely patriarchal male leadership.

Just think about it. Whether it’s the Catholic church or the evangelical church, if you’re in a position of power, you want to make sure you remain in power. Let’s just maybe narrow it down to the Catholic church. As a priest, maybe I’ll be the only one who can forgive sins. So how do we then make sure that everybody knows they need their sins forgiven? Oh, let’s choose the universal thing, sexuality, and maybe we’ll pick on something like masturbation. I will call that a sin for which you need to be forgiven because then we can be guaranteed we’ll be employed forever. All of these poor kids in confession booths for centuries just for being human. It’s really tragic.

It’s truly tragic and it is truly about control, specifically patriarchal control.

It’s not something that actually is inherent in the text, from a Christian perspective. It didn’t really begin to show up until Augustine in the fourth century.

You recently celebrated a benchmark birthday. What are you learning from your younger peers, the people who come to you with information and also with questions? What has this younger generation of the LGBTQ+ community taught you about living in this world and coming into it openly later in the game?

I love seeing how much they’re willing to explore their identity at the age of which we should be exploring our identities. There was a study came out not long ago that said that 62% of those who identify as gender nonbinary were between 13 and 26 years of age. Well, of course they were because that’s the age where we should be exploring our gender identity. Will they still be gender nonbinary when they’re 52? Who cares? The important point is that they’re able to explore how fluid gender is, that we’re all on a spectrum and that spectrum goes from what is traditionally very masculine to traditionally very feminine and everything in between.

When I look at the numbers traditionally, we’ve been saying the 0.58% of the population as identified as transgender. In young people, I saw not long ago that somebody said it’s 2.8%. That to me is something to be celebrated, not because more people are transgender than were before, but because we finally have an environment where exploring one’s gender identity is just fine. I look at my five granddaughters, who are all between 10 and 13. It took them 30 seconds to adjust to my transition. It’s just a normal thing to them. The fact that I’m trans is incidental for this whole generation. The fact that someone is trans or nonbinary is incidental. I think that’s marvelous.

The art (and science) of inviting people over again

Welcome to How to Be Social Again: The No-Stress Guide to Returning to Society. In this mini-series, you’ll get a brush-up on everything from invitation etiquette to navigating bars again — plus, a drinks menu-planner for any party size and an ode the most underrated of gatherings, the coffee date.

* * *

What does Priya Parker’s social calendar look like right now, I wonder? Reentry has gotten off to a bumpy start: Almost half of vaccinated Americans still feel “uneasy about adjusting to in-person interaction,” according to a March 2021 American Psychological Association report. So how has it been for Parker, a group conflict mediator by training and the author of “The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters” (and, I’m hoping, my guiding light)?

“We’re moving slowly, slowly, slowly,” she told me on the phone. (This was after three emails, four texts to two separate parties, and one rescheduling. The high demand for Parker right now is evidence that reentry is most definitely here.) “I want to reconnect with my people and, for me, that means slowly and individually, almost like building blocks.” She’s sticking to hosting just one or two friends at a time until she gets the sense that those in her social circles are ready for larger groups — and gaining that sense takes time and care. Parker believes that the role of host is to protect, connect, and temporarily equalize guests — and 90% of that work happens before the gathering even begins. Here’s how to do it.

Check-in individually first; then send the invite.

“Asking people to reveal their vaccination or comfort levels in front of each other unfairly puts the weight on the person who is not vaccinated or who is the least comfortable,” says Parker. Text or call each guest individually, instead, to find out what they need in order to feel safe — and to give them the opportunity to opt-out privately. “When you do that work, the invitation is a formality,” says Parker. “It’s the end of a conversation, not the beginning of one.”

Lay the ground rules ahead of time — and be specific.

“It’s on the host to make sure that people know what they’re signing up for, so establish the norms ahead of time,” says Parker. The invite should list the time, place, size of the group, vaccination level of the group, and anything else that, based on your private conversations with guests, will help them make their final calls. For example: picnic at 3:00 p.m. on Saturday; not everyone is vaccinated, so we’re going to stay outside. “Even that is information,” says Parker. “Give them enough so they can make the right decisions for themselves.”

Center the needs of the person who needs the most.

If one person isn’t comfortable with hugging, for example, then establish a no-hugging rule on the invitation. Parker says that’s the generous thing to do: “Center the person most on the fringe, because it’s good for everybody.”

Don’t feel you have to be so formal about it all!

“When checking in with people, you can be casual and funny: ‘Is that your jam yet?'” says Parker. And when you send the invite, feel free to be yourself. “It can just be two lines, like, ‘For many of you, this is your first gathering. All awkwardness is welcome.’ Just be real!”

All of this falls under what Parker calls generous authority. “If you are going to host, host,” she writes in her book. “If you are going to create a kingdom for an hour or a day, rule it — and rule it with generosity.” This isn’t about control; it’s about giving your guests guardrails. In These COVID Times, those rails need to be a little sturdier so that, instead of calculating their comfort levels or navigating anxieties in the moment, your guests can simply be together. “At some level,” Parker told me, “true etiquette is supposed to be an explicit common set of norms so that people can meaningfully connect with each other.”

So, go forth and host — carefully, generously, and with authority.

Manchin and Sinema make their choice: Defend the filibuster or democracy

It’s unclear if Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., is an idiot or is just pretending to be for some ulterior reason. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter, because she reminded Americans this week that there is nothing, not even destroying democracy, that Republicans can do that will convince her that it’s important to let the party that won power in the 2020 election — her own party! — govern. Worse, she refuses to take extremely basic measures to prevent the Republicans from enshrining themselves into permanent minority rule.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is making the unusual move of bringing up the For the People Act, Democrats’ marquee voting rights and campaign finance reform bill, for a vote on a motion to proceed to debate, despite knowing that Republicans are absolutely going to filibuster it. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, in a sad sign of how routine Republican obstruction has become, rarely has to bother to even have his caucus show up to block a floor debate. Merely signaling that they plan to filibuster — which Republicans do on nearly every bill the Democratic majority wants to pass — is usually enough to keep the majority from even trying to start debate.

But this is a voting rights bill just as Republicans have waged an all-out assault on democracy.

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As Schumer explained on Monday, there is an emergency need to pass such legislation, because, “Donald Trump, with his despicable lies, has lit a fire beneath Republican state legislatures, and they have launched the most sweeping voter suppression efforts in at least, in at least 80 years.”

The For the People Act has the support of not just Joe Biden’s White House, but of former president Barack Obama, who told CNN earlier this month that “one of our major political parties is willing to embrace a way of thinking about our democracy that would be unrecognizable and unacceptable even five years ago or a decade ago.”

Back in the Senate, which Democrats control by the slimmest of margins, a set of Democrats remain curiously unconvinced.

Sinema’s own ability to get re-elected is threatened by Arizona Republicans who are busy passing laws making it easier for the GOP to steal her next election from her. She claims even to agree with Democratic leaders about the importance of voting rights. In a Washington Post op-ed published mere hours after Schumer announced the vote for the voting rights bill on Monday, Sinema sanctimoniously noted that it is “voting-rights legislation I support and have co-sponsored.”

But, of course, those words are worthless without action to make it law and, in this op-ed, Sinema makes it quite clear that she is ready and willing to make sure absolutely no voting rights legislation will pass through the Senate. She remains committed to the filibuster even though that effectively means she’s giving Republicans in her own state the power to block her voters from either accessing the ballot or having their votes fairly counted.

And what’s her excuse for letting Republicans have total veto power over any legislation to protect voting rights? Yep, the supposed glories of “bipartisanship.”

“The filibuster compels moderation and helps protect the country from wild swings between opposing policy poles,” she wrote, arguing that if Democrats actually pass a voting rights bill by killing the filibuster, the next time Republicans have power, we’ll “see that legislation rescinded a few years from now and replaced by a nationwide voter-ID law or restrictions on voting by mail in federal elections, over the objections of the minority.”

But as Greg Sargent of the Washington Post points out, “we already live in that world” because “voting restrictions of all kinds are being passed into law by Republican-controlled legislative majorities, over the objections of minorities.” The only way to stop it from continuing is for the Democratic majority in the Senate to pass a law banning such abuses. Nearly every Democrat in Congress wants to do this. Only a few holdouts like Sinema, seemingly swayed by the intoxicating power of having more ego than sense, are preventing the protection of our democracy.

Where Sinema gets this idea that only Democrats have the power to nuke the filibuster if they’re in the majority is anyone’s guess, but it is a profoundly ahistorical and plain stupid notion. If Republicans want to pass a voter ID law when they have the majority next — which will be much easier for them to get, with states changing laws to make it much easier for the GOP to cheat — all they need to do is what they did when they wanted to confirm a Supreme Court judge in 2017, which was end the filibuster. Anyone who thinks that McConnell will hesitate to do whatever he feels is necessary to get more power is either an idiot or simply pretending to be for some nefarious purpose.

In her op-ed, Sinema warns that ending the filibuster would mean “escalating all-or-nothing political battles that result in no action.” But, of course, what Tuesday’s vote will demonstrate is that that’s already a serious problem. The filibuster is only making it worse by giving Republicans near-absolute power to keep the Democratic majority from passing any major legislation. Republicans are quite clear that they want all the power and to get it, they will give Democrats nothing.

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Tuesday’s vote is expected to be filibustered by Republicans, something Schumer and the White House have not bothered to hide. It’s meant to be a demonstration to Sinema and to West Virginia’s Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, who has also stubbornly defended the filibuster, that there is no such thing as any kind of voting rights bill that Republicans will support. For instance, this bill that is being filed can be amended in a multitude of ways, including any and all of the compromises that Manchin offered at the last minute in a delusional bid to win over Republican support. Of course, it hardly matters how much it can be tweaked because the Republican strategy is the full-on obstruction of everything Democrats want to do. That goes double for any bill meant to protect democracy, as democracy is what Republicans see as the main obstacle to their goal: permanent minority rule.

There’s still some lingering hope that Manchin will be swayed. He did, after all, go to all of the effort to put forward a compromise plan that was supposed to address Republican concerns regarding voter fraud, only to have McConnell immediately tear it up like Cersei Lannister mocking Ned Stark. Perhaps that will irritate Manchin’s ego enough to tip him over into the realm of reality and basic sense.

But Sinema, with her op-ed, has made it clear that she is impervious to being moved by reason, evidence, experience, and even a base desire to win the next election. It’s hard to believe that democracy for the rest of us hangs in the balance and what is tipping the scales towards authoritarianism is one Arizona senator’s childish inability to admit that she might have been wrong. Not only is American democracy dying, it doesn’t even get a death with dignity.

Trump tried to get Justice Department to stop “SNL” and “Jimmy Kimmel Live” from mocking him: rpt

Donald Trump reportedly urged his Justice Department to open a probe into Saturday Night Live, the left-leaning comedy sketch show, over its satirical treatment of the former president back in 2019, citing the show’s apparent failure to poke fun at “the other side.”

According to The Daily Beast, which spoke with two inside sources on the matter, Trump’s crusade against the show was set off back in March 2019, when he saw a rerun that featured a skit depicting what Trump’s life would have been like had he lost the 2016 election.

Trump, immediately incensed by the show’s portrayal, took to then-active Twitter to air out his grievances. “It’s truly incredible that shows like Saturday Night Live, not funny/no talent, can spend all of their time knocking the same person (me), over & Over, without so much of a mention of ‘the other side,'” the former president wrote. “Like an advertisement without consequences. Same with Late Night Shows.”

Trump furthermore suggested that the Federal Communications Commission should formally “look into this.”

But Trump’s ire did not stop at mere rhetoric, according to the Beast, which found that the former president had in fact consulted various officials and legal advisers on the matter, inquiring them on what could be done to stamp out any more unfavorable portrayals. The inquiry – which made its way to the FCC, the DOJ, and a number of courts – took aim at not only SNL but Jimmy Kimmel and other late-night segments to boot.

“It was more annoying than alarming, to be honest with you,” one source told the Beast.

Trump reportedly felt that the FCC’s “equal-time” rules – which require broadcast news media to provide roughly equal coverage for every political candidate running for a particular position in office – would provide a legal basis to crack down on SNL for disproportionately lampooning him. The former president, however, had to be told that these rules do not apply to SNL, given its designation as a comedy show.

“Can something else be done about it?” Trump reportedly pressed, according to another source interviewed by the Beast. The source responded that they’d “look into it,” though they later told the Beast that no such effort had ever been made.

Paul Matzko, a scholar on technology policy at the Cato Institute, told the Beast that Trump had likely confused equal-time rules with the Fairness Doctrine, a federal policy now defunct as of 1987 that previously forced broadcasters to provide opposing perspectives on controversial political issues.

The revelations about SNL come as new reports show that Trump tried to wield the DOJ to his advantage in more sinister ways, namely by attempting to overturn the 2020 election. As Salon reported last week, Trump and his allies pressured numerous DOJ officials to open probes into baseless allegations of election fraud in various swing states like Georgia. The DOJ by and large resisted the former president’s attempts to exhume the election results, disputing claims of systematic voter fraud throughout the country.

A $26-billion plan to save the Houston area from rising seas

When Hurricane Ike made landfall in 2008, Bill Merrell took shelter on the second floor of a historic brick building in downtown Galveston, Texas, along with his wife, their daughter, their grandson, and two Chihuahuas. Sustained winds of 110 mph lashed the building. Seawater flooded the ground floor to a depth of over 8 feet. Once, in the night, Merrell caught glimpses of a near-full moon and realized they had entered the hurricane’s eye.

Years earlier, Merrell, a physical oceanographer at Texas A&M University at Galveston, had toured the gigantic Eastern Scheldt storm surge barrier, a nearly 6-mile-long bulwark that prevents North Sea storms from flooding the southern Dutch coast. As Ike roared outside, Merrell kept thinking about the barrier. “The next morning, I started sketching what I thought would look reasonable here,” he said, “and it turned out to be pretty close to what the Dutch would have done.”

These sketches were the beginning of the Ike Dike, a proposal for a coastal barrier intended to protect Galveston Bay. The core idea: combining huge gates across the main inlet into the Bay from the Gulf of Mexico, known as Bolivar Roads, with many miles of high seawalls.

Just across from Galveston, at least 15 people died that night on the Bolivar Peninsula, and the storm destroyed some 3,600 homes there. Bodies were still missing the next year when Merrell began to promote the Ike Dike, but, he said, the idea “was really ridiculed pretty universally.” Politicians disliked its costs, environmentalists worried about its impacts, and no one was convinced that it would work

Merrell persisted. Returning to the Netherlands, he visited experts at Delft University and enlisted their support. Over the next few years, Dutch and U.S. academic researchers carried out dozens of studies on Galveston Bay options, while Merrell and his allies gathered support from local communities, business leaders, and politicians.

In 2014, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers partnered with the state to study Ike Dike-like alternatives for Galveston Bay. After many iterations, bills to establish a governing structure for the $26.2 billion barrier proposal, which the Corps developed alongside the Texas General Land Office, recently passed both the Texas House and Senate. In September, the Corps will deliver their recommendations to the U.S. Congress, which will need to approve funding for the project.

No one can guess the barrier proposal’s exact fate, given its enormous price tag. And as sea levels rise and storms intensify with global climate change, Houston is far from the only U.S. coastal metropolitan region at serious risk. Multibillion-dollar coastal megaprojects already are underway or under consideration from San Francisco to Miami to New York City.

President Joe Biden’s new $2 trillion national infrastructure initiative specifically calls for projects on the country’s embattled coasts. The initiative for Houston, the fifth-largest U.S. metro area and the vulnerable heart of the petrochemical industry, spotlights the tough decisions for coastal megaprojects, which must balance societal needs, engineering capabilities, environmental protections, and costs.

Meanwhile, the seas keep rising. “It’s a significant tension between the need to address these issues and do it quickly,” said Carly Foster, a resilience expert at the global design consultancy Arcadis, “and also do it right.”

