“Chance of acquittal is zero”: Experts say Trump lawyer’s closing argument reeked of “desperation”

Whether Donald Trump is guilty in the eyes of the law will be placed in the hands of twelve New Yorkers, who are set to begin deliberating in the former president’s hush money trial on Wednesday and could come back with a verdict this week. It will be they who decide if the presumptive Republican nominee becomes the first American head of state to be convicted of a crime after leaving office – and up to the judge, Juan Merchan, to decide whether a conviction means Trump will also be the first former president behind bars.

In his closing argument, defense attorney Todd Blanche tried to sneak that fact in during what was otherwise two hours spent attacking Michael Cohen, the former president’s ex-fixer, dubbed by Blanche as the “greatest liar of all time.” He also insisted that his client only ever paid Cohen for his legal work, subject to a retainer that was never documented. Saying that his client could go to prison if found guilty was how Blanche chose to close out, which does not suggest confidence that he will be found innocent; it’s also why one of the last things the jury saw was Merchan reprimanding the defense counsel, reminding him that the rules of court prohibit trying to sway jurors with talk of incarceration when the crime, here, could be punished with a fine.

Blanche, a former prosecutor himself, possibly calculated that the talking down would be worth if it give just one juror pause about the gravity of a conviction. It also reeked of “desperation,” per former federal prosecutor Harry Litman.

Donald Trump "Full panic mode": Experts say Trump mad he's "finally being treated like any other defendant"

“The idea is to try to gin up a hung jury or some kind of person to have sympathy,” Litman said during an appearance on MSNBC. That, he argued, does not suggest confidence that the five weeks of trial – in which jurors saw Trump Organization financial documents spelling out how Cohen would be reimbursed for a $130,000 hush payment to Stormy Daniels, including handwritten notes from Trump loyalist and Rikers Island inmate Allen Weisselberg – went well for his client. “If you thought you had a decent shot at a hung jury without that, I don’t think you would engender the judge’s ire in that way.”

Timothy Parlatore, an attorney who previously represented Trump, was similarly underwhelmed by Blanche’s performance. “It went way too long,” he told CNN, saying the two-hour rebuttal of the prosecution’s case “probably bored the jury.”

It was dull without Blanche even addressing the documentary evidence, from Weisselberg’s handwritten notes, as the Trump Organization’s then-chief financial officer, on the apparent hush money conspiracy, to Trump Organization accountant Jeffrey McConney’s notes explaining how Cohen’s monthly payments “from DJT” would cover the taxes he’d owe from falsely claiming the hush money reimbursement as income.

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“Why would Cohen and Weisselberg have done this without Trump’s authorization? The defense failed to come up with a compelling explanation,” wrote former U.S. attorney Joyce Vance on her personal website. Vance noted that multiple witnesses had described Trump as a micromanager – contra Blanche’s argument he’d be too busy as president to involve himself in an illicit scheme to falsify business records and evade campaign finance laws – and rebutted the notion that Cohen would drop $130,000 of his own money to buy Daniels’ silence without Trump’s knowledge and consent.

“This was the prosecution’s linchpin evidence,” Vance wrote, “and the defense didn’t offer the jury a good reason to reject it.”

Norm Eisen, a CNN legal analyst and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, was similarly underwhelmed.

“The prosecution was ahead on points going into the closing arguments and Tuesday did not change that calculus,” he wrote in a commentary on the closing arguments.

Ty Cobb, another former Trump attorney, was more blunt.

“The chance of an acquittal is zero to none,” he told The Daily Beast.

about Trump's Manhattan trial

Israel threatened ICC prosecutor over war crimes probe amid “coordinated effort” with Trump: report

Just over a week after the International Criminal Court announced it had officially applied for an arrest warrant for two top Israeli officials over the Israel Defense Forces' assault on Gaza, an investigative report revealed Tuesday that the Israeli intelligence chief spent close to a decade attempting to intimidate the ICC's prosecutor into halting a war crimes probe.

Former ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda opened a preliminary investigation into Israel's actions in Palestine in 2015, a year after Israel launched an offensive in Gaza that killed 2,251 Palestinians in less than two months. Bensouda aimed to make an initial assessment of allegations of possible war crimes in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.

According to Israeli publications +972 Magazine and Local Call and U.K. newspaper The Guardian, Bensouda and her prosecution team soon began to receive warnings that Mossad, the Israeli national intelligence agency, "was taking a close interest in their work."

After briefly meeting Bensouda at the Munich Security Conference in 2017, Mossad Director Yossi Cohen "ambushed" the prosecutor at a hotel in New York in 2018, when Bensouda was meeting Democratic Republic of Congo President Joseph Kabila.

"The pair had met several times before in relation to the ICC's ongoing investigation into alleged crimes committed in his country," reported The Guardian. "The meeting, however, appears to have been a setup. At a certain point, after Bensouda's staff were asked to leave the room, Cohen entered, according to three sources familiar with the meeting. The surprise appearance, they said, caused alarm to Bensouda and a group of ICC officials traveling with her. Why Kabila helped Cohen is unclear, but ties between the two men were revealed in 2022 by the Israeli publication TheMarker."

The investigation found that Cohen—who retired in 2021—repeatedly called Bensouda and sought meetings with her after the "ambush," eventually prompting Bensouda to alert senior ICC officials about the Mossad chief's conduct after his tactics shifted to "threats and manipulation." One ICC official compared Cohen's behavior to "stalking."

Cohen initiated at least three meetings with Bensouda between 2019-21, including one where he allegedly told the prosecutor: "You should help us and let us take care of you. You don't want to be getting into things that could compromise your security or that of your family."

He also allegedly suggested to Bensouda that a full investigation into war crimes by Israel would harm her career, and showed her copies photos that had covertly been taken of her husband.

The Guardian reported that Cohen did not respond to a request for comment, and Bensouda declined to comment on the reporting. A spokesperson for the Israeli government told the newspaper that the report was "replete with many false and unfounded allegations meant to hurt the state of Israel."

Threats against an ICC prosecutor could amount to offenses against the administration of justice, a violation of Article 70 under the Rome Statute, which established the court in 1998. Israel is not a signatory to the Rome Statute and does not recognize the authority of the ICC, but Israeli officials including Cohen can still be prosecuted for an offense against the administration of justice.

After Cohen's alleged threats against Bensouda's family and career, the ICC in 2021 opened its formal war crimes investigation into alleged war crimes going back to 2014. Last week, current ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan announced he was seeking warrants to arrest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and three Hamas leaders for actions since October 7, 2023.

Jacobin journalist Branko Marcetic said the revelations about Cohen's targeting of Bensouda in the midst of her preliminary investigation proves the Israeli government "is completely out of control"—partially because continued political and material support from the United States, its largest international military funder, allows it to act with impunity.

The Netanyahu govt threatened an ICC prosecutor and her family to try and avoid charges. Israel is completely out of control. I don't recall even the worst pariahs – Saddam's Iraq, DPRK for e.g. – doing anything like this. Biden's support is the differencehttps://t.co/r7mBLu18HR

— Branko Marcetic (@BMarchetich) May 28, 2024

Threats against an ICC prosecutor, said Canadian New Democratic Party lawmaker Charlie Angus, "are the actions of a criminal state."

Another of what one journalist called "truly jaw-dropping allegations" was that Mossad obtained transcripts and other materials that were part of a "smear campaign" against Bensouda.

"The diplomatic efforts were part of a coordinated effort by the governments of Netanyahu and [then-President] Donald Trump in the U.S. to place public and private pressure on the prosecutor and her staff," reported The Guardian.

The Trump administration imposed sanctions including visa restrictions against Bensouda between 2019-20, allegedly in retaliation for a separate war crimes probe regarding Afghanistan. Then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo suggested the sanctions were imposed because the ICC was "putting Israel in [its] crosshairs."

An end run around democracy: Red state Republicans hack the system

With all the violence and vandalism on Jan. 6, it's easy to forget that Trump and his henchmen's real game plan was to send the election to the House and let them decide the winner as the Constitution anticipated would happen in case of a tie. This was to be accomplished by submitting competing sets of electors to the VP who would throw up his hands and say that he didn't know how to count the votes so Congress would have to decide the election. According to Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, they had hoped that in the event Pence didn't cooperate, having the mob storm the Capitol could have caused a delay which would have allowed Justice Samuel Alito time to stop the certification but they were thwarted when Speaker Nancy Pelosi reconvened Congress that night. (There is no word on whether Justice Alito had been apprised of his role but it's not a stretch to think he would have been happy to oblige considering his history of flying insurrectionist flags during that period.)

Had they persuaded Pence to twist the constitutional process for a tie vote into a process for resolving (fake) competing slates of electoral votes and had the House of Representatives taken it up, Trump would have won because votes are counted by state delegation and there are more Republican delegations than Democratic. There was a whole group of Republicans ready and willing to declare Trump the winner and let the courts and anyone else try and stop them under this unprecedented, unconstitutional plot. This was the coup.

Essentially, they were willing to stretch their undemocratic electoral college advantage in controlling rural, lower-populated states to an even more undemocratic electoral advantage in the House to steal the election. If Pence had cooperated, they might have pulled it off.

Texas GOP votes for platform that would prevent Democrats from winning any statewide election

It's obvious that the framers made a huge error with this silly process of having the House delegations decide the election in case of a tie. It should be the popular vote winner. (It should be the popular vote winner in all cases but for some reason, we seem to be stuck with this antediluvian artifact of a compromise that should have been fixed over a century ago.)

The old saw that "states are the laboratories of democracy" has long been one of the rationales for states' rights adherents to excuse their anti-democratic behavior.

There has long been a belief among a certain set of America's white elites that democracy is good in theory and a very nice idea, but really we can't let the riff-raff have the last word. Our history of denying the voting franchise to vast numbers of citizens goes all the way back to the beginning and we're still fighting over it. That's also why we're stuck with the Senate which gives two senators to states that have more cows than people and two senators to states that have many more people than cows. They finally managed to allow direct election of those senators, which was a step in the right direction, but the Senate is an undemocratic institution.

