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Charlottesville’s Robert E. Lee statue can finally be removed after 5 years of protests, court rules

Late last week, the Virginia Supreme Court overturned a Circuit Court decision that prevented the city of Charlottesville from removing a monument of Confederate general Robert E. Lee — the same monument that was the focus of a violent white nationalist and neo-Nazi rally in 2017. 

The ruling also allows the city to remove a nearby monument of Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson after a group of residents had sued to prevent the statues’ removal, citing a 1997 state law that they said barred city officials from “disturbing or interfering with them.” 

According to the Associated Press, the Jackson statue was erected in Jackson Park in 1921 and the Lee statue was erected in Lee Park in 1924. In 1918, the city had accepted a resident’s offer to donate land for parks for both statutes. 

State Supreme Court Justice Bernard Goodwyn wrote in his ruling that the 1997 state law should not be applied retroactively. 

In a statement, Charlottesville Mayor Nikuyah Walker praised city residents “for their steadfastness and perseverance” while city officials said they plan to redesign the park spaces where the statues are located “in a way that promotes healing and that tells a more complete history of Charlottesville.”

This ruling, which is nearly five years in the making, is deeply symbolic because the events surrounding 2017’s “Unite the Right” rally — during which an avowed white supremacist plowed his car into a crowd of people, killing counterprotester Heather Heyer and injuring dozens more — catalyzed a national conversation about whose likenesses we put on literal pedestals in modern-day America. 

All across the country, citizens began reexamining who was memorialized and 2020’s protests over the killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery gave activists a megaphone (often literally) to advocate for public spaces that didn’t glorify racism. According to a report from NPR, nearly 100 Confederate monuments were removed last year. 

Per the Southern Poverty Law Center, 54 Confederate monuments were removed between 2015 and 2019. However, more than 700 monuments remain. 

And often, as was the case in Charlottesville, it’s a lengthy road to removal. 

I saw this play out firsthand in Louisville, Ky. Days after the “Unite the Right” rally in 2017, protesters gathered at the foot of a monument honoring John Breckinridge Castleman — who had served in the Confederate Army — holding up “Black Lives Matter” signs and chanting “Mayor Fischer, take it down, take it down.” 

It would take three years for Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer to take it down. During that time, the statue was vandalized multiple times: it was splashed with orange paint, spraypainted with the words “traitor” and “racist,” and then again, months later, with the phrases “house homeless” and “no borders.” 

The city spent $8,200 after the initial vandalism to clean and restore the statue, but made no attempts at complete restoration after that. Meanwhile, Fischer punted the idea of the statue’s removal through a series of city-organized panels and monument committees. 

Ultimately, the statue wasn’t removed until after the 2020 deaths of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old Black woman who was fatally shot by Louisville Metro Police Department officers, and David “YaYa” McAtee, a 53-year-old Black barbecue stand owner fatally shot by LMPD officers and the National Guard. 

In a statement at the time, Fischer said: “The events of the past weeks have shown clearly that it’s not enough just to face our history — we’ve got to address its impact on our present.” 

In Charlottesville, there’s no word on when the Robert E. Lee and “Stonewall” Jackson monuments will actually be removed from their pedestals, but according to Mark R. Herring, Virginia’s attorney general, there is still work to do. He plans on fighting in the state Supreme Court this summer against the appeal seeking to block the removal of the Lee statue in Richmond.

“I have worked hard to help remove poisonous Confederate propaganda from our publicly owned spaces,” he said. “I believe it glorifies a false history and sends a dangerous and divisive message about who and what we value.”

The Ingenuity helicopter just survived its first night alone on Mars. Now comes the hard part

Many parents know the anxious feeling of seeing their child grow up and move out of their house for the first time. The same goes for a rotorcraft on Mars.

On Monday, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) confirmed that Ingenuity, the four-pound rotorcraft attached to Perseverance, survived its first harrowing night on Mars alone, untethered from the rover that carried it all this way.

“Safe & sound on the surface of Mars,” NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) tweeted on April 4, referring to Ingenuity’s detachment from Perseverance.

Ingenuity was previously attached to the belly of Perseverance which provided it shelter and power. Now, it’s operating on its own.

“This is the first time that Ingenuity has been on its own on the surface of Mars,” said MiMi Aung, Ingenuity project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, in a statement. “But we now have confirmation that we have the right insulation, the right heaters, and enough energy in its battery to survive the cold night, which is a big win for the team.”

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Surviving a night at Jezero Crater, where Perseverance landed on February 18, is no easy task.

Temperatures at night can dip as low as negative 130 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 90 degrees Celsius). Such temperatures could possibly freeze and crack unprotected electrical components. Fortunately, Ingenuity is solar-powered and relies on a rechargeable battery to keep its systems warm during the night. However, solar power is not as easy to come by on the Red Planet as it is on Earth; Mars receives half the amount of solar energy that reaches Earth. When Ingenuity was attached to Perseverance, it fed off the rover’s nuclear-powered radioisotope thermal electric generator to stay warm.

As Salon has previously reported, mission control considered Ingenuity’s surviving its first night alone a huge milestone on the way to reaching its final goal of flying through the thin Martian atmosphere. Ingenuity is quite small because it must be lightweight to fly through the atmosphere, but it also must have enough energy to retain power during frigid Martian nights. Now, Ingenuity has another big hurdle to overcome still: charging autonomously using its solar panel.

“Our 30-sol test schedule is frontloaded with exciting milestones,” said Teddy Tzanetos, deputy operations lead for the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter at JPL, said in a media statement. A sol is the term for one Martian day, which is equal to about 24.6 hours on Earth. “Whatever the future holds, we will acquire all the flight data we can within that timeframe.”

For the next couple of days, Ingenuity will gather data on how its thermal control and power systems are working now that it’s on its own. This information is critical to its survival for the next 30 sols.

The first flight test for Ingenuity will happen no earlier than April 11, NASA recently stated. Previously, the space agency was targeting anytime after April 8.

Ingenuity’s flight plan is to receive flight instructions, via mission controllers here on Earth, from Perseverance. Then, Ingenuity will proceed to run its rotors to 2,537 revolutions per minute, and lift off. If all goes well, it will ascend about three feet per second and hover at 10 feet for 30 seconds before it descends and touches the ground on Mars. After a couple of test flights, the real mission will begin.

“Mars is hard,” Aung said in a previous statement. “Our plan is to work whatever the Red Planet throws at us the very same way we handled every challenge we’ve faced over the past six years – together, with tenacity and a lot of hard work, and a little Ingenuity.”

If it succeeds at flying, it will be the first powered-controlled flight on another planet.

Ron DeSantis denies Publix vaccine “pay for play” scheme; GOP cries foul against CBS

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has strongly denied suggestions in a Sunday night broadcast of CBS’ “60 Minutes” that the rising Republican star took part in a pay-for-play scheme, allocating coronavirus vaccine doses designated to the state to major donors, including the Publix supermarket chain, which had previously cut his campaign a $100,000 donation.

“Publix, as you know, donated $100,000 to your campaign, and then you rewarded them with the exclusive rights to distribute the vaccine in Palm Beach,” CBS reporter Sharyn Alfonsi stated at a recent DeSantis press conference, which was featured in the “60 Minutes” segment. 

DeSantis responded to Alfonsi by saying her question was based on calling a “fake narrative.”  “So first of all, what you’re saying is wrong,” the Florida governor replied. “That’s a fake narrative. … I met with the county mayor. I met with the administrator. I met with all the folks in Palm Beach County, and I said, ‘Here’s some of the options. We can do more drive-through sites. We can give more to hospitals. We can do the Publix.’ And they said, ‘We think that would be the easiest thing for our residents.'”

The exchange between Alfonsi and DeSantis continued when the governor was pressed on what many observers have described as an inequitable rollout of the state’s coronavirus vaccines. “It’s wrong, it’s a fake narrative. I just disabused you of the narrative, and you don’t care about the facts because obviously, I just laid it out for you in a way that is irrefutable,” DeSantis declared. 

There was one more rebuttal and attempted question from Alfonsi before DeSantis snapped, “No, no, no, you’re wrong, you’re wrong, you’re wrong.” 

The “60 Minutes” segment reported on FEC records indicating that the grocery giant gave DeSantis’ campaign a $100,000 donation weeks ahead of the governor’s announcement that vaccines would be distributed in Publix stores. “Campaign finance reports obtained by ’60 Minutes’ show that weeks before the governor’s announcement, Publix donated $100,000 to his political action committee, Friends of Ron DeSantis,” Alfonsi reported in the segment. “Julie Jenkins Fancelli, heiress to the Publix fortune, has given $55,000 to the governor’s PAC in the past. And in November, Fancelli’s brother-in-law, Hoyt R. Barnett, a retired Publix executive, donated $25,000.”

This isn’t the first time DeSantis has been accused of implementing a vaccine rollout that favorited privileged communities and wealthy donors. A January analysis published by the South Florida Sun Sentinel found that “Publix vaccine sites were out of reach for many poor and Black Floridians.” In February, numerous state officials said the governor’s COVID vaccine distribution plan was based on “political influence,” which was “potentially illegal.” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., told the Sun Sentinel at the time that DeSantis’ implied threats “that he would pull vaccine if people don’t like the way the distribution system is working is vile and shows the callous indifference he has had in how the vaccine has been handled.” DeSantis was also criticized by Florida State Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried, the top statewide elected Democrat, who said there was “no reason that Gov. DeSantis should be rationing vaccines based on political influence.”

Following the Sunday “60 Minutes” interview, a coordinated campaign pushed by conservatives and right-wing media, including Fox News and Newsmax, began to spin a defense of DeSantis, claiming that CBS News had “maliciously edit[ed]” the governor’s remarks.

“Wow, this is really, really bad. They ask a question full of innuendo … and cut off the answer. Political ads have gotten taken off the air for less than this. @60Minutes has some explaining to do,” GOP staffer Matt Whitlock wrote in response to the segment. Conservative Twitter pundit Stephen Miller argued, “So it turns out this is a lie & 60 Minutes used deceptive edits to create a narrative.”  

Interviews on a news-magazine show like “60 Minutes” are often edited for narrative or dramatic impact, and rarely feature verbatim remarks. Whether CBS News presented DeSantis’ answers fairly or unfairly is the central question here — and not one on which his boosters and critics are likely to agree. While Fried tweeted that the “60 Minutes” segment was “exposing the nation to @GovRonDeSantis’ failings & corruption during the pandemic,” Jared Moskowitz, outgoing director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, tweeted that no one from DeSantis’ office had suggested Publix as a vaccination site and the story was “absolute malarkey.” 

Republicans are falling out of love with all of their favorite corporations

Republicans are in a tizzy over Major League Baseball’s decision to pull the 2021 All-Star game from Atlanta in protest of Georgia’s new GOP-backed voting crackdown law –– a bill widely seen by Democrats as a legislative maneuver designed to suppress the Black vote, in particular.   

On Friday, Donald Trump urged his fans to “boycott” the MLB in response, claiming that the organization has genuflected to “the Radical Left Democrats.” He also took aim at “woke” corporations that have been called upon by the left to take a stance against the restrictions. “Baseball is already losing tremendous numbers of fans,” Trump wrote in a statement, “and now they leave Atlanta with their All-Star Game because they are afraid of the Radical Left Democrats who do not want voter I.D., which is desperately needed, to have anything to do with our elections.”

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, the Republican who signed the bill into law, also joined the chorus of outrage, calling out “cancel culture” –– a phenomenon which Republicans have in the past month have framed as a clear sign of the U.S. losing its way. 

“Georgians – and all Americans – should fully understand what the MLB’s knee-jerk decision means: cancel culture and woke political activists are coming for every aspect of your life, sports included. If the left doesn’t agree with you, facts and the truth do not matter,” Kemp said in a statement. “This attack on our state is the direct result of repeated lies from Joe Biden and Stacey Abrams about a bill that expands access to the ballot box and ensures the integrity of our elections. I will not back down.”

Rep. Buddy Carter, R-Ga., also condemned the MLB’s decision, calling the league “absolutely pathetic.” 

“The organization has completely caved to the lies of the Left and America’s pastime has now become a political tool for the liberal mob,” he said in a statement. “Let’s be clear – Georgia will be losing potentially hundreds of millions of dollars because Democrats, including the President of the United States, have been spreading lies about Georgia’s Election Integrity Act,” Carter argued.

Other Republicans pointed out the supposed hypocrisy of the MLB pulling its game from Atlanta while entering a new business arrangement with China, which granted the country the rights to continue streaming its games until 2023. “Dear GOP,” tweeted Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. “@MLB caves to pressure & moves draft & #AllStarGame out of Georgia on the same week they announce a deal with a company backed by the genocidal Communist Party of #China Why are we still listening to these woke corporate hypocrites on taxes, regulations & anti-trust?”

Democrats have for the most part unilaterally rebuked the GOP-backed bill voting bill, which Georgia voting right activist Stacey Abrams demurred as “Jim Crow in the 21st century.” The bill, she argued, will disenfranchise thousands of black voters, a bloc which in large part helped President Biden get elected. 

According to The Washington Post, roughly 200 businesses have signaled opposition to the GOP-backed bill. Such businesses include American Airlines, AT&T, Coca-Cola, Delta, Home Depot, and more. Eight Republicans state House representatives in Georgia have since announced their plans to remove Coca-Cola products from their offices. 

MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred said that the MLB’s decision was driven by various conversations with players and as well as management. “Over the last week, we have engaged in thoughtful conversations with Clubs, former and current players, the Players Association, and The Players Alliance, among others, to listen to their views,” said Manfred in a statement. “I have decided that the best way to demonstrate our values as a sport is by relocating this year’s All-Star Game and MLB Draft.”

GOP cancel culture targets Georgia: Republicans want to silence critics of their war on voting

Donald Trump and Republicans tried to make the 2020 election all about “cancel culture.” Free speech was under attack, they argued, not from government censorship, but something they regarded as much more powerful and oppressive: Liberal disapproval.

Many a tear has been shed over wealthy actors losing plum gigs for embarrassing movie studios with their bigoted tweets, or obscure books by famous authors being delisted voluntarily by their own publishing companies, or people making fun of a paranoid right-wing couple in St. Louis who pulled guns on peaceful protesters, or the librarian whose boss prevented her from humiliating herself by doing a rap presentation to onboard college freshmen. Free speech, they argue, is dependent not just on the absence of censorship, but the absence of any consequences whatsoever, including criticism from others who are using their free speech rights. It turns out there was one caveat to this right to speech unfettered by opposition, criticism, or consequences, however: It is a “right” enjoyed only by those on the right. For those who oppose bigotry, vote for Democrats, or express discomfort at overt racism, there is no limit to what can and should be done to silence them. This was always evident — see how Trump unleashed tear gas on peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square — and is only becoming more clear in the fight over voting rights in the state of Georgia. 

If ever there was a legitimate case of “cancel culture,” it really should be the anti-voting bill that was signed into law late last month by Georgia’s Republican Gov. Brian Kemp. When it comes to the right to express yourself as a citizen, the right to vote is about as fundamental as it gets. Moreover, the entire process of signing the restrictive law was draped in signifiers of the GOP contempt for the right of people of color to the franchise, including the arrest of state Rep. Park Cannon for merely asking for the right to witness Kemp’s signing of the bill. 

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But when major corporations started to use their own free speech rights to speak out in favor of the right to vote, the self-appointed warriors against “cancel culture” on the right suddenly discovered their limits of tolerance for unfettered speech. On the contrary, the folks on the right start strapping on their canceling boots, ready to cancel anti-racist speech with every tool they have at their disposal — including the use of government force. 

Georgia-based companies like Delta and Coca-Cola put out statements condemning the new law, which is designed to make it harder for people in urban areas to vote and easier for Republicans to invalidate the results of a free and fair election when they don’t like the results. Major League Baseball (MLB) went a step further, pulling the All-Star game out of suburban Atlanta to signal disapproval of Georgia Republicans trying to cancel their state’s own voters. In response, Republicans freaked out in a way that puts any liberal disapproval of racist tweets from actors to shame. Republicans in the Georgia legislature immediately started moving to formally punish Delta by revoking their tax breaks, which goes well beyond even the most robust cancelation campaigns instigated by liberals and straight into literal government censorship territory. Kemp flipped his lid, giving a speech in which he claimed that Republicans were the victims of “cancel culture,” even though the actual people being “canceled” are voters in Georgia who vote in ways Kemp doesn’t like. 

Fox News host Laura Ingraham — who shamelessly switches back and forth between telling progressive athletes to “shut up and dribble” and whining about how liberal criticism “cancels” conservatives — made a robust pro-cancellation argument Thursday night. “We’re going to punish you,” she threatened, raging against anti-racist statements from corporations, and arguing, “these corporations are going to face the wrath of GOP officials as well as the tens of millions of American consumers.” Rachel Campos-Duffy of Fox News didn’t even bother to pretend there was no contradiction here, suggesting on Friday that it’s time for “American conservatives to cancel sports” in order to force them to “respect” conservatives, i.e. by being silent in the face of racist voter suppression. 

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The same folks who cry foul every time liberals refuse to support public figures or companies whose opinions they disagree with suddenly discovered they love boycotts, actually — so long as the boycott is done in the name of silencing anti-racism. Trump, whose main campaign issue was literally opposing “cancel culture”, came out in favor of canceling any opponents of Georgia’s racist law. He released a statement calling on his followers to “boycott baseball” and threatened others who use free speech to speak out against racism with, “Are you listening Coke, Delta, and all!”

Twitter wits pointed out that Trump, a terminal Diet Coke addict, is unlikely to be party to his own calls to cancel the popular soda brand. But his position — that it’s only “cancel culture” if conservatives are the ones being criticized — is widely shared among Republicans.

Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie accused the MLB of stoking a “raging fire,” and complaining that “every disagreement doesn’t have to be a cause for total war,” ignoring the fact that Republicans themselves started this by waging total war on Georgia voters for disagreeing about what leaders they preferred at the ballot box. A bevy of other Republicans put out similar statements, all based around the same principle: Consequences like boycotts are good to silence anti-racist speech, but consequences for Georgia legislators for literally trying to cancel people’s votes are “cancel culture.”  

It certainly isn’t consistent with any definition of the concept of “free speech.” Instead, all of this is simply Republicans imposing “white people’s Thanksgiving” rules on the entire nation, where people who express bigoted opinions — or even take bigoted actions — are politely indulged, but anyone who talks back is immediately castigated. It’s consistent, alright, but not with any noble principle like “free speech.” It’s just consistent support for bigotry and oppression, and consistent anger at the very concepts of equality and fair play. By lashing out this way, Republicans have once again exposed the small-minded bigotry that fuels their party.

Transform your leftover Easter candy into gourmet-inspired cookies

Even as a more-gullible-than-average child, I never quite bought into the notion of the Easter Bunny. My grownups never seemed to able to come up with a satisfying straight answer about my queries about his motivations or appearance. Was he human-sized? Was he an actual bunny? Why was he just hopping in on the heels of the most somber time of the year in the Christian calendar?

Then I had kids of my own, and I found myself keeping up a ruse I didn’t even understand. Fortunately, when they were little, my daughters were satisfied with a straightforward, “It’s a bunny, and he brings candy” explanation. Even though my girls are older now, we still celebrate Easter with baskets teeming with brightly colored treats. And we still typically find the leftovers kind of gross by Monday morning.

But no longer! Rather than forlornly digging pastel M&Ms out of a thicket of plastic grass before chucking the whole works in the trash this year, I invite you to upcycle what the Bunny brought you in a gourmet-inspired way.

I’m obsessed with everything Christina Tosi creates in her Milk Bar empire, from the legendary cereal milk soft serve to the buttery Milk Bar pie. But I have a special soft spot for the cornflake marshmallow cookie, an irresistible melding of chocolateness, crunchiness, saltiness, gooeyness and my favorite flavor profile — burnedness. Baked into cookie dough, marshmallows get springy in the middle but shatteringly caramelized at the edges. And what is a marshmallow but a Peep that has not yet ascended to its highest form?

The classic Tosi cookie calls for her signature cornflake crunch. While I would never dissuade you from making a double batch, because you’ll be eating it by the fistful, I’ve streamlined the process here to get you out of the kitchen and eating faster. 

Because holiday candy is sweeter than the dark chocolate and regular marshmallows you might typically go for in a recipe like this, I’ve added a little more flour and recommend going with a completely unsweet crunch element in here. I made a recent batch of these with kettle corn, but crushed plain potato chips or pretzels would be heavenly. 

And though I haven’t tried it, if you’re feeling like lowering the bar, I’d bet you could skip the cookie dough-making part entirely and just add your mix-in trio to a softened tube of supermarket sugar or chocolate chip cookie dough. 

Serve these fresh and warm, and thank the Easter Bunny for leaving the ingredients.

***

Recipe: Easter Candy Cookies

Inspired by Milk Bar’s Cornflake Chocolate Chip Marshmallow Cookies

Makes about 20

Ingredients:

  • 2 sticks of butter, softened
  • 1 1/4 cups of granulated sugar
  • 2/3 of a cup dark brown sugar, packed
  • 1 egg
  • 1 3/4 cups of AP
  • 1/2 teaspoon of baking powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda
  • Pinch of salt
  • 3 cups of something salty — crushed potato chips or pretzels, popped popcorn, crumbled Ritz crackers
  • 1 cup of something chocolate — candy coated eggs, a smashed up bunny, the fun-sized candy bar dregs of the Easter basket
  • 1 cup of Peeps, cut in small pieces

Instructions:

  1. In a stand mixer or a hand mixer (or with a bowl, spoon and elbow grease), cream together the butter and sugars on low until they’re thoroughly mixed and airy, about 2 minutes.
  2. Add your egg, vanilla and salt; then mix another 2 minutes or so.
  3. Add your flour, baking powder and baking soda. Mix until just combined and there are no floury parts.
  4. Mix in your salty thing and chocolate thing until just combined.
  5. Mix in your cut-up Peeps until just combined. (Your elements should be nicely distributed.)
  6. Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper.
  7. Using a cookie scoop, ice cream scoop or big spoon, scoop out 1/3 cup portions of cookies onto your sheet. Pat them down to flatten a little. They should still be thick.
  8. Chill in the fridge for at least an hour. (I’m sorry, but this is not optional.)
  9. Preheat your oven to 375-degrees.
  10. Take out as many of the cookies as you wish to bake at a time, and put them on a parchment-lined cookie sheet. Make sure they’re socially distanced — 4-5 inches apart. They spread!
  11. Bake for 10-12 minutes, rotating your tray once midway. They should be golden, oozy and a little lacy around the edges.
  12. Remove from the oven, and let the cookies sit for a few minutes before attempting to serve and eat.
  13. Put the rest of the unbaked cookies in a container or big plastic bag, and stick it back in the fridge so you can have fresh cookies whenever.

One note: Marshmallow is made of sugar, and sugar burns very easily. Things can go from delicious amber goodness to “Why is my kitchen so smoky?” quickly, so keep an eye on these as bake.

 

More Quick & Dirty: 

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Mike Huckabee tweets anti-Asian “joke” as hate crime numbers, racist rhetoric rise

Former Arkansas governor and long-ago presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, while trying to criticize companies that have objected to Georgia’s new stringent voting law, joked that he now seeks to “identify as Chinese” in a tweet which was widely attacked as patently offensive to Asian-Americans. 

“I’ve decided to ‘identify’ as Chinese. Coke will like me, Delta will agree with my ‘values’ and I’ll probably get shoes from Nike & tickets to @MLB games. Ain’t America great?” Huckabee tweeted on Saturday. The tweet was apparently meant as a dig at Delta Airlines, Coca-Cola and Major League Baseball after those entities expressed opposition to the new Georgia voting law, which seeks to make the voting process in the state more restrictive and is disproportionately likely to affect Blacks and Latinx voters. To put it mildly, Huckabee’s gag didn’t land well, attracting more than 60,000 comments, with many users calling out the former governor for constantly avowing his Christian faith yet espousing hateful anti-Asian rhetoric. 

“I’ve decided to identify as Mike Huckabee because I am also a huge idiot who has no skills with interacting with modernity,” Daily Beast reporter Asawin Suebsaeng responded.

Rep. Ted Lieu, a California Democrat, fired back by addressing Huckabee’s daughter, the former White House press secretary under Donald Trump: “Dear Sarah Huckabee: You defended the former President’s use of racist phrases like Kung Flu. Do you condone Mike Huckabee adding fuel to anti-Asian hate? Asking on behalf of Americans everywhere who drink Coke, fly Delta, wear Nikes, and watch baseball #StopAsianHate.”

Comedian Ken Jeong replied directly to Huckabee: “I’ve decided to identify you as Racist!”

Others cited the recent increase in anti-Asian hate crimes, which President Biden recently discussed in a White House address. “Anti-Asian hate crimes soaring and former GOP presidential candidate wannabe and top Trump ally tweets this,” MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan wrote on Twitter. “Given the events of the last week, this is unbelievably dark,” Franklin Leonard added. The New Georgia Project replied, “What in the openly racist hell?”

Huckabee’s remark indeed comes amid an evident surge comes in anti-Asian hate crimes, most notably including the Atlanta-area shootings last month that left six Asian women dead. 

“Name-calling, shunning, and assault were among the nearly 3,800 hate incidents reported against Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders nationwide over the last year, according to Stop AAPI Hate,” The New York Times reported in March. The group said it had received reports of 3,795 incidents between March 19, 2020, and Feb. 28, 2021, the Times reported, but said “the number could be higher because not all incidents are reported.” 

In a more recent feature story, the Times reported on the rise of anti-Asian rhetoric and widespread acts of violence and intimidation, apparently fueled by the coronavirus pandemic, which Trump and many other conservatives have implicitly or explicitly blamed on China:

Over the last year, in an unrelenting series of episodes with clear racial animus, people of Asian descent have been pushed, beaten, kicked, spit on and called slurs. Homes and businesses have been vandalized. The violence has known no boundaries, spanning generations, income brackets and regions.

The New York Times attempted to capture a sense of the rising tide of anti-Asian bias nationwide. Using media reports from across the country, The Times found more than 110 episodes since March 2020 in which there was clear evidence of race-based hate.

Huckabee has yet to apologize or delete his tweet, and on Saturday night attempted to deflect criticism, responding to a user who called the original tweet “antithetical to the gospel” by writing, “I don’t take Twitter or myself that seriously, but I do take gospel seriously. I truly wish you only joy & continued blessings.”

