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Best of 2020: “Low class” Donald Trump and the Wasps

Try, just try to find a parody of a pair of Wasps more entertaining than Thurston and Lovey Howell of “Gilligan’s Island.” Played by Jim Backus, who was of Lebanese descent, and Natalie Schafer, who was Jewish, Thurston and Lovey behave the way people like to believe — and sometimes they’re right — that real Wasps do: the Howells, possessors of fathomless inherited wealth, are duplicitous snobs who don’t do any work. Some of the show’s best lines nod to Thurston’s blue-blooded Republicanism. When Lovey compliments him for being “democratic,” he hears an uppercase D and snips at her, “Watch your language.”

Thurston and Lovey are meant to be, like my ancestors of my mother’s side, New England Wasps — in one episode, we’re told that they’re from Boston; another episode mentions a home in Newport, Rhode Island — but I don’t recognize my family in the buffoonish Howells. True, my grandmother, whom I just about worshipped — she was quick-witted and cosmopolitan and tall, like Myrna Loy’s Nora Charles in the “Thin Man” movies — was a Republican, and I did once witness her committing a Howell-ish act of snobbery. During a nostalgia road trip that brought us to her old neighborhood in Montclair, New Jersey, she described one style of residential architecture as “Wop,” a derogatory term for Italian. She meant that the style looked modern, or like something that would never provide shelter for any self-respecting person whose ancestors came over on a boat in the queue behind the Mayflower.

If you had asked me about my background before Trump moved into the White House, I would have led with my father’s Syrian side. (My long-legged, button-nosed maternal grandmother must have puzzled at the looks of me, short and with eyes and nostrils for days.) I saw my Wasp side as ethnically neutral — white bread that couldn’t hold its own against all the more interesting loaves out there. But since Trump’s presidency, I frequently find myself reaching for my grandmother’s word, “vulgar,” to describe him. You’re using the word too, you say? Yes, but hopefully you’re not using it with — what’s this? — an involuntary air of condescension that I’m worried I may be mistaking for some sort of birthright.

I get why no one is standing on a chair and claiming Wasp as a cultural identity. Wasps went out in the mid-1900s, their markers — repressed colors, repressed emotions — swept aside in a cyclone of unkempt hair and pot smoke (some of it my mother’s). Make no mistake: I’m as glad as anyone that Wasps got the cultural heave-ho — they’d been on top for far too long and have the whole snob thing to answer for. But last year I had some strangely gratifying eureka moments as I read Tad Friend’s “Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor.” I recognized in it the window dressing of my childhood: Welsh rarebit. Beatrix Potter. “Grandfather clocks and cocktail shakers brimming with gin.” Yes indeed, these were my people — much more so than my Syrian side. After my mother and father divorced when I was two I lived primary with her, our small house accommodating a condensed version of Wasp splendor. It was only after my mother died, in 2010, and I, her only child, inherited a squadron of antique end tables, which she told me on her deathbed I wasn’t allowed to sell, that I realized I knew of no other person my age who had grown up in a home that resembled the set of “Leave It to Beaver.”

Donald Trump doesn’t live in a home that resembles the set of “Leave It to Beaver.” Like the Howells, Trump is a Republican who inherited wealth and enjoys shiny things — his wives, his Fifth Avenue pile — and he delights in showing them off. This is how the Howells would fail a true-life Wasp sniff test: people with old money think that it’s poor form to flaunt it. When I was a kid and behaved badly, my mother would accuse me of acting “spoiled,” which only now do I appreciate meant like someone with a shamefully conspicuous amount of loot.

The Trumps and the Howells have something else in common besides their obvious pleasure in displaying their money: they love to talk about it. This trait makes me squirm even more than Trump’s shticky name-calling, cotton candy hair, and allegiance to the trinity of lowbrow entertainment forms professional wrestling, reality television and the beauty pageant. No one ever explicitly told me why it’s bad manners to talk about money, but I think the idea is that money is a personal matter, like hygiene, and that talk of it reflects a materialism upon which God (in whom my mother and grandmother unstintingly believed) would frown, which I hope it goes without saying is not remotely the same thing as implying that Wasps are above materialism. Of course, Wasps can get away with insisting that talking about money is vulgar because they generally have enough of it — bloody right my grandmother would have talked about the $54.17 she didn’t have if she was in danger of losing her electricity because she couldn’t pay her bill.

Where Wasps go wrong, I think, is mistaking bad manners for moral breaches. I have rampaged about Trump being “low-class” but then felt guilty because I know that someone’s lack of decorum isn’t a good reason to declare him unfit for elected office — I mean, a person should be perfectly free to talk about, say, what Hillary Clinton was doing in the bathroom during a debate break, as Trump did from the stage in 2015, and still earn my vote if he’s solid on the issues, right? But as it happens, there are countless cocktail shakers brimming with sound moral reasons not to support Trump. For my grandmother, his greatest offense would have been his underhandedness: she was about nothing if not being aboveboard. (Again, I suppose she could afford to be, but let’s give her this one.)

The best-known anecdote about my grandmother — it was trundled out at her funeral, in 1994 — is that well into her dotage she drove back to a store because upon arriving home she realized that the cashier had given her a few dollars too much in change. But I know a better, less funeral-friendly story about her. She had probably never voted for a Democrat in her life, but in 1972, her two hippie children convinced her that Richard Nixon was a crook, so she held her nose, clutched her pearls, and threw the lever for the uppercase D Democrat, George McGovern.

Just as I was idly and, it must be said, rather smugly assembling a mental list of Wasp virtues — we don’t brag (Tad Friend writes of our “trademark self-deprecation”), we don’t complain (although maybe we don’t have much to complain about?), we invented noblesse oblige (because we could afford to, but still!) — it came to me that Trump, whose mother was Scottish and whose father was of German ancestry, is technically at least part Wasp. That took the glory out of my list making, as well it should have: I do know that Wasps haven’t cornered the market on virtue. But may I claim for the Wasps just one trait that no one else would want, and with which, were it in my power, I would frost Trump’s next beautiful piece of chocolate cake?

The whole point of being a Wasp, as best as I can conjure, is to get through life without embarrassing oneself in public. Trump’s ancestors plainly failed to pass on this characteristic; otherwise, he would have known that — to use but one example of dozens — when someone flails his limbs in imitation of a disabled person, as Trump did at one of his rallies, it’s not the disabled person who should be mortified.

Nashville bombing eye-witness describes waking up to gunshots and a recorded evacuation warning

An eye-witness to the Nashville bombing said that the recording on the RV wasn’t what woke her up before the bomb went off, it was gunshots.

Speaking to CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Betsy Williams said that she and her husband, who live about a block from the blast site, heard what she said sounded like automatic weapon fire. Cooper said that there were reports that the gunfire could have been part of the recording warning people to leave the area, but Williams said that she couldn’t hear the recording and it was the gunshots that woke her family up.

Willams said that she called 911 to report shots fired and estimated that it was between 8 and 10 shots that they heard. When they went outside they heard the recording that the bomb was going to go off and to evacuate the area. They got in their car and drove across the river for safety. After the 15 minutes had passed, and nothing happened, they called 911 again to ask what they should do. She said it was about 30 minutes after the countdown began that the bomb actually went off. She recalled that the countdown began about 5 or 10 minutes until 6:00 a.m. because she remembered the countdown being at 11 right at 6:00 a.m.

She explained that the voice on the announcement was a computerized woman’s voice and that it was counting down the 15 minutes. She left at about the eight-minute mark.

See the interview with Williams below:

What is tempeh? All about this hearty plant protein

Looking for a new way to perk up your meat-free meals? Tempeh is a plant-based protein made from fermented soybeans that’s easy to find, easy to cook, and well-worth a spot on your weekly shopping list. Nutritious, flavorful, and versatile, tempeh is on a steady rise in popularity, giving tofu a run for its money. Plus it’s vegetarian (vegan, actually!) and gluten-free, meaning just about anyone can fall in love with it.

What is tempeh

Tempeh is made by cooking, hulling, and fermenting dried soybeans with a yeast starter — similar to sourdough starter but made with rice flour instead of wheat. The resulting mixture is drained and compressed into slabs that are typically sliced, cubed, or crumbled. What may appear to be white mold on the outside of tempeh actually is white mold: remnants of the fermentation (like the rind on Brie), and a natural, harmless, flavorless part of the process. Thanks, helpful white mold!

What does tempeh taste like?

More savory on its own than tofu or seitan, tempeh has a pronounced nutty, slightly tangy flavor — with plenty of umami notes, courtesy of the fermentation process — and readily takes on the essence of whatever it’s prepared with. It may prove a little bland just raw straight from the package, so it’s best to cook it before eating (and the possibilities are boundless!).

Nutrition

A rich source of nutrients (particularly B vitamins and calcium), tempeh has more calories and healthy fats than other popular plant-based proteins. It’s high in carbohydrates and fiber for sustained energy release, and it ranks low on the glycemic index.

Where to buy tempeh

Supermarkets that sell tofu and vegan-meat substitutes will usually carry packaged tempeh in the same refrigerated case. Health-food and specialty markets may carry several brands, as well as variations like marinated tempeh or frozen crumbles. Store tempeh for up to a week in the refrigerator, or freeze for up to three months.

How to use tempeh

Owing to its chewy texture and sturdy composition, tempeh is well-suited for frying, grilling, baking, stewing, and crumbling for a texture similar to animal protein in chilis, pasta sauce, and grain bowls. Other flavor-packed ways to use tempeh:

Yes co-founder Jon Anderson: “I wouldn’t be here but for the Beatles”

British singer-songwriter Jon Anderson recently joined host Kenneth Womack to discuss “being spurred on to do better music” by the Beatles on “Everything Fab Four,” a new podcast co-produced by me and Womack, a music scholar who also writes about pop music for Salon, and distributed by Salon.

Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Anderson, co-founder and former lead singer of the legendary prog rock group Yes, has enjoyed a prolific career spanning over six decades, most recently with his 2019 album “1000 Hands.” Though he had a band with his brother as a teen in 1962, they were largely focused on being the Everly Brothers or Elvis Presley — that is, until they heard “Love Me Do.”

After that, says Anderson, he and his brother decided to go see the Beatles in the nearby Merseyside town of Southport. “It was April of ’63. And it was amazing…[their] album hadn’t come out yet, but they were selling it at the gig.” Six months later, British Beatlemania had hit. Upon going to see the band perform in Blackburn, Anderson recalls, “we couldn’t hear them. It was pandemonium.”

Though the early Beatles tunes had ignited a spark in Anderson, it was being on the road and hearing “Eleanor Rigby” on a transistor radio while making a stop that really blew him away. “I went, ‘what the hell is this?’ That was in ’66. They spurred me on to want to do better music. I started writing songs, very bad songs. But you keep trying, you know.” 

The “Beatles blueprint” of songwriting is especially evident in such classic Yes recordings as “Your Move” and Long Distance Runaround.” Anderson also admits to wanting to take acid in 1967 because Paul McCartney had taken acid. “That was a headline at the time,” he says to Womack, “And I was like, quick — go get me some acid!”

Having met the Beatles’ producer Sir George Martin in an elevator at the BBC — twice! — Anderson is a big fan of the original ’60s recordings. There’s “something very clean and pure” about them he explains, compared to recent remixes.

Ultimately, though, Anderson says it’s the Beatles’ “melodic quality — the lyrics too, of course — but it’s the melodic quality that helped [their music] reach more people all around the world.” As he states, “I wouldn’t be here but for the Beatles.”

Listen to the entire conversation with Jon Anderson, including what Paul McCartney once said to him backstage, which Beatles album he calls “a revolution on every level in music” and how he feels about the 2019 movie “Yesterday,” on “Everything Fab Four” and subscribe via Spotify, Apple, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.

“Everything Fab Four” is distributed by Salon. Host Kenneth Womack is the author of a two-volume biography on Beatles producer George Martin, the bestselling book “Solid State: The Story of Abbey Road and the End of the Beatles,” and most recently “John Lennon, 1980: The Last Days in the Life.”

Dickens, refrigeration and New World turkey: Behind the decline of the traditional Christmas goose

There never was such a goose. This line, found in the third chapter of “A Christmas Carol,” greatly contributed to my childhood understanding of a traditional Christmas dinner. Bob Cratchit, Ebenezer Scrooge’s underpaid clerk, remarked that “he didn’t believe there ever was such a goose cooked. Its tenderness and flavour, size and cheapness, were the themes of universal admiration.” 

It was a celebratory dinner — the goose, which would have been a rarity in the household, was served with applesauce, mashed potatoes and gravy — and was sufficient for the entire Cratchit family. When Scrooge, accompanied by the Ghost of Christmas Present, looked in on the family, he was struck by how contented they seemed. 

That scene always appealed to me, because traditions surrounding my family’s Christmas dinner always were — and still are — pretty fluid. We try new things on for size every year: honey-baked ham or lasagna one year, turkey and the trimmings the next. Last year, I made oxtail and orzo, while this year I’m undecided. 

For those who could afford it in Victorian England, these annual questions did not really exist — goose was it. It was a main dish steeped in centuries of tradition, further mythologized by Dickens’ portrayal. He was “the man who invented Christmas,” after all. 

But somewhere along the way, that Dickensian ideal fell by the wayside. When I polled friends who are based in both the U.S. and the U.K. about their typical Christmas main dish, there were several common responses: ham, turkey, and roast beef. Goose wasn’t on anyone’s shopping list. 

So, what happened? How did the poultry that used to dominate holiday tables become a ghost of Christmas past? It’s a multifaceted downfall — one which can be attributed to biology, refrigeration, New World availability and Dickens himself. In an unprecedented year, some home cooks are now giving it a second look. 

Saintly celebrations and ‘Goose Clubs’

For centuries, roast goose had been a traditional element of winter feasts. The observance of Saint Martin’s Day, or Martinmas, dates back to the Middle Ages; geese became a symbol of the saint — who is the patron saint of beggars and vintners — because, according to church lore, Martin of Tours hid in a pen of geese to avoid being ordained bishop. 

Ultimately, their cackling gave him away. 

Martinmas also takes place on Nov. 11, and it was widely celebrated as the start of winter, which coincided with seasonal preparations, such as the butchering of animals like geese. Geese are natural foragers that once domesticated, were often turned loose in fields to find and eat the scattered grain left behind by harvesters. They were at their largest post-harvest — just in time for the feast. 

Geese are still typically consumed either in the spring, when they are young, and then in the winter, when they are fattened. Because of this, many families in Victorian England would budget throughout the year for a Christmas goose. 

This led to a rise in Goose Clubs, to which someone like Bob Cratchit would have likely belonged. According to “The Holiday Book for Christmas and the New Year,” a series of periodical extracts that was bound and published in 1852, these clubs were often established by public house owners. 

“The members pay a shilling a week for eight to ten weeks before Christmas, and in addition to a goose, are generally entitled to a bottle of gin for their ten shillings,” it said. “Right proud is the landlord to show his prize geese to his customers; and great delight does he take in telling them about the number of miles he travelled by rail, of the bargain he made weeks before to be supplied with geese of the first quality at so much per head, and ‘not to be done,’ he examined them all.” 

Cratchit earned about 15 shillings a week, so in total the goose was not a small expense — especially when factoring in London cost of living and the expenses associated with caring for seven children — but the week-by-week payment plan made it attainable for many families. Those same families were not typically wealthy enough to have ovens in their homes, so pub owners or bakers would offer to cook their birds for a fee. 

Did Dickens kill the Christmas goose? 

Some actually point to the final chapter of “A Christmas Carol,” when a reformed Scrooge presents the Cratchits with a huge prized turkey, as the beginning of goose’s end. It was then viewed, in comparison, as a poor man’s dinner. But Dickens was likely just recording dietary preferences at the time. 

Turkeys are not native to England. They were likely brought back to the country by the 16th Century merchant William Strickland after a visit to the Americas, so they were still viewed as slightly exotic in the 19th Century. The taste profile is completely different, as well. The biological makeup of turkey means that they have more white meat than geese. 

Geese are more equipped for flight than turkeys, so their muscles require more oxygen and have more iron. “Dark meat cuts come from muscles that use more oxygen and have more iron,” University of Arkansas meat scientist Janeal Yancey wrote. “The iron is held in a protein called myoglobin, which gives it the darker color. White meat cuts come from muscles that metabolize energy with less oxygen, so they have less myoglobin and are lighter in color.”

