People don’t trust their surgeons when they can’t see their (masked) faces: study

In Weird Al’s 1985 music video parody “Like a Surgeon” (which riffed off of Madonna’s song “Like a Virgin” from the previous year), the melodious funnyman plays a surgeon who signals his medical incompetence by — among many, many other things — not wearing a mask while he operates.

Obviously, a trustworthy surgeon would don a facemask during surgery. (They would also refrain from performing magic tricks and scarfing down sandwiches, as Dr. Weird Al does.) Yet curiously, while wearing a facemask is ideal for preventing the spread of germs, it is not effective at conveying trust in patients, according to a new study.

Clearly, it’s crucial for patients to be able to trust their surgeons — they quite literally hold patients’ lives in their hands — and that is why this recent study published in the journal JAMA Surgery is so important. The study found that when patients cannot see their surgeon’s entire face due to masking requirements, they find it more difficult to trust and understand them.

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To conduct this study, a team led by Dr. Muneera Kapadia from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine analyzed how 200 patients responded to professionals from 15 surgeons’ clinics across seven subspecialties. They found that, although eight out of 15 surgeons chose a standard face covering over a clear mask, patients overwhelmingly felt more comfortable when their surgeons’ masks allowed them to see their entire face. Surgeons who wore clear masks received higher marks for displaying empathy (99% to 85%), establishing trust (94% to 72%) and offering understandable explanations (95% to 78%).

“At beginning of pandemic I had a patient say, ‘Dr. Kapadia, it’s odd you’ve taken out a big part of my colon and I don’t even know what you look like,'” Kapadia remarked in a press release. “It made me realize we don’t have much information on how masks are effecting surgeon-patient communication and relationships.”

Kapadia spoke with Salon about her findings.

“I don’t know that the clear mask is the solution, but we definitely identified a problem,” Kapadia explained, noting that she is not sure that surgeons preferred the opaque masks so much as they had pragmatic reservations about the effectiveness of clear ones.

“It’s more that they did not prefer clear masks, and the issues cited were that the clear mask had issues with fit and fogging,” Kapadia told Salon. “Some of the surgeons questioned how safe they were in terms of protecting against COVID-19.”

She emphasized that, from a psychological perspective, the study found that patients struggle when they cannot see their surgeon’s face and benefited when they could.

“I think they could hear better,” she observed. “I think they can read expressions better. I think some of those things that play into trust. I think all of those things, they all build up to form a better connection with your surgeon. Those are the underlying things that lead to trust. “

There have been a number of studies which explore the psychological consequences of mask-wearing. In a paper published in International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health last year, researchers found that people often have an instinctive aversion to wearing masks because they feel as if their autonomy and freedom are being taken away from them. It also noted that the politicization of mask wearing and the mixed messages being given out from various trusted institutions created a sense of confusion about whether it was necessary to wear masks.

An article published last year during the early months of the pandemic also identified a stigma associated with wearing masks.

“Wearing face masks has been associated with the stigma of being sick, and normally healthy people do not need to wear face masks to prevent diseases,” explained the researchers behind an article published in the journal General Psychiatry. “This stigma might need to be changed due to the threat of COVID-19.”

There is no question that wearing a mask is essential to limit the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19. Studies have found that states with mask mandates had slower coronavirus growth rates; another study of multiple countries found that regions with government policies or social norms of wearing masks had lower COVID-19 death rates. Likewise, studies have found that those who wear masks regularly will have less severe COVID-19 symptoms if they do contract the virus.

With new arrests, police provide more clarity into death of Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick

Two men had been arrested and charged with assaulting former Capitol police officer Brian Sicknick during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

Federal authorities are still investigating the death of Sicknick, who sustained injuries while defending the Capitol building from pro-Trump rioters. Investigators have confirmed that Sicknick did not die of blunt force trauma. And while it remains unclear what exactly lead to Sicknick’s death, a video from Jan. 6 show him being attacked and sprayed with unknown agent. A toxicology report has not been publicized.

Sicknick’s death was originally reported on Jan. 8 –– two days after the riot –– in The New York Times, which alleged that Sicknick was slain as a result of blunt force trauma sustained from a fire extinguisher with which a protester used to attack him.

“On Wednesday,” The Times initially reported, “pro-Trump supporters attacked that citadel of democracy [i.e., the Capitol], overpowered Mr. Sicknick, 42, and struck him in the head with a fire extinguisher, according to two law enforcement officials. With a bloody gash in his head, Mr. Sicknick was rushed to the hospital and placed on life support. He died on Thursday evening.”

Many other news outlets disseminated these very same details. The New York Post released a video on Jan. 11 showing a rioter throwing a fire extinguisher at an unidentified Capitol police officer, who was struck on the head by the extinguisher.

But it was never confirmed that Sicknick was the officer shown in the video. In a statement on Jan. 7, the Capitol police said that Sicknick was “injured while physically engaging with protesters.” However, according to the statement, Sicknick returned to his office, where he collapsed, was brought to the hospital, and was later declared dead. The statement did not say that he was not rushed to hospital immediately after the riot (per the New York Times report).

On Feb. 16, just five weeks after The Times’ story broke, The Times revised its original story to reflect that its sources may have been unreliable. “Law enforcement officials initially said Mr. Sicknick was struck with a fire extinguisher,” it reported, “but weeks later, police sources and investigators were at odds over whether he was hit. Medical experts have said he did not die of blunt force trauma, according to one law enforcement official.”

Right-leaning outlets such as Fox, TheBlaze, and The National Review quickly feasted upon the correction, likely in service of a narrative that the Capitol riot was less violent than characterized by the rest of the mainstream media. National Review contributor Andrew McCarthy expressed concern over the inclusion of Sicnick’s death in Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial.

“If [Sicknick’s death] did not happen the way the House Democratic impeachment manners have represented that it happened,” McCarthy argued, “we should be told that — and be told why such an inflammatory allegation was made in the impeachment article and repeated in the pretrial memo.”

Fox News’ Tucker Carlson also decried what he thought was a weaponization of Sicknick’s death by Democrats.

“[The New York Times report] forms the basis of the myth that Democrats have constructed around Jan. 6.,” he said. “Sicknick’s remains lay in honor at the Capitol building. Streams of politicians, who just months before had told us that cops were racist by definition, praised Brian Sicknick as a hero. They had finally found a police officer who served their political uses.”

Sicknick’s mother believes that her son died of a fatal stroke. Investigators are now exploring the possibility that the stroke was triggered as a result of a chemical irritant, such a bear spray.

In an interview with Propublica shortly following the attack, Sicknick’s brother made clear what he felt happened. “[Brian] texted me last night and said, ‘I got pepper-sprayed twice,’ and he was in good shape,” adding, “Apparently he collapsed in the Capitol and they resuscitated him using CPR.”

“This political climate got my brother killed.”

Why many European countries are suspending use of the AstraZeneca vaccine

Though millions of doses have already been administered, the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine has hit a new stumbling block in Europe.

While the vaccine has yet to be approved for use in the United States, a handful of European countries — including Germany, Italy, Slovenia, Portugal, Denmark, France, Spain, Estonia, Lithuania, Luxembourg and Latvia — have temporarily suspended their use of it.

The temporary suspensions arose due to reports that, as of March 8, 2021, at least 37 people across Europe given the AstraZeneca vaccine developed blood clots, out of more than 17 million vaccinated.

At the moment, there is no evidence that the shot was responsible for the blood clots. For now, various health agencies are investigating if there’s a causal link between the vaccine and the blood clots — some of which have reportedly been deadly — before restarting AstraZeneca vaccinations again.

Germany’s health minister Jens Spahn said the decision to suspend AstraZeneca shots was a “purely precautionary measure,” according to AP News. The suspension, which was announced Monday, is expected to go on until there’s a further investigation, as German health officials investigate specific cases of blood clots in the brains of people who received the vaccine. The Paul-Ehrlich-Institut, Germany’s authority in charge of vaccines who recommended the suspension, said in a press release “the experts of the Paul-Ehrlich-Institut now see a striking accumulation of a special form of very rare cerebral vein thrombosis (sinus vein thrombosis) in connection with a deficiency of blood platelets (thrombocytopenia) and bleeding in temporal proximity to vaccinations with the COVID-19 vaccine AstraZeneca.”

The health agency recommends that if anyone feels increasingly unwell for more than four days after being vaccinated — say, with a severe and persistent headache or “pinpoint bleeding of the skin” — they they should seek medical treatment immediately. The European Medicines Agency, the regulatory body roughly equivalent to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), is leading the investigation and expected to deliver a verdict by Thursday, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The AstraZeneca vaccine was created by the eponymous biopharmaceutical company in collaboration with the University of Oxford. Instead of using messenger RNA (mRNA) to trigger an immune response like the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, the AstraZeneca vaccine uses a viral vector based on a weakened version of a cold-like adenovirus.

AstraZeneca is expected to apply for authorization for emergency use as early as this month in the U.S., after it submits results from Phase 3 human trials which have been conducted in the United States.

AstraZeneca released a statement on Sunday offering safety reassurance for its vaccine. In the statement, the company said that in its clinical trials the number of thrombotic events — meaning blood clots formed due to blood changes, when the red and white blood cells and platelets bind together — was lower in the vaccinated group than the unvaccinated group.

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“Around 17 million people in the EU and UK have now received our vaccine, and the number of cases of blood clots reported in this group is lower than the hundreds of cases that would be expected among the general population,” Ann Taylor, Astrazeneca’s Chief Medical Officer, said in a statement. “The nature of the pandemic has led to increased attention in individual cases and we are going beyond the standard practices for safety monitoring of licensed medicines in reporting vaccine events, to ensure public safety.”

According to Al Jazeera and Reuters, health authorities in Denmark suspended the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine after a 60-year-old woman died after receiving the vaccine. The cause of death was a blood clot. In Italy, the suspension also came after three deaths of people who died after receiving their shots.

The World Health Organization is urging countries to not pause vaccination distribution.

“As of today, there is no evidence that the incidents are caused by the vaccine and it is important that vaccination campaigns continue so that we can save lives and stem severe disease from the virus,” WHO spokesman Christian Lindmeier said.

Notably, in the United Kingdom, more than 11 million people have received at least one dose of the vaccine and there has been no sign of excess deaths or blood clots, according to BBC News.

“Blood clots can occur naturally and are not uncommon,” said Dr. Phil Bryan, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency’s Vaccines Safety Lead. “More than 11 million doses of the COVID-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca have now been administered across the UK, and the number of blood clots reported after having the vaccine is not greater than the number that would have occurred naturally in the vaccinated population.”

The news is certainly a safety setback for AstraZeneca’s vaccine, which has already struggled with public perception for having slightly lower efficacy rates than competitors, and because of a widely-publicized incident in which two vaccinated volunteers in Britain developed neurological symptoms consistent with transverse myelitis; no evidence linked the symptoms to the vaccine. (One of the volunteers had an undiagnosed case of multiple sclerosis.) It’s also a setback that many health experts fear could feed the vaccine hesitancy that’s already brewing across the world.

Daniel Salmon, director of the Institute for Vaccine Safety at Johns Hopkins University, told the New York Times that the investigation into the safety concerns should be seen as a sign that surveillance is working as it should.

“I wouldn’t jump to any conclusions that because you saw some blood clots after vaccination that they’re causal,” he said. “It warrants looking at it more carefully.”

Salmon said “there is a possibility for a real problem,” but “there’s a much higher probability that some coincidental event will scare people — and derail the program.”

What the horrific crash on the border says about U.S. immigration policy

The cause of the collision between an SUV and a semitruck that left 13 dead in Holtville, California, on Tuesday morning is still a horrific mystery. But federal investigators are exploring a likely explanation for why the overloaded car sped through an intersection in the rural area: a case of human smuggling turned deadly.

Surveillance footage shows the 1997 Ford Expedition and another SUV loaded with people entering the U.S. through a breach in the border fence shortly before the crash. Ten victims were Mexican nationals; the other three were women from Guatemala. While consular officers keep working to confirm victims’ names, special agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement began piecing together how 25 adults came to be crammed into a vehicle meant for no more than eight.

It’s an all-too-familiar story, and one that has not become less common as the world fights a global pandemic and migrants south of the border wait to see the effects of immigration changes promised by the administration of President Joe Biden. Clandestine migration to the U.S. has accelerated through last fall and into the early weeks of the new administration, as poverty, crime and public health conditions across the border have grown more desperate.

“You’ve lost your source of income, whatever it is. People — especially in the informal economy, which are the ones that drive local economies, as we know — you’ve lost those sources of income. Their own relatives who could have afforded to support them are probably also broke,” says Gabriella Sanchez, a migration researcher with the Danish Institute for International Studies.

“People who might not have thought about migrating, now are like, ‘Well, at this point, I really don’t have anything else to lose. Anything I could have lost, I already lost.'”

For the last year, the U.S. has used an obscure public health law to expel anyone caught trying to cross the border rather than formally deporting them. That keeps the federal government from having to detain migrants for days (and often months or years) after their arrival on the U.S. side of the border. But it also further incentivizes evading detection by the authorities, which is where the smugglers come in.

The crash occurred about 10 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border; United Farm Workers members said the victims weren’t among the 6,000 farmworkers who commute from Mexico to tend crops in the Imperial Valley. The SUV’s passengers ranged in age from 16 to 65, packed into a vehicle manufactured to carry a passenger weight of no more than 2,000 pounds. (All but the front seats of the Ford had been removed to create space.)

An ICE spokesperson told the Los Angeles Times, which has been the authoritative news source on the incident, that Homeland Security investigations agents “responded to the scene of today’s fatal crash” and began their smuggling investigation. The surveillance footage showed a second SUV, which held 19 people, also crossing the border around the same time. It subsequently caught fire; the Holtville fire chief speculated to the Lo s Angeles Times that the combined weight of the passengers caused the vehicle to malfunction.

There are plenty of ways for migrants to be killed trying to come to the United States. People suffocate in locked tractor trailers, die of heat or cold in the Arizona desert, or drown off the California shore. Migrants die in crashes while being chased by the Border Patrol, a phenomenon that ProPublica and the Times investigated in 2019. Even when they’re not being pursued — as they weren’t in this case — vehicles overstuffed with people can be hard to steer and dangerous to drive, which may have been the case here.

When Sanchez first heard about the crash, she immediately recognized the hallmarks of a smuggling accident. The case “reminded me of when I lived in California, growing up,” says Sanchez. “The trucks are packed, and then immigration coming over or chasing them.”

The need to evade apprehension by border agents creates danger. That’s part of the logic of deterrence — a logic that has guided U.S. border policy for decades. If the point of border security is to make it as difficult and unappealing as possible to enter the United States, the only possible routes will be the most dangerous ones, and the people who are willing to take them will be the most desperate.

For the last few years, national attention has focused on the relatively recent phenomenon of large numbers of children and families coming to the United States, mostly from Central America and mostly to seek asylum. There’s a reason for that: The deterrence system was not built for families and children, so it didn’t have the resources to address them.

The Biden administration is simultaneously trying to expand its capacity to keep unaccompanied children in custody (before releasing them to sponsors, usually relatives, in the U.S.) and trying to slowly unwind some of the policies imposed by the administration of President Donald Trump to expel families from U.S. soil as quickly as possible.

American policymakers can sometimes speak as if the most important factor in migration is U.S. government policy — or at least how welcoming the country is perceived to be. Biden officials take every opportunity to tell would-be migrants explicitly not to come; the new administration’s critics (such as Trump immigration czar Stephen Miller) say that any loosening of immigration restrictions is encouraging a flood of new migrants. But the fact is that beyond U.S. borders, the rest of the world changes too, often in ways that make emigration seem not just appealing but necessary.

In the early months of the pandemic, it seemed that tight restrictions on international travel — including the Trump administration’s mass-expulsion policy under the public health law — had all but frozen migration. But smugglers of drugs and people quickly rebounded, modifying their tactics, taking fewer trips with bigger loads, for example, to adapt to the pandemic while meeting demand. And the demand was very much there.

