DOJ investigating whether Matt Gaetz received illegal favors from cannabis industry: report

According to sources speaking to CNN, federal authorities are investigating whether a 2018 trip GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., took to the Bahamas was part of an orchestrated effort to illegally influence him on the issue of medical marijuana.

The Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section is looking into whether Gaetz took gifts, including travel and paid escorts, in exchange for political favors, CNN reports.

“As part of an ongoing probe into Gaetz, investigators are examining whether he engaged in a relationship with a girl that began when she was 17,” CNN’s Evan Perez, Paula Reid, Scott Glover and David Shortell report. “In pursuing evidence of potential public corruption, sources tell CNN that investigators are also scrutinizing Gaetz’s connections to medical marijuana, both in terms of legislation he’s sponsored and his connections to people involved in the industry, searching for so-called pay-to-play arrangements.”

Read the full report over at CNN.

Scientists say T. Rex walked as slowly as humans

It is perhaps one of the most darkly comical moments in “Jurassic Park.” As three of the main characters flee from a hungry Tyrannosaurus rex by car, one of them glances at a side mirror and is greeted by a most unwelcome sight. The razor-sharp teeth and giant head of the ferocious beast is already perilously near their vehicle, and the words below say: “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.”

As it turns out, the protagonists of Steven Spielberg’s 1993 classic sci-fi adventure flick may not have had to worry about their T. Rex pursuer nipping at their heels in real life. A new study suggests that T. Rexes were actually quite slow, particularly when they were walking.

In a new study published in the journal “Royal Society Open Science” by researchers at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, researchers calculated that T. Rexes actually walked at roughly the same speed as humans — that is, at just under three miles per hour. To determine this, scientists did more than simply analyze the animal’s hip height, mass and stride length, as had previously been done. They also looked into the T. Rex’s tail, realizing that as the T. Rex walked, its tail would have moved up and down while passively suspended in the air.

From there, the next step was to create a realistic T. Rex model that included this new information into its calculations. For reference, the researchers used an adult T. Rex specimen named “Trix” from the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, the Netherlands. They reconstructed the ancient animal tail’s bone and ligament structure, then determined an estimated walking speed by combining that information with what we know about step frequency and step length.

Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon’s weekly newsletter The Vulgar Scientist.

The scientists emphasized that their project does not answer all questions about T. Rex speed. For one thing, they write that “gait reconstruction of dinosaurs has numerous inherent uncertainties, and therefore it is important to compare results from different methods, in an attempt to find a convergent point.” They also noted that the tail, while slowing down a T. Rex while it walked, may have helped it go faster when it ran.

“This could have implications for maximal running speeds of large taxa like T. rex: maximum running speed was shown to be limited by peak stresses on the limbs, but a compliant tail may serve to reduce these stresses,” the authors added.

This is not the first major news to come out in April about T. Rex. Last week a group of scientists led by University of California Museum of Paleontology director Charles R. Marshall estimated that roughly 2.5 billion T. Rexes roamed the Earth over approximately 127,000 generations before a meteor or comet likely wiped them out 66 million years ago.

“The View” co-host Joy Behar misgenders Caitlyn Jenner three times, blames it on a lack of sleep

“The View” co-host Joy Behar found herself apologizing for misgendering Caitlyn Jenner multiple times during a Friday broadcast, claiming that she underslept the night before.

The apology came out of a discussion between her and her fellow co-hosts about Jenner’s recently announced bid for California governor. While remarking upon Jenner’s high hopes of winning –– given the former athlete’s political connections to aides and officials from the Trump administration –– Behar called Jenner, a transgender woman, “he” several times within the same breathe.

“He’s got this guy Brad Pascale running his campaign. What do you think about that?” Behar asked her co-hosts. “I mean that guy was accused of using campaign funds to enrich himself. That’s who is running his campaign—or her campaign, rather.”

“I think that he should—she, rather—should take a seat and let somebody with the credentials take over a major state like California,” she said, later correcting herself, after which she called Jenner a “he” again just before the segment concluded.

Following a commercial break, Behar addressed the audience to make a formal apology. “So first of all let me apologize for my pronoun mixup,” she started. “I think I just didn’t get enough sleep last night. I had no intention of mixing them up, and I tried to correct it immediately, but whatever, it just came out. So I’m sorry if anybody was upset by that.”

Although she quickly apologized, Behar’s slip-up earned her some criticism on Twitter.

“Joy Behar misgendered Caitlyn Jenner at least four times on the View this morning,” tweeted New York Magazine columnist Yashar Ali. “Caitlyn transitioned over six years ago. I don’t know why Joy misgendered her but it’s an important reminder that we don’t misgender people even if we don’t like their politics.”

Geoffrey Ingersoll, editor-in-chief of right-wing news site The Daily Caller, responded to Ali’s tweet with a jab at the left: “Yet another reminder about how often the woke new rules don’t apply to people the elites find politically distasteful.”

On the significance of Jenner’s bid, the View’s co-hosts were notably split.

“I think it’s great,” declared Ana Navarro. “Breaking the glass ceiling is a good thing. A transgender Republican might change some Republican minds … if she wants to run, it’s her right to run.”

Co-host Meghan McCain disagreed. “I don’t take this that seriously,” McCain said. “I don’t think she’s going to win… I don’t think this is the type of thing that should have on the job training.”

Earlier during the broadcast, Behar apologized for an entirely separate remark made about a mom who was demanding that her child’s school end its mask mandate. The mom in question, Behar said, was “bitching about” the issue.

She later walked that comment back after some pushback from McCain. “Maybe I shouldn’t have said she was ‘bitching,'” Behar admitted. “I apologize. It just slipped out.”

Why onscreen martial arts is important to Asian Americans – even if we don’t practice it ourselves

When I was five years old, I broke a bully’s nose. Having exhausted every diplomatic skill I possessed — Care to join me and Mr. Bear for a tea party? Want to do a “Highlights” puzzle with me? — I punched him. I had no philosophy of combat. Kindergarteners rarely do. He was a Nelson Muntz who violently bullied everyone, and that punch was so deserved I don’t think anyone even bothered to tell my parents.

I didn’t use any martial arts moves because I didn’t know any. But for many Asian Americans, martial arts are as central to their childhood memories as “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” and videogames. Including “Mortal Kombat.”

Actor Lewis Tan, star of the latest big-screen “Mortal Kombat” iteration, shared his own relationship to martial arts on Twitter: “Started at 5 years old to winning my first kickboxing competition at 16, to fighting on the big screen in one of my greatest childhood games. Dedicated for life, hard work pays off. I will be a student forever.”

Started at 5 years old to winning my first kickboxing competition at 16, to fighting on the big screen in one of my greatest childhood games. Dedicated for life, hard work pays off. I will be a student forever. #MortalKombat #MortalKombatMovie @wbpictures pic.twitter.com/MV6ePpUwPM

— Lewis Tan (@TheLewisTan) April 17, 2021

First an arcade game, then a videogame, the rebooted film version of “Mortal Kombat” is landing before audiences as a harbinger of future possibilities while also reaching back into the past. The 1995 film version was cheesy, this is true, but also noteworthy because it featured an Asian actor (Robin Shou) as the lead. The 2021 version reclaims the hard-R ultraviolence of the game itself, while also setting it inside a universe that is unapologetically Asian. In 1995, Lord Raiden was played by Christopher Lambert (whom I adore, but he’s the Highlander.) This time around, Asano Tadanobu is playing that role.

The history of “Mortal Kombat: The Movie” is a good reminder that representation matters, and advocacy can work: it was the outrageous casting of Scarlett Johanssen as Motoko Kusanagi in “Ghost in the Shell” and Tilda Swinton as an Ancient One in “Doctor Strange,” among others, that finally convinced the public that Asians actors ought to be cast in Asian roles. Crucially, many of the new “Mortal Kombat” cast members have long embraced martial arts as being central to their identity, including the biracial British-Chinese lead. Playing a new character named Cole Young, Tan’s arc drives the reboot, even as Tan himself is calling on viewers beyond the fandom to support Asian characters, actors, and stories – referencing the campaign to fill theaters when “Crazy Rich Asians” premiered.

When crazy Rich Asians came out we rented a theater paid for everything and gave out tickets just to support, that’s not even my type of movie but we rep for our people. I would love to see that support for a blockbuster action film.

— Lewis Tan (@TheLewisTan) April 9, 2021

* * *

Onscreen, Asian America is flexing its muscles. Suddenly it seem as if big-budget martial-arts fantasy epics are everywhere — Marvel’s upcoming “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings“; the Cinemax-turned-HBO Max historical Western “Warrior” conceived by Bruce Lee; and the CW’s reboot of “Kung Fu“— and they’re starring Tan, Joe Taslim, Simu Liu, Andrew Koji, and Olivia Liang, plus a host of other Asian actors in major supporting roles.

But the history of Asians in America is complicated, and so too is that association between Asians and martial arts. Is claiming martial arts a way to honor your cultural roots, or is it perpetuating a stereotype? Why are Asians so often turned into sidekicks in their own story, even when they’re the ones doing the fighting?

For novelist Claire Light, whose fantasy/mystery hybrid “Monkey Around” reflects her longstanding appreciation of martial arts, Hollywood’s “new” interest in martial arts is, more accurately, an “old” interest, perhaps best summed up by the two film versions of “Mulan.” In Western imaginations, she notes in an email to me, the ’90s animated version cemented the cultural connection between “Asian” and “martial arts.” This association was further strengthened with the rise of the DC and MCU universes, in which nearly all superheroes deployed some form of martial arts. The big-budget, live action version of “Mulan” was attempting to merge a “realistic” story with the heavy GCI and otherworldly powers of the superhero genre. But when it hit movie theaters, so too did COVID-19.

Olivia Liang in “Kung Fu” (The CW)

The pandemic has not only reshaped the way we consume mass entertainment, it has galvanized conversations about racism against Asian Americans. Previously, this topic had been nearly impossible to broach; the very idea that the “model minority” experienced systemic racism was waved away as minor feelings and petty grievances. The most recent Pew Survey reveals that violence against Asian Americans is indeed increasing, prompting the U.S. Senate to pass an anti-Asian Hate Crime bill. In New York City, Ava Chin and Alison Kuo have launched Sisters in Self Defense specifically for Asian American women and seniors; the inaugural class attracted about 60 people, including mothers and daughters.

“People are scared, and there’s a real need for this kind of thing,” Chin tells me. In response to the ever-rising tide of racial animus in this country, Asian America is expressing a renewed interest in martial arts — both in seeing it onscreen, and practicing it in real life.

But practice, power, and politics all move at asynchronous paces, and not necessarily in the same direction. What happens when actual Asians use martial arts in real-life situations? Sakura Kokumai, a seven-time National champion and member of the US Olympic Karate Team, was the recent victim of a hate crime, and the man who aggressed her subsequently punched an elderly Korean couple. If this was a scene from a movie, she would have round house-kicked him to the curb. In the real world, however, she simply used her phone to film him, probably mindful that she had to remain proportionate in her physical response to any attack, and using her skills could have derailed her career, or worse. (No, black belts do not have to register their hands as deadly weapons. This is a myth.)

Meanwhile, even as police forces around the country are still being trained by “killologist” David Grossman (who describes the actual killing of humans as an aphrodisiac but thinks videogames are too violent), police Sgt. Eddie Chan is being investigated by internal affairs for posting a video showing off his martial arts skills to the theme music from . . . “Mortal Kombat.”

* * *

In real life, Asians using martial arts have to contend with invisible powers: the architectures of control, the appetites of capitalism, the assumptions of a social order that punishes anyone who steps “out of line.” The sudden studio investment in Asian-themed film and TV productions does not mean that anti-Asian racism is a thing of the past. It chiefly reveals that diversity is profitable inside the global marketplace.

The argument for diverse representation onscreen has always had two major prongs: one, that real life is diverse, and it is both boring and self-defeating to keep repeating the same stories; two, that the entertainment industry is a business, and discriminatory casting ultimately prevents actors of color from practicing their profession. Actors live in the real world where representation matters at the level of the political. In this country, Asian creators still report being rejected for being “too Asian” yet also “not Asian enough,” their scripts passed on due to the absence — or presence — of martial arts storylines; or they are told that their Asian fantasy project won’t sell because it’s already been done by a white writer. Ironically, this last may be the root of “Mortal Kombat”‘s major conceptual flaw: its actors are (finally) Asian but its sensibilities are not, irrespective of how many martial art moves it includes.

Fantasies such as “Mortal Kombat” aren’t message movies. Their job is to divert, hopefully to entertain. For the best science fiction and fantasy to use the supernatural to illuminate the lineaments of ordinary oppression, it has to know where those invisible lines are in the first place. “Mortal Kombat” is not pushing visual or storytelling boundaries. What it is doing, as Amy Z. Chan remarked to me, is using martial arts to show Asian Americans as being “worthy of starring in stories that feature our character’s journeys.” Every film like this makes it possible for Asians to better see themselves as Americans, fighting for the right to be ordinary heroes of their own lives.

“Mortal Kombat” releases on Friday, April 23 in theaters and HBO Max.

“Neo-fascist” Republican Party resembles a “sentient YouTube comment section,” Howard Dean says

Former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean had some choice words for the GOP recently, calling members “neo-fascists” and “nutcases” while comparing the party’s congressional delegation to a “sentient YouTube comment section.”

The previous Democratic National Committee chairman made the incendiary comments on The Daily Beast’s “The New Abnormal” podcast, saying the Republican Party was “unrecognizable” from where it stood just a few decades ago.