Geese also have a lot of fat, which dissolves and drips as they cook. While you can typically feed eight adults with an eight-pound turkey, it is suggested that you plan to purchase a bird that is twice as heavy to feed the same amount of people since it doesn’t have quite as much edible meat after being roasted. 

For a very long time, they were kind of an aspirational dish in England — but there was a big shift after WWII rationing ended. Modern refrigerators started being mass-produced, and it was possible for home cooks to actually purchase and store big birds like turkey. 

This dovetailed with a rise in industrial farming in both the U.S. and the U.K.

“I think that’s maybe partly why, especially in the U.S., commercial rearing has, on an industrial scale, always looked at turkey first,” food historian Ken Albala said. “Turkeys are easier to raise. They can grow bigger breasts and don’t take as much feed to become fat as waterfowl.” 

He continued: “If you have small farms, you can have a handful of geese in a pond, because they need water to be happy. And that’s just not something that you can easily do in a big industrial sheds, in the way that we raise chickens and turkeys.” 

Once turkeys started being raised on a factory-scale, the price dropped immensely. 

“Turkey just turned out to be so cheap to raise that, you know, we have ground turkey and turkey bacon and turkey burgers for people who don’t want to eat red meat,” Albala said. “But geese are just too expensive, which is a shame, because they are so much more interesting than turkeys. Turkey is kind of the most boring of meat, while goose is richer and it’s got more fat on it. I think it’s as good as food gets.” 

According to the British Turkey Council, 75% of British home cooks will roast a turkey for Christmas this year, while 1% will have goose. Meanwhile, in the U.S., roast goose never really took off. Wild turkeys were plentiful, and while it was common for colonists to hunt Canada Goose, they were soon hunted to near extinction. After being rediscovered in the 1960s, they were put under stricter hunting management. And while the English who settled in America ate goose for a while, their tastes eventually assimilated to what was available. 

For a while, it seemed like the future of the goose was cooked. 

Is goose due for a comeback? 

Starting in 2000, several publications began speculating about whether goose was going to begin reappearing on holiday plates. By winter 2010, the Los Angeles Times reported that 240,000 geese were headed to market in the U.S. — up 65% from 2000.

“While goose remains a specialty item, sourced from a few gourmet-product wholesalers or from farmers who raise less-popular birds, the numbers are starting to add up,” Charles Passy wrote for the Wall Street Journal in 2017. “D’Artagnan, a New Jersey-based gourmet company that sells goose to restaurants in the city as well as directly to the public via mail order, says it expects orders for about 2,800 birds this holiday season — an increase of 27% over 2016.”

Jim Schiltz is the president of Schiltz Foods, Inc., the largest goose producer in the Americas. They provide 85 to 90% of the geese on the American market. Aafter experiencing three years of losses in the mid-2000s, they now process 6,000 to 7,000 birds a day. 

But winter is still, by far, their busiest season. “Christmas will always be the main focus,” Schiltz said, followed by the Chinese New Year and then some Orthodox Easter celebrations. 

The farm’s full raw goose is still by far the company’s most popular item, but according to Teri Metz, Schiltz’s marketing specialist, other smaller items — like their sliced smoked breast pieces and smoked goose legs — have seen an uptick in interest this year (likely due to the pandemic, in part). 

“I think it’s because people are having smaller gatherings,” she said. “So we’re noticing that a bit more.” 

More people may also be flocking to goose, because it gives them a taste of something different in an unprecedented winter, while also conjuring images of more “traditional” Christmases. Food historian Ken Albala is one of the Americans who has purchased a goose for the  holiday. 

He purchased a frozen one from a speciality grocery store in Stockton, Calif., for $60 — about $5.99 a pound (the average frozen Butterball Thanksgiving turkey cost $1.09 this year). He has made this a Christmas tradition for the past several years. 

“And often what I do is cure it,” he said. “So I’ll add salt and sodium nitrate and make a kind of prosciutto out of it, which is aged, or I’ll just cure it and smoke it, which is absolutely delicious.”

As Biden gets sworn in, White House will get scrubbed down

It was a down-in-the-mud presidential campaign, but the dirtiest part comes on Inauguration Day.

As Joe Biden lifts his right hand to take the oath of office at noon on Jan. 20 at the Capitol, a team of specially trained cleaners will be lifting their hands to disinfect the White House.

The executive mansion will get a deep clean after two COVID-19 outbreaks this fall led to President Donald Trump and members of his staff and family becoming infected.

The departure of one president and the arrival of another is always a fast but highly synchronized behind-the-scenes ballet by White House staff members and moving crews.

But this year is different. The shift means more than rearranging the Oval Office and putting new clothes in bedroom closets: It means a top-to-bottom disinfection amid a pandemic. Biden, who at 78 is taking office as the oldest president in U.S. history, is at high risk of complications from the virus.

So, the General Services Administration will oversee a thorough cleaning and disinfection of every doorknob, toilet handle, light switch, stair railing, telephone, elevator button, computer keyboard and other objects inside the 55,000-square-foot mansion at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

But can such a large building get fully clean in just five or six hours?

Experts say that should not be a problem with a large enough team and preparation time.

K. Mark Wiencek, lead microbiologist for South Carolina-based Contec Inc., which sells cleaning supplies to hospitals, said GSA cleaners should focus on the rooms last occupied by the Trump staff, since the virus can’t survive long on surfaces. Cleaning crews, he added, should wear masks and gloves to protect themselves and not introduce any germs.

He recommended replacing the air filters and using fogging and spraying disinfectant to kill viruses.

The GSA said it is already cleaning the White House East Wing and West Wing offices daily with disinfectant.

GSA officials said they expect no difficulties in making the transition and pledged that all furniture and surfaces would be cleaned. “GSA will thoroughly clean and disinfect the building spaces between the administrations and ensure that everything is up to standard,” a spokesperson said in a statement.

It’s vital that cleaners leave the cleaning chemicals on surfaces a full 10 minutes before wiping them down, said O.P. Almaraz, a disaster relief expert in West Covina, California, and president of Allied Restoration, which has cleaned dozens of businesses after suspected COVID cases.

“With a large enough crew, a professional disinfection company could apply disinfectants to the entire White House in six hours,” he said. It’s important, he explained, that the crew pay “special attention to points that may be touched often, like tabletops, door handles and light switches.”

As long as cleaners have an organized plan for each room, Almaraz doesn’t see them having trouble getting done before the Bidens move in at the end of the day.

Sheldon Yellen, CEO of Michigan-based Belfor Property Restoration, said cleaning crews need to be rehearsed and in fully ventilated suits to clean the White House in one afternoon.

“It’s a level 3 clean,” he said, noting the building needs the most intensive service because of confirmed COVID cases. That means disposing of anything that doesn’t have to stay for the Bidens, including pillows and bedsheets. He said books need to be wiped down, not just on the binding but all sides. He recommended cleaning the ductwork and ventilation systems as well.

Jack Shevel, co-founder of San Diego disinfection company Zappogen, said that because COVID-19 spreads by airborne transmission, it is best to disinfect using an electrostatic sprayer or fogger filled with a disinfectant designed to kill airborne pathogens. That covers a large area more easily than just wiping surfaces.

“To truly disinfect all those rooms quickly and thoroughly, they should be sprayed with a fine micron mist that can reach all crevices and surfaces evenly,” he said.

Still, the White House cleaners must be careful to remove paintings, antiques and other valuable items before spraying with disinfectant, said Ernesto Abel-Santos, professor of biochemistry at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. Those items should be cleaned by hand.

Abel-Santos said a simple alcohol-based disinfectant should be enough to kill the COVID virus. Although the virus can be detected on some surfaces for days, it typically degrades within hours. People are much more likely to be infected by droplets expelled when someone coughs, sneezes or talks.

During the turnover, cleaners should focus on the most commonly used areas of the building, he said, such as the Oval Office and bedrooms. “The rest can get deep-cleaned as needed,” he added.

Even more important than cleaning, however, is asking the new president and his family and staff to physically distance, wear their masks and wash their hands, according to Abel-Santos.

“You don’t realize how many times in a day you touch your face with your hands,” he said. “If you touch a surface and then touch your face, it increases the probability of contagion.”

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

Climate change is giving “Christmastown, USA” an identity crisis

When I was 9 years old, a reporter from Good Morning America visited Leavenworth, Washington, and declared it “the ultimate Christmas town.” It was 2007, and he was doing a spot on my hometown’s most popular winter event, the Christmas Lighting Festival, where thousands of people crowd around the Front Street gazebo to watch half a million red-and-green Christmas lights simultaneously turn on. Due to the East Coast time difference, he shot it live at 4 a.m. local time. Hundreds of people showed up anyway, many in costume and carrying signs, hoping to make it onto the program.

The postcard version of Leavenworth, Washington, is a winter wonderland — “one of the most Christmasy places in America,” according to the city’s official website. The charming town, home to 2,000 people, is filled with wooden balconies and A-line roofs with dark paneling, reflecting the architecture of an Old-World, alpine Bavarian village. We have year-round Christmas shops, a reindeer farm, and horse-drawn sleigh rides through what’s sold as “white and drifted snow.” According to the tourism board — which doesn’t hold back, when it comes to schmaltz — December weekends “end like a Dr. Seuss tale,” when the local “townsfolk” participate in the lighting festival, joining hands for some good old-fashioned Christmas caroling.

But the snow-blanketed, postcard-ready version of Leavenworth is in flux. According to the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s Fourth National Climate Assessment, winter is retreating across the Pacific Northwest — and it’s expected to recede even further in the coming decades. Thanks to climate change, towns like Leavenworth are slated to experience warmer temperatures and more rain. Notably, the snow season could shorten by a full month by the time I’m 50.

In Leavenworth, we are already getting a glimpse into that future — and so far, the effects of global heating aren’t exactly amplifying our “Old-World Christmas spirit.” December feels rainier. There’s sleet in January. By February, slush replaces snow on the streets downtown. Of course, there are still some years when we get a lot of snow — but overall trends don’t seem promising for our winter wonderland. As climate change chips away at Leavenworth’s winters and brings the possibility of a season without “white and drifted snow” ever closer, the town is facing an identity crisis.

* * *

The first time I remember seeing the city bring in snow machines was in 2011. I was 12 years old, and a team of filmmakers wanted to shoot a low-budget independent movie, Ira Finkelstein’s Christmas. (Its name was later changed to Switchmas, which is only slightly less cringey.) The storyline follows a Jewish tween from California, Ira, who desperately wanted to experience a Hallmark Christmas —one with Santa Claus, Christmas carols, and, of course, snow.

In the movie, Ira gets his way by swapping places with his doppelgänger in an airport.Ira goes to Leavenworth, while his lookalike visits Ira’s grandparents in Florida. I was slated to be an extra in the film, sledding down a hill on Front Street as a nameless resident of Leavenworth, or, as the movie rebranded us: Christmastown, USA.

As a stand-in for Christmastown, Leavenworth was an obvious choice except for one problem: When the film crew scouted the area, the ground was “brown and muddy.” That year hadn’t been great for snow, and it was late in the season — thus, the Mission Ridge snow machine had to be called in. If it hadn’t been for a belated Christmas miracle — a truly anomalous two-week-long stretch of late-season snow days that coincided with the film shoot — Ira Finkelstein’s magical Christmas would have been entirely human-made.

Since that strange film, I’ve seen a lot more of those snow-making machines in Leavenworth — “snow guns,” as they’re officially called.Even when we aren’t using the city center to film cheesy Christmas movies, there’s a need to keep up wintry appearances, or at least, try to. In some cases, the snow guns can’t keep up with snow loss, especially in high-traffic areas like Leavenworth’s iconic Front Street sledding hill — the same place where I made my one-second Hollywood debut for Switchmas.

The hill has become an iconic downtown disaster zone, although it doesn’t start the winter that way. For a few days each December, it’s covered in powdery white snow, making it a sledding favorite for tourists visiting from Seattle. Growing up, my sister and I used to envy their impressive assortment of sleds —round ones, rectangular ones, plastic ones, foam ones.

But within days of the first flurries, overzealous sledders smush the snow down flat, and it mixes with the dirt underneath. The result is a black-and-brown slurry that colors the hill for weeks. It freezes and thaws until nighttime temperatures start to climb above freezing. But still, the kids come.

* * *

Snow holds more than symbolic significance to the people of Leavenworth; it helps support an entire tourism industry. Within a 10-minute radius of downtown, the city has three cross-country ski areas and a small alpine run, as well as two snowshoeing courses. The Leavenworth Winter Sports Clubmaintains much of this infrastructure, “grooming” the trails every night during peak season and holding races with Scandinavian-sounding names like the “Skirennen.”

When I was in middle school, I joined the Sports Club’s cross-country ski team. For some of my friends, ski team was their world — after weeks of practicing on Leavenworth’s trails, they’d take off for weekend races in Winthrop, Washington, or Bend, Oregon. Even after spring had come and the snow had all melted into the Wenatchee River, they would bust out roller skis, practicing on the pavement in anticipation of “Junior Nationals,” an end-of-the-season race in Wyoming, Vermont, or some other exotic and snowy destination. As I neared the end of high school, it seemed like they were spending more and more time on roller skis.

When I come back to Leavenworth now, on break from college, my friends and I often have to use “rock skis” — secondhand, inexpensive pairs of skis that you don’t mind scuffing on rocks, pine cones, and exposed branches lying beneath the thinning snow’s surface. Some years, the ski season doesn’t even begin until late January, when I’m about to fly back to school for the spring semester.

For people who work in the ski tourism industry, the lack of snow can be devastating. In the early 2000s, each low-snow year in the Northwest was associated with annual economic losses of $173 million and 2,100 fewer jobs, compared to high-snow years. And with climate change, things will only go downhill, with scientists already forecasting the demise of some of Washington’s most popular ski resorts by 2050. Some areas have been forced to purchase snow machines for the first time ever.

The winter of 2014-15 provided an alarming sneak preview, when the Northwest’s temperatures shot 6.2 degrees F above the 1970-99 average. Precipitation was down too — the first half of the year was the seventh driest ever recorded. Stevens Pass, a popular ski resort within driving distance of Leavenworth, got only 40 percent of its usual amount of snow, and made 43 percent less money than during the previous season.

I remember that time. It was my junior year of high school, and people were calling it our year without a winter. I also remember that it was the same year Kentucky Senator James Inhofe infamously brought a snowball onto the Senate floor, “disproving” climate change once and for all. “It’s very, very cold out,” he said before tossing the snowball. “Very unseasonal.”

* * *

Leavenworth has begun to remind me of a fast food ad —the food you get never looks quite as beautiful as the promo. In Time Magazine, we’re one of the top 10 places with the most holiday cheer. On HGTV, we’re an “exquisite Christmas town.” Our own promo materials claim that “Leavenworth in winter is just like living in a snowglobe,” before suggesting eight distinctly snow-dependent activities for visitors to do during a six-day “week of winter fun.”

Living in Leavenworth, you see the less-shiny reality firsthand. In 2020, I’ve spent more time here than in any year since before college. Other than a brief stint in a Seattle sublet and a couple of weeks in Portland, Oregon, I’ve been living with my parents on the outskirts of town since my university sent its students home in March. Right now, people are understandably focused on COVID-19, which has caused business closures and canceled all of our winter events. In a normal year, 25,000 visitors might pack into Leavenworth’s downtown plaza every weekend to watch the Christmas Lighting Festival. This year, no one will.

In both crises — COVID-19 and climate change — the urge to go on as normal can be overwhelming. Tourists continue to visit Leavenworth during lockdown, shivering on restaurant patios in cold, wet weather because of the restrictions on indoor dining. Many of Leavenworth’s downtown shops now sell Christmas face masks.

It’s a similar story with climate change. Folks visiting Leavenworth from Seattle expect a winter snowglobe. Driving over the pass, checking into hotel rooms, bundling up the kids, and purchasing newfangled sleds — it’s a ritual that had better end with a goddamn snowman, or at least a snowball or two. So as the winter hobbles on, when it’s January, it’s lightly raining, and the sledding hill is streaked with brown, bright-eyed kids will innocently put sleds to dirt, as if sheer willpower could change the painful reality: Christmastown isn’t what it used to be.

The psychology of fairness: Why some Americans don’t believe the election results

The electoral votes have confirmed Joe Biden won the 2020 United States presidential election. The presidential electors gave Biden 306 electoral votes to President Donald Trump’s 232 votes. Biden also recorded a solid lead of over 7 million in the popular vote.