In Central America, the U.N.’s World Food Program estimates that hunger quadrupled from 2018 to 2020, and that was before the region was pummelled by hurricanes at the end of last year. Interviews with emigrants reveal that many of them have simply lost hope that things will ever get better in their home countries. In Mexico, meanwhile, things have gotten worse. The country’s economy shrank by 8.5% in 2020; its national coronavirus czar was hospitalized last week with the virus, epitomizing a disastrous government response that’s contributed to 186,000 Mexican deaths in the pandemic; and homicides in the first 11 months of 2020 had already passed the record for a full year (set in 2019).

While we don’t know the whole story of migrants like the victims in Imperial County — or any other unknown victims of deadly migrations — it is possible they knew they could be killed on the journey and still felt that it was their best or only option.

“Phobias” horror film stars discuss tapping into fears, playing tortured, and anti-Asian attacks

New horror film “Phobias” doesn’t go for the obvious or common fears — spiders, snakes, heights, or even flying. This entertaining anthology film has the evil Dr. Wright (Ross Partridge, deliciously sinister as a gleefully mad scientist) trying to harness the fear out of captive “patients” who suffer from robophobia (robots), vehophobia (cars), ephebiphobia (youth), hoplophobia (weapons), and atelophobia (imperfection) in order to extract the sensations of terror and turn them into an easily contained gas for weaponization.

The film opens with Johnny (Leonardo Nam of “Westworld“) being attacked by a group of young men because he is Asian. (They call him Chinese, but he corrects them; he is Korean). Back home, when the computer Johnny is working on contacts him and wants to befriend him — to be a part of his world as well as solve his problems — the young man is skeptical. But the robot reacts anyway, punishing Johnny’s abusive neighbor and then his chief bully. Alas, the price Johnny pays is being captured and sent to Dr. Wright’s lab where he meets Sami (Hana Mae Lee), who is haunted by a car accident, revealed in the next episode. Other detainees recount their stories and fears. Renee’s (Macy Gray, who co-executive produced) is arguably the most disturbing.

Nam makes for an engaging hero in “Phobias” as he goes from a passive victim to active leader. And Lee, a far cry from her comic turn in “Pitch Perfect,” shows her sinister side. Nam and Lee spoke with Salon via Zoom, about their fears and making “Phobias.”

Leonardo, I watched your first scene in the film with horror, seeing your character being attacked because of his race. There are horrific real-life attacks on Asian Americans happening across the country right now. And while I know you are Korean, can you talk about Sinophobia (anti-Chinese and by extension anti-Asian sentiments)?

Leonardo Nam: I am so grateful you even asked this question and are giving us this platform as a way for us to talk about this. I’m disheartened by what’s been happening our community — and by community, I mean not just the Asian American community, but the American community as a whole. This has been happening since the beginning of time. To know and to see that this experience is coming to light, and that President Biden has spoken about it — I so appreciate someone who is in a leadership position like that taking their position seriously and using it for good. I wrote an article at the beginning of the pandemic where I talked about xenophobia and the anti-Asian hate crimes that were happening. We can keep talking about the negatives — regarding the violence and horrible attacks that the community has experienced — but I also want to take a moment to highlight the positives that have happened. I’m heartened by the cross cultural grouping, these allies that have come forward and these organizations that are solidifying and helping each other. Communities that have helped people walk home from the subway. As horrifying as that is, that you need to have that presence there, the fact that people were thoughtful to do that and did give a damn to do that, I am so grateful.

When we were filming [the attack scene], I didn’t have to stretch far. I have experienced that my whole life. It wasn’t that we could predict this would be the climate right now, but it has been happening, and I’m grateful we can now speak about it, and that people are finding their own voice to say something. When people generalized the community to say we don’t speak out loud — we put our noses down and keep going — that may be true to a certain degree, but anyone who’s been aggressed does not feel they can talk about it. You are retraumatized if you are asked about it, and if you gather the gumption to say something, you have to retraumatize yourself and be aware that is what you going to have to do. But I am grateful people are speaking out and helping others and highlighting the possibility that our community as America, can shift focus away from hate and to unifying and living in an allied community. There have been several people who have reached out to me. What was originally overwhelming to me, I started to see as a positive thing — that people want to help.

Hana Mae Lee: That was very beautiful, Leo. I’m still shocked and super-saddened by everything that is going on. I grew up in the [San Fernando] Valley were everyone was mixed-race, and we all hung out together, so it wasn’t only white, Black, and Mexican — and me. I didn’t grow up with that hate. I don’t talk too much about politics because it makes me sad, and I have so many emotions about it. The time we are in now, and what is happening, is crazy to me. I don’t know where the disconnect is — our education system, our families — where we learn to only see color and that’s it, and not skill and talent, but color and gender. There needs to be a relearning and teaching of that. When we die, we are just bones. We are all made out of the same thing. We need to go back to that. It saddens me when I see what’s going on now, and I’m in shock. I feel like I’m watching something from years ago. It’s very disheartening.

I like that you are both Asian actors headlining an American horror film that is not a remake of a K-horror or J-horror film or a franchise. Can you talk about the importance of making a film like this in your career?

Nam: I wanted to dive into a new genre. This is my first foray into this, and it feels nice to play a character that is three dimensional that audiences are going to hitch on to and the race or gender isn’t the thing the filmmaker is trying to highlight. It’s about the ride of emotion that every human has. It feels like a fun experience playing that kind of a role. In regard to have someone who looks like us in an American film, it feels great! I love that we are at this crossroads, and hopefully this opens the door to many more opportunities, not only for us but for different kinds of filmmakers and actors and characters that more people will be able to see themselves reflected on screen.

Lee: I love horror. I grew up loving being scared — I mean, not in real life, but with monsters and all that. I’ve done a handful of horror movies and psychological thrillers, where it becomes physical. It’s fun. You get to explore all different kinds of fear. And that I don’t speak like this (mimics accent of the Asian stereotype) which is sometimes called for, but it’s not necessary. It’s nice that we are not Asian immigrants in “Phobias.” It’s not about race. It’s a mixed, diverse cast. We all have fear; that connects us.

Sami is a scary badass in “Phobias.” In what ways do you instill fear in others?

Lee: Personally, I don’t know. I don’t wake up wanting to f*ck up people. I don’t know how I make people fearful of me, but I know that I have a lot of internal fears and phobias. I feel like everyone has something that they are paranoid about or think about, or don’t want to think about. It was easy for me to tap into a fear in this movie. What do I choose? I have a plethora of things I’m afraid of!

Such as? I was going to end with that question but since you brought it up . . .

Lee: My fears — losing self-control is a big one because who is controlling me? I have a fear of heights because my eyesight isn’t so good. When I am a higher up, the fall looks way farther.

Hana Mae, your segment mostly involves being frightened by your car behaving weirdly— windows, the radio, and door locks all having a mind of their own. Can you talk about playing those scenes? How do you act fearful?

Lee: First, this is not the stereotype about Asians being bad drivers! [Laughs] I love horror movies, and so when I saw “The Sixth Sense” and I went home and washed my face, I was like “Who’s behind me?!” So, it was pretty method. What was great was Maritte [Go], who directed my segment, said that that kind of thing happened to her for real. When there is some sort of truth or experience behind a fear makes it more graspable and makes it more fearful. Sometimes I get paranoid, and when the music starts changing and you have no control . . . This is not a computerized car. It’s a Caprice, and everything’s manual.

Johnny in the film sees technology being used for good as well as evil. What are your thoughts about the power and danger of technology?

Nam: I have, in my past, literally gone up to my Alexa and put it on mute. That concept that they are listening, and information is being collected [is scary]. Playing Johnny was interesting because I was trying to find a way to carry the audience through an experience. And to jump from my segment “Robophobia” and into the government institution, I wanted to create an element for that leap, so I shaved my head to change the actual physical alteration of him. Going from internal in “Robophobia,” interpreting 1s and 0s and converting that into the decision to make change. That was a fun, finding that. Johnny is a victim of hate, but I wanted to find how does he mute that? The bigger goal is his love for family. What is going to happen to his dad?

Speaking of the government institution, I understand the location was “truly a sick place” — what do you know about it?

Lee: That hospital was messed up! Do you remember Leo?

Nam: It was a massive compound way out in the boonies!

Lee: I don’t know if they were doing experiments, but a lot of the props in the movie were not props. They were real.

Nam: I remember walking around in between takes into different rooms and being like, “This is so cool that the art department did this.” And they said, “Nope, they didn’t touch this room.” It was crazy and weird. [Laugh]

Lee: It was pretty intense. Those tables and lights were scary.

Dr. Wright also chains, abuses, tases, and tortures Sami. What are your thoughts about women being victimized by men? Curiously the women in “Phobias” are all pretty strong and in control in their individual episodes, but there is an element of torture porn, though.

Lee: Torture, for me, is a little different. I deal with pain very poorly, but I have high tolerance. Meaning, if something really happens, I try to walk It off and play it cool if I’m around people. If I’m at home, it’s a different story. But in those torture scenes, the car scene, Maritte said it was a lot — so let’s just use your eyes. In the chair, maybe it is too much and it looks like I’m really being electrocuted. I wanted to try it all. I had a lot of seizures when I was a kid, and I’m sure that was frightening for my mom. When I experience pain, my face can get weird, and I can get really quiet, so I wanted to explore the physicalities of it, because I haven’t been able to do that. There are so many different kinds of pain, and how we express it. Some people might be dead quiet because their arm is broken and they are in shock, and some people are sobbing. It was fun to do all sorts of levels of torturous pain. Sami is a badass, but she is up to no good. So, when she goes into the [government] camp, she gets very internal. She’s tortured by all these things. It was fun to play.

Leonardo, what was your mindset in the torture scenes, and how did you develop your body language?

Nam: Playing that level of intensive pain or any level of feeling and emotion is so much fun to do. You get to scream your guts out, and that’s what I hope the audience can partake in as well. It’s part of the fun of watching a film like this. It’s a rollercoaster ride of emotion. You get to roll with that as an actor. There are so many films where the characters are centered and held within, but here you are allowed to let it out and go with this crazy ride.

Leonardo, your character shifts from being passive victim to an active leader. Whereas Hana Mae, your character goes from active to passive. How do you calibrate these issues of having and losing control?

Nam: Going from passive to active, there was a moment in reading the script and doing it that I thought, “How can I not perpetuate the stereotype of this meek Asian dude that doesn’t know how to fight back?” It was an interesting instinct where for so long a majority of roles of projects haven’t given the breadth of being a lead or having a full transformation. I had to remind myself, this is a long journey, and I had to start at this place. It was exciting for me to find these key moments and find his voice and his way into becoming this active leader.

Lee: I think Sami has goals and she will stop at nothing to achieve them. Living a life on her own and getting people she needs, like having her boyfriend as an ally to achieving her goals. She is used to being in control, but when you have zero control — and that relates to me too — with her, it is all internal. What she stood for is pointless at this place, because she’s so helpless and drained of physical, emotional and mental energy. She’s tortured by what she’s done to others and the tortures going on around her. It’s a constant repeat of pain. I didn’t want her to be one-note. What would it be like if something like that happened? Would you be completely the same? Some folks have traumatic experiences and don’t change, and some people change so much, you wonder, “Where did the person I know go?” Leo’s character has to think five steps ahead of everyone else. He’s a savior, while as the rest of us are so messed up we don’t realize we need to be saved.

I was surprised all the patients were women and this man has to save them.

Nam: And it is a man that was torturing all these women. You could read it as that, but when I was talking with Jess Varley [the director of the “Outpost 37” segments] and Joe Sill [director of “Robophobia”] and Maritte, they found a way to balance that out by including creators and filmmakers that were female and understood from that lens not to only make it a journey of victimhood, so I hope it doesn’t come across as that.

Leonardo, we didn’t get to talk about your fears earlier. I’m afraid you can’t escape this question. What are your fears?

Nam: I have a fear of drowning, but it’s dissipating more and more. I surf, and it does cross my mind. I’m a good swimmer, but the ocean is so vast. We don’t know how deep it is. That freaks me out a bit. And bad food. What creeps me out is Cornish hen. The fact that it’s small.

You know about ortolans, right? These tiny birds are drowned in liquor and you eat them whole, with a napkin over your head.

Nam: A napkin over your head?

Yes, there are several theories about that. One is that you don’t want people see you eating this. Another is so you can privately spit the bones out.

Nam: That is SO GROSS!

I don’t like rats or mice. Snakes are fine. But vermin . . . NO!

Nam: I had mice in my house, and one ran over my foot and I f*ckin’ yelled so loudly! I was ready to get it, and it did that, and I lost it! And the rats in New York. I opened my door to throw out my trash once and it was like this whole circus, they were juggling balls!

“Phobias” is available on demand and digital beginning Friday, March 19.

“Persona” argues convincingly that it’s time to cancel personality tests

There is one jarring, infuriating scene in “Persona: The Dark Truth Behind Personality Tests” that distills the entire film. The documentarians are interviewing a businessman whose company creates personality tests for employers to use in hiring decisions. By this point, the filmmakers have already established that these tests are predominantly designed by middle-aged, privileged white males and are (as a disability justice advocate puts it) “by and large constructed to be ableist, to be racist, to be sexist and to be classist.” The businessman is asked about the people who suffer from said discrimination as a result of personality testing.

He smirks. “I would say you may have applied for the wrong job,” he says, smugness oozing from his every pore. “Who wants a job you’re going to hate?”

Set aside, for a moment, that many of those denied jobs because they “failed” personality tests aren’t pleasure-cruising, but need employment to survive. This clip, which I hope goes viral, perfectly captures the attitude through which oppression is rationalized. If you suffer under the status quo, it’s because you’re doing something wrong, or maybe because there is something inherently wrong with you. The people at the top know best. After all, why else would they be at the top? And if they decide that you’re a misfit, figure out how to stop being such a square peg in their world of round holes. Failing that, you should accept that happiness is for other people.

I’ve written before about my struggles in the workplace as an autistic person, and don’t want to repeat those stories here. Suffice to say that “Persona,” a new documentary on HBO Max that explores the Myers-Briggs and (to a lesser extent) Big Five personality tests, brought back a lot of workplace memories that I’ve tried very hard to suppress. To the best of my knowledge, I was never denied a job because I failed a personality test. I have lost many opportunities and jobs, however, because of the workplace attitudes encapsulated by those tests and the culture that engenders them.

This was what I brought to the experience of seeing “Persona,” which was directed by Tim Travers Hawkins (perhaps best known for the 2019 documentary about Chelsea Manning, “XY Chelsea”). If you haven’t experienced workplace discrimination but use personality tests for online dating, you might bring a different perspective to the documentary. Or perhaps you are one of the tens of millions of Americans who has taken an online or real-life personality quiz, such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, and are wondering about its efficacy.

In that case, prepare to be disillusioned. As Hawkins traces the history of Myers-Briggs — which claims that there are sixteen personality types based on being introverted or extroverted, intuitive or sensing, thinking or feeling and judging or perceiving — we learn more and more about their questionable, pseudoscientific origins. Their creators, Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers, were not psychiatrists. One of them wrote a novel that promoted racist beliefs about African Americans. Did those biases leak into their metrics? Meanwhile, other personality test developers imported their own biases, particularly the assumption that women are predisposed toward being emotional. Hence, personality tests have never been conclusively proved to be absolute predictors about a person’s ability to fit into certain jobs.

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Yet the documentary is able to find many people — including one who ultimately committed suicide — who were regularly screened out as unemployable because of Myers-Briggs or similar personality tests used by companies. “Persona” is strongest, both as a film and as an indictment, when it juxtaposes their stories with the sordid history of the tests themselves. It is extraordinarily persuasive in demonstrating that, like eugenics and phrenology before it, personality tests are deliberately and/or unwittingly used by people who benefit from systems of oppression to both justify and maintain their privileges. Because powerful people dare not explicitly state that they wish to discriminate, they need to come up with new ways to argue that marginalized people are genuinely “not a good fit.” Personality tests are one way in which they do that.

While I was enthralled by “Persona,” I will add that it is held back by its lack of focus. The documentary has too many diversions into personality test-related subjects that don’t involve discrimination: YouTube personalities who develop their brand based on their Myers-Briggs type, for example, or people explaining that such tests are harmless as long as you don’t take them too seriously (which, well, duh). By meandering from its central theme so often, “Persona” winds up being bogged down by pacing issues. Even worse, it means that the documentary winds up underserving the deeper issues of racism, sexism, ableism and classism that comprise the core phenomena at work in how personality tests have been used for sinister reasons.