* * *

Galveston Bay is a low, sandy subtropical estuary, bordered to the north and west by Houston’s sprawl. About twice the size of New York City, the bay is only 6 feet deep on average, with a deep channel dredged for tankers and other huge vessels traveling to and from the Port of Houston.

Given the sheer size and complexity of the Galveston Bay region, “balancing the environment and people and economics is just really tough,” said Antonia Sebastian, an assistant professor of applied hydrology and water resources at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Planners must weigh the costs and benefits, to minimize risks to an acceptable level. “And what that acceptable level is can be widely debated,” she said.

Moreover, the risks are growing. Last year, five hurricanes hit the U.S. Gulf Coast, one with sustained winds up to 150 mph. There’s scientific consensus that climate change will cause greater numbers of these monster Atlantic hurricanes, said Ming Li, a physical oceanographer at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.

As the sea rises, the land is also sinking: In the last century, the Texas coast sank about 2 feet into the sea, partly due to excessive groundwater pumping. Computer models now suggest that climate change will further lift sea levels somewhere between 1 and 6 feet over the next 50 years. Meanwhile, the Texas coastal population is projected to climb from 7 to 9 million people by 2050.

“We are absolutely going to have hurricanes hitting the Texas coast,” said Kelly Burks-Copes, an Army Corps of Engineers ecologist and project manager for the study that generated the barrier proposal. “There’s a significant barrier island system that naturally affords a defense to potential surge coming in from the Gulf, but it’s become populated over time and eroded over time. And so we are particularly vulnerable to what we call killer surges.”

Protecting Galveston Bay is no simple task. The bay is sheltered from the open ocean by two low, sandy strips of land — Galveston Island and Bolivar Peninsula — separated by the narrow passage of Bolivar Roads. When a sufficiently big storm approaches, water begins to rush through that gap and over the island and peninsula, surging into the bay.

Building on Merrell’s concept, the centerpiece of the latest Corps proposal is a massive set of gates across the Bolivar Roads. As a storm approaches, the two main navigation gates will float and swing out of dry docks to close the channel. Each will be 82 feet high — with 22 feet above water when closed — and 650 feet wide — almost twice the length of a football field. These giants will be combined with two smaller swing gates, plus a set of vertical lift gates that stay open in normal weather to let the tides flow.

The Corps also plans to raise two parallel lines of dunes, which would run 43 miles along the Bolivar Peninsula and the unprotected western side of Galveston Island, fronted by 250 feet of beach. Constructing them, the Corps estimates, will require 40 million cubic yards of sand. Additionally, since a storm on the scale of Ike would wash away the dunes and surge into the Bay, the project calls for other gates and walls around the Bay, including a ring barrier encircling the city of Galveston.

“What we are proposing is multiple lines of defense,” said Burks-Copes.

Proponents also are thinking big about environmental repair, restoring 6,600 acres of ecosystems such as wetlands, bird rookery islands, and oyster reefs, some located elsewhere along the Texas shore. “We did both coastal storm risk management and ecosystem restoration and we selected sites that actually afford a natural defense system,” choosing those “that would still provide critical ecosystem habitat,” Burks-Copes said.

The coastal barrier has earned enthusiastic support from numerous local politicians and members of Congress. “We need it yesterday,” said Houston mayor Sylvester Turner in August 2020, after Hurricane Laura struck the nearby Louisiana coast, narrowly missing the Galveston Bay.

But Merrell and other experts also raise concerns about how well the Corps plan would protect the region from the worst blows. Some environmental advocates are skeptical the environmental impacts are worth the benefits. And many observers suggest that localized projects, such as raising homes and building smaller seawalls, may offer better and quicker payoffs.

Questions about payoffs begin with those immense swing gates across the Bolivar Roads inlet.

Experience with similar giant moving barriers in the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe shows that the structures can work reliably, although each design is unique, said Bas Jonkman, a professor of hydraulic engineering at Delft University who led much of the research for the Ike Dike and its successor plans.

Jonkman compared the enormous moving parts to a jumbo jet that has to fly just once every 10 years. The barrier must be expertly operated and perfectly maintained, which turned out to be more challenging and expensive than expected after the construction of a similar barrier protecting Rotterdam, the busiest port in Europe.

Some experts are also concerned about the sand dunes slated to cover Bolivar Peninsula and Galveston Island. Merrell’s Ike Dike proposal and a previous Corps plan originally envisioned 17-foot or higher levees that would have hampered access to the Gulf beaches. Under pressure from disgruntled locals — the Corps received some 13,000 public comments about the levees, Burks-Copes said, most of them negative — they replaced the levees with dunes. But the taller dunes would be only 14 feet high, much lower than the 22-foot-high gates at Bolivar Roads. Storms no larger than Ike would wipe their sand away, Merrell and other experts have warned.

“Your whole system’s only as strong as your weakest link,” said Merrell, who continues to collaborate with academic experts to analyze coastal measures. Speaking of the Corps land barrier plan, he said “They’ve made it so weak, it’s pretty much worthless.” Far better, he said, would be a 17-foot dune fortified with clay, rock, or concrete and topped with sand.

Merrell also questions the Corps’ decision to leave open San Luis Pass, the inlet to the Bay on the southwest side of Galveston Island, instead of installing a gate there. “That’s insane,” Merrell said. “That’s like leaving the back door open to your house during a hurricane.” The Corps responds that, even in a worst-case-scenario storm, water flowing through the Pass would only raise the surge in the Bay by about a foot.

Merrell and his colleagues estimate the additional cost to fortify the sand dunes and close the San Luis Pass at $10.7 billion. They argue that their measures would offer better benefits per buck than the Corps plan, which is estimated to pay back about double for each dollar invested.

No surge barrier will slow the extreme rainfalls that can unleash devastating floods, like those of 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, which killed more than 70 people in greater Houston. In fact, seawalls can trap these floods of freshwater, requiring enormous pumps to release them.

Barriers also can’t stop the wind. When Hurricane Laura ripped into the Louisiana coast in August 2020, wind losses ravaged the area, said Tracy Kijewski-Correa, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Notre Dame University. Some pictures show wind damage that looks as bad as storm surge damage, she said. The houses completely exploded.

Local environmental advocates are also concerned about the impact of the project on the wetlands and fisheries of Galveston Bay.

The Corps plan slates about $2.6 billion, a tenth of the total bill, for ecosystem restoration, such as restoring salt marshes that can absorb the impact of surging seawater. “That’s a great benefit of this project,” said Michelle Hummel, assistant professor of civil engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington.

“Everybody in the environmental and conservation community is supportive of the ecosystem restoration,” said Bob Stokes, president of the Galveston Bay Foundation, a local conservation nonprofit. “We’ve also been told that that’s not going to be the first money that’s spent — that’s going to be at the end of the project.”

Stokes also is wary of the Bolivar Roads vertical lift gates. In normal weather, the gates will cut the tidal flow across the inlet by less than 10 percent, according to Corps estimates, but Stokes worries about the results of altered water movement. “The biggest concern in my mind is the fisheries impact, in the sense that pretty much all of our fish, crabs, and shrimp spend some portion of their life cycle in the Bay system and some portion in the Gulf of Mexico,” he said. Since the gates will reduce flooding, he also worries about water quality impacts. (Burks-Copes said Corps models suggest impacts will be minimal.)

In Stokes’ view, the environmental assessments performed to date are inadequate. The Corps essentially plans to analyze the environmental impacts as they get to them, Stokes said. “Our bottom line is that if we’re going to build this thing, we absolutely have to know those impacts ahead of time.”

* * *

Perhaps the biggest question on the coastal megaproject is about the $26.2 billion cost, 35 percent of which must come from the state or other local sources. So will all the operating costs, estimated at more than $100 million a year. The timeline is protracted, too: The Corps estimates that, even with a quick legislative greenlight, the project would not be completed until around 2042.

There’s no lack of smaller-scale alternatives, most of them based on measures that are far cheaper and quicker, such as flood-proofing businesses and raising homes. Even when such options can’t offer much protection against mega-storms, they can guard against smaller events and the regular nuisance flooding that’s becoming more of an issue with sea-level rise.

These localized programs often can lower risks significantly and don’t take decades to complete, said Paul Kirshen, professor of climate adaptation at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, who led a study that rejected an outer harbor barrier for Boston in favor of onshore measures. Local improvements also can protect key infrastructure such as power stations and hospitals.

They also may be more immediately affordable than giant initiatives. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that the U.S. needs to spend $2.59 trillion — more than a third of the entire federal budget for 2020 — to bring infrastructure up to standard. Meanwhile, other cities are seeking federal dollars for billion-dollar-plus coastal proposal, and Biden’s infrastructure plan, which initially called for $50 billion for such projects, remains stalled in the Senate.

Still, many experts are skeptical that patchwork solutions are up to the task of protecting coastal cities from rising seas and amplified storms.

Given all the uncertainties about climate change in the decades ahead, “we’re going into uncharted waters,” Kirshen said. “All of our solutions have to be questioned.”

And there are large and growing swaths of coast where the sea simply can’t be warded off for many years. “Are there points at which we can strategically retreat?” Sebastian asked. “And if we do strategic retreat, how do we do that in an equitable way with consideration of everybody’s ties to place? Those are really the hardest questions to ask. But I do think, in the context of talking about spending billions and billions of dollars on the coastal spine, those questions should be asked.”

“We have to think big,” Li said. “If you just have a Band-Aid solution, it’s not going to work.”

Merrell can’t guess exactly what will end up being built, or when, in Texas. But he does expect action there — and elsewhere around the U.S. We’re slowly shifting from recovery as our strategy to prevention, he said. “You don’t switch policies quickly and easily. We ought to expect this to be hard and a bit chaotic.”

* * *

Eric Bender is a science writer based in Boston who primarily covers biomedical research.

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

Federal court blocks ruling overturning California’s assault rifle ban

In a one-page order issued on Monday, a federal appeals court blocked a federal judge’s recent controversial ruling that overturned California’s 30-year assault weapons ban. The stay issued by the three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit is “pending decisions in other gun cases that are now before the court,” the Los Angeles Times noted.

“The stay shall remain in effect until further order of this court,” wrote Senior Circuit Court Judge Barry Silverman, Circuit Judges Jacqueline Nguyen and Ryan Nelson.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed an appeal against a surprise ruling earlier this month that reversed California’s decades-old ban on assault rifles, likening the AR-15, a lightweight semi-automatic rifle, to Swiss army knives. U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez of San Diego issued an injunction to suspend the ban, arguing that the state restriction impinged upon California residents’ Second Amendment right to bear arms.

“Like the Swiss Army Knife, the popular AR-15 rifle is a perfect combination of home defense weapon and homeland defense equipment,” Benitez said in his ruling. “Firearms deemed as ‘assault weapons’ are fairly ordinary, popular, modern rifles.”

“One is to be forgiven if one is persuaded by news media and others that the nation is awash with murderous AR-15 assault rifles,” the judge added, castigating the current media narrative around gun violence. “The facts, however, do not support this hyperbole, and facts matter.”

Benitez, however, granted a request by Bonta to allow a 30-day stay on the ruling.

#BREAKING: The 9th Circuit granted our motion to stay the district court’s ruling in Miller v. Bonta.

This leaves our assault weapons laws in effect while appellate proceedings continue.

We won't stop defending these life-saving laws.https://t.co/L8F8zpLuhv pic.twitter.com/udtszNfOis

— Rob Bonta (@AGRobBonta) June 21, 2021

“Today’s decision is fundamentally flawed,” Bonta said in response to the initial ruling. “There is no sound basis in law, fact, or common sense for equating assault rifles with Swiss Army knives — especially on Gun Violence Awareness Day and after the recent shootings in our own California communities.”

The ban was originally implemented back in 1989 under Gov. George Deukmejian, a conservative Republican who supported the measure but resisted sweeping gun reform. The measure prohibited the sale of at least 24 different types of assault weapons, including the AK-47 and the Uzi.

However, in 2019, a lawsuit filed by the San Diego County Gun Owners Political Action Committee, California Gun Rights Foundation, Second Amendment Foundation, and Firearms Policy Coalition revitalized the debate, arguing that the 1989 ban restricts the rights of gun owners who want to use high-capacity magazines in otherwise legal rifles. California is “one of only a small handful of states to ban many of the most popular semiautomatic firearms in the nation because they possess one or more common characteristics, such as pistol grips and threaded barrels,” the pro-gun group argued in their suit.

In 2017, Benitez blocked a state restriction on magazines of over 10 rounds. An appeals court affirmed his ruling but added in February of this year that the case would be reheard. Benitez’s latest ruling was met with substantial backlash from both state officials gun reform advocates across the country.

“Overturning CA’s assault weapon ban and comparing an AR-15 to a SWISS ARMY KNIFE is a disgusting slap in the face to those who have lost loved ones to gun violence,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom wrote. “This is a direct threat to public safety and innocent Californians. We won’t stand for it.”

Brandon Wolf, a survivor of the Orlando nightclub shooting in 2016 – in which a shooter armed with several semi-automatic rifles murdered 50 guests – wrote on Twitter: “I can assure you — if a Swiss Army knife was used at Pulse, we would have had a birthday party for my best friend last week. Not a vigil.”

California is home to 185,569 assault rifles, according to Benitez, and as Bonta points out, has one of the lowest firearm mortality rates in the U.S. CNN reported that most mass shootings throughout modern human history have involved the use of such weapons.

American apartheid and the wealth gap: How white supremacy drives inequality

American society is structured around racism, white supremacy and protecting the unearned advantages of white people as a group. That is not hyperbole or an accusation. It is a fact.

It’s true that these power relationships across the color line are not fixed, static or permanent in terms of how they manifest across American society. But it is equally true that American society from the founding to the present has been structured to maintain the dominance and power of those individuals and groups who are considered “white” over and above those who are considered “nonwhite”.

To claim that American society is not structured around protecting white advantage (or “white privilege”) is to engage in willful ignorance, at best, or to employ intellectual dishonesty on behalf of white supremacy, at worst. Denying the existence and persistence of racism has almost become religious dogma for many white people (and for some Black and brown people as well). Such denial is an act of faith, not based on facts and empirical reality.

When truths about America’s past and present, about the color line and racial inequality, are pointed out to racism deniers, they receive those truths as a narcissistic injury, a literal attack on their sense of self.

That psychological dynamic helps explain why those who tell uncomfortable truths about American society and the color line are viewed by the white right and “conservatives” more generally as social and political heretics, as seen in the concerted attacks on the New York Times’ 1619 Project and “critical race theory.”

New research by the Reflective Democracy Campaign adds to the evidence that American society is structured around protecting white (male) privilege and power. As the Guardian summarizes, white men are about 30% of the population but hold 62% of public offices, “dominating both chambers of Congress, 42 state legislatures and statewide roles across the nation”:

By contrast, women and people of color constitute 51% and 40% of the US population respectively, but just 31% and 13% of officeholders, according to the research by the Reflective Democracy Campaign, shared exclusively with the Guardian.

“I think if we saw these numbers in another country, we would say there is something very wrong with that political system,” said Brenda Choresi Carter, the campaign’s director.

“We would say, ‘how could that possibly be a democratic system with that kind of demographic mismatch?” …

Two factors perpetuate white male control over virtually every lever of US government: the huge advantage enjoyed by incumbents, and the Republican party’s continued focus on mostly white male candidates.

Another obstacle to a more representative government comes from the Republican establishment, which does not run candidates reflective of the nation. In the 2020 primaries, 93% of Republican candidates were white, and fewer than one in four were women.

Democratic candidates, the report continues, “were 44% women and 32% people of color,” not quite a match to the nation’s overall demographics but “far more inclusive than the GOP’s virtual erasure of entire communities.” That partisan divide creates a political climate in which policies supported by substantial majorities cannot win legislative approval, including gun control laws, automatic voter registration and a national living wage.