Nonetheless, results from a new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist survey found that approximately three-quarters of Republicans did not trust the election results. Corroborating this finding, a separate study of 24,000 Americans found that nearly two-thirds of Republicans lacked confidence in the fairness of the election and over 80% feared fraud, inaccuracy, bias and illegality. In addition, nearly 60 lawsuits filed by Trump claiming various forms of election fraud have been dismissed, including two evaluated by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Of course, doubting the fairness of a disappointing decision is not a Republican phenomenon — it’s a human one.

When a decision is made and people get the outcome they want, they often tend to see the outcome as fair. For example, when people apply for a promotion and get it, they are more than likely to believe they deserved it. But if they didn’t get the promotion, it is likely to drive a different reaction. At that point, the process used to make the decision becomes of utmost importance. Some might ask whether the process was free of bias, consistent and ethical.

To investigate this perplexing phenomenon, it’s important to understand the psychology of fairness.

Fair procedures usually matter

Research consistently finds that when people get an unfavorable outcome but believe the process used to make the decision was fair, they react more positively.

They may be disappointed, but they tend to accept the decision and stay loyal to the institution that made the decision. This is known as the “fair process effect“: the tendency for fair procedures to mitigate negative reactions to an unfavorable decision.

However, research my colleagues and I conducted in 2009 identifies an important caveat to this effect. We found that when an unfavorable decision is very important to someone — that it is central to their identity as part of a group or their personal values — they tend to look for flaws demonstrating that the process used to make the decision was unfair.

In the first study, we asked 180 university students about a decision that the administration would soon make about limiting the free speech of students. We manipulated whether the outcome was favorable such that half of the students were told the administration planned to restrict free speech and the other half were told there would be no restrictions. We also manipulated the process by telling students they had an opportunity to express their concerns in a public forum or did not have that opportunity.

We then assessed whether the decision made by the administration violated students’ identity as a member of the university and their personal values.

We found that when students felt the decision violated their social or personal identity, they perceived the process and outcome were unfair even when they had the opportunity to express their views at a public forum. In other words, there was a weak or no relationship between providing an opportunity for voice and fairness perceptions for people whose identity was violated.

In the second study we asked 277 adults with work experience about a time a decision was made at work when the outcome was favorable (or not) and the process was fair (or not).

As in the prior study, we found that an objectively fair process did not improve fairness perceptions when an outcome violated one’s identity. Instead, these participants were more likely to say that there was a procedural flaw — they doubted the opinions they provided to the decision-maker were ever considered.

The fact that they did not get the outcome they wanted on something that was central to their identity led participants to seek out reasons that an objectively fair process was somehow flawed in a meaningful way. They felt the need to discredit the process.

These findings are consistent with other research showing that for those who have a strong moral stance on an issue, judgments about whether the process and outcome are fair are determined more by whether the outcome was favorable than whether the procedure was objectively fair.

For example, when participants supported abortion rights, and a defendant in a trial was not convicted of bombing a clinic that performed abortions, these participants believed the trial process was less fair than those who held anti-abortion rights beliefs.

Similarly, when participants held anti-abortion rights beliefs and a physician on trial for providing illegal late-term abortions was acquitted, participants believed the trial was less fair than did those with abortion-rights beliefs. When we care deeply about an issue and get an unfavorable outcome, we question the process used to make the decision.

What can you do?

In an environment in which partisan and identity politics rule, perhaps it is not surprising that a decision that hurts one’s in-group — in this case, Republican supporters — is dismissed on the basis of perceived procedural flaws that render the election unfair despite objective reality.

Of course, the act of discounting the fairness of a decision process when a decision violates one’s identity is not limited to one political party. For example, after Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed as a Supreme Court justice, Democrats tended to believe that his confirmation hearings were unjust, including the withholding of important evidence.

Given that anyone can fall victim to this bias, several things can be done. First, it is important for leaders to legitimize the decision process. For example, when an organization makes a policy change to extend or reduce the number of remote days of work per week, it is important for leadership at all levels to clarify there was reasonable and fair process used to make the decision.

Second, it is critical to ask someone who is impartial. When wrestling with an ethical conundrum, people often come to a conclusion that is aligned with their self-interest — what psychologists call “motivated moral reasoning.” Thus, a neutral person can more accurately assess the decision.

Third, reducing how much a person feels distinct and isolated from members of another group by not dehumanizing members of the other group can lessen beliefs that a decision process was rigged or biased.

People often do not get the outcome they want on issues central to their identity, so it is important to actively guard against questioning the legitimacy of an objective and fair process.

David M. Mayer, Professor of Management & Organizations, University of Michigan

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

“Bridgerton” is Netflix’s randy costume confection that you’ll want to put in your face straightaway

People with hearts set on spending Christmas Day  inhaling new Netflix series “Bridgerton” would best be served resisting the urge to compare and contrast it with strict Jane Austen interpretations. Some association is inevitable, as would be true of any story set within the bustle of Regency London society’s upper crust. Austen reigns eternal as the queen of the form, and author Julia Quinn’s series of “sensual” novels, from which the series is adapted, are patterned after what she wrought.

But “Bridgerton” is a Shondaland creation through and through – an idealized vision of a world where everybody’s a little bit randy and nobody notices race. Specifically, it is the first product of Shonda Rhimes’ reported $150 million deal with Netflix, brought to us by protégé and series creator Chris Van Dusen. And while it may not qualify as an instant classic, or even very good, it is good enough to smooth out the raggedy ending of 2020.

All the graces and visual splendor one expects of some dream version of 19th century England seduces the eye on the front end, but beneath this show’s heaving decolletage beats the heart of “Scandal” and lust of “Grey’s Anatomy.” That is to say, this is a show devoted to casting the broadest of broad nets: careful social politics informing each character’s move, interrupted by interludes of banging in back rooms and, in one very early moment, against a tree.

“Bridgerton” takes the physical yearning present in Austen’s work and expands it into full-blown humpery during the back half of its eight-episode season, positioning all the exquisite balls, soirees, garden strolls and afternoons chastely nibbling ladyfingers with gentleman callers that are the hallmarks of Regency Era literature as extravagant pre-game stimulation.

Devoted Austenites could be scandalized. They might also want to loosen those bodice laces a little and settle in because honestly, for a little while this confection is all anyone’s going to be talking about.

“Bridgerton” stirs cravings – for fancy cookies, mainly (the gentleladies do love their sweets!) but also for pops of wild floral colors and sparkle in all its forms, be it jeweled, fireworks or raindrops on roses. Netflix knew exactly what it was doing in releasing this as a holiday bauble – especially on this holiday, at the end of a miserable year.

Between the opulent set design and lavish costumes all lit and filmed to inebriate the senses, the production transports us to the center of its fantasy, making the narrative and dialogue secondary to the series’ success.  Both those aspects do the job by the way, and follow the melodic pattern Austen established on the page; this is merely to point out that little jumped out from the scripts that qualifies as highly quotable.

“Bridgerton” really could use its own Violet Crawley, in other words. The imperious Lady Danbury (Adjoa Andoh) is the closest we come in that she does not mince words or suffer fools, but what style she has shows through her fashion . . . which, to be fair, is to die for. (Her top hats alone are enough to send a person down an Etsy rabbit hole.)

As for the story . . . honestly, if you’ve seen any modern film adapted from Austen’s work, you’ve a notion of what to expect; now amplify the gaudiness and camp and banish the stiffness, save for those antiquated ballroom dances. A touch of the staid nature that crispens past films and BBC productions based on Austen’s work remain in play here, but Van Dusen gussies things up to appeal to the “Gossip Girl” constituency.

Narration by a society pamphlet writer who goes by the nom de plume of Lady Whistledown provides a place for these two audiences to meet; Lady Whistledown has the goods on everyone in the “ton” (the colloquial name for high society in that era) and keeps everybody on their toes.

That the mysterious character is voiced by Julie Andrews further strengthens said bridge between classic and popular tastes. Somewhere between the two dances a line of anachronistic details, few more noticeable than the classical music covers of tunes by such artists as Ariana Grande and Taylor Swift.

But if you don’t recognize the familiar pop song hooks here and there, whatever. The central charm is in the barely subtle rivalry between the Bridgertons, whose eldest daughter Daphne (Phoebe Dynevor) stuns in her society debut before the imposing Queen Charlotte (Golda Rosheuvel), and the status-hungry Featheringtons, whose family name is ludicrous and style, garish (and yet both mother and daughters have bolder gowns than the Bridgertons; go figure!).

Daphne starts the season in an enviable position but thanks to spirited cockblocking by her oldest brother Anthony (Jonathan Bailey) her prospects soon dwindle from an ocean of suitors to one persistent wretch with weird lips and broad gums.

Enter Simon Basset, Duke of Hastings (Regé-Jean Page), whose emotional unavailability, ill-temper and astronomical hotness make him the catch of the season. Simon rolls his eyes at all the women throwing themselves at him – save for Daphne, who claims to harbor no desire for him. Thus they strike a bargain, pretending to court so that the ladies will back off and the eligible men will try to win Daphne away from him.

As negging experts may guess, their initially platonic partnership progresses as one may predict, eventually culminating in marathons of furious rutting with very little foreplay in bedrooms, on stairs, even atop a lawn or three.

The Featheringtons are not as lucky, especially when their cousin Marina Thompson (Ruby Barker) joins them and surprises them by being a gorgeous flower as opposed to the bucktoothed bumpkin they were expecting. But Marina is not entirely as she appears. The same is true of many of the figures here, from Anthony, who hides a highly improper affair with a soprano, to his younger brother Benedict (Luke Thompson), who is lured into the more licentious side of the aristocracy.

All main roads lead to boinking anon, yielding subplots that poke at the stifling mores of a patriarchal era where men are free to roam and act as they please whereas for women, the smallest misstep can lead to ruin. Related discussions about honor and the worth of marriage occur within each drama, as does a twist related to, ahem, bodily fluids – all of which tips its hat to Austen’s protofeminist bent while also taking matters to places that probably would have made her pass out.

Important, too, is the manner in which the directors execute the romantic scenes shown here. To find examples of the female gaze in intimate scenes beyond what “Outlander” depicts on the regular, take a luxuriant look at end of Episode 5 and the start of Episode 6. In adult film terms this is me mapping out how to skip over the pesky story and get to the goods. Then again, the cinematography creates porn of other sorts throughout the series, very little of which you’ll want to miss if you’re into that sort of thing.

Few gems are without flaw, even the prettiest of them. I suspect that it won’t be long before analysts dig into the production’s deeply suspect definition of inclusive casting as it manifests here, and they’re not wrong.

While Rhimes and Van Dusen strive to break away from the all-white casts that have been the standard Austen tale palette set long ago, viewers aware of the role colorism plays in casting are going to have a few things to say about the fact that most of the Black characters playing major roles are light-skinned, starting with Page and ending with Rosheuvel, Parker and Kathryn Drysdale, who plays Genevieve Delacroix, dressmaker to the socialites.

To any who may say, “But those are four featured actors!” keep in mind this is a large, mostly white ensemble, and most the non-white characters populate the show’s sea of extras and non-credited characters. “Bridgerton” in this respect is no great leap forward for inclusion but rather a hop from total whiteness to a teeny, tiny dot on a nearby tile.

That said, casting Rosheuvel as Queen Charlotte, the hub of power in this hive, can be interpreted as a nod to better intentions. The actual Charlotte is the subject of speculation over whether she had Black ancestry, explored more than a few times in the lead-up to Meghan Markle’s wedding to Prince Harry. People who know that story might appreciate the show’s choice. People who don’t will surely enjoy Rosheuvel’s mirthfully intimidating performance. Everyone watching will note that the Queen is, at best, a risky shade of beige.

Calling attention to these points matters, regardless of whether ones argues that these concerns are beside the point of a fictionalized historical tale mainly informed by class instead of race, which is in keeping with the Regency oeuvre. This also is an excuse given and heard many times whenever creatives are confronted about homogenous casting choices.

Another very valid response to all this is that maybe for one (more) day (in a string of days, years and decades) those of us who are tired of witnessing the hollow result of so-called raceless casting can either not watch or maybe decide to not care. (Again.)

For most, “Bridgerton” only needs to be the fluffy tail on a beastly year.  Despite its very real imperfections nobody should torture themselves for succumbing to whatever enjoyment it offers. Look at it in the same way you might view the combinations of sugar, flour and fat we’re inhaling with abandon right now: eat heartily, love the sweetness, and save your worry over the longer-term impact for that inevitable post-holiday comedown.

All eight episodes of “Bridgerton” are available to stream on Netflix starting on Dec. 25.

The Home Edit’s easy gingerbread brownies with eggnog frosting

Clea Shearer and Joanna Teplin, the stars of the popular Netflix show “Get Organized with The Home Edit,” share their recipe for Easy Gingerbread Brownies with Eggnog Frosting with Salon Food. This holiday-themed bake is a great last-minute dessert idea, because it’s incredibly easy to make. You can watch Clea and Joanna prepare their recipe on the Flavor Maker App by McCormick (free on iOS and Android), which helps users organize their physical and digital pantries.

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Recipe: The Home Edit’s Easy Gingerbread Brownies with Eggnog Frosting

Prep Time: 15 minutes

Cook Time: 45 minutes

Makes 16 servings

Ingredients:

Gingerbread Brownies

  • 1 package family size fudge brownie mix
  • 3 eggs
  • 1/3 cup vegetable oil
  • 1/4 cup molasses
  • 1 tablespoon water
  • 2 1/2 teaspoons McCormick® Ground Ginger
  • 1 teaspoon McCormick® Pure Vanilla Extract

Eggnog Frosting

  • 2 cups (about 8 ounces) confectioners’ sugar
  • 1/4 teaspoon McCormick® Ground Cinnamon
  • 1/4 teaspoon McCormick® Ground Nutmeg
  • 1/2 cup vegetable shortening, softened
  • 1 teaspoon McCormick® Pure Vanilla Extract
  • 4 teaspoons water
  1. Preheat oven to 350°F. Line 8-inch square baking pan with foil, with ends of foil extending over sides of pan. Spray with no stick cooking spray. Set aside.
  2. For the Gingerbread brownies, mix all ingredients in large bowl until well blended. Spread evenly in prepared pan. 
  3. Bake 40 to 45 minutes or until toothpick inserted in center comes out with fudgy crumbs, rotating pan halfway through baking. Cool completely in pan on wire rack. 
  4. Meanwhile, for the Eggnog Frosting, sift confectioners’ sugar and spices into medium bowl; set aside. Beat shortening in large bowl with electric mixer on medium speed until light and fluffy. Add vanilla; mix well. Gradually beat in confectioners’ sugar mixture, scraping sides and bottom of bowl after each addition. Add water; beat until light and fluffy.
  5. Use foil handles to remove cooled brownies from pan onto cutting board. Spread frosting evenly over brownies and cut into squares to serve.

Looking for a vegan version of this tasty brownie recipe? Skip the eggs and use this replacement! Whisk 3 tablespoons ground flaxseed and 9 tablespoons water in small bowl until well blended. Let stand 10 minutes. Whisk again and immediately stir into brownie mixture in place of the eggs. Continue as directed, increasing bake time to 45 to 50 minutes. (Don’t forget to check the brownie mix to make sure it’s vegan-friendly!)

“Wonder Woman 1984” is “chaotic” and “delightfully cheesy”: Reviews of this year’s superhero sequel

We deserve “Wonder Woman 1984,” but does the film deserve us? In a year of upheavals and unprecedented loss, those of us who’ve survived want – nay, we demand – something that will make us feel good for the holidays. Warner Bros.’ “Wonder Woman” sequel could be what we’re hoping for: escapism that also empowers, giving us that illusion that not all is futile as long as you’re optimistic and just a little bit Gritty.

In Patty Jenkins’ highly anticipated follow-up to her 2017 blockbuster, Amazonian warrior Diana Prince (Gal Gadot) is working at the Smithsonian as a senior anthropologist, raising the bar impossibly high for any real-life anthropologists (sorry, Margaret Mead). There, she meets new co-worker, the insecure Barbara Ann Minerva – who later becomes villain Cheetah (funny gal Kristen Wiig) – and ambitious businessman Maxwell Lord (“The Mandalorian” star Pedro Pascal). Also, through some sort of magic, Diana’s dead lover Steve Trevor (Chris Pine, the best Chris) comes back to life to make totally ’80s quips and wear stylin’ fanny packs. 