Nevertheless, “Persona” will hopefully serve as a clarion call for those who make hiring decisions based on personality tests. As I interpreted it, the movie’s moral is that personality tests like Myers-Briggs shouldn’t be considered any more revealing than a Buzzfeed quiz asking which Marvel superhero you are. But personality tests need to stop being used to determine people’s destinies. The mind is a complex and beautiful thing. It debases all of us when it is reduced to a few letters and numbers — and, worse, perpetuates injustice when used on a systemic level.

A Midwest pipeline promises to return carbon dioxide to the ground

Most pipelines that snake around the United States carry carbon that was buried underground for millions of years and then dug up, destined to be burned in a combustion engine or furnace or boiler and emitted into the atmosphere. But a new pipeline that could soon wind through Iowa, Minnesota, and the Dakotas promises to do the opposite.

Summit Carbon Solutions, a spinoff of an Iowa-based agricultural company, recently announced it is developing a $2 billion pipeline project that will carry carbon dioxide captured from ethanol refineries scattered across the Midwest to a site in North Dakota where it will be pumped thousands of feet underground. The CO2 will start in the atmosphere, where it is heating up the planet, and get sucked down to earth by stalks of corn. While some of it will be turned into ethanol and blended into gasoline, the rest will be returned to the earth’s crust and — if all goes according to plan — buried forever.

If it gets built, the project will prove a new business model for carbon capture in the biofuels industry and expand the country’s network of carbon dioxide pipelines, infrastructure that some researchers and climate advocates say is necessary to bring U.S. emissions down to zero.

Summit told Grist it already has agreements with enough biorefineries — a general term for facilities that create fuel out of organic material — to sequester 5 million tons of CO2 per year once all of the components of the project are up and running, which it expects to be in 2024. Its goal is to sign on additional partners, including other types of carbon-emitting facilities like fertilizer producers and power plants, to capture and store at least 10 million tons of CO2, which is about the amount that the state of Vermont emits in a year.

“With the inbound interest we’ve received from biorefineries and other industrial CO2 emitters since our project announcement, it’s likely that we may even exceed” 10 million tons a year, said Bruce Rastetter, CEO of Summit Agricultural Group, in an email.

* * *

Carbon capture and storage, or CCS, is often criticized for being too expensive to be worthwhile, but the process looks fairly different depending on where the carbon is being captured. Fossil fuel–fired power plants emit a hodgepodge of gases, making it difficult and energy-intensive to build a capture system that can separate out the CO2. But at a biorefinery where corn or another form of biomass is fermented into ethanol, the process emits a pure stream of CO2, with just a little water vapor mixed in.

“There’s no energy required for capture” at biorefineries, said Daniel Sanchez, an engineer and energy systems analyst at the University of California, Berkeley, explaining that only a small amount was needed to compress and dehydrate the gas. That’s “the reason why this works so well, why it’s cheap, and why everyone wants to do it,” he said.

Still, very few do. Two biofuel plants in Kansas capture their CO2 and sell it to oil companies that pipe it out to aging oil fields and pump it underground to coax up additional oil — a process known as “enhanced oil recovery.” Only one biorefinery buries its CO2 underground solely for the sake of taking it out of the atmosphere, and the project was enabled by substantial financial support from the Department of Energy. That plant, located in Decatur, Illinois, and owned by Archer Daniels Midland, has the capacity to capture 1 million tons of CO2 per year and bury it nearby. (As of 2019 the project was only capturing and storing about half that amount, which the company said was due to reduced ethanol production.)

Though it isn’t hard to capture at a biorefinery, until recently, captured CO2 had little worth. But now the economic landscape is changing. Summit’s project was made possible by a confluence of factors. First, in 2018, Congress increased the value of the 45Q tax credit, which will eventually pay up to $50 for every ton of carbon a facility captures and stores underground, and also made it easier to use. The final rules for the enhanced credit were released in January.

A second development came in 2019 when California’s Air Resources Board adopted a new carbon capture and storage protocol for its low-carbon fuel standard. That means ethanol facilities that use CCS to lower the carbon intensity of their fuel can generate tradable credits when they sell it in California. Producers of dirtier fuels that don’t meet California’s standards have to buy those credits to comply. Recently, the credits have been selling for around $200 per ton of carbon. Summit told Grist it will earn revenue through the 45Q tax credit in addition to sharing the value of the California fuel standard credits with its partner biorefineries. The company also expects similar low-carbon fuel markets to develop in other parts of North America and around the world, potentially creating more demand for Summit’s partner refineries.

The third factor is that North Dakota is one of two states that the Environmental Protection Agency recently granted authority over regulating Class VI Underground Injection wells — the category of wells developed specifically for geologic sequestration of CO2 — making the permitting process much easier for companies that want to inject carbon underground. Unlike Iowa, Minnesota, or South Dakota, most of North Dakota sits atop the right geological conditions for CO2 storage, called deep saline formations.

Summit’s project is designed to connect biorefineries dotting the midwest to saline formations in North Dakota.Dane McFarlane and Elizabeth Abramson / / Great Plains Institute

Brad Crabtree of the Great Plains Institute, an energy nonprofit that advocates for policies that support scaling up carbon capture and storage, said that the project not only benefits the climate but also creates a significant economic opportunity in the region. “I think it’s groundbreaking in terms of its potential to transform perspectives and attitudes about what is possible in terms of addressing climate change and managing CO2,” he said.

* * *

Growing crops for fuel has always been controversial, as it risks taking land away from food production, and cropland is sometimes created by razing forests and other important habitats. Growing corn, in particular, requires a lot of fertilizer, which can run off into nearby waters and create harmful algal blooms. But if you assess corn ethanol solely on the basis of greenhouse gas emissions, past studies have found that the average CO2 emissions from the full life cycle of producing and burning ethanol are about 20 percent lower than gasoline. A more recent study conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture asserts that ethanol production has become more efficient and currently emits, on average, 40 percent less CO2 than gasoline. (Ethanol doesn’t fully replace gasoline — it is typically blended into gas at about 10 percent.)

Jeremy Martin, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said that even as the world moves quickly to switch to electric vehicles, a full phase-out of gas-powered cars is going to take decades. It will take even longer to find zero-emissions solutions for airplanes and cargo ships, which are expected to increasingly adopt lower-carbon fuels made from biomass or hydrogen, in the meantime. “We’re going to continue to use quite a bit of ethanol for quite a few years to come,” he said. “We need to both do what we can to decarbonize all the fuels we’re using and we need to move to the cleanest fuels that we can at the same time.”

Sanchez said that adding CCS to the fermentation process, as Summit is doing, will probably reduce the carbon intensity of the ethanol by 30 to 40 percent. But there are other ways it can become cleaner still. Most biorefineries burn fossil fuels to create heat for the fermentation process, and capturing the emissions from that step or burning biomass instead of fossil fuels — or, better yet, both — would lower ethanol’s carbon intensity further. Fertilizer plants produce a lot of emissions, and installing CCS technology there would also improve the life-cycle emissions for ethanol — since, remember, growing corn for ethanol requires fertilizer. In the long term, replacing corn with other crops that don’t require as many resources to grow, like switchgrass, would also substantially improve ethanol’s carbon footprint. Sanchez is optimistic that mechanisms like California’s low-carbon fuel standard will continue to push the industry toward these cleaner options.

Beyond lowering the emissions associated with ethanol, Summit’s pipeline project is a step toward building the infrastructure that some researchers and climate advocates say is necessary to bring U.S. emissions down to zero.

In a report released last year that looked at how the U.S. could achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, Princeton researchers found that success depends on a new national network of CO2 pipelines — potentially 70,000 miles worth. They found that even if the U.S. electrifies vehicles and buildings, and replaces almost all fossil fuel electricity with renewables, we’ll likely need to capture CO2 from cement production (which can’t yet be electrified), from gas-fired power plants (if any remain), from biofuels and hydrogen production, and maybe even from machines that can suck carbon directly out of the air — and transport it to a place where it can be used or sequestered underground.

The new secretary of energy, Jennifer Granholm, seems to agree. “Obviously, it’s still nascent technology in capturing CO2 emissions, but we’ve got to do it on all types of fuel, if we’re going to get to net-zero,” she said in a recent interview with E&E News. “The CO2 pipelines that will be necessary for it could put lots of people to work, so I think it’s a big job opportunity, I think it’s a big carbon reduction opportunity, and we’re going to be bullish about it.”

Some climate advocates reject carbon capture on the basis that it extends a lifeline to carbon-intensive industries and technologies that should be phased out as quickly as possible. And carbon capture does not solve the air and water pollution issues associated with any of the industrial processes it has been proposed for. But when it comes to finding solutions for carbon emissions, Crabtree said that it’s irresponsible to take options off the table.

He stressed that we are trying to decarbonize in a political context, where we need many stakeholders, including companies and workers, to support climate policy. He said carbon capture allows existing facilities that pay high-wage jobs to manage their emissions. “We have to be putting options on the table or we will not get to zero anywhere near in time,” he said.

Jared Kushner breaks his silence to offer Joe Biden unsolicited advice, gets lampooned on Twitter

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed published on Sunday, Jared Kushner praised President Biden’s diplomatic posture toward Iran. Twitter, however, was not having any of it.

In the column, Kushner glossed through the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict and lauded Biden’s effort to “call Iran’s bluff.”

“While many were troubled by the Biden team’s opening offer to work with Europe and rejoin the Iran deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action,” Kushner, a former Trump White House senior adviser, wrote. “I saw it as a smart diplomatic move.”

During the Trump administration, which formally withdrew the U.S. from the Iran deal in 2018, Kushner led peace talks with the Middle East. He credited Trump in his column with laying the groundwork that could help Biden temper relations between the U.S. and Iran.

“This negotiation is high-stakes and, thanks to his policies, America holds a strong hand. Iran is feigning strength, but its economic situation is dire and it has no ability to sustain conflict or survive indefinitely under current sanctions.”

Many on Twitter had a bone to pick with Kushner’s claim that the Arab-Israeli is at all waning. As Kushner put it: “We are witnessing the last vestiges of what has been known as the Arab-Israeli conflict.

White House reporter for The Washington Post Annie Linskey underlined the sentence and tweeted, “Jared Kushner makes a very big claim in the @wsj this morning.”

“Writing in today’s Wall Street Journal,” echoed former New York Times reporter Steven Greenhouse, “Jared Kushner evidently forgets that the Palestinians exist and that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is very much alive.

Others took issue with his trivialization of the conflict. Wrote Kushner, “The Abraham Accords exposed the conflict as nothing more than a real-estate dispute between Israelis and Palestinians that need not hold up Israel’s relations with the broader Arab world.”

Founder of Crooked Media Tommy Vietor tweeted, “Jared Kushner calls negotiations over the creation of a Palestinian state a “real-estate dispute” and yet amazingly that still isn’t the most arrogant, naive part of his high school essay-turned oped in today’s WSJ.”

CNN White House correspondent Jeremy Diamond chimed in: “As [Kushner] touts the real progress achieved by the Abraham Accords, Jared Kushner boils down the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as ‘nothing more than a real-estate dispute between Israelis and Palestinians,’ which is pretty remarkable & insulting.”

Democratic digital activist Hawaii Delilah lambasted Kushner for assuming a role as a de facto advisor for Biden. “Jared Kushner thinks he can give foreign policy advice to President Joe Biden and his expert foreign policy team, including Sec of State Blinken,” she tweeted, “He says ‘if the Biden admin is smart.’ The arrogance of this little shit.”

Another user joined in: “Kushner is suddenly an elder statesman foreign policy expert attempting to gain cred after all the Saudi/UAE grifting involving stealth financial deals and arms sales to the House of Saud? I’m not fooled. @WSJ.”

Florida Republicans want to stop rising seas — not climate change

Before it was pumped, leveed, and paved, south Florida looked like a network of spongy wetlands. Over the course of about a century, those damp lowlands were transformed into a paradise for more than 9 million people, complete with a bustling tourism industry and trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure. Now, the flattest state in the union is uniquely threatened by sea-level rise: the lower third of the state could be submerged in just a few generations. The ocean is threatening to turn paved paradise back into a sponge.

After years of dragging their feet, Republican lawmakers in the state are trying to prevent that from happening — but they still aren’t talking about the most necessary solutions to the problem.

Last week, Republican state legislators in Florida announced a suite of measures intended to save the Sunshine State from rising seas. The central plank of the plan, which is widely expected to become law, will direct $100 million per year over the next two years toward protections against sea-level rise and flooding. As a result, homeowners who pay to raise their houses higher off the ground will get a tax break. Local governments will get funding to come up with targeted strategies to deal with impending rise. The Florida government, in partnership with the University of South Florida, will establish a Flood Hub for Applied Research, which will exclusively focus on the state’s exposure to flooding and how to reduce those risks.

Carlos Curbelo, a Republican and former U.S. representative for south Florida, told Grist that the $100 million per year figure might seem small from a federal perspective, where funding for climate adaptation usually comes in billion dollar increments, but it’s a significant investment at the state level. “The fact that it’s being championed by Republicans makes it even more noteworthy,” he said. “I’ve always believed that the bipartisan solution to climate change will be born in Florida.”

It’s not often that Republican state senators and representatives introduce legislation that addresses the effects of climate change. While blue states rushed to fill the climate action void left by the Trump administration over the past four years, red states pulled in the opposite direction: passing laws to undermine climate science, shore up coal and other polluting sources of energy, and withdraw from regional cap-and-trade agreements. Republicans in Oregon literally fled the state to avoid voting on a carbon pricing bill.

The same story has largely played out in Florida, where former Governor Rick Scott, who served between 2011 and 2019, stifled climate science and even banned environmental regulators from using the term “climate change.” But that’s starting to change, in no small part because Florida doesn’t have the luxury of ignoring climate change anymore.

Last summer, the state’s current Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, signed Florida’s first climate-related law ever, SB 178, into law. It prohibits the spending of tax dollars on projects in coastal zones that have not taken rising sea levels into account. The new suite of measures builds on that first foray into climate change mitigation.

“Coming out of Governor Scott’s legacy, this is better than nothing,” Yoca Arditi-Rocha, executive director of the nonprofit, Florida-based CLEO Institute, told Grist. “It’s a good first step.” But Arditi-Rocha pointed out that a bill to counteract sea-level rise is not the same as a bill that addresses the root causes of climate change. “We’re at the frontlines of the climate crisis, and flooding is not the only issue we’re experiencing,” Arditi-Rocha said, citing extreme weather, algal blooms, and rising temperatures as other consequences of planetary warming in Florida.

Preston Robertson, president and CEO of the Florida Wildlife Federation, told Grist that the bills are a Band-Aid solution to the state’s problems. “We need to try to stem rising seas at the source, which is to decrease these power sources that create greenhouse gases,” he said, “and that’s not in any of these bills.”

The fact that the bills don’t direct any funding or attention to managed retreat — the methodical and coordinated movement of people away from risks (in this case, flooding) — is even more concerning. Even if Florida’s state legislators were able to pass a comprehensive plan to address emissions, some sea-level rise is already baked in. At some point not that far in the future, south Florida will be covered in water. People will have to move elsewhere before that happens. But neither political party in Florida — or at the federal level, for that matter — has made any real effort to confront that reality, perhaps because the thought of retreating from sea-level rise has implications that are too grim to bear.

“How in the world do you do that when there are trillions of dollars in property just in Miami-Dade alone?” Robertson asked. “It’s almost impossible to get your mind around the fact that if the seas keep rising, those residences and commercial structures are going to become uninhabitable.”

Curbelo said that managed retreat is still a taboo topic in his state. “I think both parties want to avoid that issue for as long as possible,” he said. “It is a bipartisan issue in the sense that no party really wants to talk about it.”

