With mass vaccination, medical volunteers face a new test

In theory, Alice Weisz retired in 2016. But in practice, the retired endocrinologist in Virginia Beach has had a busy year. Last January, as Covid-19 reached the U.S., Weisz volunteered to help the local health department field phone calls. By late spring, she was sliding swabs up people’s nostrils at drive-through Covid-19 testing sites.

In the fall, Weisz administered flu shots. And earlier this month, she found herself in the vacant ambulance bay of a Virginia Beach emergency medical services facility, giving shots of the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine to a roster of essential workers: a nurse, a dental assistant, a mortician. People “want it on video, they want their picture taken that they’re getting the vaccine,” she said. “Everybody’s feeling, ‘Yes, yes, I did it!'”

Weisz is a member of the Virginia Beach unit of the Medical Reserve Corps, a little-known federal government program, launched in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, that mobilizes local volunteers to assist with public health emergencies as well as day-to-day tasks like health screenings and community education. Today, the program’s rolls include more than 190,000 volunteers in 48 states as well as the District of Columbia and some territories. Since the pandemic began, hundreds of MRC units have deployed volunteers to help with the Covid-19 response. They have since logged hundreds of thousands of volunteer hours, often with little public recognition.

Now, as the mass vaccination campaign for Covid-19 begins, further straining overstretched health departments, MRC units are sending in more volunteers like Weisz to help with vaccination. In the months ahead, these volunteers may be one important part of the race to administer hundreds of millions of doses of vaccine in a short period of time.

But some public health experts close to the MRC say the program has suffered from neglect in recent years, and that it has sometimes been underutilized during the Covid-19 crisis, amid a disjointed federal government response to the pandemic. While some states, such as Virginia, were able to rush MRC volunteers into action early in the pandemic, with vocal support from the governor, others seem to have mobilized more slowly.

Some of that engagement may change with the Biden administration, which has signaled interest in expanding the role of MRC units in the response to Covid-19, including a mention of the program in its official national pandemic response strategy.

“You always hate to capitalize on a tragedy,” said Rob Tosatto, a retired U.S. Public Health Service officer who ran the national MRC program from 2003 to 2017. “But I really hope that this next administration will see what the MRC was, what it could be, and give it the support and life that it needs.”

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After the Sept. 11 attacks, some health care workers headed to the disaster sites, eager to help. Their assistance was not always welcomed. These 9/11 volunteers, a 2005 report on the MRC, co-authored by Tosatto, noted, “meant well, but unfortunately their appearance at these scenes became problematic for the emergency managers and frustrating for everyone.” Emergency responders had little way of knowing who was actually qualified to help. Coordinating volunteer efforts on the fly was difficult, too.

The next year, then-President George W. Bush launched USA Freedom Corps, a federal initiative to encourage volunteerism. As part of the effort, he tasked Richard Carmona, then the U.S. Surgeon General, with finding a way to organize medical volunteers. “The president really had a vision that was correct, which was, how do we harness the great energy of all of these people who want to do things when our nation is hurting from something?” said Carmona. “And that’s where it all started.”

Carmona and his staff decided the program should be organized into independent local units. He also pushed for MRCs to have volunteer roles outside emergencies, helping with the day-to-day tasks of public health.

The program ran into some skepticism, said Carmona and Tosatto. Overworked local officials were sometimes reluctant to take on responsibility for coordinating volunteers.

Still, the program quickly grew, from a few dozen pilot chapters to hundreds of units around the country. The response to Hurricane Katrina, Tosatto recalled, helped the MRC prove its worth: In particular, thousands of volunteers in dozens of units provided support in the aftermath of the disaster. MRC volunteers staffed shelters for hurricane evacuees, worked in clinics in hard-hit areas, and delivered medical supplies to help with the response.

Today, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, there are more than 780 units nationwide. Many volunteers are doctors and nurses. Others are veterinarians, pharmacists, and dentists, and still others have no medical skills at all, often helping with logistics and administrative tasks. Like Alice Weisz, some MRC volunteers are retirees looking to contribute to the cause; others are students or people with full-time jobs.

Like many public health programs launched after 9/11, federal government support for MRCs waned, even as some local units remained vibrant. The federal budget for the program has dropped steadily — from budgets of $10 or $11 million per year to an annual budget, in recent years, of around $6 million. The program also moved from the Office of the Surgeon General into the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR).

According to a statement provided to Undark by Suzanne Sellman, a public affairs specialist with ASPR, MRC units are run locally and “are not federal assets.” But the statement, which Sellman said was attributable to an HHS spokesperson, noted that ASPR “supports the MRC network by providing technical assistance, coordination, communications, strategy and policy development, cooperative agreements, contract oversight, training, and other associated services.”

Tosatto, though, said a lack of financial support and institutional buy-in from the federal government has hurt the program. By January 2020, he said, the program was receiving only “minimal guidance and support from the national level.”

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When Covid-19 arrived, though, MRC units began to mobilize. As early as January, some units were helping staff calls centers, said Oscar Alleyne, the chief of programs and services at the National Association of County and City Health Officials, or NACCHO, which helps administer the program. “By March, we saw about 150 units had been activated,” Alleyne said. “By April, we had 250.” Data recently posted on an HHS website reports that more than 450 MRC units in 47 states — as well as Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, and American Samoa — have participated in the Covid-19 response, logging more than 800,000 volunteer hours.

Still, it’s not clear policymakers were always well prepared to draw on the volunteer resources. “There are communities that I called, and people in leadership positions didn’t know what an MRC was,” Carmona said. Programs like MRC, Carmona said, can sometimes “become invisible” in between national emergencies.

Some critics also argue that the federal government has done too little to boost MRC units — even though the program is written directly into some government pandemic readiness plans. “I haven’t seen any push from the national office to highlight or promote the efforts of the MRC” during the pandemic, said Tosatto. Contacts involved with President Joe Biden’s transition team, he said, told him that when the Biden transition team had brought up MRC, “they were told, ‘Well, that’s not really something that we’re thinking about or concerned about for the response.'”

Kavita Patel, a health policy fellow at the Brookings Institution and former policy staffer in the Obama administration, raised similar concerns in a conversation earlier this month. “People just are not aware of it,” said Patel, who is also a primary care physician. “The people who need to make others aware of it in the government are, candidly, not respected and not able to.” Former Surgeon General Jerome Adams, who stepped down at Biden’s request earlier this month, she added, did little to publicize the MRC, despite the program’s historical ties to his office. “For reasons I still don’t understand,” she said, “he’s never talked about it, hasn’t made it a priority, and I don’t know why.”

Patel was an emergency responder during Hurricane Katrina, where she saw MRC volunteers providing care to people who had been displaced by the storm. She said she hopes the Biden administration will consider a federalized deployment of MRC volunteers, similar to what happened during Katrina, to help with vaccination in areas where the rollout has faltered.

The statement Sellman provided to Undark stressed that HHS directed more than $1 million to help support MRC units early in the pandemic, followed by $160,000 this fall, which NACCHO distributed as $5,000 grants to help units with their pandemic response. The statement noted that local, community-based work was the core of the program. “At this time,” the statement continued, “the MRC program is not planning to federalize MRC volunteers.”

There are signs the Biden administration may bring changes. The Friday before his inauguration, in a speech detailing his $20 billion mass vaccination plan, Biden said — without naming the MRC — that his administration would “expand the pool of medical professionals, including retired health care workers, who can administer the vaccine.”

And the administration’s 200-page Covid-19 response plan, released last week, says that the federal government will “work with state and local programs to support the Medical Reserve Corps,” as part of its efforts to “bolster support for state- and local-run community vaccination clinics.”

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In the meantime, many MRC units across the country have gotten involved in the Covid-19 response, although not always without hiccups.

In New York City, the deployment of the local unit, which currently has around 13,000 members, appeared to have a somewhat rocky start. News reports from the spring detail how some eager medical volunteers, who made themselves available through the MRC and other volunteer initiatives, sat idle in the chaotic early response.

By early January 2021, as critics charged New York City with a too-slow vaccine rollout, City Councilmember Mark Levine wrote in a tweet on Jan. 3 that vaccination was “basically only occurring during business hours,” calling the pandemic a “war-like situation.” Levine announced that he would be pushing legislation to open more vaccination sites — and to “require activation of the NYC Medical Reserve Corps.”

By mid-January, New York City Medical Reserve Corps members were mobilized for vaccination. On a recent Thursday afternoon at a city vaccination hub in Bushwick, Brooklyn, 27 vaccinators — a mix of city employees and MRC volunteers — administered shots to a steady stream of elderly New Yorkers and essential workers.

The city had turned a high school building into a clinic. The shots took place in the gym, with neat rows of tables under the basketball hoops. Each vaccinator had their own station, with a red biohazard bucket, a stack of vaccination cards, and a small vial of the Moderna vaccine. The vials had arrived early that morning, on dry ice, in a white Styrofoam cooler bearing a small sticker that said “Vaccine.” The site leaders stored reserves of the precious fluid in a classroom.

Vaccinators held up numbered green signs whenever they were ready to receive a new patient. The site vaccinated 1,000 people when it first opened earlier that week on Sunday. By Thursday, it was approaching 1,400 shots per day, with MRC members and city vaccinators logging 13-hour shifts.

Ilana Nossel, a psychiatrist in New York City, signed up for a shift on a recent Sunday at another city-run vaccination site, at a high school building in the Jerome Park neighborhood of the Bronx. Nossel joined the MRC after Hurricane Sandy, but that Sunday was the first time she was able to go out and volunteer. After “the helplessness of this year,” she said, “it felt like it would be great to have the opportunity to do something productive.”

Local news reports suggest that MRC units across the country — from Oklahoma to Connecticut — have been deploying volunteers to help with the vaccination campaign. In the past several weeks, many public health departments have also issued calls to enlist more volunteers to join MRC units and assist with the effort.

Some units are capitalizing on momentum that has been building for months. In Virginia, which has an active MRC program, Gov. Ralph Northam began issuing public calls for more volunteers in April. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the state has processed more than 8,000 applications according to Jennifer Freeland, who, as the state volunteer coordinator for the Virginia Department of Health, oversees the state’s 22 MRC units.

Freeland laughed when asked when her team had begun preparing for the Covid-19 vaccination. “We started training last February,” she said. “As soon as we had the pandemic, we knew that we were going to need to start training vaccinators, so we started training vaccinators in the core functions.”

More recently, Freeland said, they’ve been conducting online trainings for Covid-19 vaccination. Volunteer enthusiasm overwhelmed their videoconferencing software: “We maxed out the thousand seats twice,” Freeland said, “and had to bump up to a 3,000-seat room in Zoom.”

Exhaustion has been a major issue for public health workers during the pandemic. “This is overwhelming for all of us,” said Freeland. “To see people in the community just step up and be willing to help and come alongside us — I just can’t even tell you how meaningful that it is to us,” she added. “We could not — absolutely could not — do what we’re doing without our Medical Reserve Corps volunteers.” At many of the state’s newly launched vaccination sites, she said, large portions of the vaccinators and support workers are MRC volunteers. Their numbers are growing: Freeland said that she has received hundreds of applications just since Jan. 1.

Weisz, who joined the Virginia Beach MRC unit a couple of years ago, said she has been impressed with her fellow volunteers, some of whom volunteer on top of full-time jobs. And although she’s of retirement age, she said she was not nervous helping out on the frontlines. “It was great, actually,” she said. “Because, for my life, this is what I did: I helped people when they had problems.”

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

New clues to help monarch butterfly conservation efforts

Fall used to be the time when millions of monarch butterflies in North America would journey upwards of 2,000 miles to warmer winter habitat.

But these days the iconic butterfly’s numbers are dwindling. The western migratory population is down 97% since the 1980s — a survey this mouth found fewer than 2,000 — and the eastern population has slipped 80% in just the past 15 years.

Because of these grim numbers the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ruled in December that monarchs deserved protection under the Endangered Species Act, but it would still be several years before the butterflies were listed as threatened or endangered.

It’s time the species may not have.

Halting the precipitous decline of North American monarch populations hinges, in large part, on milkweed. It’s the sole plant the caterpillars eat and where monarchs lay their eggs. It’s also quickly disappearing with increasing urbanization and pesticide use.

Since monarchs can’t survive without milkweed, conservation efforts have focused on planting more milkweed. But it’s not as simple as it sounds.

“We’ve learned a good bit in the past two or three years about how to create these types of habitats, but there’s not a whole lot of evidence guiding the way we create the plantings,” says Adam Dale, an assistant professor in entomology at the University of Florida. “For example, the diversity of plants in a garden, the specific plants that are used and their arrangement — all of those things matter for how the butterflies are able to locate the hosts and move from one to the next.”

In a new study published in the journal Insects, Dale and his colleagues tried to identify whether more diversity of wildflowers in milkweed gardens would be a boon for the beleaguered butterflies or whether plots should contain only milkweed plants.

Biological diversity in ecosystems is usually a good thing, but a large body of research has shown that more diverse habitat may not be good for species like monarchs that are so specialized in what they eat.

“There’s a potential for actually reducing monarch success by increasing the diversity of plants,” in these conservation gardens, says Dale.

One reason is that a more varied garden can make it harder for the insects to find their host plants if they’re obscured visually or chemically. A recent studyfrom researchers at the University of Kentucky found that monarchs did better when milkweed was planted on the perimeter of gardens.

Another reason has to do with the “enemies hypothesis,” where greater plant diversity means more natural enemies for specialist herbivores like monarchs. Increase the plant diversity and increase the chance of larvae being eaten.

That’s why, Dale says, they were surprised by some of their findings.

In the study, areas where they planted a mix of native swamp milkweed and other wildflowers saw an increase in monarch eggs compared to areas planted with just milkweed. And even though there was an increase in the number of predatory insects, as suspected, it didn’t have an effect on the number of monarch larvae that survived.

“So what we were concerned about didn’t come through,” he says.

While the study was done in Florida, Dale says in general the findings should be applicable to monarch populations in other places.

“Our main goal is to try to create conservation habitat in urban areas where we’re replacing natural habitat with human habitat,” he says. “So ultimately we’re trying to figure out ways to integrate these types of gardens into our yards and green spaces, and just try to make them as good as they can be.”

With monarchs teetering on the edge of extinction, Dale hopes applying what they’ve learned from research like this can help make conservation efforts more successful.

“I hope that people who are interested in conserving monarchs and other insects will see this because I think it provides a little more evidence that helps inform how people create these types of gardens,” Dale says. “Whether that’s a homeowner, a green-space land manager in an urban area, a golf course superintendent looking to create conservation habitat or anyone who’s creating these spaces, I think they could use this to improve the condition of the habitat they’re creating.”

The Dyatlov Pass incident, one of the most famous missing hiker mysteries, may have just been solved

The Dyatlov Pass incident is one of the great unsolved mysteries of the twentieth century, so inexplicable that it has provided fodder for conspiracy theorists over the past fifty years. The story goes like this: Nine Russian hikers, all students from the prestigious Ural State Technical University, went missing in the northern Ural Mountains between Feb. 1 and Feb. 2, 1959. For unknown reasons, the group cut their way out of their tent in the middle of the night and fled into the wilderness, despite not being properly dressed for the subzero temperatures. Some of their bodies had bizarre injuries: four had severe skull or thorax injuries, two had eyes missing, and one was missing its tongue. When investigators arrived, they determined that most had died from either hypothermia or physical trauma. Yet no one could figure out the chain of events that caused them to flee their campsite or (in some cases) die such grisly deaths.

It sounds like the set up to a horror movie. (Indeed, acclaimed director Renny Harlin made a famous one in 2013, and conspiracy theorists have touted UFOs or even yetis as a possible explanation.) Because the hikers were experienced yet remained in various states of dangerous undress, and because of the odd nature of their injuries, numerous theories emerged, some more out-there than others.

Now, in a new paper published in the journal Communications Earth and Environment, a group of scientists believe they have a theory more viable than any other posed in the past. Despite the seemingly fantastical possibilities behind this horrifying event, the real-life explanation may have been physical, not metaphysical, and involved a highly unusual type of avalanche.

Specifically, the nine students set up camp in an area that they thought was safe from an avalanche, because its slope was less than 30 degrees. 30 degrees is usually considered the threshold for avalanche risk, although flatter slopes can still occasionally experience avalanches. In the case of these nine hikers, the slope was steeper than the hikers must have thought (it was 28 degrees even though it probably appeared to be 23 degrees) and there was a weak layer of underlying snow that made the area susceptible to an avalanche. Although there was no snow fall that night, there were strong winds, which could have moved the snow to the slope above their tent. Because the hikers had set up their sleeping areas on top of their skis, the snow would have hit their tent while they were in an unusually rigid position, thereby explaining their gruesome wounds.