And after the debacles of the 2000 and 2016 elections in which Republicans won the presidency with victories in the electoral college while losing the popular vote, it's not necessary to make any argument that our presidential elections have a very serious, potentially fatal flaw for a modern democracy. It's really no wonder that the Republican Party, faced with the fact that it is a minority party, has decided to push the envelope even further.

Vote suppression and disenfranchisement are no longer enough. They have discovered they can change the system itself in their favor now. The latest example comes from Texas, which held its GOP convention last week. Aside from the odious culture war issues they installed in their platform, such as labeling gender-affirming care as child abuse, requiring the Bible to be taught in public schools and calling for "equal protection for the preborn" which means abortion can be punishable as a homicide, they are proposing to create an electoral college system in their state:

The State Legislature shall cause to be enacted a State Constitutional Amendment to add the additional criteria for election to a statewide office to include the majority vote of the counties with each individual county being assigned one vote allocated to the popular majority vote winner of each individual county.

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In other words, they want to create a system in which every county has exactly the same vote, whether the county has 20 people or 5 million people. As Paul Waldman wrote in his newsletter The Cross Section, this would be the equivalent of California and Wyoming each having one electoral vote for president. Waldman ran some numbers and the outcome is astonishing:

In the 2020 election, 11,315,056 votes were cast for president in Texas. Fifty percent plus one of the votes cast in the smallest 128 counties (almost all of which Trump won) produces a total of 191,978 votes. Which means that under the GOP proposal, a candidate could win a statewide race with less than 2 percent of the vote.

That’s right: You could get blown out 96%-2% and become governor, attorney general, or any of the other statewide offices. The candidates who did this would inevitably be Republicans, because they’d be the ones winning all those small rural counties. Which of course is the point.

Texas isn't the only red state to attempt such an end run around democracy and majority rule. In Missouri where their ballot system was allowing some progressive policies to be passed by a majority of citizens, they tried to change the law to require that not only do they need a majority of voters to pass, but they must have a majority in five of their eight congressional districts which gives rural GOP districts the upper hand. Arizona has proposed a similar initiative. So far they haven't had any luck enacting any of these changes, and the Texas proposals are just part of the GOP platform for now, but does anyone think that MAGAfied parties in red states won't do it if they get the chance?

The old saw that "states are the laboratories of democracy" has long been one of the rationales for states' rights adherents to excuse their anti-democratic behavior. Donald Trump's Big Lie and coup attempt have given permission to these same political actors to experiment with ways to permanently advantage their shrinking constituency by corrupting the election systems in the states. And because of the electoral college, that will likely permanently advantage them in presidential elections as well.

Donald Trump will not win the popular vote next November but he might be able to eke out another win in the electoral college. The opposition which is fighting so energetically to save democracy is already fighting with one hand tied behind its back and it's only going to get worse.

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Scientists recreate conditions of Saturnian moon in a lab — and it could help us find alien life

When scientists using NASA's Cassini space probe discovered organic compounds in blocks of ice from Enceladus, they wondered if this meant the Saturnian moon might have the ingredients for life. Six years later, researchers working at research laboratories in Germany recreated conditions analogous to those on that distant frozen world. In the process, they obtained a tantalizing clue on how explorers can determine if Enceladus harbors extraterrestrials.

Previous experiments never studied the organic compounds from Enceladus in hydrothermal conditions such as those believed to exist on the moon's its subsurface ocean.

The scholars drew up new guidelines for understanding biosignatures from life-sustaining elements in future Enceladus missions, publishing their findings in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences. They did so by analyzing data from the Cassini mission and using it to create on Earth a simulated version of the hydrothermal fields at the bottom of Enceladus' ocean.

Previous experiments never studied the organic compounds from Enceladus in hydrothermal conditions such as those believed to exist on the moon's its subsurface ocean, says the study's lead author Nozair Khawaja, a professor at Freie Universität Berlin's Department of Planetary Science and Remote Sensing. This recent study therefore broke new ground.

"Now the question that we followed was whether we can identify such biosignatures, which are processed under those extreme conditions, and whether we can differentiate those processed compounds from un-processed," said Khawaja. "Our findings show that hydrothermal processing do have effect on the appearance of those compounds" in their scientific equipment, meaning that biosignatures can be identified in future data coming from Enceladus."

A simple algorithm could reveal the ghosts of alien life in Mars dirt, study finds

Determining whether these biosignatures appeared in the conditions of hydrothermal vents was only one part of the challenge. The next part: Because some scientists suspect life on Earth may have begun in similar hydrothermal vents in our oceans, they wanted to see if outright organic molecules discovered in those fields might have formed more sophisticated molecules. Could they have even created amino acids, which are the basic building blocks of proteins and all life as we know it?

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"We will expand our simulations to incorporate more conditions to see their effect on the features of biosignatures in the data."

When the researchers built their hydrothermal chemical reactor, built from a stainless steel cylinder that can "simulate pressures found deeper within the porous core of Enceladus," as the paper notes, they found the answer was yes: When temperatures in the simulation reached between 80º to 150º C, and a pressure of 80 to 100 bar prevailed, the amino acids changed in ways characteristic of Earth-bound life forms.

At the same time, the pressure conditions were roughly a hundred times higher than on the Earth's surface. Even though the study demonstrated organic compounds could form amino acids on Enceladus, there are many other hurdles any potential life form would have to overcome to actually develop in that alien environment. Fortunately, Khawaja and the other researchers believe that these experiments can be performed given the right conditions.

"With this new laboratory setup, we will simulate a range of hydrothermal conditions, from the high pressures and temperatures associated with greater depths into the core, to the milder conditions in the ocean water near the water-rock interface," the authors write in the paper. "Investigations into the abundances and solubilities of inorganic (e.g. metal- or phosphorus-bearing) ions in the presence of organic matter using our hydrothermal reactor would offer insight into the detection of important biologically relevant molecules and complexes in ice grains from Enceladus."

Even the most sophisticated laboratory simulations, of course, cannot replicate the literal physical act of exploration. Astrobiologists dream of being able to directly study Enceladus and other potentially life-bearing worlds like it. It goes without saying, visiting Saturn is an immense challenge, though both NASA and the European Space Agency have their eyes set on going there someday. In the meantime, laboratory models are an excellent substitute and will help cosmologists know what to look for when spacecraft arrive to the actual moon.

"[The] public should clearly understand that this result is based on laboratory simulation of extraterrestrial ocean world," said Khawaja. "Laboratory work is like [the] backbone to understand the data from space. This work is a significant addition to aid the detection of biosignatures (which are emerging from hydrothermal vents locations) in space through space based mass spectrometers such as Cassini's Cosmic Dust Analyzer in the past and also in future, the Surface Dust Anaylzer onboard Europa-Clipper."

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Khawaja added, "Furthermore, this work in continuing and we will expand our simulations to incorporate more conditions to see their effect on the features of biosignatures in the data."

This is not the only recent study to suggest that life-building molecules might exist on Enceladus. A paper last year in the journal Nature revealed elements of phosphorus in a watery plume shot into space from Enceladus' southern hemisphere. Phosphorus is also an essential building block of life.

"We previously found that Enceladus' ocean is rich in a variety of organic compounds," lead author Frank Postberg of Germany's Freie Universität said in a statement at the time. "But now, this new result reveals the clear chemical signature of substantial amounts of phosphorus salts inside icy particles ejected into space by the small moon's plume. It's the first time this essential element has been discovered in an ocean beyond Earth."

about extraterrestrial life

“Just disgusting”: Nikki Haley writes “finish them” on Israeli bomb bound for Gaza

Humanitarians reacted with outrage on Tuesday after former presidential U.S. candidate Nikki Haley wrote and signed an Israeli artillery shell while visiting an Israel Defense Forces post.

"Finish them! America [loves] Israel always," Haley wrote on the shell Tuesday, signing her name. She was accompanied by Danny Danon, a member of the Knesset, Israel's parliament, who posted photos from their tour on social media. Haley, who was the ambassador to the United Nations under then-President Donald Trump, has been an ardent supporter of Israel's war in Gaza and has ties to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a pro-Israel lobby group.

"Nothing to see here, just AIPAC's favorite politician, Nikki Haley, celebrating death and destruction in Gaza with an autographed missile," IfNotNow, a U.S. Jewish group that supports Palestinian rights, wrote on social media.

"Just disgusting," wrote Alon-Lee Green, director of the Jewish-Arab Movement for Peace, Equality & Social Justice in Israel. In the post, Green pleaded with Americans to take back their "filthy death-promoting politicians."

Alec Karakatsanis, an American civil rights lawyer, wrote that the Haley's message was "one of the most depraved things I have ever seen."

The timing of Haley's autograph of the weapon of war heightened the outrage. On Sunday night, Israel bombed the tents of displaced Palestinians in a "safe zone" of Rafah, killing at least 45 civilians, mostly women and children. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the strike a "tragic mistake," but the Israeli military then killed at least another 21 Palestinian civilians in a similar attack on a refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip on Tuesday.

Haley "spent Memorial Day not commemorating fallen American service members, but visiting Israel as it conducts a brutal massacre in Gaza," The New Republic's Hafiz Rashid reported, calling her autographed message "sick."

Haley has spent recent days in Israel making unfounded claims about Russian, Chinese, and Iranian connections to the October 7 attack led by Hamas—and voicing her full support for the war effort, using rhetoric that wrongly indicates that she speaks for all Americans.

"America stands by Israel," Haley said during her tour with Danon, according to i24 News. "Israel is fighting the enemies of the U.S. today. Don't stop until you win."