“They believe in autocracy — not democracy. They are racist,” he told The Beast’s Molly Jong-Fast. “It’s just shocking what’s happened to the Republican Party.”

“They have nothing to contribute, frankly, to American politics,” he continued, “except for incendiary and sometimes delusional public statements.”

Dean did concede at one point that there may still be one or two decent Republicans in Washington, though he said they lack the backbone to push back on the majority in their party who are “emotionally, essentially, neo-fascist.”

He said on the podcast that he wouldn’t seek elected office again, and he’s free to speak his mind as a result.

He also heaped praise on the Biden administration for not falling into the trap of seeking bipartisanship for the sake of bipartisanship, a mistake which he said former President Barack Obama made during the early days of his White House career.

“I think he’s probably off to the best start of any president I’ve seen in my lifetime,” Dean said.

Robin Thede says “A Black Lady Sketch Show” returns more ridiculous than ever to “bring some joy”

Robin Thede is not a soothsayer, although watching “A Black Lady Sketch Show” might raise a few suspicions. Think about it — way back in 2019, Thede and her co-stars Quinta Brunson, Gabrielle Dennis and Ashley Nicole Black framed all of their skits around an apocalypse. Throughout the season the show checked in on the foursome, who gathered at Robin’s place to drink and bust jokes about each other while outside the front door, the world burned.

“I just thought when Trump was in office, he was going to get us killed some way. And I wasn’t wrong,” Thede told Salon in a recent interview. What she didn’t expect was how close to home those scenes of four women quarantined inside a bubble would hit in 2020 and well beyond. “Sadly, we kind of predicted this,” she said, adding, “I’m smiling, but I’m not happy about that.”

On the bright side, this also means insanely outsize figures like Dr. Hadassah Olayinka Ali-Youngman, Pre-PhD, suddenly look a lot more familiar. Dr. Hadassah, in case you aren’t familiar or don’t remember, is a fire and brimstone, dashiki-clad “hertep,” a conspiracy-spouting nutcase who doesn’t believe women should leave the house or be literate. In 2019 the character seemed absolutely unreal. And now?

“I started thinking, ‘Oh, I need to make this even more ridiculous because the internet is full of the things that she says, and people take them so seriously,'” Thede admitted. “So yeah, I’ve had to push her a little bit more, for sure.”

Unsettling coincidences notwithstanding, Thede has a lot to be proud of as the second season premieres.

Last year “A Black Lady Sketch Show” was nominated for an Emmy and won a Television Critics Association award. Thede has since locked down an overall deal with Warner Bros. TV and has a few feature films, including one titled “Fashionably Black” and a freshly announced zombie action-comedy called “Killing It.” She warns that we’re “about to be sick of all the announcements that are coming out about all the things I have going on.”

All of which is to say that while most of languished under the weight of pandemic and its accompanying ills — racial and social injustice, widening wealth disparity and a right-wing insurrection, to name a few of them — Thede’s output has multiplied.

She also grew more resolute and purposeful about how she wants “A Black Lady Sketch Show” to serve its audience.

“This last year has been really soul-crushing for many of us,” she said. “I know that’s such a heavy thing to say when I’m promoting a sketch show. But at the end of the day, this work is greater than us. And because we’re the only group of Black women doing this, in the history of sketch and currently on television, I think it’s really critical that we’re able to bring some joy.”

Nothing in life is guaranteed. The past year slammed that lesson home for 99.9% of the world, as if we weren’t already aware of that cold fact. Thede certainly is. Within the last five years she’s made history and lived to see opportunities come and suddenly vanish.

On “The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore,” she made history as the first Black female head writer in late-night television. When that was abruptly cancelled in 2016, she moved on to host her own late-night variety program on BET, “The Rundown.” That lasted for about a year.

Then, at the suggestion of Issa Rae, who co-produces “A Black Lady Sketch Show,” she brought the show’s concept to HBO, and the network purchased it at the table. Almost immediately its six-episode first season became a crossover success on par with Rae’s “Insecure.”

So it’s safe to say that momentum was rolling when Season 2 of “A Black Lady Sketch Show” was ready to shoot in February 2020, only to be halted when a version of the show’s reality became our own.

That’s one of the reason why you’re not going to see any direct references to the pandemic besides a specific continuation of a few first season themes. (Sadly we won’t see Brunson either; she had to step away due to production conflicts.)

But we do get to enjoy the return of a few fan favorites like Hadassah and the slack-jawed romantic idiot Chris, a man who can never give a straight answer to the simplest questions or for that matter, entirely close his mouth.

People who watch “A Black Lady Sketch Show” already have a sense of its brainy humor but may not realize how nerdy and serialized the show actually is. I’m not just talking about the end-of-the-world interstitials, either.

Go back and rewatch the first season before diving in the new episodes, and look closely at what’s going on in each sketch. Train your eyes to notice the small details, and you may come away from these episodes with an entirely new level of appreciation for what Thede and her writers are accomplishing here.

While I’m dying to give specific examples, HBO sent reviewers a list of “do not reveals” — not typical for a sketch variety show.

However, the new season’s list of guest stars is not only impressive but used well, and includes Jesse Williams, Gabrielle Union, Omarion, Kim Wayans, Ayesha Curry and “Lovecraft Country” star Wunmi Mosaku, among others.

“A Black Lady Sketch Show” always asks much more of its ensemble cast, joined in the new season by Laci Mosley and Skye Townsend who are immediately put to work matching Thede’s prolific costume changes and transformations.

“Bringing together this community of women, some who I knew and some who didn’t, has just created this second family for so many of us,” Thede said. “I think that was absolutely necessary because we had to shoot during a global pandemic. Without that kind of bond, I don’t know how you get through a show like this.”

She’s talking about the pressures of production, understand. Watching “A Black Lady Sketch Show” is entirely easy to sail through. Depending on who you are, the humor takes on various meanings. Thede always meant for the skits to be universally relatable, which is why the show succeeds.

But as is the case with everything she does, its portrayals are part of a strategy of expanding opportunities. She wants to show Black women in as much variety as possible in a very condensed amount of time.

“I don’t think you can expand your horizon of what Black women can do, unless you see us doing all these ridiculous things and believing, ‘Wow, they can do that,” she said.

Thede points out that this is especially important in the sketch community, which skews white and male. Imagining the “yeah, but” response to this she rattles off the exceptions to the rule: “Key and Peele,” “Chappelle’s Show,” “In Living Color. “

“Those have been spread out over the last three decades, you know? And you get a new white male sketch show every year,” she said, “Every year! That’s no shade to them. I’m just saying like, there’s no limits on what they’re allowed to play. And so in our world, we just want that to continue to be limitless for us as well.”

In this way Thede is doing what she can to make people feel seen. “We really strive to ground our characters in something that is very real to Black womanhood, whatever that is,” she explained “And Black womanhood doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing for everyone, right? Because that includes all of our sisters: trans, straight, gay, whatever the clan of Black womanhood is, is meant to be celebrated on this show. We can’t represent every Black woman, but we want to every season to represent more and more.”

That the joy increases along with the variety is only natural . . . and expected.

Season 2 of “A Black Lady Sketch Show” debuts Friday, April 23 at 11 p.m. on HBO.

Republican Ron Johnson tries to explain why there is “no reason to be pushing vaccines on people”

Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., on Thursday challenged the national “push” to get everyone vaccinated against the COVID-19 virus, claiming that there is “no reason to be pushing vaccines on people.”

During an interview with Wisconsin-based talk show host Vicki McKenna, Johnson admitted that he was getting “highly suspicious” of the “big push to get everyone vaccinated” when it’s “not a fully approved vaccine.” The congressman asked, “If you have a vaccine, quite honestly, what do you care if your neighbor has one or not?”

None of the three U.S.-backed vaccines (Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson) have been formally approved by the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) –– an arduous process that can take many years –– but all three have been granted emergency use authorization.

While casting doubt over the legitimacy of the vaccine, Johnson, in the same breath, acknowledged that the vaccines are 95 percent effective, a point which he used to argue that vaccines should be “limited” to those most vulnerable to COVID-19. Of course, Johnson failed to mention that President Biden did precisely this by delaying eligibility for adults under the age of 50 to April 19.

Johnson’s comments are just his latest in a clear pattern of pseudoscience.

Last month, the congressman claimed that he doesn’t plan on getting vaccinated because he already contracted the disease, which he argued “probably provides me the best immunity possible.” According to the Centers for Disease Control, with regards to natural immunity, “experts don’t know for sure how long this protection lasts, and the risk of severe illness and death from COVID-19 far outweighs any benefits of natural immunity. COVID-19 vaccination will help protect you by creating an antibody (immune system) response without having to experience sickness.”

Johnson’s latest comments are a marked departure from some of his Republican colleagues who have directly advocated for Republicans to get vaccinated.

Last month, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., urged all Republican men to get immunized, claiming that there’s “no good argument” not to. Back in February, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., went further, urging every American to vaccinate their children.

Last year, Johnson advocated for the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID infections, even though the use of the drug was not approved by the FDA –– a point which did not appear to concern the senator at the time. By July of last year, following reports of severe illness and death as a result of the hydroxychloroquine’s use, the FDA “caution[ed] against use of hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine for COVID-19 outside of the hospital setting or a clinical trial due to risk of heart rhythm problems.”

According to Forbes, Johnson remains undecided on whether he will run for re-election in 2022. He has told reporters that he doesn’t plan on announcing any time soon, and he has not received an endorsement from former President Trump. A poll recently released by his Democratic opponent, Tom Nelson, the former Majority Leader of the Wisconsin Assembly, showed that Nelson has a 4 percent edge over Johnson.

“Wisconsin voters have clearly soured on Ron Johnson’s non-stop controversies, from helping incite the insurrection of January 6th to promoting false COVID-19 quack science to trying to deny desperately needed survival checks,” said Nelson’s campaign manager, Irene Lin. “His racist remarks made national news and are an embarrassment to Wisconsin. Voters are ready for change and a senator who will finally pay attention to the needs of everyday Wisconsinites.”

9 ways to make grocery store bouquets look like $1 million bucks

If you’re lucky, you might end up with a life luxurious enough to have weekly seasonal floral arrangements, brought into your home by a dedicated florist who snips blooms at their peak . . . But if you’re in the other 99% (like us), it’s more likely that you pick up flowers from the grocery store every once in a while to treat yourself. Because, if we’re being honest, floral arrangements are really expensive.

While you’d probably rather pore through the online options for expertly-arranged flowers, sometimes it’s not within the time frame or the budget. Your dreams of a home freshly-scented from fluffy peonies notwithstanding, grocery-store bouquets are a great quick fix for a dinner-party host, a friend who’s had a bad day, or a surprise mother-in-law visit. What’s even better? There are plenty of ways to spruce ’em up.

Enter: Christina Stembel, the founder and CEO of Farmgirl Flowers, who was kind enough to share her best tips for crafting professional-looking arrangements from store-bought blooms. As it turns out, your local Trader Joe’s floral section is actually a great place to grab a bunch of stems — you just need to know what you’re looking for, and how to best arrange them.

The good news? It’s seriously easy to spot quality flowers and put them together in a most artful way. Read on for how to do it.

* * *

1. Choose long-lasting varieties

Sure, you might be tempted by the trendy ranunculus, but the first thing to take into consideration is what condition the flowers are in. If they’re fully open, browning on the petals, or their stems are starting to turn mushy, it might be a sign to go with a hardier variety.

Some of Stembel’s favorite long-lasting flowers include carnations, calla lilies, oriental lilies, orchids, spray roses, and regular roses. However, she explains that you can get an indication of how long flowers will last based on their stems. “When in doubt, look for hearty stems,” says Stembel. “Thick, solid-stemmed flowers usually last longer, whereas thin, hollow stems usually expire more quickly.”

* * *

2. Select a mix of colored and neutral flowers

Stembel recommends selecting a mix of brightly colored and neutral ones for a balanced bouquet. “Select three different types of flowers in complementary tones or whichever ones are your faves,” she says. “I usually pick one bright color to pair with a couple muted or neutral tones. It’s an easy recipe that’s hard to get wrong.”

* * *

3. Vary the shape of the flowers

In addition to the color, you’ll also want to consider the shape. “You’ll want to pick at least one round-headed flower variety to pair with more linear varieties,” Stembel explains. “For this arrangement, I chose gorgeous blush roses for the round-headed variety and paired them with my new fave, coral carnations (don’t judge too quickly — they’re beautiful, smell great, and last forever!), and peach tulips, which is what we call a linear flower.”

This variety will help create an interesting and well-balanced bouquet.

* * *

4. Don’t forget the greens

Here’s another pro tip that will take your arrangement to the next level: Mix in greenery like ferns, eucalyptus leaves, or long grasses. “I always start with a mixed green bouquet, which is important to get that wild look,” Stembel says.

Grocery stores typically carry mixed green bouquets, but you can save a few bucks by simply picking them out of your garden: “If you’re fortunate enough to live in a place with lots of vegetation at your disposal, you can also forage from your backyard.”

* * *

5. Grab some wrapping paper

If your bouquet is going to be a gift, swing by the gift aisle of the grocery store for some wrapping or tissue paper, or for a more rustic look, you can hit up the meat counter! “Go to the gift wrap section of the store and select some pretty tissue paper or even ask for a couple pieces of butcher paper,” says Stembel. Grab some ribbon or twine to tie up your bouquet as well.