How Britain’s “build back better” plan went very, very wrong

Retrofitting homes is a key pillar of Joe Biden’s $2 trillion American Jobs Plan to “build back better” from the COVID-19 recession. The president urged Congress on Wednesday to mobilize $213 billion to “produce, preserve, and retrofit” more than a million homes for affordability and efficiency. In addition to creating jobs, energy efficiency measures like insulating roofs and walls and installing electric heating will save people money on their utility bills and reduce carbon emissions from the nation’s buildings.

But the Biden administration would be wise to look across the pond for a cautionary tale before rolling out any such program too quickly.

Last summer, U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s administration unveiled its own “build back better” economic stimulus package, which centered around a $2 billion program to retrofit England’s homes. The program was supposed to fund energy efficiency and clean heat upgrades in 600,000 homes, getting the country closer to net-zero emissions while creating 100,000 jobs, but it was canceled last week after a shambolic six-month run that may have killed more jobs than it spurred.

“When it comes down to improving the energy efficiency of our homes, this is about the worst thing the government could have done,” Andrew McCausland, the director of a British contracting company, told the i, a daily newspaper. “It has destroyed confidence in the building business in taking on this work in the future.” 

Through Johnson’s Green Homes Grants program, or GHG, most U.K. homeowners and landlords could receive up to about $6,900 to help pay for insulation, electric heating systems, and various other energy-efficient fixes like new windows, doors, and heating controls. Low-income homeowners were eligible for up to nearly $14,000. 

The trouble began shortly after the grants became available at the end of September. In order to apply, building owners had to obtain a quote from an accredited installer, but few existed. Installers said they were reluctant to go through the time-consuming and expensive process of getting accredited without a longer-term assurance that there would be work. The program was designed to run only through March 2021. 

McCausland told the Guardian he spent $8,200 and an estimated 160 hours of unpaid work to get his employees accredited. Others said that navigating the process, which involved multiple certifications, was overly complicated, making it especially difficult for small companies with no administrative staff. 

Building professionals’ wariness was understandable — they had been burned before. In 2015, the U.K. government canceled a similar energy efficiency retrofit program after just two years, resulting in a steep drop in demand for this kind of work. 

On November 18, Johnson announced he would extend the Green Homes Grants program for another year, through March 2022. But installers were still unconvinced. Several testified to the Environmental Audit Committee of the British Parliament that a much longer-term commitment was needed to provide the certainty that the industry, and particularly small installers, needed to make the investment in accreditation.

By January, a parallel catastrophe was unfolding. A Guardian investigation found that the administration of the program, which was being handled by an American consulting firm called ICF, was in chaos. When the program first began, installers reported losing business as homeowners put projects on hold while they applied for the grant. Now homeowners were waiting months to hear back about their applications. There was no Green Homes Grants customer service number to call — all communication was conducted via email. Multiple installers said they had hundreds of customers interested in retrofits, but only a few dozen whose applications had been approved. 

Program administrators often rejected quotes for being too high, asking applicants to provide more details or seek out additional estimates. On December 24, the program sent notifications to thousands of applicants that said it was unable to verify their identity, and that their quotes were too high. Many homeowners dropped their retrofit plans altogether. Installers were incensed that their work was being devalued and that they were losing customers. 

Installers were also going into deep debt waiting for their checks. Once their applications were approved, homeowners received vouchers for the portion of the retrofit the government agreed to cover. They would then hand those off to installers, who could redeem the voucher after completing the work. Bhumit Chandi, a business owner in the suburbs of London, told the Guardian in January that he had installed 16 systems and hadn’t been paid for any of them, putting him nearly $120,000 in the hole.

“Chaos is an understatement for what is going on,” another installer, Eddie Gammage of EDG Installations, said at the time. “We haven’t received any payments at all yet for seven jobs we have completed. I have had to lay people off.” 

In evidence submitted to the Environmental Audit Committee of the British Parliament, another installer wrote that the Green Homes Grant program had hurt his business more than COVID-19. He said that his revenue had decreased by at least 40 percent, while administration and costs were up by 300 percent. He was considering cutting staff, and reported that his company’s cash flow would be negative for the first time in years. “Our credibility with customers has never been at such a low point due to mistakes with the GHG communication with customers,” he wrote.

As if things weren’t bad enough, in February, Johnson’s government delivered a major blow to the program. Though it had extended the deadline to apply for a grant through 2022, Anne-Marie Trevelyan, the Minister of State for Business, Energy and Clean Growth, said that unspent funds from the original $2 billion would not be rolled over after March 2021. Instead, the program would have a new budget of just $440 million. By mid-February, only $130 million worth of vouchers, or about 6 percent of the original budget, had been approved. 

Last week, after months of investigating the Green Homes Grants, the Environmental Audit Committee of Parliament published a damning assessment of the program. It wrote that the government had “failed to consult industry adequately,” that the plan had set an impossible timeline, and that administration of the grants had been “nothing short of disastrous.”

The committee demanded that Johnson’s government overhaul, extend, and fully fund the program “to provide a genuine long-term stimulus to the domestic energy efficiency sector. The scheme should not be scrapped or quietly wound down.”

But just five days later, the program was abruptly canceled. Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng announced that a separate, much smaller energy efficiency program administered through local municipalities would be extended for another year, but that March 31, 2021 would be the last day homeowners could apply for Green Homes vouchers. As of last Saturday, less than half of the 96,000 applicants to the program thus far had been issued vouchers — far from the 600,000 homes the program was supposed to reach. The government expects  to fund just $413 million worth of retrofits by the program’s end.

A fact sheet for Biden’s American Jobs Plan says that energy efficient homes should be paid for through “targeted tax credits, formula funding, grants, and project-based rental assistance.” The U.K.’s Green Homes Grant debacle shows that rolling out these sorts of incentives without a long-term commitment to funding, input from the industry, and competent administration risks doing more harm than good.

“The tragedy is not so much that the scheme is cancelled, but that it wasn’t planned well in the first place,” Chris Stark, chief executive of the U.K.’s independent Climate Change Committee, wrote on Twitter.

Biden administration apologizes after Trump administration accidentally sanctions Italian restaurant

Former President Trump accidentally slapped sanctions on an Italian restaurant in his final days of office, thinking that the restaurant was part of a Venezuelan oil network that the administration sought to blacklist. 

On Trump’s final day of office, the former President sanctioned all Venezuelan companies and individuals associated with Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), the country’s state-owned oil firm, in order to force Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro to resign. Maduro, often described as a “dictator” has been widely criticized by the international community for various forms of corruption and human rights abuses. Several nations did not recognize his most recent election win in 2018.

As a part of the long-term U.S. embargo on Venezuela, the Trump administration identified a man named Alessandro Bazzoni over suspicions that he was involved in a network of Venezuelan oil companies attempting to skirt around U.S. sanctions. 

However, Trump erroneously applied sanctions to two other men with the same name, one of whom runs a Sardinia graphic design studio called SeriGraphicLab and the other a Verona pizzeria called AMG SAS Di Alessandro Bazzoni & C. The pizzeria owner reportedly discovered he’d been sanctioned during a visit to his bank.

“When I heard that my current accounts had been blocked, I thought it was a joke,” Bazzoni told Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. “These are already difficult times for us restaurant owners, the last thing I needed was to have my accounts blocked.”

Bazzoni, a 45-year-old restauranteur whose business suffered greatly from the sanction amid the pandemic, told the paper that he had not received an apology from the U.S. government. However, a treasury official corrected the error on Wednesday, according to Reuters. The department reportedly flagged the mistake back in January. 

“After receiving additional information following the designations, [Office of Foreign Assets Control] concluded that companies were owned by a different Alessandro Bazzoni than the person we designated,” a treasury official told The Hill. “Consequently, we promptly removed the two companies from our list to avoid inadvertently harming innocent parties.“

Legal experts say mistakes like this have happened in the past and can be costly to deal with.

“I thank the new American government for the efficiency with which it intervened,” Bazzoni, the restaurateur told Corriere della Sera. “They resolved the problem. I shouldn’t be involved anymore. It was a mistake […] thankfully it was all resolved in a couple of months.”

Tim O’Toole, a sanctions specialist at law firm Miller & Chevalier, told Reuters that Trump likely committed the error amid the tidal wave of hastily-applied restrictions against Iran, China, and Venezuela. “When you move that fast, you tend to make mistakes,” he said. 

According to The Washington Post, the usage of targeted sanctions against individuals shot up during the Trump administration. An analysis conducted by law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher found that Trump had applied just about double the amount that former President Obama did. 

A treasury official told the Hill that the intended Bazzoni remains under sanctions.

 

Inflammation? Fever? What to expect after your second COVID-19 vaccine shot

Every day, millions of people in the United States are getting the COVID-19 vaccine. And as more shots end up in more arms, more questions arise—especially for the two-shot vaccines, which are still the majority of the vaccines distributed in the United States.

Anecdotally, many of the vaccinated report fatigue or even faint fevers after receiving their second shot. Podcaster Ellie Schnitt said she felt like she was “on her death bed” after her second shot. Producer and TV writer Scott Derrickson said he felt “like he had Covid” after his second dose.

Indeed, while it is certainly possible to experience side effects after dose one, there’s a higher frequency of side effects after the second dose, according to clinical trial data for both vaccines. 

The vaccines that require two shots are the two from Pfizer and Moderna, which are both approved in the United States and are both made using messenger RNA, or mRNA. This mRNA technology delivers the genetic code of one of the virus’s proteins to one’s cells. The immune system learns recognize the spike protein on the SARS-2 coronavirus and develop antibodies to fight it. While both vaccines use the same technology, there are a few differences between the two.

First, the Pfizer vaccine has been authorized for people aged 16 and older; Moderna has been approved for people 18 and older. However, both companies are conducting vaccine trials for those in lower age groups. Second, both vaccines have remarkable efficacy; Pfizer is at 95 percent, and Moderna was 94.1% effective at preventing symptomatic COVID-19 cases. Another major difference is the time between receiving the first and second dose— the second Moderna dose is 28 days. For the Pfizer vaccine, it’s 21 days. This is partly because Moderna administers a larger first dose— 100 micrograms. The Pfizer dose contains 30 micrograms of the vaccine.

Salon interviewed Dr. Amesh Adalja, a Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, to answer some of readers’ most pressing questions on how to prepare for one’s second shot, and what to expect. As always, this interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. 

Should people take time off of work for a day or two, or let their bosses know that they’ll be getting the second dose, in case they’re not feeling well?

I wouldn’t necessarily preemptively take a day off, but I would probably let people know that you’re getting a vaccine and just to be a little more understanding and maybe flexible about that, because it’s unpredictable. I know people who have had a second dose and had no problems at all. I myself had a second dose and went and worked an overnight shift in the ICU afterwards. I felt a little achy, but it was fine. And then there are other people who have more severe symptoms, so I think it really is variable. I would just let people know that that’s what’s happening. And have some flexibility built into that.

Fatigue is a common side effect. For the Moderna vaccine, the highest rate of fatigue reported were by trial participants 18 to 64 years after the 2nd dose. More than half of Pfizer trial participants reported fatigue after the second dose, too. But people are wondering, how much fatigue should they expect to experience? Is it possible that too much fatigue would be alarming, and someone should call their doctor if they’re experiencing it?

Some people spend the day in bed, and other people feel tired but they still go about their day. I think it’s variable.

It’s usually just you feel tired, you feel more sleepy than normal, that’s basically how most people experience it. It’s hard to know exactly how much the fatigue is concerning because it’s such a subjective type of complaint, and also depends on your baseline and other medical conditions that you may have. I would say for the 36 or so hours post-vaccine that it’s probably normal to feel fatigue after that. If it continues then I think it may be something else unrelated to the vaccine, or something you might need to be formally evaluated for.  I don’t think there’s any hard and fast rule to come up with, because you have to kind of look at each person’s baseline and understand where they fit.

Are there any side effects people should keep their eye on after the 15 minute observation period is over?

The 15 minutes period is meant to screen out people that might have severe allergic reactions. Severe allergic reactions are unlikely to occur after that period of time. You may still have the aches and pains. Some people with the Moderna vaccine get a rash several days later at the injection site. Some people do get those Moderna rashes evaluated by their doctors, but it’s not something that requires you to call 911.

People have asked if they can take over the counter medicine after they received the vaccine — say, Ibuprofen and Advil. What are your thoughts on that?

I took acetaminophen (which is Tylenol) about 12 hours, or maybe 18 hours, after the second dose because of a headache, some muscle aches and pains. I think it’s completely fine to do that.

There are some theoretical concerns about using  non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) like ibuprofen, naproxen, which brand names are Advil or Motrin or Aleve, because they think it might blunt the immune response. There have been some studies with other vaccines, but I don’t know if it’s clinically significant. But for people that have that concern, you could take acetaminophen, or Tylenol — it’s not an anti-inflammatory drug.

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What about drinking alcohol? There have been some reports of people in other countries being advised not to drink after receiving the vaccine.

I don’t think it makes a big clinical difference. The only thing I would say is just be careful with alcohol and then blaming the vaccine for your hangover. You know, or if you get nausea and vomiting or you get a headache because you’re hung over.