Trump is conditioning MAGA for the next stage

Authoritarian leaders train and condition the public to follow and obey them -– or at the very least to not oppose them. This training takes various forms, such as threats of violence and acts of intimidation, propaganda with an emphasis on disinformation and misinformation, generating a state of constant precarity, fear, and death anxieties (what I have termed “horror politics”), manipulating White Christianity and other belief systems, and more generally offering incentives and rewards for supporting the authoritarian and the movement and the regime. Those who resist or are not sufficiently supportive will be punished – severely.

In a 2021 essay, historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat offered these insights into the power of propaganda and its role in authoritarian training and conditioning:

Propaganda gains traction through repetition and saturation. The same message is disseminated through multiple channels and institutions, with small variations, to lead a maximum number of individuals “in the same direction, but differently,” as the sociologist Jacques Ellul wrote….

Seeing the same messages over and over can lead some to tune out, but it may also boost confidence that the content is truthful. Repetition can lead to familiarity, which increases acceptance — especially when the state has silenced alternate voices.”….

Moreover, once people bond with the leader, they may be inclined to dismiss any evidence that conflicts with his claims, or overlook contradictions in his messages. They believe him because they believe in him. Or, in an interesting twist, they know he is lying, but they decide that they don’t care: better him than his enemy (who, as they have been taught to believe, lies even more). And some people actually approve of all the lying, seeing it as rule-breaking by a rogue they adore.

The authoritarian regime does not have the resources to monitor every person’s behavior at all times (totalitarian regimes such as Nazi German, Stalin’s Russia, and North Korea aspire to have such control, but even they are unable to fully accomplish it). Emotional training and other forms of conditioning to Power are a way of creating compliant subjects that are self-regulating – and who will in turn monitor and impose the rules of the regime on their peers and the larger society.

This is the playbook that Donald Trump and his MAGAfied Republican Party and the other enemies of democracy on the right are using to target the American people. The abnormal and aberrant are being presented as normal and desirable.

Heroes or “losers”: Trump taints Memorial Day with divided memories

In a recent speech at the National Rifle Association convention in Texas, Trump once again basically threatened to kill and imprison Joe Biden, calling the president a “Manchurian candidate” and a “traitor.” Trump and his propagandists are attempting to normalize the fascist practice of executing political rivals.

Last week, Donald Trump shared a video that invoked the rise of Hitler and the Nazis and celebrated a Trump Reich, when/if he takes power as the country’s first dictator in 2025. This is part of a much larger pattern of behavior: Donald Trump has repeatedly channeled Adolf Hitler and the Nazis with his eliminationist threats and other promises to purge the “blood” of the United States of human “vermin” when he takes power.

Trump and his propagandists are now telling the lie that President Biden and the Department of Justice wanted to assassinate him during their search of his Mar-a-Largo resort for stolen classified and top-secret documents. The search was conducted according to standard protocols. Moreover, the Department of Justice and FBI timed the search in such a manner as to ensure that there was no danger to Donald Trump. The lie that President Biden and the Department of Justice wanted to “assassinate” Donald Trump is an act of projection and an attempt to incite his MAGA people into committing acts of terrorism and other acts of public disorder and insurrection.

Unfortunately, Donald Trump and his agents’ campaign of emotional training and conditioning is working.

Public opinion polls and other research show that a large portion of the American public are willfully unaware of Trump’s threats and promises to be a dictator who will end multiracial democracy. Even more troubling, a large percentage of the American public is so deluded that they have somehow convinced themselves that Donald Trump’s disastrous time as president was somehow successful, a recent golden age to which they want to return.

In reality, Trump’s presidency was one of the worst in American history where his negligence and choices led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in this country from COVID, he was impeached twice, put tens of thousands of people in concentration camps, and attempted a coup on Jan. 6 among his many other ignominious “distinctions”.

The most basic and important evidence of the effectiveness of this authoritarian training and conditioning is how Donald Trump (a man who is a coup plotter, sexual assaulter as confirmed by a court of law, and now criminal defendant in four felony trials) and President Biden are tied in the early 2024 election polls. President Biden continues to trail Donald Trump in the key battleground states.

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As the truism goes, those who do not study and learn from history are doomed to repeat it. In an excellent new essay at The Guardian, Peter Pomerantsev highlights how Donald Trump and his propagandists and other agents are emotionally training and conditioning the MAGA people and other members of the Trump political cult using techniques that are similar to those used by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis:

Hitler gave people the sense of being part of a huge mass, a Volk, which appealed to many after the confusing changes of the early 20th century, when the old social order had been upended. He also gave people roles to play when the old ones had vanished: in the confusing cabaret of Weimar Germany, where identities were in flux, you knew who you were when you became a Nazi party member or an SS man. These roles were emotionally satisfying: they allowed people to submit to a strong leader, and feel strong and superior through him; they also allowed them to feel the victim, which in turn legitimised anger and cruelty to others. Some psychoanalysts who observed the rallies believed these grievance narratives gave people the chance to blame external forces for all the things they didn’t like about themselves. Orators like Hitler make us feel we can crush the voice inside of us that tells us we are not good enough, by projecting it on to others.

Today’s propagandists play on the same needs. In a time of rapid economic, social and technological change it can be comforting to be part of a large, angry crowd. Online conspiracy theory communities are particularly effective at pulling together a sense of being part of a group with a secret knowledge and mission. Such media also give people a role to play in a confusing world: as a Proud Boy or a “patriot” storming the Capitol. Social media, where you are encouraged to label who you are, only exacerbates this performance. Meanwhile the allure of “strongmen” has never gone away. Whether you buy into the psychoanalytic theories, the grievance narratives work – from Trump’s crusade to Make America Great Again to Putin promising to get Russia back off its knees.

Trump’s MAGA followers are energized. By comparison, President Biden’s supporters and voters, and the American people as a whole, are tired, exhausted, and succumbing to a state of learned helplessness.

At the Atlantic, Charles Sykes evaluates the emotional and psychological health of the American people in the Age of Trump and concludes that they are disoriented and experiencing something akin to societal air sickness:

“At what other moment in American history,” Anne Applebaum recently asked, “could a presidential candidate praise a fictional serial killer, and inspire almost no reaction at all?”

Even by the standards of the times, what she was referring to did seem a vertigo-inducing moment. Amid an anti-migrant tirade at a rally earlier this month in New Jersey, Donald Trump gave a shout-out to the “late, great” Hannibal Lecter, referring to the fava bean–loving cannibal played by Anthony Hopkins in the 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs as a “wonderful man.”

And the nation shrugged, because this was simply the latest in a long list of 2024’s bizarre and disorienting moments (including an earlier recent reference to cannibalism from the president himself). “The scale of the abnormality is so staggering,” ABC’s George Stephanopoulos argued recently, “that it can actually become numbing.”

But Americans’ reaction is less like numbness and more a response to something like airsickness, which results when we experience a disconnect between our senses—a nausea-inducing conflict between what we know and what we see. Motion sickness is caused by a discrepancy between what the inner ear detects and what the eye sees. The effect can be vertiginous—so the way people avoid being nauseated is by trying to ignore the dissonance.

We’ve been led to believe that things work in a certain way, that there are mores and norms. We thought our world was right side up, but it now feels as if it’s been turned upside down. Words don’t mean what we think they do. Outrage is followed not by accountability, but by adulation. Standards shift, flicker, vanish. Nothing is stable.

At The Guardian, Margaret Sullivan emphasizes realpolitik and how Donald Trump’s “strongman pose” is working:

For the most part, exhausted Americans yawn. They shrug off the latest outrage as regrettable but harmless, just another case of Trump being Trump. The Wall Street bigwig and Republican mega-donor Ken Griffin even told Bloomberg News recently that he might change his mind and support Trump because the former president would “exude a level of strength” that would help to stabilize the world in trying times.

The “strongman” pose, in other words, is working: an authority figure is the one to deal with a chaotic world. Just don’t look too carefully at where the chaos originates. As Trump claimed during the 2016 campaign, the world is in crisis and “I alone can fix it.”

Much of the mainstream media covered this week’s “unified reich” posting as if this were just part of a typical campaign. “Trump’s latest flirtation with Nazi symbolism draws criticism,” one headline in the Hill put it. Yes, and so did President Obama’s decision to wear a tan suit.

Despite all of Trump’s misdeeds – the criminal indictments, the abhorrent words, the sordid relationships, the clear plans to dismantle democratic guardrails – he rolls on undaunted.

With the “unified reich” video, as with all the earlier outrages, you’ll hear no apology, no disavowal, no expression of regret. And certainly no promise that this will never happen again.

It will happen again. After all, it’s working.

Writing at The New Republic, Greg Sargent succinctly summarizes how the American people are being emotionally trained and conditioned into accepting the end of their democracy and the rise of neofascism as, “Understood this way, the conspicuous offering of such heinous policy “solutions” by Trump and MAGA thinkers seems designed to measure public tolerance for authoritarianism.”

The American people have a choice to make. They can continue to sleep-walk, zombified, even deeper into the Age of Trump and his first dictatorship or they can wake up and resist. The emotional training and conditioning into accepting Trumpism and American neofascism does not take hold quickly. It is a years and decades-long process. The American people still have agency and time to resist. But the most important thing is to acknowledge and internalize that none of this is normal, and then to create a bulwark around our internal emotional and intellectual and spiritual lives as a defense against the authoritarian(s) and their forces’ assaults. The next step is to form meaningful relationships with other people who believe in and are willing to defend the country’s democratic life. Demagogues and aspiring dictators like Donald Trump and his MAGA enforcers want you to be isolated, alone, alienated, overwhelmed, and exhausted. In such a state, a person is a compliant and ideal subject for the allure of fake right-wing populism and other forms of authoritarianism and neofascism. Resistance is never futile. But at this point in the Age of Trump it seems that too many Americans have preemptively surrendered.

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America’s stormy weather clears a path for hope

The news today is filled with photographs and stories about tornados that have blasted through Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Kentucky. At least 25 people have been killed and another round of storms was expected to hit Texas Tuesday evening. CNN is calling the weather this Spring “freakish.”