This is the America that today’s Republican Party and its neofascist movement are so desperately trying to defend.

Racism and white supremacy do not exist in isolation. They intersect, overlap and work through such social identities as gender, class, sexuality, ethnicity, religion and ability status. As the British sociologist Stuart Hall famously observed, “race is the modality in which class is lived, the medium in which class relations are experienced.”

Even if unintentionally, the much-discussed new investigative report from ProPublica on how America’s richest individuals pay little or nothing in taxes reveals the relationship between race and class in stark detail. The trove of revealed IRS data, ProPublica reports,

demolishes the cornerstone myth of the American tax system: that everyone pays their fair share and the richest Americans pay the most. The IRS records show that the wealthiest can — perfectly legally — pay income taxes that are only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions, if not billions, their fortunes grow each year.

Many Americans live paycheck to paycheck, amassing little wealth and paying the federal government a percentage of their income that rises if they earn more. In recent years, the median American household earned about $70,000 annually and paid 14% in federal taxes. … The confidential tax records obtained by ProPublica show that the ultrarich effectively sidestep this system.

ProPublica undertook a novel form of analysis, comparing “how much in taxes the 25 richest Americans paid each year to how much Forbes estimated their wealth grew in that same time period.” Those 25 individuals “saw their worth rise a collective $401 billion from 2014 to 2018,” during which time they paid a collective total of $13.6 billion in federal income taxes. That’s a “staggering sum,” the report concludes, but “amounts to a true tax rate of only 3.4%.”

A new report from the Institute for Policy Studies reveals a similar story of Gilded Age robber baron-style riches, in which the wealthiest American families have rigged the tax code and the legal and political system to their extreme advantage. In practice, the United States is a country where poor, working and middle-class people subsidize the ultra-rich.

Some have described such income and wealth inequality as a “wealthocracy,” which is actively threatening the stability of American democracy and society. That last part is true enough, but to label America’s plutocracy using race-neutral language is to willfully ignore the role of racism and sexism in creating and perpetuating such a system. Nearly all the richest Americans described in these reports are white men. As such, the “wealthocracy” has both a racial and gender identity.

Understood in total, extreme wealth and income inequality pose a critical danger to America’s long-term social, economic and political stability — and racism and white supremacy are key elements of this crisis.

In a 2020 report, economists and other researchers estimated that anti-Black racism has cost the U.S. economy $16 trillion over a 20-year period.

New research from the McKinsey consulting firm indicates that 19% of Black American households have negative wealth, compared to 8% of white households. Social scientists have estimated that the wealth gap between median Black households and median white households is enormous: The figure is $24,000 for the former, and $188,000 for the latter. If motor vehicles are removed as an asset in these calculations, the racial wealth gap is even more extreme.

In the aggregate, white households possess 84% of the country’s wealth, while Black households own just 4%. These disparities are largely the result of centuries of government policies that have subsidized the creation of white intergenerational wealth, while denying Black and brown Americans those same financial resources and other opportunities. Examples stretch from the history of white-on-Black chattel slavery and Jim Crow to racial pogroms and other forms of violence to the GI Bill and FHA/VA home loan programs, housing segregation and the creation of postwar suburbia, through to the predatory mortgage and lending practices of recent years.

Defending American society from the Jim Crow Republican Party and its campaign against multiracial democracy demands that we must understand wealth and income inequality as inseparable from racial justice.

To that end, Democrats, liberals, and progressives should embrace a narrative frame of “wealth justice,” making clear that such egregious inequalities are deeply connected to questions of democracy and opportunity and upward mobility for working and striving Americans on both sides of the color line.

For reasons of their own self-interest, white Americans should come to understand how racism and white supremacy hurts them as well. We cannot hold our breath waiting for such an epiphany: White Americans have had centuries to reach such an awakening. But if enough Americans of all colors can come to see how deeply and intimately race, class and inequality are intertwined, there may yet be hope for saving the country from Trump and the Republican Party’s neofascist movement.

Device makers have funneled billions to orthopedic surgeons who use their products

Dr. Kingsley R. Chin was little more than a decade out of Harvard Medical School when sales of his spine surgical implants took off.

Chin has patented more than 40 pieces of such hardware, including doughnut-shaped plastic cages, titanium screws and other products used to repair spines — generating $100 million for his company SpineFrontier, according to government officials.

Yet SpineFrontier’s success arose not from the quality of its goods, these officials say, but because it paid kickbacks to surgeons who agreed to implant the highly profitable devices in hundreds of patients.

In March 2020, the Department of Justice accused Chin and SpineFrontier of illegally funneling more than $8 million to nearly three dozen spine surgeons through “sham consulting fees” that paid them handsomely for doing little or no work. Chin had no comment on the civil suit, one of more than a dozen he has faced as a spine surgeon and businessman. Chin and SpineFrontier have yet to file a response in court.

Medical industry payments to orthopedists and neurosurgeons who operate on the spine have risen sharply, despite government accusations that some of these transactions may violate federal anti-kickback laws, drive up health care spending and put patients at risk of serious harm, a KHN investigation has found. These payments come in various forms, from royalties for helping to design implants to speakers’ fees for promoting devices at medical meetings to stock holdings in exchange for consulting work, according to government data.

Health policy experts and regulators have focused for decades on pharmaceutical companies’ payments to doctors — which research has shown can influence which drugs they prescribe. But far less is known about the impact of similar payments from device companies to surgeons. A drug can readily be stopped if deemed harmful, while surgical devices are permanently implanted in the body and often replace native bone that has been removed.

Every year, a torrent of cash and other compensation flows to these surgeons from manufacturers of hardware for spinal implants, artificial knees and hip joints — totaling more than $3.1 billion from August 2013 through the end of 2019, a KHN analysis of government data found. These bone specialists make up a quarter of U.S. doctors who have accepted at least $100,000 or more, and two-thirds of those who raked in $1 million or more, from the medical device and drug industries last year, the data shows.

“It is simply so much money that it is staggering,” said Dr. Eugene Carragee, a professor of orthopedic surgery at the Stanford University Medical Center and critic of the medical device industry’s influence. Much of the money is deemed to be compensation for consulting duties or medical research, or royalties for inventing, or fine-tuning, new surgical tools and techniques. In some cases, it pays for trips or splashy junkets or rewards surgeons for promoting products to their peers.

Device makers say the long-established practice leads to higher-quality, safer products. “Doctors help develop and refine medical devices, and they even create new devices themselves, sharing their intellectual property with companies to help save and improve patients’ lives,” said Scott Whitaker, president and CEO of AdvaMed, the medical technology industry’s trade group.

But industry whistleblowers and government investigators say all that money changing hands can corrupt medical judgment and tempt surgeons to perform unnecessary and wasteful operations. In ongoing lawsuits, patients say they have suffered life-altering injuries from screws or other spinal hardware that snapped apart or live with disabilities they blame on defective knee or hip implants. Patients alleging injuries range from seniors on Medicare to celebrities such as Olympic gold medalist Mary Lou Retton, who had surgery to replace both her hips. The gymnast sued device maker Biomet in January 2018, alleging the hip implants were defective. The suit has since been settled under confidential terms.

The case of Chin’s company, SpineFrontier, is among more than 100 federal fraud and whistleblower actions, filed or settled mostly in the past decade, that accuse implant surgeons of taking illegal compensation from device makers — from surgeon entrepreneurs like Chin to marquee names like Medtronic and Johnson & Johnson. In some cases, device makers have paid hundreds of millions of dollars in fines to wrangle out of trouble for their involvement, often without admitting any wrongdoing.

Court pleadings examined by KHN identified more than 700 surgeons who have taken money, including dozens who pocketed millions in royalties, fees or other compensation from 2013 through 2019.

The names of hundreds more surgeons were redacted in court filings or sealed by judges.

Court filings named 35 spine surgeons who used SpineFrontier’s surgical gear, some for years. At least six of those surgeons have admitted wrongdoing and paid a total of $3.3 million in penalties. Another has pleaded guilty to criminal charges. It’s illegal under federal law to accept anything of value from a device maker for using its wares, though most offenders don’t face criminal prosecution.

Chin, 57, who lives in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and owns SpineFrontier through his investment company, declined comment about the DOJ lawsuit or the consulting agreements.

“There is a court date [for the DOJ case] as ordered by a judge,” Chin said via email. ”If we get to that point the facts of the case will be litigated.”

Back Surgeries Under Scrutiny

The nation’s outlay for spine surgery to treat back pain, or to replace worn-out knees and hips, tops $20 billion a year, according to one industry report.

Taxpayers shoulder much of that cost through Medicare, the federal program for those 65 and older, and Medicaid, which caters to low-income people.

In one common spinal procedure, surgeons may replace damaged discs with an implant and screws and metal rods that hold it in place. The demand for surgery to replace worn-out knees and hips also has mushroomed as aging boomers and others seek relief from joint pain that restricts their movement.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the competition for sales of orthopedic devices is fierce: Some 250 companies proffer a dizzying array of products. Industry critics blame the Food and Drug Administration, which allows manufacturers to roll out new hardware that is substantially equivalent to what already is sold — though it often is marketed as more durable, or otherwise better for patients.

“The money is just phenomenal for this medical hardware,” said Dr. James Rickert, a spine surgeon and head of the Society for Patient Centered Orthopedics, an advocacy group. He said most of the products are “essentially the same,” adding: “These are not technical instruments; [it’s often] just a screw.”

Hospitals can end up charging patients $20,000 or more for the materials, though they pay much less for them. Spine surgeons — who make upward of $500,000 a year — bill separately and may charge $8,000 to $20,000 for major procedures.

Which equipment hospitals choose may fall to the preference of surgeons, who are wooed by manufacturing sales reps possibly present in the operating room.

And it doesn’t stop there. Whistleblower cases filed under the federal False Claims Act allege a startling array of schemes to influence surgeons, including compensating them for joining a medical society created and financed by a device company. In other cases, companies bought billboard space or other advertising to promote medical practitioners, hired surgeons’ relatives, paid for hunting trips — even mailed checks to their homes.

Orthopedic and neurosurgeons collected more than half a billion dollars in industry consulting fees from 2013 through 2019, federal payment records show.

These gigs are legal so long as they involve professional work done at fair market value. But they have drawn fire as far back as 2007, when four manufacturers that dominated the hip and knee implant market, including a J&J division, agreed to pay $311 million to settle charges of violating anti-kickback laws through their consulting deals.

KHN found at least 20 whistleblower suits, some settled, others pending, that have since accused device makers of camouflaging kickbacks as consulting work, including paying doctors to sit on suspect “advisory boards” or other activities that entailed little work to justify the fees.

In November 2019, device maker Life Spine and two of its executives admitted to paying consulting fees to induce dozens of surgeons to use Life Spine’s implants in the operating room. In all, 21 of the top 30 Life Spine adopters were paid and they accounted for about half its total device sales, according to the Justice Department. Life Spine and the executives paid a total of $6 million in penalties. The company did not respond to requests for comment.

Similarly, SpineFrontier received “the vast majority” of its sales, more than $100 million worth, from surgeons who were compensated, the Justice Department alleges. Often, they were paid by way of a “sham” company run by Chin’s wife, Vanessa, from a mail drop in Fort Lauderdale, according to the Justice Department. Vanessa Dudley Chin, a defendant in the DOJ civil case, had no comment.

Kingsley Chin told KHN via email that he takes no salary from SpineFrontier, based in Malden, Massachusetts. In 2013, Chin received $4.3 million in income from the company, according to court filings in a divorce case in Philadelphia from an earlier marriage. In 2018, SpineFrontier valued Chin’s interest in the company at $75 million, according to government records, though its current worth is unclear.

SpineFrontier’s management thought paying doctors was “the only reliable way to steadily increase its market share and stave off competition,” Charles Birchall, a former business associate of Chin’s, alleged in a whistleblower complaint. The case is one of two whistleblower suits filed against SpineFrontier that the DOJ has joined and consolidated. Chin has yet to file a response in court.

From March 2013 through December 2018, the company offered some surgeons $500 or more an hour for “consulting,” which could include the time they spent operating on patients — even though they already were being paid by Medicare or other health insurers. Other surgeons were paid repeatedly to “evaluate” the same products, though their feedback was “often minimal or nonexistent,” according to the DOJ complaint.

Patient Injuries Pile Up

While the payments have piled up for doctors, so have injuries for patients, according to lawsuits against device makers and whistleblower testimony.

Orthopedic surgeon-turned-whistleblower Dr. Manuel Fuentes is suing his former employer, Florida device maker Exactech, alleging it offered “phony” consulting deals to surgeons who had complained about alarming defects in one of its knee implants.

Their findings should have been forwarded to the FDA to protect the public, Fuentes and two former Exactech sales reps alleged in their suit. Instead, the company paid the surgeons “to retain their business and secure their silence” about patients needlessly undergoing a second operation to address the defects implanted in the first, according to the suit. Lawyer Thomas Beimers, who represents Exactech in the case, said the company “emphatically denies the allegations and looks forward to presenting the real facts to the court.” In a court filing, the company said the suit was “full of conclusory, vague and immaterial facts” and said it should be dismissed.

In Maryland, spine surgeon Dr. Randy F. Davis faces a lawsuit filed in early 2020 by 14 former patients who claim he implanted counterfeit hardware from a device distributor that had paid him hundreds of thousands of dollars in consulting fees and other compensation.

Davis used the hardware, which had not been FDA-approved, on about 250 patients at the University of Maryland Baltimore Washington Medical Center in Glen Burnie, Maryland, according to the suit. Several patients say screws or other implants failed and they sustained permanent injuries as a result. One woman said she was left with little feeling in her right foot and needs a cane or walker to get around. Others claim “extreme mental anguish” for fear the hardware inside them will fail, according to the suit.

The patients allege that Davis improperly disposed of defective screws and other hardware he removed rather than send the items for analysis or report the failures to authorities. Instead, the University of Maryland hospital sent “hush” letters to patients that falsely told them that no defects had been found, according to the suit. A spokesperson for the hospital, which also is a defendant in the suit, denied the allegations, noting: “We will vigorously defend this lawsuit and at its conclusion are quite confident we will prevail.” Davis and his lawyer didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment. The lawsuit is pending in Anne Arundel County state court.

Surgeons are free to implant devices they helped bring to market or promoted, though doing so can prompt criticism when injuries or defects occur.

That happened when three patients filed lawsuits in 2018 against Arthrex, a Florida device company. The patients argued they were forced to undergo repeat operations to replace defective Arthrex knee devices implanted by Pennsylvania orthopedic surgeon Dr. Thomas Meade.

Meade was not a defendant in the cases. But the patients accused him of misleading them about the product’s safety and a recall. One noted that Meade had served as a prominent consultant to Arthrex and had “participated in the design, testing, marketing, promotion and sales” of the knee implant. The patient alleged that Arthrex had paid Meade more than $250,000 for work that included “promotional speaking, travel, lodging, and consulting.”

In court filings, Arthrex admitted making payments to Meade for “consulting and royalties” but denied wrongdoing. The cases were settled in 2020. Meade did not respond to requests for comment.

Chin’s dual roles as SpineFrontier’s CEO and user of its hardware was called a “huge” conflict of interest by a judge in a pending malpractice case filed against him and the company in South Florida.

In that case, Miami resident Patrick Chapoteau alleges Chin performed back surgery in 2014 using SpineFrontier hardware even though it had little chance of success. According to the suit, a Chin-designed screw implanted to stabilize Chapoteau’s spine broke in half, causing him pain and disabling injuries.

In a legal brief, Chin’s lawyers argued that he regularly operates on people with disabling back problems, noting: “The surgery is sophisticated and challenging. On a few rare occasions, his patients have not obtained the relief they expected or experienced unanticipated complications that required additional care.”