Warner Bros. sent shockwaves through Hollywood when it revealed that on Christmas Day, “Wonder Woman 1984” would simultaneously hit theaters and HBO Max, a release model the studio is planning for many other highly anticipated tentpole films. If ever there was a time to sign up for a new streaming service, this is it (especially since HBO Max finally came to Roku). Although drive-in movies and other theaters have figured out a way to stay viable during the pandemic, friends and families who want to share the experience safely can pull up a couch.

Will “Wonder Woman 1984” be worth all the hype and successfully kick a wretched 2020 to the curb with shiny red-booted heel? Check out the trailer and what critics are saying in the reviews below:

Wall Street Journal: “Wonder Woman 1984” review: Wishfulness run riot

Joe Morgenstern says:

As “Wonder Woman 1984” began streaming in preview on my living-room screen, I felt something of the pre-Covid thrill of sitting in a theater and being drawn into the 2017 “Wonder Woman,” a terrific action spectacular starring Gal Gadot as the Amazon warrior princess Diana. That one included a flashback to Themyscira, the Amazons’ island home, where Diana as a child was being trained in martial arts. The sequel, with Ms. Gadot once again in the title role, starts with another flashback to Themyscira, but Diana, nearly into adolescence and played as before by Lilly Aspell, is competing against formidable women in the Amazon Games, a succession of challenges that make the Olympics look like hopscotch. This opening sequence is as elegant and exciting as anyone could have wished for. When it’s over, though, the film, opening in theaters and streaming on HBO Max, turns coarse, shrill and chaotic, a kinetic but uncomic concoction that plays like some demented sendup of the Make-A-Wish Foundation

* * *

RogerEbert.com

To the tune of only 2 stars, Christy Lemire acknowledges that Gadot is “winning and winsome” but the sequel is “wilder and brasher.” She finds the ’80s touches particularly annoying: 

“Too often, though, the instinct in evoking that period is to wallow in obvious nostalgia —popped collars on pastel Polo shirts, a Centipede game at the arcade, a B. Dalton Bookseller at the brightly-lit, triple-decker mall,” she writes. “It feels like it belongs to a movie that actually came out in the ’80s.”

* * *

Playlist: “Wonder Woman 1984” dreams big, but wishes it’s something it’s not: compelling [review]

With the exception of the “rousing” opening flashback to Diana’s youth, Rodrigo Perez appears to find the entire film inane and incoherent. Scoring it a D+, he writes:

“‘Wonder Woman 1984’ is more than just mere disappointment or letdown from the last film . . . For all its hopes and dreams, ‘WW84’ has much ambition, but fails to attain the engaging and inspirational greatness it seeks.”

* * *

Washington Post: “Wonder Woman 1984” is two movies: a fun one, and a bloated, grandiose one

Ann Hornaday notes that Kristen Wiig does a good job:

Here, that honor belongs to Wiig, whose kooky persona is the perfect foil for Gadot’s watchful reserve. Even more gratifyingly, filmmaker Patty Jenkins has found a way for Diana’s love interest, Steve Trevor, to time-travel back into her life, meaning that Chris Pine has time-traveled back into ours. Gamely throwing himself back into the love-interest role commonly reserved for ingénues, he steals every scene he’s in, whether in a Mystery Date-like fashion montage (all hail the fanny pack) or being introduced to such modern-day phenomena as D.C. Metro escalators and the great works of the Hirshhorn.

Unfortunately, by the time the movie passes the 90-minute mark, she writes, “It’s as if Jenkins remembers her other deliverables, in the form of special effects, epic global crises and a plotty, ever-more-muddled story line that metastasizes into something much darker and more violent.”

* * *

Vanity Fair: On a small screen, “Wonder Woman 1984” is a little less wonderful

Richard Lawson points out that the film “colorful and playful in a way not seen elsewhere in the DC Universe,” but it’s just really “awfully messy” – from Pine’s delivery that comes off as “Marvel-esque” and the bloated plot to a stumbling resolution and wasted talent.

“Wiig and Pascal add some nice timbre to the more serious scenes, but the Barbara of it all gets short shrift,” he writes. “She disappears for a while and is sorely missed. Game as Pascal is, I think he could have been jettisoned and Wiig moved to the center.”

* * *

USA Today: Review: “Wonder Woman 1984” is a rousing, retro throwback to Christopher Reeve’s “Superman”

Brian Truitt (3 out of 4 stars) is far more tolerant of the ’80s-ness of it all, calling it “rad.” Overall, he’s there for the performances and views “1984” as the Christmas gift it’s meant to be:

Gadot and Pine’s chemistry was one of the best aspects of the first “Wonder Woman” and they bring so much life to the new one, as a buoyant Diana introduces fish-out-of-water Steve to fanny packs and parachute pants. Throw in a soaring Hans Zimmer score and together the two lovebirds give the film an exciting, earnest vibe that’s the closest recent DC superhero projects have come to Christopher Reeve’s original “Superman.”

. . . Jenkins is the resident Santa Claus, gifting us this holiday season – even those stuck at home – with an action-packed, heartwarming flick full of grace, goodness and a tank-flipping, whip-smacking, baddie-bashing Gadot.

* * *

Mashable: “Wonder Woman 1984” gives the gift of grace and compassion to a desperate world

While Angie Han acknowledges some of the narrative issues, she also recommends that viewers not pay too close attention or expect logic. Instead, she’s down for the wackiness of Steve Trevor’s ’80s journey and especially the authenticity of the emotions between him and Diana.

Overall, it’s all about what the film wants to be, which is heartwarming and a balm for this often depressing world:

“There’s a pivotal moment when the otherwise busy film slows down long enough for Diana to acknowledge how hard life on Earth can be, how scary and sad it can feel. Watching it in the midst of one of the toughest years in recent memory, it hits like a sigh of relief. Her words aren’t enough to fix everything, not in the movie and not in real life, but there’s power in the simple acknowledgment of it — in being seen for the miserable creatures we are, and in deciding to love and be loved anyway.”

* * *

Vox: Wonder Woman 1984 is a better rom-com than superhero movie

Alex Abad-Santos once again acknowledges the muddled nature fo the film –– trying to fit in too much of everyting – but revels in the humanity of this larger-than-life blockbuster.

“The best moments of Jenkins’s ambitious and hefty sequel, WW1984, engages with Wonder Woman’s very human problem. Diana is a goddess — in appearance, morality, strength, invulnerability — living among mortals, but she is otherwise alone.”

Those human problems – her romance with Steve, the rivalry with Barbara – work, but Abad-Santos finds there’s just one too many villains.

“The frustrating part of WW1984 is that these two solid storylines are saddled with a third. Looming in the background is the maniacal Maxwell Lord who wants to rule the world and wield unrivaled influence,” he writes. “While Pascal is doing great work, lacing American cheesiness into every fiber of his character, I found myself wondering when we’d get back to Diana and Steve, or questioning whether Barbara and Diana would ever be friends again, or asking myself what Diana loves more: being a goddess or being in love? The more time spent on it, the less time WW1984 spends being wondrous.”

* * *

SlashFilm: “Wonder Woman 1984” review: A startlingly kind, delightfully cheesy balm for the horrors of 2020

For every person offended by the ’80s excess, there’s someone, such as Hoai-Tran Bui, who embraces it for the feel-good goofiness it’s meant to be . . . and an antidote to this horrible year.

“The filmmaker digs her heels even further into that promise of cheesy superhero goodness, to the point of it being a potential health hazard,” But writes. “But the cartoonishly optimistic charms of ‘Wonder Woman 1984’ feel like a direct rebuke of the current political and cultural landscape in a way that is unquestionably ham-fisted, but is — as trite as it sounds to repeat this far-too repeated phrase — a much-needed balm for 2020.”

She also calls Wiig’s performance “endearingly insecure” and reserves her best praise for Pedro Pascal:

“If there ever was a role that played perfectly to Pascal’s natural charisma, it’s Maxwell Lord. The role requires a lot from Pascal — hamming it up in an over-the-top performance befitting the best ’80s villains — who has to play someone simultaneously detestable, charming enough to get people to spill out their deepest wishes to him, and disarmingly sympathetic.”

* * *

LA Times: Review: With big villains and bigger hair, “Wonder Woman 1984” is a gloriously overstuffed sequel

Count Justin Chang among the fans of sincere cheese: “Director Patty Jenkins and her star, Gal Gadot, have mastered the art of cornball conviction. If what you wish for this season is high spirits, earnest emotions and the unironically delightful sight of Chris Pine in a fanny pack, well, consider it granted.”

* * *

IndieWire: “Wonder Woman 1984” review: Gal Gadot returns in a bonkers blast of ’80s excess and intrigue

And finally, Kate Erbland raves about the film’s bright and overdone ebullient delights: 

“Leave it to Jenkins to find a suitable and satisfying workaround in the form of ‘Wonder Woman 1984,’ the rare superhero sequel that, for better (and sometimes, but rarely) worse, carves its own path and finds something joyous, wacky, and deeply enjoyable as a result. All that neon and all those parachute pants? Just a bonus, as Jenkins and Gadot take their heartfelt heroine back to 1984, finding bombastic new territory for Diana Prince to explore, blessedly outside the confines of her contemporary compatriots.”

What If, after 9/11, George W. Bush had just thrown a bunch of parties?

‘Tis the season to be folly
Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la
Don(ald) we now our gay apparel,
Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la!…

It’s party time in the nation’s capital and the Christmas spirit reigns supreme, even if the Texas Republican Party does want to secede from the Union. I mean, who doesn’t?

And hey, don’t you want to attend a party? After all, it’ll be at the White House, masks purely optional, social distancing not particularly necessary. Too bad you already missed the Congressional Ball (redubbed the “Covid Ball“) that The Donald and Melania so graciously hosted. Still, if you make it to one of the others, be sure to check out Melania’s decorations, not to speak of her just-unveiled new White House tennis pavilion of which she should be proud, despite all the criticism. After all, unlike you-know-who, she used the moment to welcome non-Trumpian presidents to come! (“It is my hope that this private space will function as both a place of leisure and gathering for future first families.”)

Meanwhile, even though more than 50 people in his circle have already been infected with Covid-19, her husband has been hosting up to 24 parties and celebrations of every sort at the White House this month. In other words, top-notch super-spreader Christmas fun until more or less the end of time. (If you’re well over 65, like I am, it may quite literally be your last chance to have a blast.) And whatever you do, when you’re freely wandering the White House, don’t miss that tribute to essential workers in the Red Room!

If, however, you’re of a slightly more serious frame of mind, how about cocktails and hors d’oeuvres at Mike Pompeo’s State Department? Hurry it up because one thing is guaranteed: it’s not going to be anywhere near as much fun in the Biden years. (I mean, so been-there, done-that, right?) And don’t worry, since the State Department building has been deep-cleaned repeatedly due to reported Covid-19 infections there and pay no attention to the fact that State Department personnel are being urged to work from home. I guarantee you that it’ll be a blast — and I don’t mean a bombing-Iran sort of blast either, though for all any of us knows, that might be in the works, too! After all, you could already have run into a bevy of foreign ambassadors and up to 900 guests (actually, fewer than 70 appeared) in rooms on the eighth floor of that building (but socially distanced, I swear) at gatherings that were supposed to go on until Christmas.

Whoa, rein in that sleigh, Santa! Sorry to disappoint, but Mike canceled his final superspreader party and went into quarantine last week after — big shock! — coming into contact with someone who had the coronavirus while hosting those “diplomats and dignitaries” at close quarters!

Deck the halls with boughs of folly indeed!

A historical switcheroo

And 2020! What a year to celebrate, right? The very year when Donald Trump won his second term as president in a landslide — or am I confused? Did I mean lost the presidency in a landslide of pandemic deaths? Still, if in this “holiday” season, and in the true spirit of Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo, I were to be offered the chance to remake the history of this century, here’s the switcheroo I might choose to pull.

Let’s start with this simple fact: on December 9th, more people died in a single day from Covid-19 (3,124) than died on September 11, 2001, in the ruins of the Twin Towers and part of the Pentagon (2,977). Or cumulatively speaking, think of it this way: more Americans have died in less than a year from the coronavirus than the 301,000 civilians that Brown University’s Costs of War Project estimates have died in America’s forever wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, and Yemen since 2001.

Donald Trump’s response to the pandemic has, of course, been to give awful advice, hold super-spreader rallies galore, and most recently host those ongoing, largely unmasked festivities at the White House; he has, that is, responded to the arrival of Covid-19 on our shores by committing murder big time. (Estimates are that, by February 2021, 450,000 Americans could be dead from the pandemic even as vaccines to prevent it begin to arrive. By the time this country is more or less safe — if it ever truly is — that number might be 600,000 (or almost in the range of the American toll in the “Spanish Flu” of 1918).

Now, to step back just a few years, consider the response of President George W. Bush to that one day of horrific death caused by 19 mostly Saudi hijackers aboard four commercial jets. In response to those 9/11 attacks, he launched what quickly became known as the Global War on Terror, promptly invaded Afghanistan, and a year and a half later did the same thing in Iraq. (That was, of course, something he and his top officials had begun thinking about — quite literally, in the case of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld — in the rubble of the Pentagon, even though that country’s ruler, Saddam Hussein, had nothing whatsoever to do either with al-Qaeda or those terror attacks.) Of course, 19 years later, despite a president who swore he would end this country’s “forever wars,” the war on terror is still ongoingwithout a lasting victory or true success in sight.

Now, as this mad Trumpian Christmas of ours approaches with increasing parts of the country in lockdown and Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths eternally rising into record-breaking territory, here’s my fantasy proposition, my imagined historical switcheroo: What if, in response to 9/11, George W. Bush had, irresponsibly enough, simply thrown parties at the White House in high Trumpian-style; and what if, in response to the coronavirus crisis, Donald Trump had, responsibly enough, launched a global war on Covid-19 in true Bushian fashion? How differently history might have turned out.

The blazing fool before us

Instead, of course, Bush did launch those disastrous invasions and Trump did launch his own personal war on truth when it came to the pandemic (and so much else). The result, in both cases: crimes and deaths galore. Though it’s seldom thought of that way, both of those twenty-first-century presidents of “ours” were, in a rather literal sense, mass murderers. In addition, thanks to the two of them and the cast of characters that accompanied them, we now live in a world of remarkable lies and self-delusion, whether we’re talking about the U.S. military or our health and well-being.

After all, if you don’t think this country is delusional when it comes to what still passes for “national security” consider this: just the other day, the Democrats and Republicans in Congress, who can evidently agree on so little else, passed a record veto-proof defense bill giving the Pentagon a staggering $740 billion dollars for the next fiscal year. (Talk about inequality in this country with so many Americans at the edge of eviction or even hunger and Congress doing next to nothing for them!) In fact, together they actually agreed to offer more money than the Pentagon even asked for when it came to purchasing new arms, including extra Lockheed Martin F-35 jet fighters, already the most expensive and possibly least effective warplanes in history. Meanwhile, across the planet, the weaponry into which all that “national security” money has been poured is still killing people, including startling numbers of civilians, in never-ending unsuccessful wars that have turned millions of people in distant countries into displaced persons and refugees.

Considering such funding to be for “national security” isn’t just a joke, but a lie of the first order. It has, as a start, produced both global and national insecurity (while aiding the rise of what’s now called right-wing populism). Those disastrous but disastrously well-funded wars launched by George W. Bush proved to be, above all else, acts of mass murder abroad, even as they also led to the deaths, injuries, or PTSD misery of significant numbers of Americans. Think of them, in fact, as, in the most literal sense imaginable, war crimes.

Of course, those acts of mass murder all took place in distant lands far from most American eyes, even as, in an ever more unequal society, they deprived so many here of needed assistance. In part, Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential campaign was a product of that mass murder abroad. And now, without ever actually ending those wars as he promised so vociferously, he’s become a mass murderer at home in his own striking fashion. In this pandemic year, think of him, whether in relation to Covid-19 itself or the election that took place in its midst, as launching a kind of war on terror on both Americans and our political system.

In the process, he’s helped create a world of staggering folly that should be eternally unmasked. (Whoops! Well, you know what I mean.) The America he’s played such a part in producing has created a kind of mental chaos that’s hard to take in. One nurse in unmasked South Dakota caught its sad spirit in this series of tweets:

“I have a night off from the hospital. As I’m on my couch with my dog I can’t help but think of the Covid patients the last few days. The ones that stick out are those who still don’t believe the virus is real. The ones who scream at you for a magic medicine and that Joe Biden is going to ruin the USA. All while gasping for breath on 100% Vapotherm. They tell you there must be another reason they are sick. They call you names and ask why you have to wear all that ‘stuff’ because they don’t have Covid because it’s not real… These people really think this isn’t going to happen to them. And then they stop yelling at you when they get intubated. It’s like a fucking horror movie that never ends. There’s no credits that roll. You just go back and do it all over again.”