It's unknown if the record-breaking reports of severe weather over the Memorial Day weekend are a product of global warming, but after this Spring, that conclusion appears unavoidable. According to CNN, there were 622 reports of severe weather between Wyoming and New Hampshire on Sunday alone. The previous record was 565 reports of severe weather in one day, and that was on May 8, only three weeks ago.

CNN reports that there have been 14 tornado emergencies announced so far this year, with five over Memorial Day weekend alone. One tornado touched down in Oklahoma and stayed on the ground wreaking havoc and destruction for an hour. Tornado emergencies are issued by the National Weather Service only when a storm threatens severe property damage and loss of life. On average, about 12 tornado emergencies occur each year. With 14 on record already, this year promises to be a record-breaker when it comes to severe weather.

You can’t prepare for storms like tornados. They don’t announce themselves in advance. When severe thunderstorms move in, tornados just drop from the sky and begin sucking up anything in their paths. The funnel clouds that drop from thunderheads appear white at first and only become dark from the debris in their lifting whirlwinds. They are terrible things to witness. A friend and I were about a quarter mile north of a tornado in Ohio that was moving east as I was riding a bicycle cross-country going west. They do sound like a freight train. If you’re as close as we were, you can actually hear pieces of metal and wood and other debris from damaged buildings banging against each other as they are swept up and then disgorged by the storm.

President Biden has called the governors of each of the states that were affected and promised any federal help they need. There is no news yet about what federal assistance has been requested, but there are plenty of pictures and news footage of local emergency services and neighbors pitching in to help search damaged homes for survivors and pick up the debris from the storm. The Red Cross will move into the affected areas and set up services, and if called on, FEMA will establish local headquarters where federal aid can be applied for and emergency assistance, including cash money, can be dispensed.

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The news every day is filled with stories of the severe partisan divide in this country’s politics. The divisions extend from political parties’ differences to the differences between rural and urban areas of the country. Some states have begun separating themselves from the rest of the country with the passage of severe laws against abortion that have wiped out the reproductive rights of women. Threats are emerging to the rights of LGBTQ people in the same states that have banned abortion and taken steps to ban the teaching of the racial history of the country. The divide between those who are now known as MAGA adherents and citizens who hew to a centrist or liberal political outlook is described as so wide that it often seems as if they speak a different language. When it comes to what news the two sides consume, not only the language is different, but the information is. Disinformation and the mass spreading of lies has become an industry as large as the entertainment business.

But if you watch the news during a season of severe weather as bad as this Spring, it is clear that storms bring us together. Tornados and other severe storms like hurricanes don’t distinguish between Democrats and Republicans. Disaster brings help, not political division. Fire departments and emergency services don’t ask your political party when they are called.

Matthew Yglesias has a good column on his “Slow Boring” Substack Monday called “Negativity is [still] making everyone miserable.” In the column, he points out trends that are actually much better than many people perceive them, including the homicide rate, which is down significantly. Deaths from auto accidents have declined two years in a row; COVID deaths are down; life expectancy is up; global poverty is down significantly, even as the population has “surged,” according to figures Yglesias quoted from Our World in Data.

I would add that although we have troops in harms way, and there have been deaths from individual attacks on U.S. forces in areas of conflict around the world, we are not engaged in any active shooting wars that are producing steady numbers of military casualties the way our misbegotten wars in Iraq and Afghanistan did for decades.

If your news diet consists mostly of domestic politics and scandals bedeviling both political parties – albeit one party more than the other – it’s easy to settle into an “all is lost” or “it will never get better” attitude. Our political news is depressing. The challenges we face as a country that is divided against itself can seem overwhelming.

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But I’m here to tell you that all is not lost.

What we need as a people, and badly as the Democratic Party, is a more positive attitude. The other political party is mired in the doom and gloom of their Maximum Leader, whose firehose of daily negativity and grievance and lies now defines the Republican Party. Those who regularly consume the steady diet of that man and his puppets in Congress and in red states dominated by that party live in a universe of bottomless depression and anxiety.

I contend that most people don’t want to be depressed and angry all the time. They want to be proud of the country they live in. This Memorial Day, when we gave thanks for the sacrifice of members of our military who have given their lives to defend our liberties, it was a reminder that we can be proud of them at the same time we are sad for the sacrifice of their lives. As we recover from the tornados of this weekend and more that will surely come, we can be proud of the way communities come together to help people in need, no matter their political leanings.

Some of us are Democrats, some of us are Republicans, and some of us are Independents. We believe differently, we live different lives in different areas of the country, but in the end, blood flows through all our veins and we share the same struggles brought upon us by disease and disaster and personal tragedy.

It is important to remember that we have more in common than we often think. We can get through this. We can pitch in and help each other when the need arises, as it has across the country this Memorial Day weekend. We can vote. We can win. We’ve got this.

from Lucian Truscott

Why billionaire Tom Steyer argues capitalism is the best tool to fight climate change

It may be unusual to hear the ultra-rich argue for increasing government regulation of the economy, but billionaire Tom Steyer believes such a thing is necessary to stop the onslaught from climate change. Steyer may be best known for his longtime investment in climate solutions, as well as his decision in 2012 to step away from a highly successful investment fund he had founded.

Like many people who pay attention to the overwhelming scientific evidence that humans are causing climate change by burning fossil fuels, as explored in his new book "Cheaper, Faster, Better: How We'll Win the Climate War," which was released this month. He sees climate changes as a multi-pronged menace, one that causes hardships from mass migration to extreme weather events like hurricanes, wildfires and droughts.

Why climate change action requires "degrowth" to make our planet sustainable

Yet unlike philosophers such as the University of Tokyo's Dr. Kohei Saito or the University of Massachusetts Amherst's Dr. Richard Wolff, Steyer is firmly convinced that climate change can be solved within the confines of capitalism. The solutions of the staunch left he describes as "panic."

"Cheaper, Faster, Better" is a testament to Steyer's conviction on all of these points. As the leader of a climate investment firm, he offers readers an entertaining and informative look into the world of green energy and the clean energy transition. He argues that capitalism can save the planet from the excesses of fossil fuel companies and provide people with the tools to better educate themselves. He is nothing if not an optimist.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

In your book, you discuss your realization that climate change is important during a 2006 trip to Alaska and you discovered that one of your favorite glaciers had melted. Do you have other harrowing experiences like that one, which have happened since and which have also influenced your views on climate change?

You mean where I've seen physical evidence of climate change in a way that's irrefutable and scary?

Precisely.

Around two years ago, I went on a trip. Originally it was supposed to be to Greenland to see what's going on from a climate standpoint, but because of [COVID-19], we weren't allowed to go in. So we went up to the coast of Iceland and went to a series of glaciers and fjords to see exactly how much the ice had moved and what the pace was. And of course that was something which was similar to Alaska in the sense of you could see where it had been quite recently. You could see how far it had moved and you could see where it was likely to move.

So that to a very large extent is one of the places in the world where it's most obvious: in the far north and the far south, partially because the ice is changing so fast and partially because the poles are heating up three or four times faster than the rest of the globe. But because the places where you can see in the natural world that the human impacts are most profound and most significant are at the poles, there aren't that many people who live in the way, way far north or the way, way far south.

As a climate change reporter, the risk that I run into is I'm giving a lot of statistics, a lot of data, and a lot of concepts, but people need to visualize these things. They need to see it and hear it, not simply know it intellectually. What reforms should be implemented to help the people who need it most when climate disasters happen?

Let's start with the basic rule of global climate change, which is the less that you've done to cause the problem, the more you're going to suffer.

If you look at the people of Pakistan last year, I think one-third of the people there were displaced by huge floods. And yet Pakistan had produced numbers as low as one 10th of 1% of the cumulative greenhouse gas emissions around the globe. When we think about what are the rules, the real question is that we don't have rules at this point to reflect the pain that is being inflicted on people around the globe, nor do we have rules in place to charge people for the pollution, for the global greenhouse gas emissions that are causing the problems in the first place.

And so, before we even get to rules, one of the things that I think is absolutely critical for my standpoint is transparency. So that when we think about, how are we going to make this fair between peoples long before we get there, the question is, how are we going to measure emissions in a way that we now know what a specific company is doing?

We need a whole new information system so that we understand what's going on and can measure it. And then we need to say, under those circumstances, how are we going to make this in some way work for the people of the world in a way that's acceptable?

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"When we think about what are the rules, the real question is that we don't have rules at this point to reflect the pain that is being inflicted."

How does one implement that? Because the problem that I'm seeing is that there is massive resistance on both the political and corporate level to everything you've just proposed.

Of course, corporations are pushing back against transparency and information because they love plausible deniability. But if you will notice, California has passed laws that go into effect somewhere around 2027 asking that major corporations that do business in California actually measure and make public their emissions profile. I think the EU is also pushing a regime of transparency around emissions. You know the old saying: If you can't measure it, you can't manage it, whether that's the corporate level, the individual level or the governmental level.

When it comes to rules, don't forget, I am acting as an investor in this. And so from my standpoint, I can see business-related means of setting up fair measurements to turn into ways to reward people for sequestering carbon and charging people for emitting carbon in ways that are verifiable.

That is the beginning of a system to try to get back into the marketplace some sense of paying off the cost to people and also charging people for the cost that they're incurring for others.

What about seemingly more radical approaches to deal with climate change? Dr. Kohei Saito is a Japanese scholar who wrote a book, "Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto," advocating for Marxism as a response to the climate change controversy. He argues that we need "degrowth" in our economy, that we need to stop with perpetual growth and re-orient our entire economic infrastructure because any consumption-based economic system he argues will inherently cause climate change. When people accuse him of being socialistic, he doesn't deny it. He argues that that's a good thing. What are your thoughts about those kinds of ideas?

I just don't believe that any of those systems has ever worked. I think the system that has worked for producing people's needs and desires at scale in the world has been a capitalist system. One of the things I always say is there's no such thing as a free market. All markets have rules. And in fact, going back to the earliest Greek marketplaces, there are always rules about who gets to put their stall where. When the market opens, where the market is physically located, there are always rules.