* * *

6. Prep your flowers

Once you have all your supplies, it’s time for the fun part! Start by preparing your flowers — you’ll want to strip the leaves off the bottom half of each stem. “Simply snip off all the foliage that will fall below the water line once put in a vase,” Stembel explains. “You’ll want to keep the top ones on to help the flowers open, but the leaves that are in the water can grow bacteria on them that will make the flower expire more quickly.”

If you’re putting the flowers straight into a vase, you’ll also want to snip off the bottom of each stem. This fresh cut will help them suck up water. You can even go the extra mile by adding a little DIY flower food to the water, with this simple recipe: 1 quart water, 1 teaspoon bleach OR 1 teaspoon vinegar, and 1 tablespoon sugar.

* * *

7. Stagger your blooms

Now, it’s time to arrange your blooms. If you’re making a hand-wrapped bouquet, here are Stembel’s tips on how to make it look professional: “Lay the greenery down diagonally on the paper in a slight fan shape. Next, lay the carnations on top of the greens, about two inches below the top level of the greenery, and — this is key — stagger them all in height so they’re not in a straight line.”

“Do the same with the roses and then the tulips, fanning them all out on top of each other. Tie the stems with a ribbon so they’ll be easier to handle, then cut the stems the same height. Wrap both ends of the paper around them and tie again with a ribbon.”

The same idea holds true if you’re creating an arrangement in a vase. You’ll want to cut the flowers to different heights to create a balanced, multi-level design. Put in one stem at a time, and turn your vase as you work to ensure your arrangement looks good from every angle.

* * *

8. Avoid common rookie mistakes

Take care to avoid a few missteps that will make your bouquet look amateur. “Not staggering the flowers in height and combining too many bold (primary-ish) colors together are the common mistakes we see,” says Stembel. She also recommends taking the cellophane off, as it’s a giveaway that the flowers are store-bought.

* * *

9. Let your creativity take charge

Finally, have fun with your flowers and let your creativity flow. The more you play with store-bought bouquets, the better you’ll get at creating beautiful, budget-friendly designs that will light up your home.

“Time” filmmaker on families affected by incarceration: “Being together is a type of resistance”

As a Black man coming of age in the era of mass incarceration, I know how easy it is to go to prison. Especially in my hometown of Baltimore, when Martin O’Malley was mayor, and all you had to do to earn a few nights at central Booking was be Black and walk down the street. The arrest was so bad, and so racist, that the former mayor turned governor was sued by the NAACP and ACLU.

And we always hear about the scores of Black men and women coming in and out of the system –– and how poor politicians push poor policy on top of poor policing, and how the sum of all continues to fuel mass incarceration, but what about the families of the incarcerated men and women? If you are the provider, and you go to jail –– how does your family survive? If you are released, and become unemployable because of your record, how do you resume your role as a provider? And if you can’t resume the role of provider, then what’s to stop you from committing another crime and repeating the cycle over and over again, leaving your family in the same position? Award-Winning director Garrett Bradley captures this cycle, and the other side of mass incarceration brilliantly in her Academy Award-nominated film “Time.”

Amazon’s “Time,” directed and produced by Bradley, follows the journey of Sibil “Fox” Richardson, a true warrior for justice as she fights for her husband’s freedom while challenging our broken system, making a living and raising their six boys. I recently got a chance to talk with Bradley on an episode of “Salon Talks,” about how she got involved with the project and the role of artist in our nations fight for equality.

You can watch my “Salon Talks” episode with Bradley here, or read a Q&A of our conversation below to hear more about the mission behind her creativity, the success of “Time,” and the power of enjoying the moment over always focusing on what’s next.

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

How have you been surviving the pandemic and all this craziness that’s going on in the world?

Surviving the pandemic, I don’t know. I think you just take it day by day. I think that the pandemic has been illuminating for all of us, right? It’s just been a unearthing of everything that’s always been there, so I’m grateful for that, actually, and in a place of just thinking about how we can change the world, really. That’s how I’m spending a lot of my time.

It seems like as a filmmaker coming out with a project around this time, you do have a lot of people in the same place at the same time, so a lot of people are going to get a chance to see and enjoy the film. I think it was amazing. Can you give our viewers just a brief background of the project without giving too much away?

Yeah. It’s so funny. It’s like that’s always the hardest thing to do, actually, is to recap, but I’m going to do my best. At the heart and soul of it, really, without even getting into the minutia, “Time” is, it’s a love story, really, that spans over two decades and it’s really centered around Fox Rich as the family matriarch who spent 21 years fighting every day to reunite her family and we’re in New Orleans, Louisiana. I would say that’s the meat and potatoes of it. I’d like to think that all films and all things that we make, there’s also so many more layers and nuances within that.

How did you get involved in the project?

I feel really, really lucky that every project I’ve made has just come out of my natural and real relationships with people and things that are happening in my community. I’ve never gone out thinking, “I want to make a film about incarceration.” That’s something that has just been in close proximity to me and came out of making a short film called “Alone,” which I always say for anybody who’s out there watching this. I didn’t know anybody at the New York Times. “Alone” was a New York Times Op-Docs film. I went to their website, I submitted an idea. They responded to me three months later and I made the short film, and so anyone can do that, first of all. That film was really, it was also centered around a woman who was navigating the system, trying to figure out how to really put one foot in front of the other while her partner awaited trial for a year and a half in a private prison in Louisiana.

Because of the stigma around the incarceration, there were very few people that she could talk to, to get support, to get information. So the impetus for that film was really trying to facilitate intergenerational conversations between women who could offer support to one another. I contacted this organization, did another Google search, contacted this organization called FFLIC, Friends and Families of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children and Gina Womack, who’s the co-founder and director of that organization picked up and said, “The first person that Lon needs to speak with is Fox Rich.” So Fox is briefly in “Alone” and makes a really vivid connection between slavery and the prison industrial complex. Again, it wasn’t like saying, “I want to make another film about incarceration,” but, to me, it felt like there is such an absence, such a void of talking about this issue from a Black woman’s point of view, from a mother’s point of view, from a family’s point of view and it just was a natural thing that happened.

Something that just blew my mind was how Fox has so many home videos in a time where everybody wasn’t walking around with their cell phones all day. Could you talk about that a little bit and what was she shooting on?

A Hi8 mini or mini DV tape camcorder. So there’s a couple of things to say about it because I think that the Black family archive in America, for us I feel like is, it’s a type of resistance in and of itself, because it’s evidence of ourselves as we see ourselves in a way that works in parallel to mainstream media where we don’t always see ourselves as we see ourselves, right? We are building our own legacy in the process of documenting our families. I think that for Fox, and that even is a added layer when you think about it in a Southern context, in a context in New Orleans, in Louisiana, where Katrina obliterated the legacy of many, many families, right?

So there’s that. I think that there’s also this element of what you’re speaking to where Fox is literally speaking to the camera. This is before social media. This is before it’s actually going out anywhere. I think it was a type of therapy for her. I think it was, on some level, her also finding her voice and transitioning from, we see this evolution of Sibil to Fox. But it was also in my mind, this really incredible testament to her character, to her complete lack of doubt that her husband would come home and see these videos. I think that that’s a really incredible thing not to overlook because self-doubt is something that sometimes in our worst moments, we are led by.

This woman had no doubt in her mind that she was going to create this archive and document these moments and also in doing so, recreate imagery and symbolism around what being wholesome was and what being an American family was. It was incredible.

So in looking at all those home videos, did that have something to do with your decision to make the film black and white? Where did that come from or how did you arrive on that, because I’m pretty sure her videos were in color?

They were in color. Yeah. The videos were – they were beautiful and they were so vivid and so lush – and the black and white, again, I thought I was making another short film, to be honest with you, because “Alone” was 13 minutes long. So I was really committed to all of the stylistic and visual choices that I made with that short film. I really wanted those to be adapted into this other film, so I didn’t even have to think about it. I knew it was going to be a black and white. I knew I was going to shoot it the same way. When I realized that the archive existed at the end of filming, not something I had the forethought to be able to include in my mind. That was something I learned on our last day of shooting. It was more like I knew that self-documentation was a part of her life, but I had no idea that she had 100 hours of personal hallmark. She, herself, didn’t know that she had 100 hours.

I just feel like single mothers who have to raise kids while the fathers aren’t present are just too often left out of the conversation. I think you did a great job amplifying that. Fox’s voice is extremely strong, and it deserves to be heard. What should the world know about women who face this in this country?

Well, that’s a great question. I think, first of all, Fox herself I think would pay homage to her mother, to Miss Peggy, who was also a key role in keeping the family together and taking care of the boys. I would also say that although Robert, their father, was physically separate from them, was incarcerated, Fox and Rob made a commitment to one another when they both were incarcerated that they would not let the system separate them. That unity is a part of resistance, right? We’ve been separated systematically as Black and brown people from the beginning of time, from the beginning of the New World. So being together, whether incarceration is a factor or not, is a type of resistance to that history and as parents, they were keenly aware of that.

So I just am wanting to say Fox did an incredible job raising her six sons, but I think she, herself, would also want to say it came through the support that is intergenerational, that was from her mother and that was also very much connected to her husband and their father staying involved in their life. I think if there’s one thing that is actually really important that I would hope people take away from this film really is this idea of forgiveness, because the film is not trying to make a case for innocence. They committed a crime. They made a mistake. Fox is very clear in saying they were in a desperate situation, and desperate people do desperate things, right?

But what does it mean for us, then, once the crime has been committed, where do we go from there? How do we actually think about forgiveness as a key part of changing this world, as a key part of giving people an opportunity to contribute to society and to contribute to their families in meaningful ways? What do we actually gain from separating people and throwing them in a cell and keeping them there for a lifetime? What’s actually lost in that? I think whether someone is touched by incarceration or not, I think it’s about having an imagination saying, “Imagine if I were in that situation and what is it that I need to forgive in myself, what is it that I need to forgive in others?” If we can think about that as the bedrock and the foundation of society, we can actually start to create change.

Something that I don’t want people to miss in the film, is just this whole idea of plea deals and how important they are to our criminal justice system that it just totally doesn’t work. Could you speak to that?

Yeah. I think that I made a choice, actually, when I was making the film, not to get into the intricacies of the legal system because I feel that to a certain extent, “Time” really stands on the shoulders of a film like “13th,” right? Ava [DuVernay]’s film “13th.”

Her film does an incredible job of really mapping out, unequivocally, for people, the connection between American slavery and the prison industrial complex. She does that through the minutia of the system, understanding plea deals, understanding bad lawyers, understanding wanting people to be punished from the beginning without any kind of fair trial, without any real guidance in any kind of real way. What needs to exist parallel to that is the human experience and is the effects of the data, the effects of those facts. I’m going around that question a little bit intentionally because I’m trying to make a point that in order for us to actually demand change and understand change, we need to separate ourselves from our political allegiances, from our political identities and think about, “Who am I outside of what I think I know about a system?”

So I can try to explain a legal system to you till the cows go home, but I’m asking you to actually ask yourself, “Who are you as a father? Who are you as a mother, as a daughter, as a grandparent?” If something was done that was wrong, is locking somebody up for a numerical life sentence really worth it? What’s actually lost in that? What would be gained again through this idea of forgiveness and how do we shed light on the hope and the resilience and the strength of 2.3 million American families, right?

That’s really where I want to center the conversation because I think that there are conversations that are happening around the legal system that are critical, that need to continue to be illuminated. But in parallel to that, we need to also talk about the human experience and the human effects of that on love, on Black love, on Black joy too.

Do you feel like a lot of your work or the bulk of your work is mission-based?

Yeah, absolutely. I think anything you put into the world is mission-based. I think it’s impossible to do anything, even our conversation, even “Salon Talks” is mission-based on something because it’s like you have an intention, and then, you’re giving something to the world. I think that that’s even more critical when you understand the medium of filmmaking, which is around images, and images are so powerful. They last longer than us. They, oftentimes, are seen sometimes without context, right? The image itself is both specific and it offers context all at the same time.

So how we see ourselves, how we document each other says a lot and I think everything I do is motivated by the idea of celebrating people, celebrating families, celebrating individuals in their strengths, in their beauty, in their resilience. I don’t work with people that I don’t love, that I don’t have respect for, and it’s really about trying to share that with people. I wouldn’t even say it’s like giving voice. I think it’s saying, “There are these voices that are already there with or without me, and I would like to help amplify that. I would like to help celebrate that.”

Do you feel like some of these things are going to cause a shift in and lead towards systemic change?

I hope so. I think all we have is hope. We have to aspire to something greater in order to move forward. I think that images, again, when you think about the Vietnam War and that being the first time that people could see war and being able to see it meant that they could believe something and then be angry about something and protest something. When we think about Emmett Till’s mother and her brilliance and understanding what it means to have an open casket so the world could see. Images hold systems accountable in a way that sometimes nothing else does. So I feel like part of my mission, going back to your question, is in creating images that prove what’s happening in our country and the system, the prison industrial complex is invisible by design.

The only evidence, sometimes, of 2.3 million people being incarcerated is in the family, is in those that are serving time on the outside. So I think that there is a call to action that is also about demanding more sight, demanding more visibility and transparency around what’s happening. Angola, which is a private prison where Robert was incarcerated for 21 years, with several plantations that were consolidated into one plantation that is 18,000 acres of land. My drone could only get a fraction of that and so that says something to us about why people are not on the streets demanding that this be taken down and stopped right away. I don’t think it’s because people don’t care. I think it’s because they literally don’t know and that, again, is by design. That’s intentional.

What are you working on next?