“In the Dyatlov case, the victims were trapped between the falling slab and the tent floor, which was placed on compacted snow reinforced by skis,” scientists Johan Gaume and Alexander M. Puzrin write. This would explain the unusual injuries because avalanche victims usually are not pressed against “stiff obstacles” during the incidents in question.

The researchers reached their conclusion by creating avalanche simulation models based on what is known about the conditions surrounding the hikers’ deaths.

They are not the first scholars to determine that the hikers died because of an avalanche: The Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation (ICRF) concluded that an avalanche was the culprit in 2019, and their findings were reinforced by the office of the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation in 2020. This new study has addressed criticisms of that theory, including that there were no obvious signs of an avalanche at the time, the steepness of the tent location, the fact that the avalanche would have occurred after the hikers cut into the slope and the atypical injuries.

As Gaume and Puzrin point out, avalanches have been known to occur in slopes as low as 20 degrees, albeit rarely. A number of factors would have led to the release of a small snow slab directly above the tent rather than a large avalanche, explaining the lack of obvious avalanche signs and the amount of time it took for the event to occur.

The scientists emphasized that this does not mean every facet of the matter has been resolved.

“We do not explain nor address other controversial elements surrounding the investigation such as traces of radioactivity found on the victims’ garments, the behavior of the hikers after leaving the tent, locations and states of bodies, etc,” the scholars write.

Evan Rachel Wood makes abuse allegations against musician Marilyn Manson

Actor and singer Evan Rachel Wood, known for her starring roles in HBO’s “Westworld” and 2003 drama “Thirteen,” along with four other women, came forward on Monday to allege that they had been abused by musician Marilyn Manson, Vanity Fair reported.

“The name of my abuser is Brian Warner, also known to the world as Marilyn Manson,” Wood wrote in an Instagram post. “He started grooming me when I was a teenager and horrifically abused me for years. I was brainwashed and manipulated into submission. I am done living in fear of retaliation, slander, or blackmail. I am here to expose this dangerous man and call out the many industries that have enabled him, before he ruins any more lives. I stand with the many victims who will no longer be silent.”

Manson and Wood were briefly engaged after the couple had dated for three years; she was 19 and he was 38 when their relationship became public in 2007.

In 2018, Wood testified before before a House Judiciary Subcommittee as part of an effort to get the Sexual Assault Survivors’ Bill of Rights passed in all 50 states. While she did not name a perpetrator at the time, she said that her experience with domestic assault included “threats against my life, severe gaslighting and brainwashing, waking up to the man that claimed to love me raping what he believed to be my unconscious body.”

“He cut me off from my close friends and family one by one, by exhibiting rage in some form or another when I was in contact with them,” she said in her testimony. “He had bouts of extreme jealousy, which would often result in him wrecking our home, cornering me in a room and threatening me.”

While Manson has been silent on the allegations, his representatives told the music magazine Metal Hammer, when asked about Wood’s court testimony, that “personal testimony is just that, and we think it’s inappropriate to comment on that.”

Manson has, however, commented on his breakup with Wood. In a 2009 interview with Spin Magazine, he said that he called her 158 times one day after their breakup and cut himself on the face and hands with a razor blade. “I have fantasies every day about smashing her skull in with a sledgehammer,” he said.

The song “I Want to Kill You Like They Do in the Movies,” Mason said, was about her. His representatives told Metal Hammer that the quotes were “obviously a theatrical rock star interview promoting a new record.”

In response to Wood’s post, several other women, including Ashley Walters, Sarah McNeilly, Ashley Lindsay Morgan and a woman who simply identified as Gabriella, posted similar statements on Instagram.

Walters, a photographer who once worked as Manson’s personal assistant, said that she still suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of the abuse.

“I continue to suffer from PTSD, and struggle with depression. I stayed in touch with quite a few people who went through their own traumas, under his control,” she wrote. “As we all struggled, as survivors do, to get on with our lives, I’d keep hearing stories disturbingly similar to our own experiences.”

As Vanity Fair reports, Manson is set to act in the upcoming season of AMC’s horror anthology “Creepshow.” AMC has issued no statement regarding his participation in light of today’s allegations. However, according to Hollywood Reporter, Manson’s record label Loma Vista Recordings said they will no longer promote Manson’s recent album or continue to work with him on new projects.

“In light of today’s disturbing allegations by Evan Rachel Wood and other women naming Marilyn Manson as their abuser, Loma Vista will cease to further promote his current album, effective immediately. Due to these concerning developments, we have also decided not to work with Marilyn Manson on any future projects,” the record label said.

In a 2018 New York Times profile, Wood stated that she wanted to use her experiences with trauma, as well as her personal fame, for good — which is what compelled her to testify before Congress on behalf of other assault survivors “If you’re going to be famous, for me it has to mean something, or be used for something, because otherwise it just freaks me out,” she said.

In “At the Ready,” teens’ path to Border Patrol & law enforcement is “akin to military recruitment”

Law enforcement jobs — border patrol, customs, and corrections — offer a way for high school graduates in El Paso, Texas (and elsewhere) to earn up to $50,000 in their first year of work. At Horizon High, both classes and an extra-curricular club provide realistic scenarios for training students. The teachers are encouraging — although one admits to sugarcoating some situations and hiding his PTSD.

“At the Ready,” which premiered Jan. 31 at the Sundance Film Festival, is Maisie Crow’s enlightening portrait of three teenagers from the Horizon High program. Cristina, who is the first member of her immigrant family to attend college, is staying in El Paso to get her Associates degree. Her father, who came to America to give his kids a better life, earns about as much money as she will if she takes a Border Patrol job. Mason (Kassy in the film), a senior at Horizon, is the only son of a truck driver who works nights, leaving him alone most of the time. He finds a sense of family in the club. Cesar, also a senior, is caring for his younger brother since his mother works. His father is in Juarez and cannot enter the U.S. after being released from jail on drug trafficking charges.

These teens face parental pressures, but they also have concerns about their prospects of enforcing border laws as Trump’s administration restricts immigration. Classroom debates focus on the deployment of the Texas National Guard at the border as the 2018 migrant caravan approaches, and there is a discussion of the 2018 Senate election race between Beto O’Rourke and Ted Cruz. In addition, the separation of children from their families at the border impacts Cristina, whose heart breaks when she witnesses 7- and 8-year-old kids having their American Dreams denied.

“At the Ready” shows how the program equips these teens to have discipline and think for themselves as they combat doubts and make critical decisions about their lives. Crow spoke with Salon about her documentary and the personal and political issues it raises.

How did you find the participants for the film and why did you decide to make a film about this subject?

I’m interested in things I don’t know about. I try to get in and really understand what motivates the participants. I was really surprised when I was visiting a High School in Laredo, and I saw kids in the hallway with the red guns you see in the film. I was really taken back. It was 2017. Gun violence in schools and active shooters have been happening in schools since before Columbine. It was very startling for me to see kids in school with guns as part of a class. I started researching it. I found out there are law enforcement classes in about 900 high schools in Texas. I went to high school in Texas, and I did not have this program. So, I went down a rabbit hole, learning as much as I could. I learned that there were competitions, and I wanted to understand what it meant for the students going into those programs. Why did they go into programs, what did they get out of them, and how did program like this affect them as individuals? That coincided with the rhetoric of Donald Trump during that time. Because I live in the border region, I wanted to focus on a school on the border because these kids were not only learning about policing, but they were being asked some heavy questions that us as adults were struggling with. To look at it from teenager’s perspective, it provided me with a very valuable insight.

What qualities do you think make for good law enforcement officer?

I think a good law enforcement officer is compassionate, interested in community policing, and their first focus should not be getting the bad guy. There needs to be more nuance in law enforcement. As a country, we are looking at policing in a different way. The protests this summer and George Floyd’s death happened while I was in the editing process. I wanted to be back in Ms. Weaver’s classroom where she was constantly having these discussions with students, allowing the teens to take sides and letting them debate what was happening in the world around them. This is something that I think the students would have benefitted from discussing and diving into critically.

How do you think the students are prepared to become good Border Patrol agents?

That was what was so eye-opening — at the end of the day they are students. I felt so protective of them. When Cristina, who is in Border Patrol Explorers and has this long dream of being in Border Patrol is confronted with the reality of child separation, you feel that coming-of-age moment. Things are not so cut and dry. Things are going to be complicated. I have to be a more hardened person if I am going to go in this career.

I’m from Corpus Christi, three hours north of the Border. I left Texas after college, and when I moved back, I was surprised to see so many Latinos in Border Patrol. I knew that was one of the talking points that I wanted to get into with some of the participants in the film — in particular Cristina, because she was so willing to talk about what she was feeling about things in ways I was not expecting. Her family was so warm and welcoming. They weren’t afraid to discuss things that one might assume would be hard to discuss.

What are your impressions of the job recruitment efforts? They appeal to the teen’s interest in exciting, well-paying jobs, but they also seem insidious, exploiting the students’ Latino culture to help solve cases.

Any time a law enforcement agency is looking for an informant, they are looking for someone that is a part of the community they are trying to access information. I was more surprised at the lack of other career options at career day. There are other well-paying jobs that do not necessarily involve law enforcement. But it’s true. If you speak Spanish and English, you can get a $50,000 a year job in any agency and that’s a starting range. It is akin to military recruitment. A large number of kids want to go into law enforcement. That’s the career respect they see.

What are your thoughts about a fact raised in the film that most Border Patrol guards are Latino, and civilians see them as the enemy, and even racist? This is a contradiction that these teens face.

Something that stuck out to me early on — and you see it in the opening of the film where Mr. Jimenez, one of the teachers, talks about law enforcement being family and the [after-school] club being family. It’s an institution that is very insular and they are very supportive of each other because of the complications and conflicts that may arise from their communities or other communities that they come from. The teachers certainly made that clear. Another teacher says, “It’s a rewarding job, you get to help people, but sometimes the people don’t like you.” There is an acknowledgement that law enforcement is not always liked. That is something that all of these kids, if they go into it, have to accept.

The realities of the job are sugarcoated by the teachers; one hides his PTSD while telling students about the adrenaline rush they get doing this work. How aware are the kids regarding what they are possibly getting into?

I think that was, especially with the competitions, something that surprised me. As a teen I would have totally gone into one of these clubs. It did seem so exciting, and the fun of playing pretend police officer really trumps discussion of some of the harsher realities of being in law enforcement. Mr. Jimenez has struggled with PTSD for a long time, and I think he was reluctant to share that with students for a number of reasons.

The students often feel pressure from their families who depend on them to help manage the family. What observations do you have about achieving this American Dream, and the teens’ resiliency, adaptability, and the pressure they face “paying back” their proud parents?

I think Cristina in particular, was very captivated by what she initially learned in school about Border Patrol. Her parents were excited to see her have a dream that was a career, and she was confronted with some harsh reality. She really wants to make them proud and heard from her dad this makes him proud. But I think she can do anything, and they would be proud of her — as long as she’s pursuing a career and growing into the person she would become. I think she creates the pressure herself. I don’t see the pressure coming from her parents. They are genuinely proud of the young adult she has become. She is pressuring herself to make sure that they are proud. But they already are proud.

There are also outside forces in the form of politics that each teen considers as they pursue this career path. I like how they each developed a level of political engagement through their work. Can you talk about this focus in “At the Ready”?

When I started making the film, I didn’t necessarily have a larger agenda in terms of incorporating the outside forces. But in Ms. Weaver’s classes, the way she encouraged dialogue and debate on the hot button issues of the day, was very interesting for me. The first debate I witnessed amongst the students was the migrant caravan. I felt like I was like a ping pong ball. Their answers kept surprising me. You hear Irma say, “But Joshua lives in Juarez,” and Joshua is saying, “We should close the border.” That was the first time I thought we can use these moments to explore the nuance and the complexity of what being a teenager on the border during the Trump administration means. It’s so much more complex than this black-and-white issue that is debated at a national level.

The program seems to be very useful in helping these youths focus on teamwork but also teaches them to think for themselves. Each subject faces an important decision point. What are your thoughts about the benefits of this program?

I think vocational training is always important, and I’m glad there is vocational training in schools. For these kids, really getting to discuss the issues that were playing out on a national level in a classroom setting and be able debate these issues and not be told that their opinion was wrong was always a positive for me. They had a family in the club.

For Mason, this provided a family, because he had no one at home. Even before he articulated it to me, it was clear that he could care less really about what he was learning in the program. He was more interested in the feeling of community and family he got. It was where he felt he fit in.

Dolphin-assisted therapy, a long-touted idea, faces renewed scientific scrutiny

It sounds like something out of a Hallmark movie: A child with autism frolics with a dolphin, and suddenly they open up to the world. Cue the inspiring music and roll credits.

It seems like a great premise for a cheesy but uplifting film, but dolphin therapy is very much a real thing, having been touted for years by proponents as a way of treating autism, depression, ADHD, Down Syndrome and a wide range of other psychological or neurological disorders. Yet the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that Dolphin-Assisted Therapy (DAT), as it is known, is bad for the dolphins and useless for the humans. The practice involves the patient interacting with the dolphin by either swimming with it or being pulled around by it or simply by quietly observing it from the side of a pool, touching it or feeding it — and neither party benefits, at least not in the long-term.

Lori Marino of the Whale Sanctuary Project and the Kimmela Center for Animal Advocacy, who co-authored the paper with the late Scott Lilienfeld in the Journal of Clinical Psychology, expounded upon the issues with dolphin-assisted therapy over email. “In many places outside the U.S. the dolphins are captured and taken from their families in the wild,” Marino said. “This is a traumatic highly stressful process and dolphins who undergo these captures have a six-fold chance of dying within a few weeks of the capture.”

Marino added that the dolphins held in captivity, whether born there or because they were captured from the wild, suffer from having to live in concrete tanks and being forced to perform.

“For DAT in particular, they are forced to allow humans to touch them and, often, ride on them or be towed through the water by them,” Marino explained. “This is a coercive practice that infringes on the dolphin’s choices and must be reinforced with food in order for the dolphin to even participate. And there is always a risk of disease transmission from dolphin to human but, also, human to dolphin.”

As the paper points out, DAT originated with research conducted by Florida International University anthropologist Betsy Smith in 1971, although Smith later disavowed DAT. DAT has also been explicitly denounced by the International Association of Human-Animal Interaction Organizations (IAHAIO). On three occasions over the past 22 years, Marino and Lilienfeld examined research that claimed DAT was successful: First in 1998, then in 2007 and again in their most recent article. As the researchers explained in their paper, part of their motivation was that there were “relatively few peer‐reviewed scientific articles” that studied whether the therapy worked as a treatment for anything.

By 1998 there were enough peer-review papers on dolphin-assisted therapy that they could analyze the methodologies used by several of the ones that claimed DAT could be effective. Then, they found that these studies had a “plethora of serious threats to various types of validity and flawed data analytic methods.”

After more studies were published in the ensuing years, they returned to the topic in 2007, and then again reviewed the literature this year.

“Our studies – three in a series – show that there is no scientific evidence supporting the notion that interacting with dolphins has real therapeutic effects for any disorder,” Marino told Salon. “Despite the claims and the testimonials, the studies of DAT are too methodologically flawed to support its validity as therapy.”

Marino explained that the studies have a number of “serious weaknesses” including “the question of whether dolphins are necessary in the whole practice or whether just any novel enjoyable experience, e.g., being in the water, traveling, attention from other people, is going to produce the very temporary positive mood one sometimes sees in these situations.” Marino observed that children benefit from having fun experiences “but that doesn’t make it therapy and it doesn’t justify charging desperate parents a lot of money under the guise of therapy.”

Marino also told Salon that DAT reinforces incorrect assumptions about autism, a condition that is widely misunderstood. (Note: This reporter is on the autism spectrum.)

“DAT can contribute to misconceptions about autism because it suggests, falsely, that the profound problems associated with autism are curable or treatable with a very nonspecific temporary ‘feel good’ practice,” Marino explained. “This vastly underplays the seriousness of autism.”

Marino described her late colleague, Scott Lilienfeld, as the epitome of “something that most of us only strive for — an openness to ideas combined with a capacity for critical thinking that gave his work an authenticity and sharpness few have achieved.” She noted that he was passionate about debunking pseudoscience, making sure people were not hurt by bad scientific claims and protecting dolphins from mistreatment.

Republican lawmakers want to use campaign funds to protect themselves — from their own voters

Both of the national political committees dedicated to electing Republicans to Congress have asked the Federal Election Commission to allow lawmakers to use campaign donations to hire bodyguards, citing heightened fears related to the Jan. 6 insurrection and its aftermath — an attack overwhelmingly carried out by Republican voters.

In a letter sent last week, attorneys for the National Republican Senatorial Committee and National Republican Congressional Committee requested guidance on whether regulations on campaign spending cover “personal security personnel” to protect members of Congress and their families from “threatened harm.”

“In light of current events involving concrete threats of physical violence against Members and their families, Members have been compelled to consider further security measures for themselves and their families,” the letter says. “As has been well-documented in the media, Members and their families continue to endure threats and security breaches, which are being timely reported to appropriate law enforcement officials.”