And one of the rules here is that people don't have to pay for their CO2 emissions. God didn't come down and say that; that was just something that people didn't understand, that there was inherent cost to emitting CO2.

And over time we've come to understand that, but we are allowing people, in a sense, to pollute for free. They make a lot of money polluting for free, and they want to continue to pollute for free. The answer to that is not anti-capitalism. The answer is to actually put into capitalism, to undo the mistake. And so, to a very large extent, what I'm trying to do is to show that actually clean technologies winning in the marketplace is the way to affect change at scale, at speed, in a way that solves this problem and also does it in a way that solves the needs of people around the world. That's what I believe in.

You mentioned earlier that there will be political instability as climate migration worsens. Do you think that political instability will reflect itself in part in people embracing more radical ideologies?

When people are under pressure, you never know which way they're going to jump. They jump a lot of strange ways, but that's why it's so important to do what we're talking about: to be ahead of the game, actually solve problems, don't appeal to people's fear and panic, but actually do the smart things to prove that it works and make that happen.

And then make the argument and make it happen better and actually do the right thing, as opposed to trying to play off people's deepest fears, which honestly, if people are worried about the health and safety of their families, those fears run very deep and people can jump a lot of different ways. And that's why, to me, doing the right thing and building the right businesses and winning in a way that really takes care of people, I think is the only way to solve this.

The whole point about this book is, yes, we have a big problem, but that isn't all we have. We have an amazing opportunity to create something great, a better life than people have ever known on this planet. And so let's not get so freaked out about the challenge. Let's meet the challenge and create the opportunity.

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Because if we in fact go to what you're talking about, which is kind of panic, you don't make your good decisions in fight or flight. Fight or flight is about not being able to see anything peripherally. Not being able to focus on anything but what's right in front of your face in an emotional way. What we're talking about is doing something that's much more responsible, much more optimistic, much more positive and will have a much better outcome.

As a billionaire, what would you say to people who are more critical of billionaires in general in terms of the issue of climate change? And what would you say to your fellow billionaires who could do more to assist with the problem?

Look, I think [laughs], you know, the old saying: If you have a lot, you have a lot of responsibility too.

Or as it goes in the "Spider-Man" movie: "With great power comes great responsibility."

Well, I don't know if it's great power, but I will say this: I think for the people who are lucky enough to have succeeded, particularly in our society where being just being part of the society is such a benefit, I think we have all have a responsibility to try and take care of the society that nurtured us, and the other people who are part of that and who help build this society. That's my basic going in philosophy.

about climate change

Drinking unpasteurized raw milk containing bird flu viruses may be dangerous, new study finds

A new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine Friday found that drinking unpasteurized, or raw, milk containing H5N1 avian flu viruses may be dangerous.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison discovered that mice that were fed samples of milk from a herd of H5N1-infected cows subsequently grew very sick. Signs of illness, including ruffled fur and lethargy, appeared shortly after the mice consumed the milk.

Researchers euthanized the mice on day 4 of the study and studied where the virus was found in mouse tissues. High virus titers — a laboratory test that measures the level of antibodies in a blood sample — were detected in the respiratory organs of several mice. In two of the tested mice, the virus was found in the mammary glands.

“Detection of virus in the mammary glands of two mice was consistent with the high virus load in the milk of lactating cows, even though these mice were not lactating,” per the study. “Collectively, our data indicate that HPAI A(H5N1) virus in untreated milk can infect susceptible animals that consume it.”

Despite the recent findings, more research is needed to determine whether humans who drink raw milk containing the H5N1 virus would be affected in a similar manner as mice. The study, however, concludes that H5N1-positive milk poses a risk when consumed untreated.

The Food and Drug Administration has advised against the consumption of raw milk — mainly sourced from cows, sheep and goats. Raw milk can carry dangerous bacteria such as Salmonella, E. coli, Listeria, Campylobacter and other pathogens that cause foodborne illness.

As of May 24, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that 63 dairy cow herds in nine U.S. states have confirmed cases of H5N1 virus infections in dairy cows. Two human infections in dairy farm workers who were exposed to infected cows were also reported.

Vatican apologizes for Pope Francis allegedly saying homophobic slur

Pope Francis is in hot water after reportedly using a derogatory term for gay men when discussing and reaffirming the Vatican's long-standing ban on gay priests behind closed doors to Italian bishops.

While there may not be an official transcript or confirmation of Pope Francis' comments, on Tuesday, the Pope apologized for his use of the term, allegedly targeting gay men. The Vatican's spokesperson issued a statement acknowledging the backlash and media frenzy that has followed the comments made on May 20.

“The pope never intended to offend or express himself in homophobic terms, and he extends his apologies to those who were offended by the use of a term that was reported by others,” the spokesperson said. However, they avoided outright confirming that the pope had used the term, in line with the Vatican's tradition of keeping conversations that happen behind closed doors secret. However, the spokesperson did not deny that Francis used the term, The Associated Press reported.

Pope Francis formally approves blessings for same-sex couples

Italian media like gossip website Dagospia and then mainstream outlets were the first to report on the incident, citing that Francis, a native Spanish speaker, who is also fluent in the Vatican's official language, Italian, had said "f*****ness" in Italian.

According to reporting done by NBC News, sources in the room said that the conversation was about the acceptance of gay men into seminaries when Francis said that the seminaries were already too full of an Italian slang term "that represents a vulgar way to refer to a gay person." After the use of the slur, the audience of bishops was surprised given that the pope has openly been accepting of the LGBTQ+ community in the church and at large, NBC News said.

The reception of Francis' comments has not been received kindly by Italian media. The controversy comes as a shock as Francis has been widely regarded as one of the most liberal popes in history. He has recently allowed priests to bless individuals in gay marriages, opened the Vatican to transgender sex workers, instilled more women in the church and even called an end to anti-gay legislation.

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In an interview with The Associated Press last year, the pope said, “Being homosexual is not a crime.” During another interview with "60 Minutes" reporter Norah O’Donnell last week, she asked the pope about his comment that “Homosexuality is not a crime,” to which he responded, “No, it is a human fact.”

Vatican reporter Gerry O’Connell, a non-native Italian speaker, said in America Magazine that the pope’s remark was “a gaffe on the part of the pope, rather than a slur."

“As he has had the opportunity to state on several occasions, 'In the Church there is room for everyone, for everyone! No one is useless, no one is superfluous, there is room for everyone. Just as we are, everyone,'” the Vatican spokesperson said.

Despite Francis' liberal views, in April, the Vatican blasted gender-affirming surgery and surrogacy as a violation of human dignity. The church similarly sees gender-affirming care as on par with abortion and euthanasia, saying it rejects God's plan for human life, The Associated Press reported. In his interview with O’Donnell, Francis also clarified that the church has not allowed priests to bless the union of gay marriages, "That cannot be done because that is not the sacrament. I cannot . . . To bless a homosexual-type union, however, goes against the given right, against the law of the Church. But to bless each person, why not?"

about the Pope

“Documents don’t lie”: Prosecutors close by telling jurors they don’t have to trust Michael Cohen

On Tuesday afternoon, Manhattan prosecutor Joshua Steinglass presents the state's closing argument against former President Donald Trump, seeking to reframe the case after two hours of defense arguments that it all relies on the credibility of one Michael Cohen.

Steinglass began by arguing that that the case is not in fact about Trump’s former fixer. “That’s a deflection,” Steinglass told the jury, CNN reported. “It’s about Mr. Trump and whether he should be held accountable for making false business entries in his own business records,” he continued, and "whether he and his staff did that to cover up election interference.”

The prosecutor reminded the jury of the testimony from David Pecker, former publisher of the National Enquirer, and his stated belief that Trump had an affair with Playboy model Karen McDougal. Trump has denied the affair but, Steinglass noted, Pecker testified that the former president had described her as a "nice girl," indicating that he knew her.

Steinglass called Pecker's testimony "powerful evidence of the defendant’s involvement, wholly apart from Cohen."

The prosecution also went through the interactions between National Enquirer editor Dylan Howard, Michael Cohen, and celebrity lawyer Keith Davidson's interactions. Howard, as an editor at the National Enquirer, worked with Cohen to buy the silence of Stormy Daniels, who had been represented by Davidson.

"Howard tells Cohen Davidson rejected their offer. Howard tells Cohen that he implored Davidson to get it done. They agree on the broad strokes of the deal," Steinglass said.

He then read out a text message from Davidson joking that the two should get him an ambassadorship to the Isle of Man for all of his work on getting the deal done.

"Why is the joke funny? The joke is funny because it's a palpable recognition of what they're doing. They're helping Mr. Trump get elected," Steinglass explained.

The former president has been charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records. And while the charges against him stem from his reimbursement payments to Cohen, who paid off adult movie star Daniels, Steinglass reminded the jury that Cohen’s “significance in this case is that he provides context and color to the documents, the phone records.”

In fact, each criminal charge Trump faces is directly related to a specific entry among the business records of his organization. Steinglass said jurors should see Cohen as "like a tour guide through the physical evidence," and that while his own credibility has been questioned, "those documents don't lie and they don't forget."

How do I keep my fruit, veggies and herbs fresh longer?

We all know fresh produce is good for us, but fruit, vegetables and herbs have a tendency to perish quickly if left uneaten.

This is because even after harvesting, produce from living plants tends to continue its biological processes. This includes respiration: producing energy from stored carbohydrates, proteins and fats while releasing carbon dioxide and water vapor. (Ever found a sprouting potato in your pantry?)

On top of that, fresh produce also spoils easily thanks to various microbes – both harmless and ones that can cause disease, called pathogens.

Simply chucking things in the fridge won't solve the problem, as different types of plants will react differently to how they're stored. So, how can you combat food waste and keep produce fresh for longer? Fortunately, there are some helpful tips.