Another side effect is swollen lymph nodes.

That’s not necessarily just a second dose side effect, that can happen anytime. A lot of these things could happen with either, but yeah, you can get swollen lymph nodes. After a vaccination, that’s not uncommon. It happens with other vaccines as well.

That’s one of the sites of your immune system, where it’s housed, so it’s not uncommon to see that increased activity of your immune system be correlated with increased lymph node swelling, which is usually transient and goes away just like when you get swollen lymph nodes after a sore throat, for example.

When the lymph node swells, the one that swells is closest to where the site of inflammation is in the site of inflammation. The site of inflammation with this vaccine is your deltoid muscle, which is going to drain to your axillary lymph node, so the lymph nodes in your armpits. So those are the ones that you wouldn’t you’d maybe see get full in versus the ones in your neck which you get sometimes after, you know, what, when you have strep throat.

Some people have wondered, “if I’m not having any side effects is the vaccine working?”

You can’t make that kind of a claim. In general, when you do have those side effects it is the result of your immune system but the absence of those side effects doesn’t mean that you’re not getting a take, or we call say “the vaccine is not taking.” We can’t really say that some people have no symptoms at all with the vaccine and they have a perfectly appropriate response to it, immunologically.

Do either the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine have more side effects than the other?

These weren’t studied in head to head trials, so it’s very hard to make comparisons.

The entire Trump campaign was a scam — and it is not over

During the 2016 presidential campaign, candidate Donald Trump happened to be in the middle of a major federal class-action lawsuit spanning several states over an allegedly fraudulent operation called Trump University. You may recall that one of his first racist scandals during the 2015 primary campaign came about after he claimed the judge in that federal fraud case was biased against Trump because of his Hispanic heritage. The Trump University suit was a big story during that campaign but, as always, there was so much chaos surrounding Trump that I’m not sure people really understood what it was all about. It should have been the biggest story because it was unfolding during the campaign and illustrated everything the people needed to know about Donald Trump. It showed, in living color, that Trump was a real, bonafide con artist, in the literal sense of the word.

The grift was pretty simple. It started off as an online operation that quickly morphed into one of those bait and switch operations where they entice you to come to listen to a free lecture from some “expert” to teach you the tricks of the trade (or tell you the secret of life) which turns out to be nothing more than a sales pitch to buy more expert lessons in the same subject — which also turn out to be sales pitches. It’s what a lot of multi-level marketing schemes and frankly, cults, do to bilk people out of their savings. A 2017 report from the Center for American Progress explains further: 

Near the end, Trump University focused almost exclusively on the seminars, both running them and licensing the brand name out to an organization called Business Strategies Group. These seminars often began with a free session to get people in the door. Once individuals arrived, salespeople often tried to upsell them the “Trump Elite Packages,” ranging from the Bronze Elite Package for $9,995 up to the Gold Elite Package for $34,995.

Trump, of course, had a TV show in which he pretended to be a genius businessman and that was enough to get a lot of naive fans to sign on, apparently believing the lies in the brochures, which said that Trump had personally chosen the instructors and the so-called courses were credentialed by major universities like Stanford and Northwestern. The court case showed that none of that was true. And according to the Washington Post, Trump was personally involved in all the advertising that made those claims.

And despite pressure from the leaders of the seminars to write favorable reviews of the “course” there was an unusually high refund request rate from unsatisfied “students.” Time magazine reported that it was 32% for the three-day seminar and 16% for the Gold Elite package.

Trump eventually settled the fraud case for $25 million after the election, successfully shutting it down before it reached a courtroom. In the end, 6,000 customers were eligible for a piece of the $25 million settlement.

How in the world could an advanced democracy ever elect someone who was so blatantly a con man? It wasn’t as if it was far in the past or there was some serious dispute as to whether or not it was really a scam. It was obvious to anyone who looked at the case that there was no “university” and Donald Trump was running a grift. It wasn’t the first or the only one but it was being litigated right in the middle of the campaign.

I was reminded of that astonishing story this weekend when I read Shane Goldmacher’s shocking New York Times report on the Trump campaign’s fundraising practices. If anything, they were even more deceptive than the Trump University con.

Goldmacher reported that the campaign and its online fundraising platform WinRed hustled its most loyal supporters out of tens of millions of dollars with deceptive donation links on their emails and websites. It’s unknown to this day how many people unknowingly signed up for weekly recurring donations and “money bombs” (agreements to donate a lump sum on a future date), but there were so many requests for refunds that at one point, 1-3% of all credit card complaints in the U.S. were about WinRed charges.

The credit card companies told the Times that they were inundated with complaints and requests to cancel cards:

“It started to go absolutely wild,” said one fraud investigator with Wells Fargo. “It just became a pattern,” said another at Capital One. A consumer representative for USAA, which primarily serves military families, recalled an older veteran who discovered repeated WinRed charges from donating to Mr. Trump only after calling to have his balance read to him by phone.

The unintended payments busted credit card limits. Some donors canceled their cards to avoid recurring payments. Others paid overdraft fees to their bank. There is no way of knowing how many people just paid the bills, either thinking they had no recourse or failing to notice it.

The Times compared the GOP’s WinRed donation platform to the successful Democratic site ActBlue that it is modeled on and the GOP’s practices leading up to the 2020 election were much more unscrupulous. The refund request rate wasn’t even close. In fact, “the Trump/RNC operation issued more online refunds in *December 2020* than the Biden/DNC operation issued in all of 2019 and 2020.” But then WinRed itself is a product of Trump-affiliated henchmen who made their platform for profit, unlike the non-profit Act Blue, and even kept their fees when people demanded a refund which Act Blue does not. They made a lot of money on this scheme.

The sheer number of refunds to Trump donors amounted to a huge no-interest (and profitable for WinRed) loan to the campaign — a loan which required that the people loaning the money go to a great deal of trouble get money back which they didn’t consciously agree to “loan” in the first place. Trump’s post-election “Stop the Steal” fundraising at least partially went to pay off those “loans” from the campaign making the whole scheme very “Ponzi-esque.”

It wasn’t just the Trump campaign that did this. GOP candidates who used WinRed all used the same tactics including the Republicans in two Senate runoff campaigns in Georgia. There were many many requests for refunds of donations to both Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, the Times reported.

For his part, Trump is still doing it. He’s been telling his supporters not to send money to the RNC and to send it to his Save America PAC where he can do pretty much anything he wants with the money. The PAC uses WinRed. Anyone who decides they want to throw money into that black hole should read the fine print very carefully. They could be signing up to give the billionaire Donald Trump a weekly donation for life. 

Scientists just discovered a dinosaur so massive it is literally named “one who causes fear”

When a dinosaur is named after the fact that it is terrifying, you know that the discovery is massive — in this case, literally.

The freshly discovered carnivore is an abelisaurid, meaning that it stood on two stocky legs and had a massive head with an ornamented skull. (They looked similar to the famous Tyrannosaurus rex, although T-rexes were not abelisaurids.) In a study published Tuesday for the peer-reviewed publication Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, paleontologists revealed that they had found a well-preserved skull of an abelisaurid so big that it has been dubbed Llukalkan aliocranianus. The second part of its name is Latin for “different skull,” but the first part is striking: It is from the language of the Mapuche, who live in the region of Argentina (Patagonia) where the skull was found, and translates as “one who causes fear.”

It is easy to see why the Llukalkan aliocranianus would be considered fearsome. When it thrived in the Southern Hemisphere roughly 80 million years, Llukalkan aliocranianus was up to 16 feet long and had very sharp teeth with powerful jaws that could bite down hard on its prey. Based on the structure of its skull, scientists believe that it had an excellent sense of smell and a hearing ability that surpassed even that of other abelisaurids. Its skull had protuberances similar to those you might find today on a Gila monster or certain types of iguanas; its hind legs were strong enough to enable it to dart forward at great speeds; and its feet had large, razor-sharp claws perfect for slicing open its unlucky victims as it crushed them under its weight.

“This is a particularly important discovery because it suggests that the diversity and abundance of abelisaurids were remarkable, not only across Patagonia, but also in more local areas during the dinosaurs’ twilight period,” Dr. Federico Gianechini, a paleontologist at the National University of San Luis, Argentina who served as lead author on the paper, explained in a statement.

Because the Llukalkan aliocranianus was so different from other abelisaurids that lived at the time, this demonstrates that they were still flourishing and evolving before dinosaurs abruptly went extinct.

“These dinosaurs were still trying out new evolutionary pathways and rapidly diversifying right before they died out completely,” Dr. Ariel Mendez from the Patagonian Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, Argentina, who co-authored the paper, said in a statement.

If you’re a dinosaur buff, 2021 has already been chock full of exciting new discoveries. In February paleontologists announced that they had discovered the oldest known titanosaur, which they named Ninjatitan zapatai. Titanosaurs were a type of sauropods, or the long-necked, long-tailed and massive behemoths whose most famous members include the brontosaurus, apatosaurus and brachiosaurus. (Think the first dinosaur spotted by the main characters of the 1993 film “Jurassic Park.”) Those sauropods were not titanosaurs, but famous titanosaurs include the Notocolossus, the Patagotitan, the Puertasaurus and the Argentinosaurus.

In January paleontologists announced that they had found sauropod bones so large that they would have had to belong to the biggest land animal to ever live. A co-author of the report that revealed the find told Salon at the time that “the specimen here reported strongly suggests the co-existence of the largest and middle-sized titanosaurs” along with smaller sauropods known as rebbachisaurids “at the beginning of the Late Cretaceous in Neuquén Province.”

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Also in January, paleontologists informed the world that they had found fossilized soft tissue which for the first time ever gave scientists an up-close look at dinosaur butts. The dinosaur had a cloaca, or an anatomical feature commonly found on animals like birds and reptiles that serves as their equivalent of genitals, an anus and a urethra. As corresponding author Dr. Jakob Vinther, a paleontologist at the University of Bristol, told Salon at the time, “the shape of the cloaca is somewhat distinct. It doesn’t look like either birds or the close relatives, the crocodiles. It’s got a pair of sort of swollen lips on either side that sort of flare out. They sort of join together in one direction and then they flare out towards the tail.”

Texas Court of Criminal Appeals will review Crystal Mason’s controversial illegal voting conviction

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has agreed to review the illegal voting conviction of Crystal Mason, a Tarrant County woman facing a five-year prison sentence for casting a provisional ballot in the 2016 election while she was on supervised release for a federal conviction.

The state’s court of last resort for criminal matters granted Mason’s petition on Wednesday, elevating the profile of a case that could test the extent to which provisional ballots provide a safe harbor for voters amid questions about their eligibility. Her 2016 vote was never counted.

After discovering she was not on the voter roll, Mason submitted a provisional ballot in that year’s presidential election on the advice of a poll worker. Because she was still on supervised release for a federal tax fraud conviction, she was not eligible to participate in elections and her vote was rejected. Throughout the case, Mason has said she had no idea she was ineligible to vote under Texas law and wouldn’t have knowingly risked her freedom. But Tarrant County prosecutors pressed forward with charges, arguing Mason’s case came down to intent.

A trial court judge convicted her of illegally voting, a second-degree state felony, relying on an affidavit Mason signed before casting her provisional ballot. The affidavit required individuals to swear that “if a felon, I have completed all my punishment including any term of incarceration, parole, supervision, period of probation, or I have been pardoned.” Mason said she did not read that side of the paper.

The all-Republican court’s decision to review Mason’s case is notable. The Court of Criminal Appeals isn’t required to review non-death penalty convictions, and it rarely grants requests to do so. However, the court indicated it won’t hear oral arguments in the case and instead rely on legal briefs.

Mason turned to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals late last year after a state appeals court panel affirmed the trial court’s judgement.

In her petition to the court, Mason’s lawyers argued the appeals court erred in upholding her conviction because the state’s illegal voting statute requires a person to know they are ineligible to vote and Mason did not. In its ruling, the three-judge appeals panel wrote that the fact Mason did not know she was ineligible was “irrelevant to her prosecution.”

“The State needed only to prove that she voted while knowing of the existence of the condition that made her ineligible,” Justice Wade Birdwell wrote in the court’s opinion. In other words, Mason’s knowledge that she was on supervised release was sufficient for an illegal voting conviction.

Mason’s lawyers argued that letting that finding stand “eviscerates” a voter’s right to cast a provisional ballot under the Help America Vote Act, which established provisional ballots as a way for people whose registration is in doubt to record their votes and allow local officials to later determine if those ballots should be counted.

“These issues have far reaching implications for Texas voters who make innocent mistakes concerning their eligibility to vote and could potentially be prosecuted for such mistakes, including the tens of thousands of voters who submit provisional ballots in general elections believing in good faith they are eligible to vote but turn out to be incorrect in that belief,” their brief read.

Tarrant County prosecutors have insisted they’re not criminalizing individuals who merely vote by mistake and that they were able to prove Mason she was ineligible through the affidavit.

In response to Mason’s petition, Tarrant County Criminal District Attorney Sharen Wilson told the court she would not file a formal reply unless it granted review and instead submitted her office’s response to Mason’s previous request for the appellate court to reconsider her case.

“[Mason] does not even fall within the group of people whom she claims [the Help America Vote Act] is designed to protect. Her conviction for voting in an election when she knew she was not eligible to vote does not run afoul of HAVA in any way,” her office argued in that brief.