She’s right. No credits roll and yet the president and his men, as well as Republican governors like South Dakota’s Kristi Noem who refuse to mandate masks are, in an obvious sense, aiding and abetting murders. Take, for instance, the president’s lawyer, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani who traveled the country unmasked, ignoring social distancing guidelines wherever he went, to beat the post-election drums for Donald Trump. He then fell ill with Covid-19, was hospitalized, got special medications that most Americans could never receive thanks to his pal, and called into his own radio show from his hospital room to essentially denounce masking and social distancing and assure his listeners that Covid-19 was “curable.” (Tell that to the more than 300,000 Americans who have already died from it.)

Now, don’t such acts, multiplied many times over, qualify as part of what might be considered a homegrown war of (not on) terror in a world not of holly but folly this Christmas season? And I haven’t even mentioned the crimes this president and his administration have committed against the environment or President Trump’s criminal urge to torch the planet itself in a fashion that, given what we already know about climate change, will potentially result in so much more death, destruction, and displacement.

We live in a land of vast crimes against others and increasingly against ourselves. We also await a new president whose greatest ad line is simply that he is not Donald J. Trump (thank god!), though in all honesty that “new” has to be taken under advisement. Let’s hope for the best, especially when it comes to climate change, but Joe Biden will, after all, be 78 years old — by far the oldest president in our history — on entering the Oval Office. He’s the been-there, done-that man of our moment and, Obama appointee by Obama appointee, he seems largely intent on recreating a familiar past that helped create the very future we’re now mired in.

As we await him in a country on edge, armed, angry, and in a conspiratorial frame of mind, as we face a Mitch McConnell Republican Party that would rather take down the future than negotiate much of anything, Donald Trump, the murderer, continues to prove himself the ultimate, possibly all-time, sore loser, even as he parties away at the White House. He gives a pandemic version of Christmas true meaning.

See the blazing fool before us,
Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la

Copyright 2020 Tom Engelhardt

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My Christmas among the spies. In the Holy Land. In 1974

What was I thinking?

That’s the question I ask myself when I think of the winter of 1974. I was in Israel, writing about terrorism for the Village Voice — covering terrorism, if you will, as if you could cover something as horrific and capricious and criminal and essentially inscrutable as the attacks against civilians that were ongoing almost daily in Israel. 

It was a year after the Yom Kippur War, only seven years after the Six Day War of 1967, and the Arab world wanted revenge after suffering yet another humiliating loss at the hands of the Israelis. So Palestinian militants were carrying out terrorist attacks against Israel almost nightly. A Druze family was killed in a terror attack less than a mile from the border with Lebanon, a dozen moviegoers were injured in a suicide bombing of a cinema in Tel Aviv, a rubber raft filled with terrorists was intercepted on a beach between Tel Aviv and Jaffa, and more attempts at invasion by sea were being made further north along the coast all the time. The attacks were so commonplace they rarely made the pages of the New York Times.

I was 27 years old, and what the hell did I know? I had been sent over to Israel because there was supposed to be another war with Syria, this time over the Golan Heights, but when I got there in early November, the threat of war had dissipated, and the Syrians had gone back to arming and funding Palestinian splinter groups and their terrorist networks, so almost by default, that’s what I found myself writing about. There was, in fact, a war going on that no one was covering. It was the only war that a side with pipe bombs and AK-47s and RPGs could fight against the side with supersonic jets and nuclear weapons. It was a war of terror.

I was staying in a hotel on the beach in Tel Aviv. I would get a call from a source about a terrorist attack, go to wherever it had taken place and “cover” it, then I would write my dispatch for the Voice and hand it over the Israel Defense Forces censor to get it cleared as not being dangerous to Israel’s national security. Then, sometime after midnight, I would hike over to the empty offices of the Westinghouse Broadcasting Corporation and pound away on their telex into the wee hours of the morning, sending my words off to New York.

I did this for weeks, and during all that time, I didn’t have a clue that I was being watched by the Israeli secret services and being evaluated by spies for the Mossad to see whether I would be useful to them as a spy myself. Everyone had to hand in their copy to the office of the military censor. They used the process to keep watch on reporters, check out what they were covering, get a look at their political attitudes and general competence, and figure out if and how they could be influenced and used as witting or unwitting spies for Israel. I was innocent about spying. I had no idea what spies did or how they worked. Yet, as I learned, spies were all around me.

Sometime in mid-December, my friend John Broder and I decided it was time to travel to the place where most of the terrorism against Israel was being planned and prepared. We wanted an up-close look at Beirut. Broder was a runner at the Tel Aviv bureau of the Associated Press, which is to say he was a gofer around the office who occasionally got sent out on a story when the veteran reporters were either busy or asleep. He got the night shift a lot. We had “covered” a couple of terror attacks together, and Broder had told me he was tired of being a peon at the AP and was ready to quit if he could nail down a couple of assignments. I took note of his restlessness and called a friend of mine in Chicago who was an editor at Playboy and got Broder an assignment to write a story about terrorism for them. (Broder would go on to become bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune in places like Moscow and Beijing.) The Playboy editor wired $1,000 in expenses to Broder, and we started figuring out how to get to Beirut from Israel — not an easy task, as it turned out, and nearly impossible if you had Israeli stamps in your passport, which we both did.

The usual way to do it was to fly to Cyprus and change planes for Beirut, but Cyprus was in the middle of one of its many wars and the airport was shut down. Broder had a friend who knew a guy who had a friend who might know something about traveling to “Indian country,” as Lebanon was called. We met the friend at a coffee shop on Dizengoff Street. He said he knew a guy who could help us with tickets and gave us a name and an address in Tel Aviv. The next day, we found the place at the end of a small alley off Ben Yehuda Street in a residential neighborhood, walked up a typical set of outside stairs and knocked on an unmarked door.

It was answered by a portly man in a white shirt who was smoking a cigar. He welcomed us into a room furnished with a steel desk and three metal office chairs and a phone. Nothing else. No lamps. No posters on the walls. He said he understood we were interested in traveling to Beirut. When did we want to go? What was our interest in traveling to such a dangerous place? Didn’t we know there was fighting going on there between Palestinian factions, and it wasn’t safe?

We knew all that, but we still wanted to go. He asked us more questions about what we knew and why we were so determined to go. We were journalists, we explained. We’re writing about terrorism. He didn’t take any notes. 

I look back on the scene in that room today and wonder, what were we thinking? Did we think this sketchy guy was a travel agent? The plain room in an apartment building wasn’t like any travel agency either of us had ever been to, nor was the guy with the cigar like any travel agent we had ever met.

After chatting for a half hour or so, he opened a drawer in the desk and removed one of those ticketing machines, the kind where you set a multi-page ticket on a horizontal slot and yank a slide back and forth that makes a coded airline imprint on the ticket. He pulled out a cardboard box full of little metal templates for different airlines and riffled through them. He explained that we would have to fly through Athens, and because we both had Israeli stamps in our passports, we’d have to change them for “clean” ones at the American embassy there. But not to worry. He knew a guy…

He consulted a calendar and a thick airline schedule book and made a couple of calls. Within an hour, he had finished writing tickets to and from Athens on TWA and tickets to and from Beirut on Middle East Airlines. He gave us the name of the guy at the U.S. embassy in Athens, and told us he would arrange the “clean” passports that would work with Lebanese immigration and customs. We would have to exchange them for our original passports on our way back. Without further ado, he pushed the tickets across the desk. Broder and I pulled out our wallets and asked him how much we owed him. He puffed silently on his cigar for a moment and smiled. “How does $25 sound to you?” “Each?” I asked, dumbfounded. “No. Twenty-five total.”

He was a spy, of course. So was the guy at the American embassy in Athens, who was ready for us when we got there, even though we hadn’t called ahead. Nominally some kind of cultural attache, he was actually in the CIA station at the embassy. He took new passport photos of us, and within 24 hours produced two legitimate U.S. passports that looked and felt used and had the identical visas from our original passports — minus the Israeli stamp. 

When we met up with him to change our passports back a couple of weeks later, on our way back to Israel from Beirut, he was very interested in where we had been and who we had met and what we had seen, especially when we told him we had spent Christmas Day on the border between Lebanon and Israel. So was the “travel agent” in Israel when I conveniently “ran into him” at a restaurant in Tel Aviv after we had returned.

When I told him we had seen a guy on the street in Beirut whom we had met at a party in Tel Aviv before we left, he insisted that we meet at his “travel office” the next day. We told him the guy had been dressed in a business suit and carried a briefcase. He had recognized us at the same time we recognized him and turned casually to look at a display in a storefront window. We immediately realized we couldn’t be seen with him and crossed the street and headed in the opposite direction. At the party in Tel Aviv, he had told us he worked for an electronics firm and traveled a lot on business. I’ll say. 

We asked our “travel agent” questions about the mysterious Israeli we’d seen in Beirut that he wouldn’t answer. “Forget this guy,” he instructed. “You never saw him.” He asked if we had told anyone. We hadn’t. He asked us not to write about what had happened. We agreed.

Several years later, I got to know a man in New York who had served in the OSS during World War II and still had connections within both the CIA and Mossad. When I told him about running into the Israeli agent in Beirut, he just chuckled. “Mossad has people everywhere. They can appear to be Arabs or Russians or Albanians or Turks. They are embedded everywhere. You’ve probably met some of them right here in New York.” It turned out that I had. His partner, with whom he ran an international business I won’t mention, and which you would never suspect was useful to an intelligence agency, was an agent for Mossad.    

We could see artillery and mortar explosions on the blacked-out hills of the Deir Qoubel and Yinnar neighborhoods above the airport as we landed in Beirut. We were the only two passengers on our Middle East Air 727. Our new passports worked just fine when we passed through immigration at the totally deserted arrivals terminal. An AK-47-toting teenager stopped us on our way to the cab stand. Both of us had long hair. I was wearing cowboy boots and a Levi jacket over a grape-purple down vest I had picked up in Aspen. Broder was wearing a black leather jacket and Levis. The teenager made a motion like he was smoking a joint. Broder glanced at me and we nodded. The kid grinned. He took us for two hash dealers headed for the marijuana fields of the Bekaa Valley and passed us on.

Beirut was full of spies. There were hotels where spies were known to stay, like the Commodore, and bars where spies gathered to drink all over town. There was a Palestinian cab driver named Toufiq who waited outside our pension on Rue Mexique every day in his 1968 Oldsmobile 88. He was a spy for the PLO, or Fatah or the PFLP — for somebody, anyway. It was his job to keep tabs on us and report where we had gone and what we had seen and what we were likely to write about. We had heard the PLO had files on every reporter in town, and it was true. Toufiq had read everything I had written for the Voice from Israel, and even some of the AP dispatches Broder had managed to file. He later told us he knew our names before we introduced ourselves.

Toufiq would honk for us if he heard there had been a terrorist attack somewhere in town, then he would drive us at breakneck speed through the insane Beirut traffic and translate for us when we got there. We always wondered if he translated our questions accurately. He could have been taking sides, seeking to influence us, pitching a dispute between Palestinian factions one way or another. We never knew. We just wanted to be close to the action. There were terror attacks everywhere, all the time. We had a hard time figuring out who was who and why they were bombing and shooting each other, but it didn’t really matter. It was terrorism. We were in the middle of it all. We were writing about it. Beirut was heaven. We were both in our 20s and we had wings.

We were told by a friend of Broder’s in the AP Beirut bureau that we should assume we were followed everywhere we went. We never saw anyone tailing us, but then we had Toufiq driving us everywhere we went and translating for us. They didn’t need anyone else to follow the two hippie-looking goofs who were going around Beirut asking questions, hauling out cameras and notepads everywhere they went. 

The border with Israel was a no-go zone. Everyone told us to stay away from it. You couldn’t get there anyway, they said. There were roadblocks everywhere — one Palestinian faction controlled this village, another faction controlled that one. The whole region, all the way from the Golan Heights in the east to the Mediterranean coast, was an armed camp with UN peacekeeper outposts scattered throughout the no man’s land between the border fences. There were Israeli patrols on the other side of the border.

We had to go. It was surprisingly easy to talk Toufiq into driving us down there. We had dinner on Christmas Eve at the pension and left early on Christmas morning. Toufiq thought he knew a route where we wouldn’t run into too many roadblocks and headed southwest, toward the Golan Heights. We could see crumbling Crusader castles on hilltops. Hillsides were lined with stone-walled terraces, and we could see old men and boys plowing behind plodding oxen. It was like we were in the 3rd century, and we were less than 20 miles from Beirut.

Toufiq talked us through a couple of roadblocks and by mid-morning we were in the foothills of the Golan Heights. We could see scattered Israeli farmhouses across the border. We parked outside a medieval stone village with cobbled streets no wider than a donkey cart. Toufiq scared up the mukhtar, the village mayor, and he took us around, pointing to damage the village had suffered from bombing by Israeli jets. He told us Fatah used to hide their technicals — pickup trucks with bed-mounted machine guns — under the olive trees. The Israelis figured it out and now large swaths of olive groves had been flattened by bombing, and the villagers couldn’t earn their living from olive farming anymore. 

We turned a corner on a narrow village street. The hoods and windshields of pickup truck technicals were visible just inside the front rooms of several stone homes. The street-side walls had been removed and the trucks backed far enough into living rooms and bedrooms that they could not be seen by Israeli jets overhead. 

Suddenly a guy in a headscarf appeared, and Toufiq grabbed my arm, pulling me back around the corner. “Not good,” he said. We ran back along the narrow street and hopped into the Oldsmobile. Toufiq fired the engine and we backed up. He spun the wheel and floored it down the narrow road up the hill to the village. 

I heard gunfire and turned around to find one of the technicals following from a distance. I could hear the machine gun rattling as I hit the floor of the backseat, trying to dig my way through to the car’s undercarriage. I looked up at Broder. He was hanging out the window with his camera, taking pictures.

Toufiq’s Olds 88 was faster than the pickup, and we soon lost them. But now they knew we were there, and our jaunt along the border was over. Toufiq turned off the border road and made his way northwest for the coast. We ate our Christmas dinner at a seafood restaurant on the harbor in Tyre where Alexander the Great had laid siege to the city. We left as it grew dark.

That night, as we drove through the ancient city of Sidon and north to Beirut, Toufiq told us a story about a family of spies: his own. He and his three brothers had been born in Haifa — then in British-administered Palestine, now in Israel. As a young man, Toufiq made his way to Lebanon to join with other Palestinians in exile. His mother, however, chose to remain in Haifa in a house that had been in their family for more than 100 years, where she gave birth to three more sons. 

When his brothers were young, before they left home, Toufiq would sneak across the border into Israel and visit his family in Haifa. But after his brothers had grown up and joined him in exile, it was too dangerous for all four of them to cross the border to visit their mother, so she began to smuggle herself across the border to visit them.

One night she was caught crossing the border by Israeli authorities and jailed. The next day when she went to face the judge and he asked her how she pleaded, Toufiq’s mother asked the judge if he had chickens when he was growing up. He said that he had. She asked him if he remembered how mother hens behaved with their chicks after they were born, gathering them under her wings at night to protect them and keep them warm. The judge remembered. 

“Well, judge, I am that mother hen, and I plead guilty.”

The judge fined her 50 Israeli pounds. Toufiq’s mother looked up at the judge as she paid her fine to the clerk of the court. “Here is my 50 pounds, judge,” she said, counting out the money. She continued to count out more bills. “And here is another 50 for the next time I go north to visit my chicks, and another 50 for the time after that.” 

The whole of the region, from the village we had visited that morning to the harbor where we had enjoyed our Christmas dinner, had been conquered over and over and over again through the centuries. We passed Roman ruins as we drove into and out of Tyre. The Romans had conquered the Seleucids in order to take Tyre, which meant they had spied on them. Before the Romans ruled, the Seleucids had spied on the Greeks, who had spied on the Persians, who had spied on the Babylonians, who had spied on the Assyrians, who had spied on the Phoenicians, who had spied on the Egyptians, who had spied on whatever tribes of ancient people had been living in the hills and valleys when they got there with their armies. We had been driving through a land of spies all day. 