Freshness and quality begin at the farm

Farmers always aim to harvest produce when it's at an optimal condition, but both pre-harvest and post-harvest factors will affect freshness and quality even before you buy it.

Pre-harvest factors are agricultural, such as climatic conditions, soil type and water availability. Post-harvest factors include washing and cleaning after harvesting, transportation and distribution, processing and packaging, and storage.

As consumers we can't directly control these factors – sometimes the veggies we buy just won't be as good. But we can look out for things that will affect the produce once we bring it home.

One major thing to look out for is bruised, wounded or damaged produce. This can happen at any stage of post-harvest handling, and can really speed up the decay of your veggies and fruit.

Moisture loss through damaged skin speeds up deterioration and nutrient loss. The damage also makes it easier for spoilage microbes to get in.

To wash or not to wash?

You don't need to wash your produce before storing it. A lot of what we buy has already been washed commercially. In fact, if you wash your produce and can't get it completely dry, the added moisture could speed up decay in the fridge.

But washing produce just before you use it is important to remove dirt and pathogenic bugs.

Don't use vinegar in your washing water despite what you see on social media. Studies indicate vinegar has no effect on lowering microbial loads on fresh produce.

Similarly, don't use baking soda. Even though there's some evidence baking soda can remove pesticide residues from the surface of some produce, it's not advisable at home. Just use plain tap water.

Location, location, location

The main thing you need is the correct type of packaging and the correct location – you want to manage moisture loss, decay and ripening.

The three main storage options are on the counter, in the fridge, or in a "cool, dry and dark place", such as the pantry. Here are some common examples of produce and where best to put them.

Bananas, onion, garlic, potatoes, sweet potato and whole pumpkin will do better in a dark pantry or cupboard. Don't store potatoes and onions together: onions produce a gas called ethylene that makes potatoes spoil quicker, while the high moisture in potatoes spoils onions.

In fact, don't store fruits such as apples, pears, avocado and bananas together, because these fruits release ethylene gas as they ripen, making nearby fruits ripen (and potentially spoil) much faster. That is, unless you do want to ripen your fruits fast.

All leafy greens, carrots, cucumbers, cauliflower and broccoli will do best in the low-humidity drawer (crisper) in the fridge. You can put them in perforated plastic bags to retain moisture but maintain air flow. But don't put them in completely sealed bags because this can slow down ripening while trapping carbon dioxide, leading to decay and bad smells.

Some fruits will also do best in the fridge. For example, apples and citrus fruits such as oranges can keep fresh longer in the fridge (crisper drawer), although they can stay at room temperature for short periods. However, don't store watermelon in the fridge for too long, as it will lose its flavour and deep red colour if kept refrigerated for longer than three days.

Most herbs and some leafy vegetables – like celery, spring onions and asparagus – can be kept with stems in water to keep them crisp. Keep them in a well-ventilated area and away from direct sunlight, so they don't get too warm and wilt.

Experimenting at home is a good way to find the best ways to store your produce.

Fight food waste and experiment

Don't buy too much. Whenever possible, buy only small amounts so that you don't need to worry about keeping them fresh. Never buy bruised, wounded or damaged produce if you plan to keep it around for more than a day.

"Process" your veggies for storage. If you do buy a large quantity – maybe a bulk option was on sale – consider turning the produce into something you can keep for longer. For example, banana puree made from really ripe bananas can be stored for up to 14 days at 4°C. You can use freezing, blanching, fermentation and canning for most vegetables.

Consider vacuum sealing. Vacuum packaging of vegetables and berries can keep them fresh longer, as well. For example, vacuum-sealed beans can keep up to 16 months in the fridge, but will last only about four weeks in the fridge unsealed.

Keep track. Arrange your fridge so you can see the produce easily and use it all before it loses freshness.

Experiment with storage hacks. Social media is full of tips and hacks on how best to store produce. Turn your kitchen into a lab and try out any tips you're curious about – they might just work. You can even use these experiments as a way to teach your kids about the importance of reducing food waste.

Grow some of your own. This isn't feasible for all of us, but you can always try having some herbs in pots so you don't need to worry about keeping them fresh or using up a giant bunch of mint all at once. Growing your own microgreens could be handy, too.

Senaka Ranadheera, Associate Professor, The University of Melbourne

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

“Highly inappropriate”: Todd Blanche chided by judge for claiming Trump could go to prison

As if as a final hurrah, Justice Juan Merchan scolds defendant Trump’s lawyer Todd Blanche Tuesday — the closing statements day in the Manhattan criminal court in the former president’s hush money trials.

It all started as Blanche began to wrap up his nearly two hour-long closing argument. He tried to remind the jury that their decision shouldn’t be influenced by their political or personal views of Trump and stressed that this is not a referendum on his candidacy. This was an interesting point to make since Trump and his campaign maintain that this entire trial is in fact a politically motivated sham that directly impacts the election.

But it was while thanking the jurors at the end of his remarks that Blanche made a mistake. He told them that if they remain attentive to the evidence presented in the courtroom, “this is a very quick and easy 'not guilty' verdict.” He also urged them not to send Trump t oprison

At that point, prosecutor Joshua Steinglass stood up and objected. “That was a blatant and wholly inappropriate effort to call sympathy for their client,” he said, requesting a curative instruction, The New York Times reported.

This is also when Merchan, who reportedly seemed furious, scolded Blanche for making an “outrageous” statement. He again reminded Blanche that, as a former prosecutor himself, he should know what is simply not allowed.

“Making a comment like that is highly inappropriate,” he told Blanche before the court break for lunch. “It’s simply not allowed, period.”

The reason why Blanche's remark is inappropriate is that he effectively misled jurors about the potential consequences of their voting to convict Trump, which could lead jury members to reconsider their decision in light of the claimed punishment. If found guilty, it will be Judge Merchan, not the jury, deciding what Trump's punishment should be – and it may not involve incarceration at all.

"That comment was improper and you must disregard it," Merchan told the jurors after lunch on Tuesday.

Theater apologizes for Richard Dreyfuss’ allegedly “offensive” comments at “Jaws” screening

"Jaws" star Richard Dreyfuss has been slammed for his comments at the movie's screening in Massachusetts.

In an evening billed as "An Evening With Richard Dreyfuss + Jaws Screening” which was held at The Cabot Theater in Massachusetts on Saturday, attendees were met with a rant from Dreyfuss that the Hollywood Reporter said was centered on attacking trans youth and gender-affirming care and the Academy Awards’ inclusion rules.

On Monday, the theater apologized to its attendees in a statement that read, “We are aware of, and share serious concerns, following the recent event with Richard Dreyfuss prior to a screening of the film 'Jaws' at The Cabot. The views expressed by Mr. Dreyfuss do not reflect the values of inclusivity and respect that we uphold as an organization. We deeply regret the distress that this has caused to many of our patrons.

"We take full responsibility for the oversight in not anticipating the direction of the conversation and for the discomfort it caused to many patrons," the statement continued. "We are in active dialogue with our patrons about their experience and are committed to learning from this event how to better enact our mission of entertaining, educating and inspiring our community.”

While Dreyfuss' comments were not recorded during the screening, various attendees took to social media to criticize the actor's tirade. One user posted an alternative title for the evening: “An Evening of Misogyny and Homophobia With Richard Dreyfuss. Disappointing doesn’t even begin to cover it.”

Another said in a Facebook post, “We walked out of his interview tonight along with hundreds of others because of his racist homophobic misogynistic rant.” Others called the conversation with Dreyfuss “disgusting” and “offensive.”

Last year, Dreyfuss told PBS’ "Firing Line" that the Oscars' new inclusion requirements “make me vomit.”

Cannon accuses special counsel Jack Smith of lacking “professional courtesy,” rejects gag order

Judge Aileen Cannon, the Trump appointee presiding over the former president’s classified documents case, has rejected special counsel Jack Smith’s request for a gag order. And while she stopped short of embracing the defense's motion that prosecutors should be held in contempt, she lectured prosecutors for failing to give the defense adequate time, in her view, to draft a response to their request for a gag.

Cannon took the prosecution to task over their filing at the end of last week that sought to stop Trump from putting law enforcement in “foreseeable danger” over their raid of his home in Mar-a-Lago. Smith pushed for the gag order after Trump’s false statements on Truth Social claiming that the feds were authorized to assassinate him.

Technically, Cannon did neither side a favor on Tuesday since she denied both motions without prejudice. However, Smith certainly got the shorter end of the stick as she scolded his team, Law & Crime reported.

“[T]he Court finds the Special Counsel’s pro forma ‘conferral’ to be wholly lacking in substance and professional courtesy,” Cannon wrote. “It should go without saying that meaningful conferral is not a perfunctory exercise.”

In plainer English, Cannon chided prosecutors for rushing to file the gag order just before the Memorial Day weekend. In a filing Monday, defense lawyers had argued that doing so violated court rules and should be punished with sanctions.

In her ruling, Cannon said Smith's team had not provided the defense "sufficient" time to “permit reasonable evaluation of the requested relief by opposing counsel and to allow for adequate follow-up discussion as necessary about the specific factual and legal basis underlying the motion.”

Legal expert calls out Trump lawyer’s “blatant and wholly inappropriate” closing message to jury

Trump lawyer Todd Blanche used his closing arguments to continue to attack former Trump fixer Michael Cohen’s credibility – a strategy that a legal expert called both expected and central to the defense’s push to distance the former president from the alleged scheme to disguise hush-money reimbursements as legal fees.

Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass argued that voters in the 2016 presidential election should have been able to weigh whether Trump slept with an adult film star before they went to the polls. Steinglass said the campaign killed such salacious stories by falsifying business records that concealed the true purpose of payments to Cohen — all with the intent to defraud the public and ensure his candidacy.

"You don't get to commit election fraud or falsify business records because you think you've been victimized," Steinglass said, according to Newsweek reporter Katherine Fung.

But Blanche said the idea that the former president had time for the alleged “scheme” while serving as "the leader of the free world" was “absurd.”