Communities on the front lines of sea-level rise don’t have the luxury of avoiding the issue. In 2019, local officials in the Florida Keys informed residents that they will not be able to raise every street above flood lines. It “sent shock waves” through communities in the Keys, Curbelo said. Soon, those residents will have to move elsewhere. But there are still a thousand open-ended questions about how that will work. “Where do they go, into the Everglades?” Robertson said. “I have no answer for that.” The sooner leaders help them figure it out, the less painful retreat will be.

“The Talk” goes on brief hiatus following Sharon Osbourne’s meltdown about Piers Morgan

“The Talk” is cancelling its live shows for Monday and Tuesday following Sharon Osbourne’s meltdown about Piers Morgan, Variety reports.

The news comes after CBS announced that it would be launching a probe into last Wednesday’s episode, during which Osbourne defended her friend and former ITV commentator Piers Morgan’s assertion that he did not believe Meghan Markle actually struggled with suicidal thoughts, and went on to verbally attack her co-host Sheryl Underwood, who is Black.

“We are committed to a diverse, inclusive and respectful workplace. All matters related to the Wednesday episode of ‘The Talk’ are currently under internal review,” the network said in its earlier statement.

Osbourne came under fire initially when she tweeted “@piersmorgan I am with you. I stand by you. People forget that you’re paid for your opinion and that you’re just speaking your truth.” Twitter users began responding that Osbourne herself was racist for aligning herself with Morgan, who said that he did not believe Meghan’s account that she had asked a senior royal about seeking inpatient care, but was rebuffed because “it wouldn’t be good for the institution.”

“Who did you go to? What did they say to you? I’m sorry, I don’t believe a word she said, Meghan Markle,” Morgan said on an episode of “Good Morning Britain.” “I wouldn’t believe it if she read me a weather report.”

Osbourne chose to address this during last week’s episode of “The View.”

As Salon’s Melanie McFarland wrote, Osbourne seemed calm at first. “I feel even like I’m about to be put in the electric chair because I have a friend who many people think is a racist. So that makes me a racist,” she opines. “And for me, at 68 years of age, to have to turn around and say, ‘I ain’t racist.’ What’s it got to do with me?”

She continues: “OK? How can I be racist about anybody? How can I be racist about anybody or anything in my life? How can I?”

Osbourne went on to angrily demand that Underwood educate her about why Morgan’s statements were racist.

“I will ask you again, Sheryl,” Osbourne raged. “I’ve been asking you during the break. I am asking you again — and don’t try and cry because if anyone should be crying, it should be me — this is the situation. You tell me where you have heard him say — educate me, tell me – when you have heard him say racist things. Educate me! Tell me!”

Osbourne eventually apologized for her behavior during the segment, tweeting a statement that read, in part, “I am truly sorry. I panicked, felt blindsided, got defensive & allowed my fear & horror of being accused of being racist take over.”

However, when Osbourne spoke with Variety on Saturday, she said she blamed the network for the situation, saying that she wasn’t prepared to discuss the racism allegations.

“I was blindsided, totally blindsided by the whole situation,” she said. “In my 11 years, this was the first time I was not involved with the planning of the segment.”

Per the publication, the current plan is to return to filming on Wednesday, but “The Talk” producers will evaluate and see where they are before moving forward.

The gender gap in economics is huge — it’s even worse than tech

There is no shortage of disciplines and industries rife with sexism. The STEM fields – science, technology, engineering and mathematics – are particularly well known for their misogynistic cultures.

But I believe, based on my personal experience, the experiences of my fellow female economists and hard data, that there’s a strong case to be made that economics is the worst academic field in which to be a woman.

And the consequences of this aren’t felt only by the women who work in the field and must endure sexist policies and hostile behavior. Government policies would likely look very different were more women involved in drafting them.

The numbers don’t lie

Most people realize that women are underrepresented in STEM fields. But even though women are actually less well represented in economics, there seems to be little awareness of how bad things are in that field – and how slowly they’re changing.

The field of economics is dominated by men, in terms of both faculty and students, with disproportionately few women and members of historically underrepresented racial and ethnic minority groups, relative to the overall population and to other academic disciplines.

By rank, women represent fewer than 15% of full professors in economics departments and 31% of faculty at the assistant level. Altogether, just 22% of tenured and tenure-track faculty in economics are women, according to a survey the American Economic Association conducted last year.

By many measures, the gender gap in economics is the largest of any academic discipline. For example, women received about 30% of doctorate and bachelor degrees in economics in 2014 – the same as in 1995 – compared with 45% to 60% of degrees in business, humanities and the STEM fields. That’s the latest year for which comparable figures are available.

Nationwide, there are about three men for every woman majoring in economics, and this ratio has not changed for more than 20 years. Women are even underrepresented in economics textbooks, in both real-life and imagined examples.

Both the tech sector and the film industry committee that hands out Academy Awards – two groups called out in recent years for their lack of diversity – have better representation than the field of economics.

A lack of role models and sexism

It may seem strange that the field of economics would have such a gaping gender gap when one of the most powerful economists in the world, Janet Yellen, is a woman. She’s currently the U.S. treasury secretary and was chair of the Federal Reserve from 2014 to 2018.

But she is among the exceptions.

Women are notoriously underrepresented at the top of the economics field. Just eight of the 140 Fed presidents appointed since 1914 have been women, as are barely a fifth of current members of the National Bureau of Economic Research – one of the most influential economic policy think tanks in the U.S.

This can also been seen in how few economic-related awards are given to women, including just two Nobel Prizes in the field since 1969.

This lack of role models for female students interested in the field of economics is one of the reasons that fewer women study economics in college or graduate school.

However, I believe the biggest reason for the gender gap is the widespread sexism in economics departments, which has been well reported and documented. For example, a 2019 American Economic Association survey, which drew 9,000 responses from current and former members, found that nearly half of women reported that they had been discriminated against on the basis of sex or didn’t speak at conferences and have kept away from social events to avoid possible harassment and disrespectful treatment.

A team of researchers recently tried to quantify just how much sexism women face when presenting papers and research data to their peers. They found that women are not only asked more questions during their presentations than men but that these queries were more likely to be patronizing or hostile – something that I and many of my female peers have firsthand experience with.

And a 2018 study of posts on a popular economics jobs website found that nine of the top 10 words predictive of a post about a woman contained explicit sexual references. It also found that posts about women contained 43% fewer academic or professional terms and were 192% more likely to contain terms related to personal information or physical attributes.

But despite this evidence of sexism within the field, what is surprising to me is how many male economists don’t seem to think that gender-based hostility has any effect on the underrepresentation of women in the profession or that it even exists.

Recently, I mentored an economics student who was at a different university studying gender discrimination in our profession. She came to me because she was unable to find anyone in her all-male economics department willing to advise her. She said she was told that such discrimination doesn’t really exist in the field so it would be hard to do research on the topic.

Most of my female peers and I have experienced similar gaslighting – told that we are too sensitive, overreacting or taking it too personally when we brought up the issue.

Economics’ diversity problem

Achieving more gender and other kinds of diversity in economics isn’t just about political correctness. Diversity leads to better results and policies by altering group dynamics and decision-making.

Decades of research by organizational scientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists and demographers show that being around people who are different from ourselves – and not just by gender, but by race, class, ethnicity and sexual orientation – makes people more creative, diligent and hard-working.

And the economics profession doesn’t just have a gender problem. It has a terrible track record on race, too. While Black people make up about 13% of the U.S. population, they make up less than 3% of economic doctoral graduates, 2% of full professors and less than 1% of the staff at the Fed in Washington.

This lack of gender and racial diversity has consequences for policy. In terms of gender, for example, women economists are much more likely to believe that regulations in the U.S. are not excessive, that the distribution of income should be made more equal and that job opportunities are not the same for men and women, while policies over the last few decades have generally favored opposing objectives.

If the ultimate goal of economic research is to develop and communicate lasting insights, this evidence suggests that the value and impact of the economics profession is not only failing women in economics, it is failing everyone.

Veronika Dolar, Assistant Professor of Economics, SUNY Old Westbury

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

Trump’s still facing “the big iceberg” of legal threats even after Cy Vance’s retirement

Former president Donald Trump is embroiled in numerous lawsuits and criminal investigations since leaving the White House, and a legal analyst identified “the big iceberg in front of him.”

NBC News reporter Tom Winter told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that Trump faces legal jeopardy in a number of cases — which may be heating up in Manhattan, where district attorney Cy Vance Jr. has announced he won’t seek another term, leading some to believe he’ll wrap up his investigation before leaving office.

“I think long term, are there any particular concerns in Florida with any properties there, will that get swept up in the Manhattan district attorney’s office or the attorney general, Letitia James, as you suggested, she is looking at this,” Winter said. “We know her investigation from court filings and trying to get Eric Trump to testify, or sit for a deposition, rather, that that investigation also goes coast to coast. Right now that’s believed to be civil in nature. She might have to refer out any criminal elements to local district attorneys.”

“We are talking about Cy Vance with his own case anyway,” he added. “We’ll have to see where the cases go. He faces obviously civil litigation concerns with respect to allegations made by women in his past. That’s a separate matter. The big iceberg in front of him is definitely this investigation by Manhattan district attorney Cy Vance.”

Joe Biden is boring — and it’s driving the media crazy

After years of relentless reality show antics caused by Donald Trump, the latest word in the cable news discourse is that President Joe Biden is boring. He spends all his time doing policy work and his press engagement is a total snoozefest, with nary a single unhinged rant in front of buzzing helicopter blades. And the mainstream press is starting to get annoyed by it.

Last week, the Washington Post editorial board complained, “Avoiding news conferences must not become a regular habit for Mr. Biden,” even while grumpily admitting that, unlike Trump, Biden’s White House has daily press briefings that “are informative, not forums for White House lackeys to attack journalists.” Over the weekend, the clamor for press conferences featuring Biden himself grew louder, with members of the White House press corps such as Jonathan Karl of ABC News admitting that “reporters like press conferences and will always demand them” while insisting “press conferences are for the public’s benefit.” Peter Baker of the New York Times then picked up the baton:

At this point in office, Trump had given five news conferences. Obama had given two, George W. Bush three and Clinton five. Biden so far has given zero. @farhip https://t.co/h4HVeyd8kx

— Peter Baker (@peterbakernyt) March 13, 2021

It all sounds very noble until one remembers that the press is comparing Biden disfavorably to Trump, who literally incited an insurrection only two months ago, and is benefiting handsomely from mainstream media worried more about counting press conferences than about the ongoing national instability caused by an increasingly radical right.

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Trump loved making himself available to the press, due to his severe personality disorder driving him to thrive on attention and conflict. No one can honestly say that led to anywhere good. Perhaps that’s why on social media there was a great deal of skepticism of demands for more press conferences featuring Biden instead of his wholly competent (yet also boring) press secretary, Jen Psaki. Many folks — including many journalists — appeared to believe that the press is less interested in asking Biden substantive questions, and more interested in trying to corner him with fatuous bait about Dr. Seuss or Mr. Potato Head or “cancel culture” or whatever other trollish inanities are being favored by the Fox News crowd these days.

A challenge for every reporter saying Biden should hold a press conf: After he does hold one, during which at least half the questions will inevitably be about something inane, or asking Biden to play pundit, criticize the questioner for wasting time instead of doing journalism

— Isaac Chotiner (@IChotiner) March 14, 2021

And sure enough, Mike Allen of Axios proved the point by complaining on CNN that Biden was keeping his nose out of the ongoing controversy around Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York, who has been accused of sexual harassment by multiple women.

Mike Allen says Cuomo situation is becoming a crisis for …. Joe Biden. Says it’s “unsustainable” for Biden not to demand Cuomo resign. https://t.co/VUJfNZvSG5 #axiosam

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) March 14, 2021

To be certain, sexual harassment is a serious issue. However, New York Democrats are doing just fine calling for Cuomo’s resignation on their own. It’s clear that Allen is less interested in Biden’s opinion out of a noble desire to end the scourge of sexual harassment and more out of a salacious desire to stoke intra-party conflict among Democrats. It’s worth remembering that reporters let Republicans slide for years in their support for Trump, who is on tape bragging about sexual assault, mostly because it was understood that Republicans would stay united behind the belief that sexual abuse is no big deal. As media critic Eric Boehlert noted in the Monday edition of his newsletter, the press is “creating conflict and controversy where none exists,” to the point of absurdity with stories about Biden like when “the New York Times dinged him for being out of touch with voters because of the expensive watch he wears, and the exercise bicycle he uses” while workers were still cleaning up damage to the Capitol from Trump’s insurrection.

One person who very much agrees with the mainstream journalists complaining about Biden’s terminal boringness is Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tx., who shared a meme on Twitter over the weekend describing the president as “boring but radical.” Radical, of course, is the conservative code word for any Democratic policy that is actually enacted, no matter how mainstream or uncontroversial. Which are two words that perfectly encapsulate Biden’s recently passed American Rescue Plan, which polls show ranges from 61% to nearly 70% approval with voters. But mostly this was Cruz, like the mainstream journalists he claims to oppose so much, trying to bait Biden into being a little less of a boring bureaucrat.

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Cruz, of course, is very much the opposite of Biden. He loves trolling for attention and getting into petty culture war fights, but doesn’t so much like doing the actual job of governing, which is why he didn’t think twice about abandoning Texas for a Cancun vacation during the winter storm crisis last month. Cruz tried to slot the Cancun story into the “inane bullshit” category, even though there were legitimate policy concerns around his global warming denialism and his support of deregulation, which contributed to the crisis. But his whining about Biden being “boring” exposed the reality, which is that Cruz — and Republicans in general — are the ones who benefit when the media focuses on silly non-controversies, instead of on important-but-boring policy concerns.

Republicans know full well they lose any debate that’s focused on actual policy, which is why the party didn’t even bother to have a platform during the 2020 election. So Republicans are desperate to make the topic du jour about anything but policy, grasping desperately at Potato Heads and Dr. Seuss, so they don’t have to talk about their opposition to efforts to end the pandemic and restore the American economy.

Biden’s refusal to take the bait helps cut off oxygen to such bullshit.

The Dr. Seuss story, for instance, is already running out of steam because Biden isn’t on hand to give quotes for Fox News to pretend to be offended by. Republicans are nothing but trolls these days. There are plenty of people on hand who can handle the fake outrage about children’s toys and “cancel culture” without wasting Biden’s time. For his purpose, Biden’s smartest move when dealing with trolls is not to feed them.

To be certain, the idea that the president should do more press conferences sounds good and reasonable in the abstract. In our current climate, however, there’s a serious need for everyone — politicians, pundits, journalists, even news consumers — to detox after years of Trump’s roller coaster of manufactured drama.

Trump turned governing into a reality TV show akin to “The Apprentice.” Turning it back into a real government may just depend on Biden’s ability to stop feeding the beast. There is no reason to think Biden will hold out on press conferences forever, but by keeping them lean and mean, he can hopefully train the press to focus on issues that matter instead of wasting everyone’s time with “gotchas” and right wing-generated nonsense.

Up to 25% of House members refuse COVID shots; Fauci warns of “disturbing” GOP vaccine avoidance

Slow acceptance of the coronavirus vaccine among lawmakers is delaying plans for the House of Representatives to return to a full legislative session, allowing members like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., to stall bills that have clear majority support.

About 25% of House members have either refused to be vaccinated, are avoiding it due to medical conditions or have not reported getting one, according to a memo from the Office of Attending Physician obtained by Axios. The memo said that congressional doctors cannot make new recommendations “regarding the modification or relaxation of existing social distancing guidelines” until they understand why members have not been vaccinated.

The report did not specify which members have been most reluctant to get the vaccine but polls show that white Republicans, particularly men and Trump supporters, are far more likely to oppose the vaccine than any other group, while Democrats overwhelmingly say they want a vaccine or have already received one. Congress has had its own vaccine supply since December.

“I won’t be taking it. The survival rate is too high for me to want it,” 25-year-old freshman Rep. Madison Cawthorn, R-N.C., told Axios in December.

But the refusal has not been limited to young legislators.

“It is my choice,” 62-year-old Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo., the chairman of the Colorado Republican Party, told Fox Business in December, arguing that he was more concerned about the safety of the clinically-tested vaccine than about a highly contagious virus that has killed more than a half-million Americans in the last year. “I have the freedom to decide if I’m going to take a vaccine or not and in this case I am not going to take the vaccine.”