Spying was like a bacterium in the soil, a strand in the DNA of a place that had been fought over since before humans were able to record history. Now it was 1974, and everyone was still spying on everyone else. It was Christmas in Beirut, and all through the house, if a creature was stirring, someone was watching.

How to make savory-sweet shallot jam with three ingredients

Big Little Recipe has the smallest-possible ingredient list and big everything else: flavor, creativity, wow factor. That means five ingredients or fewer — not including water, salt, black pepper, and certain fats (like oil and butter), since we’re guessing you have those covered. This week, we’re making a savory jam to smear on everything.

* * *

On a good day, jam refers to “a food made by boiling fruit and sugar to a thick consistency.” Or on a bad one, “a crowded mass that impedes or blocks movement.” This three-ingredient jam is neither.

Yes, we will be boiling. Yes, there will be sugar. But fruit? Not a strawberry or peach or even tomato in sight. Instead: shallots. Lots and lots of shallots.

Sure, jam is best known as a way to stretch summer’s bounty, to make fragile berries that would’ve gone moldy in days last for weeks or months. But just as jam need not be limited to fruits — hi bacon, hello red peppers — it need not be limited to warm weather either.

Come colder, clouder, gustier months, there are plenty of ingredients that would love to be stirred with sugar and simmered, simmered, simmered into oblivion. Especially alliums. Maybe you’ve already heard of onion jam, on ricotta-dolloped biscuit bites or goat cheese crostini. I like to think of shallot jam as the ultimate onion jam — what an onion dreams of becoming after it falls asleep.

“Shallots are one of the things — a basic prep item in every mise-en-place — that make restaurant food taste different from your food,” Anthony Bourdain wrote in “Kitchen Confidential.” “You should always have some around for sauces, dressings, and sauté items.”

And jam. Score a couple pounds and you’re halfway to this high-impact spread that your fridge will be thrilled (chuffed!) to have around. Here’s the cheat sheet: Dice shallots and sauté until transparent-ish, like stained glass. Treat to sugar, which will encourage deeper, darker caramelization. Then wake things up with a hefty pour of vinegar.

The last ingredient depends on you — or, more specifically, what you already have around. My vote is for malt vinegar, widely known as the finishing touch on fish-and-chips, but it’s a wonder-ingredient in countless other places, too. In this case, it gives shallot jam a roasty, toasty — and, yeah, malty — flavor. Feel free to swap in other vinegars like white wine, red wine, rice, or any of those mixed with balsamic or black.

Once you have shallot jam around, the world is yours, as far as your eyes can see. Try it with:

  • Buttered toast
  • Triscuits and Gouda
  • Pork chops with sautéed peppers
  • Crispy sausage and scrambled eggs
  • Chopped liver (or liver mousse) toasts
  • Penne with butter and Parmesan
  • Roast chicken and any vegetables
  • Oil and vinegar as a vinaigrette
  • Rice-and-beans burrito
  • Fettuccine with Greek yogurt
  • Quesadilla or grilled cheese

I won’t try to hide it — the last one is my favorite. On a bad day, I’ll sandwich seedy bread, sharp cheddar, and shallot jam, griddle it until crispy outside, melty inside, then take a bite while it’s still too hot. Just like that, the bad day becomes a little better.

***

Recipe: Shallot Jam

Prep time: 15 minutes

Cook time: 50 minutes

Makes: about 1 1/2 cups

Ingredients

  • Neutral oil, such as canola or grapeseed
  • 2 pounds shallots, peeled and chopped
  • 3/4 teaspoon kosher salt
  • 1/2 cup granulated sugar
  • 6 tablespoons malt vinegar (or another variety), divided

Directions

  1. Set a wide saucepan over medium heat and add enough oil to thinly coat the bottom. Add the shallots and salt. 
  2. Cover and cook, stirring occasionally, for about 10 minutes, until the shallots have significantly softened and turned a pale, almost-transparent pink. 
  3. Remove the lid and drop the heat to medium-low. Stir in the sugar along with a small splash (about 1 tablespoon) of water. Continue cooking for 30 minutes—uncovered, stirring occasionally, and deglazing with water (about 1 tablespoon at a time) if anything starts to stubbornly stick.
  4. Stir in 4 tablespoons of the vinegar. Continue cooking for another 10 to 15 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the texture is as jammy as you’d like. At this point, stir in the remaining vinegar, then cut the heat. 
  5. Taste and add more vinegar or salt, if you’d like. 
  6. Let cool, then jar and refrigerate for up to a couple weeks. If the jam becomes too stiff once chilled, you can loosen with a bit of water, vinegar, or both.

 

Secret Service may recruit Ivanka to help remove Trump from White House, according to expert

What will happen on Jan. 20 if President Donald Trump refuses to leave the White House?

One former senior Secret Service official tells The Daily Beast’s Marc Ambinder that Secret Service agents may have to recruit family members such as first daughter Ivanka Trump to tell her father to vacate the White House.

“I’d have a conversation with the chief of staff, and then the family, Ivanka and the other kids and say, ‘It’s going to be your job to make sure he’s gone,'” the former official said.

Another possibility, this former official said, was to simply lock the president’s staff out of the White House on Jan. 19.

“When the staff leaves on January 19, don’t let them back into the complex the next day,” they said. “He can’t do anything without his staff.”

Another former Secret Service agent told Ambinder that Trump will simply not be president after noon on Jan. 20, which means that “by law he would be a trespasser,” and “we’d have to escort him out.”

Did we defund the police? No, but “big changes are happening” even after protests die down

After weeks of nationwide protests over the police killings of unarmed Black people this summer, many demonstrators worried that newfound political support for cutting police budgets would die down once the television cameras turned off. But a slew of new city budgets shows that many local governments are moving ahead with reallocating police funds to community programs as activists refuse to let up.

“I feel like we’re winning,” Mary Hooks, a strategist for the Movement for Black Lives and co-director of the Atlanta-based advocacy group Southerners on the Ground, told Salon. The protests, she said, succeeded in placing a demand “that was probably not even possible years ago” directly at the center of public discourse around policing.

Los Angeles, San Francisco, Austin and Denver are just some of the cities that significantly cut their police budgets with an eye on reinvesting in social programs.

“Big changes are happening and millions of dollars have been reallocated,” said Alex Vitale, the author of “The End of Policing” and a sociology professor who heads the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College. “I see a huge amount of momentum, actually, in terms of real programmatic changes happening.”

Los Angeles lawmakers agreed to slash the police budget by $150 million last month, nearly 10% of the LAPD budget. San Francisco lawmakers approved more than $60 million in cuts over the next two years, nearly 10% of that city’s police spending. Denver slashed its police and related spending by more than $50 million, nearly a 10% cut. Seattle reduced its police budget by $69 million, nearly 20% of its police spending.

To be sure, some of the cuts were necessitated by the decline in tax revenue due to the coronavirus pandemic. More cities are expected to slash police spending after Congress failed to provide additional aid to cash-strapped state and local governments, which face an estimated $170 billion shortfall over the next two years. But many cities are also moving police officers out of schools and changing the way authorities respond to calls related to mental illness and homelessness. Police budget cuts alone do not show the full picture.

Harris County, which includes Houston, recently consulted with Vitale on a plan to “roll out a major alternative to using police on mental health crisis calls,” he told Salon. “Oakland, California, shut down its school policing operation, as a result of public pressure. Portland, Maine, shut down its school policing. There are a lot of places that are rolling out a program here or there, or exploring things. And then there’s an even bigger list of cities where I think there are going to be major battles over this in the next budget year.”

In some cases, cities are increasing funding for social services even if they are not cutting police budgets. Atlanta recently increased its police budget but also vowed to invest in community programs after slashing its corrections budget.

Hooks said that the protests came just as Atlanta came out of its budgeting session and city officials “refused to listen to what the public was saying about pulling resources from the police.”

Though Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms has committed to closing the city jail, it is “still open,” Hooks said. “That money that has been allocated from the corrections budget, it’s supposed to go into turning that space into a community wellness center.”

Hooks said activists were ramping up pressure on city lawmakers and predicted the issue would be key in 2021 local elections.

“We’ve been doing homework to gather people and talk to people and knock on doors to talk about reimagining public safety and to talk about money the police had that should be going into our communities, hopefully making that a hot topic in the discourse of the local election,” she said.

Not all cities that vowed to dramatically slash their police budgets have moved forward with actually doing so. A majority of the Minneapolis City Council vowed to “dismantle” its police force in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, which launched the worldwide wave of protests. The council ultimately reallocated just $8 million, or about 4.5% of its $179 million police budget, while keeping staffing levels at their current rate.

“Look, nobody in this movement, which has been around for years, imagined that some city government was going to zero out the police budget because we had some protests this summer,” Vitale said. “That was never in anyone’s imagination. If you look at what people in Minneapolis were calling for, it was very measured. Now, the city council has some people on there who were very sympathetic to the deep critique of policing. In the face of the protests, they got some pledges to try to move the city in a different direction. I think this is still going to happen, but it’s not something you can just do overnight.”

Vitale said the rhetoric about eliminating police departments got “overblown,” adding that that “wasn’t even really what the movement was calling for.”

“What the Minneapolis plan called for was a process of consulting with communities about their public safety needs, and then to look at what alternative interventions would look like and begin to try to roll those out,” he said. “I think we’re just going to continue to see more of that.”

Vitale was highly critical of New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s claim that the city cut $1 billion from its police budget when it really just shifted some numbers around. The city plans to move some positions out of the NYPD into other departments and potentially decrease the police overtime cap, the mayor’s office has said, but the budget passed this summer did not do any of that.

“New York City made a lot of noise, but there was no there there, and we all knew that. It was a fake pledge, and it was clear from the outset that it was all fake,” Vitale said. “They really didn’t do anything. That was all incredibly vague.” He added that at least de Blasio, whose term ends next year, “has finally acknowledged the need to create some kind of non-police response team.

“The mayor has increased funding for community-based anti-violence” programs,” Vitale said. “So they are doing things that are in keeping with what the movement is demanding. They’re just not calling it ‘defund the police.'” 

The movement to reallocate police resources has also come up against a dramatic rise in crime rates across the country. Some critics have blamed the budget changes for the rise, although that defies logic: The crime spike clearly began at previous funding levels. Cities that have increased their police funding have seen crime rates increase as well.

Still, the perception of a possible linkage has become an “impediment” to activists because it’s being used by law enforcement and “centrist politicians” against them, Vitale said.

“When crime goes up, the police say, ‘We need more money to respond to crime,'” he said. “And then, when crime goes down, they say, ‘See, look, policing works. We need more money.’ So their argument is always the same. Everything is a reason why you need more money for police. Even when it doesn’t work, it’s a justification for why we need more of it.”

Critics have also pointed to polls showing that Black people prefer more police presence, not less.

“Everyone in the movement knows that there’s a lot more work to be done at the community level,” Vitale said. “But if you look at the cities that have actually shifted resources, these are cities where there has been on-the-ground organizing for a number of years. In those cities, there is broad support among low-income Black and Latino communities for these interventions.”

He noted that as many as 40% of poll respondents backed defunding the police over the summer, which critics said showed the movement was unpopular.

“My reading of that was entirely the opposite,” he said. “I couldn’t believe that  40% of the people are supporting this idea. That was beyond my wildest expectations. So we’ve seen tremendous inroads, but this is not going to happen overnight. Everyone on the ground doing this work is in this for the long haul. This is going to take years, to change a logic that’s been in place for generations.”

Hooks said the pandemic has made it harder to organize, particularly when it comes to city council meetings and public appearances by lawmakers.

“It’s difficult. I’m not going to pretend like it’s easy,” she said. “That’s why I think the elections of 2021 here in Atlanta are going to be so important, because many of these cats are going to be showing their faces. They’re going to be out in the community more than we’ve been able to physically put eyes on them in the summer. We have to use all the means necessary.”

The push to reallocate local police funding has also encountered pushback from conservative governors, who could roll back the progress made on the ground. The city of Austin approved a plan to slash its police spending by more than 30%, for instance, but Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, has threatened a state takeover of local police departments in response to the cuts.

States will certainly try to fight police cuts, Vitale said, “but there is a lot of local control over police budgets.” He predicted that more cities will move to cut police spending next year.

One sign that’s likely to happen, Vitale said, is found in “the growing number of local and national organizations across the country that have shifted their demands for body cameras and implicit bias training, to getting the police out of the schools, getting the police out of the mental health business and ending the war on drugs. That’s what this is about.”

Hooks said the prospect of someone like Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp rolling back potential cuts in cities like Atlanta was a “big concern.”

“Here in the South, with the right continuing to maintain control and power at the state level, we’re keeping our ear to the ground because we are hearing that different states are trying to take full control of police forces all across the state,” she said. “We know what that battle is, in terms of, you can live in a place like an Atlanta that might seem ‘progressive,'” but must contend with a state that wants to “roll back local wins.”

“As much as power is built locally, we know why it’s critical to build statewide power,” Hooks said, adding that her group has been “starting new chapters and building our relationship with other movement and coalition partners across the state. We know they’re going to come for us. We know they’re going to try to roll back all the things that we win locally. But we also know that it’s our work to continue to organize and mobilize people, to fight, to protect those things we see as necessary that are going on our community.

“So that’s the work. That’s the work until we change the people.”

Cruz and Graham working to block Biden from rejoining Paris climate and Iran nuclear deals

In an early example of the opposition and obstruction that President-elect Joe Biden is expected to face from right-wingers in Congress, Sens. Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham are already hard at work attempting to ensure that he cannot deliver on his campaign promises to return the United States to the Paris climate accord and Iran nuclear deal.

President Donald Trump made a big deal of ditching both international agreements that were finalized under the Obama administration, for which Biden served as vice president. Trump left the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), as the Iran deal is officially known, in May 2018, ignoring concerns that doing so could increase the chances of war — and despite the climate emergency, the U.S. formally exited Paris just after Election Day last month.

RealClear Politics revealed Tuesday the Cruz, R-Texas, who has acted as an ally to Trump during his presidency after intensely criticizing him ahead of the 2016 presidential election, is pushing the outgoing president and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to submit both deals to the Republican-majority Senate as treaties, with the expectation that the ratification votes would fail.

In a letter dated December 21, obtained by RealClear Politics and tweeted in full by a Washington Examiner reporter, Cruz argued that the agreements are treaties requiring approval from two-thirds of the Senate, and praised Trump for leaving them.

“Your administration has rightly changed course as a matter of substantive policy by withdrawing from both the Iran deal and the Paris agreement. This was a great accomplishment for the American people,” Cruz wrote.

“I urge you now also to remedy the harm done to the balance of powers by submitting the Iran deal and the Paris agreement to the Senate as treaties,” added Cruz, a constitutional lawyer. “Only by so doing will the Senate be able to satisfy its constitutional role to provide advice and consent in the event any future administration attempts to revive these dangerous deals.”

Cruz pointed out that in 2015, when asked by a congressman why the Paris agreement wasn’t considered a treaty, then-Secretary of State John Kerry — who will serve as Biden’s climate envoy — said:

Well congressman, I spent quite a few years trying to get a lot of treaties through the United States Senate, and it has become physically impossible. That’s why. Because you can’t pass a treaty anymore. It has become impossible to schedule, to pass, and I sat there leading the charge on the Disabilities Treaty which fell to basically ideology and politics. So I think that is the reason why.

Graham, R-S.C., another Trump-critic-turned-loyalist, similarly took aim at both agreements in a series of tweets last week, sharing that he is “working hard to secure a vote in the U.S. Senate regarding any potential decision to reenter the Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA).”

“Rejoining this agreement would be the most destructive decision a Biden administration could make regarding stability in the Middle East,” Graham claimed. “The Senate should go on the record about whether it would support or oppose this decision. Also believe Senate should be on record in support or opposition to any decision to reenter Paris climate accord. As currently drafted, the accord is a big win for China and India.”

“These two nations are enormous CO2 emitters and, under the accord, go virtually unchallenged,” the senator said. “Climate change is a worldwide problem, not just an American problem.”

The Republican senators’ early efforts to block Biden’s agenda follow a virtual global summit marking the fifth anniversary of the Paris accord, during which United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warned that “if we don’t change course, we may be headed for a catastrophic temperature rise of more than 3 degrees this century,” and asked: “Can anybody still deny that we are facing a dramatic emergency?”

Advocates of ambitious climate action are urging Biden to not only reenter the Paris accord — which activists and scientists have long said is not nearly bold enough to address the human-caused global crisis — but also commit the United States to its “fair share” of emissions cuts and climate finance, given its disproportionate contributions to creating the current emergency.

