How a peace conference’s failures a century ago set the stage for today’s anti-racist uprisings

The racism that is now the target of protest across the globe is rooted in the tragic choices of leaders seeking to roll back change a century ago.

Nearly all historians now agree that at the end of World War I, the choice to return to an imperialist world order by the victorious Allied, or Entente, powers — France, Britain, Russia, Italy, Japan and the United States — was a historic error. It not only prepared the ground for the rise of fascism in Europe, but also sparked decades of political violence in Asia and Africa by people denied their rights and humanity.

As World War I ended in November 1918, the Spanish Flu pandemic swept across the globe, killing more than 50 million people. Most vulnerable were soldiers living in crowded barracks and their families back home, where hunger weakened immunity.

Like today, the effect of pandemic was aggravated by economic recession and unemployment. Worse, the people of the defeated German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman empires suffered chaos under political collapse.

Amid these multiple crises, the Paris Peace Conference opened in January 1919. American President Woodrow Wilson personally traveled to Paris to ensure that the conference would make the world “safe for democracy.”

Wilson had promised a new era of peace and justice in his famous Fourteen Points statement of war aims, which included an end to secret treaties, the curtailment of colonial empires, the right of all people to choose their own government and a League of Nations to adjudicate international conflicts.

In 1920, like 2020, race became the pivot of a historic turning point. In both moments, world leaders faced a choice: to restore the previous status quo that had produced the crisis — or to embrace the need for a new world order.

The European members of the Entente powers at Paris — Britain, France, and Italy — ignored Wilson’s call for world order based on law and rights. With the implementation of the Treaty of Versailles in January 1920, they chose to restore a racial hierarchy across the globe, extending their colonial rule over territories once held by the defeated German and Ottoman empires in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

The treaty, which included establishment of the League of Nations, betrayed not only Wilson’s ideals, but also the Entente’s nonwhite allies and the colonial soldiers who fought in the “war to end all wars.” The racial injustice of the 1919-20 peace settlement sparked decades of political violence — not only in the colonized Middle East, Africa and Asia, but also in the United States.

Journey to Paris

In January 1919, activists from around the world traveled to Paris despite risks to their health. They embraced Wilson’s Fourteen Points as a chance to remake a broken world system of imperial rivalry that had led to World War I and the deaths of 10 million soldiers and 50 million civilians.

Among those activists was NAACP leader W.E.B. Du Bois, who had fought against the spread of racist, segregationist Jim Crow laws from southern states to the North. He now feared that a similar legal double standard might be imposed in international law, to the detriment of African rights.

Du Bois asked to join the American delegation at Paris, but the Wilson administration refused him. Wilson feared that Du Bois’ call for racial equality might spoil his negotiations with the other conference leaders — prime ministers of Britain, France and Italy — who ruled most of Africa as colonies.

Claiming rights

Undeterred, Du Bois organized a Pan African Congress to defend Africans’ rights. He understood, as others did in Paris, that racial inequality was the foundation of the old imperial world order.

Like Du Bois and his African allies, Arabs and Egyptians claimed their right to sovereignty. But they found that the Entente leaders also considered Arab Muslims a lower species of human, unfit for self-rule.

Prince Faisal of Mecca gained entry to the conference because his Arab army had fought against the Ottoman Turks alongside Britain, with the understanding that Arabs would gain an independent state. But the British broke their promise and denied independence to Faisal’s Syrian Arab Kingdom. They instead joined French colonialists to divide Arab lands between them.

Asians, too, were regarded as an inferior race. Japan had fought alongside the victorious Allies and had won a leading role at the conference.

But when the Japanese delegation proposed a racial equality clause for the Covenant of the new League of Nations, the conference’s white leaders rejected it.

Racial inequality codified

The Covenant of the League of Nations, drafted by those same leaders at Paris in 1919, codified the inequality of races in international law. Article 22 denied independence to Arabs, Africans and Pacific Islanders once ruled by the Ottomans and Germans.

In the condescending language of moral uplift, the article designated them as “peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world.” Therefore, they would be placed under temporary European rule as “a sacred trust of civilisation.”

In other words, the League of Nations would administer temporary colonies, called mandates, to tutor uncivilized (nonwhite) people in politics. Racial inequality was enshrined in the very institution, the League of Nations, that was to ensure the governance of international law.

The mandates were imposed by gunpoint, with no pretense to respect self-determination. In July 1920, the French army occupied Damascus, destroyed the Syrian Arab Kingdom and sent Faisal into exile. Likewise, the British battled mass opposition to claim its mandates in Iraq and Palestine. Meanwhile, South Africa imposed a brutal racist regime upon southwest Africa.

Racial exclusion from the club of so-called civilized nations provoked anti-colonial movements for the rest of the 20th century.

The president of the Syrian Arab Kingdom’s Congress, Sheikh Rashid Rida, foresaw violent consequences in his 1921 appeal to the League of Nations.

“It does not befit the honor of this League, which President Wilson proposed to include all civilized nations for the good of all human beings,” he wrote, “for it to be used as a tool by two colonial states. These states seek to use this Assembly to guarantee … the subjugation of peoples.”

Rida prophetically warned that “Syria, Palestine, and other Arab countries will ignite the fires of war in both the West and the East.” The bitter sheikh turned against European liberalism and inspired the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928.

In the later 20th century, this racial exclusion of Arab Muslims inspired the violent Islamist movements that drew the United States into seeming endless conflict in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.

Jim Crow stays

In the United States, racial hierarchy was similarly reimposed by violence. Black veterans returned from Europe to confront lynching and race riots.

The link between the American racial order and the new world order was made explicit by President Wilson’s adviser, Colonel Edward M. House. He advised Wilson that racial equality would cost him votes in the South and California. Worse, such a clause could empower the League of Nations to intervene in the United States against Jim Crow laws.

In March 1920, the U.S. Senate rejected American membership in the League of Nations precisely because clauses on transnational law enforcement and collective security threatened U.S. sovereignty.

It is no accident that the current crisis in the U.S. has come to focus on racial injustice. Among its several sources are the decisions made 100 years ago by white men from powerful countries who believed maintaining their dominance was more important than seeking peace through justice.

Elizabeth Thompson, Professor and Mohamed S. Farsi Chair of Islamic Peace, American University

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

Bill Barr and Donald Trump are trying to torch the “Ancient Constitution” that governed kings

With each passing day, it seems, the Trump administration seems intent on replaying the leadup to the English Revolution.

Like King James I of England (aka James VI of Scotland), Trump believes that he, to quote James’ tract of 1598, “The True Law of Free Monarchies,” “is above the law,” accountable only to God. He asserted in a July, 2019 speech that Article II of the Constitution means “I have to the right to do whatever I want as president.” Like James’ son, Charles I, who ruled England for 11 years without a parliament, Trump is increasingly governing through executive orders rather than making laws with the House and Senate.

Attorney General William Barr, Trump’s legal theorist, has put forward the notion that the president’s powers are “undivided and absolute.” Even more astonishing, Barr wrote in his June 2018 unsolicited memo to the Trump administration that “The Constitution itself places no limit on the president’s authority to act on matters which concern him or his own conduct . . .” Both Barr and Trump believe that the chief executive’s prerogatives are not to be questioned. It is “presumption and high contempt, “James told Parliament in 1616, “to dispute what the king may do.” Barr said pretty much the same thing in his speech to the Federalist Society in November 2019, arguing that the “presidential power has become smothered by the encroachments of the other branches.”

The response to this view of untrammeled presidential power is about the same as Satan’s in Milton’s “Paradise Lost” after God suddenly alters Heaven’s political structure: “strange point and new! / Doctrine which we would know when learned.” Over and over again, we hear the phrase, “Trump is not a king.” Meaning that does not reign supreme, and the Constitution does not give him the right to do whatever he wants.

But saying “Trump is not a king” misrepresents the nature of English monarchy and understates just how radically Trump and his enablers are trying to redefine the American polity. Barr’s notion that the founders would have approved of an executive with nearly unlimited authority is not only wrong in contemporary terms, it’s profoundly ahistorical. To understand that, we need to briefly trace the history of the Ancient Constitution, the unwritten rules governing the limits on monarchic power in England, as these values traveled across the Atlantic and formed the basis for how the colonists understood authority, and why they felt justified in rebelling against King George III.

There are in fact two kinds of monarchy: absolute, in which the monarch is above the law, and limited or mixed, in which the monarch’s powers are limited by convention. England’s monarchy has always been a limited or mixed monarchy. It was never absolute, and the one English monarch who tried to rule as if he were an absolute monarch — Charles I — literally lost his head as a result.

Let me give a few examples.

In 1385, Parliament had enough of Richard II and his shenanigans, so they decided to impeach him because he was a “tyrant over his subjects and worthy to be deposed.” To justify the deposition, Henry, Duke of Lancaster, soon to become Henry IV, gave the Commons a list of Richard’s crimes, the most important being #16: “he said that the laws of the realm were in his head . . . by reason of which fantastical opinion, he destroyed noble men and impoverished the poor commons.” (I’m quoting from Hall’s “Chronicle,” widely available and used by Shakespeare for his history plays).

About a century later, England’s chief justice, Sir John Fortescue, wrote an immensely popular and influential tract, “In Praise of the Laws of England,” declaring that, the monarch “is not able to change the laws of his kingdom at pleasure.” Laws can be altered, and taxes imposed, only “with the assent of his subjects.” Meaning, only with Parliament’s approval.

Not that monarchs didn’t try to get around these rules. In 1508, a very young Henry VIII tried to change the coronation oath. In place of swearing to uphold “the laws and customs of the realm . . . which the folk and people have made and chosen,” he wanted to add the following proviso: he would uphold only those laws “not prejudicial to his crown and imperial jurisdiction.” But he didn’t succeed, and had to swear to the original oath, the one limiting monarchic power.

While some political theorists on the Continent believed in absolutism, nobody in 16th-century England held that the monarch had unlimited power. After being slapped down, Henry VIII always worked with Parliament. Queen Elizabeth I, for all her self-regard, never said that she was an absolute monarch. James did, but while he talked the absolutist talk, he never tried to put those ideas into practice. That fell to his son, Charles, and it did not work out well for him. He was executed in 1649, leading to the short-lived English Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell, itself overthrown 11 years later. But after the Restoration, the English crown never made the sorts of claims for itself that Charles did. The Ancient Constitution, not absolutism, ruled.

These assumptions travelled across the Atlantic with the colonists, and they formed the bedrock for the American Revolution.

In 1680, for example, the English writer Henry Care published “English Liberties: Or, the Free-born Subject’s Inheritance.” Care began by declaring that the English monarchy is “the best in the World” because the English enjoy “a most excellently mixed or qualified monarchy.” The monarch, to be sure, has his powers and prerogatives. But so do the nobility, whose privileges act as a “screen to Majesty, and a refreshing shade to their inferiors.” So does the commonality or the people, guarded “by the Fence of law, as renders them free men, not slaves.” Quoting Fortescue, Care observes that in England, the phrase, “what pleases the prince has the force of law,” does not apply. Instead, it’s the opposite. In England, monarchs swear an oath “to observe and cause the laws to be kept,” not to change them at will or, as Henry VIII tried, to observe only those laws that do not infringe on his authority.

Care’s book was reprinted five times, indicating its popularity. One reprint, in 1721, was published by James Franklin, Benjamin’s brother, and went through at least six editions. As Nick Bunker writes in “Young Benjamin Franklin,” Care’s volume “amounted to a source book of ideas that [Benjamin Franklin] would draw upon until the 1770s, when Americans replaced it with better treatises of their own.” Treatises that would build on the Ancient Constitution.

Returning to the present, Trump and Barr’s notion of a president who can do what he wants, immune from all investigation, and can govern by fiat, is profoundly ahistorical and wrong. It’s inconceivable that the Founders would have given the president powers that not even the English monarch enjoyed.

Which is not to say that Trump will not try, or that he might not succeed. UC Berkeley law professor John Yoo has proposed that the Supreme Court’s DACA decision allows Trump the latitude to do whatever he wants through executive order: Presidents “can now stop enforcing laws they dislike, hand out permits or benefits that run contrary to acts of Congress and prevent their successors from repealing their policies for several years.” Trump appears to have tested this thesis this past weekend, signing an incoherent series of executive orders and memoranda intended to go around Congress on unemployment benefits, payroll tax suspension and other coronavirus relief measures.

It’s not yet clear whether Trump will succeed where Charles I failed. The coming election will determine whether the United States remains loyal to its roots in the Ancient Constitution, or whether the fundamental nature of this republic will move toward something much more authoritarian and absolutist. Will “what pleases the president have the force of law”? The answer depends on who wins in November.

Greed wins as labor loses leverage: A lesson from Depression history echoes in D.C. today

Last week ended with the U.S. Congress still locked in dysfunction over how best to address the rapid deterioration of our national circumstances.

As our federal government’s paralysis continues, state government in my home state of New Jersey borrowed almost $10 billion to tide it over.

Across the river, Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York resisted calls to close his multi-billion-dollar budget gap by raising taxes on the wealthy, for fear they would opt to flee to another state.

Even leading Democrats like Cuomo are concerned about the care, feeding and preservation of his wealthiest denizens, worried that higher taxes for them during this existential crisis would prompt them to abandon the Empire State.

American pyramid

For decades now, as the marginal tax rate for high-end earners dropped from 90 percent during Dwight Eisenhower’s tenure, great wealth has been on a roll, pressing it down to 37 percent. Wealth preservation has become such a national priority that when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., suggested raising that top rate to 70 percent, the establishment howled that was far too radical.

With the capture of our politics by the corporations and the country’s richest, this approach of bending over to serve them has resulted in the amassing of massive government debt, which generates bonds — which themselves are purchased sold and speculated upon by the very folks at the top of our pyramid.

This has prompted state governments to embrace gambling as a source of revenue despite the destruction it brings to so many families in the most marginal of circumstances.

Meanwhile, in the midst of this once-in-a-century pandemic, a killer virus is proliferating along our socioeconomic fault lines, at the base of this weighty pyramid, exacting the heaviest toll on the poor and the essential workforce.

Here in New Jersey, according to data from the Department of Labor the last week in July saw 28,063 new unemployment claims, bringing the total number of workers sidelined by the pandemic to 1.44 million, roughly 25 percent of our state’s workforce.

At its worst, during the Great Recession of 2008-9, the state’s jobless rate got as high as 9.8 percent.

By comparison, over the arc of the several years of the Great Depression of the 1930s, joblessness in New Jersey ranged between 25 to 33 percent, with African-American unemployment as high as 50 percent.

Recovery stumbles

According to the July national job numbers, the initial rebound that came after the economy’s COVID-19 meltdown has already lost steam as dozens of states reported increased infection and mortality rates.

In June, employers made 4.8 million new hires, after having laid off tens of millions earlier in the year. But in July, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported only 1.8 million had been added. CNN reported that uptick was fueled disproportionately by lower-paying part-time jobs.

A week or so back, the Commerce Department announced that in the second quarter the nation’s GDP shrunk at an annualized rate of 32.9 percent, the most severe contraction in the 73-year history of such records.

Yet, as the bad news has piled up, unemployment benefits expired and evictions loomed for millions, Congress remained deadlocked, incapable of rising to the occasion.

It’s understandable, in a sense. So many Washington politicians are insulated by wealth and privilege from the daily experience of the swelling ranks of Americans struggling day to day amid a killer pandemic which hits the poorest and people of color the hardest.

Back in 2018, Quartz examined the personal financial disclosure filings for all members of Congress and found that the “typical” member was “12 times richer than the typical American household.”

That same analysis found that “unlike the typical household lawmakers were relatively unscathed by the most recent recession,” with the average member of Congress continuing to get richer while “the typical American household saw their wealth decline, dented by the 2008-09 financial decline.”

That eye-opening analysis came right after Congress passed the $2 trillion Trump/McConnell Tax Cut and Jobs Act, which in its first year bestowed 50 percent of the tax cuts on the top 5 percent of income earners, according to a study by the Economic Policy Institute and the Center for Popular Democracy.