While the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol chiefly targeted Democratic leaders, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have expressed fears for their safety. Last week, more than 30 members asked House leadership to grant broader use of taxpayer-funded allowances to hire security in their local district offices.

Rep. Peter Meijer, R-Mich., told CNN on Jan. 13 that he was afraid of threats that would follow his decision to break with the overwhelming majority of his party and vote to impeach former President Trump.

“I am not going to let that sway my decision,” Meijer said. “I think if we give the assassin’s veto, if we give the insurrectionist’s veto, we lose something in this country, and I won’t let that happen again.” He later told MSNBC that he plans to buy body armor: “It’s sad that we have to get to that point, but you know, our expectation is that someone may try to kill us.”

Federal guidelines currently allow lawmakers to put campaign funds towards installing and upgrading home security systems without violating prohibitions on personal use, but the regulatory body has not ruled on personal protection. Only a handful of candidates have reported security details as expenses over the years, campaign filings show. In 2013, Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., spent about $30,000 in campaign cash on travel expenses for his security team, but filings show that he appears to have reissued those payments. In a single week between Oct. 29 and Nov. 7 last year, however, Rep. Madison Cawthorn, R-N.C., dropped more than $20,000 on personal security, some of that explicitly for protection on election night. A few weeks before those hires, Cawthorn, who complained that some young “punks” vandalized campaign signs outside his home. Later, at a December event, Cawthorn told a crowd of young supporters to “lightly threaten” their elected representatives while urging them to overturn the results of the presidential election.

While the FEC advisory process typically lasts up to two months, the GOP committees — citing a number of public incidents, news reports and a Jan. 19 arrest for threats to murder lawmakers — asked the six-member board to expedite the process. Trump’s upcoming impeachment trial appears to figure prominently, with the letter citing an Associated Press report that “law enforcement officials are examining a number of threats aimed at members of Congress as the second [impeachment] trial of President Donald Trump nears,” including “plots to attack members of Congress during travel to and from the Capitol complex during the trial.”

Prior to the Jan. 6 attack, three newly-elected Republican members made headlines for their politically-driven defiance of local and federal laws regulating the carrying of firearms in Washington, D.C., and on the House floor. Salon reported that one of them, Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, was given a customized Glock at a private event last week, which would be prohibited by law. After Salon contacted Boebert about the gift, she issued a statement to say that she had not accepted the gun but planned to pay for it in the future, which would probably be legal.

Following the Jan. 6 attack, some Democratic lawmakers expressed fear of their Republican colleagues, some of whom have expressed solidarity with groups involved with the riot. A group of 31 Democrats, concerned about whether some of the rioters had inside help, sent a letter to the acting House sergeant at arms last month asking for a review of visitor logbooks and closed circuit video from the day before the siege. The Democratic counterparts to the GOP national committees have so far not filed a similar letter to the FEC.

If the FEC grants the GOP’s request, it is unclear whether or how it could restrict lawmakers from hiring personal security details that included members of fascist or anti-government organizations that were involved in the riots. Longtime Trump associate Roger Stone frequently receives protection from the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, who escorted him in Washington on the night before the Jan. 6 riots. Boebert has drawn criticism for her public appearances with members of militia groups. At least one militia member is connected to the biker group that presented her with the customized Glock, and later shared video of the event on social media.

Will Joe Biden tackle single-use plastics?

When then Presidential-candidate Joe Biden told the crowd at an Iowa campaign stop in 2019 that plastic should be phased out, the announcement was met with applause. He promised then to “[treat] the climate crisis like the existential threat that it is” and as his administration gets underway, voters expect him to deliver, calling on Biden to be the first #PlasticFreePresident.

“Now we have a president who is concerned about environmental issues and wants to be engaged in the global community,” says Sarah J. Morath, a law professor at Wake Forest University and author of the forthcoming book, “Our Plastic Problem: Costs and Solutions.” “There is a potential to enact legislation and be involved in efforts at the international level to address environmental issues.”

A coalition of 550 conservation groups, including Greenpeace, Beyond Plastics, Surfrider Foundation and the Center for International Environmental Law, just released a Presidential Plastics Action Plan that includes eight actions the federal government could take to help mitigate plastic pollution. The action items include eliminating subsidies for plastic producers, suspending permits for new or expanded plastic production facilities, and supporting public health and fair labor initiatives in communities that suffer adversely from plastic production.

The group, part of a Break Free From Plastic movement, calls on the president in this action plan to “transform our extractive, throwaway economy to a regenerative inclusive one,” in order to charter a path toward a pollution-free future.

Getting back on the right track

The need to address plastics pollution is dire, according to new research from the Pew Charitable Trusts that found the amount of plastic flowing into the ocean each year will triple — to 29 million tons — unless drastic action is taken.

The coronavirus pandemic exacerbated the issue. In addition to the need for single-use personal protective equipment, including 129 billion face masks and 65 billion gloves used each month, more consumers ordered takeout and had their groceries delivered during the pandemic. Compounding the problem, several cities and states reversed or delayed efforts like plastic bag bans — and, so far, most have not reinstated their bans.

The collapsing oil market also contributed to an increase in single-use plastics, which made manufacturing virgin plastics cheaper than recycling. By 2030, the production and disposal of plastics is expected to generate 1.34 gigatons of emissions per year, which is the equivalent of operating 295 coal-powered plants.

Even though the United States is the biggest global producer of plastic waste, generating about 42 million metric tons that flows into the ocean annually, the Trump administration ended efforts to eliminate the sale of plastic water bottles in national parks, propped up petrochemical companies through repeated rollbacks of environmental regulations, withdrew from the Paris climate agreement, and blamed Asian countries for ocean plastic pollution.

“We’ve seen how much the Trump administration reversed in four years . . . when everything was going in the wrong direction and it feels like we missed out on all of the progress we should have been making and even lost ground,” says Maine Congresswoman Chellie Pingree. “I think Biden can get us on the right track, especially if we get started early and have four years of changing our behavior [and] our standards.”

In 2020, legislators introduced the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act to mandate reductions in single-use plastics. Pingree, who co-sponsored the legislation, believes federal laws are essential for curbing plastics pollution, explaining, “plastics have become such a dire issue that I think if we don’t have some federal intervention, we’re not going to solve the problem quickly enough.”

Legislation is not enough

While federal legislation can help address plastic pollution, companies must also do their part to tackle the issue, according to Sybil Bullock, global brand audit coordinator for Break Free From Plastic.

As part of the 2020 Brand Audit Report, volunteers in 55 countries collected almost 350,000 pieces of plastic waste and cataloged those marked with clear consumer brands to come up with its top global polluters list, which included companies like Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Unilever, Nestle and Philip Morris International.

Like other organizations working to reduce plastic pollution, Break Free From Plastic wants companies to set clear, measurable targets for reducing single-use plastics and reinvent their packaging to eliminate these items from the waste stream altogether — and some companies are making an effort.

“Even if [consumers] were to avoid buying plastic and recycle as much as possible, it will never be enough at the rate that corporations are continuing to extract massive amounts of fossil fuels to manufacture a growing amount of single-use plastics,” Bullock says. “These corporations have huge budgets, massive research and design teams and . . . the power to redesign the way you deliver your products.”

Several of the “top polluters” listed in the Break Free From Plastic report are participating in Loop, a service that uses refillable packaging to provide zero-waste versions of popular brands. PepsiCo plans to roll out a new recyclable, PET-free paper bottle manufactured from sustainably sourced pulp; Poland Spring, a Nestle brand, is collaborating with researchers at the University of Maine to develop bio-based packaging for its bottled water and startup Notpla developed a pod made from plant materials like seaweed that could replace single-serving condiment packets.

“Despite Trump [pushing deregulation] . . . businesses have still been focused on reducing their carbon dioxide emissions,” Morath notes. “If businesses continue to focus on reducing their plastic waste or thinking about alternative feedstocks or reducing packaging on their own . . . it will make it easier for the government to partner.”

Both the Presidential Plastics Action Plan and the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act address the need for private companies to step up and suggest legislative actions that can force their participation, including holding plastics manufacturers accountable for waste through fines and investigating (and prosecuting) violators.

Pingree points to the “extended producer responsibility” clause as one of the most important elements of the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act, explaining, “it puts the onus back on the entities that either use plastic packaging or are manufacturing it.”

Holding polluters (and presidents) accountable

Voters are aware of the issues, too. In fact, consumer demand has driven much of the innovation aimed at addressing single-use plastics waste. One global report found that 43.3 % of consumers believed manufacturers should take the lead when it comes to reducing plastic waste; additional research showed that 74% of consumers are willing to spend more for products with sustainable packaging.

The market demand — and a willingness to vote on environmental issues — could help spur legislation, Pingree notes.

“Sometimes Congress follows what big companies do . . . as businesses set examples, it makes it easier for members of Congress to go along with that because they can say, ‘Oh, this company has already proven it’s economically viable,'” Pingree notes.

Biden has been vocal about the need to address climate change, lending hope that he could become the #PlasticFreePresident. His pick for the first national climate advisor, Gina McCarthy, the former president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council, has also spoken out about the need to address climate change, writing, “The climate crisis is already hitting us hard, and it will hit us even harder unless we take bold action now.”

Making a significant dent in plastic pollution will require strong federal legislation, including the passing of the Break Free from Plastics Pollution Act and executive orders to tackle the issues laid out in the Presidential Plastics Action Plan. Even so, it could take longer than one — or two — terms in office to address plastic pollution.

“The plastic pollution crisis is a structural failure,” Bullock says. “We cannot anticipate bolder, more serious commitments from these companies without bold serious commitment from the government to help us hold these companies accountable.”

10 parenting strategies to reduce your kids’ pandemic stress

Parents are dealing with huge demands on their time and energy. Children may not be attending school or involved in regular activities. As the pandemic continues to wreak havoc on families, routines have collapsed, patience is wearing thin and self-care is a distant memory.

Decades of research have taught us that adversity during childhood has damaging effects on health and development. Many studies have shown that kids who have faced abuse, neglect and family conflict struggle forming friendships, have academic difficulties and face physical and mental health problems in adolescence and adulthood.

Fortunately, developmental scientists have identified ways to help children survive and thrive during times of adversity. The beneficial effects of protective and nurturing experiences are powerful antidotes to stress and adversity and prepare children to cope with hard times for years to come.

Families worried about possible long-term effects of pandemic-related disruption can learn from these proven strategies. Here are 10 ways parents can foster children’s resilience during challenging times.

1. Connect with one another

Make time to talk, listen and play without distractions. Be sure children know they are loved unconditionally. This can include taking breaks to check in during the day when learning and working at home, having a special bedtime routine that includes talking about the day, taking walks together, or playing favorite games. Making the effort to connect helps children know they’re valued and creates a sense of security.

2. Support children’s friendships

Think about ways for children to play together outdoors, talk via technology or play a video game virtually with friends. Some families are creating safe zones or bubbles, where they allow children to pick a close friend or two whose family is practicing recommended coronavirus precautions that they can interact with more closely. Maintaining friendships gives children opportunities to learn from peers and reduces stress, providing support and acceptance.

3. Find ways children can help others

Talk about how others are also struggling. Encourage them to donate toys they’ve outgrown, save money for a special cause or help a neighbor with errands like shopping, bringing in mail, doing yardwork or dog-walking. When you do things for others in the community, include your children and talk about why you do it. This helps children learn about the needs of others and cultivates empathy.

4. Help children stay involved in clubs or groups

Some groups that work well during a pandemic include outdoor Scouting, Zoom clubs and other special-interest clubs such as outdoor sports, fishing, hiking or biking. Being part of a group helps children feel a sense of belonging and promotes identity development. It can also help build morals and values and even promote academic success.

5. Stay in touch with important adults

Children benefit from relationships with other grown-ups, like grandparents and teachers. They can be another source of support and someone to talk to about problems or successes. They’re particularly important when parents are unavailable due to work or other obligations. Help kids stay connected through Zoom, email, phone calls, FaceTime and special activities like outdoor events. Some social media groups have targeted programs to link children with others to play games or chat.

6. Keep up with hobbies

Boredom is a parent’s worst enemy. Having an enjoyable hobby is rewarding for kids; it provides engaging leisure time and opportunities to master something. Such activities provide connections with others, can teach discipline and how to manage one’s emotions and behavior, and promote self-esteem. Explore art, music, science projects, writing, chess and other hobbies that develop physical, artistic and intellectual skills while providing hours of enjoyment.

7. Be physically active

Make exercise a part of family routines. Take walks or ride bikes, play active video games like Wii, go to the park, stretch or do yoga together. Exercise has many of the same benefits as hobbies. It also helps children handle the physical effects of stress on the body and improves mood and mental health.

8. Create routines

Routines are a powerful nonverbal signal to children’s brains that they are safe and that life is predictable. Keeping a routine can reduce the number of conflicts, and children know what to do and expect during different points of the day.

Create and display (together, ideally) daily or weekly calendars with words or pictures that remind children when learning, playing, resting, sleeping and eating activities occur. Invent little rituals that comfort as well as accomplish goals, especially at bedtime: read, tell stories, sing a special song, say a prayer or list loved ones. Such activities ensure better sleep than allowing children to drift off watching a video. Children may push back if they’ve gotten used to less structure during the day, but most will welcome knowing what to expect.

9. Keep realistic expectations for learning

Children’s involvement in schooling varies widely during the pandemic, with some hardly affected and others learning entirely at home. Virtual schooling requires parents to be more involved than before – monitoring assignments, checking in during the day and seeking help when children are struggling.

While schoolwork is indeed important, not all learning takes place in class. Involve children in opportunities to learn during everyday tasks such as cooking (measuring, timing), gardening, shopping (figuring sales prices, adding), and games (cards, dominoes, board games) that build memory and thinking skills. Read with your child every day. Depending on the level of the book, you can read to your child or take turns reading pages.

10. Maintain a healthy and safe home

In addition to maintaining COVID-19 precautions, make nutritious meals, declutter and organize toys, games, hobby supplies and learning materials. Find ways to involve children in preparing meals, organizing their work and play spaces, cleaning up after activities, and sharing in conversations about family rules. Chaos and clutter are the enemies of calm. Creating safe and orderly spaces helps children manage stress. Eating healthy foods together benefits physical and mental health.

Parenting in the time of coronavirus

Many parents naturally do the things listed above. However, with increased stress and demands on time, these activities are difficult to maintain. Now is a good time to pick a few of these strategies and get back on track.

Every family is different, and what’s appropriate differs by children’s ages, whether infants and toddlers, school-age children or teens and young adults. But adjusted for age and circumstances, these tried-and-true techniques can help youngsters make it through tough times and come out the other side OK.

Amanda Sheffield Morris, Professor of Human Development and Family Science, Oklahoma State University and Jennifer Hays-Grudo, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Oklahoma State University

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

After $100K donation, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis awards contract for supermarket vaccine distribution

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is facing criticism after deciding this month that he would revoke COVID-19 vaccine access at health centers in Palm Beach County and instead, funnel the states’ vaccine supply through Publix, a regional grocery chain. His decision comes just a few weeks after Publix donated $100,000 to his PAC, Friends of Ron DeSantis.

After the county runs out of its current supply, which health officials say will happen early next month, officials confirmed this week that the state would no longer distribute vaccines through Palm Beach’s health department and will be giving them directly to Publix. DeSantis says that the county will be a “test site” for the pilot program to funnel the state’s vaccines through Publix.

“I am absolutely disgusted that the governor of this state has 100 percent taken the ability to vaccinate our residents out of the hands of our public health officials and our medical officials and given that authority to a corporate entity,” said the county commissioner at a meeting. Palm Beach County has a population of nearly 1.5 million people. Some of the county’s residents live 40 miles away from a Publix.

Florida’s vaccine administration has thus far been rocky and, in some ways, discriminatory, some report, and many worry that the distribution of the vaccine through Publix will only cause further disparities. So far, the Miami Herald writes, vaccine administration has favored the wealthy in Florida — the highest vaccination rates are in wealthy counties and the lowest are in the poorer counties. The disparity is wide: in one wealthy oceanfront county, half of the residents have been vaccinated. But in one county where 40 percent of the residents experience poverty, only two percent have been vaccinated.

There are also disparities along racial lines in vaccine administration in the state. According to data from the state, approximately 4.9 percent of the people who have been vaccinated so far are Black despite Black people making up 16.9 percent of the population. In Palm Beach, Black people make up 3 percent of the vaccinated population and 19.8 percent of the population overall. Nikki Fried, a state official, told NPR that, with regards to the vaccine distribution disparities, “We have seen numbers that should be morally shocking.”