As for the nuclear deal, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani — whose country has been devastated by the economic sanctions of Trump’s “maximum pressure campaign” — said last week that Iran would return to the JCPOA without even an hour of delay if Biden makes good on his promise to do so. Speaking at a televised news conference in Tehran, Rouhani said, “I believe that the era of the economic war has come to an end.”

Data expert hired by Trump supporters to investigate fraud in Nevada debunked their claims

Nevada is among the battleground states where supporters of President Donald Trump have concocted a narrative that President-elect Joe Biden’s victory was due to widespread fraud. In the hope of making their case, Trump supporters asked Rex Briggs — a Nevada resident who specializes in data analysis — to investigate that state’s election returns.

But when Briggs conducted an investigation as they requested, their claims fell apart. He ended up debunking their arguments, rather than finding proof for them. This should be no surprise, of course. Not only are the pro-Trump claims of election fraud made without credible evidence, but they’re also made so wildly and out of proportion with reality that there’s no indication the people making such allegations care about the truth at all.

In an article published by the Nevada Independent, Briggs explains: “I was enlisted by ‘The Trump Digital Army, Election Integrity Division’ on November 8, 2020 to look at the source data in each battleground state, and compare 2016 to 2020 results to find any outliers/anomalies in the 2020 election results that could signal fraud.”

And the data Briggs analyzed, at the request of Trump supporters, included “voter registration, 2016 vs. 2020” and “turnout by county, 2016 vs. 2020” as well as “turnout exceeding registered voters” and “margin of victory by county, Republicans vs. Democrats, 2016 and 2020.”

Briggs was also asked to analyze “age anomalies in voter registration: e.g., potentially dead voters or under-age voters” and “out-of-state voters and party registration.”

After analyzing the data, Briggs found that “no evidence of rigging the voter registration process for Biden in Nevada” and “no evidence of rigging turnout for Biden in Nevada” as well as “no evidence of stuffing ballots for Biden in Nevada.”

“Turnout exceeding registered voters would indicate ballot-stuffing,” Briggs notes. “However, there is no county where the number of ballots cast exceeded the number of registered voters. The three highest voter turnout figures are from Humboldt, Douglas and Eureka, all counties that pulled heavily for Trump.”

In Democrat-leaning Clark County, which includes Las Vegas, Briggs found that Biden underperformed slightly. Not only did the results in Clark County not show Democrats inflating Biden’s numbers — they were slightly disappointing to Democrats. If Democrats had really stolen votes in Clark County, as Trump supporters claim, the vote count wouldn’t have showed Biden losing ground there compared to 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton four years ago.

“Democrats actually lost ground in votes in Clark County, the main source of Democratic support in the state, slipping from 10.7% margin in 2016 to 10.0% in 2020,” Briggs observes. “This makes Clark County an unlikely source of systemic widespread fraud by Democrats.”

Sidney Powell and other pro-Trump attorneys have been claiming that the software used by Dominion Voting Systems was used to swing the election unfairly to Biden. Powell has even claimed that the same Dominion equipment that gave Biden an unfair advantage helped the late President Hugo Chavez steal elections in Venezuela — which would have been impossible because according to Dominion, its product was never even used in that South American country.

Briggs, discussing Dominion software and Nevada, explains, “I investigated the pre-election machine testing and the verification process that confirms that what is entered matches the vote tallies. I also checked a machine when I voted in-person and could examine the printed tape. I also checked the methodology of the post-election audit of the electronic vote tally vs. the tape count. All of them aligned, and all of those processes were open to the public and had both parties observe the audits.”

The bottom line, according to Briggs, is that Biden won Nevada fairly, albeit by smaller margins than Democrats would have liked.

“I found nothing in the data that shows the election was rigged,” Briggs notes. “If anything, there are a few small factors that tilt slightly in favor of Republicans.”

Meet the Caltech physicist growing “designer snowflakes” in his lab

It wasn’t until Kenneth Libbrecht moved to decidedly un-snowy southern California that he finally began to appreciate snow.

“I found it kind of funny that after I ended up as an adult and moved away from North Dakota that I finally understood what snowflakes were,” Libbrecht said. “I’d never really looked at them much when I was growing up.”

Libbrecht moved from North Dakota to Pasadena, California, to work in the department of physics at the California Institute of Technology. Originally trained as a solar astronomer, Libbrecht’s research as a professor of physics and the department chairman over the last twenty years has focused on a variety of topics — from observing gravitational waves, to helieseismology (the study of the structure and dynamics of the sun) and snowflakes. Growing up on a farm outside of Fargo, snow was common in winter. But when Libbrecht started working at the California Institute of Technology, he grew more curious about ice crystals, — how they form, and their geometric intricacies. 

Libbrecht’s snowflake obsession began with an uncommon snowflake type called the “capped column.” Strikingly different from the six-lobed snow crystals that don holiday decorations, capped columns resemble barbells in profile; Libbrecht describes them as looking like “two wheels and an axle.” The columns of this specific snowflake form at 21 degrees Fahrenheit in the atmosphere, and then at five degrees Fahrenheit grow plates that form the wheel-like part of the crystal. This is Libbrecht’s favorite ice crystal, in part because it is little-studied and rarely depicted in pop culture snowflake iconography.

For years, Libbrecht traveled to Ontario, Alaska, or Vermont in winter — locales chosen for being cold without being windy — to study snowflakes in the wild. Libbrecht would stand with a piece of foam board and wait to catch the snow crystals so he could preserve and study them. But, he says, such work is grueling, for reasons obvious and not.

“It’s hard to find a really nice snowflake in the wild,” Libbrecht said. “It’s rough out there, there’s wind and other particles bouncing around, crystals collide with one another, and so, they tend to get kind of beaten up, they don’t always grow very large, and they’re not always symmetrical.”

It’s true that no snow crystal — the technical term for a single snowflake — is the same, and that’s because of the complex processes that turn an ice crystal into a unique, symmetrical shape. Starting high in the atmosphere, sometimes in clouds, a small formation of the snow crystal’s plate begins. From there, branches or columns grow as it passes through different humidities and temperature changes as it moves through the air towards earth. The shape is determined by the path it takes to fall to the ground, and no two snowflakes take the same path. This all makes the formation of snowflakes grow a little differently.

Since, Libbrecht said, a lot of “bad stuff that can happen up in the clouds,” he started growing his own snowflakes in a lab, called “designer snowflakes,” to better understand how snow crystals form at a molecular level.

Amazingly, in the lab, Libbrecht has been able to make what he calls “identical-twin” snowflakes,” by exposing the seed crystals to identical conditions.

But why would a physicist spend two decades, author several books, and do so much research on snowflakes? We sat down with Libbrecht to learn more. As always, this interview has been condensed and edited for print. 

Why would a physicist be so enamored by snowflakes?

Well, it’s part of physics — it’s material science. The main thing that got me interested was, when you grow crystals in the air, you get these plate-like crystals, which are what people used to when they think of snowflakes. They think of the plate — we call it a flank — but they also grow in these columnar structures. You can think of it like a wooden pencil hexagonal column.

And this was one of the first things I learned when I started reading about this, was that there are a lot of different transitions from plates to columns with temperature. Plates grow at just below freezing, and then columns grow a little colder, and plates grow a little colder and then columns grow colder. Why it does that has been a puzzle for 75 years.

And so I started thinking well, surely we have to figure it out the physics of this. And you can, to some degree, but it’s still a difficult problem because you’re talking about what’s going on at the molecular scale, and it’s complicated. There are a lot of different effects, and my job as a scientist is just to try to figure some of that out.

So, in the lab, are you trying to create the perfect snowflake? Is there such a thing?

Well, it’s not so much the perfect snowflake, but I do grow snowflakes in the lab in a variety of different ways. One thing I do is I grow very tiny, tiny snowflakes— smaller than a human hair — to study the growth. Those are very simple, you can make models of them, for a variety of reasons. The shapes are very simple, and you can more easily understand what’s going on.

So I spent a lot of time making these teeny tiny little prisms. But at the same time, I also tried to make large stellar crystals. And this kind of branched out of the photography end. When you go outside and want to photograph snowflakes, especially the large stellar crystals — the holiday favorite — they’re hard to find. You can’t just go outside any old day. The temperature and other conditions have to be just right in order to find these exceptionally beautiful crystals.  You spend an awful lot of time sitting and waiting.

And it was a challenge to try to figure out a way to engineer a snowflake, if you will, but I worked on that for a while and figured out how to do it. After perfecting it for a while now, I can grow pretty nice-looking stellar crystals. And they are, in some ways, better than or more perfect than what you see falling out of the sky. Because the facets are very sharp in the lab, and I can make them with just exceptionally good symmetry, which is hard to find out in the wild.

I tried for a long time to find a really nice crystal in the wild, and I had some success with that. But I sort of gave that up when I started growing them in the lab, because the crystals in the lab are more perfect in a way, and I like that. I mean, I was driven somewhat to make the “perfect snowflake” if you will, but there’s no single perfect snowflake. One of the fun things about growing in the lab is you can play around with it, changing the conditions as they grow. The temperature and humidity can change a lot.  I can change the conditions and explore what kind of conditions cause growth behaviors.

Are you working on this every week still? What is your end goal with creating these designer snowflakes?

I’m still working on it, and I have this apparatus that’s designed for that. I don’t run it all the time, but this whole thing is a bit of a side venture for me. It’s in part an artistic venture, and I have artistic goals.

In terms of science, it’s hard to do science with these ornate crystals; they’re very complicated. The smaller crystals are easier to understand. Early on when I figured out how to do this I would put two snowflakes side by side that grew at the same time. And I’d call them “identical twins snowflakes” because they end up looking very similar. In the lab I can expose two crystals to basically identical conditions and so they grow very similar. I call them identical twin snowflakes, because they’re a little like identical twin people, in that they look very, very similar although not exactly the same.

There is no great application to understanding how ice crystals grow, and nobody pays me to do this. When I give a talk, I tell people their tax dollars are not being used for this.

Can you explain the process of growing a snowflake in the lab?

The first thing one needs is a source of cold. And I have a refrigerator for that. And it gets complicated in terms of the hardware, but it’s just a cold chamber. And then I make these very tiny little crystals which are about the diameter of a human hair. These are very easy to make, and they’re so small, you can’t really handle them; they just float around in the air, and then I will take some of that air with these crystals floating in it, and sort of pass it over my cold substrate.  Everything’s temperature controlled. Then some of these tiny crystals will fall on this piece of glass, and I will position that under the microscope. And then I will blow humid air onto that crystal and it will start to grow. Then I can change the temperature of the glass plate and I can change the temperature of the air that I’m blowing on, and then in the humidity in the air, and all of that will change how the crystal grows. I have these knobs to control all this because everything’s electronically controlled.

And so, I will say I want to grow it at minus 15 degrees Celsius for a little while, and I’ll do that, and then a couple of minutes later maybe I’ll go to minus 17 for five minutes. Sometimes I’m randomly playing with it and sometimes I might have a plan.

And how long does this take?

Maybe a half hour to an hour, depending on what I’m growing.

It’s amazing you’ve been able to do this.

To think that these things just spontaneously appear, that nobody’s designing them up in the clouds, and that they just randomly happen, that is part of the interesting physics side of it. How do you spontaneously grow complex structures, just from nothing but air and water? And this kind of ties to biology, in a sense. I mean, how do you grow a brain from nothing? And happens all the time. This is a lot simpler than a biological thing, but, some of the underlying science is the same. I mean it’s molecules interacting with one another, and crazy stuff can happen, and so it’s kind of fun to figure out how and why.

Part of the magic of a snowflake is very clearly the symmetry. It’s the combination of complexity and symmetry. It’s easy to make simple symmetrical things, but something that’s very complicated and yet still symmetrical — that kind of seems like magic.

Loeffler didn’t disclose top donors own multibillion-dollar company cited for illegal hiring scheme

Georgia’s unelected Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler received several recent max-out donations from ten members of the Asplundh family, which owns the eponymous Pennsylvania-based utility and infrastructure clearing company, as well as from the company’s president, according to two recent filings with the Federal Election Commission. However, the Loeffler campaign filings did not fulfill the federal agency’s requirement to report who employed those donors. Their company,  Asplundh Tree Expert Co., a Pennsylvania-based tree trimming company, notably settled a $95 million criminal settlement after a Department of Homeland Security investigation found the company circumvented laws to undercut competitors by hiring undocumented workers.

Asplundh has also faced backlash in Loeffler’s home state of Georgia for discriminatory employment practices against Black employees and applicants. In 2019, the Department of Labor forced the company to pay back wages to employees of color who were victim of the “illegal practices” at its Macon facility. According to a government press release, the action came after an investigation found that, beginning in 2015, Asplundh had discriminated against 124 Black applicants in the hiring and selection process for a number of positions at its Macon facility. As part of the arrangement, the company agreed to make job offers for specific positions, for “eligible class members.”

Loeffler happens to sit on the Senate committee that oversees labor and the Senate’s forestry subcommittee, which oversees aspects of Asplundh’s business. The federal government is also an Asplundh customer, with contracts for infrastructure work through the Department of Energy.

Despite what the Loeffler campaign describes as its “best efforts” — as well as readily available public information, including from the donors’ own recent FEC contribution history as well as from the company itself — Loeffler’s joint fundraising committee, which shares the same treasurer as the Loeffler campaign, responded to an FEC notice that it had not reported employer information for dozens of donations over the summer. 

In addition to the Asplundhs, Loeffler’s campaign failed to provide employer information for more than 100 donors in its latest report. Indeed, the campaign for the multimillionaire appointed by Georgia’s GOP governor failed to identify employers for hundreds more donors in several reports filed since responding to the FEC notice — for example, here; here; here; and here.

Top campaign finance expert Brett Kappel told Salon that the Asplundh omissions push reasonable belief “to the breaking point.”

“FEC regulations only require campaigns to use their ‘best efforts’ to provide occupation and employer information for each donor,” Kappel said. “It strains credulity to the breaking point, however, to believe that the Loeffler campaign was unaware that all these members of the same family were actually the owners of the Asplundh company.”

Recent FEC reports from Sen. David Perdue, the other multimillionaire Republican Senator under federal scrutiny while facing a runoff in The Peach State, are also missing employer information, though not to the same extent as Loeffler (e.g., here; here; and here). By comparison, none of the recent reports for either Democratic candidate in the Georgia runoffs — Loeffler challenger Rev. Raphael Warnock, and Perdue rival Jon Ossoff — are missing any employer information.

“The FEC will definitely be asking the Loeffler campaign for an explanation for why it failed to provide occupation and employer information for such a large number of contributors,” Kappel said.

Loeffler, a former top executive at a financial multinational whose husband chairs the New York Stock Exchange, has for months faced scrutiny from the media, the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission for well-timed stock transactions made in advance of the coronavirus epidemic. Last week, Salon reported on millions of dollars in donations to a Loeffler-backing super PAC from billionaire hedge fund exec Ken Griffin, who had business before the NYSE. The Senator also happens to sit on the committee that has direct oversight of her husband’s companies and her former colleagues and Wall Street associates, and she was also a member of the subcommittee that focused specifically on the subject, only stepping aside after her trades became public. That same committee also has jurisdiction over her brother’s agriculture operation in Illinois, which has received millions of dollars in government funds.

A Reuters report two months ago married the two subjects: Members of the Asplundh family have been in talks with investment bankers about a sale in anticipation of possible tax hikes under a Biden administration. The article cites a senior partner at investment firm PJT Partners named David Perdue, son of the Georgia Senator who has also been investigated amid allegations of insider trading.

“Since the summer we have seen a lot of dialogue from family offices about exploring a sale of some assets. Many of these investors are sophisticated about how they handle their affairs from a tax perspective,” Perdue told the outlet.

In late November, two days before the first Asplundh maximum contributions to Loeffler rolled in, the company’s PAC reported that it only had $1,100 in its account. None of the family donors gave to Loeffler before the general election, according to FEC records.

Best of 2020: Marriage in the time of coronavirus

When the first news of the novel coronavirus COVID-19 came out from China, I was concerned but not overly worried, even though I’m immune-compromised. “Oh, it’s no worse than the flu,” I remember saying to my husband. Even then, I started thinking about the supply chain of medications from China, how fragile those chains can be, and started checking the refill dates on my prescriptions. We had breakfast and discussed the problem from a scientific point of view; I have a biology degree and my husband one in chemical engineering. “New viruses almost always mutate when they start passing from human to human,” I mused to my husband, “Usually to a milder form.” We went back to eating fruit and yogurt, my husband drove into his work.