And, while the “tax benefits to middle or low-income individuals are modest and will expire in 2025 … the enormous tax breaks for corporations are permanent. By 2027, after the individual provisions expire, the top 1 percent of households alone will see 83 percent of the benefits of the TCJA.”

And post-pandemic, the ratio between the wealth of Congress and our president is surely even more grotesquely skewed.

An analysis from the Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) and the Institute for Policy Studies Program on Inequality (IPS) documented that in the span of just three months during the pandemic, “the U.S. added 29 more billionaires while 45.5 million filed for unemployment.”

Now tens of American families hang over the abyss of a pandemic while some Republicans suggest that the $600-a-week supplementary unemployment benefit they allowed to lapse was overly generous.

With long lines for food pantries and COVID testing, the nation that fancied itself the planet’s wealthiest is awash in disease and food insecurity. We are living in a dystopia that’s a cross between “The Hunger Games” and “The Apprentice.”

This has all been a half-century in the making. This pandemic caught us at a time of grotesque wealth concentration and income disparity, which was the direct consequence of a bipartisan effort over decades to advance the interests of multinational corporations over those of America’s working families.

Between the hundreds of millions in campaign contributions and the revolving-door incentives that reward “public service” with lobbying work, the fix was in.

Tough all over

U.S. tax policy has long provided incentives for U.S.-based multinationals to shift their operations offshore and even to shift their profits to the kinds of tax havens that are always trying to outdo each other to attract capital.

“This is the perfect time to highlight the role of global tax,” said James Henry, an attorney and senior advisor to the Tax Justice Network, which tracks international tax avoidance trends. “We now have public budgets on a worldwide basis under extreme fiscal stress, due to the loss of revenue and with governments at all levels facing cruel decisions of making cuts in the midst of a pandemic.”

In 2005, the Tax Justice Network estimated that $11.5 trillion was held offshore by the world’s wealthiest individuals. A decade later, the international advocacy group published an estimate that the offshore stash ranged from $21 to $32 trillion.

After World War II, as multinational capital became “king of the world,” labor was losing its luster as corporations raced around the planet to play one nation’s workforce off another.

The great uncoupling

By the 1970s, the wages American workers earned did not keep pace with our productivity. Even as women entered the workforce in ever greater numbers, American families kept falling further behind as U.S. corporations became multinational behemoths. With wages flat, Americans took on more and more debt. As the power of capital consolidated its grip on our political system from the Beltway to State Street, labor unions withered.

Fifty years ago, one out of three workers was in a union.In 1981, President Ronald Reagan’s mass firing of striking air traffic controllers was a body blow to the movement. By 1983, only one in five workers was represented. Today, it is just one in 10 and still on the decline.

“Where labor is concerned, recent decades strongly resemble the run-up to the Great Depression,” wrote the New Yorker’s Caleb Crain:

Both periods were marked by extreme concentrations of personal wealth and corporate power. In both, the value created by workers decoupled from the pay they received: during the nineteen-twenties, productivity grew forty-three per cent while wages stagnated; between 1973 and 2016, productivity grew six times faster than compensation.

And unions were in decline: between 1920 and 1930, the proportion of union members in the labor force dropped from 12.2 per cent to 7.5 per cent, and, between 1954 and 2018, it fell from thirty-five per cent to 10.5 per cent.

At the outset of the pandemic much was made of the “essential workforce,” who were hailed as heroes. But as the weeks have churned into months it appears these workers have lost their leverage.

Union supporters in Congress have not been able to get enough colleagues to sign on to the COVID-19 hazard pay provisions, even as essential workers in industries like meat processing as well as health care providers and first responders are getting sick from the virus and dying, all while putting their families at risk.

Similarly, there’s real resistance from Republicans in Congress to backstop local, county and state governments that find themselves in fiscal free-fall. More than a million public workers have already been laid off in the midst of a nearly unprecedented public health crisis.

Gravity wins

Once these kinds of structural dominoes start falling, gravity takes over. There’s a synergy to it. With the federal government’s refusal to launch a coordinated national public health response compounded by its abdication of its role as fiscal guarantor, the states, counties and local governments will all bear the burden of Washington’s neglect.

New Jersey’s Great Depression timeline remains instructive.

Just two years after the 1929 stock market crash, “confronted with sharply reduced revenue,” the state government cut its budget from $34.5 million in 1931 to $19.7 million in 1933, according to the New Jersey Almanac.

The collapse of Trenton’s tax revenues was accompanied by a precipitous decline in county and local property tax revenues as real estate values collapsed. Some local governments had to issue scrip — promissory notes that committed the municipality to actual cash payment at some prescribed future date.

Occupy Trenton

At one point in 1936, the state was close to running out of money to provide the most basic sustenance for more than 100,000 families on relief.

Like Washington today, the New Jersey capital was hopelessly deadlocked on what to do, even as the state’s population’s situation continued to deteriorate.

According to a digest of Daily Record news accounts collected by the Morris County Library, covering the action in Trenton through March in April of 1936, the legislature was stuck. It couldn’t decide if it wanted to divert money from highway accounts, levy a “luxury tax” on amusements, soft drinks, cosmetics and cigarettes or just dump administration of the program on the local governments:

All day and all night and into the early hours of yesterday morning they sat, flanked by State police, in belief their presence would be pressure enough upon the legislators to bring about relief measures, while Republicans caucused and caucused until worn down to the breaking point. One Assemblyman keyed to the limit of sane endurance broke into song with “Home, Sweet Home,'”another emerged from the caucus room, tears streaming down his cheeks, and sat exhausted in his seat in the assembly chamber. “My God, do they know they are dealing with human souls?” cried a woman in the gallery. “Have they ever experienced relief? Do they know what it means to starve?”

As the political stalemate continued, the AP dispatches carried accounts of thousands of unemployed workers converging on Trenton.

TRENTON, (AP) — Powell Johnson, secretary of the Workers’ Alliance, whose members have held possession of the New Jersey Assembly chamber night and day since Tuesday afternoon, said today the group would surrender the chamber when the lawmakers return to their desks tonight… Several thousand of the unemployed were expected to come to Trenton from various sections of the State to take part in a State House demonstration on behalf of the unemployed.

For going on a week “a hundred members of the Workers’ Alliance” spent the “night sleeping in the Assemblymen’s swivel chairs” subsisting “on coffee, bread, cold meats and macaroni donated by Trenton merchants and friends of the group.”

The Daily Record reported that at a Trenton prayer service in support of the takeover by the unemployed, the Rev. Robert Smith of Grace Episcopal Church told the “shabby men and women to ‘keep up the fight,’ and invoked the deity to ‘break down all smugness and self-complacency and lead all men to be more indignant of injustice, more indignant of oppression and deprivation.'”

That same night, as the occupation continued, “spectators in white collars and fur coats watched the good-natured jobless poke fun at the Assemblymen in their sixth ‘evening session’ of a mock legislative meeting. They adopted a resolution ‘appropriating $1,000 to permit Governor Harold G. Hoffman and Mayor Frank Hague of Jersey City to go to Alaska and survey the Alaska salmon, its life, loves and tax problems, so the New Jersey Legislature will be free to do its duty without outside influence.”

Trump’s long history of racism laid bare in damning “Morning Joe” supercut video

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough blew up President Donald Trump’s attempts to portray Joe Biden as racist.

The president pounced on Biden’s suggestion that the Latino community was diverse, “unlike the African American community with notable exceptions,” and the former vice president was forced to clarify his remarks in a series of tweets.

Throughout my career I've witnessed the diversity of thought, background, and sentiment within the African American community. It's this diversity that makes our workplaces, communities, and country a better place.

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) August 7, 2020

Trump claimed Biden “totally disparaged and insulted” Black Americans, but the “Morning Joe” host laughed off those allegations as ridiculous given the president’s history.

“We mentioned that Donald Trump’s attempt to paint Biden as a racist, he was doing that off the latest comments, but we’ve been talking about this for a while on this show that Donald Trump, unfortunately for his campaign, can’t take Biden on on so many issues because it always opens Donald Trump himself up to a more severe counter attack,” Scarborough said. “Let’s just take the issue of racism.”

The host then rolled a supercut of Trump’s lengthy history of racist remarks.

Fauci remains unfazed as scientists rely on unproven methods to create COVID vaccines

With millions of lives on the line, researchers have been working at an unprecedented pace to develop a COVID-19 vaccine.

But that speed — and some widely touted breakthroughs — belie the enormous complexity and potential risks involved. Researchers have an incomplete understanding of the coronavirus and are using technology that’s largely unproven.

Among many worries: A handful of studies on COVID-19 survivors suggest that antibodies — key immune system proteins that fight infection — begin to disappear within months. That’s led scientists to worry that the protection provided by vaccines could fade quickly as well. Some even question whether vaccines will really end the pandemic. If vaccines produce limited protection against infection, experts note, people will need to continue wearing masks and social distancing even after vaccines roll out.

Yet in an interview with KHN, the country’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said he’s “cautiously optimistic” that researchers will overcome such obstacles.

“We know the body can make an adequate response against this virus” after two shots of a vaccine being tested, Fauci said. “There’s no reason to believe that we won’t be able to develop a vaccine against it.”

Because early-stage trials began just a few months ago, doctors don’t know how long antibodies in vaccinated people will last, he said.

Scientists will get answers to some of their questions from the country’s first large-scale COVID-19 vaccine trial, launched last week by the National Institutes of Health and Moderna at 89 locations around the country.

“Once we get a protective response, we will see how long it lasts,” Fauci said.

“If we don’t get as long a response as we want, we can always give a booster shot.”

The leading vaccine candidates are based on new approaches that have never resulted in a licensed vaccine. Moderna, a relatively young company, has yet to produce any approved vaccines.

“Even more so than usual, as we create vaccines, we’re sailing in uncharted water,” said Dr. William Schaffner, a professor at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.

If approved, a COVID vaccine created by researchers at Oxford University and drugmaker AstraZeneca would be the first licensed vaccine to use a virus that causes colds in chimpanzees but doesn’t sicken people. Scientists use the cold virus to deliver key elements of the vaccine into a patient’s body. In this case, the virus delivers the gene that instructs the cell to make the spike protein, which helps the novel coronavirus enter cells.

Early studies show that the Oxford vaccine stimulates the immune system as intended. If the vaccine is successful, these antibodies and other immune cells will recognize and neutralize the spike protein if they encounter it again, protecting people from disease.

Two other candidates — a vaccine from Moderna and another from Pfizer and BioNTech, a German company — were also developed with novel methods. They use genetic material from the coronavirus called messenger RNA, or mRNA.

Unlike traditional vaccines, which expose the body to a viral protein to stimulate the immune system, mRNA acts as an instruction kit, telling the body how to construct the proteins itself. The immune system then responds to the viral protein by making antibodies.

Moderna officials have said they were able to produce the COVID-19 vaccine so rapidly because they had developed experimental vaccines against two other lethal coronaviruses — those that cause SARS and MERS — which are closely related to the COVID-19 virus.

When the pandemic emerged, Moderna tweaked those vaccines to target COVID-19, Fauci told KHN. Fauci’s team contacted the company the day after China made the virus’s genome public.

Two months later, Moderna’s vaccine was ready for a trial because “98% of the scientific work had been done,” Schaffner said. “They went back to these scientific methods and adapted them very quickly. That saves years of work.”

But there is a potential risk in relying so heavily on unproven techniques: New technology can sometimes cause unforeseen problems or side effects, said Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

For all their differences, most of the vaccines in development target the spike protein, Adalja said. That is likely a winning strategy, considering successful veterinary coronavirus vaccines also target the spike protein.

But some scientists say this uniform approach could also leave us vulnerable.

Ideally, scientists should diversify the portfolio of vaccines, in case targeting the spike protein doesn’t work as well as researchers hope, Adalja said. Developing a vaccine that targets other key proteins might help scientists to hedge their bets.

Researchers around the world are working on more than 165 vaccines; more than two dozen are already being tested in people. Early human studies focus on safety and finding the best dose. Later clinical trials are larger and measure a vaccine’s effectiveness by comparing the outcomes of volunteers who receive the vaccine with those of people given a placebo.

Fauci said he’s reassured by early studies that showed the Moderna vaccine to be safe. Although some volunteers developed fevers and headaches after vaccination, these side effects were no worse than those caused by other licensed vaccines.

“That’s not a showstopper at all,” he said.

A Perplexing Pathogen

Some of COVID-19’s most important mysteries involve the immune system, said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Offit said he’s mystified by the fact that a small fraction of people with COVID-19 don’t make any antibodies against the virus. He knows of no other virus that does this.

“We’re only seven months into this and we’ve had a lot of surprises,” said Offit, a member of a National Institutes of Health effort to develop vaccines and drugs to treat COVID-19. “This virus does things that no other virus does.”

This is not like preventing measles. “It’s easier to create a vaccine for diseases that confer long-term immunity,” Offit said. People never catch measles more than once. The two-dose measles vaccine stimulates immunity, protecting 97% of people for life, Offit said.

It’s also not like strep throat or gonorrhea, which people can catch multiple times because the bacteria that cause them don’t ignite lasting immunity. “That’s why we don’t have a vaccine for them,” he said.

Some coronaviruses cause more serious symptoms than others. Coronaviruses that cause the common cold don’t stimulate lasting antibodies, which is one reason people can catch colds repeatedly, Schaffner said.

Studies show that antibodies against more lethal coronaviruses last a bit longer. Antibodies against the severe acute respiratory syndrome virus, which caused a pandemic in 2003, and the Middle East respiratory syndrome virus, which appeared in 2011, appear to last two to three years.

People with severe symptoms from COVID-19 tend to have higher antibody levels than those with milder cases.

Some people fail to generate antibodies because they have compromised immune systems, said Mark Sangster, a research professor at the University of Rochester Medical Center.

Even when people do generate antibodies against the novel coronavirus, studies suggest the antibodies may not last long.

In a recent New England Journal of Medicine report on COVID-19 survivors, antibody levels dropped rapidly over three months, at a rate that could leave them without any antibodies within one year. Those findings echo the results of a June report in Nature Medicine that found antibody levels began to fall two to three months after infection.

Such reports have worried some scientists, who fear that antibodies will decline just as rapidly among people vaccinated against COVID-19.

“One wants a vaccine that lasts longer than two months,” Schaffner said.

Other antibody research has been more encouraging.

A July paper found that COVID-19 infection “induces robust, neutralizing antibody responses that are stable for at least three months.” Antibodies typically rise during an infection, then fall again as the immune system returns to normal, said Florian Krammer, co-author of the study, which was published online before undergoing peer review.

“What we found looks like a normal antibody response to a viral infection,” said Krammer, a professor of microbiology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York.

Early studies of the Moderna vaccine suggest people mount a strong immune response after two doses, Fauci said. But because the earliest trials began just a few months ago, doctors don’t yet know how long antibodies in vaccinated people will last.

The United States has invested nearly $6 billion in potential COVID-19 vaccines.

Conflicting evidence on antibodies “shouldn’t interfere with efforts to develop a safe and effective vaccine,” added Fauci, noting he’s encouraged by the results of early clinical trials. “The durability of the vaccine may be quite good.”

Dr. Michael Watson, who is developing Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine, said he hopes vaccinated people will have a stronger immune response than those sickened by the coronavirus. He said it’s possible the virus not only infects cells, but also dampens the immune system, suppressing antibody response.

A vaccine that contains only one part of the novel coronavirus — a protein that allows it to enter cells — might be able to stimulate antibody production without suppressing the immune response, Watson said. Only large clinical studies will show whether this is the case.

Memories That Don’t Fade

Yet there’s more to the immune system than antibodies.

The body is also protected by memory T-cells, which can recognize viral threats to stimulate the production of antibodies even after many years, said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, professor of infectious diseases at UCLA. Memory T-cells can stimulate B-cells to make antibodies, while instructing other immune system players to fight the virus in different ways.