Democratic member of the House of Representatives in Florida Omari Hardy, who represents part of Palm Beach County, expressed his concerns with the decision on Twitter: “There are entire communities that don’t have a Publix, communities like the Glades, which is majority Black, rural, and economically depressed. Other Black communities with Publixes, like Riviera Beach in my district, don’t have pharmacies at them. So no vaccines there either.”

“The decision to make Publix the sole vaccine distributor in Palm Beach County means that Black people will continue to struggle to gain access to this vaccine. He has to know this,” Hardy continued. “This is more evidence DeSantis doesn’t care one bit about Black people. Not one bit.”

Three mayors in the county recently wrote a letter to the governor expressing their concern over this decision. “In more affluent communities, none of those distances would be a barrier to getting the vaccine,” the mayors wrote. “This is simply unacceptable, and, quite frankly, unconscionable. Placing such a barrier on an already vulnerable, highly underserved population cannot be allowed to happen.”

“When we first started there were people concerned about, really hesitant about taking the shots, skeptical about it,” one mayor told HuffPost. “We’ve been out there knocking on doors letting people know, trying to encourage them to take the vaccine … now they’re excited and willing to do this and now they’re hearing that they have to go 35-40 miles away.”

DeSantis’s office denies that there is any connection between the donation and his decision to exclusively distribute the vaccines to the public via one grocery chain in Palm Beach. However, many Florida residents have been left with unanswered questions about why he’s chosen to do it. Some have pointed out that even opening availability to other pharmacy chains like Walgreens — which has donated less to DeSantis’s campaign than Publix — would be helpful.

In West Virginia, where they are outpacing the rest of the country in vaccination rates, officials have found success in what is essentially the opposite strategy from DeSantis’s recent decision: since chain stores like Walgreens and CVS aren’t as widely spread in West Virginia, they have instead been focusing on distributing to local pharmacies and independent stores. More than 9 percent of the state’s residents have received their first dose there, as opposed to an average of 6 percent nationwide.

House Republicans are cracking up along Trump lines

There is a partisan storm brewing within the GOP.

The fate of two House Republicans, Rep. Liz Cheney, R-WY, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-GA, two congresswomen who lie on opposite ends of a post-Trump Republican Party, will be decided this week as their colleagues convene to discuss whether they will keep their leadership and committee seats.

The House Rules Committee will move Wednesday to begin the process of removing the freshman flamethrower from Georgia off of the Education and Labor committee Republicans just assigned the infamous conspiracy theorist to. Greene, who has a strong affiliation with QAnon, has called for the deaths of various Democratic lawmakers, accused the Rothschild family of using space lasers to start wildfires, linked Israel to the Kennedy assassination, and has labeled several school shootings as “false-flag affairs.”

The intra-party storm is a culmination of a weeks-long battle within the House following the Capitol riot on Jan. 6 that has since placed Republican lawmakers in something of a political quandary. Should they continue in the GOP’s past direction –– that is, Trump-era demagoguery, radicalism, and conspiracy –– or attempt to “restore the soul” their party, bringing it back to a pre-Trump state of respectability?

Rep. Liz Cheney, who voted on Jan 13 to impeach President Donald Trump, is one of few House Republicans in support of the latter. Cheney will come under scrutiny this week on Wednesday, as a House Republican Conference will assemble to discuss whether her impeachment vote warrants expulsion from Congress. According to Politico, at least 107 of Cheney’s colleagues have said they are willing to vote against her on a secret ballot.

Cheney, who was the subject of widespread Republican outrage, was joined by nine other Republicans, including Rep. Tom Rice, R-SC, Rep. Peter Meijer, R-MI, Rep. Dan Newhouse, R-WA, and Rep Adam Kinzinger, R-IL, who has launched a new PAC to challenge Republican support of Trump, likening his PAC’s mission to that of the Lincoln Project, the NeverTrump super PAC whose founder was recently accused by 21 young men of making inappropriate sexual comments online.

Rep. Matt Rosendale, R-MT, who is leading the charge to expel Cheney, said last week, “[Rep. Cheney] has proven that she is out of step with the vast majority of our conference and the Republicans across the nation,” adding, “A lot of people within our conference have a problem with it.”

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-CA, has also expressed dissatisfaction with Cheney’s repudiation of the former President but stopped short of calling for Cheney’s removal.

“She took a position as a No. 3 member in conference, she never told me ahead of time,” McCarthy told CNN. “She can have a difference of opinion, but the one thing if we’re going to lead within the conference, we should work together on that as a whole conference because we’re representative of that conference. So I support her, but I do think she has a lot of questions she has to answer to the conference.”

Cheney’s expulsion will require that lawmakers convene immediately unless two-thirds of the conference demands an immediate vote. Those who have come to Cheney’s defense include Rep. Nancy Mace, R-SC, Rep. Chip Roy, R-TX, and Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-TX.

Also in the national spotlight is Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-GA, who has rapidly risen to notoriety as a laundry list of social media controversies surrounding the Congresswoman have come to light in the past several weeks. Greene, who has a strong affiliation with QAnon, has called for the deaths of various Democratic lawmakers, accused the Rothschild family of using space lasers to start wildfires, linked Israel to the Kennedy assassination, and has labeled several school shootings as “false-flag affairs.”

Greene’s team, which has been in a perpetual state of damage control, is now on a crusade to scrub all of her conspiracy-laced rants from the web –– a task which will no doubt prove challenging, given the steady stream of improprieties that continue to surface on a daily basis.

On Saturday, Greene revealed that she’d spoken with President Trump. “I had a GREAT call with my all time favorite POTUS, President Trump!” she said on Twitter, “I’m so grateful for his support […] The blood thirsty media and the socialists hate America Democrats are attacking me now just like they always attack President Trump.”

McCarthy, who plans to have a “conversation” with Greene, has been relatively silent on Greene’s conduct otherwise and few other Republican leaders have taken a stance against the freshman congresswoman.

“I think Republican leaders ought to stand up and say it is totally unacceptable what she has said,” Sen. Rob Portman, R-OH, told CNN on Sunday. Portman expressed that he “wouldn’t be surprised” if Greene were removed from her seat on the House Education and Labor Committee and the House Budget Committee.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-IL, joined Portman. “I’d certainly vote her off committee,” echoed Kinzinger. “In terms of eviction, I’m not sure because I’m kind of in the middle. I think a district has every right to put who they want there. But we have every right to take a stand and say, ‘You don’t get a committee.’ And we definitely need to do that.”

McCarthy, who met with Trump on Thursday to discuss winning the House majority next year, has urged members of the GOP to refrain from infighting. He also said the former President’s support will remain key advantage in regaining the House majority. “United and ready to win in ’22,” McCarthy tweeted.

With a divided House and the former President’s voting bloc now rapidly shrinking, however, McCarthy will have to navigate a rocky political landscape full of partisan landmines to assemble anything close to a united GOP.

Sorry, Republicans, but there’s no way to acquit Trump without endorsing his insurrection

For weeks now, Republicans in Congress have been playing a rhetorical game regarding the impeachment of Donald Trump on charges — for which he is quite obviously guilty — of inciting an insurrection. On one hand, Senate Republicans want very badly to acquit Trump, even though this would allow him to run for office again, believing that the Republican voting base is more loyal to Trump than they are to the GOP or to the nation itself. On the other hand, they don’t want to come right out and say that Trump was justified in sending a violent crowd to storm the Capitol on January 6. That sort of overtly fascist stance can hurt one’s bookings on cable news shows and cause corporate donors to put you on ice for a cycle.

So Senate Republicans glommed onto what they thought was the perfect strategy to have it both ways: pretend that they are springing Trump on a technicality.

Last week, in a vote called by Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, 45 out of 50 Senate Republicans voted affirmatively on the claim that it’s unconstitutional to hold an impeachment trial for Trump now that he’s out of office. “Impeachment is for removal from office, and the accused here has already left office,” Paul argued, clearly imagining himself a true artiste of hair-splitting.

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Senate Republicans want to maintain a position as Schrödinger’s insurrectionists, neither for or against Trump’s attempted coup. But Trump was never a man with a taste for the politically useful equivocacy and has special loathing for Republicans who aren’t enthusiastic enough about the terrible and illegal things he likes to do. So it’s unsurprising that Trump looks like he’s going to make life very difficult for Senate Republicans by leaning away from the technicality arguments and pushing for his lawyers to simply defend his actions in attempting to overthrow the legally elected government.

“According to both the New York Times and the Washington Post, Trump insisted that his lawyers mount a defense focusing on ‘his baseless claims about election fraud,'” Heather “Digby” Parton explained Monday morning at Salon. The result is Trump’s legal team, afraid of repercussions for lying during trial arguments, has decided to quit his case. Trump’s now scraped the bottom of the barrel for new lawyers at the eleventh hour.

All of this means that rather than playing along with the acquit-on-a-made-up-technicality strategy handed to him by Senate Republicans, Trump is likely to run a defense based on the premise that he did nothing wrong by sending a mob to the Capitol in an effort to overturn the election. This puts Senate Republicans in a bind by making it hard to maintain the illusion that they’re not endorsing the insurrection while letting Trump off the hook for inciting it.

It’s worth remembering that we’ve been down this road before. In Trump’s last impeachment trial, Republicans in the Senate and conservative legal experts both generally felt that the smartest defense was to argue that Trump was wrong to run an extortion scheme against the president of Ukraine, but that it fell short of being an impeachable offense. Trump, however, was attached to the “Trump can do no wrong/Trump is perfect in every way” defense. And that’s what he eventually got, as Alan Dershowitz, always ready to be maximally shameless, advanced the claim that anything Trump wants to do to get re-elected should be rendered legal by the grace of Trump’s indubitable wisdom as president.

Trump bet during that impeachment that, given a choice between kissing his ass in public and maintaining a sense of dignity, Senate Republicans would all line up behind him, lips a-puckered. It’s a bet that paid off. In the end, Trump got all Senate Republicans, except for Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, to vote to acquit him on the strength of the “Trump can do no wrong” defense.

It’s laughable, however, that Republicans in the Senate ever thought there was going to be a way to acquit Trump this time around with their dignity intact. They were always going to have to sign onto his ridiculous claims that the election was stolen from him and to back his use of violence to try to get his way. There have only ever been two options for Republicans: Cut Trump loose or completely subjugate themselves to his massive ego. There is no middle ground.

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Even before Trump made this move, it should have been clear to Republicans that impeachment would come down to the stark question of whether they are for or against an authoritarian uprising against democracy. While some Beltway journalists might be snookered by political hedging on this question, voters generally aren’t going to be too interested in the fine distinction between “supporting a fascist coup” and “merely opposing consequences for the ringleader of a fascist coup.”

Whether Senate Republicans want to admit it or not, the reason Trump has them clutched in his stubby fingers is that most of their voters support Trump’s efforts to overturn the election.

In an NBC poll taken less than two weeks after the insurrection, 87% of Republican voters said they approved of Trump, a drop of only two percentage points from November. And three-quarters of Republican voters insist that Trump got more votes than Joe Biden, even though he received 7 million fewer. Like the politicians they support, those voters will sometimes feign disapproval of the violence in order to look good to pollsters. But those poll numbers tell the real story: Republican voters back the insurrection, back the excuse for it, and back the man who incited it.

The entire reason Republicans in Congress won’t convict Trump, even though they know he’s guilty, is fear of offending their pro-insurrection base. Whatever excuses they make are frankly beside the point. Republican leadership is complicit with Trump’s attempted coup. The only way to not be complicit any longer is to vote to convict Trump.

“We will march to the Capitol building”: Trump’s impeachment trial to include this pre-riot robocall

Among the revelations in the bombshell New York Times report about the final 77 days of Donald Trump’s presidency was that MAGA organizers for the Jan. 6 rally never intended to march to the U.S. Capitol.

While the president tweeted that the Jan. 6 event would be “wild,” organizers saw their efforts overpowered by Trump’s insiders.

“The rally had taken on new branding, the March to Save America, and other groups were joining in, among them the Republican Attorneys General Association,” The Times reported. “Its policy wing, the Rule of Law Defense Fund, promoted the event in a robocall that said, ‘We will march to the Capitol building and call on Congress to stop the steal,’ according to a recording obtained by the progressive investigative group Documented.”

Allies of Steve Bannon, Jennifer Lawrence and Dustin Stockton were working with Women for America First, founded by Amy Kremer and run by her daughter Kylie Jane Kremer.

“Mr. Stockton said he was surprised to learn on the day of the rally that it would now include a march from the Ellipse to the Capitol,” said The Times. “Before the White House became involved, he said, the plan had been to stay at the Ellipse until the counting of state electoral slates was completed.”

Some of the speakers from the group would be the night before because Trump’s involvement meant his speech would take precedence.

“What we’re doing is unprecedented,” Cindy Chafian of the 80 Percent Coalition, when the event began. “We are standing at the precipice of history, and we are ready to take our country back.”

She ultimately told Trump through the crowd, “We heard your call. We are here for you.”

These are likely just some of the facts expected to be addressed in the second impeachment trial of Trump.

Read the full New York Times report.

Joe Manchin snipes at Kamala Harris for pressuring him to vote for coronavirus relief

Sen. Joe Manchin, the conservative West Virginia Democrat who is seen as crucial to passing President Biden’s agenda, appears to have launched a feud with Vice President Kamala Harris. This came after Harris pushed both Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, another centrist Democrat, to support the Biden administration’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus rescue plan.

Manchin and Sinema have emerged as potential foils to Biden’s agenda, and potential allies to “moderate” Republicans eager to slow that agenda down in the name of bipartisan compromise. With the Senate split 50-50, the two hold serious leverage on any bill that Democrats may seek to pass along party lines, and both have already come out against scrapping the filibuster and expressed concerns about Biden’s relief plan. Last Thursday, Harris gave interviews to local news outlets in West Virginia and Arizona, seemingly as a way of ramping up the pressure on the two lawmakers to back the proposal, which infuriated Manchin.

“I saw [the Harris interview], I couldn’t believe it. No one called me,” Manchin told local news outlet WSAZ on Friday. “We’re going to try to find a bipartisan pathway forward, I think we need to do. But we need to work together. That’s not a way of working together.”

Manchin also “conveyed his displeasure privately” to senior White House officials last week, according to Politico, which noted that Harris is not popular in West Virginia and may have caused “eye rolls in the state” when she referred to “abandoned mine lands” as “abandoned land mines” in the interview.

Harris appeared on WSAZ a day earlier to highlight how critical the aid was to Manchin’s constituents.

“In West Virginia, one in seven families is describing their household as being hungry, one in six can’t pay their rent, and one in four small businesses are closing permanently or have already closed, so it’s a big issue in West Virginia and across the country,” the vice president said Thursday.

Harris’ comments struck an even darker tone in her interview with the Arizona Republic, highlighting the need to expand vaccination to rural areas.

“If we don’t pass this bill, I’m going to be very candid with you: We know more people are going to die in our country,” she told the outlet. “More people will lose their jobs and our children are going to miss more school. We’ve got to be here collectively to say that that is not an option in America.”

Manchin is part of a bipartisan group of senators that includes Republicans like Mitt Romney of Utah and Susan Collins of Maine, which met with Biden’s team last week to urge the administration to limit the $1,400 direct payments included in the proposal.

“We met with his economic team and they put out what they wanted,” Manchin told WSAZ. “We want to help everyone that needs help. But if a person’s making $250K or $300K, I don’t think they’re in [as] much need as a person making $40K or 50K. That’s all I said. We’re going to target.”

Biden’s plan begins to phase out the payments at an individual income of $75,000, and eliminates them for anyone making over $115,000 per year, or $206,000 for couples.

A group of 10 Republicans, including Collins and Romney as well as some more conservative members of the GOP Senate caucus, on Sunday called for Biden to reduce the payments from $1,400 to $1,000 and to shrink his proposal by more than two-thirds, from $1.9 trillion to around $600 billion. Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, said on Sunday that Republicans will push to limit the direct payments to Americans who earn under $50,000 and couples that earn up to $100,000.

Biden is slated to meet with the Republican group this week. White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Friday defended Harris’ interviews in West Virginia and Arizona.

“We want to make the case to the American people across the country. … This is a way to do just that,” she told reporters, adding that Harris will do a “number of additional regional calls and regional interviews, as will members of the team.”

Biden has repeatedly said he wants to work in a bipartisan fashion, but the Republican proposal is not likely to stop Democrats from seeking to use the budget reconciliation process — which Republicans used in 2017 to push through sweeping tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefited the rich — to pass the relief plan with a simple majority. The Republican proposal would phase out direct payments to those making over $40,000 (compared to $75,000 in previous bills), reduce enhanced federal unemployment benefits from $400 a week in Biden’s plan to $300, and would end those benefits in June rather than September. The GOP proposal also rejects Biden’s proposed federal minimum wage increase, which would gradually reach $15 an hour, a major goal of progressives for the past several years.

The consensus view among Democrats is that the Republican offer is so much lower than Biden’s proposal that it “is not worth entertaining,” according to The Washington Post’s Jeff Stein.