Mason’s case has played out amid a Republican-led crackdown on voter fraud that’s been largely fueled by baseless claims of rampant illegal voting and recent failed attempts to impose even tighter voting restrictions and to scour the voter rolls for supposed noncitizens.

In light of those failed efforts, attention has turned to a handful of high-profile prosecutions of people of color.

Before Mason, who is Black, there was Rosa Maria Ortega, a legal permanent resident also living in Tarrant County who was convicted of voter fraud after attempting to register to vote despite not being a citizen. Ortega — who did not realize her immigration status meant she was ineligible — cast ballots that counted in several elections. She was sentenced to eight years in prison in 2017 and granted parole in 2019; as of February of last year, Ortega was facing deportation.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

Are supermarkets doing enough to reduce single-use plastic waste?

Plastic is ubiquitous in supermarkets. Produce packaged in clamshell containers; water bottles and jugs, peanut butter canisters, salad dressings in plastic bottles and jars; and pasta boxes with miniature plastic windows line almost every shelf.

Those small pieces of plastic in your shopping cart add up to mountains of plastic waste. The U.S. generates 42 million metric tons of plastic waste each year and most ends up in oceans or landfills where it takes up to 500 years to break down. Your weekly shopping trip generates a significant portion of plastic waste.

“Supermarkets are where the average consumer encounters the most throwaway plastics,” says John Hocevar, marine biologist and oceans campaign director for Greenpeace USA.

Data about single-use plastic waste in supermarkets in the U.S. is scant but a Greenpeace UK report found that seven of the top supermarkets in the U.K. were responsible for putting 59 billion pieces of plastic packaging — or 2,000 pieces for each household — into the environment annually.

In the U.S., food containers and packaging generate more than 82 million tons of waste each year and the single-use plastic packaging in supermarkets ranks as the largest contributor to plastic waste — and supermarkets are failing when it comes to tackling the problem.

The recently released 2021 Supermarket Plastics Ranking report from Greenpeace USA ranked 20 supermarkets based on their efforts to address plastic pollution and all received failing grades.

Giant Eagle, the highest ranked supermarket in the new report with a score of 38.8 out of 100, committed to eliminating all single-use plastics in its stores by 2025; Kroger announced a goal for all of its store brand packaging to be 100% recyclable, compostable or reusable; ALDI set a similar goal and committed to a 15% reduction in the packaging of its store products by 2025.

Greenpeace UK reported that half of supermarkets had no specific targets to reduce plastic waste and those that did had such modest goals that it would take decades for single-use plastics to disappear from store shelves.

“The future is in reuse and it needs to be a big part of how grocery retailers do business,” Hocevar says. “Plastic [reduction] is still a low priority for retailers [and] these companies still have a long way to go to reach their goals.”

Pandemic pushback

The COVID-19 pandemic has made the problem worse.

Thanks to an uptick in takeout and home deliveries and bans on reusable coffee cups and reusable bags, plastic waste increased 30%t in 2020. Bulk bins were off limits, too, with grocers like Stop and Shop, Tops and Whole Foods closing or limiting bulk offerings and banning refillable containers.

The Plastics Industry Association promoted single-use plastic products as “the most sanitary choice” and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued draft recommendations encouraging restaurants to prioritize disposable items to minimize virus exposure. Grocers pointed to those claims as evidence that supported the return to single-use plastics.

In a Greenpeace USA statement released last June, a group of virologists, epidemiologists and health experts agreed that the risk of transmitting COVID-19 via surface contact was slim and reusables were safe and should be encouraged.

Although some cities have reversed their pandemic-inspired plastic bag bans and allowed stores to reopen their bulk bins, the problem of single-use plastic waste persists.

A love of convenience and recycling’s false promise

“Our consumerism drives demand in plastics,” explains Rachel A. Meidl, LP.D., CHMM, a fellow in energy and environment at the Baker Institute for Public Policy. “The widespread use of plastics is driven by our desire for convenient, portable, lightweight products . . . that results in low quality mixed polymers that are impossible to recycle within our current systems.”

Indeed, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data shows that just 8.7% of plastics are recycled, in part because of a lack of facilities. Consumers who are committed to recycling might be duped into choosing single-use plastics. In 2020, Greenpeace USA filed a lawsuit against Walmart, claiming that the retail giant was labeling single-use plastics as recyclable despite a lack of access to facilities to separate them from the waste stream for recycling.

“If plastic packaging that is not recyclable is haphazardly tossed into the recycle bin, it contaminates higher quality polymers that are recyclable and, due to cost of segregation and sorting, the entire bin will likely be routed to landfill or incinerator,” Meidl says.

Or, it gets shipped overseas. The US exports more than 2.5 billion pounds of plastic waste to poor nations like Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand (after China refused to accept more discarded plastics). In 2019, 189 countries agreed to limit the amount of plastic waste shipped overseas as part of the Basel Convention. The latest data shows that overall scrap exports remain unchanged.

Manufacturers are exploring alternative packaging options but an obvious replacement for single-use plastics has not emerged — yet.

“There are a lot of obstacles,” admits Yael Vodovotz Ph.D, professor of food science and technology at The Ohio State University.

Vodovotz cites cost; limited access to raw materials to replace the volume of petroleum-derived plastics; and challenges designing strong, biodegradable, food safe packaging. Polylactic acid (PLA) and polyhyroxyalkanoates (PHA), bioplastics made from fermented feedstock, have emerged as possible solutions but research is ongoing and production is limited.

“It’s not going to happen overnight; we need to look at incremental changes,” Vodovotz adds. “If we take a plastic that takes 400 years to degrade and get it [to degrade] in five years, we’re doing a great job.”

Zeroing in on sustainable solutions

Zero waste grocery stores have emerged as one option. The stores stock products ranging from coffee and cereal to flour and olive oil in clear self-service containers that are dispensed into reusable containers; the goods are weighed at the checkout.

“Grocers need to build up reuse and refill offerings and offer more package-free options,” Hocevar adds. “There are a lot of good options out there…and retailers, once they take responsibility for what they sell, can have an enormous influence.”

The website Litterless maintains a database of markets in the US are zero waste or that offer some refillable options like bulk bins, but the options are extremely limited. There are just nine grocers in Denver, eight in Portland, Oregon and Minneapolis. Loop is one of the few national options: The zero waste grocery delivery service stocks brands like Haagen-Dazs, Nature’s Path, Tropicana, Crest and Clorox. Items are packaged in reusable containers; when the containers are empty, the packaging is returned via a postage-paid reusable tote. Currently, the online retailer stocks 100 items and most are toiletries.

Although the number of zero waste options are growing, it’s still not a mainstream concept — and Meidl warns that it might solve one problem but create another.

“Reusable containers have clear benefits: It avoids the environmental costs of manufacturing and disposing of single-use plastic packaging and reduces littering . . . but the materials that replace single-use plastics also have life cycle impacts,” she says. “Glass and metal products are heavier, thus requiring more fuel to transport and both are emissions and resource-intensive to manufacture and cotton scores poorly for waste generation and high energy, water and land use; these products have to be used thousands and thousands of times to even gain the environmental benefit.”

Engagement across industries

In its Roadmap to 2030 report, ReFED, a national nonprofit working to eliminate food waste, noted that grocers connect all points along the supply chain from manufacturers to consumers and can exert that influence to drive change but cannot address single-use plastic waste alone.

“The onus does not solely rest on any one industry,” says Meidl. “Every party along the value chain has a responsibility.”

Meidl would like to see supermarkets partner with the downstream recycling industry to establish collection sites for post-consumer plastic bags and product wraps that can be recycled. Grocers could also work with plastic producers, brands and waste management companies to phase out packaging.

Legislation is also essential. Some states have enacted laws aimed at reducing single-use plastic pollution: California, Maine, Oregon and Vermont are among eight states that have banned single-use plastic bags and cities like Los Angeles, Seattle and Washington D.C. have also prohibited plastic straws.

More recently, a coalition of 550 conservation groups, including Greenpeace, Beyond Plastics, Surfrider Foundation and the Center for International Environmental Law, released a Presidential Plastics Action Plan to encourage President Biden to take federal action to address plastic pollution.

“The government has to hold retailers and manufacturers accountable for their plastic waste,” adds Hocevar. “[With the new administration] it’s easier to imagine meaningful action coming out of Congress.”

In the meantime, supermarkets have enormous power to address waste from single-use plastics and Hocevar points to a Greenpeace UK report, Unpacked, which offers a roadmap for grocers looking to cut plastic waste that includes removing “pointless packaging” like apples sold in clamshell containers, adding refill stations for beverages like soda and milk and adding more bulk bins and package-free groceries. He also hopes that calling out their efforts through vehicles like the Supermarket Plastics Ranking could move the needle.

“The retail sector is competitive and customers will use these tools to decide where to shop,” he says. “Retailers often default to the excuse, ‘We’re giving customers what they want,’ but a lot of us want better than what we’re being offered.”

When Greenpeace USA started the Supermarket Seafood Sustainability Scorecard in 2008, all 20 supermarkets received failing scores. A decade later, the same supermarkets achieved passing scores.

“Companies acknowledged the problem and made quick progress; the whole sector came a long way in 10 years,” Hocevar adds. “Plastic is a lot less complicated than seafood . . . and the culture can change quickly if there is a commitment to tackling the problem.”

Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene: An unholy Trumpian alliance continues

Although former President Donald Trump has been gone from the White House for over two months and Democrats control both the executive and judicial branches of the United States’ federal government, Trump’s grip on the Republican Party continues —and in the U.S. House of Representatives, one of the most Trumpian alliances is that of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida. With the 38-year-old Gaetz facing allegations that he was sexually involved with a 17-year-old girl — allegations he has vehemently denied — Greene is rising to his defense just as he recently rose to hers.

Gaetz finds himself caught up in a broad sexual trafficking investigation being carried out by the U.S. Department of Justice. The far-right GOP congressman and devout Trump supporter is not the main target of the probe, but the allegation that he had a sexual relationship with an under-age girl and paid her to travel with him is one of the things the DOJ is investigating.

The brash and snarky Gaetz has alienated a lot of people on Capitol Hill, including fellow Republicans — and he has been quick to attack others in his party for being insufficiently devoted to Trump. But Greene, on March 31, proudly expressed her support for Gaetz.

The far-right congresswoman and QAnon supporter tweeted, “Remember all the conspiracy theories and lies like Trump/Russia collusion and propaganda that the media has spread around. Take it from me rumors and headlines don’t equal truth. I stand with @mattgaetz.”

Another far-right House Republican and Trump devotee who is standing by Gaetz is Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio. Jordan, a Tea Party activist and co-founder of the House Freedom Caucus, told CNN, “I believe Matt Gaetz.”

The 46-year-old Greene is no stranger to controversy. In September 2020, she posted, on Facebook, an image of herself holding an AR-15 next to photos of progressive House Democrats Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rep. Ilhan Omar and Rep. Rashida Tlaib and called for “strong conservative Christians to go on the offense against these socialists who want to rip our country apart” — a post that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi denounced as a “dangerous threat of violence.”

Greene has a long history of making anti-Islam remarks. When Tlaib and Omar were elected to the House in 2018, for example, she described their victories as an example of “an Islamic invasion of our government.”

In January 2019, Greene accused Pelosi of treason and called for her execution, saying, “A crime punishable by death is what treason is.”

But despite all that, Gaetz defended Greene on March 19 when he posted:

One of the things that has kept the Gaetz-Greene alliance strong is their mutual support of Trump. After Trump lost to now-President Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election by more than 7 million votes, both of them promoted the debunked conspiracy theory that he was robbed of a victory by widespread voter fraud.

Many Republicans are now distancing themselves from Gaetz. A GOP staffer, quoted anonymously, told the Daily Beast, “I don’t think you’ll find a lot of people who are desperate to keep him involved in Republican politics.”

But Greene is an obvious exception, and their unholy alliance continues.

Legal scholar Jennifer Taub on Trump as a symptom of America’s massive inequality

In the United States, there is one set of rules for rich people (especially if they are also white) and another set for everyone else. That unjust and anti-democratic system is reflected across American society. The country’s wealth and income inequality is so extreme (especially the race-wealth gap) that it more closely resembles that of a Third World autocracy than one of the world’s richest countries and a “leading democracy.”

There is the “legal” theft. The county’s laws are literally written by the rich and the powerful. In turn, those laws represent their interests and goals over and above those of the average American. Political scientists have actually shown that America’s elected officials on the national level are largely not responsive to the demands and needs of ordinary people.

The tax code is one such example of how the rich and powerful have created a system that rewards their class with subsidies, tax breaks, write-offs and other benefits to such a grotesque extreme that some of the country’s richest individuals, families, and corporations pay no taxes at all — and in many cases actually receive “refunds” from the American people. “Job creators” and “too big to fail” are convenient shorthand to describe rent-seeking behavior and the ways many of the country’s plutocrats and other members of the elite classes are economic and social parasites.

Even allowing for the fact that the nation’s laws are written to serve the interests of the rich and powerful, new reporting has shown that the top 1 percent of income earners still hide or otherwise do not report at least 20 percent of their income. That theft is on a massive scale: It is estimated to cost the American people $1.4 trillion over a 10-year period. The FBI also reports that so-called white collar crime costs the American economy hundreds of billions a year.