“The T-cells are like the conductors of a symphony,” Klausner said. “These multiple, complex arms of the immune system work together like a symphony to control infection.”

Even if antibodies dwindle over time, memory cells can often replenish the supply, preventing infected patients from developing dangerous symptoms, Sangster said.

New studies suggest people who survive COVID-19 develop both memory T-cells and B-cells. One paper even documented memory T-cells —which can instruct other cells to make antibodies — in survivors of the 2003 SARS pandemic.

Fauci said it’s too early to know what sort of role T-cells will play in defending against the novel coronavirus.

Researchers will get more definitive answers about vaccine-induced immunity to COVID-19 in coming months, after they complete large, rigorous trials of tens of thousands of volunteers, Offit said. Vaccine makers have said they plan to study their products’ safety and effectiveness even after approval, to measure long-term efficacy as well to detect rare side effects that don’t appear in smaller, shorter studies.

In addition to Moderna’s trial, AstraZeneca said results from an ongoing study of 50,000 volunteers should be available this fall.

With so many vaccines in development, Adalja said, it’s difficult to know which one will prove the safest and most effective.

“The first vaccines may not be the ultimate vaccine that everybody uses,” he said.

And some vaccines may work better in certain populations than others, Offit said. For example, studies may find that one shot works particularly well in children, while another better protects older adults. “There is definitely a lot to learn,” he said.

Ideally, doctors would like all vaccines to be as successful as the measles shot, Offit said. But a COVID-19 vaccine could more closely resemble flu shots and rotavirus vaccines, which don’t prevent all infections but dramatically reduce the risks of hospitalization and death. Although some people who receive a flu shot still get influenza, their infections tend to be much milder than those of people who aren’t vaccinated.

“You’d like to have a vaccine that protects against severe disease, and it likely will,” Offit said. “But people might still get mild infections and still shed the virus and still spread it” even after being vaccinated.

If that happens, Offit said, the vaccine may not slow the spread of the pandemic as much as people have hoped. “You’d still need masks and social distancing” to reduce the spread of the virus, Offit said. “It’s going to take both — a vaccine and these hygienic measures — to defeat the virus.”

KHN editor Arthur Allen contributed to this story.

Watchdog reports evidence the State Dept. IG may have been fired in a cover-up for Trump’s friend

One of the inspectors general who President Donald Trump fired earlier this year was Steve Linick, former IG for the U.S. State Department. The Project on Government Oversight has investigated Linick’s firing and is reporting that according to its sources, the firing was “likely motivated in part by a review into alleged misconduct by the U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom, Robert Wood ‘Woody’ Johnson IV, a long-time friend of the president.”

According to an article that POGO members Danielle Brian, Nick Schwellenbach and Adam Zagorin wrote for the organization’s website, “(An) inspection report, which went to the London embassy for comment in late April, about two weeks before then-Inspector General Steve Linick’s firing, has been sitting on the desk of his replacement — who unexpectedly announced Wednesday that he would be leaving his post Friday.”

They note that the State Department’s Office of Inspector General “examined allegations” that Johnson — owner of the New York Jets and an heir to the Johnson & Johnson business empire — has “made racist and sexist remarks in violation of anti-discrimination laws and rules.”

A source described by Brian, Schwellenbach and Zagorin as someone “with knowledge of the operations of the London embassy,” told POGO, “Ambassador Johnson was concerned that if the report were published, it would be damaging to his reputation…. The fact that Ambassador Johnson is given to sexist, inappropriate comments about women and their appearance is very widely known in the embassy because his comments were on a weekly, if not daily, basis. They are more than just racially insensitive, they’re also offensive.”

Johnson, however, has flatly denied making any racist or sexist comments. On July 22, the Johnson & Johnson heir tweeted, “I have followed the ethical rules and requirements of my office at all times. These false claims of insensitive remarks about race and gender are totally inconsistent with my longstanding record and values.”

When Secretary of State Mike Pompeo testified before the U.S. Senate on July 30, he claimed that Linick was fired because of low employee morale in the State Department’s Office of Inspector General. But Brian, Schwellenbach and Zagorin report, “The (State) Department’s Office of Inspector General, in fact, had the third highest engagement score of any State subcomponent in 2019, according to the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service’s analysis of Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey data from 2019.”

From café au lait to cocktails, David Lebovitz offers a master class in French drinking culture

From café express in the morning to a Suze & Tonic at apéro, the beverage prospects in France are not only endless but also legendary. Perhaps more important than the beverage itself is whom you grab it with. Good friends grab a drink at cafés, which the esteemed chef David Lebovitz more fondly refers to as the living rooms of Paris. Since moving to France in 2004, Lebovitz has come to love the café culture in France, which he chronicles in his ninth cookbook.

“Drinking French” is what the world needs right now. In a time when most of us aren’t able to travel far from home, the recipes in this witty and downright fun cookbook immediately transport readers to a street side café in Paris. Though you may not be able to hop the next flight to the City of Light right now, your wildest fantasies of dipping pastries into café au lait can come true in the comfort of your own home.

“My book came out during lockdown. And a lot of people sort of took to the book. It was very interesting. I started doing these Instagram Live apéro hours,” Lebovitz told Salon Food in a recent interview. “And I realized that people still wanted to travel, and they wanted to feel like they were somewhere else.”

“You know, a lot of people were buying different spirits from my book, ordering online, having them delivered,” he continued. “And once again, I realized people are traveling. They’re traveling in their mind — and that’s what cookbooks do. And also, that would be my tip for coffee. Get a French coffee cup or some coffee bowls.”

If you appreciate a good cocktail, you’ll want to snag a cocktail shaker, too. In addition to serving up fun, Lebovitz shares a comprehensive overview of French drinking culture. Did you know, for example, that the Bloody Mary was actually invented in France? Read our Q&A below for that story, as well as a true master class in French drinking. From coffee to cocktails, we cover everything you need to up your beverage game at home.

Stainless Steel Cocktail Bar Tools –

Drink in style when you shake one of David’s cocktails. At Salon Food, we’re fans of this stainless steel cocktail bar, which stores 11 tools in one place. Next time your friends unexpectedly knock on your door, you’ll be able to mix up a decadent cocktail in the blink of an eye.

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First, I wanted to check in and see how you are doing. I was actually recently in Europe. I was in Italy right when the lockdown started. So, it was quite the experience, visiting Florence and Milan. You’re in Paris. What has it been like over there?

Well, apparently right now is the time to go to Italy, because there’s no tourists and all the cities are remarkably open, and they’re very calm and everything. So, maybe you should have stayed. But you look happy where you’re at.

You know, in Paris, we’re out of lockdown. We’ve been out for about a month. All the cafés are open. Everybody’s partying and drinking. Optimistically, the virus is under control, as the French government has said. So we are hoping for that. And it is nice, because it’s spring, and we all want to be outside. We all want to have a drink with our friends, and we’re allowed to now, which is great.

That’s one thing I wanted to ask you about. I know so much of the social life in Paris, which I’ve never actually been to myself, is centered around cafés and that idea of eating or grabbing a drink out with friends. What was the impact of the shut down?

Well, it was really interesting, because a lot of my French friends were saying, “I need to go to a café. I need to have a drink with my friends.” And they were starting to freak out about that — big time. And they were all closed, of course.

But people started having secret parties and stuff, and somebody had one across the street from me. There was like a hundred people there. They just could not resist having a drink with their friends. It’s such an integral part of the French way of socializing — there’s always a drink involved. And you mentioned you were just in Italy, and Italy is similar to France in that respect. But France really holds these traditions so dear and close to them, whereas the Italians just kind of do it.

I’m in New York right now, and you’re in Paris. So we’re in a little different time zones. I still haven’t had my coffee yet, because it’s been a busy morning. The very first drink in your book is actually a café au lait, and I wanted to let everybody know that you cover all sorts of beverages in your new book, whether you drink alcohol or not. What’s the difference between having an espresso, for example, in France versus in Italy?

Well, that’s an interesting question to start with! Basically, an espresso in Italy is a café express in France. And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been corrected online for saying café express. And people don’t think I know what I’m talking about, but in French, it’s an express.

The difference is in Italy, coffee is really an art. You go to a café, you go to a train station, you go to a library — wherever it has coffee. And you get a little espresso, and it’s amazing. It’s delicious. It’s only meant to be drunk within 20 seconds. And then, boom. You’re out the door.

In France, they put a lot more coffee in the cup. Historically, the coffee in France has been — to be polite — of lesser quality beans and so forth. Robuster beans than the quality used in Italy. So the quality of the coffee in France was not always a concern. It was just more something to socialize around a bigger cup, having caffeine and cheap.

And you say the most misunderstood drink outside of Paris is the café au lait. Why is that?

Well, a lot of Americans have this fantasy about France, and that’s fine. I have fantasies about a lot of countries, too. Like right now, all I want to do is go to the beach. I’m like, “I want to go to Thailand.” But we can’t go yet.

This whole café au lait thing — it rolls off the tongue so easy, and it sounds very French. But what a lot of people don’t realize is: Café au lait is something served in a bowl at home. It’s not a drink you get in a café. Once again, it’s kind of a ritual. You know, you have coffee in a bowl. You dip your pastry in it. It gets all soggy, and you shove it in your mouth.

And the first time I saw my partner doing that was about 18 years ago. I was like, “Oh, my God. I live in France.” And we were having café au lait and dipping pastries. I still don’t dip my pastry in my coffee.

Do you have any tips for making coffee at home? Because over here, for example, we’re still pretty much under lock and key, as far as things with the quarantine go. Some places we’re able to eat outside, but a lot of people really are missing their favorite coffee shops right now. So what are some easy tips to get things going at home?

Well, you know, I was thinking about this the other day, because my book came out during lockdown. And a lot of people sort of took to the book. It was very interesting. I started doing these Instagram Live apéro hours. And I realized that people still wanted to travel, and they wanted to feel like they were somewhere else. So my tip would be — you can probably order these — but maybe get some coffee bowls. It makes you feel like you’re somewhere else.

You know, a lot of people were buying different spirits from my book, ordering online, having them delivered. And once again, I realized people are traveling. They’re traveling in their mind — and that’s what cookbooks do. And also, that would be my tip for coffee. Get a French coffee cup or some coffee bowls.

One thing that’s come to prominence amid the lock downs are Zoom happy hours. We’re on Zoom right now having a chat. Have you attended any of those?

I have attended a few. The problem with them is you tend to drink a lot, because you’re at home. You’re a little nervous. You know — is the Zoom going to work? Is it going to cut off? Oh, I forgot! I scratched my backside, and everyone’s watching on camera. It’s this whole stressful thing: being on Zoom. So I think people tend to drink more. At least I do.

So I’ve been to a few apéro with friends. I’m sort of a person that doesn’t mind being alone, because I grew up working in restaurants around a lot of people. You know what? I just want to lie on the couch and watch TV when I’m home. So I wasn’t feeling the need to connect with people as much as other people were. But I did start this Instagram Live apéro hour, where I did a live cocktail or a drink from my book every evening. And that was really good, because it was kind of like having an apéro with the world.

The problem was a lot of people like you are in New York, and it was 9:00 a.m. in California. At noon, not everybody was ready to mix up a martini. Here I am shaking up drinks, and people with their coffee are like, “What’s he doing?”

What are your tips for hosting a virtual happy hour from home?

“Drinking French” is my ninth book. There’s always the question you get asked. And the question for this book is: “What liquor should I buy?” And you never know what the question’s going to be. I wrote an ice cream book, and usually everybody asks you: “Can this be frozen?” When you write recipes, it’s: “Can I freeze this?” I was like, “Finally, no one’s going to ask me that question.” So people started asking me, “How long does ice cream last?” I never thought of that. You just keep it in the freezer, and if you’re hungry enough — no matter how much frost it’s got — you’ll eat it.

But you know, this question of what liquor people should buy. It’s very interesting sort of curating the list down, because you know, you can tell people to buy all this liquor and spend hundreds of dollars. But I didn’t really want to do that. I was aware of people’s budgets. So I sort of narrowed down what liquor people should buy and featured them on my Instagram Live. You can buy a bottle of vermouth, and it’s very French.

In the book, you say that one doesn’t need a lot of tools to get things started. But what do we need to get started at home?

Well, basically, to make any cocktail, you either need a cocktail shaker or a mixing glass, which is just a glass with a spout. If you have a measuring cup, you’ve got a mixing glass. If you’ve got a chop stick, you’ve got a stirring spoon. If you’ve got a mason jar, you’ve got a cocktail shaker. So, you don’t need to buy stuff.

That said, I think it’s a lot more fun to have the right equipment. Once again, you don’t have to buy a $300 cocktail shaker. You can buy one for $15, and it does as good of a job as one that’s $50.

But that’s something I tell people. You don’t have to get equipment to make a cocktail, but you do need decent alcohol. Once again, I shy away from telling people to buy very expensive liquor, because not everybody either has the budget or the interest. And you know, something like Chartreuse is $55 in the U.S. And for some people, that’s a real commitment. Whereas Citadel gin — the first French Gin — it’s like $25 or $30, so it’s much more palatable for the wallet.

But you do say that French drinks taste better in traditional coffee cups or cocktail buses. Is there a science behind that?

I think it’s psychological — having a good wine glass. Have you ever been to a fancy restaurant, and they have these really thin wine glasses? And it’s like, “Oh, this is really good.” Then you come home, and you have your thick wine glasses that won’t break when your friends drop them after a party. And they do taste different.

I love collecting vintage glassware. I spent years doing that when I was working on the book, and it really makes drinking out of them much more enjoyable. You know, everybody has their favorite coffee cup, and I see you have glasses on your shelves. And you know, they’re probably very special to you. And you bought them for a reason: You like the shape, you like the color, you like the way they feel in your hand. But also, you probably have your favorite coffee cup. And if you live with somebody else, you have to have that cup, and they can’t take it. So there is a science behind it. I don’t know what it is —

I know what you mean. For me, I have some of my mom’s dishes, which I inherited. So I drink out of one of her mugs every morning, and that’s really special to me.

If you’re drinking a martini, you want it out of a coupe glass or even a martini glass. You don’t want it in a tumbler. That doesn’t work.

Speaking of wine glasses, one thing that I think about automatically when I think about France is wine. I have most associated drinking in France with wine. In the book, you actually note that wine consumption has decreased over time in France. Can you tell us more about the rise of the cocktail in France?

Well, wine consumption decreased over the last 20 years. It’s a variety of factors, which is a very long but interesting subject. It’s also a cultural thing: A lot of younger people are drinking beer, but also, the cocktail culture came back. A lot of people don’t realize this, but a lot of cocktails were invented in France.

During prohibition, a lot of Americans went to Paris to drink. People would take the boat from New York, and as soon as the boat left the dock, the bar would be open. And everybody just spent a week or so — however long they took — drinking. Then they came to Paris and drank and once they were in Paris, there was Harry’s Bar. They would drink, and drink and drink — and it was fabulous.

They had all this liquor, so they invented cocktails. And of course, they used a lot of French liquors like cognac, and vermouth and so forth to make these cocktails, because that’s what was available. As well as Canadian whiskey, because Canada didn’t have prohibition. So Canadian whiskey became very popular in France, and it’s in a number of classic cocktails like the Scofflaw or the Toronto. Arguably, the Manhattan, as well. So a lot of them have roots in France.

You write that the Bloody Mary is one of those drinks.

Yes, the Bloody Mary is very controversial. I sort of tracked it down. This is my first book on alcohol, and I really needed to get the facts right, because I know that everyone’s going to be taking a close look. Plus, I was very interested in printing the truth. So the story goes that it was invented in Paris. Some Russian immigrants bought a bartender a bottle of vodka. He tasted it and he’s like, “This doesn’t taste like anything.” So he started adding stuff to it and settled on tomato juice with some spices. And the “bucket of blood,” as it was called, was invented. As the drink evolved, eventually it came to America. “Bucket of blood” wasn’t going to make it in America.

How does a Bloody Mary in France compare to one over here in America?