Some longtime congressional aides also suggested that the Republican proposal was a setup for a bait-and-switch, predicting that the inclusion of highly partisan Republicans like Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota and Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina means that some in the group are not likely to back any final proposal.

“This letter illustrates Republicans’ credibility problem. Half the names here don’t pass the laugh test,” said Adam Jentleson, who served as chief of staff to former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. “It’s one of the more transparent efforts to paper over obstruction I’ve seen. They’re offering a fraction of what Biden proposed and experts say is needed. They came in at exactly 10 signers, meaning only one has to find a reason to peel off. It’s just not worth Biden’s time.”

“In the end this letter will more practically just serve as these [Republicans’] explanation for voting no on the final package,” agreed Brendan Buck, a longtime aide to former House Speakers Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and John Boehner, R-Ohio.

With Republican support for the package unlikely, many Democrats are instead worried that Manchin could be the lone vote who blocks a Democratic push to get the legislation passed quickly.

“Manchin controls everything,” a senior Democratic aide told Politico.

Biden has said he is open to negotiating the parameters of the direct payments.

“There’s legitimate reason for people to say, ‘Do you have the lines drawn the exact right way? Should it go to anybody making over X number of dollars or Y?'” he told reporters last week. “I’m open to negotiate those things.”

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., argued that reducing the income threshold was dangerous because it was based on past income, meaning that people who lost their job in the last year may not qualify.

Former Federal Reserve economist Claudia Sahm agreed that shrinking eligibility means some people could fall through the cracks, particularly people who lost their jobs but are ineligible or unable to receive unemployment benefits.

“These checks circumvent all kinds of administrative barriers,” Sahm told The Hill.

Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., warned Democratic leaders in a letter last week against “an overemphasis on targeting aid.” Jayapal argued that “if you target too much, it becomes harder to get relief out quickly.”

Members of Biden’s team have pushed back against the idea of more precise targeting as well.

“The checks are better targeted than I think most people realize. Now, that doesn’t mean that they just go to folks at the bottom, but that is because it’s not just folks at the bottom who need the money,” Jared Bernstein, a member of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, told Bloomberg. “If anybody is listening to me in the $75K to $100K range, many of them, yes, have kept their jobs. Many of them have lost hours. Many have lost wages.”

The other costs in Biden’s plan are driven by economic needs, not political ambitions, advisers say.

“The president is uncompromising when it comes to the speed that we need to act at to address this crisis,” Brian Deese, Biden’s top economic adviser, told CNN. “The provisions of the president’s plan, the American Rescue Plan, are calibrated to the economic crisis that we face.”

A growing number of Democrats have also shrugged off Republican complaints about using the budget process for coronavirus relief, noting that the group backed the process to get tax cuts under Trump.

“Regular people don’t care whether we pass something with 51 or 60 votes,” Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, said on Twitter. “It’s a pandemic and the largest economic contraction in 90 years. We must ignore those who call anything a Republican proposes a compromise, and anything a Democrat proposes partisan. We have to deliver.”

Bernstein agreed that the “key to getting robust job opportunities is to cease any delay, any inaction, any wait-and-see around this rescue plan.”

“The American people could not care less about budget process,” he told Fox News. “They need relief, and they need it now.”

Trump just fired his legal team because he is trying to turn his impeachment trial into a circus

As the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump approaches, we are beginning to get some idea of how the House managers intend to proceed. The single Article of Impeachment alleges that Trump lied repeatedly about the results of the election and called people to Washington, D.C. for a rally at which he incited them to “violent, deadly, destructive and seditious acts.” It cites his earlier attempts to subvert and obstruct the certification of the results of the election, including that astonishing phone call in which Trump openly asked an election official in Georgia to “find” the votes needed to overturn the election in his state.

Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer told MSNBC on Saturday that the trial will “show the American people — vividly, on film — what happened there in the Capitol, what Trump said. … All of America will see it.”

There’s a lot of video and audio available to tell that story — much of it produced by the insurrectionists themselves. The call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republicans, was also taped. There are dozens of court transcripts from indicted insurrectionists who say they believed that the president had told them to do what they did. It is well documented that Trump did what he is accused of doing.

This is why Republicans have offered up a defense for Trump that would evade the charges altogether and argue simply that the Senate has no constitutional right to impeach him at all since he is already out of office. The fact that then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., made sure the Senate was not in session to receive the Article of Impeachment until Joe Biden took office gives away the game on that one.

In other words, Republicans believe the best way to let Donald Trump off the hook for telling a crazed mob to march to the Capitol on January 6th to overturn the election they all know he lost, is to pretend that the process is fundamentally illegitimate. This is a highly disputed claim but it’s really all they’ve got.

Trump, however, is apparently having none of it.

Just a little over a week before he is to file briefs in the case, he abruptly parted ways with most of his legal team, a group of respected lawyers from South Carolina led by a former prosecutor named Butch Bowers. The split, which was made public on Saturday, reportedly occurred over differences of opinion about strategy. Trump’s former lawyers believed that his best defense was the one the Senate Republicans handed him on a silver platter last week when 45 of them cast a vote making it clear that they backed the “illegitimate process” argument and would acquit Trump of the charges on that basis.

Their client curiously disagreed.

According to both the New York Times and the Washington Post, Trump insisted that his lawyers mount a defense focusing on “his baseless claims about election fraud.” Bowers informed Trump they could not do it. The reason for that, of course, is that they would have to lie and like many of the lawyers Trump has employed since the election — other than the unhinged legal freakshow of Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis — they refused to break the law on his behalf or participate in his propaganda campaign to undermine the election results.

The Times also reported that the newly pardoned Steve Bannon, back in Trump’s good graces and advising him on his future, believes that Trump should go to the floor of the Senate and make his case in-person because “he’s the only one who can sell it.” There was also speculation that Trump might let his old buddy Giuliani take over as he’s been champing at the bit to do from the beginning, but since Giuliani is actually a participant in the incitement, telling the January 6th mob that there should be “trial by combat,” it seems the president’s advisers have succeeded in keeping him from the case. And it was not entirely unlikely that Trump just would not bother to put up a case at all, allowing McConnell and his other henchmen in the Senate to make his argument for him and call it a day. After all, he already believes he’s guaranteed an acquittal as Trump’s reportedly told people he couldn’t see why he should have to spend money on lawyers if he already has the verdict in the bag.

But Trump did end up hiring two lawyers to replace the team that left on Saturday. Roger Stone’s former attorney David Schoen, who had evidently already been working with Trump, now assumes the lead role. Bruce Castor, a former DA from Pennsylvania best known for refusing to prosecute Bill Cosby, has also been added to the team. According to the news release announcing their hiring, they both believe that that the trial is unconstitutional — which doesn’t actually say much about how they plan to defend the president.

Both Schoen and Castor have reputations for theatricality. In Schoen’s case, that’s a literal description since he studied at the Actor’s Studio in New York and has recently acted in a docudrama about the late accused child trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, whom he met with just days before Epstein committed suicide. Schoen describes himself as someone who has represented “reputed mobster figures: alleged head of Russian mafia in this country, Israeli mafia and two Italian bosses.” Now he’s representing Donald Trump. Castor was evidently once an up and coming Republican politician in the state of Pennsylvania but his Cosby decision derailed his career when he turned to mush on the witness stand.

Trump’s new attorneys would appear to be the kind of lawyers who will do for his impeachment trial what Dr. Scott Atlas did for his COVID response. When asked about the Democrats’ reported trial strategy, Trump adviser Jason Miller told Axios’ Mike Allen: “‘Emotionally charged’ is code for ‘We know this is unconstitutional, but we’re going to try to put on a show anyway.'”

I asked one of Donald Trump’s former lawyers for a reaction to his new impeachment legal team.

Their response?

“Should be a circus.”

— Olivia Nuzzi (@Olivianuzzi) February 1, 2021

Trump likely sees this trial as a way to once again rally the base with a spirited “defense” stating the election was stolen, this time with an implicit admission that he believes the insurrection was justified. If he does that all the pundits insist it’s going to make the GOP senators very nervous and they might end up voting to convict. Will it? Nah. They’ll find a way to make sure he faces no accountability at their hands. We have to stop pretending otherwise.

The question is whether the “show” the Democrats put on to prosecute Trump will be more convincing to the American people than whatever “circus” Trump is planning. If you want emotion, he’s got plenty of emotion ready to go. He might even get some of that incitement going all over again. But the evidence of what he did that day is irrefutable. He’s guilty as sin.

GOP senators behind skimpy $600 billion COVID relief happily voted for $740 billion military budget

Each of the 10 Republican senators who threw their support behind a widely criticized $600 billion coronavirus relief proposal on Sunday recently approved a whopping $740 billion military budget, a vote progressive lawmakers are highlighting as further evidence of the GOP’s warped priorities amid a devastating pandemic and economic crisis.

“Every single one of these Senate Republicans voted to give the Pentagon billions more than what they’re willing to give to the American people,” Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), chair emeritus of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), tweeted Sunday in response to the GOP’s proposed “compromise” package.

“The QAnonGOP jammed through tax cuts and goodies for their corporate pals. Now, let’s jam for the people. Reconciliation if they don’t want to play ball.”
—Rep. Rashida Tlaib

“$1.9 trillion is the floor—not the ceiling,” Pocan added, referring to President Joe Biden’s opening coronavirus relief offer.

While the details have not yet been fully hammered out, the GOP’s watered-down relief proposal currently calls for reducing Biden’s proposed direct payments from $1,400 to $1,000 per individual—and dramatically restricting eligibility for the checks—as well as scaling back the unemployment relief provisions outlined in the president’s plan.

“The Biden plan would increase those benefits to $400 weekly and extend them through September,” the Washington Post explained. “The GOP plan would keep the payments at $300 per week and extend them through June.”

The Republican proposal, as it stands, was summarized in a letter sent to Biden Sunday by Sens. Susan Collins (Maine), Mitt Romney (Utah), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Bill Cassidy (La.), Rob Portman (Ohio), Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.), Todd Young (Ind.), Jerry Moran (Kan.), Mike Rounds (S.D.), and Thom Tillis (N.C.).

All ten Republicans voted in July to approve the Senate’s version of the $740 billion National Defense Authorization Act, and then voted last month to override former President Donald Trump’s veto of the measure.

Every single one of these @SenateGOP voted to give the Pentagon billions more than what they're willing to give to the American people.

$1.9 trillion is the floor—not the ceiling. https://t.co/M704vLb5V5

— Rep. Mark Pocan (@RepMarkPocan) January 31, 2021

With Biden expected to meet with the group of Republicans at the White House on Monday, progressives reiterated their position that anything less than the president’s opening offer would be unacceptable and argued Democrats should use their unified control of the federal government to pass a robust aid package without GOP input.

“Covid relief can’t wait any longer,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the CPC. “If the Republican Party doesn’t feel the urgency of Americans who are struggling to keep food on the table, then it’s time for us to act without them.”

CPC vice chair Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) echoed that massage late Sunday, declaring that “during a global health crisis and a historic economic hardship, this is not the time to ‘compromise’ our residents.”

“The QAnonGOP jammed through tax cuts and goodies for their corporate pals,” Tlaib tweeted, referring to Republicans’ use of the budget reconciliation process in 2017 to pass their $1.5 trillion tax bill with a simple-majority vote.

“Now, let’s jam for the people,” said Tlaib. “Reconciliation if they don’t want to play ball.”

After Trump, the crisis: White America at the historical crossroads

Donald Trump’s coup attempt — and especially the Jan. 6 attack he incited on the U.S. Capitol — were a type of “white riot” and insurrection against multiracial democracy. Sociologist Bart Bonikowski recently offered this analysis to Thomas Edsall of the New York Times:

Ethnonationalist Trump supporters want to return to a past when white men saw themselves as the core of America and minorities and women “knew their place.” Because doing so requires the upending of the social order, many are prepared to pursue extreme measures, including racial violence and insurrection. What makes their actions all the more dangerous is a self-righteous belief — reinforced by the president, the Republican Party, and right-wing conspiracy peddlers — that they are on the correct side of history as the true defenders of democracy, even as their actions undermine its core institutions and threaten its stability.

The lethal violence by Trump’s followers at the Capitol was not the end but rather another stage of escalation in right-wing extremism and terrorism against multiracial democracy. Law enforcement officials and counter-insurgency experts are warning that the United States will likely experience an increasing amount of white supremacist and other right-wing extremist terrorism and other political violence in response to the country’s changing racial demographics. The symbolic power of Joe Biden’s presidency, and especially of Kamala Harris, the first woman, first Black person and first Asian American to serve as vice president, will only fuel more right-wing terrorism and other violence.

Trump’s neofascist movement has given permission for such violence, and has provided a space for radicalization into political extremism as well as the material and other resources to sustain an armed insurrection against American democracy. Trump has signaled that he hopes to be a “shadow president” commanding this movement through stochastic terrorism.

In total, the power of Donald Trump’s appeals to white supremacy, racial authoritarianism, white victimhood and white violence were so powerful for his voters and other followers that despite a ruined economy and a pandemic that has already killed more than 440,000 people in the United States, Trump received millions more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016.

The rise of Trumpism and its enduring appeal for tens of millions of white Americans also reflects a phenomenon described by social scientists and other researchers: Many people in that population feel a growing sense of alienation and loneliness as well as feelings of obsolescence and declining social value. This gives rise to widespread resentment, a disregard for death (and in some cases a literal death wish) and an increasing attraction to conspiracy theories, fantasies of violence, apocalyptic right-wing Christian extremism and other anti-social values and beliefs among Trump’s followers and other white Americans.

Whiteness appears to be in a state of crisis. To better understand that dynamic, I recently spoke with David Roediger, a professor of history and American studies at the University of Kansas. He is the author of such notable books as “Working Toward Whiteness,” “How Race Survived U.S. History” and “Towards the Abolition of Whiteness.” His new book is “The Sinking Middle Class: A Political History.”

In this conversation, Roediger explores the perils of increased public focus on the “white working class” and why that language should be used much more carefully. He also addresses such questions as how public discussions about “structural racism” often distort and misrepresent the concept and its implications, and what many liberals and leftists misunderstand about the relationship between race and class.

At the end of this conversation Roediger warns that white America may be at a historical crossroads, facing a choice between embracing a more inclusive social democracy or instead becoming more reactionary and dangerous.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

How are you feeling?

Hopeful, in a way. The George Floyd rebellions, which were some of the largest sustained protests in the history of the United States, really changed things in some fundamental ways. On that note, I believe that we could have thought differently about the Trump administration. We could have had a strategy that envisioned bringing Trump down through popular protests. In most European countries, a figure such as Donald Trump would have been protested out of office as much as he was voted out of office, and earlier probably.

Language does political work. It shapes reality and the limits of our collective imaginations, and how we think about political society and our role in it. For example, in the Age of Trump, and especially in the moment of the George Floyd uprising, there were more public discussions of “structural” or “institutional racism.” Joe Biden is also using this language. I worry that most people, both in the news media and on the day-to-day, do not have a real understanding of what those words mean in practice.

Structural racism is a very important concept, but it is now becoming an empty signifier. I believe that it is very hard to know what politicians mean when they say “structural racism.” And to hear police departments and law enforcement talking about structural racism particularly begs for a serious discussion of the concept as related to redress of grievances. The structures in this country are such that white working people have learned that their racist claims and desires will be listened to. Black people have learned that those white working people have to be placated in their racism or Democrats cannot be elected. If there can be a change where poor whites can be brought together in an alliance with antiracism, that would be an interesting moment.

“Working class” is a term that has come to dominate American political discourse during the Trump regime and now beyond. But it is emptied of all content and meaning. “Working class” is too often used in a superficial race- and gender-neutral way by the mainstream news media and other political elites. In many ways, “working class” is just another way of saying “white men.” That assumption is so deep it goes unremarked upon by most.

To talk about the “white working class” is really to fight on the terrain that the likes of a Trump or a Steve Bannon or Breitbart could occupy.

If one goes down the road of talking about the “white working class,” inevitably the emphasis ends up on “white.” With the Bannons and Trumps that “white” is emphasized, as in the full-blown white nationalism that they gravitate towards.

Even with the Democrats there is an emphasis on the “white” in “white working class,” because they do not have anything as a party to offer in terms of class or the specifics of trade policy that would actually appeal to the people in Macomb County, Michigan. The Democrats are not for trade union rights in any fundamental way. The Democrats are not for reorganizing the working class. The Democrats are very much in favor of disastrous trade deals such as NAFTA.

When political leaders and pundits say “middle class” they mean the white middle class — what is imagined to be the middle of the class structure. But for African Americans, the 50th percentile has about one-ninth of the wealth of the middle of the white class structure.