"Cohen had an ax to grind because he did not appreciate what President Trump did or did not do for him after he became president of the U.S.," Blanche said.

Cohen has provided prosecutors with crucial testimony of his own interactions with Trump: including a key 2017 meeting at Trump Tower where he said Trump approved the reimbursement plan. Cohen also said that Trump knew about and approved the plan to pay off adult film star and director Stormy Daniels.

But Blanche urged jurors to not believe testimony from Cohen, who served time in federal prison for tax fraud and perjury. He called Cohen: "the human embodiment of reasonable doubt, literally.”

"Blanche's big finish was exactly what we expected – hammer home on reasonable doubt and give that reasonable doubt a name, "Michael Cohen," Laurie Levenson, a professor at Loyola Law School with a focus on criminal law, told Salon.

Legal expert: Next witness Michael Cohen may be the "only person" who can connect Trump to scheme

Trump is charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, with prosecutors saying that audio recordings, internal business records and witness testimony prove he was scheming to kill damaging stories about alleged extramarital sex ahead of his 2016 campaign and disguising reimbursements for the hush money to Cohen as legal fees — all in violation of state and federal election law and state tax law. Each count carries up to four years in prison, which Trump would likely serve concurrently if convicted. Trump denies the charges, as well as the alleged sexual encounters.

Prosecutors say that the October 2016 release of the Access Hollywood tapes – in which Trump is heard talking about being able to grope female genitalia because he's famous – prompted the campaign to go into overdrive to work with the National Enquirer to quash other damaging stories, including Daniels’ account of a sexual encounter with Trump in Lake Tahoe in 2006.

That tape was "capable of costing him the whole election and [Trump] knew it," Steinglass said.

Prosecutors and defense are at odds over whether there’s evidence that Trump intended to defraud or unlawfully influence the 2016 election – an issue central to the felony charges.

Blanche said jurors have plenty of reasons to disbelieve prosecutors: from the defense's contention that Trump didn't tell Cohen about the payments to Daniels ahead of the 2016 election, to the Trump Organization reporting the payments to Cohen in an IRS filing.

"It doesn’t matter if there was a conspiracy to try to win an election, every campaign in this country is a conspiracy," Blanche said.

Steinglass urged jurors to weigh an Aug. 2015 meeting at Trump Tower where prosecutors say Cohen, Trump and former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker hatched the so-called "catch-and-kill" plan.

"The real game changer of this meeting was the catch-and-kill component, and that’s the illegal part," Steinglass said. "Because once money starts exchanging hands from the campaign.. that’s federal election campaign violations."

Steinglass said that plan wasn't merely influencing an election as part of a democratic process: "It was the subversion of democracy."

Levenson said prosecutors would use closing arguments to focus on the witnesses who testified, and the documents and communications that back their testimony.

“As he wraps up, it appears that Blanche is making this case into what it always has been ‘Cohen v. Trump,’ with the hope that Cohen is such a damaged witness that jurors won't believe him – especially on the key point of whether Trump knew about the scheme,” Levenson said.

On Tuesday, Blanche said Trump faced extortion and that his campaign used strategies common in the world of politics and entertainment – namely, that of NDAs and settlements – to protect his reputation and family.

“Trump is being portrayed as someone too busy and too important to really know what was going on, and this whole case has been about embarrassing Trump,” Levenson said. “They have also emphasized that there is nothing inherently sinister about NDAs.”

Prosecutors in turn argued that Cohen's penchant for willing to lie and break rules was exactly why Trump decided to hire him as his personal attorney and fixer.

"The defendant chose Michael Cohen to be his fixer because of his willingness to lie," Steinglass said.

Levenson said that line was the essence of the prosecution's rebuttal to the attack on Cohen.

"If Cohen was such a bad guy, why did Trump rely on him so much. I also think it helps with the prosecution laid out in the beginning that this was about a cover-up – not just of the affair with Daniels, but Costello was being used to cover-up Trump's deal with Cohen," she said.

As Blanche ended his closing statements, he urged jurors not to send Trump to prison.

The New York Times reported that Judge Juan Merchan grew "clearly furious."

“Making a comment like that is highly inappropriate,” the judge said. “It is simply not allowed, period. It’s hard for me to imagine how that was accidental.”

And a prosecutor called the move a "blatant and wholly inappropriate effort to call sympathy for their client."

Levenson said the judge was "right to be mad."

"First, it is not at all clear that Trump will go to jail, even if convicted," she said. "Second, jurors are not supposed to consider the possible punishment in their deliberations."

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Blanche also argued that Daniels, her manager, and a former National Enquirer editor conspired to get the money from Trump. Neither the manager nor editor testified in the trial.

Levenson said that Blanche's claim was a “bit of a surprise.”

“Defense counsel is using a common tactic of blaming people who are not in the courtroom and asking the jurors to speculate about what others might have testified to if they had been called,” Levenson told Salon in an email.

One central issue is whether the $420,000 that Trump paid to Cohen through 2017 was to pay Cohen back for paying off Daniels to the tune of $130,000.

Key pieces include Exhibits 35 and 36: handwritten notes that prosecutors say lay out the plan to reimburse Cohen.

McConney testified that Exhibit 36 contains his handwritten notes calculating 2017 payments to Cohen.

The notes read: “Bonus: $50,000” and include a calculation of “$180,000 x 2 for taxes” for a total of $420,000 divided by 12 for $35,000 a month.

“Wire monthly from DJT,” the note reads. “Start $35,000/month Jan 2017. Mike to invoice us.”

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

Former Trump Organization controller Jeff McConney testified that nine of 11 checks to Cohen came from Trump's personal account, that Trump signed the checks from the Oval Office, and that the accounting department labeled the payments as “legal expenses.”

Cohen said he did “very minimal” work for Trump in 2017, including reviewing an agreement involving a wax figure of Melania Trump.

On Tuesday, Blanche stressed that Trump paid Cohen – his personal attorney – for legal services.

Blanche said Cohen’s invoices detailed how he was being reimbursed for legal services. He said Trump didn’t always look at the invoices, and that he never saw the 2017 checks.

And Blanche asked jurors: why would Cohen do any legal work for free for Trump?

Cohen had testified that he felt underpaid by Trump in past years.

Prosecutors say the $420,000 in payments include money for taxes, reimbursement for Cohen’s payment to a tech company and a $60,000 bonus.

The defense team asked Cohen whether he “stole” money from Trump by only paying the tech company $20,000.

Cohen told prosecutors he was “angry” because his annual bonus was slashed.

Blanche called Cohen a “thief.”

"Literally, stole, on his way out the door, stole tens of thousands of dollars from the Trump Organization,” Blanche said.

Steinglass questioned why the defense would trust Cohen's account of the bonus in the first place.

And he turned that argument on its head, saying: "The defense is trying to have it both ways."

Steinglass said if the defense denies that Cohen received the $420,000 as a reimbursement, then Cohen didn't steal anything — he was simply getting paid for his legal fees.

about Trump's criminal trial

Outside Manhattan court, Robert De Niro calls Trump a “coward” who has others do his “dirty work”

Robert De Niro, the actor best known for his roles in “Taxi Driver,” “Goodfellas” and “The Godfather II,” spoke on behalf of President Joe Biden's campaign Tuesday at a surprise press conference outside Donald Trump’s Manhattan criminal hush money trial.

"We New Yorkers used to tolerate him when he was just another grubby real estate hustler, masquerading as a big shot," De Niro said, describing the former president as a "two-bit playboy" who had been "lying his way into the tabloids." About 20 Trump supporters were spotted in a park nearby waving flags, including one that declared: “Trump or Death.”

“I love this city," De Niro continued, per the Associated Press. "I don’t want to destroy it. Donald Trump wants to destroy not only the city but the country, and, eventually, he could destroy the world.”

De Niro was joined by two former police officers, Harry Dunn and Michael Fanone, who defended the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. The actor spoke about the attack, blaming it on Trump and describing it as "coward's violence," saying the former president “doesn’t get blood on his hands – no, he doesn’t, he directs the mob to do his dirty work for him.”

De Niro also addressed Trump's policy agenda, which he described an assault on American liberty.

“I don’t mean to scare you. No, wait, maybe I do mean to scare you,” he said. “If Trump returns to the White House, you can kiss these freedoms goodbye that we all take for granted.”

A spokesperson for the Biden campaign, Michael Tyler, explained to reporters that De Niro was invited to speak in order to take advantage of the crowd of reporters attending Trump's trial.

"It’s easy to talk about the choice in this election when the entire news media is here day in and day out," he said.

Trump defense “overplayed its hand,” fell into Michael Cohen’s phone call “trap”: ex-prosecutor

Former President Donald Trump’s defense team has “overplayed its hand,” former prosecutor Glenn Kirschner told an MSNBC panel Monday.

Kirschner, along with other legal experts, discussed Trump’s hush money case wherein the presumptive GOP nominee allegedly hid payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential election.

Kirschner was asked about an opinion piece he wrote for MSNBC about the testimony from Trump’s ex-fixer, Michael Cohen. The former prosecutor highlighted a “trap” set by Cohen, pointing to a damning phone call between Trump and Cohen that the latter was fuzzy on the details about. While Trump's defense sought to portray Cohen as lying about the call ever happening, dwelling on the alleged conversation might lead jurors to spend more time thinking about the broader substance of Cohen's argument that he was doing the former president's bidding when he bought Daniels' silence.

"You may remember the substance of a consequential call but you don't remember the date and the time,” Kirschner told the panel. “And more importantly, as much of a cheapskate as Donald Trump is, do you really think that he would have started writing $35,000 reimbursement checks if Michael Cohen hadn't told him, 'Hey, boss, I made the payment. I want my money.'"

Kirschner called these “common sense arguments that will resonate with the jury.” He added: “The good news is that the jurors don’t check their common sense at the courtroom door. They bring it into the jury box. They bring it into the deliberation room.”