Some Republican lawmakers, like Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, have actively discouraged members of Congress from getting vaccinated, while conservative media pundits like Fox News host Tucker Carlson have promoted vaccine skepticism for weeks.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on Sunday that the trend was “disturbing,” expressing hopes that former President Donald Trump would encourage his fans to get a shot. Trump, despite demanding credit for the vaccine development, hid his vaccination from the public and was the only living former president not to appear in an ad campaign promoting the vaccine drive.

“How such a large proportion of a certain group of people would not want to get vaccinated merely because of political consideration, it makes absolutely no sense,” Fauci told NBC News.

Vaccine avoidance among members of Congress lawmakers has delayed a return to normal legislative sessions. Due to social distancing requirements, votes can take more than three times longer than usual, according to Axios. That has allowed lawmakers like Greene to delay the passage of bills like the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill and the Equality Act by forcing lengthy votes on procedural matters, frustrating even members of her own party.

Republicans have been adamant in pushing for a return to full sessions.

“Simply put: it’s time that we return to regular order. House Republicans are eager for the chance to reopen the People’s House, restore America’s voice in Congress and work day in and day out to address the many concerns our constituents face,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said in a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., last week.

Minority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., echoed that sentiment during a debate on the House floor last Thursday.

“Now that we have seen from reports … that roughly 75% of all members in this House have had a vaccination for COVID-19, there’s a strong desire to get back to a regular floor schedule,” he said.

But Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., responded by calling out vaccine avoidance by lawmakers.

“It would be a lot simpler if every member had been vaccinated,” he said.

A spokesperson for Hoyer told Axios that the House will continue to “conduct our business in accordance with public health guidelines and in consultation with the Office of the Attending Physician,” citing the “health and safety of members, legislative staff, journalists and House employees.”

Public health officials also worry that vaccine avoidance by Trump supporters could stall the country’s path to herd immunity. Disease experts say that between 75% and 85% of Americans need to be vaccinated to reach herd immunity but surveys have repeatedly found that Republicans plan to either refuse the vaccine or “wait and see.”

“Vaccines are our only way out of this. If we don’t have 80-plus percent of the population vaccinated before next winter, this virus is going to come back raging,” Dr. Paul Offit, who sits on the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine advisory committee, told NBC News. “What worries me is if 25% of Republicans say they won’t get vaccinated, that’s going to be hard to do.”

Paul Mango, who helped lead the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed initiative, told The Washington Post that it was “confounding” that the former president’s supporters are apparently most likely to avoid the vaccine he touted for months.

“I really don’t understand it, to tell you the truth,” he said. “To me, this was the most spectacular medical development in our lifetimes.”

Public health experts say that Trump’s attempts to downplay the pandemic poisoned the well long before vaccines became available.

“The attitude that the seriousness of COVID was being exaggerated in the media tracks well with how President Trump talked about it when he was in office,” Liz Hamel, director of the public opinion and survey research team at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told the Post. “His message ‘you shouldn’t be worried about it’, his relentless positivity, is reflected in the attitudes of many Republicans who don’t want to get the vaccine.”

Trump did not urge people to get vaccinated until his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference last month. Fauci told Fox News on Sunday that if Trump took a more active role in urging his fans to get shots, that “would make all the difference in the world.”

Fauci continued: “It’s puzzling to me. I mean, clearly Operation Warp Speed started in the Trump administration. It was very successful in getting us the vaccines we have right now. It seems like an intrinsic contradiction, the fact that you had a program that was started during his presidency and he’s not telling people to get vaccinated. I wish he would. He has such an incredible influence over people in the Republican Party. It would really be a game-changer if he did.”

“Minari” love, “Ma Rainey’s” best picture snub: 6 big takeaways from the 2021 Oscars nominations

On Monday morning, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced their 2021 Oscar nominations. In a year of really strong feature films, from “Judas and the Black Messiah” to “Promising Young Woman,” some of these Academy Award nods were expected. But the nominations also revealed several historic breakthroughs for actors and filmmakers of color — a welcome development in the wake of the 2015 #OscarsSoWhite controversy — alongside some unexpected snubs.

Here are the biggest takeaways from this year’s nominations:

The year’s most nominations went to “Mank”

David Fincher’s sharp black and white film, “Mank” — which tells the behind-the-scenes story of screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) racing to finish the first draft of the screenplay that would become “Citizen Kane” — led Oscar nominations on Monday morning with 10 nods, including best picture.

Rounding out the Best Picture nominations are “The Father,” “Judas and the Black Messiah,” ”Minari, “Nomadland,” “Promising Young Woman,” “Sound of Metal” and “The Trial of the Chicago 7.”

After the Golden Globes controversy, “Minari” finally gets the attention it deserves

As Salon reported in February, the Golden Globes’ decision to classify “Minari,” Lee Isaac Chung’s semi-autobiographical film following a Korean American family relocating from California to Arkansas in the 1980s as a “foreign language film” created controversy and a significant amount of backlash. Its actors were also snubbed in their respective categories.

“Minari” is very much an American film — one was created, produced and bankrolled by Americans — though the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the voting body behind the Globes, justified their decision to exclude it from the best motion picture, drama category because “Minari” is predominantly a Korean-language film and to be considered for the more prestigious category, film dialogue must be at least 50% English. However, in the past, films including “Babel” (winner, 2006 best motion picture, drama) and “Inglourious Basterds” (nominee, 2009 best motion picture, drama) did make it into the Globes’ best picture category despite this stipulation.

This has led many in the industry to call for an examination of how the HFPA’s rules are applied and, on a larger scale, how American filmgoers and critics categorize “foreignness” in a country that is fundamentally built on the immigrant experience.

However, “Minari” scored six Oscar nominations on Monday, several historic: it’s the first Asian American-produced, directed and cast film to be nominated for an Academy Award for best picture, and Steven Yeun is the first Asian American performer to be nominated for an Oscar for best actor. Chung received a nod for best director and Youn Yuh-jung became the first South Korean artist to be nominated for best supporting actress for her performance as the family’s grandmother.

“Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” is this year’s biggest best picture snub

The best picture category is competitive this year, stocked with films like “Minari,” “Promising Young Woman,” “Judas and the Black Messiah,” “Mank,” “Sound of Metal,” “The Father,” “The Trial of the Chicago 7” and “Nomadland.”

Conspicuously missing from the nominee list, however, was “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” the Netflix film starring Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman, based on August Wilson’s play.

Set in 1927 Chicago, tensions rise when the trailblazing Mother of the Blues, Ma Rainey (Davis), and her band gather at their recording studio. There, her ambitious trumpeter, Levee (Boseman in his final posthumous role), wants to launch his own career by modernizing Ma’s old-fashioned music.

The film was critically acclaimed, and Boseman and Davis both received nods for their performances, leading some cinephiles to wonder why it, as well as two other Black-led films, “One Night in Miami” and “Da 5 Bloods,” were excluded from the best picture nominations, especially since up to 10 films are permitted to be nominated and the academy only nominated eight.

Viola Davis made history

While it’s disappointing that “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” wasn’t nominated in the best picture category, Viola Davis was nominated for best actress for her role as Ma Rainey, officially making her the most-nominated Black actress in history. She has received four nominations so far in her career: supporting actress nods for “Doubt” and “Fences,” and best actress nominations for “The Help” and now “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” Davis won the 2017 Oscar for her performance in “Fences.”

Andra Day — who played Billie Holiday in “The People vs. Billie Holiday” — also received a best actress nod, making this year’s Oscars only the second time in Academy Award history for two Black women to compete in the category in the same year.

In a February interview with Variety, Davis said that while she was excited by the prospect of becoming the most-nominated Black actress in Oscars history, it also reflected the lack of opportunities people of color have had in the business.

“If me, going back to the Oscars four times in 2021, makes me the most nominated Black actress in history, that’s a testament to the sheer lack of material there has been out there for artists of color,” she said.

People were left wondering who the star of “Judas and the Black Messiah” is supposed to be

As Salon’s D. Watkins wrote, “‘Judas and the Black Messiah’ stars Daniel Kaluuya and LaKeith Stanfield and tells the story of Fred Hampton (Kaluuya), a young, brilliant revolutionary who unites Black activists, gang members and working-class whites with the purpose of fighting for justice, freedom, and liberation for all in the 1960s.” He was targeted by the FBI, who used Bill O’Neal (Stanfield) to infiltrate the Black Panther Party and gather intelligence on Hampton.

Typically, when two men or women co-lead a film, one is positioned as the definitive lead during awards season so that both actors have a shot at garnering respective nominations in the best and supporting categories.

In the case of “Judas and the Black Messiah,” Stanfield had been positioned as the lead; Kaluuya has already received a Golden Globe win and a BAFTA nomination for best supporting actor for his performance.

However, for the Oscars, Stanfield and Kaluuya are both nominated for best supporting actor for their roles, leaving viewers to contemplate who the star of the film was. And for fans of both actors and the film, seeing both actors nominated in the same category isn’t necessarily cause for celebration. When two performers are nominated in the same category for the same film, they can end up splitting the vote and tipping the balance to another film’s nominee.

This year’s Best Director category was historic for several reasons

For the first Oscars year in history, two women directors are up for best director. Chloé Zhao is nominated for her work on “Nomadland,” while Emerald Fennell received a nod for “Promising Young Woman.” Both films are also up for best picture. Zhao is also the first Chinese woman and the first woman of color to be nominated for the category.

Prior to Monday, only five women have ever been nominated for best director; and only one, “The Hurt Locker” director Kathryn Bigelow, has ever won the award. The other four to earn a nomination were Lina Wertmuller (“Seven Beauties”), Jane Campion (“The Piano”), Sofia Coppola (“Lost in Translation”) and Greta Gerwig (“Lady Bird”).

Lee Isaac Chung (“Minari”), David Fincher (“Mank”) and Thomas Vinterberg (“Another Round”) round out the 2021 best director nominations.

Here’s the complete list of nominations for the 2021 Oscars.

The 93rd annual Academy Awards are scheduled to air live on ABC on Sunday, April 25, from multiple locations, including the Dolby Theatre.

“A new despicable low”: GOP Sen. Ron Johnson called out for racist remarks about Capitol riot

Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis. is facing blistering backlash after admitting that he didn’t feel threatened by the pro-Trump rioters at the Capitol insurrection but would have if they had been Black Lives Matter protestors.

“Even though those thousands of people that were marching to the Capitol were trying to pressure people like me to vote the way they wanted me to vote,” Johnson said in an interview on conservative radio host Joe Pag’s show Thursday, “I knew those were people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law, and so I wasn’t concerned.”

“Now, had the tables been turned — Joe, this could get me in trouble — had the tables been turned,” he continued, “and President Trump won the election and those were tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and Antifa protesters, I might have been a little concerned.”

Five people died during the insurrection, including one police officer. Some 140 law enforcement officers were injured, and two officers died by suicide following the riot. Over 315 people have been charged in connection to the Capitol riot, and about forty have been arrested. Rioters brought a host of weapons to the rally, including guns, smoke bombs, stun guns, knives, brass knuckles, as well as other items that could be fashioned into makeshift weapons.

A large contingent of the rioters who participated in the unrest have direct connections to white supremacist hate groups, as well as extremist and paramilitary groups with histories of violence. Members of Congress had to be quickly evacuated from the Capitol building to avoid confrontations with rioters. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., feared that she would be killed.

Johnson claimed that the riot “didn’t seem like an armed insurrection,” saying “I mean ‘armed’, when you hear ‘armed’ don’t you think of firearms?”

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the largest newspaper in Wisconsin, called on Johnson to resign in an editorial responding to his comments. “Johnson must go,” it stated, “It’s obvious now that he won’t do the honorable thing and resign after violating his oath to support and defend the Constitution. By what he has shown of his character, there is no reason to believe he will keep his campaign promise to not run for a third term when this one expires.”

The senator’s remarks left some members of Congress outraged.

Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., who assisted in managing Trump’s second impeachment trial, tweeted: “I reviewed many of the videos and statements we submitted during the Impeachment trial. The mob murdered a police officer and injured 140 other officers. They would have hurt you if they got their hands on you. That’s why Senators hid that day. Remember?”

Dear Sen Ron Johnson: In case you weren’t paying attention during the Impeachment trial, we showed multiple videos of the largely white mob attacking police officers. That’s why Senators like you went into hiding. Your white skin color would not have saved you from the white mob. https://t.co/mO7maRadWl pic.twitter.com/7tqEzOU9uz

— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) March 13, 2021

In a Saturday interview on MSNBC, Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., called Johnson’s statement a “damning commentary, but certainly not surprising.”

Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., a Democrat representing Wisconsin’s 2nd District, tweeted that Johnson’s remarks were “seriously embarrassing to our state.” Wisconsin’s Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin called Johnson’s comment an example of systemic racism, comparing them to claims made earlier this week by Republican Rep. Glenn Grothman about Black Lives Matter supporters being anti-family.

As I said earlier this week, systemic racism is real. Whether it's on the House floor as we heard from a Congressman a couple of days ago, or as we hear it from the mouth of a Senator. Their words don't represent the Wisconsin I know.https://t.co/8UD1HtWS70

— Sen. Tammy Baldwin (@SenatorBaldwin) March 13, 2021

Tom Nelson, a county executive who is seeking the Democratic nomination to run against Johnson should he run for a third term, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that Johnson had reached “a new despicable low.” Milwaukee Bucks executive Alex Lasry, another potential Johnson challenger, slammed his as “a racist and is unfit to serve the people of Wisconsin.” Lasry told the Journal Sentinel that “There is no missing context here. He knew what he was saying, he knew he shouldn’t say it, but this is who he is.”

Republicans, however, have so far refused to condemn Johnson’s remarks.

Ron Johnson is a racist. He is a white nationalist sympathizer…we need to start calling these people what they are and not tiptoe around it, not look to be politically correct, not try to say there are "both sides" who need to be equally heard and debated." pic.twitter.com/mSYACdBOxq

— Kurt Bardella (@kurtbardella) March 13, 2021

Johnson has denied that his statements harbored any racial animus. He told WISN-AM later on Monday, “It has nothing to do with race. It has everything to do with riots. I completely did not anticipate that anybody could interpret what I said as racist. It’s not.”

“Remember those leftist activists, those protesters, that some of them turned into riots, a lot of them are white,” Johnson added. “So there’s no racism involved in this at all.”

To make his case, Johnson earlier cited data on the Black Lives Matter protests which have taken place since the summer of last year. “Out of 7,750 protests last summer associated with BLM and Antifa,” he said, “570 turned into violent riots that killed 25 people and caused $1-$2 billion of property damage. That’s why I would have been more concerned.”

Johnson’s office did not supply a source for the data. But a representative from the organization which appears to have produced the study, The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), said that Johnson left out key context.

“In many of these cases police took a heavy-handed approach to break up the protests, prompting clashes with demonstrators and escalating the event into violence,” said Sam Jones, senior communications manager for ACLED, “Additionally, in some cases, violent or destructive behavior may have broken out as a result of aggressive intervention by counter-demonstrators or non-state actors like militia groups, and BLM-linked demonstrations were also targeted in dozens of car-ramming attacks throughout the year. It would be inaccurate and misleading to frame all of these events as ‘BLM riots.”

ACLED’s study determined that, of the 10,600 demonstrations that swept the country from May 24 to Aug. 22, nearly 95 percent of them were entirely peaceful.

In late February, Johnson spread the erroneous conspiracy theory that outside actors, such as Antifa, infiltrated the riot and stoked violence for political reasons.

Johnson, one of Trump’s most vocal backers in the former President’s effort to overturn the election results, has not publicly expressed any intention to serve out his third term starting in 2022. His seat could make for a key target for Democrats in the upcoming Senate race.

McDonald’s Shamrock Shake is back for St. Patrick’s Day, but our easy homemade recipe has booze

Like countless Irish Americans, I find St. Patrick’s Day a real mixed pot o’ gold. On the one hand, I’m proud of my heritage and my melancholy, pugilistic people. On the other hand, is there anything about the way the holiday is celebrated in the U.S. that isn’t just . . . gross? Even as we mark our second restrained and pandemic-influenced March, the season is still a little too overwrought with green beer, public vomiting, boiled meats and Bono for my liking. Worst of all, though, are the shakes.