Well, to be honest with you, I really am trying to just honor this moment right now. It’s always natural for us to try to jump to the next thing and I’m trying, right now, just to enjoy this with the family, enjoy this with our film team and just have a good time and then sleep a little bit and then figure it out.

“Time” is available to stream on Amazon.

In strong defense of Molly Yeh’s popcorn salad recipe

Cookbook author, Food Network host, and Food52 fan-favorite Molly Yeh has effectively shaken the internet with her recipe for crunchy snap pea popcorn salad. Naturally, we couldn’t be happier for her or more excited to test out this tantalizing-sounding concoction ourselves (though whether or not popcorn salad sounds tantalizing is, again, notably subjective).

Popcorn salad isn’t a novel concept — it’s existed in its traditional mayo-coated, vegetable-studded form across the Midwest for untold decades (though scores of Midwesterners weighed in to say they’d never heard of it until the recipe made its way into headlines). In fact, adding an acidic dressing to a puffed grain is commonplace in plenty of food cultures — think Indian chaat and Ecuadoran or Peruvian ceviche — and adding a liquid element of any kind to a puffed grain frequently results in a texturally pleasing crunchy-soggy hybrid that keeps us going back to the cereal box.

More importantly, however, Yeh likes it, which in and of itself is a strong indicator that there’s something very real to be enjoyed in the mix. Like many of my favorite recipes, popcorn salad consists of pantry ingredients and produce staples I happened to have in my kitchen.

I popped the kernels, dusted them with cheddar cheese powder (which I always have on hand for turbocharging cheddar cheesiness), coated the carrot, celery, and shaved Brussels sprouts I subbed for watercress in a simple tangy-sweet mayonnaise dressing, and tossed the whole thing together. The internet has been offering an abundance of commentary on whether the mayonnaise dressing would make the popcorn soggy and whether soggy popcorn was akin to a food crime (among other opinions), but I love it. Even if I weren’t such a hardcore popcorn devotee, I would have enjoyed it, but I am a hardcore popcorn devotee, so I really enjoyed it.

Fans of croutons that get slightly softer as they absorb dressing will delight in popcorn’s ability to enhance its own toasty, savory, corn flavor with nothing more than a light glaze of acidic mayo. While I’ll always prefer it as a snack over a salad element or source of controversy, popcorn’s crisp sponginess definitely invites this kind of enhancement. While my assessment is only one in a veritable sea of (mostly) malcontent, it’s one I’m standing by. Try your hand at this extra-crunchy, incredibly flavorful, and very satisfying salad that’s my new favorite way to enjoy a pantry adventure.

Giada De Laurentiis’ bright spin on pesto sauce uses almonds instead of pine nuts

As reminders of spring start to pop up everywhere, we can’t help but feel inclined to serve up some of that bright new energy on our dinner plates. If you’d also like to turn this vision into a reality, whip up Giada De Laurentiis‘ citrusy spin on pesto this weekend.

Giada recently shared her recipe for Pesto Agli Agrumi on social media, and it was love at first sight when the beautiful green sauce crossed our eyes. This version of pesto hails from Sicily, and it kicks things up a notch with some simple swaps from ingredients you likely already have on hand in your pantry.

The chef explains everything on her website: “Essentially, it contains the same ingredients as Pesto Alla Genovese, with almonds in place of pine nuts, and the addition of lemon or oranges – or both, like my recipe here. It also sometimes has capers, as well.”

The beauty of this recipe is that you can choose your own adventure. Whether you’d like a more subtle citrus flavor or you’d prefer to keep the pine nuts in the mix, the results will all be delicious. This sauce is also amazingly simple to make. Giada’s recipe will take you 10 minutes tops, allowing for plenty of time to figure out what Italian wine is the best match.

To begin, combine the following ingredients in a food processor: slivered almonds, fresh basil, lemon and orange juice and zest, and salt and pepper. Once everything is well chopped, add the ingredient that ensures the final product is creamy and smooth: extra-virgin olive oil.

Combine the sauce with your favorite pasta in a bowl, sprinkle freshly grated Parmesan on top and you’re left with a vibrant springtime remix of one of the classics. You can also mix things up by pairing this sauce with bruschetta or fish. (If you do go the traditional route, reserve some of the pasta water to help the sauce adhere better to the noodles.) Full recipe here

For more of our favorite recipes from Giada, check out:

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

Fox News host bashes network over COVID-19 guidelines

Fox News host Greg Gutfeld ripped into his own employer’s coronavirus protocols on Thursday evening during a segment on “The Five,” where he railed against the cable news network for not allowing hosts to be in the program’s studio to film the show.

“This is an indoor illness, not an outdoor illness,” Gutfeld stated, before getting into a spin over Fox News’ approach to social distancing and coronavirus precautions. “And I will say this, and then I will shut up,” Gutfeld continued. “We are hypocrites when we are giving our own advice on this because all of us, I believe, have been vaccinated. Some of us have had Covid and been vaccinated, which essentially makes you superhuman.”

Gutfeld further compared Fox’s COVID-19 guidelines to that of being stuck doing cable news segments from a “batting cage.” At the end of his rant, during a segment that went off the rails, Gutfeld chalked up the decision by Fox as “legal B.S” despite the protocols being in place to reduce the spread of COVID-19

Pretty sure Greg Gutfeld went rogue here.

He says that The Five should get immediately back into the studio, which was stopped after Juan Williams caught covid.

“There is no reason for us to be doing this all the time. This is legal B.S.! … we are controlled by lawyers.” pic.twitter.com/50wpqNhKSv

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) April 22, 2021

But the controversial and firebreathing Fox News host didn’t stop there, as he continued to take bold swipes at the conservative heavyweight network that cuts his paycheck.

“Lecturing people on the science as we are sitting in our isolated boxes, is it really correct? I think that it’s like, ‘we have to send a message.’ I mean, what message are we sending by being separate right now? I think it’s time to return to the studio. And start seeing each other, looking at each other in the eye when we’re talking so we know they are not interrupting each other so we can actually – I feel like every day we’re in a batting cage, and I would rather like to be passing the ball around.”

He continued: “And we weigh the benefits and the risks. So let’s get back in the studio!”

Digging his apparent hole with the network ever so deeper, Gutfeld then took a potshot at the network’s lawyers possibly having a hand in preventing the team of “The Five” co-hosts from getting back into the companies New York City studio. “There’s no science. We have the vaccines, and we have the rapid testing. There is no reason for us to be doing this all the time unless it’s legal B.S., which is the case for everything in life. We’re controlled by lawyers. Sorry!” After the remarks from Gutfeld, co-host Martha MacCallum appeared to express agreement with Gutfeld’s comments, stating, “there we go.”

A Fox News spokesperson didn’t return Salon’s request for comment on the matter.

“The Five” has long been recording the live show from remote locations. “While many Fox News programs have returned to their respective studios, The Five has been filming from remote locations for several months,” The Daily Beast reported. “After returning to its New York location in September—this time with the hosts all sitting at least six feet apart—the show reverted to remote broadcasts in December after regular co-host Juan Willams contracted coronavirus.”

Meghan McCain goes after LeBron James: “You’re also putting that police officer’s life in danger”

Nearly every episode of ABC’s “The View” feels like Meghan McCain versus everyone else on “The View,” but on Thursday the lone right-wing co-host decided to add another person into her seemingly neverending fueds. After McCain took the side of the police in the recent killing of Ohio teenager Ma’Khia Bryant, she went after Ohio’s biggest homegrown star: Lebron James.

While others on “The View” made impassioned pleas that the knife in Bryant’s hand didn’t warrant 4 shots to the chest, McCain couldn’t help but tread her own path. She acknowledged that police “tend to treat African-Americans and people of color a different way than they do white people,” but said that it’s “just a fact we’re all trying to reconcile and come to terms with.”

Taking a different note, co-host Sonny Hostin expressed outrage at Bryant’s murder, bringing up the police’s recent treatment of white gunmen like recent mass shooters in Atlanta and Colorado, as well as the vigiliante teen Kyle Rittenhouse who gunned down two people during Black Lives Matter protests in Kenosha last summer.

“George Floyd was 46 years old,” Hostin said. “You have an officer kneeling on his neck for 9 minutes and 26 seconds. She was 16 years old, in foster care. Yes, she was yielding a knife, but there were other girls also allegedly attacking her. Let’s compare apples to apples. Let’s compare this young girl, 16 years old or 17 years old, to other 17-year-olds. Let’s compare her to Kyle Rittenhouse. He was carrying an assault weapon. Do you know what officers did? The video shows the police shared water with him and thanked him for his presence.”

Co-host Whoopi Goldberg showed the bodycam footage of Bryant’s murder from the of police officer who shot her. It was accompanied by a controversial clip of CNN’s Don Lemon, who defended the police as doing their jobs. Lemon argued that they were responding to a dangerous incident where someone was armed.

“Even in our anguish we cannot abandon our responsibility to be fair,” Lemon added. “We cannot have a double standard. We have to acknowledge that police have jobs to do.”

While Hostin challenged Lemon’s stance as normalizing bad behavior, McCain agreed with the CNN host.

“I understand everything Sunny is saying, I hear you loud and clear,” McCain started, “I just disagree in this situation because she was about to stab another girl and I think the police officer did what he thought he had to do.”

“This is hard for me to talk about, because … the way I was raised is to respect authority, to respect police officers, to respect law enforcement,” she added, later saying, “She was about to stab another girl and the police officer did what he thought he had to do.”

During the segment McCain also criticized NBA star LeBron James’ tweet on the matter, which has since been deleted. “YOU’RE NEXT #ACCOUNTABILITY,” he tweeted.

“When you have people like LeBron James posting pictures of this police officer before this has been adjudicated and litigated,” McCain started, “you’re also putting that police officer’s life in danger, and I would like killing to stop in this country and violence to stop.”

James later explained on Twitter why he took down his original tweet.

“I’m so damn tired of seeing Black people killed by police. I took the tweet down because it’s being used to create more hate -This isn’t about one officer. it’s about the entire system and they always use our words to create more racism. I am so desperate for more ACCOUNTABILITY.”

Don’t bleach it away: Remembering the day Trump turned the GOP into a death cult

April 23: It’s Shakespeare’s birthday. It’s the day that Beyoncé released her instant 2016 classic “Lemonade.” It’s, uh, the day that Anne Stuart was crowned queen of England. And — much to the chagrin of those who care about things like facts, human decency, and not letting hundreds of thousands of people die to serve the pathetic ego of a sociopathic narcissist — it is also the anniversary of the day that Donald Trump, technically elected president of the United States of America, stood up on national television and suggested he had found the cure for coronavirus that those silly doctors hadn’t considered: bleach injections.

And before a sea of conservatives start saying “nuh-uh” and “fake news,” let’s go ahead and roll the tape:

I see disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute, and is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that.

Standing at a podium in the White House briefing room, Trump also insisted — and this always stuck with me because he was just so sure that he had figured out something that medical science had overlooked — “I’m like a person who has a good you-know-what” while pointing to his head. He also threw out the idea of cracking people open and letting sunlight clean them out.

Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.

The moment wasn’t just the end of any remaining dignity for the U.S. It was the end of the last remaining hope beating in liberal hearts that there was anything that Trump could say or do that would cause his followers to un-cleave themselves from the bosom heaving under that weirdly overlong tie. No, on the contrary, it was proof that the worst Trump acted, the more his supporters clung to him, determined to stick it to the liberals who kept laughing at them for voting for the wannabe fascist reality TV “billionaire” in the first place.

For the one-year anniversary of what will likely be remembered as the stupidest day in American politics, Politico did a very Politico thing and published an “inside baseball” piece allowing anonymous and self-congratulatory Trump aides to claim that they did try to stop him before he unleashed the ignorance kraken. Naturally, not a one is asked the deeper question of why they would even work for a man who was a known threat to do something so thunderously stupid.

More important, however, than the self-serving narratives of people with more ambition than sense is what this moment really ended up foretelling about the next year. No doubt it was pretty funny, this new level of cretinism reached by this known moron whose unearned privileges allowed him to fail upwards right into the White House. But Trump’s toxic combination of stupidity wed to the self-assurance of a terminal narcissist also ended up being the catalyst for months of mounting trauma inflicted on a nation where most voters really had done their level best to elect Hillary Clinton instead.

From the very beginning of the pandemic, Trump’s narcissism led him to believe that he not only knew better than all the scientists of the world combined but that they were probably only saying COVID-19 was a problem as some sort of plot against him. By giving him a daily press briefing at which he could rant mindlessly at cameras every day, his staff was able to trick him, for a time, into reluctantly pretending to take the virus seriously. Still, he was able to communicate to his followers — by refusing to wear a mask, by acting like a pouty child, and by encouraging anti-lockdown protests — his true feelings about the virus, and about his irritation at scientists for thinking they know more than him just because they read and study.

The results were deadly. Refusal to take the pandemic seriously became a badge of honor among Republicans, leading to red states falling short on quarantine measures and conservatives rejecting even the most basic precautions. Trump encouraged this by holding maskless, crowded rallies. The death toll quickly mounted, spiraling way past the early worst estimates of 100,000 or 200,000 to where we are today, with over 570,000 dead on this grim anniversary.

Trump’s leadership in framing belligerent ignorance as a right-wing virtue is still wreaking havoc. Over 40% of Republicans refuse to get vaccinated, ready to see this rejection of science until the very end. Even just this week, Trump’s former HUD Secretary, Ben Carson, was still hawking hydroxychloroquine, one of the many failed “miracle cures” that Trump hyped in his efforts to deny that scientists know what they’re talking about.

Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.

The bleach presser crystallized another important aspect of Trump’s personality that turned out to be not funny at all: His stalwart belief that there’s always some easy way out. Trump was a man who spent his whole life being bailed out of trouble by rich and powerful people, but the pandemic was not something that could be made to disappear with a quick phone call to Roy Cohn or a check written to buy someone’s silence. Still, Trump did not abandon his hope that there must be a way to make this whole pandemic business go away, and, in his grasping for such a thing, he landed on “disinfectant injections”.

Unfortunately, that same attitude of Trump’s came into play after he lost the 2020 election. His failed coup that played out over the next two and a half months was driven by his hunt to find some legal trick, some cheat code available only to him, that would allow him to sail in and seize the lost election from Biden. And when that didn’t pan out, as we all saw, he instead sent an unruly mob to storm the Capitol and try to steal it for him.

On the left, the bleach-injector moment really was the death knell for the liberal faith that conservative minds can be changed with a steady application of facts and reason. That faith had been eroding for years, in the face of research exposing the endless capacity of conservatives to rationalize their worst impulses. But the plain idiocy of the moment and the widespread coverage it got made it indisputable. Conservatives will stand by anything — no matter how blatantly moronic — in the name of “owning the liberals.”

If anything, Trump’s stupidity in that moment only made the situation worse. Liberals laughed at him, and by extension, anyone dumb enough to vote for him. That made conservatives defensive and even more determined to stick it to the liberals by voting for Trump even harder. Concepts of “good governance” don’t stand a chance against the childish hyper-defensiveness of the average GOP voter.

So yes, it was funny. I still laugh when thinking of that moron pointing at his head and saying, “I’m like a person who has a good you-know-what.” But everything that’s happened in the past year — the half a million dead, the violence against protesters at the hands of cops and right-wing vigilantes, the racist violence, and, of course, the attempted coup — has been a sobering reminder that the same ugly urges that caused conservatives to defend Dr. Bleach-Injector also caused them to not care how many people this minority of Americans hurts or kills in their quest for cultural and political dominance. Even David Brooks is starting to get it:

What’s happening can only be called a venomous panic attack. Since the election, large swathes of the Trumpian right have decided America is facing a crisis like never before and they are the small army of warriors fighting with Alamo-level desperation to ensure the survival of the country as they conceive it.

We have a new president, Joe Biden, who takes science seriously and has captained what, despite a few bumps, has been a remarkably successful vaccination effort. But we’re barely just beginning to deal with the fallout from having that 43% of Trump loyalist Americans prove that there is nothing that can be said or done that will make them see sense. That’s an illness no vaccination can prevent.

Biden shores up his plan to combat police killings

Amid yet more videos of routine police stops gone bad for Black citizens, the White House apparently dropped plans for a national commiss ion on policing to press instead for legislation.

We’re being forced as Americans to come up with answers to the continuing string of police incidents that disproportionately are escalating what most of us would see as pretty ordinary episodes into absolute moral horror stories.

We don’t expect that routine matters like expired license plates or a new car’s paper license instead of the plate end up with threats and physical subjugation. Body cams only make visible what was already there.

People and police are getting hurt and emotionally drained by what strikes as inexplicable. There simply is no way to understand:

an “accident” in which a veteran police officer is said to have mistaken an 8-ounce Taser from a 2-pound, fully loaded Glock holstered on different sides of the body
or using pepper spray and beating a cooperative, uniformed Army lieutenant
or keeping a knee on the neck of George Floyd for nine minutes and 29 seconds

Worse, some of these incidents start from unintended mistakes, like serving a no-knock warrant on the wrong address.

Yes, there are complications in each case – from outstanding warrants to a glimpse of something that may be a weapon–but no police officer knew them at the time of the stop. Add in political overtones, and we have problems.

The sheer number of such incidents – a reported 1,200 in 2020 alone – are resulting in an ever-repeating cycle of abuse, injury, even death to Black people arrested by police. The police, under pressure, seem to be too quickly pulling weapons amid admittedly confusing situations. Street protests, looting and police riot response follow.

During the presidential campaign, Biden said he would bring police and protesters together, with academicians, politicians and Civil Rights representatives looking for common ground.

But the flood of incidents is pushing for quicker government response, even understanding that policing is a local function with local police union contracts and local histories difficult to steer in any new direction.

Still, there is the so-called George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which basically would:

limit immunity from prosecution for errant police officers
eliminate particular policing techniques
create national tracking of these police abuse incidents

It has passed the House, but faces an uncertain future in the split Senate.

We’ve Been Here Before

Last year, a bill aimed at curbing police tactics like chokeholds failed. Republicans, who backed an alternative from Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., did not want to drop police immunity from potential prosecutions. The bill basically has reappeared to address a wide range of policies and practices, as well as accountability by law enforcement, including the required use of body cams.

Specifically, the bill would:

facilitate federal enforcement of excessive use of force by state and local law enforcement
expand the criminal intent standard—from willful to knowing or reckless—to convict a law enforcement officer for misconduct in a federal prosecution
limit qualified immunity as a defense to liability in a private civil action against a law enforcement officer or state correctional officer
authorize the Justice Department to issue subpoenas in investigations of police departments for a pattern or practice of discrimination

The Trump administration moved away from overall investigations of municipal police departments with patterns of abuse. This bill would create a National Police Misconduct Registry to compile data on complaints and records of police misconduct. And it would offer a framework to prohibit racial profiling at the federal, state and local levels, including bias training.

The decision to stand down on a commission was made after close collaboration with Civil Rights leaders, according to reports, as well as consultations with both protesters and police unions. The general emergent view was that a commission would simply delay action that is needed now and would repeat the work of previous commissions.

Scott is working with the House author, Rep. Karen Bass, D-Calif., on what can pass in the Senate, where 60 votes are needed.

Still, the political extremes Right and Left and are hard at work. Views range from the total defense of all things Blue Lives Matter to Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) arguing that policing cannot be reformed from being “inherently and intentionally racist.”

Bringing Rationality

You would think that after this last year we’d would have learned a lot more about addressing pandemics, epidemics or merely widespread, continuing social disease. We are not.

Just as we continue to argue about the use of masks, vaccines and public health limits even as whole states are rising again in coronavirus cases, we can’t find agreement that there is a serious race problem facing policing. The trigger response to leap to politics to label protests as riots for partisan political reasons or to see the number of 911 calls for Black joggers is telling us something very important about the pandemic of fear in our country.

The number of times we hear politicians decrying an opponent’s use of “the race card” should be prompted for saying that we need to do more, much more, as individuals and as a society to cool the heat of reactions.

The heightened response of police is as much a reflection of general societal values as it is of training protocols that stress use of weapons over a desire to de-escalate situations before they get out of hand.

That we are seeing new cases of police escalation even as we move through an extremely tense, nationalized focus on the Derek Chauvin trial on charges of murder in the Floyd death, is more than bad timing. As the defense opens its case, there is active worry about what justice actually means in the resolution of this particular case.

But we all believe that the next overly dangerous police escalation incident, we easily can believe, will emerge this weekend or next week. That’s the problem with hair-triggers: They go off.

Passing the George Floyd Act won’t stop all of these incidents. But it can be an important marker toward:

commiting to recasting training
underscoring efforts toward de-escalation
upholding a morality that we think the country is meant to reflect

Judgment calls that police officers must make under pressure still allows for defense when charges are warranted. The community can demand that there be a formal review of the rightness of the police response.

We won’t miss another commission report.

Ultimate “John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band” remixes spotlight one of the great post-Beatles solo albums

When it comes to the vaunted world of remixes and deluxe boxed sets, the Lennon camp has, once again, proven itself to be the top of the class.

With the release of “John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (The Ultimate Collection),” Yoko Ono, Sean Lennon, and their team have taken great pains to afford music lovers with a premier version of the original LP. With crisp new mixes and high production values, the collection reminds us why “Plastic Ono Band” has stood the test of time as one of the great post-Beatles solo albums.

And for the folks out there who enjoy a deep dive into the making of such landmark LPs, “Plastic Ono Band” is not only a superlative specimen—it’s an overwhelming one. The deluxe edition features an incredible 159 tracks, along with a well-researched and lushly illustrated book.

In her preface to the book, Ono writes that “with the Plastic Ono Band albums, John and I liked the idea of this really raw, basic, truthful reality that we were going to be giving to the world. We were influencing other artists, giving them courage, giving dignity to a certain style of vulnerability and strength that was not accepted in society at the time. It was a revolution for a Beatle to say, ‘Listen: I’m human, I’m real.’ It took a lot of courage for him to do it.”

In its essence, the beauty of the “Plastic Ono Band” remixes finds its origins in this same ethic of presenting a “truthful reality.” This aspect of the collection is especially well-revealed by the Elements and Raw Studio mixes that fans have come to expect from the newer Lennon releases, as evidenced by the recent deluxe set associated with Lennon’s “Imagine” LP. As the name implies, the Elements mixes afford listeners with musical highlights, while the Raw Studio mixes draw listeners into the original moment of studio creation.

Love the Beatles? Subscribe to Ken’s podcast “Everything Fab Four.”

Take the remixes for “Love,” for example. With each new iteration, listeners to the Plastic Ono Band remixes are treated to successive recordings that chart the song’s painstaking growth in the studio. What is especially appealing about providing new mixes at such a granular level is the manner in which we are able to experience hitherto unrealized nuances of sound and meaning. With “Love,” a song already rife with its own inherent beauty, we are provided with the capacity for experiencing new layers of aesthetic bliss.

By way of contrast, a track such as “God” seems to emerge with new, previously unheard levels of passion as the song builds to its powerful crescendo. This is especially true during the middle section, when Lennon offers his litany of disbelief against such historical figures as John F. Kennedy and Jesus Christ — even the Beatles, in the song’s emotional climax. The remixes provide a new window into our understanding of the song’s construction, particularly the ways in which Lennon and his bandmates summon the musical forces that drive one of his most vital solo compositions into the stratosphere.

In short, the “Plastic Ono Band” remixes not only celebrate the LP’s original release back in December 1970; they provide music lovers with a lasting memorial to one of rock’s greatest albums. Indeed, the remixes afford listeners with the opportunity to find new vistas of meaning with each return visit. That’s truly a remarkable achievement for any work of art, no matter the genre. But with “Plastic Ono Band,” we’re privileged to discover that—a mere 50 years after its original release—the journey has only just begun.

Humana health plan overcharged Medicare by nearly $200 million, federal audit finds

A Humana Inc. health plan for seniors in Florida improperly collected nearly $200 million in 2015 by overstating how sick some patients were, according to a new federal audit, which seeks to claw back the money.

The Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General’s recommendation to repay, if finalized, would be “by far the largest” audit penalty ever imposed on a Medicare Advantage company, said Christopher Bresette, an HHS assistant regional inspector general.

“This [money] needs to come back to the federal government,” he said in an interview.

Humana sharply disputed the findings of the audit, which was set for public release Tuesday. A spokesperson for the company said Humana will work with Medicare officials “to resolve this review,” and noted the recommendations “do not represent final determinations, and Humana will have the right to appeal.”

Medicare Advantage, a fast-growing private alternative to original Medicare, has enrolled more than 26 million people, according to America’s Health Insurance Plans, an industry trade group. Humana, based in Louisville, Kentucky, is one of the largest of these insurers, with about 4 million members.

While popular with seniors, Medicare Advantage has been the target of multiple government investigations, Department of Justice and whistleblower lawsuits and Medicare audits that concluded some plans boosted their government payments by exaggerating the severity of illnesses they treated. One 2020 report estimated improper payments to the plans topped $16 billion the previous year.

But efforts to recover even a tiny fraction of the overpayments in past years have stalled amid intense industry opposition to the government’s audit methods.

Now the OIG is rolling out a series of audits that could for the first time put health plans on the hook for refunding tens of millions of dollars or more to Medicare. The OIG is planning to release five to seven similar audits within the next year or two, officials said.

The Humana audit, conducted from February 2017 to August 2020, tied overpayments to medical conditions that pay health plans extra because they are costly to treat, such as some cancers or diabetes with serious medical complications.

Auditors examined a random sample of 200 patients’ medical charts to make sure that the patients had the diseases the health plans were paid to treat, or that the conditions were as severe as the health plan claimed.

For instance, Medicare paid $244 a month, or $2,928 for the year, for one patient said to be suffering from serious complications of diabetes. But medical records Humana supplied failed to confirm that diagnosis, meaning the health plan should have received $163 less per month for the patient’s care, or $1,956 for the year, according to the audit.

Similarly, Medicare paid $4,380 too much in 2015 for treatment of a patient whose throat cancer had been resolved, according to the audit. In other cases, however, auditors said Medicare underpaid Humana by thousands of dollars because the plan submitted incorrect billing codes.

In the end, auditors said Medicare overpaid Humana by $249,279 for the 200 patients whose medical charts were closely examined in the sample. Auditors used a technique called extrapolation to estimate the prevalence of such billing errors across the health plan.

“As a result, we estimated that Humana received at least $197.7 million in net overpayments for 2015,” the audit states, adding that Humana’s policies to prevent these errors “were not always effective” and need improvement.

The OIG notified Humana of its findings in September 2020, according to the audit. A final decision on collecting the money rests with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, or CMS, which runs Medicare Advantage. Under federal law, the OIG is responsible for identifying waste and mismanagement in federal health care programs but can only recommend repayment. CMS had no comment.