This should not be a surprise, but is still shocking: The IRS is much more likely to audit or otherwise investigate poor and working-class people than the rich.

Of course, the rich and powerful have found a way to profit from the misery, death and destruction caused by the COVID pandemic. The Institute for Policy Studies estimates that the world’s richest people have increased their wealth — measured in the trillions of dollars — by at least 50 percent during the coronavirus plague year.

In a pre-election article for the New Republic, Ankush Khardori explained how the Age of Trump and its many disasters created an ideal environment for white collar criminals:

The figures, disconcerting enough on their own, tell an incomplete story. Things are even worse than they look. Three and a half years after Trump took office, white-collar criminal enforcement is in its worst state in modern history — the result of top-down disinterest in, and occasional outright hostility toward, prosecuting financial crimes; the installation of inexperienced and occasionally inept political appointees and senior officials; and enforcement priorities that are alternately misguided, inexplicable, and politically motivated. Virtually every part of the white-collar enforcement apparatus at the Justice Department is broken.

As we approach the end of Donald Trump’s first term, it’s clear that it’s never been a better time to be a white-collar criminal. Amid a pandemic that shows no sign of abating, as well as an economic recession that shows all signs of getting horribly worse, the question is whether anyone — including Trump’s possible successor, Joe Biden — is going to do anything about it.

Ultimately, the Trump regime and its allies provide an almost ideal example of how rich and powerful people can abuse and break the law, enrich themselves by doing it, and face few if any consequences for their anti-social behavior.

Jennifer Taub is a legal advocate, as well as professor of law at the Western New England University School of Law. Her most recent book is “Big Dirty Money: The Shocking Injustice and Unseen Cost of White Collar Crime.” Her previous book was “Other People’s Houses: How Decades of Bailouts, Captive Regulators, and Toxic Bankers Made Home Mortgages a Thrilling Business.”

In this conversation, Taub explains how America’s two-tiered legal system encourages financial and other crimes by the very rich. She also explores how members of that group learn that behavior throughout their lives and then normalize it. In addition, Taub profiles two cases, the opioid epidemic and the 2008 mortgage crisis and financial crash, that typify the widespread harm caused by white collar crime.

Taub also reflects on a basic but powerful counterfactual: if Donald Trump had been properly punished by the law and imprisoned for the many financial and other crimes he committed earlier in life, the horror and pain caused by his presidency would likely have been avoided.

There are these hope-peddlers and others in the news media and elsewhere who keep suggesting that Donald Trump may go to jail or suffer some other severe punishments for his obvious crimes. When I hear such fables, I respond with a laugh. At worst, Trump will pay a fine. Members of his cabal who may face charges will likely do the same thing and plead out. There may be civil settlements. But none of the high-level Trumpists are going to prison. Rich people do not throw other rich people in jail. The powerful rarely if ever hold each other accountable.

Will Donald Trump ever go to prison? Wearing my lawyer hat, I am supposed to speak in a slow, sober tone and say that before there is even a discussion about whether Donald Trump spends any time in prison there has to be a process and a trial, and then after that, if the prosecution proves the case, then, yes, that day will come. My more honest and yet cynical answer is that there will not be enough consequences for Trump, given what he has done over his lifetime to this country, his ongoing harmful and dangerous behavior. Even if they “lock him up.”

This is not the movie The Wizard of Oz where someone is going to pour water on Donald Trump and he is just going to melt. Ivanka and Jared and the other people in Trump’s orbit and inner circle are not going to melt into a big pool of water on the floor either — and suddenly there will no longer be an oligarchy in America, or suddenly the billionaires will disappear who own most of the wealth in this country. That is not going to happen. We need to move forward. Bringing Trump to justice is not enough.

What is Donald Trump an example of?

Donald Trump is a perfect example of what is extruded from this unfair and sometimes corrupt system in America. Trump is somebody who is white, wealthy and well-connected and who used questionable behavior and sometimes criminal tactics to gain and sustain wealth and power.

What makes Trump unusual, in my opinion, is how high in society he climbed. Trump has been involved in potentially illegal activity for decades and was able to get away with making civil settlements.

Had Trump been held accountable before he ran for office back in 2015, he would have spent time in a federal prison instead of in the Oval Office. Trump is an example of the danger that we face as a society when we let people get by, because it’s easier just to settle than to prosecute. For many of the civil settlements involving Trump and his businesses there could have been criminal punishments. It is just easier for the government to bring civil cases and settle with people sometimes than to charge them criminally. That is the same thing that happened after the financial meltdown of 2008, where we have examples of senior bank executives who settled their cases with regulators and then avoided criminal charges.

As a class of people, how are the rich different from everyone else? How does their world work?

Consider a rich white kid. It is a cradle-to-grave system.  People from the white suburbs go to rehab, they don’t go to jail. The cops tell you, “Turn down the music and go home.” They don’t escort you to the police station. That system of protections for the wealthy continues throughout their lives.

What does that cradle-to-grave system look like?

Leona Helmsley once said that “taxes are for the little people.” Spin that out more to “Laws are for the little people.” The problem with Helmsley is she said the quiet part out loud and was too mean and too greedy and so she went to a Club Fed prison for 18 months. She was the exception, not the rule.

There’s a saying accountants tell their well-to-do clients: Pigs get fat; hogs get slaughtered. Yet for every example set, there is plenty of space for the rich and white, especially rich white men, to make mistakes and be forgiven time and again. That is also a space to be predatory and have one’s behavior covered up and otherwise ignored. And it’s not just about getting away with crime, it’s also about getting by without all that much effort or merit.

It’s the ability to be of average ambition or average motivation or average performance and still be assured a safe place to live. To still be assured a decent standard of living and the respect of society and the ability to go about your life even as an adult making mistakes. They know they won’t end up living on the street because of their mistakes. It is astonishing to see how different the world of the rich is from how everyone else lives.

How does America’s two-tiered legal system work in practice?

We have a double standard in the American criminal justice system that reflects and perpetuates inequality. Cutting legal corners is a tool for advancement only available to the already affluent.

The wealthy not only increase their power by evading punishment, but also benefit from a criminal justice system that incarcerates those with lower social status who also attempt to use crime to get ahead. Scale that up to a multinational corporate enterprise dodging the law, and the disparities are even more stark. Corporations guilty of felonies enter into deferred prosecution and non-prosecution agreements with the government and reoffend again and again. Yet high-level executives are rarely prosecuted.

Even when the exception proves the rule, and a high-status individual is prosecuted and convicted, the double standard carries into sentencing, where statutory guidelines require judges to give serious weight to a convicted felon’s past contributions to their community. Such leniency fails to acknowledge that preemptively spreading around ill-gotten funds to charities is a con artist’s trick to gain public trust, manipulate community do-gooders and inoculate themselves. Forgiveness is often reserved for the fortunate.

The federal prison system allows wealthy offenders better conditions than ordinary convicts, with low-security camp settings for the former and dangerous caged conditions for the latter. Often, when top-shelf felons — like 1980s junk bond king Michael Milken, 1990s lifestyle guru Martha Stewart and recently released Enron CEO Jeff Skilling — complete a prison sentence, they rejoin high society with sufficient funds to rehabilitate themselves and relaunch their careers with little lasting stigma.

In 2019, the actress Lori Loughlin, indicted in the college admissions scandal known as Operation Varsity Blues, reportedly sought to hire a crisis management firm that might fashion her redemption in Martha Stewart style. In contrast, the impact of incarceration on the poor and working class can be irreversible for both the defendant and their children for years, if not generations, to come.

What does justice look like in America for the rich and the poor, the elites versus everyone else? 

We are all entrenched in a legal system that helps the most powerful protect their private property and contract rights. And that same system subordinates those with less resources and power.

The same system and same courts set up to oversee those types of private disputes also handle criminal matters with a similar mindset. Criminal laws as written, interpreted and enforced tend to punish far more severely those who take property from the wealthy, and let off the hook the giant enterprises and wealthy individuals who take things of value, including lives, from the middle class and poor. 

To me, equal justice would mean that prosecutors would have a “collateral consequences” standard applied to ordinary people, not just business organizations, before they prosecute. We would have treatment available and not prison for drug offenders. We would also eliminate cash bail and only impose pre-trial detention on those who are a flight risk or a danger to their community or themselves. 

In your book, you detail how the opioid crisis is an example of criminality and lack of accountability in America for the very rich. Can you share some of those details?

Purdue Pharma shows the failures on the part of the Department of Justice in terms of enforcement and repeat offending. This is a company that was prosecuted previously. In 2007, the company did plead guilty to a felony for misbranding OxyContin under the Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act. Three senior executives — none of them Sackler family members —pleaded guilty to misdemeanors. But the company continued on.

A decade after the 2007 guilty plea, the civil lawsuits brought by the states and private individuals begin. At the end of the Trump regime in 2020, Purdue Pharma pleaded guilty again as part of a DOJ settlement with the company. This time, in addition to pleading guilty to conspiracy to violate the the Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act and to defraud the United States, Purdue also pled to violating federal anti-kickback laws.There were also civil charges against the Sackler family.

But where are the criminal charges against them or other real people? This is an example of how the failure to hold individuals accountable for the crimes of the organizations they are running or participating in does not create any kind of deterrence. It is not real accountability. It completely undermines the public trust. The Sackler family made billions of dollars. They are one of the wealthiest families in America. They amassed a reported $14 billion fortune and joined the ranks of America’s 20 wealthiest families. Meanwhile, more than 232,000 fellow Americans died from prescription opioid overdoses between 1999 and 2018. All these poor and working-class people died from overdoses. The message is that some lives and families matter, and others do not.

The 2008 financial collapse is another example of how the rich are not held accountable for their crimes.

The nonpartisan reports on the financial crisis show that at every link of the toxic mortgage supply chain there was actual criminality. There are many who say things like, “Well, it was perfectly legal!” That is not true. There were loan originators who were encouraging people to lie on their forms. They were using whiteout to change people’s income. There was fraud throughout the process from top to bottom. Decades of deregulation helped to fuel this.

As a society we do not have to live this way. We can create a kind of shared prosperity. We can create a system where we don’t have financial bubbles, or if we do have bubbles and market downturns, the people with the least do not have to suffer the most. Likewise, the people with the most do not have to gain more wealth. This is happening right now with the so-called K-shaped “recovery.” I am grateful that the Biden administration seems to understand this problem and has responded with the COVID relief stimulus and hopefully the infrastructure bill gets passed as well.

There was a recent announcement that the very rich, the top 1 percent, hide 20 percent of their income or find ways not to report it. By some estimates that may be $1 trillion dollars or more over a 10-year period that is not collected in taxes. What are the practical implications of that thievery for the average American?

For example, when people are not paying what is legally required of them it means that someone else is not getting help recovering from their drug addictions, so instead they turn to crime. It means that the roads and bridges are not safe. It means that kids do not have access to preschool. Because the rich are not paying the taxes they owe and otherwise hiding income, it means that they are a de facto criminal class. The 1 percent are literally becoming wealthier and more powerful from criminal behavior. They use their influence to change the laws so that they pay fewer taxes, and this includes underfunding the IRS.

What are the tax investigators and others looking for with Trump and his inner circle? What does “criminality” in that context look like?

In Trump’s case, apparently both the Manhattan DA and the New York state Attorney General are looking at tax fraud under state law. More generally, the reason why tax fraud can be so prevalent is that there is a voluntary system of compliance for the most wealthy.

Ordinary people who work for a living have taxes withheld by their employers, paycheck by paycheck. The very wealthy, however, earn money in all sorts of ways that they are supposed to self-report including investment income and consulting arrangements and sales of assets like artwork or jewelry for cash. While in some cases investment firms will report to the IRS on behalf of customers, banks do not need to report incoming and outgoing payments, so there is a great deal of unreported income. So, then it’s up to the wealthy to tell the IRS truthfully and to assess losses that they can subtract from their income truthfully.

Roger Stone and allies seek to destroy fellow GOP operative in bizarre personal feud

Longtime Republican operative and Donald Trump confidant Roger Stone, along with an allied far-right leader, is attempting to take down fellow GOP operative and MAGA Twitter personality John Cardillo, and it’s getting messy. 

Cardillo, a former New York police officer turned Newsmax TV host, who later became a conservative Twitter pundit of sorts, was once a close friend and ally of Stone. But in recent weeks the duo have apparently become bitter enemies. The rift is somewhat mysterious in origin, but appears related to Stone’s allegations that Cardillo is “pray[ing] on single women” [sic], while arranging “phony divorce papers with the county.” 

Over the past three weeks, Stone has posted a series of messages to Parler making allegations against Cardillo. “What kind of an asshole files phony divorce papers with the county, tells his wife nothing, and actually gets the date of their marriage incorrect in the filing that he has no intention of bringing to trial or settlement just so he can pray on single women? #busted #Congentalliar #Cardiilo #asswipe,” Stone posted to Parler this week.

Stone included copies of the purported divorce documents in his Parler post, but Salon has been unable to verify their authenticity.

A potential clue to the Stone-Cardillo feud emerged in another post, when Stone expressed anger that Cardillo had not spoken up for an NYPD officer named Sal Greco, who reportedly received money from Stone’s wife and is now under “investigation by NYPD’s Internal Affairs.” 