Well, it depends who makes it. Americans eat brunch, and that’s where most Bloody Marys are consumed. French people — in Paris, there are a lot of brunch places that have opened with “American style” brunch. You know, eggs, fruit salad and so forth. Bloody Marys still aren’t that popular in the morning as a drink. So if you get one, it’s usually an afternoon drink. But they don’t tend to over garnish them like in America now. You’re seeing fried chicken with like a whole head of celery, and there’s flames shooting out. And it’s like, “Here’s your Bloody Mary.” And it’s fun. We like fun drinks, whereas the French tone it down a little.

In your opinion, what are the two or three most popular cocktails in France? If I’m going to dig into the book, where should I start?

Well, the spritz right now is very popular. The Aperol spritz sort of became the strength that everybody took to very quickly. It was heavily marketed in France. All of a sudden, a lot of cafés had Aperol umbrellas, and Aperol seats and so forth. And I have no problem with that. I’m just putting that out there — that that was part of the popularity.

But there are a lot of different kinds of spritzes. Like, I make a spritz with this, which is Cap Corse, which is a white fortified wine. Similar to vermouth, it’s very quininey, so it has a nice bitterness. And Cap Corse is made with things like walnut husks, cocoa nibs and citrus, because it’s from Corsica. So you have this drink that’s much more richer and interesting than a Aperol spritz, in my opinion. But I know the Aperol spritz took some hits this year, so I don’t want to say anything against it.

Another cocktail that I discovered is a Suze & Tonic. Americans love gin and tonic. I love gin and tonic. The French are kind of now into gin and tonics, which they call the Ginto. And it’s basically Suze, which is a gentian liquor. It’s an aperitif, which you can also buy it in the states. You have to go to a decent liquor store. It’s very, very bitter. You mix it with tonic water, and it’s a great, great, great alternative to a gin and tonic. If you want to have a sort of lower alcohol but sort of more interesting drink. I like gin and tonics, too, but now I’m into Suze & Tonics.

Click here to purchase a copy of “Drinking French: The Iconic Cocktails, Apéritifs, and Café Traditions of France, with 160 Recipes.”

Trump blasted for naming “war criminal” and Iran-Contra convict Elliott Abrams as Iran envoy

Following the resignation Thursday of State Department Iran envoy Brian Hook, President Donald Trump named as his replacement current special representative for Venezuela Elliott Abrams, a notorious warmonger and supporter of Latin American death squads who was convicted in 1991 of withholding information from Congress during the Iran-Contra scandal.

Abrams will now serve in both roles simultaneously, alarming anti-war groups who say someone with a record as blood-stained as his “should be barred for life from government positions and recognized as the war criminal that he is.”

“From El Salvador to Guatemala, Nicaragua to Panama, Elliott Abrams’ life’s work has been defined by the worst impulses of U.S. foreign policy: embracing war, ignoring gross human rights abuses, and supporting horrific authoritarian regimes,” said Stephen Miles, executive director of Win Without War.

Abrams’ appointment as special envoy to Iran comes days after he confirmed during a Senate hearing that he is still “working hard” to topple Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Sina Toossi, senior research analyst at the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), warned that the Trump administration’s installation of Abrams as the top U.S. diplomat to Iran shows the president and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are “doubling down” on their push for regime change in Iran as well.

“Like most Trump appointees,” said Toossi, “he is not fit for the position, and will continue to hurt U.S. interests by enacting a failing strategy that will only succeed in spreading chaos and misery.”

-Trump greenlit CIA ops to destabilize #Iran
-Quit nuclear deal
-Appointed Iran hawks as advisors
-Sanctioned #Iranians into poverty
-Assassinated Soleimani

Now wants guy who lied about Iran-Contra as envoy to Iran. Goal is collapse at *any* cost. Just look at Abrams record 👇🏽 pic.twitter.com/5c4hwMf2IC

— Assal Rad (@AssalRad) August 6, 2020

In a statement late Thursday, anti-war group CodePink provided a snapshot of Abrams’ views and record dating back to his time in the Reagan administration:

In the 1980s, he defended the infamous Guatemalan General Efraín Ríos Montt, whose violent crackdown on the indigenous Ixil Mayan people of Guatemala was so brutal that it was classified as genocide by the United Nations.
He denied that the Salvadoran military was responsible for the devastating El Mozote massacre where, in 1981, a U.S.-trained battalion murdered more than 500 civilians, slitting the throats of children along the way. Not only did Abrams deny the massacre and push for continued U.S. support for the notoriously brutal Salvadoran government, but he even claimed in a 1994 interview that “the U.S. administration’s record in El Salvador is one of fabulous achievement.”
He is vehemently anti-Palestinian and shamelessly supports Israel. As George Bush’s aide on the National Security Council, Abrams did everything he could to thwart peace negotiations. He repeatedly undercut any U.S. pressure on Israel to stop the building of settlements and cited the Holocaust as justification for Israel’s killings of Palestinians (Jews are “a people who had learned from history what happens to Jews without security”). In 2015, he applauded then-Speaker John Boehner’s decision to invite Netanyahu to address Congress without the approval of President Obama. He lauds Evangelical descriptions of Israel such as the belief that “Israel is connected to the idea that God favors and protects Americans.”
In 1991, Abrams pled guilty to withholding information from Congress related to his involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal, the secret and illegal scam in the 1980s to siphon profits from Iranian weapons sales to support the right-wing Contra rebels trying to overthrow the Sandinista government.
Abrams was a key supporter of the disastrous invasion of Iraq. In 1998, he submitted a letter to President Clinton encouraging him to depose Saddam Hussein. As Deputy National Security Advisor for Global Democracy Strategy during George W. Bush’s second term, Abrams was in charge of promoting Bush’s strategy of “advancing democracy abroad.”
Abrams championed the U.S. overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, echoing the tactics used by the neocons for intervention in Iraq.
Abrams’ opposition to the Iran Nuclear Deal is epitomized by his attempts to encourage Israel to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites before negotiations became too serious. He expressed concern that Israel’s capacity to impede the deal was “already being narrowed considerably by the diplomatic thaw, because it is one thing to bomb Iran when it appears hopelessly recalcitrant and isolated and quite another to bomb it when much of the world—especially the United States—is optimistic about the prospect of talks.”
In January 2019, Abrams was appointed to be the U.S. Special Representative for Venezuela, and used his position to support an attempted coup, quash diplomatic talks, and increase brutal sanctions, even during the pandemic.

“The dangerous conflict resulting from Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear agreement will be exacerbated by a man committed to Washington’s failed policies of regime change,” CodePink said. “Elliott Abrams has made a career of lying and committing criminal acts that have led to the death and suffering of innocent people from Guatemala to Iraq. He embraces militarism, covers up for gross human rights abuses, and has a history of supporting authoritarian regimes.”

Trump allies now fear that their promotion of Kanye West’s 2020 bid could backfire: report

As evidence has emerged that Republicans are working to get Kanye West on the presidential ballot — including in the key swing state of Wisconsin — the Daily Beast reported Thursday night that some of President Donald Trump’s allies are wary of the effort.

It’s not clear if Trump himself is involved in the plot. He disavowed knowledge of the plan and only expressed fondness for West when recently asked about the matter by the press.

But the fundamental logic of the strategy is transparent, if not factually sound: Having West on the ballot could pull votes away from Biden and given Trump an edge, especially if the race is tight in key states.

Some have criticized the ideas underlying the apparent strategy as inherently racist, assuming that Black voters would be easily swayed away from Biden because of a novelty campaign by a Black celebrity. And the Daily Beast reported Thursday that a top pollster for the president, John McLaughlin, didn’t buy the theory.

“[It] could siphon from Trump Blacks who don’t like Biden,” he said. “Blacks who don’t like Biden in a two-way race would vote for the president. Now they might consider Kanye.”

The Daily Beast also reported:

Seven sources int he president’s political orbit— senior administration officials, GOP operatives, campaign advisers, and individuals close to Trump—had some mixed reactions when privately discussing Kanye this week.

There were some who loudly applauded the budding GOP-connected dirty trick to pump up West’s bizarre run, think it was at least wroth a try, if it somehow hobbles Team Biden in critical states. Several said West should be seeking professional help and support from loves ones, instead of embarking on a long-shot bid for the White House.

Forbes also reported on West’s bizarre foray after an exclusive text interview with the music star. It noted:

In a wide-ranging interview with Forbes last month about his political aspirations, West, who has never voted before, laid out a platform for his “Birthday Party” that included a pro-life plank that alleged that Planned Parenthood was placed in cities by white supremacists, a management style patterned on the fictional country of Wakanda in Black Panther and anti-vaccine conspiracy theories. In that interview, West also claimed that was dumping Trump. “I am taking the red hat off, with this interview.” His reason: “It looks like one big mess to me. I don’t like that I caught wind that he hid in the bunker.”

However, he was reticent to criticize Trump besides that. “Trump is the closest president we’ve had in years to allowing God to still be part of the conversation,” he said.

And West was eager to criticize Biden, and expressed comfort with the idea of doing damage to the former vice president’s White House chances. “I’m not denying it; I just told you.”

After that interview was published, however, West took to Twitter to throw cold water on the idea that he’s only in it to hurt Biden:

Of course, no one seriously believes that West can win with the haphazard “campaign” effort he’s put forward. So either he’s just lying to cover up for his real purpose, or, as many fear and his wife has suggested, he’s losing touch with reality and struggling with mental health issues. If that’s the case, it’s truly shameful that any GOP operatives would be cheering him on.

America’s obesity epidemic threatens the effectiveness of any COVID vaccine

For a world crippled by the coronavirus, salvation hinges on a vaccine.

But in the United States, where at least 4.6 million people have been infected and nearly 155,000 have died, the promise of that vaccine is hampered by a vexing epidemic that long preceded COVID-19: obesity.

Scientists know that vaccines engineered to protect the public from influenza, hepatitis B, tetanus and rabies can be less effective in obese adults than in the general population, leaving them more vulnerable to infection and illness. There is little reason to believe, obesity researchers say, that COVID-19 vaccines will be any different.

“Will we have a COVID vaccine next year tailored to the obese? No way,” said Raz Shaikh, an associate professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

“Will it still work in the obese? Our prediction is no.”

More than 107 million American adults are obese, and their ability to return safely to work, care for their families and resume daily life could be curtailed if the coronavirus vaccine delivers weak immunity for them.

In March, still early in the global pandemic, a little-noticed study from China found that heavier Chinese patients afflicted with COVID-19 were more likely to die than leaner ones, suggesting a perilous future awaited the U.S., whose population is among the heaviest in the world.

And then that future arrived.

As intensive care units in New York, New Jersey and elsewhere filled with patients, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned that obese people with a body mass index of 40 or more — known as morbid obesity or about 100 pounds overweight — were among the groups at highest risk of becoming severely ill with COVID-19. About 9% of American adults are in that category.

As weeks passed and a clearer picture of who was being hospitalized came into focus, federal health officials expanded their warning to include people with a body mass index of 30 or more. That vastly expanded the ranks of those considered vulnerable to the most severe cases of infection, to 42.4% of American adults.

Obesity has long been known to be a significant risk factor for death from cardiovascular disease and cancer. But scientists in the emerging field of immunometabolism are finding obesity also interferes with the body’s immune response, putting obese people at greater risk of infection from pathogens such as influenza and the novel coronavirus. In the case of influenza, obesity has emerged as a factor making it more difficult to vaccinate adults against infection. The question is whether that will hold true for COVID-19.

A healthy immune system turns inflammation on and off as needed, calling on white blood cells and sending out proteins to fight infection. Vaccines harness that inflammatory response. But blood tests show that obese people and people with related metabolic risk factors such as high blood pressure and elevated blood sugar levels experience a state of chronic mild inflammation; the inflammation turns on and stays on.

Adipose tissue — or fat — in the belly, the liver and other organs is not inert; it contains specialized cells that send out molecules, like the hormone leptin, that scientists suspect induces this chronic state of inflammation. While the exact biological mechanisms are still being investigated, chronic inflammation seems to interfere with the immune response to vaccines, possibly subjecting obese people to preventable illnesses even after vaccination.

An effective vaccine fuels a controlled burn inside the body, searing into cellular memory a mock invasion that never truly happened.

Evidence that obese people have a blunted response to common vaccines was first observed in 1985 when obese hospital employees who received the hepatitis B vaccine showed a significant decline in protection 11 months later that was not observed in non-obese employees. The finding was replicated in a follow-up study that used longer needles to ensure the vaccine was injected into muscle and not fat.

Researchers found similar problems with the hepatitis A vaccine, and other studies have found significant declines in the antibody protection induced by tetanus and rabies vaccines in obese people.

“Obesity is a serious global problem, and the suboptimal vaccine-induced immune responses observed in the obese population cannot be ignored,” pleaded researchers from the Mayo Clinic’s Vaccine Research Group in a 2015 study published in the journal Vaccine.

Vaccines also are known to be less effective in older adults, which is why those 65 and older receive a supercharged annual influenza vaccine that contains far more flu virus antigens to help juice up their immune response.

By contrast, the diminished protection of the obese population — both adults and children — has been largely ignored.

“I’m not entirely sure why vaccine efficacy in this population hasn’t been more well reported,” said Catherine Andersen, an assistant professor of biology at Fairfield University who studies obesity and metabolic diseases. “It’s a missed opportunity for greater public health intervention.”

In 2017, scientists at UNC-Chapel Hill provided a critical clue about the limitations of the influenza vaccine. In a paper published in the International Journal of Obesity, they showed for the first time that vaccinated obese adults were twice as likely as adults of a healthy weight to develop influenza or flu-like illness.

Curiously, they found that adults with obesity did produce a protective level of antibodies to the influenza vaccine, but they still responded poorly.

“That was the mystery,” said Chad Petit, an influenza virologist at the University of Alabama.

One hypothesis, Petit said, is that obesity may trigger a metabolic dysregulation of T cells, white blood cells critical to the immune response. “It’s not insurmountable,” said Petit, who is researching COVID-19 in obese patients. “We can design better vaccines that might overcome this discrepancy.”

Historically, people with high BMIs often have been excluded from drug trials because they frequently have related chronic conditions that might mask the results. The clinical trials underway to test the safety and efficacy of a coronavirus vaccine do not have a BMI exclusion and will include people with obesity, said Dr. Larry Corey, of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, who is overseeing the phase 3 trials sponsored by the National Institutes of Health.

Although trial coordinators are not specifically focused on obesity as a potential complication, Corey said, participants’ BMI will be documented and results evaluated.

Dr. Timothy Garvey, an endocrinologist and director of diabetes research at the University of Alabama, was among those who stressed that, despite the lingering questions, it is still safer for obese people to get vaccinated than not.

“The influenza vaccine still works in patients with obesity, but just not as well,” Garvey said. “We still want them to get vaccinated.”

How the 1971 Stanford prison experiment prophesied America’s authoritarian backslide

If your boss dressed you up in military gear and told you to spray tear gas on a group of nonviolent protesting mothers, would you obey their orders? Most of us humans like to believe that we are moral creatures, driven by empathy, and that we wouldn’t do something cruel even if ordered to. Yet psychological studies have shown that the opposite is true, and that humans often obey unquestionably. Perhaps the most infamous study of this was the Stanford prison experiment, conducted nearly fifty years ago by Stanford University psychology professor Dr. Philip Zimbardo, which revealed how many human beings will be corrupted by power and bow to authoritarian leaders if socially permitted to do so.

One can see how this experiment has lingering relevance — for instance, in the ordeals of the Portland protesters, who have been tear-gassed amid peaceful protests and kidnapped in unmarked vehicles. What makes a law enforcement officer willing and ready to behave in these ways, to become foot-soldiers of a nascent police state, is a question that was already answered by the Stanford prison experiment.