The term “middle class” obscures racial differences and related inequalities. I believe this has been true since at least the 1980s. Some of us on the left are implicated in this too, because there is a kind of left politics that argues, “Oh, we should advance these middle-class economic demands, which in turn would mean we do not have to talk about race so much. Our economic agenda helps everyone, so we can avoid these challenging conversations about race”.

These types of approaches to class and race in America mean that there is very little space in the public discourse to seriously consider what would bring poor people together across the color line, while also being attentive to the specific grievances that African Americans and immigrants have in the United States.

Race and class should not be discussed as being separate and apart from one another in America, or the West more generally. Where do you think the impulse to talk in simple terms, to decouple the two concepts, comes from?

For some of us who are materialists and apply Marxist analyses, part of our worst impulses are when we argue that class concerns should submerge concerns about racial justice.

For all his experience with the Black Freedom Struggle, there have been too many moments when Bernie Sanders was also guilty of that type of class reductionism.

The fact that the Sanders 2016 campaign introduced the word “socialism” into the national vocabulary was a big achievement. Given that, many people were willing to allow certain problems to go uncommented upon. In 2020, it seemed to me that Bernie Sanders had been given better advice about how to talk about race.

I believe that Sanders was most comfortable in both 2016 and 2020 speaking about things that are important for Black and brown people in the United States such as Medicare for All. Sanders was also advocating economic policies that did not have a specifically important racial dimension to them, such as college tuition for all.

Systems of white supremacy and white racism also hurt white people. How can we do a better job of explaining that to white folks?

The willingness to accept dehumanization never ends at the color line. As an example, America’s prison system is essentially an extension of Jim Crow that disproportionately targets young Black men. But that same system, from the 1980s forward also vastly increased the number of white people who are incarcerated. Using America’s Jim Crow prison system as an example, we can highlight the racism at work there against black men — but then, at the same time, call attention to how white people, in particular poor white people, are also being hurt by mass incarceration. Another example is how the number of white women incarcerated has gone through the roof in the same period.

How do you think whiteness is doing at present in America?

A majority of whites in the United States still support Trump. We often get confused by these extraordinarily close elections. In fact, these elections are so close because African Americans vote overwhelmingly for the Democratic candidate. The same is true for Latinos and Hispanics. This gives the appearance that there is all this resistance against Trump and what he represents, but in reality white Americans are generally supportive of him. We do not gain much in this country by denying that fact.

These political and cultural problems have been going on for a long time in white America. Those problems continued and maybe even accelerated under Donald Trump.

Moreover, there are huge numbers of eligible voters who do not participate. Poor people are much less likely to vote. There is something wrong with America’s culture and politics that is larger than Donald Trump.

An example of the many problems in white America — not exclusively found among the so-called white working class — is shown through the response to COVID and refusing to wear a mask. This a literal embrace of death by large numbers of white people in America. The mindless embrace of death by refusing to wear a mask also represents a type of widespread malaise.

There is much evidence of this from the studies about the opioid crisis and the so-called deaths of despair among certain segments of the white public. In total, that data and other examples point to a type of psychological emergency among some whites.

Is whiteness in some form of crisis as shown by the Age of Trump, which was at its core a white supremacist and neofascist backlash against multiracial democracy?

I do not subscribe to the argument that in the next few decades white people will somehow not be the largest group and that therefore means the end of whiteness as we know it in America.

At present there is a re-examination of the assumptions that undergird whiteness in America. That could result in a type of social democracy, or whiteness could be refurbished by admitting into its ranks groups who are now considered “people of color.” There are real possibilities of a reactionary move as well.

What is a crisis? Something that we do not know where it leads. Lots of white Americans are experiencing such a crisis.

Did “defund the police” lead to an increase in murder? Almost certainly not

Former President Donald Trump, a variety of Republican and Democratic lawmakers, and police unions have spent so many months blaming protesters’ calls to shift city budgets away from police for the widespread increase in homicides that it has become conventional wisdom. That doesn’t mean it’s true. In fact, data shows that Republican-led cities and even those that increased police budgets have experienced similar spikes.

Trump and countless Republican candidates seized on Black Lives Matter protesters’ calls to “defund the police,” or to shift police funding toward social programs to address the root causes of crime like poverty and mental illness, to link them to violent crime increases that began before the summer protests following the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd. But data compiled by crime analyst Jeff Asher from 51 cities shows that the murder rate in Democratic-led cities increased 36.2% through the fall, while the murder rate in Republican-led cities spiked by a virtually identical 35.6%.

Homicides increased by 42% during the summer and 34% during the fall in 28 major cities analyzed by Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of St. Louis-Missouri, for the National Commission on COVID-19 and Criminal Justice. Another analysis by the Police Executive Research Forum found that 80% of the 70 largest U.S. cities experienced significant spikes in homicides, including an increase of 41% from 2019 in New York City, 85% in Minneapolis, 68% in Portland, 79% in Louisville and 38% in Atlanta, even as other types of crime fell.

Homicides were already on the rise by the time protests erupted in late May. A preliminary FBI report found that homicides were up by about 15% between January and June. A report from the Council on Criminal Justice showed that homicides were up 25% in 27 major cities between April and June from the previous three years. The latter report did find a brief spike in homicides immediately following the protests, as officers pulled back patrols or were reassigned to police protests, took extended leave or early retirement, and solved far fewer crimes. But that was not a significant factor overall, ultimately amounting to “fewer than one additional death in each [of the cities tracked]” per day, with most of the increase taking place in Chicago, wrote Weihua Li, a data fellow at The Marshall Project. In fact, Chicago had increased its police budget in eight consecutive years ahead of the spike and has nearly tripled its per capita police spending over the last six decades. Homicides remained far higher than in the past even after protests died down by the fall.

It’s true murders spiked around the time the protests peaked in late May and early June, but in an interview, Rosenfeld said, “The increase in violence has been much greater than could possibly be explained by violence by the protesters.” Only 7% of the roughly 10,600 demonstrations between late May and late August involved violence, which also includes incidents of looting and vandalism, according to an analysis by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project and the Bridging Divides Initiative at Princeton University

Rosenfeld said the coronavirus pandemic, on the other hand, has had a “very significant” impact on policing. Many officers have been sidelined due to quarantine requirements and social distancing restrictions. So protests likely contributed to the spikes in the sense that cities pulled officers and resources from other parts of the city to patrol the demonstrations.

“That reduces the kind of so-called smart policing that research shows can help keep violence in check and to reduce it,” Rosenfeld said. “So you have the impact of COVID on policing, in particular on police presence, and police activity in communities hard hit by the uptick in violence.” The fallout from the Floyd killing may also have sown more distrust of police in communities where the relationship between residents and law enforcement was already tense. If that relationship “deteriorates significantly, that simply widens the space for street justice to take hold,” Rosenfeld said. “So the combination of diminished police presence, activity of the kind that can reduce violence, and diminished so-called police legitimacy — that can be a deadly combination.”

Other criminal justice experts also disputed the increasingly widespread conception that calls to defund the police resulted in large murder increases.

“I have not seen any analysis that has found a causal link between movements to change police funding and homicide rates in major cities,” David Abrams, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said in an email, noting that the timing also corresponded with changes in policing as well as cities lifting stay-at-home orders.

“The problem is that these time horizons are way too short to make any kind of reliable claims,” said Alex Vitale, a sociologist at Brooklyn College and the author of “The End of Policing.” “Crime rates are subject to all kinds of short-term blips and even trying to do something comparative at this stage is really premature.”

Beyond the protests, many critics of the “defund the police” movement have tried to paint a straight line from police budget cuts in certain cities to the rise in murders. But few cities have actually cut their police budgets to any significant degree. The Minneapolis City Council vowed to abolish the city’s police force amid the protests, but ultimately cut just $8 million from the budget while leaving the same number of cops on the street. Despite nonstop fear-mongering from the New York police union after Mayor Bill de Blasio touted what he described as a $1 billion police budget cut, the move was largely criticized by activists for moving certain departments from the NYPD to other agencies. Only about a dozen of the roughly 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the U.S. had reduced their police budgets by the fall. And many of the cities that did cut police budgets blamed revenue shortfalls caused by the coronavirus pandemic rather than demands from demonstrators. The refusal of Trump and Senate Republicans to include any aid to state and local governments in the most recent round of coronavirus relief is likely to force more cities to slash police spending as they face massive budget shortfalls over the next two years.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, and Gregg Sofer, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Texas, recently blamed the city of Austin’s decision to cut police spending by about $20 million — and ultimately reduce the police budget by about 30% by moving certain departments to other agencies — for a more than 50% spike in murders over last year. Abbott even threatened a state takeover of the city’s police in response.

Texas Tribune reporter Jolie McCullough pointed out that the uptick in Austin started “long before any cuts were on the table.” Unlike Austin, Fort Worth slightly increased its police budget — but saw an even larger 60% jump in homicides.

Rosenfeld said Abbott’s threat was “groundless” and politically motivated.

“It’s certainly not limited to cities that have begun to ‘defund’ their police departments,” he said. “That surge is very, very widespread and involves cities whose mayors are different political affiliations and cities where the defund movement has been quite pronounced, and other places where it’s been much less pronounced. I don’t think there’s a connection between the surge in violence and the calls to defund the police.”

There are many reasons homicides might be spiking. The coronavirus pandemic has resulted in business shutdowns, school closures, rampant unemployment and poverty, and increased stress. It has also, to a significant degree, trapped domestic violence survivors in their homes.

“You have what some people refer to as the COVID effect on people’s lives,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum. “They’re more prone to let a small thing get out of hand, especially if they have a gun. Gang members are still engaging with each other … people engaging in robberies of other drug dealers that go bad and they shoot one another. There’s a lot of different explanations. I don’t buy into any one of them as much as a combination of factors.”

The coronavirus also resulted in widespread efforts to free people from overcrowded prisons, has upended court proceedings, and has reduced the number of proactive police stops.

While Republicans have been quick to blame protesters for the rise in homicides, none have mentioned the record 39 million guns sold this year.

“One thing that we’re looking at is guns,” Wexler said. “Why are more people getting guns, carrying guns, using guns? The murders that are increasing across the cities are primarily the result of someone shooting someone else … It’s a combination of factors that center around the fact that a lot more people today appear to be carrying guns than ever before.”

Rosenfeld noted that the guns on the streets are also deadlier than the ones in the past.

“We may simply have more guns on the street, and more guns may end in more killing. … It’s quite clear that the guns that are out on the street are simply more lethal than those we’ve seen on the streets in the past,” he said. “They are semi-automatic or even automatic-type weapons that enable the shooter to get off multiple rounds within seconds. They often have magazines or clips that will contain, say, 30 rounds. That means someone involved in a shooting can generate a great deal more firepower per unit of time than in the past. That will generate more deaths from gun assaults, and that could be one reason we’ve seen a bigger increase in homicides than we’ve seen, for example, in non-fatal gun assaults.”

One question that has perplexed criminologists is why homicides are up when other types of crime, including non-lethal assaults, are down.

“Homicide tends to be an emotional crime. I would link it to frustration regarding the pandemic, the tense political climate, and the fact that people are tired and frustrated, and emotions are on edge,” said Lorenzo Boyd, a longtime former police officer and director of the Center for Advanced Policing at the University of New Haven, adding that he doesn’t see a “relationship between increased homicides and the protests.”

“When people are emotional, they tend to make emotional decisions,” Boyd added. “The protests are not the issue, but rather indicative of larger issues in society. Do not let anyone do a sleight-of-hand and refocus the attention away from the underlying issues in society. If we fix many of the issues in the [criminal justice] system, then the protests will no longer be needed.”

Boyd has argued that police officers are primarily investigators rather than crime-stoppers.

“Police as currently instituted do not affect crime rates,” he told CNN. “What they do affect are investigations and arrests after the crime.”

A 2019 analysis by The Marshall Project and USA Today showed that raw numbers of police officers have no significant effect on crime trends. Violent crime continued to drop between 2014 and 2019 even as the number of police officers per 1,000 residents declined.

Another analysis by Brandon Beck, a professor at the University of Colorado, Denver, and Aya Gruber, a professor at the University of Colorado Law School, found that between 1990 and 2017 the average police budget increased by 59%, an aggregate budget increase of over $17 billion per year, even as violent crime “precipitously declined” by 56%.

Rosenfeld and Wexler argued that police function was a larger factor than raw numbers of cops. Both agreed that there is no reason for police to be first responders to calls relating to homelessness, substance abuse or mental health. They both called for cities to focus on accountability for police misconduct. Wexler said police officers should be required to wear body cameras.

Wexler, who opposes efforts to “defund” the police, said that cutting budgets amid the homicide spike was “counterintuitive” and “almost seems punitive rather than helpful.” If “we want to fix something, we have to invest in it,” he said.

“You have to hire a new generation that reflects the values that you want in a department. You have to get them the right training, the right equipment,” he argued. The “defund” movement, he suggested, “will mean reducing the hiring of new cops into the future. IF you’re trying to infuse the department with a new kind of recruit, you’re trying to hire from all walks of life — if that process gets slowed down it slows down the effort to reform policing. No good can come from cutting a police budget unless you’re making some other investment in some other institution.”

Proponents of shifting city funding away from police departments say it is equally important to focus on where the funding would be redirected.

The National Network for Safe Communities credited its Group Violence Intervention model, which relies on partnerships between communities, police and social service programs to reach out to street gangs, for helping reduce shootings in cities like Boston by 27% in 2018.

An analysis by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health also credited the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Cure Violence program, which uses “violence interrupters” to reach out to street gangs, with helping to reduce shootings and killings in cities like Baltimore by more than 34%.

But Cure Violence “has a mixed track record,” with good success in some communities but “less so in others,” Rosenfeld said. “I understand the appeal of Cure Violence to some activists, the idea that it’s community-based and has nothing to do with the police,” he continued. “I’m not suggesting that approach be abandoned. But on a cost-benefit basis, it would not be my favorite.” He pointed instead to Oakland, California’s Ceasefire violence-reduction strategy.

“At the heart of that program was so-called focused deterrence,” Rosenfeld explained. “This is a program that involves a combination of community actors, social service providers in particular, and criminal justice representatives, including police, the local prosecutor, the juvenile justice officials, the federal prosecutor, what have you. This approach focuses on those in the community who are most at risk of becoming the next victim of violence, and very typically they’re also at the highest risk to become the next offender. It focuses on people’s risk of victimization, uses that as an opening in meetings with those folks.

“That’s not a cure-all, but it has been shown to be effective. And by the way, the record is quite a bit less mixed than for Cure Violence.” He added that the focused-deterrence approach is “far less expensive than Cure Violence,” noting that a recent Cure Violence program targeted three specific locations in St. Louis at a cost of $7 million while “focused deterrence can be carried out throughout the city continuously at a fraction of the cost.”

Joe Biden and the climate crisis: What a difference two weeks makes

Just 10 days after the Biden administration took over, in alignment with the new president’s overall blitz strategy, a flabbergasting phalanx of U.S. climate policies have been turned smartly on their heels and are marching toward the future. President Biden has returned the nation to the Paris Agreement, required truth-telling in government reporting, enforced a regulation that government purchases must feed U.S. supply chains rather than imports, terminated the massive giveaway of taxpayer property to coal, oil and gas extractors, restored the integrity of federal climate science, frozen a horde of horrible Trump environmental rollbacks, and even launched a New Deal-style Civilian Climate Corps. All that is already in the rear-view mirror as Biden’s team moves on to the deeper work of a clean-energy, decarbonized and more inclusive economy.

Most Americans, who fear climate chaos, embrace clean energy opportunity and welcome American innovation and leadership, should be celebrating — and are. But hold your breath: The good news runs even deeper than this. The striking emphasis that the new administration has given to its “whole government” climate strategy; the repeatedly-noted climate depth of his Cabinet and sub-Cabinet appointees at the Treasury (Janet Yellen), the State Department (John Kerry), economic policy (Brian Deese), the Energy Department (Jennifer Granholm), the Department of Transportation (Pete Buttigieg), and the Department of the Interior (Deb Haaland); along with the breadth of new climate initiatives are only a part of the new administration’s commitment to climate progress.

This shock-and -awe launch also reflects an external reality: The Trump administration’s dogged march into the past had departed from any semblance of where America was headed. The first wave of climate progress under Biden is almost all “low-hanging fruit,” “no regrets” and “we can all unite on this,” because Trump’s legacy was starkly at war with economic and marketplace reality, not just climate science.

Look at the chorus that has responded to Biden’s climate drumbeat. Politico hails “a coalition that ranges from labor unions, anti-fracking activists and racial justice advocates to leaders of Wall Street, the auto industry and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce” as lining up with Biden’s broad thrust. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on MSNBC boasts that his program to phase out internal combustion cars and trucks by 2030 is a winner because he already has the support not only of climate advocates but also of the United Auto Workers, Ford and General Motors.