Growing up, I had a fraught relationship with McDonald’s famed Shamrock Shake. Who doesn’t love a once in a while item, like a Peep or a pumpkin spice latte? What sweeter words are there than “limited time only?” In my family, McDonald’s was a rare treat, and the Shamrock Shake was the rarest of all. I still have happy memories, as vivid as the green liquid in my plastic cup, of sitting in a McDonald’s booth with my cousins, our napkins flecked with French fry grease and our heads throbbing with seasonally induced brain freeze.

After all this time, can I now confess now my dark truth? Mint is disgusting. There. I said it.

Why anyone would sully an eating experience with flavors associated with tooth brushing remains a lifelong source of bafflement to me. I can grasp the branding leaps of faith that must have been involved in the creation of the famed fast-food treat: What’s Irish? Green things! What else is green? Mint! But we don’t have to forever shackle ourselves to such arbitrary and (again) disgusting restrictions.

Did you know that the original Shamrock Shake wasn’t minty at all? When the “St. Patrick’s Day Shake” (as it was first known) was introduced in the ’70s, it was more of a lemon-lime sherbet affair. It next enjoyed a decade-long run as a simple vanilla-flavored concoction embellished with green food coloring. The mint was introduced — like many other bad ideas — in the ’80s. In other words, it’s not canon, and we don’t have to be precious about it.

So why not make like St. Patrick and drive the shakes out this year? Why not make something that plucks at your nostalgia chords but actually tastes the way you want it to taste? Maybe that means vanilla extract, or maybe it means coconut ice cream. Maybe it means something slightly different.

My daughter asked me recently if Shamrock Shakes have alcohol, because, as she put it, “I just assume anything Irish does.” She had a valid point. It seemed only right to explore that, so when I made a batch of shakes this week, I spiked mine with a shot of Jameson. I did so confidently, inspired by the example of the wonderful New York bakery Baked and the famed bourbon milkshake recipe from their cookbook.

Obviously, it was incredible, because ice cream and alcohol go together like Irish people and alcohol go together. Heady with vanilla, mellow with whiskey, this shake is, as they say in the old country, feckin’ brilliant. Suddenly, this traditionally lame mid-March holiday seems a little more authentic.

***

Recipe: Boozy Shamrock-ish Shake

Inspired by McDonald’s and Baked’s Matt Lewis

Serves 2 (or 1, no judgment!)

Ingredients:

2 cups of vanilla, coconut or white chocolate ice cream
1 cup of whole milk
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract (or mint, for a truer McDonald’s vibe)
6 – 10 drops of green food coloring (less if you’re using gel)
2 shots of whiskey (optional, but darn good!)
Whipped cream

Instructions:

Add first five ingredients to blender, and blitz until well combined.
Pour into individual glasses or mason jars, and generously top with whipped cream.
Enjoy!

It’s simple to make this recipe vegan: Just swap in your favorite non-dairy ice cream and milk!

More Quick & Dirty:

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MAGA, the Proud Boys and the police: Biden’s DOJ must drain Trump’s swamp

Back in July of 2016, not long after he had clinched the nomination, Donald Trump made an important declaration. “We must maintain law and order at the highest level or we will cease to have a country, 100 percent. We will cease to have a country. I am the law and order candidate.” Lest you think he was advertising himself as a hardcore authoritarian, he set us straight by adding, “not only am I the law and order candidate, but I am also the candidate of compassion, believe it. The candidate of compassion.” That was very reassuring.

As I have discussed here many times, Trump has never had an original idea when about politics so that catchphrase, “law and order,” like all of his, came from a previous president: Richard Nixon used it in his 1968 campaign. Trump probably had no idea that it had that association but he would have been fine with it in any case. Nixon’s “law and order” theme was a thinly veiled appeal to white, conservative voters angry about the Vietnam protest movement, the social unrest in the inner cities and the counterculture that was challenging all the existing mores of bourgeois American life.

Trump was also planning to “clean up the streets,” particularly focusing on undocumented immigrants and cities with large Black populations. But he was doing something else, as well. He was openly courting the support of law enforcement as a political constituency.

While politicians often make appeals to order and express support for law enforcement, Trump’s level of blatant pandering was unusual. And it wasn’t really necessary. Police unions have been increasingly supporting Republicans over the past few decades and would have been expected to endorse Trump in any case. But Trump made it clear that he thought of law enforcement as part of his MAGA movement from the very beginning — and many of them were eager to join.

There were exceptions.

The National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives, for instance, and plenty of individual Black police officers didn’t feel the call, for obvious reasons. And some police departments strongly discouraged partisan activity, such as the wearing of red Trump hats while in uniform. But there was little question that members of law enforcement, from local precincts to the Border Patrol and ICE to some members of the FBI, were MAGA enthusiasts.

Trump had always been very pro-cop, and in particular, very pro-police violence. You will recall that one of his earliest forays into politics was the buying of the infamous full-page ad back in the 1980s entitled “Bring Back the Death Penalty, Bring Back Our Police!” He made it clear that he believed they should be allowed to take off the gloves and deliver street justice at their discretion.

What has happened to law and order, to the neighborhood cop we all trusted to safeguard our homes and families, the cop who had the power under the law to help us in times of danger, keep us safe from those who would prey on innocent lives to fulfill some distorted inner need… Let our politicians give back our police department’s power to keep us safe. Unshackle them from the constant chant of “police brutality” which every petty criminal hurls immediately at an officer who has just risked his or her life to save another’s…

He kept it up as president. In 2017, Trump even gave a speech to cheering cops in uniform and told them “please, don’t be too nice,” suggesting that when they put suspects in the back of their cruisers, they crack the heads of the handcuffed arrestee on the roof of the car.

Trump’s always had an affinity for vigilante justice as well, as long as the vigilante targeted people Trump believed needed to be dealt with harshly. During the 2016 campaign, he used to reminisce fondly about the movie “Death Wish” a 1970s revenge movie. By the summer of 2020, during the George Floyd protests, he was encouraging vigilantes. He tweeted, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” and defended a 17-year-old armed, “Blue Lives Matter” counter-protester, Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot dead two protesters and seriously wounded another in Kenosha, Wisconsin. At that same protest, police told armed militia members “we appreciate you guys, we really do.”

They were all MAGA now, Trump, the militia and cops alike. This explains why, as the New York Times reported on Sunday, some of the president’s biggest fans — the violent, far-right, neo-fascist, Proud Boys — have been repeatedly protected by the police all over the country in altercations with protesters for years.

The thugs would violently assault protesters and instead of being arrested, the cops would arrest their victims and let the Proud Boys go. According to the Times, federal law enforcement was aware of them but saw them as “street brawlers” who didn’t have a political ideology or present an organized threat. For non-ideological street brawlers, however, they seemed to enjoy “hyper-nationalist chants about immigration, Islam and Mr. Trump” and had a strange affinity for violent right-wing Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet.

The Times interviewed one Proud Boys member who is a police officer himself and Fresno police in California just suspended an officer who was featured in protest footage posted by a Proud Boys member who filmed himself raiding the Capitol. The founder of the group, Gavin McInness, is quoted saying, “I have a lot of support in the N.Y.P.D. and I very much appreciate that.” Cops in Philadelphia were observed hanging out with Proud Boys after a Mike Pence rally last year. In fact, according to their leader, Enrico Terrio, the FBI would contact them and warn them of “leftist” threats against law enforcement. Trump confidante Roger Stone has been using the Proud Boys as “bodyguards” for several years and is credited with bringing some of the leadership together. As journalist Marcy Wheeler has reported, when he stepped in to help Stone evade justice, former Attorney General Bill Barr dismissed concerns about Stone’s involvement with the Proud Boys and threats they made against a federal judge, behavior that would undoubtedly have been taken very seriously if they weren’t MAGA.

With Trump gone, President Biden’s Department of Justice, led by Merrick Garland, is finally taking these people seriously now. After all, they turned on the police themselves. You have to wonder what the rank and file police are thinking these days. Donald Trump unleashed a violent mob on the Capitol and they assaulted police at every turn. The great defender of law and order took hours to say anything and when he did all he had to offer was a weak little tweet that said “Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!” The “law and order” president later released a video telling the thugs who were beating cops over the head with flagpoles that they should go home. And then he told those violent rioters he loved them and believed they were “very special.”

When push literally came to shove, there was no doubt which side the “law and order” president was really on — and it wasn’t on the side of the police.

Legendary social scientist Robert Putnam: We may be on the cusp of a new Progressive era

Last week, the American Rescue Plan (ARP) was passed by the Democrats in Congress — without a single Republican vote — and signed into law by President Biden. The $1.9 trillion ARP includes such provisions as $1,400 relief checks for most Americans, an increase in tax credits for low and middle-income earners to a maximum of $3,600 dollars a year per child under age six, more food assistance, $300 a week in additional unemployment insurance, hundreds of billions in funds for local and state governments, help in preventing renters and homeowners from being evicted or foreclosed upon, and more money for COVID-19 vaccines and research.

Unlike previous legislation passed by the Republicans during the Trump regime (and before), the vast majority of money and other assistance in the Biden administration’s COVID-19 stimulus plan goes to poor, working class and middle-class Americans. By all reports, the vast majority of Americans will receive some form of aid from ARP.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson expands on this at Moyers on Democracy and also in her newsletter “Letters From an American”:

Unlike the previous implementations of this theory, though, Biden’s version, embodied in the American Rescue Plan, does not privilege white men (who in Lincoln and Roosevelt’s day were presumed to be family breadwinners). It moves money to low-wage earners generally, especially to women and to people of color. Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) called the child tax credit “a new lifeline to the middle class.” “Franklin Roosevelt lifted seniors out of poverty, 90 percent of them with Social Security, and with the stroke of a pen,” she said. “President Biden is going to lift millions and millions of children out of poverty in this country.”

Many of the most important provisions in the ARP are likely to remain law because programs such as increasing the child tax credit are very popular with the public.

Because they are social Darwinists and plutocrats with no care or concern for the American people, Republicans in the House and Senate unanimously opposed the ARP. Contrary to how the Republicans and broader right-wing (with the help of neoliberal corporate Democrats) have spent decades creating a narrative that “big government” is the “enemy of the people”, the ARP offers an example of how the U.S. government can respond quickly if it so chooses (and has the proper leadership): COVID survival checks have already begun to arrive in Americans’ bank accounts.

The ARP is correctly being described as the most progressive legislation since the Great Society, and Biden appears keenly aware of his unique role in history as the successor to a neofascist who attempted a coup during a pandemic and left the country teetering on the edge of a potentially irreversible calamity.

To that end, on Friday Biden invoked Lyndon B. Johnson and the legacy of the Great Society during a Rose Garden speech, saying that this historic legislation “changes the paradigm”:

For the first time in a long time, this bill puts working people in this nation first. It’s not hyperbole; it’s a fact.

For too long, it’s been the folks at the top. They’re not bad folks. A significant number of them know they shouldn’t be getting the tax breaks they had. But it put the richest Americans first, who benefited the most. And the theory was — we’ve all heard it, and especially the last 15 years. The theory was: Cut taxes, and those at the top and the benefits they get will trickle down to everyone. Well, you saw what trickle-down does. We’ve known it for a long time. But this is the first time we’ve been able, since the Johnson administration and maybe even before that, to begin to change the paradigm.

We’ve seen time and time again that that trickle-down does not work. … This time, it’s time that we build an economy that grows from the bottom up and the middle out. And this bill shows that when you do that, everybody does better. The wealthy do better. Everybody does better across the board.

What can the Democrats learn from history, to help maintain this progressive energy and momentum? How do the vast inequalities and other horrors seen in America’s Gilded Age resemble the problems we see in America today? What lessons can be learned from how progressives fought back in that earlier era? And what does that overused term, “progressive,” mean in 2021?

In an effort to answer, or at least address, these questions, I recently spoke with Robert Putnam, one of America and the world’s most distinguished and influential social scientists. Putnam is currently the Malkin Research Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University, and is a former president of the American Political Science Association and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2012, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal, the nation’s most prestigious honor for contributions to the humanities.

He is the author of 15 books including the landmark “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community” and “Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis.” Putnam’s new book, co-authored with Shaylyn Romney Garrettis, is “The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again.”

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

How are you feeling, given all of the tumultuous changes and challenges the American people have been facing with the Age of Trump and now into Biden’s presidency? We have gone from a nightmare scenario to some hope under Biden, but matters are still dire.

Given all the ups and downs of recent months — the pandemic, the economy and politics — prediction is hard, especially about the future. One can imagine many things going wrong — new virus strains, white nationalist terrorism and so on. That said, I’m feeling optimistic about where the country is headed, not merely in the short run, but even in the long run — and the long run is my main concern.

In my new book “The Upswing,” I examine parallels between the second decade of the 21st century, and a period 125 years ago which is very much like our present. I argue that we should and likely will be replicating the kinds of changes that were pursued in the Progressive Era during the first part of the 20th century. There is a phenomenon called the “I-We-I” curve, a movement from selfishness to community to selfishness. That curve is ripe for change in the United States.

Biden and the Democrats just passed a landmark COVID relief and survival bill. Given your concerns about social progress, how do you assess Biden’s presidency so far?

Biden is proving to be just what the doctor ordered for a shaken country, focused explicitly on “we,” not “I.” It’s not just his well-known empathy for people in pain, nor his equally well-known propensity to work across the aisle, but also his ability to adapt to changed political circumstances. While he tried to work with Republicans on the Hill — and polls show that the public believes he was sincere in that effort — he also proved able to act on his own when the GOP party leaders blew him off. His rising poll numbers show that he’s got most of the public, including many Republican voters, on his side.

From the Age of Trump and its many disasters to Biden’s presidency and its potential and opportunities, it feels as though America is in a world-historical moment. Who knows what happens next? How do you make sense of what could be a true turning point in history?

I have that same feeling. I also felt that way during another pivot point in American history, which was the middle of the 1960s. I went to college in the fall of 1959 and graduated from college in the spring of ’63. That was a period of time when we — the whole country, but especially college students and other young people — thought that we were going to change the world. We were going to end racism and social inequality, for example. Everybody in the world knew that big things were happening in all spheres of life. It’s an experience that is very difficult to explain and describe to someone who has not lived through such a moment.

What about backlash and right-wing reactionary politics?

When you are in a world-historical moment, some moment of great change, you do not know how it is all going to turn out at the end. That’s the nature of the thing. One is so close to the surface that they cannot get up to that 30,000-foot level and see what is happening in context, to see what is just around the corner. In the 1960s, we did not know what was going to happen next and it could have been anything. And in that case, what did in fact happen next was exactly the opposite of what we hoped. The reform movement of that period seemed to be winning, but then there was a dramatic reversal and basically bad things happened in every respect.

That was true in terms of racial justice. It was true in economic terms with Richard Nixon. Those questions of backlash are hanging over us now too.

If you could bring a Progressive-era activist through time to America today, what do you think they would see that is familiar? What would be different?

The first thing they would see would be completely familiar to them. That time traveler would see a world of great inequality. That is the world they knew in the Gilded Age. It was a world of intense political polarization like America’s present. Social relations among people, that is, their connections to their families, to the community and to religion and so on, were weakening.

That time traveler would see that is true here today. Their era was one of great narcissism or even self-centeredness. That is true in America today as well, especially given Trump’s presidency. He is the greatest narcissist of all.

And then, if our visitors from the Gilded Age were a bit more thoughtful, they would see that the strategies used during their era to fight back against inequality might work today as well.

We need a moral revival right now across issues such as racism and political polarization, and also more generally in terms of how our society treats human beings. We can learn from the Gilded Age how so many of our country’s problems require local solutions as well.

During the Gilded Age there was a great amount of experimentation with local solutions which would be piloted in different parts of the country and then shared nationally if they worked. These were called “laboratories of democracy.” Many of the solutions did not come from Washington. Then, as now, we also needed grassroots mobilization. And another echo of the past with the Progressive movement is how young people were the leaders. It will likely be young people who again lead the United States out of our current crises as well.

If you were to write a simple mission statement, what does it mean to be a progressive?