Joseph Wooten, a former Chin patient and Florida power company employee, alleged in a 2014 lawsuit in Broward County Circuit Court that Chin had 15 previous malpractice claims that had ended in more than $8 million in settlements, an assertion Chin’s lawyers disputed.

“He never told me of his bad record injuring people,” Wooten, 64, wrote in a court filing. He and his wife, Kim, said the surgery caused “debilitating and life-altering injuries.” The case has since been settled. Chin acknowledged no wrongdoing and the terms are confidential.

KHN reviewed court pleadings in nine settled malpractice cases in Philadelphia, where Chin served on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School from 2003 to 2007, and six in South Florida filed since 2012. Details of the settlements are confidential. Five of the six South Florida cases are pending, including one filed in December by the widow of a man who died shortly after spine surgery. In all the cases and settlements, Chin has denied negligence.

In her lawsuit pending against Chin in South Florida, Nancy Lazo of Hialeah Gardens, Florida, said she slipped and tumbled down the stairs outside her Miami office, landing on her back and arm. When the pain would not go away, she turned to Chin and had two operations, in 2014 and 2015. Her lawyers allege that a SpineFrontier screw Chin implanted in her spine in the second procedure caused nerve damage. Lazo, 51, a former billing clerk with two adult sons, said she can no longer work and remains in “constant” pain. “Based on what my doctors have told me,” she said, “I will never get back to normal.” Chin denied any negligence and the case is pending.

Government Struggles to Keep Pace

Concerns that industry payments can corrupt medical practice have been aired repeatedly at congressional hearings, in media exposés and in federal investigations. The recurring scandals led Congress to require that device makers and pharmaceutical companies report the payments, starting in August 2013, to a government-run website called Open Payments. That website shows that payments to all doctors have risen from $8.6 billion in 2014 to just over $10 billion last year. A recent study found payments by device makers exceeded those of pharmaceutical companies by a wide margin.

Both the North American Spine Society and the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons told KHN that close ties with the industry, while seeming to generate huge payouts to some surgeons, lead to the design of safer and better implants. “These interactions are really essential for good outcomes in patient care and that needs to be preserved,” said Dr. Joshua J. Jacobs, who chairs the orthopedic surgery department at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago and the AAOS’ ethics committee.

Although more than 600,000 American doctors lap up industry largesse, most do so through small payments that cover the cost of food, drinks and travel to industry-sponsored events. When it comes to big money, however, orthopedists and neurosurgeons dominate, collecting 25% of the total — even though they represent only 5% of the doctors accepting payments, according to the KHN analysis of Open Payments data.

Dr. Charles Rosen, a spine surgeon and co-founder of the advocacy group Association for Medical Ethics, said he was once offered $2,000 just to show up and watch an industry-sponsored panel. “It was quite unbelievable,” he said.

Rosen said while he believes a “relatively small number” of surgeons cash whopping industry checks, many who do so are influential figures who can “help direct medical care.”

Government data confirms that even as several orthopedic and neurosurgeons received tens of millions of dollars in 2019, 81% of them got less than $5,000 from industry.

Federal officials recently signaled their displeasure with the hefty fees paid to doctors who promote their products to peers, especially at restaurants, entertainment or sports venues that feature free food and booze but little educational content. In November, the inspector general at the Department of Health and Human Services issued a special fraud alert that such gestures could violate anti-kickback laws.

Companies that ignore the reporting law can be fined up to $1 million, though no fines were levied from 2014 through spring 2020, according to a CMS report. That changed in October, when device giant Medtronic agreed to pay the government $9.2 million to settle allegations that it paid kickbacks to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, neurosurgeon Dr. Wilson Asfora to promote its goods. Officials said the company sponsored more than 100 events at a Brazilian restaurant owned by the surgeon to clinch the sales. Just over $1 million of the fine was assessed for failing to report the transactions. A Medtronic spokesperson said the company fired or took other disciplinary action against the sales employees involved and “remains committed to maintaining the highest standards of ethical conduct.”

KHN identified four spinal device makers — including SpineFrontier — that have been accused in whistleblower cases of scheming to hide consulting payments from the government.

Responding to written questions, a CMS spokesperson said the agency “has multiple formal compliance actions pending which it is unable to discuss further at this time.”

But penalties for paying, or accepting, kickbacks often are small compared with the profits they can generate.

“Some people would say if you penalize companies enough, they won’t be making these offers,” said Genevieve Kanter, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. She said small fines may be chalked up to the “cost of doing business.”

The Federation of State Medical Boards does not keep data on how often its members discipline doctors for civil kickback offenses, according to spokesperson Joe Knickrehm. The federation has “long advocated for stronger reporting requirements,” Knickrehm said.

Justice Department officials would not discuss whether they are seeking fines from more surgeons. But in a statement in April 2020, then-U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts Andrew E. Lelling noted that the government will investigate any doctor “who accepts money from a device manufacturer simply for using that company’s products.”

The rising interest in growing mushrooms at home

For most home cooks (admittedly, myself included), mushrooms generally arrive in the kitchen in one of two ways: you either purchase them at a supermarket or farmers’ market, or occasionally, you might forage them, aka find them in the woods.

But there is a rising interest in a third way of acquiring edible fungi: growing mushrooms at home. Just as baking sourdough bread, backyard gardening and other homesteading-like activities grew in popularity as people stayed inside more during the Coronavirus pandemic, interest in mycology and homegrown mushrooms also surged in the past year.

Interest in cooking and eating mushrooms had already been on an upward trajectory pre-pandemic. “I’ve been fascinated by mycology and mushrooms for a very long time,” says Sharon Chin, a business consultant from Flushing, New York. “During the pandemic, once I was home and had more time, I thought, ‘If I’m going to have a new indoor plant or grow my own things, why not work on mushrooms?'”

Chin purchased a kit from Smallhold, a New York City-based mushroom grower who pivoted to consumer sales and mushroom kits as their restaurant business slowed down in 2020. “I saw that and thought ‘Oh, this is really accessible, this is really easy. I want to try it,'” explains Chin, who picked up two pounds of mushrooms from the grower, along with her kit for growing blue oyster mushrooms. New York Times writer Zoë Schlanger, who also used Smallhold’s kits to home grow mushrooms, describes the process, when “pink oyster [mushrooms] emerge as a cascade of salmon shingles,” as “more dramatic than [she] could have imagined.”

Mushrooms are mysterious and ephemeral,” Smallhold co-founder Andrew Carter told Schlanger for the Times. As both newbie growers and experienced pros like Carter will describe, one moment you have a bag filled with compressed waste (generally a mix of sawdust, wheat bran, ground corn cobs, etc), along with microscopic mycelium (kind of like mushroom “seeds”) hidden out of sight. Cut a few Xs in the bag, spritz daily with water, and in a week or so, you see scaly oyster mushrooms or bulbous lion’s manes spring forth, ready in just a few more days to be sauteed into your morning omelette.

Gardening, small-scale

For Back to the Roots co-founders Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez, the idea of growing mushrooms started with a college lecture, when an inspiring professor mentioned that mushrooms could be grown in used coffee grounds. The men’s interest in the inherent sustainability of fungi eventually led to their container gardening company, which sells mushroom kits, windowsill herb planters and more.

“In the past year . . . I think the kits have been especially good for parents that can [use this as an] activity with their kids and an educational activity they can do inside,” says Arora. Like Back to the Roots, many gardening retailers across the country saw record sales during the early months of the pandemic, to the point that seeds and tools became unavailable. One study found that gardeners spent 42% more time in the garden in 2020 than in prior years

“Growing mushrooms is such a great entry point,” says Arora. “They grow in 10 days, you literally don’t need a backyard. You can do this on the 44th floor of a Chicago high-rise and you can still experience the magic of growing your own food. I think there’s something really exciting about the ease of use and the pace and the quickness of it, it makes it accessible to everybody.”

Anneliesse Gormley isn’t growing her mushrooms on the 44th floor of a high-rise; instead she’s been filling every container she can find, from 5-gallon bins to a violin, vases, wooden spoons and more, with sawdust to grow the fungi. A woodcarver based in Asheville, North Carolina, Gormley first got interested in mushrooms as a material to incorporate into her work; she uses them, along with dried flowers, to add a botanical flair to her cutting boards. After realizing she could use her leftover wood shavings to grow the mushrooms, she started regularly producing fungi herself; she currently grows around 30 pounds a week using mycelium and other materials sourced primarily from Portland, Maine’s North Spore. “Just on a sustainability level, I thought how amazing it would be to have a piece of wood, use it to make something, and then use that sawdust to create a home and a vessel that mushrooms can grow out of, for either food or art or both,” she says.

Growing mushrooms is now a passion project for Gormley. “Our spare bathroom has turned into a little mushroom grow operation,” she explains, complete with a humidifier. “Once you’ve seen how one thing can grow, it’s like ‘Okay, maybe we should try shiitakes and see how they grow, or blue oyster mushrooms, or silver oyster. It’s kind of just turned into this passionate love project.”

A growing trend of growing mushrooms at home

The rising popularity of home gardening certainly helped attract new people like Chin, Gormley and Schlanger to growing mushrooms at home. But as we’ve previously reported, mushrooms are having a moment in general. The 2019 film Fantastic Fungi, narrated by film star Brie Larson and featuring a number of mycologists, mushroom growers and enthusiasts, earned a coveted 100% from Rotten Tomatoes and has been reviewed on Amazon more than 5,000 times. More than a dozen new books about mushrooms and mycology are being published in 2021; the #growingmushrooms hashtag on Instagram has been used almost 10,000 times; and Google searches for the term “growing mushrooms” spiked during the pandemic, roughly doubling in the 2020 summer months.

More than a decade after their initial coffee grounds inspiration, Arora and Velez’s Back to the Roots mushroom kit is one of Amazon’s top sellers in the plants and gardening section. “In the last year, we’ve just seen an incredible, incredible increase in momentum around mushrooms. And really, it’s been something that’s been building, I think, year-over-year for the last five years,” he says, pointing to the rising market for health food items, supplements and other food products made with mushrooms. “I think there is just more and more awareness now about the health benefits of mushrooms.”

Back to the Roots is among many companies prospering from this rising interest in mushrooms. North Spore told the Times they saw a 400% increase of sales of introductory growing supplies during the pandemic, while The Guardian reports British company Grocycle saw a 320% rise in grow kit sales during the same time. The global mushroom market — including fresh and dried mushrooms for cooking, as well as mushrooms used in medicinal products, beauty products and recyclable packaging — is expected to reach $95.2 billion by 2028, according to the market research company Grand View Research.

Digging deep into mycology

As with many other niche hobbies, there is a whole community of people interested in growing mushrooms to help support and foster those wanting to get into and learn more about fungiculture. Just like gardening or bread baking, the general task is simple, but small nuances can impact the final results. A newbie sourdough baker may try once, using a starter bought online and the baking instructions that come along with it; they may also spend weeks growing their own culture from scratch, meticulously tracking the hydration like it’s a science project, joining Facebook groups and going deep on sourdough baking Reddit threads. The same range of obsession exists in the field of homegrown mushrooms.

Chin’s experience was the former; she followed the kit and its simple instructions, only realizing after her mushrooms had emerged that she needed to account for humidity and other factors. “I think you learn by what goes wrong,” she says, explaining that some of her mushrooms shriveled up and dried in her arid New York apartment. “If I was to do it again, I would learn more about the conditions and the processes, but I trusted the kit to keep it really simple. There are a ton of best practices out there that anyone who’s interested in doing this can look at as they go on this journey.”

In North Carolina, Gormley is on that journey. “I feel like growing mushrooms is one of those things that you can come in having little experience, and then you can be a complete master and you’re growing very different mushrooms,” says Gormley, who gives grain spawn — mushroom mycelium grown in rye or millet grain, which is what also fills the growing kits — to friends interested in fungiculture. She also recommends Trad Cotter’s book “Organic Mushroom Farming and Mycoremediation” to anyone interested in learning more. “Anyone, anywhere can do it. It’s not one of those things that has to be overly expensive or overly troublesome. And it’s so sustainable too, because, once your coffee grounds are done, you just pour them into an area and they’ve become incredible fertilizer for something else to grow.”

Mushrooms and the future

With a boom in mushroom growing kit availability from shops like Smallhold, North Spore and California’s Far West Fungi, there has never been a better time to start growing mushrooms at home. “Growing mushrooms has never been more accessible. I think if you are truly interested in doing it right, there’s a community with resources to help you do it well,” says Chin, who will look to online resources like Ag Tech X when she next decides to grow mushrooms. “My first experience was probably the entry point, and I hope to do more in the future.”

Beyond the appeal for first-timers of growing their own food, Arora also sees real future potential in eating mushrooms. “There’s so much in this whole [fungi] kingdom and we’ve barely scratched the surface,” he says. “We grow way more asparagus than we do mushrooms, and you know that’s just one little crop, and mushrooms are a whole kingdom.”

Mushroom growing kits offer home growers the opportunity to explore a new corner of the fungi kingdom, beyond the button mushrooms or portobellos — which are actually the same species, in different growing stages! Whether it’s the dazzle of the bright pink oyster mushrooms, the fuzz of the lion’s mane or the medicinal benefits of reishi, these kits allow home growers to see and taste mushrooms they are unlikely to find at their regular supermarket.

This is just one reason Back to the Roots has developed a robust educational curriculum to go alongside their kits; inspired by the TOMS shoes one-for-one model, when a customer shares a photo of their kit on social media, the Back to the Roots team donates a kit to the school of their choice. (TOMS’ founder is an investor and mentor to the Back to the Roots team.)

“[From the beginning we’ve seen] families and kids and a new generation wanting to reconnect with their food and where it comes from, and grow it themselves,” says Arora, who explains the company has donated tens of thousands of the kits through the program. And whether its school children, city apartment dwellers, or homesteaders in North Carolina, home fungi cultivation offers an approachable way to do just that. “That’s it,” says Arora. “It’s about connecting a new generation to food and to the land, getting them into the garden.”

GOP threatens to shut down Tennessee Department of Health for “pushing vaccines on children”

Trutherism comes in many forms among far-right conspiracy theorists: coronavirus truthers, Jan. 6 truthers, 9/11 truthers, 2020 election truthers, vaccine truthers. And in Tennessee, far-right Republicans in the state legislature, the Tennessee Lookout reports, are threatening to dissolve the state’s health department after accusing it of targeting minors for mass COVID-19 vaccinations without parental consent.

On June 16, according to Lookout reporter Sam Stockard, “The Government Operations Committee ordered Health Commissioner Lisa Piercey to soften the state’s efforts to vaccinate children, mainly by bringing parents into the fold, and report back in July. Republican lawmakers repeatedly pointed toward a picture of a teenager on the state’s website displaying a bandage on her shoulder after having a vaccine. The wording above says Tennesseans 12-16 are eligible to get a shot, evidence the state is pushing vaccines on children, legislators said.”

Piercey, Stockard reports, “repeatedly told members of the panel the state is giving Tennesseans the choice to have vaccinations,” but “to no avail.”

Tennessee State Sen. Kerry Roberts, a Republican, told fellow Republicans, “It looks like there is a mission here, an agenda here to have children vaccinated with or without parental consent.” But Piercey maintained, “Under no circumstance is the (Tennessee Health) Department encouraging children to seek out vaccination without parental consent.”

Piercey went on to say, “I think there is a sense that we are hiding in dark alleys and whispering to kids: hey, come get vaccinated. We’re not doing that. We’re not encouraging that. It is an allowance, and we do believe that vaccination is the right thing to do for children — and so, we don’t want to prohibit that, if that’s something they want to do.”

However, Tennessee State Sen. Heidi Campbell, a Democrat, defended the Tennessee Health Department during the June 16 hearing, saying there is “no evidence” of the Department targeting minors for COVID-19 vaccinations without the approval of their parents.”