First, though, a few words about the experiment itself. Conducted at Stanford University between August 14 and August 19, 1971, 24 students were divided into groups of “guards” (with nine students) and “prisoners” (consisting of 15 students) at a simulated prison in the basement of the college’s psychology building. Once there, Zimbardo reports, the “guards” fell into sadistic and authoritarian roles, while the “prisoners” became submissive and despondent. A number of “guards” appeared to show genuine pleasure in tormenting the “prisoners,” while the “prisoners” showed signs of extreme stress and learned helplessness.

Although intended to last for two weeks, the plug was pulled after less than one week. Still, the experiment became a go-to reference point for scholars and pundits attempting to explain how ordinary people can become tyrants when given power. Though ethical concerns and controversy still swirl around the Stanford prison experiment, its relevance today is undeniable. And as many Americans perceive the nation lurching towards authoritarianism, its conclusions are more vital to understand than ever. Indeed, only in understanding authoritarianism can one stop it.

As Zimbardo explained in his response to criticisms of the experiment:

My interest in exploring the psychology of time perspective, or the temporal zones in which we all live, emerged in part from the sense of distorted time we all experienced during the [Stanford prison experiment]. Without clocks or windows, that basement prison’s time revolved around each guard shift coming and going. We often felt trapped in an expanded present time zone when the guards were endlessly harassing the prisoners, or in a present fatalistic time zone that most prisoners experienced when nothing they did made a difference in how they were treated. I subsequently developed a scale to measure individual differences in time perspective, the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory…

Salon reached out to Zimbardo for this thoughts on how his experiment pertains to America’s political situation today.

“We have never seen anything like this before in America. And hopefully, when we get rid of [Trump] in November, we won’t see anything like this again,” Zimbardo — now a professor emeritus at Stanford — told Salon. After discussing how he and other psychologists, psychiatrists and mental health experts wrote a book in 2016 warning that Trump was mentally unfit to serve, he explained that Trump “is the most extreme case of a Present-oriented hedonist. And he attracts similar kinds of people.”

The phrase “Present-oriented hedonist” refers to the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory, which refers to the different ways in which people experience the past, present and future. As Zimbardo explained, “about 20% of almost any population are Present-oriented Hedonists.” Present-oriented hedonists are defined by how “they live in the moment. They never think about future consequences of their current actions. They always seek novelty and excitement. They’re easily bored with the familiar. They always challenge rules that limit their freedom.”

He added, “These are the people earlier who were against wearing seatbelts. These are the people earlier who against wearing head gear for riding bicycles or motorcycles. In general, they’re anti-conformist. They want to have freedom from any rules. They don’t follow rules. And so this is the most terrible positive for somebody who has the power of the President of the United States.” Not only has it caused Trump to bungle America’s response to the coronavirus, Zimbardo argued, but it has inspired the worst behaviors in his followers.

“What he exudes is power without limits. He can say whatever he wants, he makes up reality. He lives in his own world,” Zimbardo explained. “He makes it up. He makes it up. He doesn’t care. So that’s a real sense of power. I say whatever I want, because I like it. And his followers get power through him. They admire his ability to do whatever you want to say, whatever you want. He doesn’t have to follow any rules. He doesn’t have to follow any decor. And that’s what makes him and them dangerous, because it is all about power. It’s unconstrained power and it’s power without reason, which is deadly.”

Salon reached out to Dr. Bandy X. Lee, a forensic psychiatrist at Yale School of Medicine for 17 years who taught at Yale Law School for 15 of those years — as well as the editor of “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” (to which Zimbardo also contributed) — for further elaboration on the applicability of Zimbardo’s theories.

“The main point of the Stanford prison experiment is about the influence of institutional structure,” Lee told Salon by email. “When abuse and violence occur, we are inclined to attribute it to ‘a few bad apples,’ and the enormous influence of structures, mostly unseen but well-documented, is easily overlooked. In my own area of study, I emphasize how ‘structural violence’ is not only the most lethal form of violence — causing more than ten times the deaths from all the suicides, homicides, and collective violence in the world combined — but is also the most potent stimulant of behavioral violence.” After explaining that structural violence can entail political, economic and cultural layers of oppression — as well as the institutionalization of classism, racism and sexism — Lee identified how Trump’s presidency has exacerbated these unjust structures in the United States.

“Having a perpetrator of structural violence in the office of presidency means that not only will he kill through his policies that vastly increase the advantage of certain groups over others, but he will also cause deaths through incitement of violence,” Lee explained. “This, of course, is what is happening in Portland and in other cities: his structures and policies are stimulating violence. For what is happening now and other reasons — such as my work in prison reform and in global violence prevention — I have long considered the Stanford prison experiment to be one of the most important contributions to our understanding and never fail to assign it in my courses.”

Lee said she invited Zimbardo to speak at a conference last year about the dangerous state of the world because “he gave critical psychological insight into how Mr. Trump resembled the worst prison guards in his experiment. . . . We can extrapolate from this how he, as commander-in-chief, would create systems that produce maximal suffering and death, as well as generate more violent personalities in the society of which he is in charge.”

Dr. David Reiss, another contributor to the book and a fellow professor at Yale, echoed Zimbardo’s and Lee’s observations.

“Even though the experiment itself had its problems in terms of methodology and what it proved or did not prove, it still brought out the ideas that under certain circumstances, people can act in ways that are very sadistic, that are very authoritarian, that are not part of what they consider their usual personality,” Reiss explained. “And in that situation, it may not have been a perfect experiment, but on the other hand, it brought out that those capabilities are there. And we get to see in politics right now is that basically the cover has been taken off the wrappings of the worst part of people’s personalities in a lot of different ways.”

Reiss drew attention to how some of these aspects of the American character existed long before Trump rose to power.

“There are unique aspects to America because of where we came from in terms of slavery, in terms of civil rights, in terms of other issues,” Reiss told Salon. “But you can look at most cultures and see the same basic dynamics played out in different ways, that human beings have a capability of cruelty and sadism. And if it’s not kept in check one way or another, it can be extremely dangerous. And of course, the more that technology and the media can come into play now more than it did 20 years ago or 50 years ago, or a thousand years ago, the more dangerous it is in certain ways.”

Elizabeth Mika, a clinical therapist and another co-author of “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” noted that “there are questions as to the methodology of [the experiment] and the ethics of [the experiment]” and that “the results of the experiments, because of that, may be tainted.” At the same time, she argued that the behavior of Trump and his supporters is a real-life demonstration of the experiment’s applicability.

“We see people following Trump now, and supporting him and doing his bidding quite enthusiastically in fact, and that itself I think — if you’re looking at this huge experiment playing out in front of our eyes, so we don’t even have to artificially create these conditions — we have it laid out for us,” Mika told Salon. “You see the Republicans in Congress supporting Trump in his decisions and defending his bizarre statements as if they completely lost conscience. And so the question is, do they have a conscience in the first place?”

She added, “What Trump has done, I think he, he has given permission for people with with deficiencies in conscience to show their true colors.”

Reiss was pessimistic about whether America can become a fully functional democratic welfare state again.

“We can’t close Pandora’s box,” Reiss explained ruefully. “We could acknowledge what’s emerged and find better ways to deal with it. But just like really any time in history when something like this has come out, it’s a process of first having to get past the denial and acknowledge that there is a problem. And then within the context of the culture we’re in now, what better ways are there to deal with it?”

He added, “What might have been better after the Civil War or the Revolutionary War or World War I or World War II may not work now. What would have worked in Ancient Greece would not work now. So it’s not really a matter of going back as a matter of acknowledging that this is human nature, that the changes in human nature are going to be evolutionary over not even generations but over hundreds of years or millennia. But there are things we can do better to keep it in check in the current environment.”

Try this fruity, refreshing twist on cold brew

Since I started working from home last summer, I’ve been on a mission to make better, more interesting coffee drinks in my own kitchen. From interviewing the experts about their recommendations, to spicing up my cold brew game, it’s been a journey.

But one tip that I just couldn’t wrap my taste buds around came from Ren Doughty, outreach and customer support coordinator at Batdorf & Bronson Roasters: add fruit to your cold brew.

As he told Salon in April, “frozen and fresh fruit in iced coffee, either as ice cube substitutes or blended in, can be a fun way to add dimension to your drink. Blackberries or blueberries parallel a brew’s sweetness, while more tropical fruits like mango and pineapple highlight its acidity without being overpowering.”

So, I started experimenting and, after being gifted with a pint of fresh blackberries, found a winning combination — blackberries, ginger beer, and cold brew. It’s a simple drink, but these ingredients make for a really multifaceted flavor profile. It’s sweet, bitter, a little spicy and, above all, refreshing.

Recipe: Blackberry Cold Brew Fizz

Yields: 1 serving of 8 ounces

4 tablespoons of fresh or frozen blackberries
1 tablespoon of light brown sugar
½ cup of water
3 ounces of cold brew
5 ounces of ginger beer

1. In a small saucepan, combine the blackberries, brown sugar, and water. Bring the mixture to a boil, then reduce heat to a simmer, stirring occasionally until the fruit starts to break down and thicken — about 10 minutes. Set aside and allow it to cool.

2. Add the blackberries to a glass over ice and top with cold brew. Stir vigorously until combined.

3. Top off with ginger beer.

Trump aides Steve Mnuchin and Peter Navarro get in “knockdown, drag-out” yelling match: report

According to a report from the Washington Post, a discussion in the Oval Office over social media platform TikTok collapsed into a shouting match between Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and trade advisor Peter Navarro while Donald Trump sat and watched.

One spectator described it as “knockdown, drag-out” brawl.

The Post reports Mnuchin was under the understanding that he had convinced Trump to allow a sale of TikTok to Microsoft, only to run into a roadblock put up by Navarro arguing for a total ban.

During the discussion, Navarro reportedly accused Mnuchin of being soft on China and the two were described as getting into screaming match with each other in front of the president.

The Post adds the confrontation “was preceded by months of backroom dealings among investors, lobbyists and executives. Many of these stakeholders long understood the critical nature of establishing close connections with key figures in the Trump administration,” before adding, Trump signed an executive order Thursday ordering a shut down of TikTok’s U.S. operations if a divestiture did not occur by September.

You can read more here.

Trump and the Radical Republicans push our economy over a cliff

Donald Trump & Co. have thrown the already rapidly collapsing America off an economic cliff. Over the next few weeks, they will pound the wreckage, even set it afire, unless they get a lucrative new favor for Corporate America.

The Trumpians are actively ruining our economy because, in a perverse way, they share the belief of the Black Lives Matter protesters that the American justice system can’t be trusted. Both Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) cruel recalcitrance on coronavirus relief and the Black Lives Matter demands are about accountability in the courts.

I’ll explain that troubling nexus, but first, let’s understand the awful reality that Trump and Radical Republicans in the Senate have created and why it can only make our economic disaster worse.

Thanks to Trump’s denial of science and idiotic ideas about the coronavirus, the pandemic grows worse and worse even as Europeans and others are tamping down the pathogen.

Because of Trump’s mismanagement, America has been in economic freefall since March as the Grim Reaper roams freely.

GDP down 33%

In the second quarter, from April 1 to June 30, the economy shrank at a rate never before seen, not even during the Great Depression or the horrible economic panics of the late 19th Century.

“Real gross domestic product (GDP) decreased at an annual rate of 32.9% in the second quarter of 2020,” the Commerce Department announced Thursday.

During the Great Depression, the economy decreased by 36%. But that was after more than three years while the Commerce Department announcement was about a one-year rate.

If our economy continues contracting at its current rate in three years, we’ll have the economy when Jimmy Carter took office in 1977. That would be a 60% smaller economic pie to be split among 50% more people. For most people, the slices would be very thin, too thin for a decent life.

Accelerating economic collapse

Trump and his Radical Republican allies are accelerating our economic collapse by cutting off, effective today, the $600 of weekly relief payments going to 17 million people without jobs.

Collectively those out-of-work Americans will lose $10 billion of income next week and another $10 billion the week after that and on and on.

This will force overall spending in America to drop by about 2.5 cents on the dollar, a severe new constraint on the economy.

This cut off of relief money is not just a disaster for those without work. It means that grocery stores, hardware stores, utilities, and landlords will collect $10 billion less per week. In turn that will force more layoffs and will push some small businesses into bankruptcy, not to mention the adults and children who will go hungry.

Evicting Families

Adding to this Trumpian misery, the CARES Act moratorium on evictions ended last week. That means landlords can throw families into the street starting Aug. 24. Where landlords will find new paying tenants is a mystery. What we know for certain is that mass evictions will overwhelm local governments, social services agencies and charities.

Next, on Oct. 1, the airlines will be free to start layoffs. Congress gave $58 billion in coronavirus relief to the airlines on the promise that they keep people employed through the end of September. Even with that, Delta says it persuaded 17,000 workers to retire or take buyouts.

More than 60,000 workers are expected to lose their jobs at just two airlines, American and United, come October. In all more than 100,000 airline workers are likely to get the boot just before the Nov. 3 presidential election. That, in turn, will mean even less spending and thus pressure on more small businesses to fold, causing those fired small business workers to need relief.

And, atop this, Trump wants to get rid of the United States Post Office, throwing its 496,000 staffers into the unemployment lines.

And why is this happening? What’s behind this economic injustice of throwing the economy off a cliff during the deadliest public health crisis in a century? The answer lies in the Washington cult of corporatism and its mantra of freedom from accountability.

Courts not trusted

Mitch McConnell believes that the civil courts simply are not just. The senate majority leader fears that workers who are hired back and then contract COVID-19 will sue their employers and then collect huge jury awards.

So, McConnell says, there will be no jobless relief or help for small business until Congress grants corporations absolute immunity from coronavirus litigation. Never mind that there is no evidence to support his fear, that the courts have made lawsuits much harder to file, especially class action lawsuits, and that McConnell has packed the federal bench with Trumpians.

On one level this is part of the long-term trend in America of giving corporations more and more power while simultaneously requiring less and less accountability.

Trump has slashed all manner of environmental and other regulations, pretty much stopped enforcing job safety laws and made it much more difficult to file complaints with regulatory agencies, which even when a complaint is successfully made do next to nothing.

Trumpian immorality

Giving corporations a pass on coronavirus litigation would encourage the worst business practices. Many companies act responsibly. Regulations exist to protect us from the worst operators. Awful employers would benefit from McConnell’s position, which is the soulless idea that being American means you enjoy the right to behave badly, especially if you are rich enough to own a business.

In the immoral world McConnell favors, and Trump has lived in since birth, businesses are not privileged creatures of the state allowed to exist so long as they operate thoughtfully. No, to these two men and their confreres, controlling an American corporation means being free to act dangerously while the state protects you from accountability for your bad deeds.

Why spend money on personal protection equipment for workers during a pandemic? Why slow the production line for disinfecting? Why widen distances between workers when you can just pack them close enough so they breathe one another’s droplets? And when those droplets are laced with coronavirus, causing workers to get sick and die, why should widows and orphans be able to sue?

Black Lives Matter

This is the perverse place where Trump, McConnell and Senate Republicans meet Black Lives Matter.

The Black Lives Matter movement doesn’t trust the justice system, either. But its concern runs in the opposite direction. The Black Lives Matter people want to remove the institutional, legal and cultural shields that protect violent police officers. They don’t trust the system to hold police accountable and provide recompense to innocent victims like Breonna Taylor, shot to death by Louisville police who broke into her home March 13 with a no-knock warrant.

Even if the House Democrats wilt and give McConnell the corporate favor he wants, the Kentucky senator says he won’t allow the $600 weekly relief payments. He wants the benefit cut by at least two thirds to $200 per week.

The tragedy of the Trump and McConnell position is that this goes far beyond their shared contempt for the 51 million Americans—roughly one of every three workers—who have filed for unemployment benefits in the last 17 weeks.

Trump and McConnell are so eager to concentrate economic power even more than today that they will make millions suffer. And it’s not just the jobless today, but those who will be laid off as the lack of relief payments forces more business to tighten up, shut down and even file for liquidation in federal bankruptcy court.

One last, and troubling, note…

Even if McConnell folds today and agrees to resume relief payments, the money will not flow smoothly or swiftly. Only 14 of the 50 states have modernized their systems for paying jobless benefits.