“I spoke up today in the case of Officer Sal Greco of the New York Police Department, who the New York Daily News is attempting to smear,” Stone posted. “One former New York Police Department officer who was fired Newsmax thinks I should be silent in the face of this lynching, but then John Cardillo needs to shut the f*ck up. #talentless #conman.”

In another recent message posted to Parler by Stone, the self-described “dirty trickster” claimed Cardillo was a “bunko,” “conman,” “b*llshit artist,” and a “psycho.” “The best one yet — one woman has come forward to say that she and @johncardillo were attempting to have a baby invitro at the time she believed that she was his girlfriend and did not know that he was married. She’s going to make one hell of a witness on the stand,” Stone wrote in late March in Parler messages.

Cardillo didn’t return a Salon request for comment. Stone responded in curious fashion that perhaps suggested faulty voice-transcription software. “I have a firm policy of only responding to increased [sic] from legitimate news organizations. Salon does not meet this criteria,” Stone wrote. Notably, following a Salon’s inquiry to Stone via email, all the Parler messages in question disappeared from the social media site. 

But the pile-on from the far right didn’t stop, with “Stop The Steal” activist Ali Alexander writing on Telegram, “I warned everyone of John Cardillo. Remember when he tried to kill the Stop the Steal movement? Now you all know more about him.” Alexander has long not seen eye-to-eye with Cardillo over the perception that the latter is no right-wing enough. 

The now-former Newsmax host is best known for his controversial takes on social media. “Does this look like an appropriate father/son interaction to you?” Cardillo tweeted at the end of 2020, questioning a picture of Joe Biden for embracing his son Hunter and giving him a kiss on the cheek.

Clear back in 2015, Cardillo caught blowback over posting a picture of himself pointing his gun at the camera, tweeting, “I’m really enjoying these Eggs Benedict so move along now. #BlackBrunchNYC,” in the wake of protests occurring in California and New York at restaurants during brunch hours to protest the killings of the unarmed Black men Michael Brown and Eric Garner. The MAGA Twitter personality, as Salon has previously reported, has also gone after Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., claiming she is “spoiled and pampered.” With more than 226,000 Twitter followers and regular retweets by Donald Trump Jr., Cardillo remains in a prominent position in right-wing social media, even as he attempts to fend off fellow denizens of MAGA world who hate his guts. 

Fox News host nails senator on GOP spending hypocrisy: “Haven’t you lost your credibility?”

Fox News host Chris Wallace on Sunday pressed a top Republican, Sen. Roy Blunt (Mo.), over Republican opposition to President Joe Biden’s infrastructure plan.

“We’re talking about raising the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28,” Wallace explained. “When President Trump came in it was 35, so it’s still a tax cut from where it was in 2017.”

Wallace noted that Republicans want to block a tax increase for large corporations and instead pay for infrastructure with new taxes and fees on the average person.

“They’re going to say you’re protecting the fat cats and putting it all on the backs of the working class?” the Fox News host explained.

Blunt argued that the massive cut in corporate taxes under former President Donald Trump unleashed economic growth.

Wallace pressed, “I haven’t heard you say it today but some of your colleagues in the Republican Party are complaining about this is going to explode debt, this is going to explode deficits.”

The Fox News host pointed out that under Trump’s leadership, the U.S. added over $3 trillion to the national debt before the pandemic while cutting taxes by $1.5 trillion.

“I guess the question is, when I hear, for instance, Mitch McConnell talking about now about, ‘Well, debt and deficits,’ hasn’t the Republican Party, haven’t you lost your credibility on this issue?”

Blunt insisted that both Democrats and Republicans have bad records on controlling budget deficits. He then attacked Democrats over the latest infrastructure bill.

“You can’t spread that blame around if you decide you’re going to do it all by yourself,” Blunt said.

You can watch the video below via YouTube:

Candace Owens to Fox News host Maria Bartiromo: “Calling everybody a racist” is “getting pretty old”

Conservative activist Candace Owens on Sunday argued that children should not be allowed to go to schools that teach how “not to be a racist.”

During an appearance on Fox News, host Maria Bartiromo misleadingly praised former President Donald Trump for his “big showing” among Black voters in 2020.

For her part, Owens suggested that it is a win for Republicans if Latino men are lured into following QAnon.

“All of this makes sense to us [conservatives],” she opined. “Calling everybody a racist and a white supremacist, it’s getting pretty old. You have to deliver, and you have to make their communities better, which Democrats are not doing.”

Bartiromo then claimed schools are encouraging people who “identify as white” to “come to a meeting because we want to make sure you can thrive and strive not to be a racist.”

“They’re assuming every kid is a racist!” Bartiromo exclaimed.

Owens pointed out that former Fox News host Megyn Kelly had taken her kids out of school due to anti-racism curriculum.

“I truly believe that it’s time for us to pull our kids out of school,” she insisted. “And I know people say, ‘Not all of us can afford to do that.’ The country wasn’t built on people having a lot of money when they were homeschooling.”

“We’re starting to see this more and more,” Owens continued. “It’s indoctrination that’s happening. They’re trying to fuel race issues in this country. They’re trying to teach this Marxist ideology.”

According to the conservative activist, children are “learning how to hate white people” instead of science and mathematics.

“It’s a Democrat [sic] long-term strategy, and it’s finally coming into fruition,” she explained.

“This has got to stop!” Bartiromo agreed before claiming that Democrats are “dividing” the country with H.R. 1, an election integrity bill.

“I’m so tired of Black Americans, Hispanic Americans being used to further the Democrat [sic] power and everything the Democrats want to do,” Owens said. “They tell you it’s going to help you, that it’s to combat voter suppression. Well, votes are not being suppressed. This is what the left always does. They make it sound good, when in fact they’re actually after the exact opposite. When I hear them saying that they’re trying to combat voter suppression, I almost know — I always know that what they’re actually after is suppressing votes themselves and making sure that they stay in power.”

You can watch the video below via YouTube:

Germany’s strange nostalgia for the antebellum American South

Swastikas may be banned in Berlin, but Confederate flags still fly.

Alongside MAGA hats and Trump 2020 banners, Reich flags and Brandenburg eagles, the American South’s battle flag has been raised high during Germany’s anti-lockdown demonstrations – the most recent of which took place in Dresden in early March.

It’s appeared in the window of an apartment complex and in advertisements for an annual Christmas carnival. The flag has also reportedly been seen in Berlin’s bars.

Perhaps its presence in Germany simply represents how the Confederate battle flag has become an international meme of the contemporary far right. The Stars and Bars could exist as just another image decontextualized and propagated through the internet’s airless corridors like, say, Che Guevara. German Neo-Nazi websites do sell “Südstaaten” – or Southern – gear, along with Ansgar Aryan and Thor Steinar merch.

However, as a cultural historian writing on transnational fascism, I see the flag as part of a longer history of German nostalgia for the American antebellum South. Germans’ identification with the region stretches back, paradoxically, to the very book that helped bring an end to that era of slavery: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

From Uncle Tom to . . .  Nazism?

On the U3 Line of Berlin’s mass transit system, there’s a stop called Onkel Toms Hütte, or Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

The stop bears the name of a neighborhood tavern and beer garden that stood for almost 100 years, from 1884 until 1978. German restaurants, inns and beer gardens bore the title of the anti-slavery polemic, which became a shorthand for a type of Southern comfort – evidence of the novel’s complex, counterintuitive and, at times, disturbing reception.

When the novel was translated into German and published in 1852 – the same year as its American release – it was immensely popular. Though the melodrama about the cruelty of American slavery did much to stir German opinion against the practice, it also initiated a fascination with the seemingly simpler life of the slave depicted in Stowe’s domestic scenes.

A cottage industry sprouted up around it: plays, musical scores, even European-set reimaginings in which slavery became an increasingly elastic concept.

The Berlin tavern, built in 1884, adopted the name Onkel Toms Hütte because its proprietor liked the novel. It was just one of many leisure establishments that drew on Stowe’s novel to promise a “good ol’ time.” Heike Paul, a professor of American studies at FAU Erlängern-Nuremberg, characterizes this attitude as a “romanticization of slavery and a nostalgic, even remorseful view of its ‘pastness.'”

This hazy romanticization was undergirded by racial prejudice, which found in Stowe’s depiction of Tom as a “happy slave” a justification for racial hierarchy. Though “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was originally cultivating sympathy for Black slaves, by the early 20th century it was invoked by both German progressives and conservatives as proof of Black inferiority and as a justification for colonization. An introduction to a 1911 German edition of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” describes how “the Negroes are undeniably an inferior race, and, now that they have been freed, are widely perceived to be a plague in the United States.”

Bettina Hofmann, a professor of American studies at Bergische Universität Wuppertal, argues that “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” introduced racial terms to the German language that foreshadow the Nazi race categories. However, as she qualifies, “it would be an anachronism to accuse Stowe of having paved the way for Hitler’s thoughts on race.”

Still, it remains a dim possibility that “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” had at least some influence. Stowe’s novel was, after all, one of Hitler’s self-proclaimed favorite books.

“The Lost Cause” in the Thousand-Year Reich

Despite a general ambivalence toward the U.S., Nazi Germany did sympathize with the antebellum South. The pubs inspired by “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” fed – and fed off of – the desire for a simpler life that slaves were supposed to have enjoyed, and which Nazism, in its idea of “volksgemeinschaft,” a people’s community, also promised.

The South after the Civil War and Germany after World War I had suffered humiliating defeats, and each revised its identity and history in the face of those losses. As both had prided themselves on their military prowess, they sought to fashion narratives that would explain their losses without admitting their shortcomings. Recognizing the similarities, the German historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch brings them together in his 2000 book “The Culture of Defeat.”

However, Schivelbusch emphasizes the differences in the stories they told. The South crafted the narrative of the “Lost Cause,” in which the experience of defeat became a Christlike sacrifice.

Meanwhile, the Nazis trumpeted the “Dolchstoßlegend,” the myth of the stab in the back. The German Army had been undefeated in the field, they claimed, but lost the war because of sabotage from within. This myth focused attention on internal enemies who needed to be eliminated.

But the “Lost Cause” nonetheless resonated in Nazi Germany. The success of Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel “Gone with the Wind” and David O. Selznick’s subsequent 1941 film adaptation points to a desire in Nazi Germany for the melodrama of sacrifice that Schivelbusch suggests the German narrative of defeat lacked. The sentimental novel went through 16 printings in Germany, selling nearly 300,000 copies. Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels watched the film repeatedly, even as they eventually banned it for general viewership. Praising the film in his diary, Goebbels declared, “We will follow this example.”

The onetime Nazi functionary Hermann Rauschning writes that Hitler felt the Confederacy had been the real America.

“Since the Civil War, in which the Southern States were conquered, against all historical logic and sound sense, the Americans have been in a condition of political and popular decay,” he recalled Hitler telling him. Though perhaps apocryphal, Rauschning’s memory of the Führer’s words squares with Hitler’s enthusiasm for “Gone with the Wind”: “In that war, it was not the Southern States, but the American people themselves who were conquered.”

Danger of Stars and Bars sentimentality

It is not only the self-declared far-right that flies the Confederate flag in Germany. Civil War reenactors do mock battle under its banner, an East Berlin country music scene gathers with it hung aloft, and even some enthusiasts of German author Karl May, who set his novels in the American West, wave it proudly. These groups insist their use of the flag “has no racist meaning.” When pressed, they appeal to tradition.

Distrust of nostalgia has been a vital part of Germany’s post-World War II national project of “working through the past.” One would expect Germans, of all people, to be wary of such justifications.

For sale at an online German neo-Nazi merchandiser is an image of the Confederate flag bearing a “Totenkopf” – a skull and crossbones. It is an embellishment of the flag. And yet it reveals what has been there, hiding behind nostalgia, all along.

Sanders Isaac Bernstein, Provost’s PhD Fellow in English Literature, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

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

How humans became the best throwers on the planet

Pitchers’ fastballs are getting better and better.

From 2008 to 2020, the average speeds of all major league baseball pitches combined rose by between 1.5 mph and 2 mph. In the 2019 season, nearly 90% of the 281 pitchers who threw more than 1,000 pitches threw fastballs that averaged over 90 mph. The 100 mph fastball – once a newsworthy event – is now relatively common.

But MLB pitchers aren’t the only expert throwers; most healthy people can throw faster than our much stronger chimpanzee relatives, who max out at around 30 mph. A study of boys from the ages of 8 to 14 who were only moderately trained in throwing could still throw two times faster than chimps.

So how and why did humans evolve to become expert throwers?

In two papers in The Quarterly Review of Biology, we explored the ecological causes and evolutionary consequences of throwing in humans.

Sticks and stones that break bones

Humans are the only species that can throw well enough to kill rivals and prey. Because throwing requires the highly coordinated and extraordinarily rapid movements of multiple body parts, there was likely a long history of selection favoring the evolution of expert throwing in our ancestors.

Most people probably don’t think throwing is important outside of sports because they’ve forgotten its usefulness. Part of that has to do with the fact that people have been using weapons like bows and firearms for centuries.

But before the invention of these weapons, our hunter-gatherer ancestors threw darts, knives, spears, sticks and stones at rivals and prey. Even today, stones remain effective weapons; you’ll see protesters heave stones at police and stoning used as a form of punishment in some places.