According to the New York Times, about 65% of the United States’ adult population has been vaccinated for COVID-19 — and President Joe Biden is hoping to get that number up to 70% by July 4. Biden is also encouraging parents to get their children vaccinated for COVID-19, although he has never said that children should be vaccinated without their parents’ consent.

Trump Organization sues New York City for terminating its contracts after Capitol insurrection

While the Trump Organization is dodging problems with the Manhattan district attorney, they’re fighting back against the city of New York for what they say was an illegal termination of their contract, reported ABC News.

Former President Donald Trump’s company managed several things for the city including the two skating rinks, the Central Park Carousel and the Trump Golf Links at Ferry Point. After the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, New York City wanted nothing to do with anything Trump-related.

“The City has no right to terminate our contract,” the Trump Organization said. “Mayor [Bill] de Blasio’s actions are purely politically motivated, have no legal merit, and are yet another example of the mayor’s efforts to advance his own partisan agenda and interfere with free enterprise.”

Presumably, if it was politically motivated, de Blasio would have terminated the contract prior to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

“The President incited a rebellion against the United States government that killed five people and threatened to derail the constitutional transfer of power,” de Blasio said in Jan. “The City of New York will not be associated with those unforgivable acts in any shape, way or form, and we are immediately taking steps to terminate all Trump Organization contracts.”

Trump makes about $17 million annually for the contracts and the golf course contract isn’t set to expire until 2032. the others expired earlier this year. The city government explained that it followed its contract termination process included in the documents.

The cash-only ice rink is one of the contracts being investigated by the Manhattan district attorney’s office.

Read the full report at ABC News.

Some states are mandating digital vaccine “passports” — while other states are banning them outright

The idea of a “vaccine passport” has been touted repeatedly, by pundits and by government officials, as a means of verifying an individuals’ vaccination status. The operative word “passport” is, of course, a metaphor — implying that vaccination verification entitles one to greater freedom of movement, akin to a real passport affording freedom of travel.

Thus, it was curious when California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom announced last week that a new vaccine verification system was to be rolled out in the state. At the press conference, Newsom emphasized it is not a “passport.”

So, then, what is it?

Officially called the Digital COVID-19 Vaccine Record, public health officials said that Californians can register for this verification through the California Department of Public Health’s (CDPH) website. The intended use is for people to have an online version of the vaccine card they received upon getting inoculated against COVID-19, which includes a scannable QR code.

California isn’t the only state implementing processes to digitally verify peoples’ vaccinations as states open up. New York recently introduced the Excelsior Pass; residents are already showing it at venues like comedy clubs, restaurants and bars upon entry. In May, Hawaii announced that it would be using a “digital health pass” known as CommonPass for travelers to either present either a negative COVID-19 test or proof of vaccination to bypass quarantine.

The lack of a federal system for vaccination status tracking has resulted in states taking the lead, yet with different individuated systems. That may create headaches for everyday Americans who move between states post-vaccination, or live in one state and work or travel to another.

In California at least, the digital vaccination record was created as a means to ostensibly reduce the headache of having to carry around an easy-to-lose paper.

“While CDPH recommends that vaccinated Californians keep their paper CDC card in a safe and secure place, we recognize that some people might prefer an electronic version,” said California State Epidemiologist Dr. Erica Pan in a press release. “And if one of the state’s nearly 20 million vaccinated Californians misplaces their paper card, the Digital COVID-19 Vaccine Record provides a convenient backup.”

The California Department of Health again emphasizes that this digital certificate is not a “passport” but merely a digitized vaccine record. Yet it is up to the businesses of California to decide if patrons need to show proof of vaccination upon entry. In that case, patrons have the option to use their digital vaccine card instead of their paper one.

The CDPH states all information provided will be kept private.

“Filling out the form on the portal does not provide instant access to your vaccine record,” the website states. “The link to the vaccine record requires a PIN that you create and is sent only to the mobile phone or email that is associated with your immunization record; only you can decide how and if you want to share your record with others.”

Not all state leaders are digitizing their vaccine records — and some are downright hostile to the prospect.

In early April, Idaho Gov. Brad Little signed an executive order banning any governmental entity in Idaho from requiring a vaccine passport.

“Vaccine passports create different classes of citizens. Vaccine passports restrict the free flow of commerce during a time when life and the economy are returning to normal. Vaccine passports threaten individual freedom and patient privacy,” Little said in a statement.

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Utah Gov. Spencer Cox signed a law banning the state government from requiring vaccine passports, too. States like Arizona, Florida and Texas, have issued executive orders stating that no business can demand to see if a customer has been vaccinated or not.

Meanwhile, other countries have their own assorted takes on the concept of a vaccine “passport.” In Israel, where half the population is fully vaccinated, citizens must show an electronic “Green Pass” to access wedding halls, dine indoors, go to the gym, and attend a concert. Starting July 1, the European Union will be moving forward with an electronic vaccine certification process, which will be determined by each country, in hopes of starting up summer travel again. Britain is testing a COVID-19 vaccine certificate system as well.

As the New York Times reported, one of the biggest concerns for a vaccine passport is privacy.

“There are a whole lot of valid concerns about how privacy and technology would work with these systems, especially as Silicon Valley does not have a great history delivering technologies that are privacy enhancing,” Brian Behlendorf, executive director of Linux Foundation Public Health told the New York Times. “And the concept of privacy here is complicated because you are ultimately trying to prove to somebody that you received something; You aren’t keeping a secret, so the challenge is to present and prove something without creating a chain of traceability forever that might be used.”

Others are worried it could exclude communities who don’t have smartphones or access to the internet.

“Any solutions in this area should be simple, free, open source, accessible to people both digitally and on paper, and designed from the start to protect people’s privacy,” Jeff Zients, the White House coronavirus coordinator, said in a statement via the New York Times.

The Biden administration has previously acknowledged that there is demand for secure documentation that allows individuals to provide proof of their vaccination status, but has said the federal government won’t be the one to provide it — hence, why states are taking matters into their own hands.

Newt Gingrich tries to prop up Kevin McCarthy’s speaker campaign — against the Trumpers

With House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy facing sagging poll numbers, including among Republicans — as Salon reported last week — long-ago House Speaker Newt Gingrich is trying to boost McCarthy’s chances of the speakership in a future Republican Congress. Gingrich sent a tweet to his “Gingrich 360” followers assuring them he is “convinced Leader McCarthy is likely to be the next Speaker of the House.”

Gingrich added in the blog post, “I think you will agree that something special is building at the grassroots.” That optimistic statement appears to overlook that the Republican “grassroots” largely consists of the same people who attempted to block McCarthy from becoming minority leader in 2018.

To determine how likely it is that fervent pro-Trump lawmakers and other MAGA loyalists would actually support McCarthy for House speaker, we must look back at previous clashes between the California congressman — frequently mocked and derided by Trump and his most devout supporters — and the right-wing fringe of the Republican caucus.

On Nov. 8, 2018, two days after Republicans lost their House majority in the “blue wave” election, a group of 61 Republican heavyweights wrote to then-President Donald Trump asking him not to endorse McCarthy as GOP leader, but to endorse Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, a stalwart Trump backer, for the top post instead: “We write to encourage you NOT to prematurely endorse Kevin McCarthy for Minority Leader, and to instead consider an endorsement of a better fighter and advocate for you and for us, Jim Jordan.”

Prominent signatories of that letter included conservative activist Ginni Thomas, who is married to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas; Ken Cuccinelli, who under Trump became principal deputy director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in 2019; and Cleta Mitchell, then a partner in the Washington, D.C., law firm Foley & Lardner, who was forced to resign after she participated in Trump’s now-infamous Jan. 2 phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. A slew of Tea Party and grassroots leaders also signed the letter, including Jenny Beth Martin, chair of the Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund; Anne Schlafly Cori, chair of the Eagle Forum; and heads of the Family Research Council, the Center for Security Policy, the American Civil Rights Union and Gun Owners of America, along with other organizations.

The group complained that McCarthy had failed to fund Trump’s border wall, repeal Obamacare or defund Planned Parenthood — major campaign promises that motivated Trump’s base in 2016, at least in their eyes. Further, they claimed that McCarthy had “forced Trump to sign a bad spending bill,” failed to impeach IRS Commissioner John Koskinen for alleged destruction of evidence and lying to Congress about the agency’s supposed persecution of conservatives, failed to seek accountability for the Benghazi incident, and did nothing to stop the so-called censorship of conservatives on social media and on college campuses.

McCarthy met longtime Republican pollster Frank Luntz, one of Gingrich’s closest allies, while both worked on Gingrich’s “Contract with America” during Bill Clinton’s administration in the 1990s. Luntz discussed McCarthy with Gingrich in a podcast this April, telling Gingrich, “Kevin is awesome, Kevin is friendly, and Kevin is smart, and he’s got a great demeanor, the perfect demeanor for right now in politics.”

Gingrich responded, “I talked to Kevin just in the last few days. I know that in the retreat [congressional Republicans] just had, he outlined the concept of an expanded and more detailed commitment to America, which is his version of the contract,” a reference to his own famous “Contract with America.”

Former Republican congressman David Jolly — who left the party in 2018 — recently offered a different and startling take on a potential McCarthy speakership, suggesting that the minority leader may possess explosive or incriminating information about the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.

In an MSNBC appearance on May 21, Jolly noted: “Liz Cheney has said that McCarthy won’t be speaker, which tells me that Liz Cheney knows that Kevin McCarthy knows something that is so damning, it could undo his ascension to the speakership, should Kevin McCarthy go under oath before a Jan. 6 commission.”

If Republicans do win back the majority in 2022, McCarthy will likely hold a razor-thin advantage in the House and may face a coup attempt by MAGA allies, some of whom have even proposed appointing Trump himself as speaker. (There is no constitutional requirement that the speaker be an elected member of the House, although all of them have been to this point.) The idea was first floated by former Trump adviser Steve Bannon but has gradually worked its way into more mainstream Republican circles, with American Conservative Union chairman Matt Schlapp proposing it in a recent cable news interview.

.@mschlapp: "There's a lot of buzz out there that Donald Trump would even be potentially be…Speaker of the House if the Republicans get the majority back." [with @JohnFBachman on Newsmax: https://t.co/VlT7z8drtO] pic.twitter.com/mhzrj1cQ3f

— NEWSMAX (@NEWSMAX) June 17, 2021

“There’s a lot of buzz out there that Donald Trump would even be potentially someone they’d crown as speaker of the House if the Republicans get the majority back,” Schlapp said last week on the MAGA-friendly cable channel Newsmax. “I’m not saying that’s a live wire, but it’s an interesting conversation about Trump inserting himself in the fight for the Republicans to get back the majority.”

Why is “liberal” media pushing an “America First” message and a new Cold War?

If you get your foreign policy news today from CNN or MSNBC or NPR or similar outlets, then you’re bombarded hour after hour with the idea that the United States has the absolute right to impose sanctions on country after country overseas if they violate human rights or are not democratic.

To give just one example: On Sunday, CNN anchor Dana Bash grilled Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, on why the White House is not imposing yet more sanctions on Russia (and China) and why Team Biden was “giving in to Russia” on the gas pipeline to Western Europe. Sullivan was emphatic in insisting that sanctions had been imposed and more were on the way, boasting that Biden had grabbed even more presidential power to sanction Russia through an executive order.

I’m old enough to remember the superiority complex behind the liberal media propaganda during the Cold War with the Soviet Union — while U.S. foreign policy, in the name of democracy, massacred millions of people of color, mostly civilians, across the globe from Asia to Southern Africa to Latin America.

In the middle of the Cold War, when Martin Luther King Jr. denounced the U.S. government as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” and criticized U.S. hubris fueling the Cold War, liberal outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post furiously condemned King — in essence, telling him to leave foreign policy to “us white guys.”

When it came to relations between nations, King criticized the “arrogance” of our country and the West in “feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them.”

Jump to the present, and you see the same arrogance in liberal U.S. media: We have everything to teach others — whether Russia or China or Iran or Venezuela or any of the dozens of countries the U.S. is imposing sanctions on, sometimes deadly sanctions.

Let’s do today what MLK urged us to do back then: Look at ourselves in the mirror.

There is no more precious human right than the right to be free from jail or prison. So it’s a human rights violation of epic proportions that the United States has more than 2 million people incarcerated, way more than any other country, including China with its much huger population. Our people behind bars are disproportionately Black or brown people. Liberal media have recently learned how to throw around the term “systemic racism,” but when lecturing other countries they deftly forget that mass incarceration is an affront to notions of “democracy” and “human rights.”

It’s a human right to be able to live without the fear of violence. Yet no other major country has so much gun violence, with hundreds shot every day — one of many problems that U.S. “democracy” can’t even address, let alone solve.

One might have hoped that recent U.S. history would have humbled liberal media pundits about their cherished belief in the U.S. as a “beacon of democracy” to the world — and therefore, our sacred right to punish other countries that don’t measure up.

After four years of Trump and a Trump movement that has captured almost half the electorate, after our corporatized media system lavished massive amounts of free airtime on candidate Trump in 2015 (CNN, CBS, ABC, etc.) because it was good for network profits, after years of a dysfunctional political system in Washington that serves the rich and giant corporations when not in total gridlock, after the Supreme Court was packed with right-wing judges through legislative double-dealing, after ever-increasing voter suppression targeting people of color and young voters, one would hope for some humility about “U.S. democracy.”

Yet liberal media pundits keep propagandizing the public about the USA’s right to lecture foreign countries over their political systems, and to severely punish them (leaving aside allies like Colombia, Saudi Arabia and Israel, of course). Never mind the horrific consequences to civilians overseas when deprived of life-sustaining imports.

These liberal news outlets may despise Trump, but they sure put “America first” when it comes to policing the rest of the world. And they seem intent on instigating new cold wars with Russia and China.

It’s indefensible that Putin has imprisoned and nearly killed opposition figure Alexei Navalny, and it’s important for the U.S. government to publicly and privately speak out against such behavior. The same goes for China’s terrible mistreatment of Uyghur Muslims. But while speaking out with self-awareness and humility about human rights, the U.S. also needs to work collaboratively with Russia on cyber-peace and disarmament (the two nations have 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons) and with China on climate change. Without collaboration, the world is doomed.

The liberal view on the original Cold War with the Soviet Union is that “we won.” The progressive view is that everybody lost, especially Global South countries like Vietnam, Iran, Indonesia, Guatemala and El Salvador that were victimized by U.S. invasions, coups and proxy wars supported by both Democrats and Republicans.

I have a bold idea you won’t hear on CNN or MSNBC: Instead of lecturing and sanctioning the rest of the world, let’s get our own house in order. Let’s lead by example. On democracy, instead of sanctioning other countries, Team Biden should rally Democrats to sanction the U.S. Senate by establishing majority rule through an end to that Jim Crow legacy, the filibuster. And Biden should address the right-wing-packed Supreme Court.

On human rights, let’s cut the U.S. military budget in half, and provide things that other advanced countries already have: universal health care and free or near-free higher education. Let’s invest billions of dollars in poor and working-class communities, and end the horrors of mass incarceration. Let’s cancel student debt that burdens 45 million people and, at long last, seriously tax U.S. oligarchs and corporations to pay for these investments (and perhaps worry less about sanctioning Russian oligarchs).

Joe Biden likes to think of himself as a foreign policy specialist. If he listens to the laptop warriors in the media who want him to “pivot” belligerently toward China and Russia, an adventurist foreign policy will undermine the Democrats’ domestic agenda and doom his administration quicker than you can say “LBJ.” And Republicans will retake Congress.

Biden can succeed only if he ignores the media hawks and focuses laser-like on domestic policy — galvanizing his party toward a serious FDR-like effort to address human rights and climate change with major federal programs uplifting working-class people of all colors.