Though controversial, extrapolation is commonly used in medical fraud investigations — except for investigations into Medicare Advantage. Since 2007, the industry has criticized the extrapolation method and, as a result, largely avoided accountability for pervasive billing errors.

Industry protests aside, OIG officials say they are confident their enhanced audit tools will withstand scrutiny. “I believe what we have here is solid,” OIG official Bresette said.

Michael Geruso, an associate professor of economics at the University of Texas-Austin, who has researched Medicare Advantage, said extrapolation “makes perfect sense,” so long as it is based on a random sample.

“It seems like this is a healthy step forward by the OIG to protect the U.S. taxpayer,” he said.

The OIG used the extrapolation technique for the first time in a February audit of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Michigan that uncovered $14.5 million in overpayments for 2015 and 2016. In response, Blue Cross said it would take steps to ferret out payment mistakes from other years and refund $14.5 million. Blue Cross spokesperson Helen Stojic said that process “is still pending.”

But Humana, with a lot more money on the line, is fighting back. Humana “takes great pride in what the company believes to be its industry-leading approach” to ensuring proper billing, Sean O’Reilly, a company vice president, wrote in a December 2019 letter to the OIG that blasted the audit.

O’Reilly wrote that Humana “has never received feedback from CMS that its program is deficient in any respect.”

The nine-page letter argues that the audit “reflects misunderstandings related to certain statistical and actuarial principles, and legal and regulatory requirements.” Requiring Humana to repay the money “would represent a serious departure from the statutory requirements underlying the [Medicare Advantage] payment model,” the company said.

Humana did persuade the OIG to shave off about $65 million from its initial estimate of the overpayment. In 2015, Medicare paid the plan about $5.6 billion to treat about 485,000 members, mostly in South Florida.

Humana is not alone in disapproving of the audits.

AHIP, the industry trade group, has long opposed extrapolation of payment errors, and in 2019 called a CMS proposal to start doing it “fatally flawed.” The group did not respond to requests for comment.

Health care industry consultant Richard Lieberman said insurers remain “vehemently opposed” and will likely head to court to try to sidestep any multimillion-dollar penalties.

Lieberman noted that CMS has “waffled” in deciding how to protect tax dollars as Medicare Advantage plans have grown rapidly and cost taxpayers more than $200 billion a year. CMS says it has yet to complete its own audits dating to 2011, which are years overdue.

The dispute has been largely invisible to patients, who are not directly affected by overpayments to the plans. Many seniors sign up because Medicare Advantage offers benefits not included in original Medicare and may cost them less out-of-pocket, though it restricts their choice of doctors.

But some critics argue that inaccurate medical files pose a risk of improper treatment. Dr. Mario Baez, a Florida physician and whistleblower, said seniors can be “placed in harm’s way due to false information in their medical records.”

30×30: How important are private lands in meeting conservation goals?

Sagebrush bulldozed for a housing development. A pipeline carved through grasslands. Forest felled for a road. Every 30 seconds in the United States, a football field-sized swath of nature is lost to development, according to research from the Center for American Progress.

This troubling trend runs counter to calls from scientists to protect more natural areas to mitigate against the effects of climate change and better protect plants and animals from extinction.

Current goals to protect biodiversity simply aren’t good enough, scientists say.

Targets set in the international Convention on Biological Diversity called for protecting 17% of land and 10% of the ocean by 2020. “These are interim measures that are politically driven but not science based and are widely viewed in the scientific literature as inadequate to avoid extinctions or halt the erosion of biodiversity,” according to research published in the journal Science Advances.

If habitat destruction and warming don’t peak by the end of this decade, we won’t be able to keep rising global temperature below the critical threshold of 1.5 degree Celsius, the researchers said. “It has become clear that beyond 1.5°C, the biology of the planet becomes gravely threatened because ecosystems literally begin to unravel,” the authors wrote.

We need to aim higher. And quickly. Efforts are now coalescing behind “30×30” — a global goal of protecting 30% of Earth’s land and water by 2030.

“30×30 has been discussed in scientific circles for quite some time in acknowledgement of the multiple crises on our hands — the extinction crisis and the climate crisis — both of which are magnified by the rate at which we’re losing nature,” says Ryan Richards, a senior policy analyst at the Center for American Progress.

In January the United States took a first step in moving the United States toward 30×30. A sweeping executive order from President Joe Biden on the climate crisis contained a mandate directing the secretary of the Interior and other relevant agency leaders to submit recommendations for how the federal government could conserve at least 30% of the United States’ land and waters by the end of the decade.

Initial findings are due later this month, but there’s no doubt that there’s much work to be done. Currently 26% of the country’s ocean waters are protected, but only 12% of U.S. lands.

“Nine years is not a very long time to protect essentially 440 million additional acres that still need to be conserved to reach that 30% goal,” says Erin Heskett, vice president of conservation initiatives at the Land Trust Alliance.

A big focus will undoubtedly be increasing the amount of federally protected public lands, possibly with a first step of restoring cuts by the Trump administration, which slashed more than 1 million acres from Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah. National parks, wilderness areas, wildlife refuges and national monuments are all important places that help protect biodiversity and sequester carbon to mitigate against climate change.

But there’s another important component, experts say: private lands. The Center for American Progress found that 75% of natural areas lost to development in the United States between 2001 and 2017 were on private lands, including farms, ranches and forests.

“That rate is five times higher than on federal or state lands,” says Richards. “So private lands are going to be one of the big pieces of the puzzle if you’re going to be successful in meeting those 30×30 goals.”

A Big Opportunity

When it comes to protecting private lands, there’s nowhere to go but up.

A mere 3% of protected areas in the country are on private lands, despite the fact that 60% of all land in the country is privately owned.

That’s bad news for biodiversity.

“Researchers have found that we’re losing habitat for threatened and endangered species twice as fast on unprotected private lands as we are on public lands, which is a big deal when you realize that a huge percentage of our threatened species live in places like the Southeast and areas outside of where we have a lot of federally protected public lands,” says Richards.

One way to begin protecting more private land is to ramp up existing programs that help local government agencies or land trusts buy private property outright or provide incentives for conservation easements.

Conservation easements, which are voluntary legal agreements where landowners are compensated for preserving — typically permanently — the conservation value of their property, already protect an estimated 40 million acres in the United States. And it’s proving to be a good investment of public money.

In Colorado conservation easements have set aside 1.5 million acres of land considered “crucial habitat,” which includes areas for Gunnison sage grouse and wintering range for elk. A report from Colorado State University found that each conservation dollar invested by the state has delivered $4-$12 of public benefits. Those benefits, often called “ecosystem services,” include groundwater recharge, flood control, water purification, and habitat for fish and wildlife.

“They are already popular, especially in the West where many landowners have a strong ethic of stewardship,” says Tyler McIntosh, a policy and design associate at the Center for Western Priorities. “Since people are already motivated to do this work, there’s an opportunity to structure our policy such that their voluntary efforts are worth it for them financially.”

Funding Sources

Several existing Department of Agriculture programs already help to boost conservation. One is the Agricultural Conservation Easement Program, which helps conserve wetlands and grasslands. Another, the Conservation Reserve Program, pays farmers to take land out of production and plant species to improve environmental health.

But McIntosh says interest in these programs exceeds most of their available funds.

That means Congress will need to allocate more resources to those programs and utilize other initiatives, such as the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which conservation groups fought last year to have fully funded by Congress.

Money from the fund — which is generated by offshore oil and gas leasing — can be used for acquiring new lands, such as through the Forest Service’s Land Acquisitions Program. But McIntosh says one important thing to remember is that most grants from the Land and Water Conservation Fund need to be matched at the state level. “It’s very important that states begin to set aside funds for conservation, too,” he says.

Exactly how much more money it will take to meet 30×30 conservation goals isn’t clear, says Heskett, but it will take efforts beyond the federal government.

“We’ll also need more from state governments, private philanthropy and conservation finance tools,” he says.

Combining permanent easements with short-term incentive programs could also help, say Arthur Middleton and Justin Brashares, professors in the department of environmental science, policy and management at the University of California, Berkeley.

“One such approach could be conservation leases with terms of 20 to 30 years that are palatable to landowners while providing meaningful protection,” they explained in an op-ed in The New York Times. “These programs would be less expensive than land purchases or easements, providing new ways for corporations and philanthropists to underwrite land protection at a scale much greater than can be achieved through the outright purchase of land.”

Additional Gains

Using private land to boost protected areas can also make nature more accessible and widens the geographic scope of where conservation happens.

The vast majority of federally protected lands are in the West, but by increasing protection on private lands in other parts of the country it can help conserve more plants and animals, as well as provide natural areas nearby millions more residents.

“Private land is often closer to communities than federal wilderness, national forests or even state lands,” found a report by the Center for Western Priorities. “For example, many city parks are protected by conservation easements. Additional benefits can include improved health, access to locally produced food, and opportunities for environmental education.”

But deciding which lands are conserved should also include identifying not just how much can be protected, but what kind of ecosystems.

“We feel that there’s an opportunity here to identify a significant portion of this goal that would invest in the lands and waters that are most resilient to climate change and would best allow animals and plants to find new places to thrive,” says Heskett.

One way to do that, he says, would be by using a tool developed by the Nature Conservancy called the Resilient and Connected Landscapes network, which identifies lands across the country that are expected to be the most resilient to climate change.

And any effort to improve conservation goals also need to be centered in equity.

“Native Americans and other peoples of color have been largely excluded from U.S. conservation policy, and many of them, living in cities, view public lands as remote and unwelcoming,” wrote Middleton and Brashares. “A successful 30 by 30 strategy must encompass needs as diverse as tribal priorities and urban green spaces in historically excluded communities.”

But if done well, a 30×30 conservation goal can help both diverse human communities and ecosystems.

“Our polling shows that the public is behind conservation,” says McIntosh. “And the question now is whether governments at state, local and federal levels are going to tap into that support and take advantage of this moment.”

Artichokes 101: How to pick, clean and prepare this amazing spring produce

If you’ve never cooked a fresh artichoke, they can be intimidating. They’re a little prickly, with a woody stem and a bitter exterior layer. But once you learn to prepare them properly, you end up with tender leaves and the heart, which both have almost the flavor of fresh, slightly grassy butter.

While they’re in season — March through May is prime time for artichokes — Celine Beitchman, the Institute of Culinary Education’s director of nutrition, recommends home cooks incorporate them into their dishes.

Here’s everything you need to know about purchasing the freshest artichokes at the supermarket, cutting off all the inedible bits, preventing oxidation and pairing them with other bright spring flavors.

What types of artichokes are there?

When we’re looking at supermarket artichokes, they’re generally going to fall into two basic categories, Beitchman says. There are the globe artichokes — sometimes called a French artichoke — which are typically about the size of a softball and a vibrant green color. Then there are baby artichokes, which, when fully matured, are only typically about 2- or 3-inches long.

“So, depending on what kind you’re working with, you’re going to be dealing with slightly different techniques and then maybe slightly different end products,” Beitchman says.

If you’re serving roasted or stuffed artichoke as a first course, plan for one globe artichoke per person, she says. If you plan to serve baby artichokes as an appetizer or hors d’oeuvre, bump up that number to three to four per person.

How do I pick the freshest artichokes at the grocery store?

The biggest indicator of freshness is that the artichoke will feel “heavy in the hand” when you pick it up off of the produce shelf.

“If it’s not heavy in the hand, if it’s very light, it’s likely lost a lot of its moisture and some of its water-soluble nutrients, as well as some of its body and flavor,” Beitchman says.

Examine the shape of the artichoke, as well. The leaves should be tightly hugging toward the center of the vegetable. Put another way: It should not look like a blooming flower or succulent.

“If the leaves are opening up from the center, that’s a sign that it’s likely been sitting out for too long or is older or experienced temperature changes,” she says. “I would say that’s the same whether it’s a globe artichoke or those little baby artichokes.”

How do you clean the artichoke?

Run the artichokes under cold water, and lightly brush the exterior of the vegetable with a vegetable brush.

How do you prepare an artichoke for cooking?

There are parts of the artichoke that aren’t super pleasant to eat, including the stem, the hard outer leaves and the choke itself — a fibrous and stringy white and purple area in the middle of the artichoke located above the heart. Much of preparing an artichoke for cooking is centered around removing these bits.

“The stem is pretty woodsy, so you’re always going to lop that off,” Beitchman says. “And then we will use our hands or a paring knife — or any small-size knife — to peel away maybe first or two outer layers of leaves. They’re going to be the hardest, almost like a hard peel.”

After that, cut off the top inch or so of the artichoke. This will remove any lingering, pointy ends and give you an opening to remove the choke. Using a melon baller or spoon, remove all of the fuzzy filaments surrounding the choke. If you don’t want to keep the artichoke whole, you can also simply cut it in half and remove the choke that way.

How do I prevent the artichoke from browning?

“We have to talk about oxidation,” Beitchman says. “The second you open an artichoke, whether it’s trimming the bottom or plucking off an outer leaf, the air is going to start browning and actually turning the artichoke black. That ‘blackening’ will not wash away during cooking, so it’s not going to dissolve.”

According to Beitchman, the oxidation doesn’t affect flavor, but we eat with our eyes, and the discoloration is not very appealing. However, something you can do to prevent — or at least slow — the browning is brush the artichoke with lemon water as you make new cuts. It’s an extra step, but it’s worth it for the aesthetics.

Can I eat it raw?

Beitchman would not recommend eating artichokes raw. “I think it would taste very bitter to people,” she says. “It would just taste unripe and astringent. There are flavor compounds that open up as part of the cooking process with heat and time.”