Darwin considered the evolution of throwing to be critical to the success of our ancestors. As he wrote in “The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex,” it allowed “the progenitors of man” to better “defend themselves with stones or clubs, to attack their prey, or otherwise to obtain food.”

The development of the skill begins with the evolution of bipedal locomotion, or walking on two feet. This happened about 4 million years ago, and it freed the arms and hands to learn new abilities like making tools, carrying goods and throwing.

The Australopithecines, the relatively small-brained, bipedal ancestors of our genus that lived in Africa somewhere between 1 million and 4 million years ago, probably threw projectiles as well, since their hand bones hint at their ability to grip objects and throw them.

But just because you can throw doesn’t mean you can throw well. Anatomical adaptations like a tall mobile waist that decoupled the hips and thorax allowed for more torso rotation. A laterally oriented shoulder joint that better aligned the main axis of the upper arm with the action of chest muscles allowed for a greater range of motion. Both are necessary for high-speed throwing, and these first appeared together in Homo erectus – the first member of our genus – about 2 million years ago.

The two main theories for why selection favored throwing are fighting and hunting. Most scholars have favored the hunting hypothesis. However, monkeys and apes – especially chimpanzees, our closest relatives – frequently throw sticks, stones and vegetation during combat with each other and potential predators. Only rarely do they do so while hunting. Because throwing at other members of the same species is an ancestral trait in primates, we argue that our throwing abilities evolved first in the context of combat and only later became a hunting tactic.

A skill that diverges by sex

Once the ability to throw quickly and accurately became critical to success in combat and hunting, our male ancestors would have been more likely than females to develop, through natural selection, these skills, since anthropologists have shown that males tended to fight and hunt big game.

Over time, men who were better throwers became better warriors and hunters. This further accelerated the evolution of throwing ability in men because success in war and hunting increases male status within groups and influenced female mate choice.

Interestingly, while all modern humans can throw well relative to other primates, sex differences in throwing are among the largest behavioral differences between the sexes. These differences emerge early in life and are not strongly influenced by experience or practice.

Anthropologists and biologists have extensively documented this advantage in throwing velocity, distance and targeting ability, although a recent study suggests training may eliminate differences in throwing accuracy.

Sex differences in throwing do not exist just because males are, on average, larger and stronger. The relative size, shape and orientation of the shoulders of men increase the range of motion of the arm during the cocking phase, which facilitates better throwing. Some of these differences begin early in life and exist even when taking into account sex differences in body size and the fact that males, from a young age, tend to throw more often than females.

Even among men, large size and strength do not always result in faster throwing. Throwing speed is influenced by a variety of factors including the range of motion of the throwing arm and stride length. That’s why relatively svelte pitchers like Tim Lincecum and Pedro Martinez were able to throw faster than most of their taller, stronger and bulkier counterparts.

Their bodies are the paragons of an evolutionary adaptation that has made humans the best throwers on the planet. If rising pitch speeds are any indication, the skill continues to develop. There are even some who argue that pitchers have become too good – and that it’s high time to move back the mound.

Michael P. Lombardo, Professor of Biology, Grand Valley State University and Robert Deaner, Associate Professor of Psychology, Grand Valley State University

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

You can level-up this zucchini gratin with some slices of fresh eggplant

As any gardener knows, a few healthy zucchini plants can outpace a family’s ability to consume the harvest. “That’s lock-your-car-door season in Maine,” Annie says. “If you don’t, you may find your car stuffed with huge zucchinis, courtesy of a ‘friend.'” This gratin is one of the many delicious things Annie has learned to make with abundant summer vegetables. If she has eggplant on hand, as she did when I was on the boat, she’ll layer some slices in there, too.

***

Recipe: Zucchini Gratin

Total Time: 1 hour
Hands-On Time: 20 minutes
Yield: 4 to 6 servings

Ingredients:

  • 3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for the pan

  • 1 pound zucchini (about 3), cut crosswise into 1/4-inch-thick slices

  • 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

  • 1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

  • 1/2 cup plain bread crumbs

  • 1 large garlic clove, minced

  • 1/4 cup crumbled goat cheese

  • 3 sage leaves, thinly sliced crosswise

Instructions:

Preheat the oven to 400° and set a rack to the middle position. Grease the bottom of a 9-by-9-inch baking pan with oil, then layer the zucchini in four overlapping rows. Drizzle each row with olive oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper. In a medium bowl, combine the bread crumbs, garlic, goat cheese, and sage, then spread this evenly over the zucchini. Bake until the zucchini is cooked all the way though and the cheese begins to brown, 40 to 50 minutes.

 

More from this author: 

Why your brain loves closed captioning

It’s Friday night, and my family and I are engaging in that rarest of pastimes — communal viewing. We fire up the newest episode of “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” and we make sure we’ve turned on the subtitles. No one in our household is hard of hearing. So why do we do that?

We’re clearly not unique in our habits. In 2020, the United Kingdom’s Office of Communications released the results of a study that found that 18% of the population regularly uses closed captioning — but only 20% of those viewers were hard of hearing. 

Home captioning has been around for nearly fifty years — the first show to introduce it was Julia Child’s “The French Chef,” back in 1972. In the early days, the service was presumed only of interest to non-hearing viewers, who soon needed a special device to access it. Over time, captioning technology was built in to televisions, and the last decade has brought more refinement of accessibility requirements to streaming services. It didn’t take long for the broader applications to captioning to become evident.

Dr Richard Purcell, a UK doctor and one of the founders of the captioning company Caption.Ed, sees his company as a service for people “with and without hearing impairment to enhance their interactions with media.” As he explains, “There is a wealth of evidence demonstrating that, for a wide range of participants, captions can improve a viewer’s comprehension and retention of information. There is also evidence to suggest captions can improve a viewer’s ability to draw inferences and define words, identifying emotions from media sources.” 

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Unsurprisingly, then, turning on the captions and integrating text with speech can assist viewers who are learning a new language. It can likewise be helpful for children and adults to promote reading skills, making it an important tool to meet the current moment. As actor comedian Stephen Fry said in a recent video called “Turn on the Subtitles,” “the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has meant that some children have actually taken a step backwards in literacy,” he tells us, “which is a worry and a tragedy.” Introducing reading into TV watching is a painless way to try to move the needle. And by giving deeper context clues, captioning can help other kinds of viewers as well.

“People with conditions such as Autism Spectrum Disorder, Attention Deficit Disorder and Mild Cognitive Impairment may find higher levels of engagement and enjoyment by using closed captioning,” says Dr. Puja Uppal of the Think Healthy podcast. Captioning, she says, “provides an immersive experience that correlates to higher levels of enjoyment, satisfaction, and retention.” 

Writing in Medium in 2018, Accalia Baronets laid out the same case from the perspective of one such viewer. “I don’t understand body language at all,” she wrote. “It’s hard to focus on a show when there’s a lot of body language going on that I don’t understand. I have ADHD. Captions help me to focus on what I’m watching.”

Dr. Stephen Christman, a cognitive psychologist and professor of psychology at The University of Toledo, admits to some more superficial pleasures of closed captioning. “When watching sporting events, I sometimes turn on closed captioning so that I can listen to music while still following the action,” he says. “Another trivial reason that I’ve also partaken of is to turn on closed captioning just to enjoy all the amazing typos that appear.”

But he also notes the potential of captioning for language learning, as well as other cognitive benefits. “We can read faster than we can speak,” he says. “With closed captioning on, the viewer can quickly read the current dialogue and then turn their attention back to the visual action and use their knowledge of what is being said — and what is about to be said — to enhance their appreciation of the nonverbal/visual aspects of what is happening on the screen.”

In my own home, there are a variety of reasons we use the subtitles. My high schooler prefers a lower volume (and sadly for my middle-aged eyes, dimmer screen), so captioning makes an effective compromise. My family likes to comment on the action, talking right over — and sometimes missing — key dialogue. We live on a city street that intermittently erupts with sirens, music and altercations, and captions enable us to tune out whatever screaming is going on outside. We also appreciate the additional information captions can provide, like the name of a song playing in the background, or the distinction between [applause] and [polite applause]. 

But in my household, the appeal of captioning goes beyond keeping peace. Like Wired writer Jason Kehe, who gave his own analysis of the boom in captioning back 2018, I frankly sometimes just don’t catch what the people I’m watching are saying. Whether you’re a fan of Christopher Nolan-era “Batman” movies or English reality shows, sometimes you need a little help. The first time a friend recommended “Derry Girls” to me, she warned, “Turn on the captions. You’re going to need them.” She was correct.

There’s value outside my four walls too. As legions of travelers and users of public spaces know — or at least they did when we traveled and used public spaces — captioning also makes it easier to enjoy personal entertainment without potentially interfering with anybody else’s airspace. Maybe watching “Gladiator” on your phone on a crowded train with the captions on isn’t quite the IMAX experience, but it is an undeniably convenient way of being entertained without bothering the person next to you.

Captioning has its limitations. It can really wreck a great punchline or suspenseful twist, making it ill-suited to anything that relies on surprise. It can be irritating when it’s poorly executed and riddled with errors. Yet for many of us, it’s a welcome enhancement regardless of our hearing ability.

Still, the captioning I enjoy the most is the kind I am still unable to enjoy. I can’t wait to be in a packed bar again on a weekend afternoon, different sporting events broadcasting from either end of the room, and above the noise of the crowd, the reassuring flicker of descriptive words underneath the action.

Is this Marcella Hazan’s most overlooked pasta sauce?

You can’t go wrong with a Marcella Hazan recipe. Her Tomato Sauce With Onion & Butter is legendary. As is her bolognese. And while both deserve all the praise they get, there are countless gems in “Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking” that don’t get the shine they should — especially chicken liver sauce.

I seek out chicken livers wherever they’re available. Deep-fried, sautéed, blended into a pâté — to me, it’s all good. I love the iron-rich flavor and velvety texture. But chicken livers are often overlooked in homemade pasta sauces (and often overlooked in general) throughout the U.S. Out of the 1,010,000,000 chicken recipes on Google, only 6.2 percent use livers. It’s a thigh and breast world that we’re living in.

But such popularity means those cuts come at a higher price tag. On FreshDirect, you can buy a pound of chicken breasts for $8.99, chicken thighs for $5.49 — and chicken livers for $2.99. More affordable, just as meaty, with a silky-buttery finish.

A simple pesto, eggy carbonara, and creamy Alfredo are all special, but there’s something luscious and inviting about chicken liver sauce that I haven’t been able to find elsewhere. It’s also a breeze to make.

Like most good sauces, this recipe is built on a foundation of shallot, butter, and garlic. Then comes the ultimate trinity of pork, beef, and chicken. (Yes, it is a lot of meat. And yes, it’s good that way.) As soon as it hits the heat, salty prosciutto flares and curls, leaving crisp edges. Tomato paste and wine add acidity, balancing the richness. Whole sage leaves lend an earthy quality. And the chicken livers give the dish a pâté vibe.

It may sound like a lot of effort, but the whole sauce cooks in 15 minutes flat. Simply add pasta and dinner is done.

Hazan recommends a thick pappardelle — I’ve used tagliatelle and fettuccine with great results. A wider pasta is best because it helps carry the sauce, but any pasta of your choice would be just as tasty. The sauce leaves every noodle licked in a glossy coating, and I can’t help but be transported back to Italy.

I’ve made this dish for my closest friends, my husband, and even his boss — everyone has loved it. It might not be as famous as the tomato sauce, but it’s just as iconic.

***

Recipe: Chicken Liver Sauce Inspired by Marcella Hazan

Prep time: 15 minutes
Cook time: 15 minutes
Serves: 4 to 6

Ingredients

  • 1 teaspoon tomato paste
  • 1/4 cup dry vermouth (or dry white wine, or heavy cream)
  • 2 tablespoons unsalted butter
  • 1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive or vegetable oil
  • 1/2 small shallot or 1/4 small yellow onion, chopped (about 2 tablespoons)
  • 1 large garlic clove, minced
  • 3 prosciutto slices (or 1/4 pancetta slice), diced (about 3 tablespoons)
  • 5 whole sage leaves
  • 1/4 pound ground beef, preferably 20% fat
  • Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
  • 1/2 pound cleaned chicken livers, cut into bite-size pieces, dried with paper towel
  • 1 1/4 pounds long pasta (such as pappardelle, tagliatelle, or fettuccine), cooked
  • Grated Parmigiano-reggiano, to taste

Directions

  1. Mix the tomato paste and vermouth until the paste has dissolved. Set aside.
  2. Heat butter and oil in a large saucepan over medium heat. Once melted, add the shallot, stirring often, until it becomes translucent. Add the garlic and cook until just fragrant, about 1 minute. 
  3. Add the prosciutto (or pancetta) and sage. Stir, cook for about 1 minute, then add the beef, a large pinch of salt, and a few grindings of pepper. Crumble the meat with a fork and cook until it has lost its raw color, about 2 minutes.
  4. Increase heat to medium-high and add the chicken livers. Cook just until the livers have lost their raw color, about 3 minutes.
  5. Add the tomato paste-vermouth mixture. Keep cooking for 5 to 8 minutes, stirring occasionally, until sauce thickens and becomes glossy. Taste and increase the salt and pepper if needed.
  6. Toss the sauce with the pasta until coated. Serve immediately with grated Parm, plus even more black pepper to sprinkle on top.