“Time to reflect”: Tucker Carlson accuses Don Lemon of having “white supremacist QAnon cookie jar”

On Fox News Monday, Tucker Carlson went off the rails with an attack on CNN late-night anchor Don Lemon that outed the neighborhood in which he lives, and the interior of his house.

Carlson referred to Lemon, who is Black, as a “successful victim” who “doesn’t like diversity,” and noted that his neighborhood is majority-white. But perhaps the strangest moment of the segment was when Carlson zeroed in on Lemon’s cookie jar, which appeared to be in the shape of a mid-20 century Black caricature figure.

“You have heard from the White House, from the president himself, that white supremacy is a lurking threat,” said Carlson. “You might not always see it, but like Russian spies, white supremacists come in the dark of night, in the most surprising form. They’re shapeshifters. Now, we’re not calling anyone a white supremacist, but you have to ask yourself — what is this? This symbol of hate — symbol of hate, posing as a cookie jar — doing in Don Lemon’s kitchen? Do you see that? That right there, ladies and gentlemen, is a white supremacist QAnon cookie jar.”

“Now, we’re not calling for the Department of Justice to look more deeply into this, because that’s not our place,” said Carlson. “We’re a cable news show, not a law enforcement agency. But let’s just put it this way. If you find yourself with a blackface cookie jar in your own kitchen — hah — it’s time to reflect.”

You can watch the video below via Twitter:

Marco Rubio says “spicy” UFO details will become public: “Ain’t no way that doesn’t leak”

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., was interviewed by TMZ about UFO’s at Reagan National Airport on Monday.

The senator was asked about the government’s highly anticipated report on UFOs.

“I think we’ll have more information, but I think at the end, I don’t think people should be expecting that’s it’s going to answer — there’s going to be a lot of questions, even after it,” he said.

“But for me, it’s about treating this seriously,” he said.

Rubio also said that if there was something “spicy” that was redacted in the report, “ain’t no way that doesn’t leak.”

You can watch the video below via TMZ:

“Rick and Morty,” resistance heroes, face a new nemesis channeling our current uncertainties

Contrary to the earliest and quite naïve assessments of the pandemic, COVID-19 is the furthest thing possible from an equalizer. But it is humbling the hell out of many, and why should the titular genius of “Rick and Morty” be exempt from that?

This refers to a feeling, by the way, not anything concrete in the long-awaited the fifth season premiere “Mort Dinner Rick Andre,” the first new episode to air since the fourth season finale in May 2020.

Series co-creators Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland, the latter of whom voices both Rick and Morty, have been working on this season since 2019, and back then only scientists like Rick were aware of what coronaviruses are.

Plus, “Rick and Morty” has always been a show that comments on the harsh reality of existence while rarely making direct reference to real-world events save for, say, the odd rise of a totalitarian regime from a democratic election.

This is a long way of saying that of course there were no face masks in the premiere written by Jeff Loveness (his last one before writing the script for the upcoming MCU feature “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania”) and as far as we know the introduction of Rick’s Loki-esque pansexual nemesis Mr. Nimbus (voiced by Harmon) was always going to come off it does.

Nimbus doesn’t seem like much of a threat when we meet him, surfacing on the ocean to confront Rick on a giant scallop shell a la Sandro Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus.” But peek at the clutch of phalluses blooming around his feet. This guy rhymes-with-ducks and he wants everybody to know it.

His reveal is triggered when Morty crash lands his grandfather’s spacecraft on water in a last-ditch effort to save both their lives. That never seemed to be a problem before but apparently it is, since Rick previously made an agreement with Nimbus, a nod at Marvel’s Sub-Mariner, to never touch his ocean. And Rick isn’t merely irritated at Morty for summoning Nimbus. He looks genuinely worried.

Although some episodes convey their roles in the show’s storyline quite plainly, many “Rick and Morty” installments contain whatever level of alternate meaning the viewer assigns to it. Nimbus could be a one-off, or perhaps he’ll hound Morty and his grandpa forever.

Or, given that we’ve shared some global version of a crash landing that millions didn’t survive, maybe Nimbus is supposed to translate as a representative of a foe we haven’t entirely figured out. In any event, Rick’s annoyance at being forced to cater to the whims of an adversary who is at least his equal if not more than he can handle places him in similar figurative territory to the place where we’ve been locked down for 15 months.

If we’re watching Rick in action he’s probably drunk or high, which is fine because he’s fought to the end of all our stories and won. Meanwhile Morty often stumbles his way to success. That Morty landed the broken craft at all is because when he thinks death is inevitable he calls his unrequired crush Jessica (Kari Wahlgren) and is so shocked at her invitation to come over to watch a movie that he pulls off the save.

But a nemesis is a fresh ordeal for Rick. That Rick has one at all is surprising, given how many episodes of this show are devoted to showing him bragging about how far beneath him every being in every multiverse is.

Certainly he tolerates life with his dim bulb of a son-in-law Jerry (Chris Parnell) to appease his daughter Beth (Sarah Chalke) and remain in his 17-year-old granddaughter Summer’s (Spencer Grammer) good graces, but he can live without them, and has.

And yet, there’s a special twinge of dark humor in making one of the many tentacles of Nimbus’ power that he “controls the police.” His arrival on a river of saltwater and eels is so off-putting to Jerry that he calls the cops, who show up and immediately hop to attention when Nimbus tells them to fight, then rhymes-with-duck, then flee.

Thus he proves what Rick said in the first place: “Mr. Nimbus is an ice-cold dick killer, Morty.”

What else can he do but placate him for a chance at negotiating a new level of détente? He does this over a table laden with food and after making Morty into his wine steward, forcing him to age some basic swill into a centuries-old vintage by placing a case or three inside a dimension where time moves differently.

Hence the episode’s complex secondary plot kicks in, since Morty encounters a lovely man named Hoovy (Jim Gaffigan) who kicks off a world-changing vendetta between his people and Morty. He steps through the portal to help Morty carry a case, and when he heads back a lifetime has passed; his pregnant wife is gone and the son he left in the womb has grown up old, bitter and homicidal.

Since Nimbus is a lush, Morty has to return to the dimension again and again, and every time the world on the other side of the door is more hostile, organized and evolves from a place that resembles “Excalibur” to something out of “The Matrix.” Eventually the other side claims Jessica, trapping her in a lucid stasis for lifetimes. When she returns to our existence she is changed.

“Time without purpose is a prison,” she says. “I have glimpsed into the mind of eternity, perhaps the mind of God, and found nothing but silence.” Then she pauses before sending Morty to a zone where no teen boy wants to be exiled: “I think we should just be friends.”

The simultaneous fondness for the recurring motifs of speculative fiction and its irreverent mocking of twists and tools that have been done to death are central to this show’s duende. And that’s also a major reason we love Rick, because he’s an old guy who has seen it all, done it all and screwed more than you can imagine.

Despite being a huge jerk, Rick is an embraceable hero because he has an itch for dismantling oppressive systems. His arrogance is an outgrowth of his ability to impose his will on chaotic forces and topple structures constructed on trust and belief – like, say, the economy.

But this only applies to all dimensions, planets and galaxies; he forgets about the threat lurking under the waves that is extremely sexually fluid, guzzles ancient vintages of fine wine, and controls the cops. Next thing you know all of our dry land is on the line.

The good news is that Jessica used all the free time she had to ascend to a higher plane, while Jerry and Beth are recommitting to making their marriage work by being more sexually free. Mostly that means watching porn together . . . until they meet Nimbus.

And if that sounds like a bizarre, unnecessary development in the face of such lethal uncertainty, welcome to “Rick and Morty” in 2021. The hero has met his match and doesn’t quite know what to do. He’s vulnerable, and so are we. Of course, he and his grandson aren’t real, but the choice they make in light of this week’s premiere is similar to our own – they’re pressing on, somewhat more blindly and possible with a little more care. Like us they’ve learned that no conclusions are forgone and no ending is predictable anymore, not even for the Rickest Rick.

New episodes of “Rick and Morty” air Sundays at 11 p.m. on Adult Swim. Previous seasons are available to stream on HBO Max. The Season 5 premiere is available online for free on YouTube, or just watch below:

The science of changing your mind — and someone else’s

Yelling at them doesn’t work. Appealing to their empathy doesn’t work. Rebutting their disinformation and conspiracy theories not only doesn’t work, it actually just makes them dig in their heels more deeply. So rather than continuing to bang our heads against the wall, or simply throwing up our hands in despairing futility of talking to our radicalized relatives and neighbors, is there anything that does work to change anybody else’s mind? Can we even, for that matter, change our own?

It’s not your imagination — we are living through an astonishingly polarized moment in history. A Pew Research report last fall painted a bleak portrait of “the increasingly stark disagreement between Democrats and Republicans on the economy, racial justice, climate change, law enforcement, international engagement and a long list of other issues.” I’ve been spending my summer so far doing coursework in conflict resolution, and it’s taught me the value of empathic listening — and the simple truth that you can’t negotiate with anybody who won’t sit at the table.

To understand how we can become less contentious (or if we even can), we have to recognize how we got to this place. No huge surprise here — as Robert Kozinets wrote for Salon back in 2017, social media has played an oversized role in rewiring our unruly, addiction-prone brains. “One of the most effective ways to achieve mass appeal,” he observed, “turned out to be by turning to the extreme.”

Who cares if it’s even true? As “The Hype Machine” author Sinan Aral explains of his research, “Novelty attracts human attention because it is surprising and emotionally arousing…. False news was indeed more novel than the truth, and people were more likely to share novel information.” The more extreme, the more arousing the information is, the brighter it lights up our brains.

That rush that social media provides also, unfortunately, creates what Facebook cofounder Sean Parker ruefully has called “a social-validation feedback loop … exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.” We gravitate to the heady cocktail of reward and anxiety that our notifications provide, in that endless, agitating loop. But it’s not just social media that’s a problem: it’s media media, as the multitudes of us who have “lost” family members to Fox News know.

Our minds are more vulnerable and our thoughts more untrustworthy when we’re scared. And while the far right takes the gold medal for anxiety-stoking — there’s scientific evidence that conservatives have a “greater gray matter volume in the amygdala”— we on the progressive side of the aisle are no strangers to fearmongering either, as my 3 AM doomscrolling can confirm. The trap here is that our brains are not super reliable about distinguishing perceived threats from actual and immediate ones, especially at 3 AM.

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Dr. James Giordano, Professor of Neurology and Biochemistry at Georgetown University Medical Center, explains that we all have our own individual “peak performance” stress range.

“As stress levels get higher, we begin to fatigue not only biologically, but psychologically and socially, and we perceive the stress and perhaps the stressor as threatening,” Giordano says. “The more vulnerable we feel, often, the more volatile we become. That volatility can be a prompt to aggressiveness and violence.”

And it doesn’t necessarily matter if the stressor is legitimate. “Perceived stress,” he says, “is very important. A perceived threat can instill a sense of dread in an individual or group of individuals, and be very influential in guiding their thoughts, emotions and behaviors. Hence,” he continues, “the effectiveness of propaganda in advancing ideas whereby a defined other, often also portrayed as ‘inhuman,’ is intrinsically threatening.”

Dehumanization is a highly effective empathy killer. And while I’m not engaging in false equivalences by any stretch here, I can certainly cop to my own fears of the faceless enemies of my ideologies, and how far stuck they are in my own brain.

So before I can even hope to change anyone else’s mind, I have to try to understand my own. Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, neuroanatomist and author of “Whole Brain Living: The Anatomy of Choice and the Four Characters That Drive Our Life,” says, “Inside of our brain we have four distinctive characters. The better we get to know those four different characters, our two emotional and our two thinking, we can identify when we’re being which, and then we can recognize that in other people.”

She continues: “When we dig our heels into something that we are emphatic and passionate about, we are using our limbic system, our emotional system. The left hemisphere emotion is looking for our differences and it is bucking against our differences. This is our fear and our anxiety. The emotion in our right brain is connected to humanity, and is looking for how to collaborate and focus on our similarities. If we’re recognizing someone else is in their emphatic, emotional, ‘I need to be right, you’re wrong’ mind, I don’t have to react with my comparable character. I can observe. I don’t have to engage.”

But if for some compelling reason I actually do want to engage, pediatric neuropsychologist and parent coach Dr. Sarah Levin Allen has some ideas. “Our brains compartmentalize and group ‘like’ information together to be more efficient,” she says. “Then, we learn by connecting new information with what we already know. In order to change people’s minds, you literally have to find what people already know and slowly connect the dots (or neurons — the cells in the brain) to the new information.”

The challenge, as she acknowledges, is finding ways around the intense pressure and high reactivity many of us are facing, and looking for the right openings to approach.

“Most of the time, people whose brains aren’t stressed with other things (like processing work or emotions) can find the thing that is ‘like’ the new information and begin to make the pathways themselves,” she says, “thus creating a change of mind. When the new idea is too much of a deviation from what someone knows or when stress reactions block the ability to make pathways, brains need help. When trying to change the mind of someone who is stressed, we actually need to do one of two things: either reduce the stress hormone in the brain by making a connection and reducing negative emotion first or slow down the process delivering ideas in very short bursts that the brain can slowly process.”

In other words, you don’t have to love your enemies, but you’re definitely not going to win them over to your ideas without first getting them to chill out.

Of course, belief and behavior are two separate entities. Your sister-in-law may believe that face masks cause demonic possession; she might still choose to wear one if she wants to go to Applebee’s. A Florida man may believe he won a re-election, he still has to hand over the nuclear football. Ultimately, life affords us plenty of opportunities to settle for grudging acceptance, if not grateful conversion. (See: Everything you’ve ever browbeaten your children into doing.)

But in many spaces, we don’t have to compromise; we don’t have to find common ground. We can choose information — and disinformation — that affirms and exacerbates our deepest anxieties. We can stoke the fires of our amygdalas and never run out of fuel; that’s totally an option. We can refuse to engage with those too far gone to reason with; that’s often a healthy choice.

The harder work, if we want to take a swing at getting those who still have ears to hear us to listen and neurons to engage, is to consider Allen’s advice. “Meet people where they are,” she says, “and bring them to where you want them to be.”

“The struggle is the story”: “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark” sequel director reexamines McNamara’s work

Nearly one year ago, former police officer Joseph James DeAngelo, known as the infamous Golden State Killer, stood trial and was sentenced to life in prison for the 50 home-invasion rapes and 13 murders he committed during the 1970s and ’80s. At the same time as DeAngelo’s trial, the six-part documentary series, “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark,” aired on HBO last summer, chronicling not just the notorious killer’s attacks across the state, but also giving voice to his victims who lived, and telling the story of the woman who had dedicated her life to trying to find DeAngelo and win justice.

Directed by Elizabeth Wolff, a new follow-up episode of “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark” airs Monday that marks the one-year anniversary of DeAngelo’s guilty plea, along with revisiting the case from the victims’ ongoing stories to the efforts of true crime investigator Michelle McNamara. The author of the book that inspired the name for the series became known in her own right, partly because of her work and partly for being the wife of comedian Patton Oswalt, with whom she had a daughter. McNamara had struggled with mental illness and addiction, especially as she became more and more obsessed with her search for the Golden State Killer. She died in 2016 of a fatal overdose, before DeAngelo was identified, and before he was sentenced.

“[McNamara’s] struggles to balance all of this — the investigation part with the writing part with the being a mom part — all of that,” Wolff said in an interview with Salon. “I don’t know what the story would be if we glamorized it. The struggle is the story.”

While the special episode revisits the Golden State Killer’s case and features equal parts devastating and empowering victim impact statements of the women he harmed, it also takes us back to the tragedy that sparked McNamara’s passion for solving cold cases, and seeking justice for victims: the unsolved, 1984 killing of Kathy Lombardo in McNamara’s hometown of Oak Park, Illinois.