“We want to make progress.” Progressives also believe that we have the right ideas about how to solve problems. However, progressives are not exclusive in how we find solutions to problems. Other people and groups may have good solutions as well.

A mission statement for progressives right now would be: Think morally. That is the first part of the mission statement. Progressives must think about how to make changes that will improve the lot of the least well-off people in society. Progressives should also think scientifically in terms of solutions and real evidence. Do not rely on old myths or hearsay and rumors.

What do we know empirically about the impact of social capital and the “I-We-I” curve on American society today?

Children who grow up in social isolation do far worse than children who grow up in communities where the “we” is emphasized. In such communities the neighbors look out for one another. “We-ness” also positively impacts education and health and social mobility. People who grow up in areas where there is low social capital do not live as long. They also have higher mortality rates from many diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer.

How come America’s death rate from COVID is so much higher than almost every other country in the world? How does such a thing happen?

The country was at the lowest ebb of our “we-ness,” that sense of collective care and concern and identity. America was at a low point in social capital, which meant that when the pandemic hit we were more vulnerable than other countries. Trump did not cause that accidental coincidence. It was a function of low social capital and COVID happening at the same time.

What advice do you have for young progressive activists today?

Change happens because people want to make change. We are agents. We are not merely the objects of history. We are the agents of history. That’s what change-makers during the Progressive Era understood. You can make a difference, and without you society is not going to change for the better.

Do you have any advice for the Biden administration and the Democratic Party on how to keep their momentum and work to create the progressive renewal you described?

Politically, their top priority has to be the midterm elections, and the American Rescue Plan is an excellent start. Whatever else may affect the Democrats’ chances in 2022 — from Dr. Seuss to crises at the southern border to unexpected Supreme Court decisions to shenanigans in Trump’s Republican Party to voter suppression — the electoral fundamentals next year will be, a) whether the pandemic is in the rearview mirror and b) whether the economy is booming again. All the experts agree that the COVID-19 rescue plan has more or less assured those two fundamentals. I’d much rather be playing Nancy Pelosi’s hand than Mitch McConnell’s hand over the next two years.

I’m focused much more on the next two decades than the next two years. But the prospects for the long run depend on what happens in the short and medium run. I’m more optimistic today than I have ever been in my life that within my lifetime. And I’m now 80! America may once again pivot toward a “we” society — more equal, less polarized, more altruistic, less socially fragmented and more attentive to historic, structural inequalities.

Small farmers are struggling after the Texas big freeze

Carolina Mueller and her partner were starting crops ranging from onions to broccoli in their greenhouse and tending to a collection of winter crops growing at Middle Ground Farms, their small, diversified organic vegetable farm outside of Austin, when the unprecedented snowstorm and deep freeze hit last month.

All the crops they had in their fields — parsley, purple sprouting broccoli, radicchio and chard — were lost in the freeze. And because the storm overwhelmed the state’s deregulated power grid, triggering widespread blackouts, their irrigation pumps shut down, so Middle Ground Farm lost access to water.

They weren’t able to water the plant starts and lost a whole round of young plants, setting them back by weeks if not months, and likely creating gaps in production for their wholesale clients and the community supported agriculture (CSA) subscription they provide in the Austin area. In total, they estimate they lost $30,000 worth of output.

“The thing with the freeze is, it wasn’t just a weather event. It was a total system collapse,” said Mueller, who is also president of the Central Texas Young Farmers Coalition.

Mueller is far from alone. In addition to resulting in dozens of deaths, the failure of the state’s power grid caused millions in damages for farmers across the state. According to The Texas Tribune, more than half of the region’s grapefruits and nearly all of the Valencia oranges have been lost, and citrus farmers in the region will also likely have no crop for next year. Livestock losses were also widespread, and could reach $228 million in costs and lost income for farmers and ranchers as herds and flocks died in the freeze and feed costs skyrocket.

Although the Big Freeze was at the top of the news cycle for the second half of February, outrage over the failures that led to the energy crisis is already cycling out of the headlines. But for small and diversified farmers, the losses are especially significant and will continue for months to come.

Becky Hume, who runs VRNDT Farm, is facing a catastrophic scale of loss. “This frost coming through has basically killed all mature vegetables and wiped me out of all saleable crops. Thankfully, some really young carrots, really young beets are going to survive and bounce back, but anything that was close to maturity is completely gone,” Hume told Civil Eats.

“There are definitely two–three months of investment in plants, tending things, weeding things, growing things . . . that’s just gone,” Hume added.

In the midst of the pandemic, these crop losses will drive up food costs and even cause shortages at food banks when needs are high. The crop loss is causing the state’s food banks to rethink their sourcing, ramping up their purchasing from out-of-state, which drives costs up.

Looming shortages of transplants and seeds

The impacts in the Rio Grande Valley don’t just affect their agricultural output.

“The next wave of problems is going to be finding transplants. All of these young plants have been lost,” said Judith McGeary, director of the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance, which advocates for the rights of small-scale farmers in the state. McGeary noted that much of the state’s young seedlings and transplants come from nurseries in the region. “Sourcing transplants and replacement plants is going to be far more expensive.”

For instance, she said, “the farmers in the [Rio Grande] Valley produce huge amounts of melons for the conventional system.” The state’s watermelon industry says it produces 15% of the total domestic watermelon crop.

In addition to her advocacy work, McGeary is a farmer, growing melons, lemons, and other crops on 165 acres. “Even those of us who are very small melon producers are not sure we will be able to source what we normally would for transplants for our small operation,” McGeary added.

The gardening boom that arose early in the COVID-19 pandemic has driven up demand for seeds and strained the nation’s seed supply chain, with seed companies struggling to keep up as more Americans started growing their own vegetables. This latest weather event created the perfect storm to overwhelm this already-stressed supply chain.

“For a lot of farms, that’s a real shortage, and because of COVID there have been incredible supply shortages in the seed supply chain. Seed suppliers have a two- to three- week backlog before they can even ship seeds, VRDNT’s Hume said. “In Texas, that delay could mean a delay in — and ultimate loss of — some production. This is happening when supply chains are already stressed out and not functioning as normal. It is definitely a compounding situation.”

Shortfall of financial support

Financial help has also been fairly limited. Small-scale farmers have been reliant on GoFundMe pages to get funding, since many don’t have crop insurance plans.

“For small, diversified vegetable farms, crop insurance is either extremely difficult or non-existent. For a large commodity farm, it is a lot easier to assess how many soybeans were lost and how much that costs,” Hume explained.

The farmers who spoke to Civil Eats said they don’t anticipate receiving help from the USDA or the state of Texas. The Texas Department of Agriculture (TDA) did not respond to a request for comment.

“The state of Texas is really bad with small- and medium-sized farmers, especially vegetable farmers. At best they’re unfriendly and at worst they are hostile to us through their policies,” Middle Ground Farms’ Mueller added. While the average farm size in Texas is 511 acres, the vast majority of farms in the state are small: According to the latest U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) ag census, 71% of the farms in Texas are smaller than 180 acres.

Crop insurance is calculated by the average crop yield in an area based on previous year output. That strategy doesn’t always work when farmers grow a diverse rotation of crops. As many see it, the program incentivizes farmers to plant the same crop year after year. According to one 2009 study published in The Journal of Agricultural Economics, farm operators became slightly more specialized —i.e., they grew fewer crops overall—in response to policy-induced increased in federal crop insurance.

When farms opt not to specialize, their options for coverage are limited. The Whole-Farm Revenue Protection (WFRP) program is one promising option, but it’s relatively new and not all small farmers feel they can opt for that level of protection.

And one of the most robust and popular assistance programs, the USDA’s microloan program, barely makes a dent for struggling farmers: It awards up to $35,000 to beginning small and medium-sized farmers.

The TDA isn’t providing any funds from the state budget, although it has started the State of Texas Agriculture Relief (STAR) Fund, which funded by private donations.

“The TDA STAR Fund consists of donations from private citizens, corporations, and organizations committed to supporting Texas farmers and ranchers. No state money is used in the Fund,” the Texas Department of Agriculture said in a release. And the fund limits payments to farmers to $4,000.

Others have stepped in where the state hasn’t. In Austin, the Sustainable Food Center has started a fund to help farmers in Central Texas. The Texas Farmers’ Market also launched a relief fund.

Farmers are largely banking on the Paycheck Protection Program in the wake of the pandemic-induced economic downturn, which could provide farmers a maximum loan amount of $20,833. It’s still to be seen how far down the newly passed relief bill’s benefits will trickle; the last round of efforts did not reach small farms.

Making changes to reduce future climate risks

Beyond the hodgepodge of emergency financial assistance options, these farmers see their only remaining choices are to prepare for the future — to do everything possible to ensure it doesn’t happen again, or at least mitigate their risk for significant damage.

As climate change makes extreme weather events like this more common, farmers are scrambling to find a solution to ensure their farm’s longevity.

But preparing for resilience measures now is a significant Catch-22. “I am looking at how to build resilience into the farm, but . . . as a young business owner and a young farmer, it’s just so hard to access capital, it’s hard to get the farm going,” Hume said.

McGeary thinks one of the answers lies within better soil management. “The [impacts of] severe storms, the droughts, can certainly significantly be mitigated by healthy soils,” McGeary said.

Better soil management through regenerative agriculture practices and no-till farming have been shown to help curb climate change. Minimized soil disturbance builds a more natural decomposition process that helps sequester carbon.

“We need regenerative methods that build these healthy soils, these biologically active soils. By doing so we can mitigate climate change. Not just on the farms, but more broadly because it sequesters carbon,” McGeary says.

The state’s failure to provide a systemic solution leaves farmers to their own devices. For example, Hume suggested that farmers building a seed and transplant safety net for themselves.

A few months back, she planted more transplants than she needed on the farm with the intention of selling them. But when the freeze wiped out her mature crops, she needed to use the extra starts to replant the farm. “That was very serendipitous, but I’ve learned that may be a good plan for resilience in the future.”

Mueller says becoming more resilient in the face of extreme weather will require an investment in infrastructure. “There are a couple of things we are already fixing to do. One of those is building insulated structures to protect the wells, and even insulating the pipes themselves . . . Another might be digging our irrigation deeper,” she says.

Farmers across the state see the freeze as a wake up call: They need to prepare for a future of climate change-fueled extreme weather. Whether or not the politicians in the state capitol got the same message is yet to be seen.

Trump administration accidentally left behind a huge gift for Joe Biden: report

According to a report from Politico, the COVID-19 aid bill recently passed by Democrats and signed by President Joe Biden got an assist from former President Donald Trump’s administration that left behind a pile of cash that is already being distributed to struggling Americans this weekend.

The $1.9 trillion aid package passed without one Republican Senate vote — with GOP senators bashing it because Democrats hold a majority that allowed them to pass it without their help — is highly popular with voters and the ability to immediately disperse the money will likely pay dividends for Democrats down the line.

As Politico’s Victoria Guida wrote, “The Treasury has a cash pile of well over $1 trillion, which will allow the government to quickly disburse money in line with the sweeping new law, including direct checks to millions of Americans that are expected to start hitting bank accounts in the coming week,” adding, “That robust rainy-day fund was built last year by then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who preemptively cranked up the pace of government borrowing, unsure of how and when Congress might mandate further relief measures.”

As the report notes, Mnuchin was amassing the cash in case Trump’s administration and Senate Republicans pushed through their own package — a move that could that could have helped the ex-president’s popularity prior to the November election.

“Treasury always has to have enough cash on hand to fund immediate government spending obligations, which it keeps as deposits at the Federal Reserve. But those funds more than quadrupled in 2020,” Guida explained. “When Biden took office, Treasury’s deposits at the Fed stood at about $1.6 trillion, compared to $400 billion in 2019, and Treasury is expected to burn through about $1 trillion of that already-borrowed cash to help fund the relief package.”

According to Seth Carpenter, chief U.S. economist at UBS, “That is $1 trillion of money that the Treasury does not have to borrow this year.”

Bandaging the corpse: Biden’s big bailout can’t pull America out of its death spiral

The established ruling elites know there is a crisis. They agreed, at least temporarily, to throw money at it with the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 bill known as American Rescue Plan (ARP). But the ARP will not alter the structural inequities, either by raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour or imposing taxes and regulations on corporations or the billionaire class that saw its wealth increase by a staggering $1.1 trillion since the start of the pandemic. The health system will remain privatized, meaning the insurance and pharmaceutical corporations will reap a windfall of tens of billions of dollars with the ARP, and this when they are already making record profits. The endless wars in the Middle East, and the bloated military budget that funds them, will remain sacrosanct. Wall Street and the predatory global speculators that profit from the massive levels of debt peonage imposed on an underpaid working class and loot the U.S. Treasury in our casino capitalism will continue to funnel money upwards into the hands of a tiny, oligarchic cabal. There will be no campaign finance reform to end our system of legalized bribery. The giant tech monopolies will remain intact. The fossil fuel companies will continue to ravage the ecosystem. The militarized police, censorship imposed by digital media platforms, vast prison system, harsher and harsher laws aimed at curbing domestic terrorism and dissent and wholesale government surveillance will be, as they were before, the primary instruments of state control.

This act will, at best, provide a momentary respite from the country’s death spiral, sending out onetime checks of $1,400 to 280 million Americans, extending $300 weekly unemployment benefits until the end of August and distributing $3,600 through a tax credit for children under the age of 6 and $3,000 per child ages 6 to 17 starting on July 1. Much of this money will be instantly gobbled up by landlords, lenders, medical providers and credit card companies. The act does, to its credit, bail out some 1 million unionized workers poised to lose their pensions and hands $31.2 billion in aid to Native communities, some of the poorest in the nation.

But what happens to the majority of Americans who get government support for only a few months? What are they supposed to do when the checks stop arriving at the end of the year? Will the federal government orchestrate another massive relief package? I doubt it. We will be back where we started.

By refusing to address the root causes of America’s rot, by failing to pump life back into the democratic institutions that once gave the citizen a voice, however limited, and make incremental and piecemeal reform possible, by not addressing the severe economic and social inequality and dislocation that afflicts at least half the country, the anomie and ruptured social bonds that gave rise to a demagogue like Donald Trump will expand. The American empire will not staunch its disintegration. The political deformities will metastasize.

When the next demagogue appears, and the Republican Party has banked its future on Trump or his doppelgänger, he or she will probably be competent. The Republican Party in 43 states has proposed 250 laws to limit mail, early in-person and Election Day voting and mandate stricter ID requirements, as well as reduce the hours at voting sites and the numbers of voting locations, potentially disenfranchising tens of millions of voters. The party has no intention of playing by the rules. Once back in power, cloaked in the ideological garb of Christian fascism, the new or the old Trump will abolish what little is left of democratic space.

The established elites pretend that Trump was a freakish anomaly. They naively believe they can make Trump and his most vociferous supporters disappear by banishing them from social media. The ancien régime, will, they assert, return with the decorum of its imperial presidency, respect for procedural norms, elaborately choreographed elections and fealty to neoliberal and imperial policies.

But what the established ruling elites have yet to grasp, despite the narrow electoral victory Joe Biden had over Trump and the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 by an enraged mob, is that the credibility of the old order is dead. The Trump era, if not Trump himself, is the future. The ruling elites, embodied by Biden and the Democratic Party and the polite wing of the Republican Party represented by Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney, is headed for the dustbin of history.

The elites collectively sold out the American public to corporate power. They did this by lying to the public about the consequences of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), trade deals, dismantling welfare, revoking Glass-Steagall, imposing austerity measures, deregulating Wall Street, passing draconian crime bills, launching endless wars in the Middle East and bailing out the big banks and financial firms rather than the victims of their fraud. These lies were far, far more damaging to the public than any of the lies told by Trump. These elites have been found out. They are hated. They deserve to be hated.

The Biden administration — and Biden was one of the principal architects of the policies that fleeced the working class and made war on the poor — is nothing more than a brief coda in the decline and fall, set against which is China’s rising global economic and military clout.

The loss of credibility has left the media, which serves as courtiers to the elites, largely powerless to manipulate public perceptions and public opinion. Rather, the media has divided the public into competing demographics. Media platforms target one demographic, feeding its opinions and proclivities back to it, while shrilly demonizing the demographic on the other side of the political divide. This has proved commercially successful. But it has also split the country into irreconcilable warring factions that can no longer communicate. Truth and verifiable fact have been sacrificed. Russiagate is as absurd as the belief that the presidential election was stolen from Trump. Pick your fantasy.