While the obstacles still cited as lying in Biden’s way are substantial, they are almost entirely inside the Beltway, where the powerful influence of fossil fuel-producing states like West Virginia (embodied in Sen. Joe Manchin) and Kentucky (Minority Leader Mitch McConnell) is repeatedly, and appropriately, recited. But what are oil companies, who wield the big fossil fuel stick, actually saying? Yes, they claim Biden is going too far, but almost exclusively in one narrow part of his program, the phase-out of oil, gas and coal extraction on federal lands.

Indeed, the oil industry is actually joining Biden’s alliance in its emphasis on tougher drilling and pollution standards for extraction. Advocacy of carbon pricing in some form is also making its way into Houston lobbying memos.

In a deeply polarized Senate, getting legislation of any significance through is indeed going to test the new president’s Capitol Hill negotiating chops. But climate is getting so much emphasis in Biden’s first two weeks in large part because it has become a less, not more, divisive issue across American society. It’s a good place for the new administration to bring the country together, perhaps because the communities that are taking the biggest climate hit — from fires, flooding, storms and energy sector layoffs — are overwhelmingly in regions where Trump, not Biden, came out on top. (A hidden secret is that rural America, which has become the heart of red America, is where storm, drought, fire and flood hit hardest. Miami Beach can afford sea walls. Cedar Rapids needs Uncle Sam to repair its levees.)

Biden’s broader coalition — you could also throw in BlackRock, whose CEO, Larry Fink, devoted his annual letter to the urgency of business embracing the climate challenge — emerged even before the November election. Major oil companies had opposed Trump’s efforts to block the cleanup of methane from oil and gas drilling. Ford and Volkswagen had partnered with California to undercut the Trump administration’s rollbacks of auto emission limits. Most of the biggest power utilities had pledged to cut from 80% to 100% of their current carbon pollution. Sixteen states had persuaded even the deadlocked Congress to commit the U.S. to phasing out climate dangerous HFC refrigerants as part of the pandemic relief bill.

So climate progress is now a powerful American consensus, precisely because we have realized that it is not a matter of sacrifice, but of opportunity; not austerity but prosperity; not American decline but American recovery.

None of this means we can relax. Big coalitions, like convoys, can bog down at the speed of the slowest member. And the biggest looming barrier is that the faster decarbonization races ahead, the greater the risk to workers and communities left behind. While there are lots of good ideas floating around for how to enable fossil-dependent segments of our nation to ride the clean energy wave, most of them remain somewhat uncertain and gauzy — after all, only a year ago we were having trouble getting McConnell to agree to sustain pensions and health care for mineworkers in his own state.

If we don’t take more seriously our need to spread the benefits of the clean energy transition to every zip code and every demography, we will blow our best change to make America truly great — for the 21st century.

Poirot at 100: the refugee detective who stole Britain’s heart

A hundred years ago, Agatha Christie introduced British readers to a small man with an impeccably maintained moustache who, with the help of his “little grey cells,” was very good at solving crimes. That man, of course, was Hercule Poirot, who made his debut in Christie’s first novel, “The Mysterious Affair at Styles,” in 1921.

Though potentially the second-most famous detective in British culture (after Sherlock Holmes), Poirot is not British at all but a refugee. Coming to England as part of a group of Belgians displaced by the Fiirst World War, his origins lie in Brussels. Writing about this retired Belgian police officer solving cases around the U.K. and across the globe, Christie was able to explore (and at times poke fun at) the complexities of Englishness and its relationship to continental Europe.

European flair

On the surface, Christie’s novels resemble a nostalgic retreat to the pastoral and to the English stately home. They can be read as a possible turning-inwards thanks to an emphasis on closed rooms and detailed floor plans of grand buildings. But such appearances are deceptive.

The opening of borders, both literal and intellectual, shapes Christie’s England. It was her understanding of the work of European thinkers that gives her detective an edge. Where an English detective, like Sherlock Holmes, looks for external pieces of evidence that can be analysed, Poirot solves the case by realising the hidden implications of people’s behaviour – including his own. Poirot’s Freudian focus on the psychology of suspects enables him to see that simple mistakes and slips of the tongue can hide deeper meanings. In “The Mysterious Affair at Styles,” a crucial clue is revealed when Poirot realises the importance of his own almost unconscious instinct to tidy.

In Christie’s world, the typically English common sense of policemen is not enough to solve the mystery. Instead, a dash of continental theory sheds light on what lies beneath the surface.

Another of Poirot’s trademarks is his occasional struggle to find the correct English word or idiom. In “The Mysterious Affair at Styles,” he even misquotes “Hamlet.” Yet it would be a mistake to read these moments as simple errors. Instead, Poirot knowingly plays into the trope of the “funny foreigner,” using difficulties with language to disarm suspects and allay fears of suspicion (how could such a comic figure be so great a detective?). In the famous scenes where Poirot explains the truth, his English becomes markedly more fluent. In this, Poirot represents the outsider perfectly placed to see through English deceptions.

Little England

The success of the “funny foreigner” schtick with unsuspecting English plays into Christie’s larger exploration of Englishness in her books.

Poirot is an enthusiastic devotee of England. In “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd” he comments that England is “very beautiful, is it not?” But this enthusiasm is not always returned. A running joke of the Poirot novels and adaptations is that he is often mistaken as French. In “Ackroyd,” he is described as looking “just like a comic Frenchman in a revue.” But in a genre that demands close attention to detail, the joke here is at the expense of a particularly inward-looking type of Englishness, those who cannot tell the difference between the French and the Belgian.

Likewise, as literary scholar Alison Light notes, Poirot’s popularity coincides with the expansion in travel, as the English increasingly saw themselves as tourists abroad. Several of Poirot’s most famous cases occur on modes of transport and in exotic locations, like “Death on the Nile.” However, while the English in these stories might be abroad, class relations from home still manage to play out wherever they might be. England follows them, and that inward-looking Englishness runs deep.

While Christie might have poked fun at England and Englishness, she managed to capture the hearts of British readers with her small, smart Belgian. Poirot was so loved by readers that Christie wrote 33 novels, two plays, and more than 50 short stories about him between 1921 and 1975. ITV’s adaptation of many of these stories, “Agatha Christie’s Poirot” starring David Suchet, ran for 25 years (1989-2013) and is also now considered a classic of British TV. Few fictional detectives have had their complete adventures adapted for the screen. In this regard, Poirot makes a strong claim to being Britain’s most loved detective.

Christopher Pittard, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, University of Portsmouth

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

Strange costumes of Capitol rioters echo the early days of the KKK — before the white sheets

After the riots at the Capitol, images of Jacob Chansley, who’s been dubbed the “QAnon Shaman,” were splashed across news outlets.

Chansley’s outlandish costume – consisting of American flag-themed face paint, a hat made of bison horns and coyote skins, a shirtless, tattooed torso and brown pants – was met with fascination and ridicule.

Given the outrageous nature of his garb, it might be easy to dismiss Chansley and the others wearing costumes or uniforms at the Capitol as silly or unhinged outliers.

However, after spending the last decade studying the rhetoric of organized racist groups in the United States, I know how outfits that look harmless and eccentric can actually have an insidious effect. In fact, costumes and uniforms have played a central role in the appeal of extremist groups throughout the history of the country.

The triumph of the spectacle

For many extremist groups, a primary goal is to spread their group’s ideology to the mainstream public. In order to accomplish this, groups need to gain as much widespread recognition as they can.

Costumes and uniforms are a form of spectacle that attract attention.

While most people recognize the infamous hood and white robes of the 1920s Klan, early Klan costumes were homemade, individualized and much more bizarre.

In the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan, “imagination was encouraged” in the creation of costumes by members, who competed to create the most “outrageous outfit.”

Historian Elaine Parsons notes that early Klan costumes were composed of animal skins, horns, conical hats and gowns featuring a range of colors and patterns. Modeled after garb from carnivals and Mardi Gras traditions, the spectacle and performance of early Klan costumes helped to spur the swift growth of the group, which an 1884 history of the Klan described as “a wave of excitement, spreading by contagions.”

And it is no coincidence that the revival of the Klan in the 1920s was in part popularized by the costumed Klansmen portrayed in the blockbuster film “Birth of a Nation.”

Like the early Ku Klux Klan, the viral spread of the QAnon conspiracy theory has been driven through spectacle. Chansley admitted as much. He has commented that his costume gets people’s attention, which then gives him the opportunity to spread the tenets of the conspiracy theory: that the world’s governments and banks are run by secret rings of Satan-worshiping pedophiles that manage child sex-trafficking organizations.

Other members of the movement are keenly aware of how their clothing can work to influence others.

Doug Jensen, the man seen in a viral video at the head of a mob chasing a police officer through the Capitol building, said in an interview that he purposefully positioned himself leading the charge wearing a “Q” shirt so that “Q” could “get the credit.”

Costumes and community

Costumes and uniforms in extremist movements serve a second purpose: fostering community among members.

While Klan costumes became more homogeneous in the early 20th century, the white hood and robes did more than conceal the wearer’s identity. They also created a sense of “magnetism and prestige” through group secrecy. One ritual of membership involved other members lifting their masks after new recruits joined.

In the era of the internet, costumes and uniforms help groups construct community in a different way.

Most organized extremist groups in the United States primarily communicate in anonymous online spaces, and members are often separated geographically.

For these reasons, costumes, uniforms and symbols on clothing can act as physical indicators of group unity. This can work to bring divergent groups together – such as via a MAGA hat – or to denote a belief in a specific ideology, like patches with the QAnon motto “WWG1WGA,” an abbreviation for “Where We Go One, We Go All.”

To be sure, there are ways in which costumes and uniforms do more than simply operate as identifiers.

Hitler’s Nazi party believed that mass gatherings gave attendees a “sense of being protectively surrounded by a movement,” with the uniformed guard creating “a tendency to place the center of authority in the Nazi party.” In other words, because people often associate uniforms with legitimacy or power, the use of uniforms can help extremist groups persuade people that they should be trusted.

A higher cause

With its costumes, the Reconstruction-era Klan liked to perpetuate the legend that its members were the ghosts of Confederate soldiers. However, the Klan of the 1920s drew heavily upon religion in framing its mission as a holy cause.

One of the most violent Mississippi chapters of the Ku Klux Klan believed their members were chosen by God to conduct a holy war against the civil rights movement. Psychologist Wyn Craig Wade has noted how the “act of donning the costume was often recounted as ‘a holy experience’” by members of the Ku Klux Klan.

It should be no surprise, then, that today’s racist and extremist groups have also used this tactic. In describing the meaning of his costume, Chansley notes QAnon is engaged in a “war of a spiritual nature” and that his costume represents his status as a “light occultic force of the side of God” necessary to defeat an unseen, omnipotent force of evil. Some contemporary neo-Nazi and racist groups incorporate Norse symbolism and mythology, while others, following the Klan, use Christianity to frame their racist ideology as righteous or divine.

Although costumes cannot tell us the entire story of a group or movement, they can provide a window into understanding how the groups and movements form and how their ideologies are spread.

While they never need to be entertained, neither should they be ignored.

Kenneth Ladenburg, Instructor of English, Arizona State University

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

Why Phoenix may be uninhabitable by the end of this century

“There will come a day when the temperature won’t fall below 100 degrees in Phoenix during the nighttime,” Dr. Andrew Ross, a professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University who wrote “Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City,” told Salon. “That will be a threshold of some kind.”

The American Southwest has long been a refuge for those seeking the health benefits of warm, dry air and sunny days. But too much of a good thing is not a good thing — for human health or for the natural ecosystem. Now, the Southwest is facing a reckoning: decades of human development, coupled with rising global temperatures as a result of carbon emissions, means that many major cities in the Southwest may become uninhabitable for humans this century.

The reason has to do with something called the Heat Island Effect, a concept that describes the effect in which the densely-populated, central parts of a city with lots of concrete and asphalt will have higher temperatures compared to the less populous areas, as Dr. Juan Declet-Barreto, senior social scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, explained to Salon. The term “island” is not a metaphor here, Declet-Barreto said, because when you look at a thermal map of many cities, “the temperatures inside the central parts of a city resemble an island, surrounded by a cooler ocean in the surrounding more rural areas.” Obviously, the effect is apt to be more dire in desert cities like Phoenix.

Sarah Mincey, associate professor at Indiana University’s O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, added that the Heat Island Effect is caused by urban centers gradually losing their tree canopies, meaning that sunlight is absorbed and held in by materials like roads and rooftops, which are typically darker in color. When they finally do release that heat back into the air, it increases the temperature experienced by the people in those urban environments.

“Tree canopies mitigate this as they can shade these surfaces, avoiding the absorption of heat in the first place and through the cooling effects of transpiration – releasing of moisture into their surrounding environments,” Mincey explained. “In general, western US cities have less urban tree canopy cover than eastern US cities, so mitigation of UHI [Urban Heat Islands] there is likely more difficult.”

Declet-Barreto offered the following metaphor to understand how it works.

“If you think about how hot it would be, imagine yourself standing on a downtown area where there is little, maybe no shade, no trees, and in the middle of the summer,” Declet-Barreto told Salon. “And then you think about standing in that same spot, but imagine that that spot was to be replaced by turf grass under your feet and some tree canopy above you. Then intuitively you can imagine that it will be a lot cooler when you’re standing underneath the tree, as compared to being standing out in the bare sun.”

As Dr. B.D. Wortham-Galvin, associate professor in the School of Architecture at Clemson University, explained to Salon by email, the Heat Island Effect is worsened by climate change.

“Over the coming decades, climate change will increase extreme weather events, raise temperatures while cities simultaneously increase in population density,” Wortham-Galvin explained. “This confluence of events means that all cities, but US Southern cities in particular, will begin to experience the Heat Island Effect more frequently and within more intra-urban locales. Without a Heat Equity and Resiliency plan, more urban residents will suffer negative health and economic impacts.”

In Phoenix specifically, the negative aspects of the Heat Island Effect will also be exacerbated by ongoing infrastructure projects that exacerbate resource scarcity issues. Water infrastructure in Arizona is already tenuous, as human habitation in both Phoenix and Tucson is dependent on the Central Arizona River Project, a massive infrastructure project that diverts water from the Colorado River to central and southern Arizona.

“That’s how Phoenix and Tucson and large metro areas get their water… It doesn’t have a direct impact on the heat, but obviously in a region that is drying out and has always had water scarcity, then every drop of water is a cause for concern — where the next bucket is coming from, how much it costs,” Ross said.

Ross also noted that, because water levels in Lake Powell (located in Utah and Arizona) and Lake Mead (located in Nevada and Arizona) are dropping, “there are sort of crisis-type responses are being proposed. One of which I think is called demand management, which is basically states paying farmers not to use the water that they’re entitled to so that it can service cities instead.”

Ross also pointed to the problem with the materials used to construct houses in the southwestern states. “We’re not talking about adobe traditional structures, which are very climate appropriate for the Southwest,” he said. “Builders don’t build adobe houses anymore.” He described a lot of the houses that are built as “energy pigs” which are “not designed to be climate appropriate.”

The Heat Island Effect, like so many other ecological issues, also has a disproportionate impact on people from more marginalized backgrounds.

“The elevated air and structure temperatures from Urban Heat Island Effects not only increase energy consumption, but also air pollution and greenhouse gas emission and, therefore, have a negative effect on urban ecosystems,” Wortham-Galvin wrote to Salon. “Heat Islands in cities disproportionately impact the most vulnerable populations, to include: the elderly, children, and those with pre-existing health conditions. The development of policies and practices that ameliorate the Heat Island Effect is also, thus, an equity issue. Certain neighborhoods within cities can often be hotter than others; particularly those without an existing significant number of green spaces, trees, and roof gardens. Those same neighborhoods may have a disproportionate number of residents without access to cooling and at greater risk.”

Mincey echoed this observation, writing to Salon that recent research has found “tree canopy cover is lowest in low-income and minority communities” and that, within 100 American cities, “formerly redlined neighborhoods – more likely low-income and minority communities – are today five degrees hotter in summer, on average, than areas once favored for housing loans with a couple western cities – Portland and Denver – seeing greater than 12 degrees hotter in summer in the parts of these cities haunted by redlining legacies.”

While America’s western cities are obviously going to be heavily impacted by this, the problem is an international one.

“It’s not just a desert city,” Declet-Barreto told Salon. “Every single place where there is a built environment, where there are cities and roadways and glass and pavement and buildings and highways and cars and air conditioning and so on, are going to be hotter than the surrounding areas where it’s a little more rural or less.” As a result “we see cities not just like the ones you mentioned, — Phoenix, Las Vegas, Tucson — but many in India, many in the Persian Gulf, that, as climate change continues unabated, are facing significant threats to the population.”

Declet-Barreto said that “extreme heat episodes” are going to “increase in frequency and magnitude and length.” Indeed, scientists predict that by 2060, Phoenix will have 132 days — over a third of the year — with 100 degree temperatures. Extreme heat limits the ability of airlines to take off and causes heat deaths: 172 people died of heat in 2017, which will undoubtedly be cooler than 2060. One wonders if anyone will want to live there by then.