What flavors pair well with artichokes?

Speaking of flavor, Beitchman says the sweet butteriness and grassiness of artichokes pairs really well with basic vinaigrette. “One great treatment for artichokes is steaming them and dipping the leaves into a Dijon mustard vinaigrette,” she says. “It’s really classic and simple.”

She continues, “Tarragon is kind of a natural pairing for artichokes, so dipping them in a little melted butter with tarragon is also a really nice pairing.”

It’s also a good side for seafood, incorporated into simple pastas, and there’s also the ultimate classic — spinach and artichoke dip, which Martha Stewart recently reimagined as a healthy one-pot weeknight meal.

More ways to up your game in the kitchen:

Eating too much sugar could affect how childrens’ brains develop: study

Parents and researchers are familiar with the physical effects of consuming a lot of sugar— tooth decay, heart disease, high cholesterol, and high blood pressure. But the way sugar consumption affects cognitive development is not as well-understood.

However, according to findings published in the peer-reviewed journal Translational Psychiatry, sugar may have a dynamic effect on childrens’ mental health and cognitive development.

Researchers from the University of Georgia and a University of Southern California research group used a rodent model, meaning an experiment on rats, to examine how sugar affects adolescent brains when consumed everyday. Their findings revealed that sugar likely has a cognitive impact on some parts of memory.

The study also revealed that shifts in gut bacteria called parabacteroides, which can be associated with high intakes of sugar, could lead to a memory impairment.

“Early life sugar increased Parabacteroides levels, and the higher the levels of Parabacteroides, the worse the animals did in the task,” lead study author Emily Noble, assistant professor in the UGA College of Family and Consumer Sciences, said in a press release. “We found that the bacteria alone was sufficient to impair memory in the same way as sugar, but it also impaired other types of memory functions as well.”

In the study, rodents were given their normal food in addition to an 11 percent sugar solution, which is comparable to sugar-sweetened beverages. After consuming the sugar, the researchers had the rodents execute memory tasks that relied on the hippocampus, which is critical to learning and memory; these included a test to remember the context in which they had seen a familiar object before, which measured episodic contextual memory.

“We found that rats that consumed sugar in early life had an impaired capacity to discriminate that an object was novel to a specific context, a task the rats that were not given sugar were able to do,” Noble said.

A second memory task measured basic recognition memory to recognize something they had seen previously. In this task, sugar had no effect.

“Early life sugar consumption seems to selectively impair their hippocampal learning and memory,” Noble said. “The question now is how do these populations of bacteria in the gut alter the development of the brain?”

The researchers said further research is needed to understand how bacteria in the gut which are related to high levels of sugar intake, impact the brain.

“Identifying how the bacteria in the gut are impacting brain development will tell us about what sort of internal environment the brain needs in order to grow in a healthy way,” Noble said.

Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon’s weekly newsletter The Vulgar Scientist.

The other George Floyd story: How media freedom led to conviction in his killer’s trial

When 17-year-old Darnella Frazier started recording video of Minneapolis policeman Derek Chauvin murdering George Floyd, she initiated a series of historic events that led to Chauvin’s conviction.

But for all the discussion of technology following her actions – how cellphones enable video recording of police abuse and how social media encourages instantaneous mass distribution – the key factor in George Floyd’s name becoming globally famous may not be Frazier’s cellphone. It may not even be social media.

It was the culture and tradition of U.S. civil liberties and media freedom that played an essential role in protecting Frazier’s ability to record and retain possession of the video, and the capability of commercial corporations to publish it.

Had the same events transpired in China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Singapore or elsewhere, nobody might ever have learned of Floyd’s fate.

The constitutional protections enjoyed by U.S. citizens empower and encourage everyday Americans to discover, record, expose and distribute evidence of governmental malfeasance. This freedom to publicize crimes committed by state actors creates the possibility of improving policing and making the administration of justice more sensitive, effective and responsive.

But it also threatens to undermine state authority, which is why so many U.S. politicians remain wary of such freedoms.

To understand how the United States developed this unconstrained news culture, you need to return to Minneapolis, to a moment one century ago, when a newspaper exposed police corruption and provided a key turning point in protecting the American public’s right to expose governmental crimes.

Press abuse vs. press limits

Jay Near always knew there were bad cops in Minnesota.

The publisher wrote about them in The Saturday Press, his Minneapolis newspaper. But Near called the cops “gangsters,” and he railed against what he claimed was a Jewish cabal controlling Minneapolis. Jay Near was a racist crank who published baseless conspiracy theories.

Today, Near is remembered – if at all – for his legendary Supreme Court victory in the 1931 U.S. Supreme Court decision known as Near v. Minnesota.

In 1927, Near and his business partner were prevented from publishing because The Saturday Press was deemed in violation of Minnesota’s “Public Nuisance Law.” That law outlawed publishing or circulating “obscene, lewd, and lascivious” or “malicious, scandalous and defamatory” materials.

Near sued to lift the prohibition, and his case made it to the Supreme Court, where his publication rights were ultimately vindicated. Near v. Minnesota opened up the modern version of press freedom we recognize today. Calling the Minnesota Public Nuisance Law “the essence of censorship,” a five-justice majority struck it down.

Essentially, the high court ruled that the U.S. Constitution allowed the abuse of press freedom in order to protect the most vibrant and robust public discussion possible. The Court had no illusions – the judges were well aware The Saturday Press published inflammatory misinformation. But in assessing the costs of censorship versus the benefits of liberty, the majority sided with the racist crank against the state of Minnesota.

Making the connection

The expansive media freedoms originating in the First Amendment, and later enshrined in Supreme Court decisions like Near v. Minnesota, would continue into the internet age with Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. That’s the law that allows people to post freely on internet sites while protecting the internet companies from legal jeopardy caused by those materials.

So, for example, defamatory accusations, negligent misrepresentation, intentional nuisance, dangerous misinformation and even content intended to incite emotional distress can be posted without Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or other companies being sued or held civilly liable.

For better or worse, Section 230 establishes media freedom across the internet in the U.S. And it is this law, built on the traditions of media freedom, that allowed Darnella Frazier – and all citizens who follow in her footsteps – to stand up to the government in ways previously unimaginable.

But some stand ready to abandon these long-established legal and cultural protections.

Had Minnesota’s Public Nuisance Law survived Near’s challenge, it very well might have prevented publication of Frazier’s video. Those images could easily have been deemed “obscene,” or a “malicious” or “scandalous” incitement to violence.

But U.S. states can’t outlaw media organizations as “public nuisances.” Yet tensions over media freedom now exist that have the potential to lead to limits on the public’s ability to record and distribute police crimes.

Joe Biden and Donald Trump don’t agree on much, but one idea they have both publicly endorsed is eliminating Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.

Critics who want to get rid of Section 230 regularly blame it for the plethora of “fake news,” misinformation, and hate speech that infects our web and social media. Because Twitter, Facebook, Tik Tok and others can’t be held liable for users’ content, the companies have felt little pressure, until recently, to moderate the blizzard of material they publish every second.

The cost of limiting the press

But media freedom is always a double-edged sword. Without Section 230 protection, social media companies would likely behave cautiously to minimize even the hint of legal jeopardy. Frazier’s video, in such a world, might be deemed too risky to distribute.

The immunity provided by Section 230 encourages YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and others, to stimulate users to post pretty much any news, information or video their users deem newsworthy or interesting.

The repeal of Section 230 could result in a system in which inflammatory or provocative news or images that might outrage or incite people could be deemed too socially destructive or disturbing of the peace by internet companies. And this could include images and video such as the murder of George Floyd.

The media freedom secured by Jay Near when he sought to expose police corruption in Minneapolis eventually assured the conviction of a criminal Minneapolis policeman.

The idea that U.S. citizens can report, publish, print and disseminate information that might be terribly damaging to authority is a radical one. Even within the United States, this freedom is often considered too expansive. In Oklahoma, for example, a new bill criminalizing the filming of police officers recently passed both houses of the state legislature, and elsewhere the rights of citizens and journalists to record police behavior occurring in public are regularly violated.

The direct line from Minneapolis in the 1920s to Minneapolis in the 2020s is the notion that protecting people’s rights promises to foster an active, aware and engaged citizenry – and that violating those rights by repressing or censoring information is deeply anti-American.

Michael J. Socolow, Associate Professor, Communication and Journalism, University of Maine

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

How is Marjorie Taylor Greene’s failed “America First” caucus any different from the GOP?

As reported last weekend, Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Paul Gosar of Arizona, perhaps the two most right-wing members of Congress, were planning to create an “America First” Caucus in the House. This is similar to the way neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members, and other members of explicitly white supremacist organizations beginning in the 1970s and ’80s rebranded themselves as “white nationalists,” with the goal of appearing more “respectable” and “mainstream.” To counter that subterfuge, Greene’s group could be more accurately described as the “White Power Caucus” or the “House Republican Klavern.”

Punchbowl News obtained access to a seven-page statement of purpose and goals from the proposed America First Caucus, which includes such standard white supremacist talking points as: “America is a nation with a border, and a culture strengthened by a common respect for uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions.”

In a particularly strange tangent, the document also argued that the U.S. should embrace “the progeny of European architecture, whereby public infrastructure must be utilitarian as well as stunningly, classically beautiful, befitting a world power and source of freedom.“

On immigration, the America First Caucus appeared to draw its inspiration from America’s long history of eugenics and “race science”: “Societal trust and political unity are threatened when foreign citizens are imported en-masse into a country, particularly without institutional support for assimilation and an expansive welfare state to bail them out should they fail to contribute positively to the country.”

Unsurprisingly, the America First Caucus also pledged its loyalty to Donald Trump and his Big Lie about the 2020 election. In total, the notional caucus’ policy platform went well beyond racist “dog whistles,” and was more like a white supremacist air raid siren.

Even the name of Greene and her cabal’s hate caucus signaled to some of the most shameful chapters of America’s history of white supremacy and racial terror.

In a 2018 article for The Nation, historian Kevin Kruse explained the broader context of Donald Trump and his movement’s invocation of the term “America First”:

As the United States drifted into the First World War, nativists increasingly became concerned over the “hyphenates” in their midst: those who called themselves German-American, Irish-American, Italian-American, and the like. It was time, Wilson insisted in 1915, for every immigrant “to declare himself, where he stands. Is it America first or is it not?” Less than a decade later, the United States embraced drastic restrictions on immigration through the National Origins Act of 1924. As a Republican supporter in Congress explained, the policy simply reflected “the doctrine of America first for Americans.”

Not surprisingly, the Ku Klux Klan employed “America First” in much the same way, using it to demand nothing less than “100% Americanism” — which for the group meant 100 percent white Americanism. In 1921, a circular listed the “ABCs” of the KKK: “America first, benevolence, clannishness.” While the Klan was often called the “American Fascisti” during this era, the same arguments were advanced by more openly fascist organizations like William Pelley’s Silver Shirts, an American counterpart to Mussolini’s blackshirts and Hitler’s brownshirts. “The various colored shirt orders — the whole haberdashery brigade who play upon sectional prejudice — are sowing the seeds of fascism,” the writer James Waterman Wise warned. “It may come wrapped in a flag or a Hearst newspaper,” he added, with “America First” on the masthead.

The Guardian’s editorial board summarizes this moment: “If anyone wondered what American fascism might look like then they could start with the proposed congressional “America First Caucus”, which emerged this weekend from the office of extremist Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene.”

It is no coincidence that Donald Trump’s white supremacist advisor, professional hate-monger and Fox News personality Stephen Miller traffics in the same language, public policies and ideas as Greene and her proposed caucus.

After Punchbowl News shared details about Greene’s proposed white power caucus, it was met with outrage and condemnation by the commentariat and political chattering class. She denied ever having seen the document, and responded with contradictory claims that no such group would be formed.

Greene of course argued that she was a “victim” of a smear campaign by the “liberal news media,” and in a striking display of cowardice even blamed a staff member for misrepresenting the nature of the caucus and releasing a rough draft of its founding document.

In all likelihood, Greene and her cabal were testing norms and boundaries. She and her allies temporarily retreated in order to reassess their larger strategy of how to weaponize white supremacy as a way to maximize their power within the Republican Party. Testing norms and boundaries and then recalibrating is a common strategy among political extremists.

Leading Republicans and other “sensible” voices on the right condemned Greene and her theoretical caucus as a way of demonstrating their false anti-racist bonafides. Such voices claimed that the America First group’s stated beliefs in the superiority of “Anglo-Saxon civilization,” and its related desire to keep America a majority-white country by shutting down nonwhite immigration, represent a betrayal of the country’s best traditions and values. More “traditional” Republicans also took the opportunity to denounce Greene and her cabal as a way of superficially distancing themselves and their party from the enduring stain of Trumpism.

Too much of the mainstream news media cannot conceal its hunger for a return to normalcy and its quest for “reasonable,” “decent” and “traditional” Republicans. In breathless reporting, the mainstream news media and its hope peddlers, professional centrists and stenographers of current events proclaimed that Republicans were “outraged” and “disgusted” at Greene and the America First caucus. The Republican Party was once again described as descending into chaos and disarray because of Greene’s latest white supremacist stunt.

But the real story of the America First Caucus is one of style versus substance: Today’s Jim Crow Republican Party largely agrees with the nativist and white supremacist policies of Greene’s proposed caucus. The fake outrage is really a function of public relations, reflecting how boldly such ideas and policies are being presented.