The special episode features interviews with Lombardo’s family, as well as McNamara’s own research into the rape and murder, and her discoveries of inconsistencies in the police work. But as Lombardo’s case remains unsolved to this day, the special commemorative episode is also a reflection on the trauma that persists when killings go unsolved, and a celebration of citizen sleuths like McNamara herself.

Salon talked to Wolff about the revelations of the new episode, directing during a pandemic (and while pregnant), the ongoing fascination with true crime among female audiences, and the importance of telling true crime stories that give victims a voice.

It’s so impressive that you were pregnant while working on this project. What was that like? Did being pregnant make the project any more personal for you?

I wouldn’t say being pregnant while working on this made it more emotional, but I think something that was very present through the course of working on this series was the fact that Michelle herself, like so many women, really struggled to find a balance between the pressures of wanting to advance her career, and the pressures of trying to be the best mom she could be. I learned a lot from her, and also from researching the culture of this. In the course of doing the series — we started back in 2018 — I had read “Perfect Madness” by Judith Warner, which explores the culture of motherhood and the pressure to do it all, and that it’s specifically American. It really gave me a better understanding of what Michelle was going through.

Doing this special episode while being pregnant, I was so well-prepared because of that research I had done on the series to know how to find that balance, and ask for it. I credit Liz Garbus, who’s a mother of two, and her production company, and HBO, for completely understanding what I was going through, and also understanding that I could do the job, that they could create systems so they could work around me and my pregnancy. I don’t find that’s often the case, especially with freelancing and the production world. It’s like, “Can you do the job? No you can’t.” The first deadline was a week after my due date, and Liz from the get-go said, “Don’t worry, we’ll create a system so you don’t feel under pressure and it doesn’t all fall on you, and you can go do the things you need to do while being pregnant and a new mom, and we’ll work around you.”

That was incredible, and it also allowed me to do the thing that I love, which is storytelling, and being really invested in my work, while knowing it was still OK to have a doctor’s appointment, or put my pregnancy and my daughter first. I have a great appreciation for that — I think in part because of what I got to learn and experience in telling Michelle’s story about her struggles with how to balance work and motherhood. It was incredibly gratifying to be able to do the thing that was creatively fulfilling, and having this personal transformation at the same time.

There’s a sort of mystique around why the true crime genre is so appealing to female audiences, as well as an ongoing debate of whether female victims’ suffering is being exploited by the genre. As a female director, and with McNamara, a female reporter, at the center of much of your storytelling, how did you approach the complexities of gender and true crime?

As a female filmmaker and learning from Michelle as a female journalist, one of those things we’re particularly attuned to is the ways traditional true crime tells the story from the perspective of the perpetrator. It was important to Michelle and important to us in making the film that we really flipped the script, and made this an empowering story, an opportunity for survivors to own their story, to tell their story from their own perspective, and for us to honor their story.

Very early on, many of the survivors said, “Every time I see these shows, or every time I do the interview, people just talk about the moment of the assault. But actually, the assault continues because of everything we have to deal with, with law enforcement, with the culture, with the lack of resolution when your case isn’t solved.” Those experiences are as important as this heinous crime itself, and we want them to be heard. We were able to deliver on that. That was a hugely important part of the creative work we did — to give survivors and women a platform and the ability to tell their story.

In terms of women’s fascination with true crime, this is something we debated a lot in the series, and talked to a lot of people about this. Michelle really thought a lot about it. We interviewed the “My Favorite Murder” podcast. There’s not any one answer to why women are particularly drawn to this. Everyone has their own answer and their own reasons. In some instances, I think looking at dark material like this allows people to connect their own darkness to something that’s externalized. There’s a process in true crime; it’s very neat and tidy, where real life is really messy. A lot of the true crime we consume has an ending. A lot of the complexities and darkness and demons in our own lives are not as neat and tidy as a procedural crime story. Sometimes, it’s easier to focus on other people’s demons and darkness than it is to focus on our own. It’s easier to avoid our lives by focusing on these things.

Something that sets Michelle apart is that she really was motivated to find justice for the survivors, and to really solve these cases. A lot of the true crime we consume and that is greenlit are stories that have an ending. She never worked on stories that had an ending, she worked on cold cases. She was haunted by the lack of resolution that so many victims and survivors experienced when their cases go unsolved. What was so satisfying about doing this episode is that Michelle wrote the book not knowing the Golden State Killer was going to be caught. She was constantly grappling with, “How do you finish a book about a killer and a case that has no ending?”

We had an ending — the killer was caught. There was something very poetic for us to have this bonus episode, to reexplore the lack of resolution, the undealt with traumas that survivors and victims’ families feel when their cases go unsolved. Much like how Michelle’s book ends, ours ends with a call to action — how can law enforcement devote more energy, and how can citizen sleuths pick up Michelle’s torch and continue to help find justice and resolution by solving these cold cases.

Many true crime documentaries lionize the detectives at the heart of their stories, but “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark” is unique in that it doesn’t glamorize the emotionally exhausting work of trying to solve these cases — especially for McNamara, as a woman with mental health struggles. Why has it been so important to tell McNamara’s story in an authentic way?

As a documentary filmmaker, I only want to do things in an authentic way. The complexities of her life, and her work, the portrait of an artist as a young mom — those are the things that attracted me to telling this story. If it wasn’t about Michelle’s investigation of this case, I probably wouldn’t be here.

I wanted to tell the real story about how these things pull you in competing directions, and how relatable it is, because we know Michelle is a writer and she’s writing a book. She’s investigating a case and over the course of writing the book, the investigation kind of took over. This is something that I can empathize with, because when I’m a filmmaker and I’m telling a story, my job is to be a filmmaker and tell a story — run a production, run edits, deliver a compelling story. But sometimes you get so sucked in, and with the Lombardo case, I had fellow producers say to me, “You’re not an investigator, you’re not going to solve Kathy’s case. Your job is to bring attention to it and tell the story accurately.” I was lucky enough to have those reminders. The open-endedness of Michelle’s deadlines that constantly kept getting pushed was such that she could kind of lose herself in the investigation. That had some deleterious effects.

This new episode seems to show holes and patchiness in the police work around Lombardo’s murder, which was very personal to McNamara. What has it been like to tell these stories, at this time of increased discourse around distrust of the police?

This story isn’t necessarily about the current cultural moment, and I think insofar as it has some parallels, it certainly depicts a history of the ways law enforcement did not bring attention to or devote enough resources to crimes against women. What the Kathy Lombardo case and the attitude of the police at the time show is how it was easier, and there was a community that benefited from perpetuating the myth that there was not a lot of crime going on, and not a lot of crime against women.

It was easier to tell the story of a peaceful suburban neighborhood than it was to reveal all of the complexities of a changing world. There are a lot of really good detectives out there and this is not an indictment of any one detective. This episode is more an exploration of a culture within law enforcement that doesn’t like to look backwards, doesn’t like to look at missteps, doesn’t devote resources to cold cases, and perhaps doesn’t devote enough resources to the investigation of sexual assault crime. That’s what we’re really bringing attention to.

McNamara’s story and her struggles show the intensity of how digging into stories like the Golden State Killer can impact someone. How important was it for you and your team to take care of yourselves through telling these stories?

It was critically important, and I remember talking to Liz about this project early on, before the Golden State Killer had been caught, and on the first days of me coming on board. I remember thinking, “Wait, they want to bring me on board to tell this story of a really, really dark serial rapist murderer, and the last woman to go this deep in the story died in the process of telling the story? Do I really want to take this on?”

From the beginning, the production was very open and devoted to making sure that everyone had the support they needed, and took their weekends, got therapy if they needed therapy, or could take a day if they needed a day. This was really, really dark material, and I saw a therapist during the whole production. There were a lot of times where we would be working on something, like in working on the episode where Michelle dies, it was really painful. And certainly not as painful as what Patton went through, and her family’s pain is unimaginable. There is also something very real about secondary trauma, when you’re working on such dark material and telling it in such an intimate way, and we had access to Michelle’s text messages, and emails — it was very, very hard.

One of the very important lessons that came out of the last three years of work for me was how important it is for yourself but also as a leader on a team of young women and men who are working on this, to really prioritize your mental health, and be able to talk about your feelings, be able to have an open space to cry or share,. So much of that is also a lesson from the survivors and the series overall, which is, if you keep something bottled up, if you bury something, it comes out in different ways. You need to let your emotions and your darkness and your demons into the light, so they can’t take hold of you. That’s something Patton speaks so eloquently about as he dealt with his own grieving process. I learned a lot from him.

What was it like to direct and film this episode during the pandemic?

The fact we did this seventh episode during the pandemic allowed for everyone to think of creative new ways for pregnant women and new moms to continue to do their work. I didn’t travel during the seventh episode; I was able to do a lot of interviews via Zoom, and to direct a lot of the shoots we were doing in Chicago via Zoom. I worked remotely, which I don’t think would have been possible had the pandemic not forced people to think of new ways to work. I think there’s a lesson here for how we can still do that work while also going through a seismic shift in our personal lives. It starts with employers being flexible.

The special episode of “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark” premieres on Monday, June 21 at 10 p.m. and will be available to stream on HBO Max.

The COVID-19 pseudoscience suffocating Brazil

In January 2021, Thalita Rocha stood by her mother-in-law, Maria da Cruz Lima, at a public health clinic in Manaus, Brazil. Lima, a 67-year-old retired nurse, had caught the highly contagious Covid-19 gamma variant (formerly called P.1) assailing the Amazon’s largest city. She was waiting for a spot to open up at an intensive care unit but was feeling optimistic — a nurse had started her on oxygen and she seemed to be improving. An oximeter clipped onto Lima’s index finger measured her blood oxygen saturation and was finally showing healthy levels, around 98 percent.

That afternoon, though, Rocha noticed her mother-in-law’s skin turning purple. Lima also broke out in a cold sweat and was feeling breathless. A sense of panic filled the room. Lima was not the only one: The oxygen at the unit had run out.

An hour later, a police car showed up at the door with two extra tanks. A team of young men hauled the heavy 5-foot tanks into the clinic. Patients took turns breathing in the life-saving gas.

For Lima, it wasn’t enough. She died that day, along with 31 other people. “The oxygen ran out so unexpectedly,” said Rocha. “We had no warning.”

But Brazil’s government did. Just a week earlier, the oxygen supplier in Manaus had sent government officials an urgent letter warning that the company’s oxygen would soon run out due to the sudden surge in critical Covid-19 cases caused by the gamma variant.

Despite the letter, the Ministry of Health failed to secure sufficient oxygen in time or encourage a lockdown in Manaus to limit the virus’s spread. Instead, the federal government decided to combat the rising Covid cases by launching a public health campaign advertising the alleged benefits of treating early-stage coronavirus with a loosely defined cocktail of unproven drugs, commonly called tratamento precoce since mid-2020, Portuguese for “early treatment.”

Although other early Covid-19 interventions with existing drugs have shown promise, proponents of tratamento precoce — which include Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro — lean on discredited or skewed experiments to trumpet the regimen’s effectiveness, even after several of the pills were proven to not work against Covid-19 in conclusive clinical trials last year. Some of the more concerning — albeit rare — side effects include rapid heartbeat, or tachycardia, and liver toxicity.

In Brazil, where more than 474,000 people have already died due to Covid-19 — second only to the United States — pseudoscience has become government policy. Bolsonaro regularly promotes repurposing unproven and cheap drugs to his nearly 40 million social media followers as he continues to minimize the gravity of the pandemic and dismiss its victims. Meanwhile, his administration has spent millions of dollars to produce, purchase, and promote pills such as the lice medication ivermectin, the antimalarial chloroquine, and popular antibiotic azithromycin, as well as anticoagulants, painkillers, and a set of vitamins. The Ministry of Health and numerous doctors endorsed using a combination of these medications to treat Covid-19, even though there is no solid evidence that it works.

“It’s not because they believe it works, but because it is a way for them to escape their responsibility for controlling the pandemic,” said Jesem Orellana, a Manaus-based epidemiologist at Fiocruz Amazônia, one of 16 units of the public health research center Oswaldo Cruz Foundation. For at least a month last fall, Orellana urged his local authorities to implement a lockdown.

David Nemer, a Brazil political analyst and assistant professor at the University of Virginia, agrees. “Bolsonaro is doubling-down on his bet on early treatment to give people a sense of security to keep going to work,” said Nemer, adding that Bolsonaro’s strategy appears to favor an open economy over health and distract citizens from his vaccine failures. “He needs something to contain his rising rejection rates.”

With recorded daily deaths breaking national records earlier this year — 4,249 deaths were recorded on April 8 — the dangers of the Bolsonaro administration’s method are becoming clearer. Just in the city of Manaus, 4,430 people died within the first two months of the year, raising the death rate to among the highest in the world.

Lima had not taken any “early treatment” pills but still fell victim to the government’s focus away from real measures — securing more vaccines and oxygen, tracing and testing, lockdowns, advocating for mask use, social distancing — in favor of pseudoscience.

* * *

As Covid-19 spread over the past year, reports of possible off-label uses of existing medications started to pop up. In March 2020, a French scientist published a now-discredited study purporting to show that hydroxychloroquine taken with the antibiotic azithromycin reduced mortality. Later, an Australian study found that the anti-parasite drug ivermectin reduced the viral load of coronavirus in cells in a dish, even though the concentrations used in the lab were not viable in a human body. For zinc and vitamins C and D — said to improve immunity — and a flood of other medications, the story is the same: small, biased, or false studies, rather than solid scientific support. Researchers continue to look more deeply at some of these treatments, including ivermectin, although it is still unclear whether the drugs will show promise.

Over the course of the pandemic, the politicized approach has gained a footing in almost every sector of Brazilian society. Medical professionals are prescribing unstandardized drug cocktails to their patients. Mayors of small and large cities have built their Covid-19 response around it, stockpiling the drugs for public consumption. Bolsonaro-allied doctors and influencers are using effective social media to tout it. This has led to individual Brazilians desperate to save themselves with a $30 kit of unproven drugs and vitamins.

When Manaus’ Enilson Mesquita, 52, and his family fell sick with the coronavirus in April 2020, he treated himself and his wife and son with traditional teas and herbs that he referred to as “jungle medicine.” The Covid drug kit still wasn’t popular then. But as cases began to rise again in the Amazonian city in the last quarter of 2020, he said he was determined to prevent reinfection and protect his mother, 76, and father, 70.

So, prompted by news reports promoting ivermectin, he decided that both he and his parents would take the pills. “I explained to my mother that until the vaccination comes through, we could at least use it to prevent coronavirus,” Mesquita said. In the months leading up to January’s oxygen crisis, Mesquita said residents swapped stories of which drugs helped them prevent or survive the coronavirus. After the family took ivermectin, Mesquita said he felt relieved. Neither of his parents caught the coronavirus. “I felt protected,” he added.

But the drugs may have provided people in Manaus a false sense of protection. The best evidence for this comes from a longitudinal study of 3,046 Manaus residents developed by scientists from Fiocruz Amazônia and the Federal University of Amazonas and published as a non-peer-reviewed preprint. Participants who admitted in August that they were self-medicating to prevent the novel coronavirus were more likely to have contracted it.

“That person feels protected, and therefore they lower their guard,” said Jaila Borges, an infectious disease expert at the Federal University of Amazonas and an author of the study. Borges added that proven interventions like mask-wearing and social distancing lose value with people who think the drugs will prevent coronavirus.

The study examines risk factors associated with a positive coronavirus test result. Participants took a Covid-19 blood test and answered relevant questions — on sociodemographic characteristics, presence of symptoms, testing, and whether they were self-medicating or taking prescribed medications — every eight to 12 weeks.

Alexandre Naime Barbosa, the head of infectious diseases at the São Paulo State University, has been working on the frontlines since the beginning of the pandemic and says he has seen more than a thousand Covid-19 patients. For him, the very claim that the drugs constitute an early treatment of Covid-19 is misleading, using a catchy term to give people false hope.