The loss of credibility among the ruling elites has transferred political influence to those outside established centers of power such as Alex Jones, celebrities and those such as Joe Rogan, Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi who were never groomed by the media conglomerates. The Democratic Party, in an effort to curb the influence of the new centers of power, has allied itself with social media industry giants such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Patreon, Substack and Spotify to curtail or censor its critics. The goal is to herd the public back to Democratic Party-allied news organizations such as The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN. But these media outlets, which in the service to corporate advertisers have rendered the lives of the working class and the poor invisible, are as reviled as the ruling elites themselves.

The loss of credibility has also given rise to new, often spontaneous groups, as well as the lunatic fringe that embraces conspiracy theories such as QAnon. None of these groups or individuals, whether they are on the left or the right, however, have the organizational structure, coherence and ideological cohesiveness of radical movements of the past, including the old Communist Party or militant labor unions. They traffic in emotional outrage, often replacing one outrage with another. They provide new forms of identity to replace the identities lost by tens of millions of Americans who have been cast aside. This energy can be harnessed for laudable causes, such as ending police abuse, but it is too often ephemeral. It has a tendency to transform political debate into grievance protests, at best, and more often televised spectacle. These flash mobs pose no threat to the elites unless they build disciplined organization structures, which takes years, and articulate a vision of what can come next. (This is why I support Extinction Rebellion, which has a large grassroots network, especially in Europe, carries out effective sustained acts of civil disobedience and has a clearly stated goal of overthrowing the ruling elites and building a new governing system through people’s committees and sortition.)

This amorphous, emotionally driven anti-politics is fertile ground for demagogues, who have no political consistency but cater exclusively to the zeitgeist of the moment. Many of those who support demagogues know, on some level, they are con artists and liars. But demagogues are revered because, like all cult leaders, they flout conventions, are outrageous and crude, claim omnipotence and disdain traditional decorum. Demagogues are weaponized against bankrupt well-heeled elites who have stripped the public of opportunities and identities, extinguishing hopes for the future. A cornered population has little left but hate and the emotional catharsis expressing it brings.

The engine of our emerging dystopia is income inequality, which is growing. This bill does nothing to address this cancer. The bottom 50 percent of households in 2019 accounted for only 1 percent of the nation’s total wealth. The top 10 percent accounted for 76 percent. And this was before the pandemic accelerated income disparity. More than 18 million American depend on unemployment benefits, as businesses contract and close. Nearly 81 million Americans struggle to meet basic household expenses, 22 million lack enough food and 11 million say they can’t make their next house payment. Only deep structural reforms accompanied by New Deal-type legislation can save us, but such changes are an anathema to the corporate state and the Biden administration. History has amply demonstrated what happens when income disparities of this magnitude afflict a country. We will be no exception. Lacking a strong left, the United States will in desperation embrace authoritarianism, if not proto-fascism. This will, I fear, be Biden and the Democratic Party’s real legacy.

10 big problems with Joe Biden’s foreign policy — and one solution

The Biden presidency is still in its early days, but it’s not too early to point to areas in the foreign policy realm where we, as progressives, have been disappointed — or even infuriated.

There are one or two positive developments, such as the renewal of Obama’s New START Treaty with Russia and Secretary of State Tony Blinken’s initiative for a UN-led peace process in Afghanistan, where the United States is finally turning to peace as a last resort, after 20 years lost in the graveyard of empires.

By and large though, President Biden’s foreign policy already seems stuck in the militarist quagmire of the past 20 years, a far cry from his campaign promise to reinvigorate diplomacy as the primary tool of U.S. foreign policy.

In this respect, Biden is following in the footsteps of Barack Obama and Donald Trump, who both promised fresh approaches to foreign policy but for the most part delivered more endless war.

By the end of his second term, Obama did have two significant diplomatic achievements with the signing of the Iran nuclear deal and normalization of relations with Cuba. So progressive Americans who voted for Biden had some grounds to hope that his experience as Obama’s vice president would lead him to quickly restore and build on Obama’s achievements with Iran and Cuba as a foundation for the broader diplomacy he promised.

Instead, the Biden administration seems firmly entrenched behind the walls of hostility Trump built between America and our neighbors, from his renewed Cold War against China and Russia to his brutal sanctions against Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, Syria and dozens of countries around the world, and there is still no word on cuts to a military budget that has grown by 15% since FY2015 (inflation-adjusted).

Despite endless Democratic condemnations of Trump, Biden’s foreign policy so far shows no substantive change from the policies of the past four years. Here are ten of the lowlights:

1. Failing to quickly rejoin the Iran nuclear agreement.

The Biden administration’s failure to immediately rejoin the JCPOA, as Bernie Sanders promised to do on his first day as president, has turned an easy win for Biden’s promised commitment to diplomacy into an entirely avoidable diplomatic crisis.

Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA and imposition of brutal “maximum pressure” sanctions on Iran were broadly condemned by Democrats and U.S. allies alike. But now Biden is making new demands on Iran to appease hawks who opposed the agreement all along, risking an outcome in which he will fail to reinstate the JCPOA and Trump’s policy will effectively become his policy. The Biden administration should re-enter the deal immediately, without preconditions.

2. U.S. bombing wars rage on — now in secret.

Also following in Trump’s footsteps, Biden has escalated tensions with Iran and Iraq by attacking and killing Iranian-backed Iraqi forces who play a critical role in the war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Biden’s February 25 U.S. airstrike predictably failed to end rocket attacks on deeply unpopular U.S. bases in Iraq, which the Iraqi National Assembly passed a resolution to close over a year ago.

The U.S. attack in Syria has been condemned as illegal by members of Biden’s own party, reinvigorating efforts to repeal the 2001 and 2002 Authorizations for the Use of Military Force that presidents have misused for 20 years. Other airstrikes the Biden administration is conducting in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria are shrouded in secrecy, since it has not resumed publishing the monthly Airpower Summaries that every other administration has published since 2004, but which Trump discontinued a year ago.

3. Refusing to hold Mohammed bin Salman accountable for the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Human rights activists were grateful that President Biden released the intelligence report on the gruesome murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi that confirmed what we already knew: Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) had approved the murder. Yet when it came to holding MBS accountable, Biden choked.

At the very least, the administration should have imposed the same sanctions on the crown prince, including asset freezes and travel bans, that the U.S. had already imposed on lower-level figures involved in the murder. Instead, like Trump, Biden is wedded to the Saudi dictatorship and its diabolical leader.

4. Clinging to Trump’s absurd policy of recognizing Juan Guaidó as president of Venezuela.

The Biden administration missed an opportunity to establish a new approach towards Venezuela when it decided to continue to recognize Juan Guaidó as “interim president,” ruled out talks with President Nicolás Maduro’s government and appears to be freezing out the moderate opposition that participates in elections.

The administration also said it was in “no rush” to lift the Trump sanctions despite a recent study from the Government Accountability Office detailing their negative impact on the economy, and a scathing preliminary report by a UN Special Rapporteur, who noted their “devastating effect on the whole population of Venezuela.” The lack of dialogue with all political actors in Venezuela risks entrenching a policy of regime change and economic warfare for years to come, similar to the failed U.S. policy towards Cuba that has lasted for 60 years.

5. Following Trump on Cuba, instead of Obama.

The Trump administration overturned all the progress towards normal relations achieved by President Obama, sanctioning Cuba’s tourism and energy industries, blocking coronavirus aid shipments, restricting remittances to family members, putting Cuba on a list of “state sponsors of terrorism” and sabotaging Cuba’s international medical missions, which were a major source of revenue for its health system.

We expected Biden to immediately start unraveling Trump’s confrontational policies, but catering to Cuban exiles in Florida for domestic political gain apparently takes precedence over a humane and rational policy towards Cuba, for Biden as for Trump.

Biden should instead start working with the Cuban government to allow the return of diplomats to their respective embassies, lift all restrictions on remittances, make travel easier and work with the Cuban health system in the fight against COVID-19, among other measures.

6. Ramping up the Cold War with China.

Biden seems committed to Trump’s self-defeating Cold War and arms race with China, talking tough and ratcheting up tensions that have led to racist hate crimes against East Asian people in the United States. But it is the U.S. that is militarily surrounding and threatening China, not the other way round. As former President Jimmy Carter patiently explained to Trump, while the U.S. has been at war for 20 years, China has instead invested in 21st-century infrastructure and in its own people, lifting 800 million of them out of poverty.

The greatest danger of this moment in history, short of all-out nuclear war, is that this aggressive U.S. military posture not only justifies unlimited U.S. military budgets, but will gradually force China to convert its economic success into military power and follow the United States down the tragic path of military imperialism.

7. Failing to lift painful, illegal sanctions during a pandemic.

One of the legacies of the Trump administration is the devastating use of U.S. sanctions against countries around the world, including Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, North Korea and Syria. UN special rapporteurs have condemned them as crimes against humanity and compared them to medieval sieges. Since most of these sanctions were imposed by executive order, President Biden could easily lift them. Even before taking power, his team announced a thorough review, but three months later it has yet to make a move.

Unilateral sanctions that affect entire populations are an illegal form of coercion, like military intervention, coups and covert operations, that have no place in a legitimate foreign policy based on diplomacy, the rule of law and the peaceful resolution of disputes. They are especially cruel and deadly during a pandemic and the Biden administration should take immediate action by lifting broad sectoral sanctions to ensure every country can adequately respond to the pandemic.

8. Not doing enough to support peace and humanitarian aid for Yemen.

Biden appeared to partially fulfill his promise to stop U.S. support for the war in Yemen when he announced that the U.S. would stop selling “offensive” weapons to the Saudis. But he has yet to explain what that means. Which weapons sales has he canceled?

We think he should stop all weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, enforcing the Leahy Law that prohibits military assistance to forces that commit gross human rights violations, and the Arms Export Control Act, under which imported U.S. weapons may be used only for legitimate self defense. There should be no exceptions to these U.S. laws for Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Israel, Egypt or other U.S. allies around the world.

The U.S. should also accept its share of responsibility for what many have called the greatest humanitarian crisis in the world today, and provide Yemen with funding to feed its people, restore its health care system and rebuild its devastated country. A recent donor conference netted just $1.7 billion in pledges, less than half the $3.85 billion needed. Biden should restore and expand USAID funding and U.S. financial support to the UN, WHO and World Food Program relief operations in Yemen. He should also press the Saudis to reopen the air and seaports, and throw U.S. diplomatic weight behind the efforts of UN Special Envoy Martin Griffiths to negotiate a ceasefire.

9. Failing to back President Moon Jae-in’s diplomacy with North Korea.

Trump’s failure to provide sanctions relief and explicit security guarantees to North Korea doomed his diplomacy and became an obstacle to the diplomatic process under way between Korean presidents Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in, who is himself the child of North Korean refugees. So far, Biden has continued this policy of draconian sanctions and threats.

The Biden administration should revive the diplomatic process with confidence-building measures such as opening liaison offices, easing sanctions, facilitating reunions between Korean-American and North Korean families, permitting U.S. humanitarian organizations to resume their work when COVID conditions permit and halting U.S.-South Korea military exercises and B-2 nuclear bomb flights.

Negotiations must involve concrete commitments to non-aggression from the U.S. side and a commitment to negotiating a peace agreement to formally end the Korean War. This would pave the way for a denuclearized Korean peninsula and the reconciliation that so many Koreans desire — and deserve.

10. No initiative to reduce U.S. military spending.

At the end of the Cold War, former senior Pentagon officials told the Senate Budget Committee that U.S. military spending could safely be cut by half over the next 10 years. That goal was never achieved, and instead of a post-Cold War “peace dividend,” the military-industrial complex exploited the crimes of Sept. 11, 2001 to justify an extraordinary one-sided arms race. Between 2003 and 2011, the U.S. accounted for 45% of global military spending, far outstripping its own peak Cold War military spending.

Now the military-industrial complex is counting on Biden to escalate a renewed Cold War with Russia and China as the only plausible pretext for further record military budgets that are setting the stage for World War III.

Biden must dial back U.S. conflicts with China and Russia, and instead begin the critical task of moving money from the Pentagon to urgent domestic needs. He should start with at least the 10 percent cut that 93 representatives and 23 senators have already voted for. In the longer term, Biden should look for deeper cuts in Pentagon spending, as in Rep. Barbara Lee’s bill to cut $350 billion per year from the U.S. military budget, to free up resources we sorely need to invest in health care, education, clean energy and modern infrastructure.

A progressive way forward

These policies, common to Democratic and Republican administrations, not only inflict pain and suffering on millions of our neighbors in other countries, but also deliberately cause instability that can at any time escalate into war, plunge a formerly functioning state into chaos or spawn a secondary crisis whose human consequences will be even worse than the original one.

All these policies involve deliberate efforts to unilaterally impose the political will of U.S. leaders on other people and countries, by methods that consistently only cause more pain and suffering to the people they claim — or pretend — they want to help.

Biden should jettison the worst of Obama’s and Trump’s policies, and instead pick the best of them. Trump, recognizing the unpopular nature of U.S. military interventions, began the process of bringing U.S. troops home from Afghanistan and Iraq, which Biden should follow through on.

Obama’s diplomatic successes with Cuba, Iran and Russia demonstrated that negotiating with U.S. enemies to make peace, improve relations and make the world a safer place is a perfectly viable alternative to trying to force them to do what the U.S. wants by bombing, starving and besieging their people. This is in fact the core principle of the UN Charter, and it should be the core principle of Biden’s foreign policy.

Dog rescue charity linked to Lara Trump has been padding Donald Trump’s pockets for years: report

A dog rescue charity connected to Lara Trump, daughter-in-law of former President Donald Trump, is at the center of scrutiny due to its spending at multiple Trump-owned properties over the last several years.

In fact, the charity is also set to spend more money at Trump’s exclusive Mar-a-Lago golf club this weekend. According to the HuffPost, a new permit filed in Palm Beach, Fla., indicates Big Dog Ranch Rescue is slated to spend approximately $225,000 at the luxury country club where Trump has been residing since departing Washington, D.C., on Jan. 20.

Based on previous Internal Revenue Service (IRS) filings, the animal protection organization has been shelling out millions to the former president’s luxury property since 2014. Over the last several years, it has spent a total of “$1,883,160 on fundraising costs,” according to the publication.

A timeline of Lara Trump’s affiliation with the organization has also been brought to the forefront. In 2018, she reportedly was listed as the organization’s chairwoman for charity events. Then, in 2019, the organization’s president, Lauren Simmons, traveled to Washington, D.C., where she visited the White House for the signing of a bill crafted to confront animal cruelty.

Despite the reports, which raise questions about Lara Trump’s involvement, Simmons released a statement defending her. Describing Lara Trump as a dog advocate, Simmons argued that the venue and rates were both generous.

“The quality of service, beauty of the venue and excellent rate provided us as a nonprofit as well as the generosity of supporters who sell-out our event there every year allows us to rescue and home thousands of dogs,” Simmons said. “Our investment there and at the other venues mentioned in the article has netted more than $12 million over an eight-year period which allows us to continue our mission.”

When questioned about why she would support a former president who attempted a coup to invalidate the results of a presidential election, Simmons reportedly offered no response. Since the charity did briefly distance itself from Trump in 2017 amid the controversy over the civil unrest in Charlottesville, Va., the move appears to have only been temporary.

The latest reports come amid the organization’s latest event being held at Mar-a-Lago today. In fact, according to WPTV, Trump made an appearance at the event wearing his signature red “Make America Great Again” hat.

During an impromptu speech, he said, “I’m with you 100%. We had many meetings in the White House and the Oval Office having to do with saving and helping dogs!”

Throughout his presidency, Trump was accused of funneling “$8.5 million of Republican donor money into his own cash registers by directing spending by the entities he controlled, including the Republican National Committee, toward his own businesses.”

The HuffPost also noted similar instances in which Trump allegedly directed several millions in taxpayer dollars to his own businesses when he frequently traveled to his own properties for golfing vacations during his time in office.