In California it will take as many as 20 weeks to restart payments and add new people to the relief roster, Sharon Hilliard, who heads California’s Employment Development Department, told a legislative committee Thursday.

That means some of the unfortunate who have or will lose their jobs due to the coronavirus can expect their next federal relief the week before Christmas, assuming they still have an address and we still have a Post Office.

It’s time for Ghislaine Maxwell’s reckoning in the “Surviving Jeffrey Epstein” docuseries

When Jeffrey Epstein was at the height of his power and seemed untouchable, he and his web of enablers, including Ghislaine Maxwell, reportedly were trafficking five or six girls a day.

“Surviving Jeffrey Epstein,” Lifetime’s new four-hour documentary, demonstrates how this was an open secret in his social circle, a sphere of influence that expanded to include some of the world’s wealthiest and most recognizable people.

Enough knew enough about his predatory habits that at his 40th birthday party, when British journalist Christopher Mason recited a custom-written composition at his former friend Maxwell’s behest, a telling moment seared itself into his memory.

“He taught math at Dalton: The naughty boy blushes/ To think of schoolgirls and all of their crushes,” he had read aloud to a roomful of people, some of whom snickered.

“It seemed like that was something that was known about him at the time, that he liked younger girls,” Mason says in the documentary, after admitting that in the context of what the world knows about Epstein now, his bawdy little ditty reads a good deal creepier. “It’s that odd thing of something that seems tongue in cheek, but you have no real sense of how utterly depraved his intentions were.”

“Surviving Jeffrey Epstein,” as the title implies, follows in the path of Lifetime’s previous documentary “Surviving R. Kelly” in granting a safe, supportive forum to the eight women who agreed to go on camera and recount their stories of being sexual exploited by Epstein and Maxwell, including Virginia Giuffre, perhaps the most prominent accuser associated with this case.

Filmmakers Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern edited these four hours in a way that locks our focus on the lives and bravery of these survivors, capturing their determination and refusing to turn the lens away from moments in which the lasting ache of what they’ve gone through and continue to live with surfaces anew.

“From our perspective, the women themselves and their stories are so specific and so clear, and caused them so much trauma,” Stern told Salon in a recent phone conversation. “This isn’t an easy thing for them to come forward and share these stories. They’re certainly not doing it for fame or fortune. They’re doing it because they want to hopefully prevent this from happening to some other young person and also to hopefully change the laws so that people who have been sexually abused won’t be up against these timelines of statute of limitations.”

Epstein was found dead in his Manhattan jail cell on August 10, 2019, and to some it would seem that this series arrives too late, coinciding with that one-year anniversary. (Netflix already traversed similar territory, albeit in more lurid fashion, in its docuseries “Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich.”)

But what Sundberg and Stern argue quite powerfully over the course of their series’ four parts is that the only way that the world’s most prolific serial sex offender and child molester could have operated so successfully, and trafficked girls from around the globe for so long without facing consequences, is that he didn’t operate on his own.

Maxwell was taken into custody on July 2 of this year. And it is her involvement that constitutes the main thrust of the fourth episode, which builds that case that even though Epstein’s death denied these women justice, they may get their day in court to confront Maxwell.

“What made [“Surviving R. Kelly] notable was the series itself helped lead to charges. It really helped effect criminal justice repercussions,” Stern said. “We feel in some ways that we have some traction now with that, especially with the focus on Ghislaine in the fourth episode. And I think with her trial and the case pending, everyone will be curious to see now if there’ll be additional charges that will be laid against some of the people who have been previously either protected or not named.”

Each hour carefully walks us through Epstein’s rise to become one of the world’s richest men while carefully refraining from humanizing him. Instead, the documentary closely examines the means by which the New York financier corrupted and successfully circumvented the justice system for most of his life.

Stern and Sundberg also lay out the web of co-conspirators named in a 2008 federal case brought against him, including Sarah Kellen, Nadia Marcinkova, Lesley Groff ,and Adriana Ross, none of whom have ever been charged with a crime, and Jean-Luc Brunel, a former modeling agency scout who has denied any wrongdoing and, like the others, has not been charged with any crime.

Every episode includes multiple reminders to viewers of each named co-conspirators insistence on their innocence, including a card from Kellen identifying her as a “potential co-conspirator” in a non-prosecution agreement between federal prosecutors and Epstein in 2008 that adds,

Her spokesperson told CBS News she was “sexually” and “psychologically” abused by Epstein for years, and “deeply regrets” any part in “the pain and damage Epstein caused.” She has not been charged with any crime.

But Sundberg and Stern are unsparing in terms of pointing out, by way of survivor testimony and ample photographic evidence, how many famous, powerful people were close enough to Epstein and Maxwell to have some idea of what was going on, and yet did absolutely nothing about it.

An extensive array of photographs are woven throughout the series showing Epstein and Maxwell with their arms slung around a jaw-slackening array of public figures. You will recognize Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, and Naomi Campbell, and many, many party pictures of the pair being chummy with Donald Trump.

Giuffre first came forward in 2014 and alleged that she had been trafficked by Epstein and Maxwell over the course of several years and, most shockingly, lent out to friends of theirs, including Prince Andrew and Alan Dershowitz.

Prince Andrew, as far as the filmmakers know, has not been interviewed by the FBI. As of May of this year, he has permanently resigned from all public duties.

However, it is Trump’s connection with Epstein that made the latter a household name in 2019. He wasn’t known in many circles outside of New York and Hollywood, even though his earlier deal that enabled him to slip free of federal charges – and facilitated between 2007and 2008 by Dershowitz and Trump’s eventual Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta, who was then the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida – made national headlines.

Acosta resigned from his position within the administration last year amid rising criticism over his handling of Epstein’s 2008 deal – specifically his agreement that the deal would be kept from Epistein’s victims, which is a violation of federal law.

But those photos of Epstein and Maxwell cozied up to Donald Trump and Melania at various parties over the years granted him a new level of national celebrity, and his suspicious death made him even more famous. Plus, long before this docuseries came into existence Trump’s quote from a 2002 New York Magazine article recirculated in the news: “”He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

When it became clear that Epstein was not going to wriggle out of his 2019 arrest and the resulting charges stuck, suddenly Trump claimed wasn’t terribly close with the man. A few eyebrow-raising shots in the fourth episode of documents, some with details redacted, tell another story.

Sundberg and Stern stressed in their interview that for most of these people, being seen in photos with Epstein and Maxwell does not mean that whatever relationship each of these public figures had included participation in any kind of sexual abuse or recruitment of young girls. True to that statement, Dershowitz denies, on camera, that he engaged in any sexual activity with any minors as Giuffre accuses him of doing.

Regardless of each person’s level of actual culpability, this visual evidence of their relationship with Epstein means, as Sundberg puts it, that each “either knew, felt or sensed” that the whisperings about his criminal behavior had to be true. In a later episode, a representative working for one of Gates’ research foundations raised concerns about the foundation accepting money from Epstein, but her protests fell on deaf ears.

“They just didn’t think it was their place to say anything, or to question his behavior,” Sundberg said. “It’s remarkable, whether or not they participated in the abuses.”

Stern added that the silence reminded them of the murder of Kitty Genovese, the famous 1964 case that inspired the social psychological theory known as “the bystander effect. “There’s this sort of a group mentality of, ‘Well, if the president isn’t going to call it out, who am I to say something is going on? Who am I to suggest that?”

In this way, “Surviving Jeffrey Epstein” becomes a study of the multiple ways that these women – and the scores of other victims whose names and faces we don’t know – were failed by the justice system and the people around Epstein and Maxwell.

Since Sundberg and Stern also are contending with a moving target with this case, that could turn around at a moment’s notice. The pair were cutting in relevant material only days ago. That includes Trump’s July 210 press conference in which he replied to the question of how well he knew Maxwell with his questionable answer that they were quite familiar, and “I wish her well, frankly.”

Any viewer with a conscience will feel the opposite, especially after taking in moments such as one fourth episode glimpse of Maxwell, glamourous in a fiery tangerine-sequined gown, as survivor Rachel Benavidez says in voiceover, “I don’t think she has any remorse about what she did. I hope she spends every last day of her life in an orange jumpsuit.”

“Surviving Jeffrey Epstein” airs over two nights, with its first half debuting on Sunday, Aug. 9 at 8 p.m.and its conclusion airing at Monday, Aug.10 at 9 p.m. on Lifetime.

Do voters want “back to normal” or big, sweeping change? Maybe it’s both at once

This entire extraordinary year has offered an extended lesson in the age-old truth that apparently contradictory things can both be true — usually because the contradiction is imaginary.

Consider the apparent confusion within the forces of “resistance” arrayed against Donald Trump, reflected in the unanswerable question afflicting the Democratic Party: Do Americans want a return to “normal,” assuming for the moment that such a state existed in the recent past and can somehow be recovered? Or do they yearn — as the George Floyd protests suggested — for bigger and more ambitious change that goes beyond the paralyzed political duopoly to address America’s enormous economic inequality, structural injustice and disordered national priorities?

In early March, just before the coronavirus began sweeping across the United States (or to be more accurate, just before we began taking it seriously) Democratic primary voters overwhelmingly chose former Vice President Joe Biden over Sen. Bernie Sanders as the party’s presidential nominee. Progressives can mutter and complain about this all they want, and they certainly did: The theory that Biden’s sudden reversal of fortune was engineered by Barack Obama is highly plausible, and the theory that the 2020 primary campaign represented a generational conflict within the Democratic electorate, in which older voters triumphed, is simply true.

But the outpouring of both white suburban voters and Southern Black voters for Biden, who had run a lackluster campaign that seemed to promise nothing specific beyond a return to a borderline-imaginary pre-2016 politics of decency and moderation, sent an unmistakable signal. By and large, Democratic voters didn’t want the potentially disruptive “political revolution” promised by Sanders. They were eager to return to a “normal” America, more or less defined as a place and time where they didn’t have to obsess about politics constantly and weren’t kept up at night by the fact that the president was an ignorant and dangerous racist buffoon.

Who can blame them, honestly? And yet, and yet: Ever since Biden swept to victory on Super Tuesday and the subsequent primaries, Democratic primary voters in various places have delivered a different and more complicated message. Three more longtime incumbent members of Congress have been primaried out by more progressive opponents this year, including a committee chairman, Rep. Eliot Engel of New York, and the scion of a Black political dynasty in St. Louis, Rep. William Lacy Clay of Missouri.

Another committee chair, Rep. Carolyn Maloney of New York, survived by an eyelash after a painfully slow six-week vote count. Two other New York progressives — City Councilman Ritchie Torres in the heavily Latino South Bronx, and former Justice Department lawyer Mondaire Jones in the largely-white northern suburbs — defeated establishment-supported Democrats for open House seats, and will become the first two openly gay Black members of Congress. Similar conflicts lie ahead: Rep. Richard Neal of Massachusetts, chair of the House Ways and Means Committee and grateful recipient of Big Pharma and financial industry dollars on a grand scale, faces an intriguing challenge from Alex Morse, openly gay 31-year-old mayor of the working-class city of Holyoke.

As I wrote back in June, the primary race between Engel and Black middle-school principal Jamaal Bowman was without question a proxy war between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (whose district adjoins Engel’s), and also part of the long tail of the 2016 primary campaign between Sanders and Hillary Clinton, which essentially has never ended. A 30-year incumbent with a long record as a foreign-policy hawk and a supporter of Israel, Engel was endorsed by Pelosi, Clinton and Chuck Schumer, and leading Democratic PACs poured millions into his campaign. Bowman was backed by Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren, and pulled support from Justice Democrats and similar left-wing groups. In the end, it wasn’t even close.

When you move to down-ticket races, the primary results have been even more startling. As Clay’s defeat in St. Louis by Cori Bush, a registered nurse and Black Lives Matter activist backed by Sanders, AOC and the Justice Democrats, has made clear, this trend is not limited to big coastal cities — although New York is certainly its epicenter.

In the June 23 New York primary, seven incumbent Democrats in the State Assembly lost to opponents affiliated with either the Democratic Socialists of America, the Working Families Party or both. That result sent shockwaves through the region’s political establishment and provoked wild charges that the challengers (mostly people of color) were part of some sinister racist conspiracy funded by out-of-state white radicals.

Clear across the country in New Mexico, the pattern was just as distinctive: Five powerful State Senate incumbents regarded as moderate or centrist Democrats — including the Senate president pro tem, the chair of the Finance Committee and the former chair of the Judiciary Committee — were defeated by younger progressive challengers in early June. As the Santa Fe New Mexican put it, “the conservative wing within the Democratic caucus in the state Senate is largely gone.”

It’s important to note here that in U.S. Senate races, which by their nature attract more media attention, public interest and donor money, the Democratic establishment has been far more successful in protecting its favored candidates. In virtually every case where Democrats see a realistic opportunity to flip a Republican-held seat — especially now that winning an overall majority seems within reach — the candidate hand-selected by Chuck Schumer and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has prevailed. Maine, Colorado, Iowa, Montana, Arizona, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas and Georgia could all hypothetically elect new Democratic senators (at varying levels of probability), and not a single one of the nominees in those states is even remotely contaminated with the Bernie virus.

Even the solitary exception is instructive: In last week’s Tennessee Senate primary, Black environmental activist Marquita Bradshaw, who ran an all-volunteer campaign on almost no money, staged a major upset over DSCC pick James Mackler, a white military veteran who spent $1.5 million on the race — and finished third. That race attracted virtually no national media and was not a focus of national fundraising, because nobody expects a Democrat to win a major statewide office in Tennessee anytime soon. Mackler was anointed to keep things respectable against Trump-endorsed Republican Bill Hagerty, and perhaps to distract GOP resources away from other races, notably the one between Amy McGrath and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in neighboring Kentucky.

I’m not suggesting that Bradshaw is more likely to win in November than Mackler would have been. She’s not. But McGrath won’t beat McConnell either, and the liberal voters across the country who keep sending her checks might as well be investing in Nigerian princelings’ online banking schemes. At least Tennessee voters will face a strikingly clear moral and ideological choice — one that’s likely to galvanize Black voters in Memphis, Nashville and Chattanooga and could lead to down-ballot local victories.

As I wrote six weeks ago, it’s high time for “Democrats to quit pretending that the progressive uprising that began with the 2016 Sanders campaign is a delusional and dangerous Marxist white-boy cult, or simply a fluke.” But a distinctive pattern has become clear since then: When establishment Democrats are paying close attention and have a large canvas to work with — as on Super Tuesday, or in a high-visibility statewide campaign — they can control the media messaging, turn out more moderate voters and generally achieve the desired result. At the more granular, retail-politics level of congressional districts, state legislature seats and local races, establishment candidates are highly vulnerable to grassroots activist campaigns.

None of this is a brand new discovery: That’s exactly how evangelical Christians and other right-wing groups built a power base within the Republican Party, eventually driving out the party’s Northeastern country-club “liberals” and forcing the so-called GOP mainstream sharply to the right. For decades, observers have suggested that a similar conflict within the Democratic coalition was inevitable, especially as party leaders sought to split the difference between their own voters and the increasingly intransigent and delusional Republicans.

I don’t think the confusing results of Democratic primaries reflect a fundamental contradiction, exactly. It’s more like a rapidly changing political dynamic, or perhaps a dialectic. In the year of the coronavirus pandemic, the Black Lives Matter uprising and the implosion of the Trump presidency, people view entrenched power with enormous suspicion and yearn for something different — however well or poorly defined. In that sense, the same forces that have positioned Joe Biden and a bunch of mainstream Senate candidates for a sweeping victory this fall have also endangered dug-in down-ballot Democratic incumbents across the country.

For months, politicians and the mainstream media told us there was a contradiction between controlling the coronavirus and “saving” the U.S. economy. As my Salon colleague Amanda Marcotte has repeatedly observed, this was always a bogus dichotomy: Forcing open the doors of Buffalo Wild Wings and Bed Bath & Beyond will not spark any kind of economic recovery amid an uncontrolled pandemic that has now killed — I have grown used to looking up the number every day — more than 162,000 Americans.