Six weeks later and it’s another story entirely. I live a mile from the hospital where nine of the first American patients died of the coronavirus; two miles from the nursing home now considered the epicenter for a wider Seattle outbreak. Amazon, Microsoft, and other tech companies have told their workers to work from home when possible. Schools are closing for not days, but weeks, after students test positive. Grocery stores and drug stores show row after row of empty shelves: first toilet paper, masks and bottled water, then bleach, then vitamins, cold medicine. One Costco even announced on a sign on their door that they were out of Spam. Can you imagine that? I couldn’t have, not six weeks ago.

Since I have a genetic immune deficiency and multiple sclerosis, I’m fairly young but still considered a “vulnerable population,” so Glenn has taken over all errands that involve other people. We are cleaning the house with bleach — the floors, bathrooms — in fact, our house has never been this clean. I get sick but there are no tests available when I go to the doctor. At this point, of the entire U.S. population only 500 people have been tested.

I was a tech writer before I became a poet, and both careers lend themselves to loneliness, confinement. So many famous writers spent a lot of time by themselves.  A friend of mine tweets: “What would Emily Dickinson Do?” in response to how to pass the time while we’re told to “shelter in place,” a phrase I’ve heard for weather emergencies, but never something like this.

My husband is a wonderful cook, and misses going to the markets every day to pick up what’s fresh and available. He makes soothing dishes from his midwestern upbringing like beef stew and potatoes au gratin. He drinks a lot of coffee. I am anxious, feeling housebound. I haven’t been in the company of other people besides my husband for a week now. The last other person I came in contact with was a doctor; we were both wearing paper masks then.  

During times of crisis, relationships are tested. This is probably doubly true when one has a disability, like I do, and even more when they are locked down together in a house, which essentially we are. I read stacks of books at a time. I watch murder mysteries. I text with my friends, all more worried even than I am because the government and media haven’t presented much in the way of reassuring facts. “Wash your hands!’ Cheerful signs everywhere say. Oh, yeah, soap was gone from the stores last week. Which made me wonder: Did people just now start washing their hands on a regular basis?

I become snippy with my husband for slight mistakes, breaking a dish while putting them away or leaving a pile of his laundry in the path I have to navigate around the house. He is not getting enough sleep. He watches me, takes my temperature, worries about my cough and stomachaches. He makes me tea with honey at least 10 times a day. He is very sweet. We are barely touching, much less kissing or anything else. You would think it would be romantic, being trapped together, but we’ve been married 25 years, and Glenn is more worried about getting me sick, since he’s the one still going out and interacting with the world — picking up supplies, prescriptions, dropping things off at the post office.

We find other ways to take our mind off the anxiety. We deep-clean the house. We do our taxes. I apply for a difficult, complicated grant. My friends in other parts of the country want “reports from the hotspot” and “reports from the epicenter.” The death count in my neighborhood, county, city goes from one, to four, to six, to nine in a matter of days. My ER doctor friend in Alaska mentions the whole state of Alaska only has 50 tests for the coronavirus the day I tell her I can’t get tested. She also says she can’t find masks to buy, that her hospital hasn’t received any. At least we’re getting international press, so the government can’t ignore us forever. Can they?

On a rare sunny day, we walk outside under blooming plum trees, letting the scent wash over us, stepping on wet pink petals, looking up at the corona of sun behind the pink branches of flowers. The Japanese talk about “Sakura Zensen,” falling cherry blossoms, a reminder of the beauty of the transitory. It seems like a metaphor for marriage, too. The brightest points in our marriage, the things that brought us closer, were often emergency hospital trips or other crises. Once you have held your partner’s hand when they faced a life-threatening illness, which at this point both of us have done for each other, they always seem a little brighter, more beautiful after, more precious. In a week a windstorm will knock all the petals to the wet cement.

My husband and I discuss the power of nature, the idea of a balancing hand, the idea that the earth itself is pissed off at us. We talk about films by Hayao Miyazaki, like “Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind,” “Princess Mononoke,” even “Ponyo”; all laden with warnings that the earth will poison and kill humanity when we damage it too much. I am glad my husband and I like the same movies, that we can talk about music without fighting too much.

I think of the coronavirus as an avenging angel, a goddess of death. She sweeps people away with a wave of her hand. Since this virus made the leap from animal to human for the first time, which makes it a “novel” coronavirus (several coronaviruses exist, ranging from severe to the common cold), this metaphor seems apt. But I still maintain that the goddess will become more gentle over time. The first sweep across continents will kill a number of us, people like me with asthma and MS, or older people whose immune systems aren’t up to fighting a new threat. But the second sweep, which will probably follow next year, will hopefully be less dangerous. My husband will probably be safe during both waves; he’s still in his forties, has no underlying conditions, and has a level of hygiene that would be admirable in a dangerous biochemical weapons lab. I remain vulnerable.

The pair of us try to sleep without waking each other. I wake up in the middle of the night with an asthma attack, he wakes up early to take a phone meeting from work. We eat together at fixed mealtimes, trying to keep as normal a schedule as possible. We both try to get outside at least a little a day, even if we can’t keep our normal workout, work or errand routines. We take pictures of birds in the trees across from our house and notice the slow emergence of bulbs in our garden. We dare to hold hands as we point out new blooms to each other.

The beauty of our marriage is in the knowledge of its fragility, its absolute lack of assurances, safety — like the coronavirus itself, no one knows how it will end, and it is ultimately out of our control. Illness, death and the pressures of a possible pandemic aside, I feel lucky as I look at his rumpled blond hair in the morning, the rather odd angles of his face when he sleeps. I turn on the news on mute, see that the government is promising more tests “soon.” The school a neighborhood away is closing for three weeks. The price of gasoline is down. Then my husband wakes up, makes me a cup of tea, and we return to the routine of eating, talking news, trying to think up a way to distract ourselves from the apocalyptic conditions around us. I place an order on Amazon for another bunch of electrolyte drinks and off-brand paper towels (all that’s left) and bathroom cleaner.

Neither of us have contracted the coronavirus yet, but if we do, we have a plan to split the house into “his” and “her” zones. But outside, in the garden, we will still be able to stand together, watch as the cherry blossoms start to unfurl. Hope, spring, love — all the cheesy metaphors — float towards me this morning in March. Thank goodness we still enjoy each other’s company after all these years. Thank goodness he is the person I would want to spend the apocalypse with.

“DeJoy is the real life Grinch”: Postmaster General’s pre-election sabotage fuels Christmas delays

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s sweeping and destructive effort to slash operating costs at the U.S. Postal Service has made an already difficult time of the year even more chaotic for the beloved agency, threatening the prompt delivery of millions of Christmas-time packages as strained postal employees tirelessly work their way through mounting backlogs.

The Washington Post reported late Monday that a “perfect storm of crises” — the coronavirus pandemic, an unprecedented level of online orders, and DeJoy’s operational changes — is wreaking havoc on the agency, which has seen drastic performance fall-offs since the postmaster general began implementing his agenda over the summer.

“Mail performance has plummeted: Only 75.3 percent of first-class mail, such as letters and bills, arrived within the standard one- to three-day delivery window the week of December 5, according to the most recent agency data available,” the Post reported. “This time last year, the mail service’s on-time score was closer to 95 percent.”

“Adding to the slowdowns,” the Post noted, “is on-the-ground confusion over the cost-cutting initiatives that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy implemented during the summer and then paused at the direction of five federal courts. The Postal Service has appealed several of those rulings.”

A Michigan postal worker told the Post that “as bad as you think it is, it’s worse.”

“No parcels are moving at all,” said the unnamed worker.

Mark Dimondstein, national president of the 200,000-member American Postal Workers Union (APWU) stressed that postal employees are doing their absolute best to ensure that Christmas gifts and other packages — including prescription medications and benefit checks — are delivered as quickly as possible. As the Post reported, mail carriers in busy areas are “working upward of 80 hours a week, including some who have worked every day since Thanksgiving without a weekend.”

“This is a long, hard struggle,” said Dimondstein. “We’re asking for your patience, and no delayed gift should take away from the valuable family time and the reason people come together and celebrate. Hopefully everything will make it there on time. But if it doesn’t, it’ll still get there.”

In the wake of the presidential election, DeJoy — a Republican megadonor to President Donald Trump — swiftly resumed his push for a major operational overhaul at the Postal Service, brushing aside evidence that his original effort caused massive mail delays across the nation before it was temporarily suspended by DeJoy himself and federal judges.

DeJoy, who took charge of the Postal Service in the middle of June, “left his initiative seeking to eliminate late and extra mail transportation trips in place, but courts subsequently ordered USPS to walk it back,” Government Executive reported last month. “USPS will now likely seek to resume those efforts, with DeJoy saying. . . USPS can ‘operate with much greater precision.'”

Given that the postmaster general serves at the pleasure of the USPS Board of Governors — which is currently dominated by 4-2 by Trump appointees — it is unclear how much the incoming Biden administration will be able to do to stop DeJoy from taking a sledgehammer to postal operations. 

As the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month, Biden vowed during the presidential campaign to fill the three vacancies on the nine-member Board of Governors with the hopes of forestalling DeJoy’s agenda and potentially removing him from office. Last week, Trump moved to fill one of the board’s three vacancies by nominating Roy Bernardi, who must be confirmed by the Senate.

“Like much else in Washington, DeJoy’s fate may be linked to the outcome of the Georgia runoffs for U.S. Senate,” the Journal noted. “Democrats on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which oversees the USPS, are eager to fill the vacant seats on the board and move away from the ‘cost cutting mentality’ among Postal Service leadership that has contributed to declines in service.”

How the coronavirus ended up in Antarctica

Dr. Cindy Prins, as epidemiologist at the University of Florida, once told me that COVID-19 is a “behavioral disease.” What she meant was that people who work from home, or those who in general avoid other people, have a very low risk of getting infected with it. That is because the coronavirus spreads from person to person, through respiratory droplets from coughing, sneezing, or talking. This is part of the reason why remote locations where people infrequently go — like Antarctica — have been able to avoid its deathly grip thus far.

Unfortunately, the icy southernmost continent is no longer untouched by the pandemic.

Last week, Chilean officials confirmed that the novel coronavirus had appeared in Antarctica, meaning that it has now infected humans on every continent on Earth. According to the Wall Street Journal, 26 army personnel and 10 civilians, who are contractors for a company doing maintenance at the research base General Bernardo O’Higgins Riquelme, are infected. All have been evacuated to the city of Punta Arenas in Chile where they are isolating and being monitored. As of December 22, none of those infected have had severe symptoms.

According to BBC News, the navy vessel Sargento Aldea arrived at the research station in Antarctica on November 27, 2020. Prior to the departure, everyone on the ship underwent a nasal-swab PCR COVID-19 test and received negative results. It sailed back to Chile on December 10, which is when part of the crew disembarked the ship which is when some members started to develop symptoms. On December 14, two people tested positive. In light of this, every crew member on the ship had to be tested again and had to quarantine. But while this was happening in Chile, people at the Chilean Antarctica base developed COVID-19 symptoms.

So how did the novel coronavirus make it to such a remote location, when everyone was tested prior to departure? While the investigation is still ongoing, there are immediate available clues.

“My guess — and it is merely that — is that the original infection occurred in Chile prior to departure, or aboard a ship or aircraft during transit to the station, ” Arctic specialist Alan Hemmings told Euronews. “Once there is a single person infected at the station, close quarters and proximity would presumably favour its wider dissemination.”

Could it be that spread happened on a ship? In the beginning of the pandemic, cruise ships were a main vector of spread of the coronavirus. Indeed, the close quarters of a ship are prime conditions for the coronavirus to spread.

Still, it is curious that everyone was tested before the voyage and received negative results, which may speak to the flaws inherent to testing.

According to a study by Johns Hopkins researchers, if a coronavirus-positive patient is tested too early in the course of infection, it is likely to result in a false negative test. There’s a reason why state health departments recommend that asymptomatic people who think they’re at risk of COVID-19 be tested five to seven days after exposure.

“A negative test result only means that you did not have COVID-19 at the time of testing or that your sample was collected too early in your infection,” the Centers for Disease and Control states. “If you test negative for COVID-19, you probably were not infected at the time your sample was collected; this does not mean you will not get sick.”

In that sense, the Antarctic outbreak may be similar to the White House outbreak, in that it reveals the shortcomings of our testing technology. After President Donald Trump tested positive, several people close to him initially tested negative after being exposed, then eventually tested positive after a few days. It can take days for someone who has been exposed to the virus to develop symptoms or test positive.

Despite Antarctica now being afflicted by the pandemic, there are other places in the world where the pandemic is under control and outbreaks are a thing of the past. In New Zealand, the coronavirus has been eliminated. As BuzzFeed recently reported, life has returned to normal in parts of Australia, South Korea, Taiwan, China and Thailand.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Antarctica’s outbreak is how it epitomizes the incredibly virulent spread of the virus. The continent is sparsely populated by transient scientist and military personnel, and is a symbol of isolation, psychological strain, and limited resources. Yet amid the pandemic, Antarctic residents had more freedom of movement and interaction than the rest of the world. As a field guide told AP News in September: “In general, the freedoms afforded to us are more extensive than those in the U.K. at the height of lockdown; we can ski, socialize normally, run, use the gym, all within reason.”

Since there are 70 research bases in Antarctica, it is unlikely that this outbreak will spread to others.

“Personnel at U.S. Antarctic Program stations have had no interactions with the Chilean stations in question or the personnel who reside there,” a spokesperson at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) told CBS News. “NSF remains committed to not exchanging personnel or accepting tourists at USAP stations.”

Trump met with Pence before calling on the vice president to thwart the Electoral College: report

Just before President Donald Trump shared a tweet calling for Vice President Mike Pence to “act” against the Senate’s coming ratification of the Electoral College vote, he reportedly met for more than an hour with his second-in-command, CNN reported.

While a person familiar with the events told CNN that the Oval Office discussion was “entirely unrelated” to the demand in the tweet, the person declined to say if the ratification issue came up. Trump soon left town for Mar-a-Lago, reportedly still obsessed with overturning his loss to President-elect Joe Biden. On the flight to Palm Beach, accompanied by his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani — the former spokesperson for LifeLock brand identity theft protection services — Trump retweeted a demand for Pence to refuse to certify the Electoral College results on Jan. 6, an impossibility that arose from baseless chatter in right-wing internet crawlspaces.

Giuliani will spend the holidays at the outgoing president’s Mar-a-Lago club, where the two men will likely discuss the limited post-election actions that may still be available to them. Trump and his GOP allies have gone one-for-sixty so far in their efforts to sue their way to victory ahead of the Electoral College’s vote. Giuliani now faces a defamation suit from an executive at a voting machine company who was forced into hiding following threats on his life stemming from some of the former New York mayor’s remarks in those efforts.

Trump has recently griped that his vice president, who as President of the Senate will formally preside over the ratification of his loss, has not gone to bat for him. CNN reported that Trump has raised the issue with Pence, but appears “confused” about why the vice president can’t use his role to overturn the election.

Speaking this Tuesday at an event in Florida for the young conservative group Turning Point USA, Pence did not mention the ratification, but promised to fight “until every legal vote is counted” and “every illegal vote is thrown out.”

That same day, the conservative Thomas More Society filed a lawsuit against Pence and the entire Electoral College, claiming that Pence should not be allowed to count the votes because states have not “affirmatively voted to certify the Presidential electors” — despite the fact that the electoral college has already voted. The court filing includes Pence due to what the plaintiffs describe as his “legal obligations under the Constitution and federal law” to preside over ratification.

“I can’t even describe it,” election law attorney Marc Elias wrote on Twitter. “It’s really dumb.”

The vice president is not constitutionally bound to ratify the final vote. For instance, in 1969, when then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey declined to preside over his loss to Richard Nixon, the role fell to the Senate president pro tempore — a post currently held by Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa.

In a parallel fit of absurdity, Rep. Mo Brooks, an Alabama conservative, has volunteered to lead a floor debate on Jan. 6, and claims he has the support of “multiple Senators.” Brooks recently discussed the plan at a meeting with Trump and a number of GOP representatives, and claimed Pence had made an appearance. The debate as planned would last 12 hours, after which Biden would be ratified as the next President of the United States.

A Pence spokesperson in a lengthy email exchange refused to reply to Salon’s request for comment.