Make no mistake: Today’s Republican Party is America’s and the world’s largest white supremacist organization. Its slide into open embrace of white supremacy with the rise of Trump and his neofascist movement did not occur overnight. That outcome took several decades, from the infamous Southern strategy of Richard Nixon’s time to Reaganism, the white backlash of the Tea Party against Barack Obama and a Republican Party that is so extreme that is has more in common with neofascist political organizations in Hungary and Poland than with mainstream democratic political parties in other parts of the West.

Donald Trump’s presidency and movement were and are based on white racial resentment, anxiety about a loss of white privilege and control over American society and, for many of Trump’s supporters and followers, an embrace of overt white supremacy and a desire to hurt nonwhite people.

The Republican Party, its leadership and elected officials fully embraced and consistently supported Trump’s policy agenda — no matter what degree of deflection or prevarication they may wish to offer. Loyalty to Trump was so extreme that the 2020 Republican platform was nonexistent: The party would do whatever Trump wanted. The so-called reasonable and traditional Republicans in Congress voted for almost every one of Trump’s proposals, however racist, cruel, fascistic and anti-democratic they have been. Even “good Republicans” such as Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, who twice voted to convict Trump for his crimes against democracy, still supported almost all of his legislation and policy positions.

Although he is no longer president, Donald Trump remains more popular among Republican voters and his followers than the party itself. Public opinion polls and other social science research has repeatedly shown that the “economic anxiety” among the “white working class” that led to the Age of Trump was primarily a function of racism, white supremacy and what experts have described as “ethnic antagonism” and fear of “displacement” by nonwhites.

On Jan. 6, Trump’s followers launched a lethal coup attack on the U.S. Capitol. That act of treason was fundamentally an attack on the legitimacy of America’s multiracial democracy. As shown by public opinion polls and other research, a majority of Republicans, then and now, support the Capitol attack or seek to blame it on others.

In numerous states, the Republican Party has publicly criticized or formally censured the relatively small number of elected Republicans who dared to condemn Trump’s coup attack, resist his false claims of election fraud or support his impeachment.

Other research shows that Republicans, and Trump followers specifically, reject the very idea of American democracy if white people are no longer to be its dominant group.

Experimental research shows that when white participants are exposed to information suggesting that the white proportion of the population is declining, they exhibit not just social-status anxiety but fears about the literal extermination of the “white race.” Such fears then lead to racial bias and greater support for right-wing extremist policies.

By refusing to accept the basic fact that today’s Republican Party is a white supremacist terror organization, the mainstream news media is repeating exactly the same mistakes that led to the Age of Trump and the coup attempt of Jan. 6.

Greene and her America First Caucus are not an aberration. They are not something strange or alien to the Republican Party. In many ways, she and her proposed group are the Republican Party’s heart, passions and unrestrained id. This is a dangerous truth that the mainstream news media is afraid to speak publicly and forcefully.

In effect, the media’s desperate search for “reasonable Republicans” is an attempt to normalize the abominable. That only serves to enable neofascism. This is not a bad habit, an involuntary compulsion or a “lack of journalistic imagination.” It is a perilously irresponsible choice that may lead to the demise of American democracy.

Coding experts tell Salon Mike Lindell’s botched social site was doomed to fail

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s social media site FRANK is facing ridicule from the community of “grandmasters” around the content management software Drupal, who say Lindell’s site was destined to fail from the start because his developers failed to take “elementary” coding steps to limit attacks from outside forces. Since its supposed “VIP launch” last Thursday night, Lindell’s platform has experienced numerous crashes, and at this writing on Thursday evening the site remains down.

Drupal’s site explains that its software is “used to make many of the websites and applications you use every day. Drupal has great standard features, like easy content authoring, reliable performance, and excellent security.” Drupal is open source, meaning that anyone can download it or modify it as they please — but it helps if they know what they’re doing.

Speaking to Salon on Thursday afternoon about Lindell’s site, one “Acquia Certified Drupal Grand Master,” who oversees a technology firm that employs numerous other “grandmasters,” said that Lindell’s site was set up for failure from its inception, noting that its developers — whom Lindell compared to Navy SEALs — had failed to carry out basic “Drupal 101” tasks.

One coder who spoke to Salon in great detail explained the potential shortcomings of the pillow maven’s program code and the patchy work done by his developer team. “Drupal can power high powerful websites, sites with lots of traffic,” the expert said, adding that it isn’t the right software to build a social media site with, since it’s not designed to handle a large amount of user-generated content. “Lindell’s website was basically trying to make soup for scratch for everybody,” said the expert, who claimed more than 25 years of experience in the IT field.

“In my professional opinion, it will be extremely unlikely, if not impossible, for Lindell to accomplish his vision with Drupal and his own servers,” the expert told Salon. “Despite how much I love it, Drupal simply isn’t the right tool for the number of users with the features that he wants to provide. It would take a massive effort of 12 to 18 months to build out the needed hosting setup and application architecture, and this would come with an enormous degree of risk. The idea that he could do this in just a couple of months is patently absurd, and I think the results speak for themselves.”

The team of “grandmasters” were granted anonymity by Salon due to the sensitive nature of their employment and the risk of being doxxed by Lindell’s supporters.

“When I was looking at the code, in the browser, they basically launched the site while it was still in development mode,” one expert told Salon, citing the fact that developers had failed to check a box to aggregate files on the platform as the first red flag he ran across. “Their files were not aggregated, and by the way, that’s a check box in Drupal — you literally check a box and click save, My jaw dropped when I saw that. I was like, ‘They did not try to launch this thing without aggregation turned on!'”

The second major red flag another Drupal expert found was that Lindell’s site was spitting out coded error messages to users, which leaves the platform vulnerable to attacks. “This is a shit show,” the expert said, calling this an “obvious” issue that coders learn how to prevent in “Drupal 101.” Other “grandmasters” poked fun at the developers’ mistakes, which were described as “extremely obvious” and juvenile in nature. One expert concluded that, based on the evidence, Lindell’s developer team was inexperienced and lacked basic knowledge, and described the output of the pillow magnate’s alleged 10-person staff as “not even student work.”

Lindell did not respond to numerous requests for comment from Salon for this story.

Biden promised a return to diplomacy — instead, he’s appeasing the hawks and neocons

President Biden took office promising a new era of American international leadership and diplomacy. But with a few exceptions, he has so far allowed self-serving foreign allies, hawkish U.S. interest groups and his own imperial delusions to undermine diplomacy and stoke the fires of war.

Biden’s failure to quickly recommit to the Iran nuclear deal, or JCPOA — as Sen. Bernie Sanders promised to do on his first day, if elected — provided a critical delay that has been used by opponents to undermine the difficult shuttle diplomacy taking place in Vienna to restore the agreement.

The attempts to derail talks range from the introduction of the Maximum Pressure Act on April 21 to codify the Trump administration’s sanctions against Iran to Israel’s cyberattack on Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility. Biden’s procrastination has only strengthened the influence of the hawkish Washington foreign policy “blob,” Republicans and Democratic hawks in Congress and foreign allies like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

In Afghanistan, Biden has won praise for his decision to withdraw U.S. troops by Sept. 11, but his refusal to abide by the May 1 deadline for withdrawal as negotiated under the Trump administration has led the Taliban to back out of the planned UN-led peace conference in Istanbul. A member of the Taliban military commission told the Daily Beast that “the U.S. has shattered the Taliban’s trust.”

Now active and retired Pentagon officials are regaling the New York Times with accounts of how they plan to prolong the U.S. war without “boots on the ground” after September, undoubtedly further infuriating the Taliban and making a ceasefire and peace talks all the more difficult.

In Ukraine, the government has launched a new offensive in its civil war against the ethnic Russian provinces in the eastern Donbass region, which declared unilateral independence after the U.S.-backed coup in 2014. On April 1, Ukraine’s military chief of staff said publicly that “the participation of NATO allies is envisaged” in the government offensive, prompting warnings from Moscow that Russia could intervene to protect Russians in Donbass.

Sticking to their usual tired script, U.S. and NATO officials are pretending that Russia is the aggressor for conducting military exercises and troop movements — within its own borders — in response to Kyiv’s escalation. Even the BBC is challenging this false narrative, explaining that Russia is acting to deter an escalation of the Ukrainian offensive and U.S. and NATO threats. The U.S has turned around two guided-missile destroyers that were steaming toward the Black Sea, where they could well have been sitting ducks for Russia’s advanced missile defenses.

Tensions have also escalated with China, as the U.S. Navy and Marines stalk Chinese ships in the South China Sea, well inside the island chains China uses for self defense. The Pentagon is hoping to drag NATO allies into participating in these operations, and the U.S. Air Force plans to shift more bombers to new bases in Asia and the Pacific, supported by existing larger bases in Guam, Japan, Australia and South Korea.

Meanwhile, despite a promising initial pause and policy review, Biden has decided to keep selling tens of billions of dollars worth of weapons to authoritarian regimes in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other Persian Gulf sheikdoms, even as they continue to bomb and blockade famine-stricken Yemen. Biden’s unconditional support for the most brutal authoritarian dictators on the planet lays bare the bankruptcy of Democrats’ attempts to frame America’s regurgitated Cold War on Russia and China as a struggle between “democracy” and “authoritarianism.”

In all these international crises (along with Cuba, Haiti, Iraq, North Korea, Palestine, Syria and Venezuela, which are bedeviled by the same U.S. unilateralism), Biden and the hawks egging him on are pursuing unilateral policies that ignore solemn commitments in international agreements and treaties, riding roughshod over the good faith of America’s allies and negotiating partners.

As the Russian foreign ministry bluntly put it when it announced its countermeasures to the latest round of U.S. sanctions, “Washington is unwilling to accept that there is no room for unilateral dictates in the new geopolitical reality.”

Chinese President Xi Jinping echoed the same multipolar perspective on April 20 at the annual Boao Asian international business forum. “The destiny and future of the world should be decided by all nations, and rules set up just by one or several countries should not be imposed on others,” Xi said. “The whole world should not be led by unilateralism of individual countries.”

The near-universal failure of Biden’s diplomacy in his first months in office reflects how badly he and those who have his ear are failing to understand the limits of American power, and to predict the consequences of his unilateral decisions.

Unilateral, irresponsible decision-making has been endemic in U.S. foreign policy for decades, but America’s economic and military dominance created an international environment that was extraordinarily forgiving of American “mistakes,” even as they ruined the lives of millions of people in the countries directly affected. Now the U.S. no longer dominates the world, and it is critical for U.S. officials to more accurately assess the relative power and positions of the United States and the countries and people it is confronting or negotiating with.

Under Trump, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis launched negotiations to persuade Vietnam to host U.S. missiles aimed at China. Those negotiations went on for three years, but they were based entirely on wishful thinking and misreadings of Vietnam’s responses by U.S. officials and Rand Corp contractors. Experts agree that Vietnam would never violate a formal, declared policy of neutrality it has held and repeatedly reiterated since 1998.

As Gareth Porter summarized this silly saga, “The story of the Pentagon’s pursuit of Vietnam as a potential military partner against China reveals an extraordinary degree of self-deception surrounding the entire endeavor. And it adds further detail to the already well-established picture of a muddled and desperate bureaucracy seizing on any vehicle possible to enable it to claim that U.S. power in the Pacific can still prevail in a war with China.”

Unlike Trump, Biden has been at the heart of American politics and foreign policy since the 1970s. So the degree to which he too is out of touch with today’s international reality is a measure of how much and how quickly that reality has changed and continues to change. But the habits of empire die hard. The tragic irony of Biden’s ascent to power in 2020 is that his lifetime of service to a triumphalist American empire has left him ill-equipped to craft a more constructive and cooperative brand of American diplomacy for today’s multipolar world.

Amid the U.S. triumphalism that followed the end of the Cold War, the neocons developed a simplistic ideology to persuade America’s political leaders that they need no longer be constrained in their use of military power by domestic opposition, peer competitors or international law. They claimed that America had virtually unlimited military freedom of action and a responsibility to use it aggressively, because, as Biden parroted them recently, “the world doesn’t organize itself.”

The international violence and chaos Biden has inherited in 2021 is a measure of the failure of the neocons’ grand ambitions. But there is one place that they conquered, occupied and still rule to this day: Washington, D.C.

The dangerous disconnect at the heart of Biden’s foreign policy is the result of this dichotomy between the neocons’ conquest of Washington and their abject failure to conquer the rest of the world.

For most of Biden’s career, the politically safe path on foreign policy for corporate Democrats has been to talk a good game about human rights and diplomacy, but not deviate too far from hawkish, neoconservative policies on war, military spending and support for often repressive and corrupt allies throughout America’s neocolonial empire.

The tragedy of such compromises by Democratic Party leaders is that they perpetuate the suffering of millions of people affected by the real-world problems they fail to fix. But the Democrats’ subservience to simplistic neoconservative ideas also fails to satisfy the hawks they are trying to appease, who only smell more political blood in the water at every display of moral weakness by the Democrats.

In his first three months in office, Biden’s weakness in resisting the bullying of hawks and neocons has led him to betray the most significant diplomatic achievements of each of his predecessors, Obama and Trump, in the JCPOA with Iran and the May 1 withdrawal agreement with the Taliban respectively, while perpetuating the violence and chaos the neocons unleashed on the world.

For a president who promised a new era of American diplomacy, this has been a dreadful start. We can only hope that Biden and his advisers are not too blinded by anachronistic imperial thinking or too intimidated by the neocons to make a fresh start and engage with the world as it actually exists in 2021.