It’s also no contradiction that a year when most Americans have spent most of the last five months inside their homes has also witnessed the biggest explosion of street protest since the Vietnam War. Conservatives have seized on this as evidence of America-hating libtard hypocrisy, but that’s based on the brain-dead assumption that leftists or progressives liked being cooped up indoors, and had some sadomasochistic desire to see that continue indefinitely. In fact, the George Floyd killing and the broader issue of institutional racism triggered an uprising that was only partly about those things, but was also an outpouring of anger at the Trump administration’s tragic mishandling of the pandemic, its rampant bigotry and corruption, and its efforts to undermine democracy and tip the country into discount-store fascism.

So do Americans want to go “back to normal,” whatever that means, or do they want to tear down the entire system and rebuild anew? Well, different people want different things in different contexts, obviously — but on a more global and historical scale the only possible answer to that question is yes. All the contradictions of 2020 have revealed an immense appetite for change: That is both exciting and dangerous, and offers more reasons for hope than we’ve had in decades.

How a mind-controlling, sexually transmitted fungus turns cicadas into “zombies”

A new study reveals that male cicadas, when infected with a mind-controlling fungus that devours large parts of their bodies, will trick other male cicadas into being infested by the same horrifying parasite — thanks in part to a psychoactive chemical found in hallucinogenic mushrooms.

One of the chemicals in this fungus is psilocybin, the psychoactive that causes humans to “trip” when they consume psychedelic mushrooms. Intriguingly, scientists believe that in infected cicadas, this drug may actually help the cicada endure the trauma of having the lower half of its bottom replaced by said fungus while the upper half decays. This is important, as the fungus starts “pulling the behavioral levers” of the cicada through various chemical interactions with the insect’s biology.

The researchers, including lead study author Brian Lovett from the Division of Plant and Soil Sciences at West Virginia University, describe how the fungus Massospora is able to engage in active host transmission, a process in which a pathogen uses “a form of biological puppetry” to manipulate one living host in order to transfer its material to another living host. This is why they are colloquially referred to as “zombie cicadas,” both in the classical definition of that term (a dead or hypnotized being whose mind is controlled by another) and the contemporary cinematic one (a body that is literally decaying but continues to move around).

“Manipulation of a host to focus on pathogen transmission is fascinating, because it raises questions about the nature of autonomy and shines a light on the physical and behavioral manifestations of parasitism,” the study, which was published in the journal PLOS Pathogens, says.

Salon reached out to Lovett to learn more about what this study suggests about the nature of free will in both insects and humans.

“We wouldn’t claim to know what these cicadas are feeling or thinking during infection, but it’s certainly tempting to empathize: how horrified would you be to discover that a sizable part of your body has been replaced by a fungus?” Lovett said by email. “What we can do is look at how some of the interesting compounds these fungi produce may affect the behavior of their cicada victims.”

When describing periodical cicadas, Lovett observed that “an amphetamine (cathinone) is produced. This drug certainly changes our mood and behavior, and it has been shown to alter aggression and feeding in other insects. We speculate these fungal drugs may help cicadas endure the trauma of having their abdomen replaced by fungus, as they continue to spread its spores.”

I asked Lovett if his research suggests that a similarly mind-controlling organism could rob human beings of their free will. Lovett laughed and replied, “I do not see a fungus evolving to replace our butts anytime soon. Modern medicine and pants prevent that from becoming a winning fungal lifestyle. However, there are already examples of parasites that manipulate our mood and behavior. In our PLOS Pathogens article, we highlight rabies as a pathogen that changes who we are to the benefit of the virus.”

Indeed, humans who suffer rabies experience hydrophobia and difficulty swallowing, which lets the virus build up in the victims’ mouth. They also become more aggressive, and in animal cases, will bite others, thus spreading the virus. In other words, rabies is a good example of a virus altering mammals’ behavior in the virus’ favor.

Massospora also has the dubious distinction of being the only known example of active host transmission in which “the pathogen behaves at least in part as a sexually transmitted disease, although natural history studies are lacking.” Massospora often infects cicadas from the Magicicada genus, also known as periodical cicadas, which includes seven species that are known to spend either 13 or 17 years underground as nymphs before emerging for a few weeks to mate and die.

To find a partner, cicadas from this genus will practice “highly stereotyped” behavior in which “males call and females respond with wing flicks, but healthy males never signal with wing flicks. When females remain unmated much beyond the onset of sexual receptivity, their responses become exaggerated with louder, more consistent wing flicks and sometimes even whole-body motions that appear to draw the attention of chorusing males.”

This is where Massospora enters the picture. The spores will force the zombified cicadas to move their wings in a way that other males of the species will associate with females seeking to mate. Once the unsuspecting male approaches the supposed female, the spores will be able to infect the new host. Instead of being able to mate with other cicadas and lay eggs before dying, the zombie cicadas are manipulated by the fungus to fly around so they can spread more spores.

In a visceral passage on why the term “zombie cicada” is visually appropriate, Nature’s Scientific Reports wrote in 2018 that after copulation it is not uncommon “to see healthy cicadas attached to fragments of abdomen or terminalia that have torn free from infected partners during attempted copulation.”

Here’s how the NRA’s new legal woes may cripple GOP candidates in November

It was announced this week that the New York attorney general is filing a suit against the National Rifle Association over fraud and saying that they must close down. It’s a case that was part of an 18-month investigation that revealed the gun lobbying group is “fraught with fraud and abuse.” Now, the NRA is faced with trying to convince the public that they’re still relevant.

Bloomberg reported Friday that the lavish spending on clothing for the group’s CEO, internal disputes, and questions about foreign donations are all crashing together just in time for the 2020 election. After spending millions to elect President Donald Trump, the NRA now struggles with its credibility.

“The timing of the lawsuits is inauspicious,” the report said. “With the presidential and congressional elections scheduled for November, the non-profit faces a variety of challenges to raise money and cover mounting legal expenses. And its longstanding leadership is being attacked by New York State.”

Republicans who accept money from the group may face questions about the corruption and illegal behavior at a time the GOP is struggling to hold onto whatever seats it has left.

“It will diminish its direct influence because they’re going to have to be in defense mode,” said Daniel Kurtz, an attorney representing non-profit groups.

Bloomberg explained that GOP politicians, from Trump all the way down the ballot, have a lot to lose this election. “In past elections, the Republican party has benefited as the NRA energized its base, got people to the polls, and funded its campaigns,” said the report.

The group has pivoted from defending the GOP to defending itself amid legal battles, telling supporters that they are under attack by New York. They’ve already attempted to counter-sue Attorney General Letitia James in federal court, saying that she’s attempting to violate their First Amendment rights. However, the First Amendment doesn’t cover the right to commit fraud, so it’s unclear how successful the counter-suit will be.

“The NRA also accused James in the lawsuit of colluding with Everytown for Gun Safety,” the report said. “Carolyn Meadows, the NRA’s president, called James’s suit a baseless, premeditated attack on the Second Amendment that was timed to have maximum impact during the election cycle.”

“You could have set your watch by it: the investigation was going to reach its crescendo as we move into the 2020 election cycle,” she said. “It’s a transparent attempt to score political points and attack the leading voice in opposition to the leftist agenda.”

The Center for Responsive Politics says the NRA has only spent a little over $900,000 for the election and has about $3.6 million reserved in advertising. It’s a far cry from the $419 million the group spent in 2016.

Read the full report at Bloomberg News.

Trump makes an overtly racist appeal to white suburban voters but doesn’t understand modern suburbia

President Donald Trump, recalling the law-and-order themes that President Richard Nixon and segregationist George Wallace used in their 1968 presidential campaigns, has been trying to frighten suburbanites into voting for him. In one of his tweets, Trump claimed that if former Vice President Joe Biden is elected president, he will use “low-income housing” to destroy suburbia as we know it. When Trump mentions “low-income housing,” that’s his way of warning white suburbanites that unless they want to see an influx of new African-American and Latino neighbors, they had better reelect him. But as the Rev. Al Sharpton has pointed out, Trump’s claims about suburbia are not only blatantly racist — they are also painfully out of date and fail to take into account the realities of gentrification.

The Suburban Housewives of America must read this article. Biden will destroy your neighborhood and your American Dream. I will preserve it, and make it even better! https://t.co/1NzbR57Oe6

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 23, 2020

In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the term “inner-city” was often used in connection with African-American neighborhoods. Soul icon Marvin Gaye had a major hit in 1971 with his political classic “Inner City Blues,” which discussed economic frustrations in the black community. But gentrification has accelerated considerably in recent decades, forcing many working class African-Americans — and working class whites and Latinos, for that matter — to leave inner-city neighborhoods and look for more affordable housing in suburban areas. When African-Americans are forced out of Harlem and areas of Brooklyn by gentrification, skyrocketing rents and skyrocketing property taxes, they seek more affordable options in New Jersey. When African-Americans can no longer afford South Philly or West Philly, they look for housing in the Philadelphia suburbs of Montgomery County, Bucks County, Delaware County or Chester County.

…Your housing prices will go up based on the market, and crime will go down. I have rescinded the Obama-Biden AFFH Rule. Enjoy!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 29, 2020

Suburban areas in general are much more racially integrated than they were 40 or 50 years ago. In a 2016 report for the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University, Alan Berube (deputy director of the Brookings Institute) found that combined, blacks, Latinos and Asians comprised 35% of the suburban population in the United States.

In 2011, John Sullivan (a research associate at the Applied Research Center) found that more and more blacks were “moving from inner cities to suburbs. The proportion of the black population living in the biggest city of a given metropolitan area decreased in all 20 of the nation’s largest metro areas in the past decade. For example, the percentage of the Detroit area’s black residents living in the city of Detroit itself dropped by 16%. Other major cities home to large black populations, including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Oakland, have all experienced large black population losses as well, as residents have left these places for suburbs or the South — or both. Notably, southern metro areas top the list for national gains in suburban black residents.”

That was almost a decade ago, and suburbia has not grown any less African-American or any less Latino since then. Trump, in other words, is making a racist appeal to a suburbia that no longer exists. The president is trying to terrify white suburbanites by telling them that they will end up with African-American and Latino neighbors if Biden has his way, but in fact, millions of white suburbanites already have African-American and Latino neighbors — even if the president of the United States doesn’t know it.

Darwin, Expression, and the lasting legacy of eugenics

In 1872, with the publication of “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,” Charles Darwin went rogue. Only a decade after the anatomist Duchenne de Boulogne’s produced the first neurology text illustrated by photographs, Darwin claimed to be the first to use photographs in a scientific publication to actually document the expressive spectrum of the face.

Combining speculation about raised eyebrows and flushed skin with vile commentary about mental illness, he famously logged diagrams of facial musculature, along with drawings of sulky chimpanzees and photographs of weeping infants, to create a study that spanned species, temperament, age, and gender. But what really interested him was not so much the specificity of the individual as the universality of the tribe: If expressions could, as de Boulogne had suggested, be physically localized, could they also be culturally generalized?

As a man of science, he set out to analyze the visual difference between types, which is to say races. While Darwin’s scientific contributions remain ever significant, it’s worth remembering he was also a man of his era — privileged, white, affluent, commanding — who generalized as much as, if not more than, he analyzed, especially when it came to objectifying people’s looks. In spite of his influence on evolutionary biology and his role in the scientific study of emotion, Darwin’s prognostications read today as remarkably prejudicial. (“No determined man,” he writes in “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,” “probably ever had an habitually gaping mouth.”) This urge to label “types” — a loaded and unfortunate term — would essentially go viral in the early years of the coming century, with such assumptions reasserting themselves as dogmatic, even axiomatic, fact.

Hardly the first to postulate on the graphic evidence of the grimace, Darwin hoped to introduce a system by which facial expressions might be properly evaluated. He shared with many of his generation a predisposition toward history: simply put, the idea that certain facial traits might have a basis in evolution. Empirically, the idea itself is not unreasonable. We are, after all, genetically predisposed to share traits with those in our familial line, occasionally by virtue of our geographic vicinity. At the same time, certain specimens, when classified by visual genre, become the easy targets of discrimination. In so doing, comparisons can — and do — glide effortlessly from hypothesis to hyperbole, particularly when images are in play.

Almost exactly a century after the arrival of Darwin’s volume, Paul Ekman, a psychologist at the University of California, published a study in which he determined that there were seven principal facial expressions deemed universal across all cultures: anger, contempt, fear, happiness, interest, sadness, and surprise. His Facial Action Coding System (FACS) supported many of Darwin’s earlier findings and remains, to date, the gold standard for identifying any movement the face can make. As a methodology for parsing facial expression, Ekman’s work provides a practical rubric for understanding these distinctions: It’s logical, codified, and clear. But what happens to such comparative practices when supposition trumps proposition, when the science of scrutiny is eclipsed by the lure of a bigger, messier, more global extrapolation? When does the quest for the universal backfire — and become a discriminatory practice?

The real seduction, in Darwin’s era and in our own, lies in the notion that pictures — and especially pictures of our faces — are remarkably powerful tools of persuasion and do, in so many instances, speak louder than words.

The idea that photography allowed for the demonstration and distribution of objective visual evidence was a striking development for clinicians. Unlike the interpretive transference of a drawing, or the abstract data of a diagram, the camera was clear and direct, a vehicle for proof. The process itself allowed for a kind of massive stockpiling — pictures compared to one another, minutiae contrasted, hypotheses often mistakenly corroborated — which, while arguably rooted in scientific inquiry, led to a stunning degree of generalization in the name of fact. If evolution is seen as the study of unseen development — biological, generational, temporal, and by definition intangible — the camera provided the illusion of quantifiable benchmarks, an irresistible proposition for the proponents of theoretical ideas.

* * *

Darwin’s cousin, the noted statistician Francis Galton, saw such generalizations as precisely the point. Long before computer software would make such computational practice commonplace, he introduced not a lateral but a synthetic system for facial comparison: what he termed “composite portraiture” was, in fact, a neologism for pictorial averaging. Galton’s objective was to identify deviation and, in so doing, to reverse-engineer an ideal “type,” which he did by repeat printing — upon a single photographic plate and within the same vicinity to one another — thereby creating a force-amalgamated portrait of multiple faces. At once besotted with mechanical certainty and mesmerized by the scope of visual wonder before him, Galton thrilled to the notion of mathematical precision — the lockup on the photographic plate, the reckoning of the binomial curve — but appeared uninterested in actual details unless they could help reaffirm his suppositions about averages, about types, even about the photomechanical process itself.

That Galton drew upon the language of statistical fact — and benefited from the presumed sovereignty of his own exalted social position — to become an evangelist for the camera is questionable in itself, but the fact that he viewed his composite photographs as plausible evidence for an unforgiving sociocultural rationale shifts the legacy of his scholarship into far more pernicious territory.

At once driven by claims of biological determinism and supported by the authoritarian heft of British empiricism, Francis Galton pioneered an insidious form of human scrutiny that would come to be known as eugenics. The word itself comes from the Greek word eugenes (noble, well-born, and “good in stock”), though Galton’s own definition is a bit more sinister: For him, it was a science addressing “all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race, also with those that develop them to the utmost advantage.” The idea of social betterment through better breeding (indeed, the notion of better anything through breeding) led to a horrifying era of social supremacism in which “deviation” would come to be classified across a broad spectrum of race, religion, health, wealth, and every imaginable kind of human infirmity. Grossly and idiosyncratically defined — even a “propensity” for carpentry or dress-making was considered a genetically inherited trait — Galton’s remarkably flawed (and deeply racist) ideology soon found favor with a public eager to assert, if nothing else, its own vile claims to vanity.