“It’s pseudoscience to even call this ‘early treatment’ because it’s a term that seeks to legitimize a strategy that doesn’t have scientific validity,” he told Undark. “No sane person would be against a real early treatment with drugs that were capable of preventing the progression of mild Covid-19 to a severe case.”

* * *

Despite the lack of evidence for the early treatment, Bolsonaro’s government has taken at least $6 million out of public coffers to buy and produce the pills and advertise the approach, which today is supported by Brazil’s Ministry of Health and Federal Medical Council.

Three days before Manaus’ oxygen supply ran out, the health ministry launched TrateCOV in the city, an app that was supposed to help guide doctors in treating Covid-19 cases. But in every case, the app recommended prescribing chloroquine, ivermectin, and five other medications, Brazilian media reported. The app, available for use nationwide, was eventually taken down on Jan. 21.

For the Ministry of Health’s Secretary of Labor Management and Health Education, Mayra Pinheiro, the main official behind Manaus’ January “early treatment” campaign and the TrateCOV app, the regular rules of medical practice can be suspended in an emergency. “In a pandemic situation, ideal scientific evidence on pharmacological and non-pharmacological measures can take time, which has a high cost in human lives,” she said. “It is necessary to not interfere in the autonomy of patients and their doctors in promoting this solution, even if it is a temporary one.”

With drawn-out lockdowns falling out of favor among Brazilian constituents, there are political advantages to touting an easy fix. Numerous cities and states aligned with Bolsonaro had already implemented the “early treatment” as standard in their health systems in 2020. Several mayoral candidates adopted the treatment as a campaign platform in the November 2020 elections.

Bolsonaro openly declared he would not be taking the vaccine, claiming he was immune after having contracted the virus. From August to December 2020, his administration ignored repeated offers from Pfizer, even with the pharmaceutical company offering doses for half the price of those sold to the U.S. and Europe. Brazil only launched its vaccination campaign because the São Paulo state governor had made a deal to secure a Chinese-made shot. Today, 14 percent of the population is fully vaccinated, and the Ministry of Health has projected an additional 563 million doses by the end of 2021.

As Brazil’s health care system collapsed in several cities in April, resulting in thousands of people waiting for an intensive care bed, politicians continued insisting on the treatment. The mayor of Sorocaba, a city of 600,000 people in the state of São Paulo, authorized the “early treatment” to confront its Covid-19 crisis as recently as mid-March.

Bolsonaro supporters have taken to the streets of several large cities to protest new lockdowns — and advocate for the unproven pills. “We don’t want the vaccine. We have chloroquine!” one sign read in Curitiba, the capital city of the State of Paraná in southern Brazil. Another, held by a woman wearing a Brazil flag shirt, read: “Prophylactic treatment. Ivermectin NOW!”

* * *

In May 2020, a group of Brazilian doctors united to promote the use of chloroquine and their right to prescribe whatever medications they feel are appropriate, naming themselves Doctors for Life. Later in the year, the group met with Bolsonaro in person, along with former Minister of Citizenship Osmar Terra, the parliamentarian who has tweeted the most fake news about the pandemic, according to Brazilian fact-checking agency Aos Fatos.

Even though a Brazilian Medical Association survey shows that around two-thirds of doctors in Brazil don’t believe the drugs work, many have embraced the treatment. In February, Doctors for Life paid to publish a half-page manifesto — signed by more than 4,800 doctors and counting — in eight of the country’s largest newspapers.

Carolina Muniz Ferreira is one of 70 doctors on the group’s website. Ferreira told Undark that she sees it as her obligation to do everything in her power to help her patients. After weighing the potential benefits and harm of the early treatment medications, she opted towards administering unproven pills like ivermectin, and today is convinced that they work. “We are human beings,” she said. “We can’t sit idly by waiting for someone to die nor hearing their family members pleading ‘save my family’ or ‘save my husband’ and do nothing.”

Some doctors are even choosing to take the unproven drugs themselves. When urologist Márcio Nóbrega, 48, contracted Covid-19, he delayed his trip to the hospital even after several days of breathing difficulties. According to the infectious disease doctor Alexandre Naime Barbosa who treated him in hospital, the medications he was taking at home gave him a false sense of security.

But Nóbrega says he would do it all over again. “It’s agonizing to have an unknown disease and do nothing to treat it. Maybe the early treatment with hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin isn’t effective, but from the psychological point of view, at least you are trying to do something,” he said. “Just for this reason, I think it is worth it. The scientific guidelines say it doesn’t work. But I don’t know if I didn’t die or not because of it. It’s hard to know whether it helped.”

* * *

Last December, Fabio Malini, a social scientist at the Federal University of Espirito Santo who regularly collects social media data on online movements, noticed an explosion in the amount of online content posted by Bolsonaro supporters on the early treatment. Just as Manaus’ gamma variant gained steam and deaths mounted between late December and early January, the number of Twitter profiles promoting the treatment doubled.

Fake news and conspiracies about masks, vaccines, and lockdown spread like wildfire on social media, dominating the conversation on these topics. Similar to this, information on the so-called early treatment overwhelmed its naysayers, Malini wrote in a Jan. 15 tweet.

According to CrowdTangle, a social media monitoring platform owned by Facebook, Bolsonaro published the most popular Facebook post on the early treatment on Nov. 19, encouraging Brazilians to start the drug regimen with the arrival of the first Covid-19 symptoms. Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook are where Bolsonaro, right-wing influencers, and even doctors hawk the benefits of unproven drug cocktails. Agência Pública, a nonprofit publication focused on investigative journalism, recently revealed that Brazil’s Ministry of Health contracted social media influencers to post about early treatment in January.

While Twitter and Facebook have repeatedly removed and added warnings to some of the more prominent tweets, including some by Bolsonaro and the Ministry of Health, this has inadvertently added to the Brazilian President’s anti-establishment rhetoric, according to a 2020 paper on medical populism published by the Getulio Vargas Foundation.

To better understand the phenomenon, Malini mapped out the keyword tratamento precoce and found that in early January, its supporters vastly outnumbered those critical of the treatment, overwhelming the internet with voices that, at first glance, seem reliable, authoritative, and science-based. Malini’s mapping reveals that nearly all of these voices are intimately interlinked with pro-Bolsonaro online communities, which have previously been called “digital militias.”

“This ‘magic cure’ has its scientific connotation upheld by doctors, the same doctors that are making YouTube tutorials on how to self-medicate using these drugs,” said Malini, adding that doctors hold an outsized influence in Brazilian culture. Doctors in these videos, many of whom don’t specialize in pandemics or infectious diseases, explain why they support the treatment and even recommend specific dosages.

With their encouragement, Carla Ferreira Ramos, 48, has been taking ivermectin since July 2020. “I saw some doctors talking about tratamento precoce on YouTube. Television rarely shows this,” said the Rio de Janeiro state government employee and enthusiastic Bolsonaro supporter. Ramos started taking ivermectin once a month and then increased it to every two weeks, based on independent online research on these platforms. After she tested positive for coronavirus in January, she credited ivermectin for limiting her symptoms. Now, she gives the drugs to all five family members in her house, including her three kids.

Raymundo Paraná, an expert in drug-induced liver injury and head of gastro-hepatology at the Federal University of Bahia in northeast Brazil, says the craze can cause liver damage. “One patient came in with clear symptoms of liver toxicity, with high levels of liver enzymes, yellowed eyes, and dark urine,” he said. “They were taking ivermectin, nitazoxanide, and hydroxychloroquine. That was an easy case to diagnose.”

While the drugs are generally considered safe for their intended uses, the sheer number of people and amounts being taken have sparked reports of negative side effects. Ivermectin sales increased more than 550 percent in 2020 over 2019 (from 8 million to over 53 million), and there was more than a 100 percent increase in hydroxychloroquine sales (from 963 thousand in 2019 to 2 million in 2020), according to Brazil’s Federal Pharmaceutical Council with data from IQVIA.

Because valid scientific studies on the use of ivermectin for Covid-19 have not yet been completed, the prescriptions have no standardization or pattern, said Paraná. “I’ve seen people taking pills once a week, three times a week, every day, three times a day,” Paraná added. “Today, I saw a prescription recommending a dose 12 times higher than the dose that has been studied in humans.”

But a four-pack of ivermectin costs around $5 and is available at most pharmacies, some of which have announced deals under $30 for a complete drug cocktail. Even in states that now require prescriptions, most pharmacies will sell the drugs without one.

As the Covid-19 death count continues to rise, the federal government is showing no sign of reversing its unfounded approach, but has warmed up to vaccines. On April 27, the Brazilian senate opened a formal investigation into the government’s contentious handling of the pandemic. In recent hearings, key figures of the early treatment movement and pro-Bolsonaro politicians reaffirmed their support for the use of chloroquine and ivermectin in the fight against Covid-19, amid fiery debate. But Bolsonaro’s minister of health, Marcelo Queiroga, recently admitted at the hearings that there is no evidence proving hydroxychloroquine, chloroquine, or ivermectin work against Covid-19.

“If these drugs work, then why is it that after one year, the situation is getting worse in the country?” asked the Fiocruz epidemiologist Jesem Orellana. “We are in a moment of deconstructing this wrong notion that this early treatment works. It’s fairly clear already. It’s one thing to do that in science, but it’s another thing to do that in the social imaginary. That takes months or even years.”

* * *

UPDATE: This piece has been updated to note that Brazil’s health minister, Marcelo Queiroga, stated this week that several medications touted by the administration for use against Covid-19 have not been shown to be effective. A correction was also made to note that the country’s death count, rather than its death rate, is rising.

Shanna Hanbury is a Brazil-based journalist and social scientist covering science, society and the climate crisis. Her extensive reporting from Latin America has been published in The Guardian, BBC, Mongabay, TIME, and more.

Kiratiana Freelon is an independent journalist based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Her reporting focuses on social injustice, Afro-Brazilian communities, and Brazil’s dynamic economic and political landscape. The Harvard graduate has worked for the New York Times, and her work has appeared in The Washington Post, Essence Magazine, New York Magazine, and other publications.

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

Why do cats knead with their paws?

Do you ever see your cat shifting his front paws back and forth just before settling down for a nap? Have you heard some cat lovers talk about their feline friends “making biscuits” or “kneading dough”?

Scientists who study cat behavior call this distinctive paw action “kneading” and believe it to be a sign of a relaxed cat. My own cats knead before taking a nap near me. While they are kneading, they purr – one of them gets so relaxed, he sometimes drools. Kneading usually occurs near a favorite person.

As a veterinarian, I think it’s important to recognize the little moments your cat is telling you she’s happy to be near you.

Kneading in kittens

If you’re ever around newborn kittens, you will see kneading pretty quickly after birth. A kitten kneads on his mother’s abdomen as a way of telling her he is hungry and ready for her milk.

At the same time, the kitten usually purrs, which is a sound created by rapid vibrations of certain throat muscles. Purring is a signal for attention.

Using these two behaviors, kittens are asking their moms, also known as queens, to remain still so they can continue suckling. Young kittens usually fall asleep while suckling.

Kittens stop drinking their mother’s milk by about two months of age. So why do cats continue to knead as adults?

Ready to relax

Kneading seems to be more common in some cats than others. If your cat doesn’t knead, it could mean he is a little stressed – or it could just be that your cat doesn’t display relaxation or affection in that manner.

But many cats do continue kneading into adulthood. It’s pretty safe to assume a cat who is kneading is feeling calm, content and ready to settle down, just like a kitten settling in to suckle and sleep.

You may already know that when your cat bunts, or butts his head and rubs his cheek, head and body against your leg or an object near you, he is putting his scent in these locations. Cats also have scent glands between their toes, prompting some people to suggest that cats are also putting a familiar, comforting scent on their sleeping area when they knead.

Don’t bother to look for these glands on your own cat. They are not easily visible.

Subtle signals

Kneading may also be a form of communication between cats and their people.

If you’ve been around dogs, you know most are quite obvious in letting humans know they want something or like someone. For thousands of years, people have purposely bred dogs to be fun companions, as well as to have useful behaviors such as herding, tracking or guarding.

Cats and people have also lived together for thousands of years – and humans have appreciated their amazing natural mousing skills. Only recently have people tried to breed cats, but mostly for their appearance, not for specific behaviors.

The result is that cats are a little more subtle than dogs in their ways of telling a person, “I like you.” Kneading is one of those clues.

Julia Albright, Associate Professor of Veterinary Medicine, University of Tennessee

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

The Biden administration has a nepotism problem, says former Obama-era ethics czar

Shortly after taking office, President Biden, seemingly dead set on departing from the nepotistic tendencies of his predecessor, promised that he would not bring any member of his family into the administration. Biden has held true to this promise for his part – but over the last several months, his top aides have blatantly flouted it.

According to a Friday report from The Washington Post, Biden’s aides have brought in at least five of their children to fill various roles in government, sounding alarms amongst government ethics and accountability experts.

Among those hired include J.J. Ricchetti, son of Counselor to the President Steve Ricchetti. On Monday, it was revealed that J.J. Ricchetti, who graduated from college in 2020, would be taking a position as special assistant in the Office of Legislative Affairs, a junior-level position in government. Meanwhile, Shannon Ricchetti, Steve Ricchetti’s daughter, is the deputy associate director of the Office of the Social Secretary at the White House, a job she took back in January. Daniel Ricchetti, Steve Ricchetti older son, is also senior adviser in the Office of the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security.

Apart from the four Richettis, Cathy Russell, director of presidential personnel in the White House, has a daughter, Sarah Donilon, who currently works in the White House National Security Council. Donilon graduated from college in 2019. At the same time, Mike Donilon, Sarah’s uncle, serves as a senior adviser to the president.

Concerns have also arisen from familial connections in the Biden administration between siblings and spouses.

Stephanie Psaki, the sister of White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, holds the title of Senior Adviser at the Health and Human Services Department as of March. Stephanie has a Ph.D. in public health and previously worked as director of Population Council, a nonprofit NGO that seeks to find health solutions in developing countries.

There’s also Monica Medina, the wife of House Chief of Staff Ron Klain, who previously served as general counsel of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration but is now up for consideration as Biden’s Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans and International Environmental and Science affairs.

According to the Post, there is no direct evidence that Biden aides had a hand in their relatives’ employment – an exercise of power that would violates federal law. A White House official told the Post those hired for the above roles had adequate experience and were well-qualified

Deputy White House press secretary Andrew Bates said that “the president has instituted the highest ethical standards of anyone to ever hold this office,” adding that “he’s proud to have staffed the most diverse administration in American history with well-qualified public servants who reflect his values.”

However, the latest hirings have not stopped ethics experts from railing against the administration for its apparent hypocrisy.

Walter Shaub, a senior ethics fellow at the Project on Government Oversight and the former director of the United States Office of Government Ethics, called the hirings a “f**k you” to government ethics.

“I’m sorry, I know some folks don’t like hearing any criticism of him,” he tweeted on Friday. “But this royally sucks. I’m disgusted. A lot of us worked hard to tee him up to restore ethics to government and believed the promises.”

He added: “The White House’s defense that they had the minimum qualifications is total BS. The issue isn’t whether they were qualified (some weren’t). It’s that a WH that promised diversity is giving these privileged white kids with connected mommies and daddies prime jobs over others!”

Mark Hanis, the co-founder of Inclusive America, a non-profit dedicated to making government more diverse, echoed Shaub’s concerns, telling the Post that the administration’s apparent nepotism points to a systemic problem. “Unfortunately, with a lot of these political positions, it is relational. It’s more about who you know.”

Just after his inauguration, Biden had in fact signed a sweeping executive order – formerly rescinded by Trump – aimed at curbing favoritism and personal enrichment. It’s now become clear that the pledge did little to prevent family webs from materializing in government.