The legendary story of Thangam Philip: food scientist, nutritionist, chef and mentor

Thangam Philip has crosshatched my life in the most curious ways. My uncle studied catering under her (very) stern supervision. My mother once took a class at the Dadar Catering College, where Philip reigned as principal — in fact, we still have a stack of her recipes, typed on sheaves of yellowed, raspy pages, all carefully filed away in a blue plastic folder. As for me: I own newer, glossier, books on baking, but it is “The Thangam Philip Book of Baking,” with its infallible madeleine and sponge recipes, that I unfailingly turn to.

Whichever way you spin it, Philip was a food legend.

Born in Kerala in 1921, Philip graduated from Lady Irwin College in New Delhi with a Home Science degree. Shortly after her first career stint at St Thomas’ School in Kolkata, she made her way to Sri Lanka, where she launched a Home Economics department at Southland Methodist College. In 1950, she made her way back to India, where her gifts would soon catapult her to fame, latching her into place as one of the country’s foremost culinary figures.

First though, a historical preamble.

The year was 1947: India had just gained independence from British rule, and an overwhelming food insecurity had taken hold of the nation. The situation compelled the new government to intervene with a slew of dietary initiatives, intended to be less prone to wavering economies and climactic insecurities, but that were divisive (and quixotic).

One of these was the Miss a Meal Movement, asking Indians to sacrifice one meal a week — a baffling request for a country hanging by a thread after centuries of colonialism. Another was the adoption of subsidiary agricultural produce, such as ragi (finger millet), bajra pearl millet, barley, yams, and the like, to reduce the country’s dependence on thirsty crops such as rice and wheat. Both directives were roundly derided. “The Bombay Free Press Journal” wrote excoriatingly about “being made to swallow barley” as a staple. “Who are the people whose food is barley and for whose benefit was this barley ordered?”

Still, the attempt was made.

The All India Women’s Council (AIWC), stewarded by Lilavati Munshi, the wife of the Union Minister for Food and Agriculture, did its bit, suggesting a nonprofit chain of canteens staffed by women, with a menu that would sensitize people to the easy availability of millets. The canteens did well. Lady Hartog (wife of the English educationist Sir Philip Hartog) wrote glowingly of them as “a new type of cafe . . . where well-cooked light meals, cleanly and attractively served are obtainable at a very moderate cost,” in her book “India: New Pattern.”

Philip was amongst those called upon to captain a café. The managerial skills she acquired were ones that she drew from later as the principal of Mumbai’s Dadar Catering College. It was a through line that irrigated the rest of her career.

* * *

In 1954, Mumbai’s Catering College began with a whisper. The AIWC dropped anchor at Bhavan’s College, with the launch of a catering course for the first time in India, and recruited Ms Philip as a professor a year later. Unfortunately, most parents balked at this hatchling of a discipline, and only six students joined! For the next four years, the course crouched gingerly somewhere between failure and popularity . . . until 1958, when the college went ahead and announced a three-year diploma in Hotel Management and Catering. A brand-new campus followed. Ms. Philip, who had just returned from a trip to the United States, was reabsorbed as principal.

The politics of Indian agriculture was soon to careen wildly again. The 1960s brought the Green Revolution, a tectonic shift in Indian agriculture. Shutting its mind to long-term effects, the government provided agriculture a technological fillip by incentivizing the use of pesticides, fertilizers, motorized pumps, and high-yield seeds.

It worked. Against all odds, India steered herself to an epiphanic victory against hunger. But the price, paid in pollution and loss of groundwater, was staggering.

Philip was a product of this time. Her books explored Indian cuisine at the cusp of these concatenations: For instance, the first edition of Volume 1 of her teaching cookbook “Modern Cookery for Teaching and the Trade,” written in 1965, is striped through with themes of food technology, diet and nutrition, and food science. C. Subramanian, then Minister for Food and Agriculture, applauded Ms. Philip’s “scientific methods of cooking, planning of meals and improvement of the sense of taste and flavour.” Several of the recipes in her book are fortified with soybean flour, peanut flour, and others, an attempt to change the patterns of traditional Indian diets. She grapples with the logistics of low-calorie cooking. She is conscientious about the tabulation of the ideal temperatures for storage of fruits and vegetables. Her books, as anthropologist-theorist Arjun Appadurai writes in his essay “How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India,” “made Indian recipes ‘modern’ by looking at them from the perspective of the nutritionist, the food technologist, and the caterer.”

Philip soon had the reins of the college firmly in her hands. She shepherded a syllabus that endures in part, even today. One of her books resounds still, as a prescribed textbook to students. She nudged the institute’s trade fairs to immense popularity. She frequently sent out teams to Mumbai’s shanties to share her considerable knowledge of cheap nutritious cooking with the less privileged. The success of the Institute of Hotel Management, Catering Technology and Applied Nutrition, Mumbai (IHMCTAN), as it is now known, kindled the spark that led to the mushrooming of other catering institutes around India.

Young, starry-eyed scholars passed through the years from IHM doors — Manish Mehrotra of Indian Accent, the late Floyd Cardoz, and Ananda Solomon. From the flickers of memory that people still hold about Philip, one thing is clear—she was a woman who emanated authority. On the Facebook page Humans of DCC (Dadar Catering College): “The terror lady of the hotel industry. When her car used to enter Mahim, IHM Dadar main sannata lag jaata thaa [IHM Dadar fell into a hush].”

But Philip wasn’t isolated by college life. She authored a slew of recipe books, among them “Flavours from India,” and my personal favorite, “The Thangam Philip Book of Baking.” There were frequent appearances on All India Radio. Her recipes found regular space in the most popular women’s magazines of the time, such as “Femina.” A staunch philanthropist, she contributed to the FAO’s Freedom from Hunger campaign launched in 1963 and worked on projects with the International Labour Organization. She sat on diverse committees, often one of very few women (if any), together with such stalwarts of the Indian culinary world as K. T. Achaya. Even after retirement in 1986, she was active as a board member of several hotels, financial institutions, and catering colleges, almost until her passing in 2009.

Her awards boggle the mind: A commemorative coin, etched in her likeness by the FAO Ceres (the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations), showed bakers stamping dough into naan (it is an honor she shared with Sophia Loren, Margaret Mead, and Coretta Scott King, among others). In 1976, the Padma Shri for Civil Service, one of India’s highest honors for civilians. In 1982, the Knighthood of the Cordon Bleu.

Thangam Philip helped prize open a new idea of India — one of lettered people that sat comfortably in an armchair in Paris or New York, easily tossing off suggestions on how to make the perfect soufflé or consommé Montmorency. Her “Modern Cookery For Teaching and the Trade: Volume 2” resounds with the minutiae of French dishes like salmis of pheasant and langouste à la parisienne. With globalization, the fifth edition was fattened to include recipes from countries such as Romania, Denmark, and Myanmar.

Perhaps some of the allure stemmed precisely from this Europeanization (and technologizing, as asserted by Appadurai) of cooking; the recipes offered a canvas of possibilities, previously unimagined, to catering students and home cooks. The Indian sections of her recipe books read like a greatest-hits version of the cuisine — Punjabi, Kerala, etc. — while the fifth edition saw an addition to the canon by way of a new section on Chettinad food, thanks to its burgeoning popularity in India. Her work wasn’t without its critics though, who argued that it led to a flattening and subordination of variegated regional cuisine in favor of one that pandered to English-speaking, Westernized, urban middle and upper classes and castes.

These critiques may be warranted. Yet, Philip’s contribution to the gastronomic world of a newly independent India is undeniable. She was a chef, a professor, a cookbook writer, a food scientist, a mentor, a businesswoman, and she was certainly the grande dame of the Indian catering world.

The story of ranch, the “Cool American” condiment that has divided a nation (and taken over Etsy)

What is ranch dressing?

Ranch dressing is a salad dressing and dip usually made from buttermilk, salt, garlic powder, onion powder, mustard, herbs, and spices. This mixture is then typically combined with mayonnaise.

Let's dive into the "Great American Ranch Divide"

In the third season of "Man Seeking Woman," the FXX surrealist romantic comedy, Josh Greenberg (Jay Baruchel) prepares to take his girlfriend of several months, Lucy (Katie Findlay), to meet his mom and stepfather. Before making the trip out to the Chicago suburbs, the couple stops over to see Jay's sister, Liz, who, with the enthusiasm of a seasoned anthropologist, explains her parents' mannerisms — from their penchant for clipping out random articles from outdated newspapers to displaying copious holiday-themed decorative towels in the bathroom.

Liz holds out a spoon of something for Lucy to taste. "It's called 'ranch dressing,'" she explains.

Lucy complies and immediately recoils. "I did not like that," she says. "It's very thick."

"You just have to pretend," Liz counters. "Ranch is central to Mom and Tom's diet. To them, it's like liquid gold."

This episode, which was appropriately titled "Ranch" and aired in 2017, encapsulates a surprisingly prevalent opinion about the dressing-turned-multipurpose condiment: that it's a passé and kind of cringey thing to order or have on-hand (sort of the culinary parallel to "Life is Good" sweatshirts and wooden "Live, Laugh, Love" kitchen signs). This is only further illustrated by ranch's frequent appearances on meme sites like Middle Class Fancy.

And, like anything that has come to serve as an emblem of middling suburban tastes, ranch dressing has garnered some impassioned detractors who voice their opinions in articles like "Ranch dressing is what's wrong with America" — wherein The Washington Post's Ben Adler writes that "fancy restaurants need to stop experimenting with this revolting milk-rot" — and Delish's "7 Reasons You Should Never Eat Ranch Dressing." In it, contributor Maya McDowell summarizes her feelings by writing, "Keep your processed AF, globby dressing away from me."

Ranch: Great or gross? Tell us in the comments below!

Now, it should be said that here at Saucy, we hate no condiments (borrowing and bastardizing a phrase from the New Testament, "Let all the sauces and dips come to me"). As a '90s baby born in the Chicago suburbs, I have vivid memories of when ranch was king of both the snack aisle and the salad bar.

And for many Americans, ranch still reigns supreme. According to a 2017 study done by the industry group the Association for Dressings and Sauces, 40% of Americans say ranch is their favorite dressing. Italian dressing comes in second, with a comparatively meager 10% citing it as their dressing of choice. For some, it's superseded mere condiment status, as evidenced by the emergence of multiple crocheted Hidden Valley Ranch bottle pillows on Etsy and a shocking amount of ranch dressing tattoos. With that in mind, let's dive into the Great Ranch Divide ™.

(Image: Ranch Bottle by Thom G from Black Square Tattoo in Brooklyn/Reddit)

Ranch dressing was originally created by plumber and construction worker Steve Henson, who came up with the dressing while working in the Alaskan bush in the 1950s. Since perishable ingredients — like fresh herbs and garlic — were difficult to acquire in that part of the country, Henson experimented with dry seasonings like garlic and onion powder, dried herbs and powdered pepper. They could be added to mayonnaise and buttermilk for an herbaceous and tangy dressing.

In 1954, Henson and his wife, Gayle, opened the actual Hidden Valley Ranch, a dude ranch in San Marcos Pass in Santa Barbara County, Calif., where they hosted guests and eventually opened a steakhouse. Henson's ranch dressing, packaged in mayonnaise jars, soon became popular souvenirs for guests. Within a few years, the couple began packaging the dry seasoning mix in envelopes, which could be shipped cross-country to customers who could then add their own buttermilk and mayonnaise at home.

By 1983, shelf-stable ranch arrived on supermarket shelves across the country. Cool Ranch Doritos followed a few years later, signaling to snack companies that the tangy, allium-heavy bite of the dressing was a welcome addition to foods beyond salads. The global marketing of the chips also cemented ranch as a uniquely American dressing — in countries other than the U.S., Cool Ranch Doritos are known as "Cool American."

Thus, it's perhaps unsurprising that ranch eventually found a kind of spiritual home in the Midwest. It became a dip for vegetable sticks and chicken wings, a dry seasoning for Chex Mix and "fire crackers," and perhaps most contentiously, an accompaniment to pizza.

It's one of those pairings that feels like a real stoner creation, and I say this with affection and without judgement. As Max Balliet — the owner of my favorite local pizza place, Pizza Lupo — once texted me, "It's sacrilegious in serious pizza circles."

"If you need ranch with your pizza, you should really think about why the pizza isn't enough," he wrote when I asked him about his personal views on the combination. "That said, I don't think there's anything wrong with using it, so long as you understand it doesn't need it . . . Or if it does need it, maybe find better pizza."

"That being said, I don't mind offering it (homemade), because it makes people happy," he continued. "It helps us not take things too seriously (even though I obsess over pizza personally), and I'd be a liar if I said I'd never indulged."

Jason Goldstein, the recipe developer for Chop Happy, is soundly in the pro-ranch on pizza camp. "I love ranch dressing on pizza, because its sweet and tangy goes amazing with spicy, cheesy pepperoni pizza," he wrote via email. "Also because dipping anything is fun."

Meanwhile, chef Franklin Becker of Benny Casanova's in Philadelphia, has more mixed feelings. "For me, ranch dressing is delicious," he said. "But unless it's a Buffalo chicken pizza, I don't think it belongs."

I think this is actually a decent encapsulation of some of unfavorable contemporary reactions to ranch — at least the ones that aren't solely taste-based. Ranch started popping up in places where perhaps it didn't traditionally "belong" — take a look at Twisted Ranch in St. Louis with its "33 proprietary ranch flavors." And when something is ubiquitous, there's bound to be pushback — the view that something popular is also representative of the lowest-common cultural denominator.

But there are a lot of chefs across the country who have recognized that the building blocks of ranch dressing — the cream, the acid, the spice and the umami — are also the same elements that make an ideal condiment. (I wrote about this late last year when I detailed my love for snack plates as an anecdote for kitchen burnout).

As such, there are now cute little bespoke jars of ranch infused with millennial-friendly ingredients like black truffle and extra dill lining the shelves of the supermarket. But if the plethora of Hidden Valley-themed jewelry and accessories on Etsy are an indication, many people are just as enthusiastic about the original as Steve Henson's customers.

How should I use ranch dressing at home?

As discussed, ranch dressing is as multi-use as you want it to be. In my own kitchen, I'm partial to using the dry mix as a seasoning in other things like the base for this play on a buttermilk-brined fried chicken sandwich (inspired by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt's famous Serious Eats recipe).

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Recipe: Buttermilk (Ranch) Fried Chicken Sandwiches
Makes 4 sandwiches

2 tablespoons paprika
2 tablespoons of cayenne pepper
2 tablespoons of dried ranch seasoning
1 cup buttermilk
1 large egg
1 pound of chicken breasts (4 breasts)
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1⁄2 cup cornstarch
2 tablespoons of salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
4 cups of peanut oil
Sliced lettuce, tomato, red onion, mayonnaise and potato buns for serving

1. In a large bowl, stir the paprika, cayenne pepper, ranch seasoning, buttermilk and large egg until fully combined. Add the chicken breasts, covering it completely with the buttermilk. Move the entire mixture to a gallon-sized freezer bag and refrigerate overnight.

2. Combine the dry ingredients in a bowl, and several tablespoons of the spice mixture from the marinade bag, stirring until incorporated. Toss chicken breasts in the flour mixture until a thick coating forms.

3. Heat the peanut oil to 425°F in a large cast-iron chicken fryer or a large wok over medium-high heat. Using tongs, tap any excess flour off the chicken breasts and place into the oil, frying for about five minutes on each side. Remove from the oil one piece at a time, and place on a clean wire rack set on a rimmed baking sheet.

4. Place the sheet into a 350-degree oven, and bake for about 10 minutes or until an instant-read thermometer inserted into the thickest part of the breast registers 150 degrees. Remove from oven, and place the breasts on a paper-towel-lined plate until slightly cooled.

5. Serve the fried chicken breasts on toasted potato buns with sliced lettuce, tomato, red onion and a drizzle of mayonnaise. (But feel free to double-down and substitute more buttermilk ranch.)

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Brand recommendations, plus a ranch-inspired green dip

Public Goods Ranch Dressing
Vegan Ranch Dipping Sauce By Veggie Fam
Hidden Valley Ranch Dressing (I mean, the list wouldn't be complete without it.)

I also have a go-to dip that I make at home that mimics all the high notes of ranch but is also reminiscent of Green Goddess dressing (you know, for health). It's perfect for the aforementioned snack plates.

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Recipe: Ranch-y Green Dip
1/2 cup of dip

1/2 cup of labneh
2 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil
3 tablespoons of dill
4 scallions, chopped
3 tablespoons of parsley
2 teaspoons of onion powder
2 teaspoons of garlic powder
1 tablespoon of lemon zest
Salt and pepper to taste

1. Add all the ingredients to a blender and pulse until well-combined. Add salt and pepper to taste.