The social climate into which eugenic doctrine inserted itself appealed to precisely this fantasy, beginning with “Better Baby” and “Fitter Family” contests, an unfortunate staple of recreational entertainment that emerged across the regional United States during the early years of the 20th century. Widely promoted as a wholesome public health initiative, the idea of parading good-looking children for prizes (a practice that essentially likened kids to livestock) was one of a number of practices predicated on the notion that better breeding outcomes were in everyone’s best interest. The resulting photos conferred bragging rights on the winning (read “white”) contestants, but the broader message — framing beauty, but especially facial beauty, as a scientifically sanctioned community aspiration — implicitly suggests that the inverse was also true: that to be found “unfit” was to be doomed to social exile and thus restricted, among other things, by fierce reproductive protocols.

In 29 states — beginning in 1907 and until the laws were repealed in the 1940s — those deemed socially inferior (an inexcusable euphemism for what was then defined as physically “inadequate”) were, in fact, subject to compulsory sterilization. From asthma to scoliosis, mental disability to moral delinquency, eugenicists denounced difference in light of a presumed cultural superiority, a skewed imperialism that found its most nefarious expression during the Third Reich. To measure difference was to eradicate it, exterminate it, excise it from evolutionary fact. Though ultimately discredited following the atrocities endured during multiple years of Nazi reign, eugenic theory was steeped in this sinister view of genetic governance, manifest destiny run amok.

Later, once detached from Galton’s maniacal gaze, the composite portrait would inspire others to play with the optics of the amalgamated image. The 19th-century French photographer Arthur Batut, known for being one of the first aerial photographers (he shot from a kite), may have been drawn to the hints of movement generated by a portrait’s animated edges. American photographer Nancy Burson has experimented with composite photography to merge black, Asian, and Caucasian faces against population statistics: Introduced in 2000, her Human Race Machine lets you see how you would look as another race. The artist Richard Prince flattened every one of Jerry Seinfeld’s fifty-seven TV love interests into a 2013 composite he called “Jerry’s Girls,” while in 2017, data scientist Giuseppe Sollazzo created a blended face for the BBC that used a carefully plotted algorithm to combine every face in the U.S. Senate.

Galton would have appreciated the speed of the software and the advantages of the algorithm — but what of the ethics of the very act of image capture and comparison, of the ethics of pictorial appropriation itself? There’s an implicit generalization to this kind of image production and indeed, seen over time, composite portraiture would become a way to amalgamate and assess an entire culture, even an era. In a 1931 radio interview, the German portraitist August Sander claimed he wanted to “capture and communicate in photography the physiognomic time exposure of a whole generation,” an observation that reframes the composite as a kind of collected census, or population survey.

The camera, after all, bears witness over time, its outcome an extension of the eye, the mind, the soul of the photographer. Sander was right. (So was Susan Sontag: “Humanity,” she once wrote, “is not one.”) With the advent of better, cheaper, faster, and more mobile technologies for capturing our faces, the time exposure of a whole generation was about to become a great deal more achievable.

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Jessica Helfand is a designer, artist, and writer. She is a cofounder of Design Observer and the author of numerous books on visual and cultural criticism, including “Face: A Visual Odyssey,” from which this article is adapted.

“Sunday Scaries” didn’t go away with working from home; it got worse

It would happen occasionally even before the pandemic: I’d be putting away dishes after dinner on Sunday night, and my stomach would gradually drop and tighten, and my breathing would become just a little more shallow. In the quiet kitchen, my mind had the opportunity to wander to the next morning’s projected unanswered email count and upcoming deadlines. If it was a particularly bad evening, there might be some light spiraling into panic (“What if I never have another story idea again?!”), but usually it’s just a few sleepless hours of contemplating how something as familiar as a 40-hour-a-week job could feel so alien.

Put simply, a case of the “Sunday scaries.”

“Sunday scaries” isn’t a scientific term, but it’s a universally recognizable feeling — that anxiety that creeps in as the weekend is ending and your thoughts turn to the impending return to the office or classroom. It’s common enough that there are podcasts, how-to-guides and CBD blends all dedicated to soothing it.

But since the novel coronavirus was declared a global pandemic in March and social distancing and quarantining recommendations have curtailed most weekend (and weekday) activities, the days have started to blend, as have some of the delinations between work life and home life.

So sometimes now, my brain is like, “Why not a case of the ‘Sunday Scaries’ — but on a Wednesday?”

And I’m not alone. Both within my friend group and in broader circles on social media, I was seeing reports of how work-based anxiety has either evolved or been accentuated due to the pandemic, wherein time feels nebulous and there’s an omnipresent sense of greater social stress.

Margo Gabriel is a freelance writer who also works in academia in Boston. She said that initially when she received notice that she and her colleagues would be working completely remotely, she was looking forward to the experience, but then her stress began to spike about two weeks into the transition.

This was largely due, she said, to the fact that her department was hosting multiple, multi-hour mandatory Zoom meetings each week, more than had been typical when they were working in person. This both interrupted her workflow and introduced new anxieties.

“I have natural hair — and I’m the only Black person on staff — so I was just hyper-aware, like, ‘Okay, I have to look a certain way and I have to make sure that I’m in a certain area in my house where it’s not cluttered with stuff,” she Gabriel said. “It was just a lot of things to think about with everything else going on in the world.'”

Gabriel said the Zoom meetings also took a more informal tone than the usual in-office meetings, which could sometimes be uncomfortable.

“Like [someone] wanted to know if any one in our families had contracted COVID, and I was like, ‘I work in finance. Why do you need to know about my uncle or whatever?'” she said. “I think having access to the video feature made people feel like they could just ask you personal questions.”

Gabriel said that she used to experience the “Sunday Scaries” occasionally as the weekend was winding down or early Monday — usually thinking about Boston rush hour traffic or upcoming work assignments that were in the office — but since the pandemic started, it has started to spike at random times.

Tracy Block, the owner of the content consultancy Block Media Worldwide, describes a similar pattern.

“A lot of my anxieties, before the pandemic, were centered around unanswered emails and work uncertainties that followed me into the weekend, which lingered specifically on Sunday nights,” she said. “I have dubbed this being ‘alone in my thoughts,’ which can eat away at me for hours and hours – sometimes until sunrise on Monday.”

The pandemic brought different challenges, however.

“Aside from the blanket anxiety of the pandemic itself, this included the loss of several major work gigs and clients,” she said. “The former ‘perils’ of unanswered emails paled in comparison to this all-encompassing crisis.”

But both Block and Gabriel recognized the need to establish new habits or some semblance of a routine, even as days continue to blend together. Both take time to get outdoors and enjoy some of their local parks, and Block has instituted a “strict unplugging rule” on weekends.

“As someone who relishes the hustle of juggling a freelance career and running a content consultancy, I got very lost in my work,” she said. “Now that things with work have slowed down — a lot — I’ve taken a step back, and have been making sure to disconnect so I can enjoy some time for myself.”

Nancy Brooks, the executive director of the Louisville chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, says that small steps like taking planned breaks from technology, going outdoors and investing time in fulfilling creative activities are ways to mitigate some of the “new home-workplace anxieties” people are experiencing.

But, she says, people also need to give themselves some grace right now.

“Everyone is currently experiencing what I would call a global trauma,” Brooks said. “This pandemic has affected everyone. We were quickly uprooted from our routines and we weren’t given time to adjust or plan or think about it.”

She said that some people have adapted more quickly than others, but that everyone may experience some mental health-related emotions such as anxiety or depression. This may be caused or exacerbated by how liminal this time period feels.

“Many people didn’t have a home office set up and ready to go, and now maybe still find themselves shuffling from room to room.” Brooks said. “I know this happens for me where I’m going into a Zoom meeting and have to kick my husband out of a spot because it is the only room with complete doors that doesn’t look like a bedroom, you know what I mean?”

She continues: “Then I’ve created this space, but then, when the meetings are over, everybody wants me to like redefine my space again.”

She’s also heard from individuals who are finding it hard to muster the desire to get up and get ready in the mornings because they aren’t going into an office environment.

“So they’re sitting in their PJs all day,” she said. “Not a healthy way for us to address this change in location for where we work, because our minds are used to that routine.”

Brooks also says that many people have spoken to her about “hitting a wall” when it came to how they were dealing with general fears about the pandemic in combination with workplace stressors — resulting in random, noticeable spikes in anxiety, something she experienced herself a few weeks ago.

“That’s normal for some people —you’re going to have that point where you just can’t move forward, and you need to step back,” she said. “And you need to take care of yourself.”

Monumental contraction of U.S. economy wipes out five years of gains

The United States economy saw a monumental contraction in the second quarter of this year, dropping at a rate that is unprecedented since records of performance started being kept in the 1940s.

U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) shrunk by seasonally adjusted annualized rate of 32.9 percent. If the rate of contraction for the second quarter of 2020 continued on for a full year, the economy would lose a third of its GDP.

According to reporting from Axios, the decline in GDP that the U.S. witnessed wiped out all economic gains made since 2015.

On the quarterly basis alone, without the annualized calculation included, the nation’s economy lost 9.5 percent of its GDP. Compared to the eurozone (the countries in the European Union that use the euro as currency), the U.S. actually suffered fewer losses as a percent GDP over the quarter, as that group of nations saw a quarterly drop of 12.1 percent GDP. However, with the annualized calculations thrown in, it appears that the U.S. is in worse shape: Compared to our 32.9 percent annualized rate, the eurozone countries only saw a seasonally adjusted drop of 15 percent annualized.

Many economists believe that European countries and many other nations around the world will have an easier time recovering than the U.S., as they are seeing a slowdown in the number of COVID-19 cases, while the U.S. is identifying tens of thousands of new cases on a daily basis.

More than 4.5 million Americans have been diagnosed with coronavirus since the pandemic reached the U.S., with 67,167 new cases being reported on July 30 alone. Over the past week, there have been more than 64,000 new cases reported daily, on average, according to The New York Times.

Some economists have blamed President Donald Trump’s lackluster response to the coronavirus for the dismal economic situation. While recognizing a global pandemic would hurt any market, former Bloomberg editor-in-chief Matthew Winkler said the president could have lessened the damage by taking a more proactive approach.

“It was Trump’s defiance of science, his muddled messaging and his incessant vitriol that has plunged the country into a swamp of joblessness, receding labor participation and slumping business confidence unseen in other developed nations,” Winkler wrote earlier this month.

In mid-April, economist Jeffrey Sachs told The New Yorker that the “only way to have a viable economy and society is to control this epidemic.” Yet the president didn’t respond in a proper way, Sachs said.

“Simply letting the virus run through the society would be unacceptably costly, and that’s why essentially no country in the world is doing that,” the economist opined.

“Here we are, a country so rich in expertise, in resources, in capacities, and yet we’re watching a complete failure of a political response — with a massive loss of life — in real time,” Sachs said. “It’s quite shocking, because Trump not only does not know how to approach this issue but he blocks those who do.”

A Cretaceous “hell ant” was preserved in amber as it was killing a baby cockroach

The idea that prehistoric animals may be trapped perfectly in amber, preserved for millions of years, isn’t just a staple of dino-cloning sci-fi franchises like “Jurassic Park.” On Thursday, scientists revealed a monumental discovery about the ancient world embodied in the discovery of a “hell ant” trapped in amber as it was in the process of devouring a baby cockroach.

A hell ant, or haidomyrmecine, is a relative of modern ants but with a critical difference: Instead of horizontal pincers that bite their prey, the hell ant had vertical jaws that resemble a scythe, which would pin its intended meals against a horn on their heads. The hell ant in question here managed to capture a Caputoraptor elegans, an insect related to modern cockroaches but which, like the hell ant itself, is now extinct.

“Hell ants are one of the earliest branches of the ant tree of life and their lineage arose prior to the most recent common ancestor of all living species,” Phillip Barden, lead author of the study and an assistant professor at New Jersey Institute of Technology’s Department of Biological Sciences, told Salon by email. “This is not unlike the relationships between extinct non-avian dinosaurs and the birds we have today.”

As the article in Current Biology makes clear, scientists are unsure why the unique vertical type of jaw seen in hell ants no longer exists today.

“The ecological pressures and developmental requirements that led to vertical mandible articulation are not yet known,” the authors write. “Also unclear are the conditions that drove haidomyrmecines to extinction after persisting for a period of at least 20 million years across present day Asia, Europe, and North America.” They note that hell ants may have been “susceptible to extinction during periods of ecological change,” though competition with other ants could have also played a role in their extinction.

Salon asked Barden to explain the larger significance of the study.

“This paper provides an explanation for why it is that we see diversity in the fossil record that is no long present today,” Barden told Salon by email. “At the same time, it also gives us a better picture of an extinct group of insects, which we can hopefully use to better understand how and why extinction impacts linages differently.”

Barden also pointed out that “although there are thousands of predatory ant species, no living ants capture prey in this way. That is, no modern ants possess horns of any kind or mandibles specialized in this particular way.” He also elaborated on what the ancient cockroach ancestor — which was a juvenile at the time it was devoured — must have experienced being preyed upon by the hell ant.

“The prey would have been essentially collared around the neck by the elongate horn and mandibles of the hell ant before most likely receiving an immobilizing sting,” Barden told Salon. “We think hell ants may have had very fast muscle movements, something we see in some modern ant predators, so the hell ant mandibles may have snapped closed in a very quick flash.”

Telemedicine has become the norm for most medical specialties — except abortion services

The ongoing pandemic has led to huge shifts in how we live and work, and health care is no exception. In the past few months, telehealth visits have surged more than 50 percent, enabling patients to access much of the health care they need without taking the added risk of leaving their homes.

But for people seeking reproductive health services, longstanding state and federal restrictions continue to needlessly limit their access to telemedicine abortion care.

Medication abortion is an FDA-approved option for ending an early pregnancy that has been used for nearly two decades in the U.S. and can be offered safely and effectively through telehealth.

Like other telehealth visits, patients connect via a HIPPA compliant video conference with a physician who reviews their records, answers questions, and then remotely prescribes medication.

Allowing providers to administer medication abortion through telehealth would be the safest, most practical way to maintain access to early abortion care while alleviating the need for in-person visits or unnecessary travel. Telemedicine abortion care also allows patients to be seen sooner, which further minimizes the risk of complications or delays.

But despite the overwhelming evidence that telemedicine is a safe and effective way to deliver early abortion care, 17 states ban clinicians from prescribing abortion medication remotely, and FDA rules require abortion medications to be obtained in-person.

Even as the federal government has eased regulations to facilitate the use of telehealth for a wide range of health care services, abortion care continues to be stigmatized and excluded.

On July 13, a federal judge temporarily blocked the FDA from requiring in-person visits for medication abortion during the pandemic. Ruling in favor of medical groups who had challenged the restriction, U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang wrote that the “In-Person requirements, combined with the Covid-19 pandemic, place a substantial obstacle in the path of women seeking a medication abortion.”
Now that the Supreme Court has once again clearly affirmed that medically-unnecessary contrivances to restrict on abortion care are unconstitutional – it is long past time for the United States to stop stigmatizing this safe, proven method of abortion care.

Restrictions on telehealth abortions are especially harmful for women who live in rural areas or states where abortion care has been essentially pushed out of reach. In some states, women are hundreds of miles away from the closest abortion provider.

As providers, we know that having an abortion is incredibly common. Statistically, 1 in 4 women in the United States will have an abortion by the age of 45. And as 98% of abortion procedures have zero complications, abortion is as safe as – or safer than – many common outpatient procedures.

We also know that telemedicine is the best and safest option for many of the communities we serve – with or without a pandemic. Our clients come from far and wide, and many live in rural areas with limited access to abortion care. Expanding access to abortion via telehealth would reduce their need to take time off work or scrape together additional money for travel.

If women need reproductive health care, they will get it. And it’s up to their elected representatives to give them safe options instead of dangerous alternatives. Medication abortion care through telehealth should be one of those options.

Instead of using the COVID-19 pandemic to block people from care, our elected officials should use this opportunity to expand access to reproductive health services through telehealth.

As states move forward with re-opening, many observers are predicting that the expansion of telehealth is here to stay. This could have far-reaching benefits for women and families – but only if our elected officials call off their politically-motivated crusade against abortion and work to expand access to telehealth for everyone, including those who need abortion care.