He explained that the biggest question jurors will likely face is: “Who benefited from this crime?” Certainly not Cohen, he argued. Kirschner added that Trump's adamant denials of any wrongdoing, including that he ever had an affair, might be hard for jurors to swallow.

"I think that the defense overplayed its hand in any number of ways, including insisting that Donald Trump had no sexual encounter with Stormy Daniels. Boy, is that going to come back to bite them."

Trump’s defense team goes after Michael Cohen in closing arguments, declaring him the “MVP of liars”

Former President Donald Trump’s lawyer Todd Blanche has used his closing argument to play down the nature of his client's alleged crimes and insist the case is merely about "documents," The New York Times reported.

The angle Blanche seems to be gunning for is that Trump was so busy being a president that he couldn’t have possibly known about much else happening under his nose. The defense lawyer is trying to paint a picture of Trump spending long days in the Oval Office, seeking to distance the former president from the documents in question, including checks he signed to reimburse Michael Cohen. Blanche has also emphasized to the jury that Trump used to be an American president, seeming to convey not just that he was busy, but that jurors should think twice before convicting someone of such stature

Rather than rely solely on spoken words, Blanche leaned on a PowerPoint presentation, with one key slide titled "No Election 'Influence,'" CNN reported. He insisted that the bottom line of the case is quite unrelated to the alleged tryst with Stormy Daniels or the hush money payments, but whether Trump. “while he was living in the White House and was the leader of the free world,” had a hand in the financial documents processed by the Trump Organization.

Part of Blanche's strategy is to also drive home the fact that Cohen is untrustworthy and a liar. "He's literally like the MVP of liars," Blanche said, NBC reported.

Ultimately, Blanche argued that this was a case of Cohen doing his own thing, of his own accord, continuing to insist – despite documents suggesting otherwise – that the former president's ex-fixer was being paid for his legal services, not his efforts to silence women on Trump's behalf.

“Blanche is making a classic horses, not zebras argument, saying that the simplest explanation of behavior is usually the right one, as he argues that Cohen was simply being paid for legal work, not repayment for a cover-up scheme,” The New York Times reported.

No, sugar doesn’t make your kids hyperactive

It's a Saturday afternoon at a kids' birthday party. Hordes of children are swarming between the spread of birthday treats and party games. Half-eaten cupcakes, biscuits and lollies litter the floor, and the kids seem to have gained superhuman speed and bounce-off-the-wall energy. But is sugar to blame?

The belief that eating sugary foods and drinks leads to hyperactivity has steadfastly persisted for decades. And parents have curtailed their children's intake accordingly.

Balanced nutrition is critical during childhood. As a neuroscientist who has studied the negative effects of high sugar "junk food" diets on brain function, I can confidently say excessive sugar consumption does not have benefits to the young mind. In fact, neuroimaging studies show the brains of children who eat more processed snack foods are smaller in volume, particularly in the frontal cortices, than those of children who eat a more healthful diet.

But today's scientific evidence does not support the claim sugar makes kids hyperactive.

The hyperactivity myth

Sugar is a rapid source of fuel for the body. The myth of sugar-induced hyperactivity can be traced to a handful of studies conducted in the 1970s and early 1980s. These were focused on the Feingold Diet as a treatment for what we now call Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), a neurodivergent profile where problems with inattention and/or hyperactivity and impulsivity can negatively affect school, work or relationships.

Devised by American paediatric allergist Benjamin Feingold, the diet is extremely restrictive. Artificial colours, sweeteners (including sugar) and flavourings, salicylates including aspirin, and three preservatives (butylated hydroxyanisole, butylated hydroxytoluene, and tert-Butrylhdryquinone) are eliminated.

Salicylates occur naturally in many healthy foods, including apples, berries, tomatoes, broccoli, cucumbers, capsicums, nuts, seeds, spices and some grains. So, as well as eliminating processed foods containing artificial colours, flavours, preservatives and sweeteners, the Feingold diet eliminates many nutritious foods helpful for healthy development.

However, Feingold believed avoiding these ingredients improved focus and behaviour. He conducted some small studies, which he claimed showed a large proportion of hyperactive children responded favorably to his diet.

Flawed by design

The methods used in the studies were flawed, particularly with respect to adequate control groups (who did not restrict foods) and failed to establish a causal link between sugar consumption and hyperactive behavior.

Subsequent studies suggested less than 2% responded to restrictions rather than Feingold's claimed 75%. But the idea still took hold in the public consciousness and was perpetuated by anecdotal experiences.

Fast forward to the present day. The scientific landscape looks vastly different. Rigorous research conducted by experts has consistently failed to find a connection between sugar and hyperactivity. Numerous placebo-controlled studies have demonstrated sugar does not significantly impact children's behaviour or attention span.

One landmark meta-analysis study, published almost 20 years ago, compared the effects of sugar versus a placebo on children's behavior across multiple studies. The results were clear: in the vast majority of studies, sugar consumption did not lead to increased hyperactivity or disruptive behavior.

Subsequent research has reinforced these findings, providing further evidence sugar does not cause hyperactivity in children, even in those diagnosed with ADHD.

While Feingold's original claims were overstated, a small proportion of children do experience allergies to artificial food flavourings and dyes.

Pre-school aged children may be more sensitive to food additives than older children. This is potentially due to their smaller body size, or their still-developing brain and body.

Hooked on dopamine?

Although the link between sugar and hyperactivity is murky at best, there is a proven link between the neurotransmitter dopamine and increased activity.

The brain releases dopamine when a reward is encountered – such as an unexpected sweet treat. A surge of dopamine also invigorates movement – we see this increased activity after taking psychostimulant drugs like amphetamine. The excited behaviour of children towards sugary foods may be attributed to a burst of dopamine released in expectation of a reward, although the level of dopamine release is much less than that of a psychostimulant drug.

Dopamine function is also critically linked to ADHD, which is thought to be due to diminished dopamine receptor function in the brain. Some ADHD treatments such as methylphenidate (labelled Ritalin or Concerta) and lisdexamfetamine (sold as Vyvanse) are also psychostimulants. But in the ADHD brain the increased dopamine from these drugs recalibrates brain function to aid focus and behavioral control.

Why does the myth persist?

The complex interplay between diet, behavior and societal beliefs endures. Expecting sugar to change your child's behaviour can influence how you interpret what you see. In a study where parents were told their child had either received a sugary drink, or a placebo drink (with a non-sugar sweetener), those parents who expected their child to be hyperactive after having sugar perceived this effect, even when they'd only had the sugar-free placebo.

The allure of a simple explanation – blaming sugar for hyperactivity – can also be appealing in a world filled with many choices and conflicting voices.

Healthy foods, healthy brains

Sugar itself may not make your child hyperactive, but it can affect your child's mental and physical health. Rather than demonising sugar, we should encourage moderation and balanced nutrition, teaching children healthy eating habits and fostering a positive relationship with food.

In both children and adults, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommends limiting free sugar consumption to less than 10% of energy intake, and a reduction to 5% for further health benefits. Free sugars include sugars added to foods during manufacturing, and naturally present sugars in honey, syrups, fruit juices and fruit juice concentrates.

Treating sugary foods as rewards can result in them becoming highly valued by children. Non-sugar rewards also have this effect, so it's a good idea to use stickers, toys or a fun activity as incentives for positive behaviour instead.

While sugar may provide a temporary energy boost, it does not turn children into hyperactive whirlwinds.

Amy Reichelt, Senior Lecturer (Adjunct), Nutritional neuroscientist, University of Adelaide

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

“Terrible place”: Bill Maher warns a civil war “could happen here” — some already “pining” for it

In a recent sit-down with CNN's Fareed Zakaria, comedian Bill Maher seemed to suggest that the United States could potentially be facing a second "civil war."

During the Sunday interview, which was meant to promote Maher's forthcoming book, "What This Comedian Said Will Shock You," Zakaria asked the "Real Time" host how the GOP, once "the party of Ronald Reagan," had transmogrified into "American carnage."

"Well I think the basis of it is we started to hate each other," Maher replied, before leveling criticism at both Democrats and Republicans. "When you hate people, you don't listen to them. So it doesn't matter how reasonable they might be. We have reached this place where each side thinks the other side is an existential threat. You hear that term from both sides all the time. That is just a terrible place to be."

"Why am I f***ing listening to you?" Bill Burr rips Bill Maher's "very simple solution" to Gaza war

"We find ourselves in this situation where both sides are literally siding with enemies of America rather than the opposition party within the country. You see Republican MAGA people with t-shirts that say, I’d rather be with Russia than Democrats,” the comedian added.

Maher observed to Zakaria that he titled the final chapter of his book "Civil War" because he feels the threat of such a conflict it is a very viable possibility.

“This is a terrible place to be, and it can happen here. The last chapter in the book is called ‘civil war’ and you hear more about it all the time, people who are actually pining for it, civil war, 'come on…let’s do this thing! Let’s get this going. Let’s have this national divorce' — it can’t work. It won’t work,” Maher said. “Half the country is not going to self-deport even if you win every election.”

Zakaria also noted how some of Maher's fans have claimed that he has "matured too much" and become "cranky" and "crotchety" in his beliefs and opinions, before asking Maher how he would respond to those naysayers who accuse him of saying "the kids are crazy."

"I mean they're wrong and the kids are crazy," Maher said, subsequently diving into a discussion about the spate of college protests regarding Israel's war in Gaza.

"They have this idea, the younger generation — maybe every generation does — that just because something is new, that it's better. And that's not true. New is not synonymous with better," Maher said. He then observed how he has been called a hypocrite because he previously supported protesting against the Vietnam War.

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"Yeah, that was very different," Maher claimed. "First of all, students weren't against their own. These students were threatening other students. That didn't happen in the Vietnam War. And being against the Vietnam War made sense — it was a war that we probably should not have been in. This is demonstrating and protesting for a terrorist group."

"The left has changed," Maher argued. "Now, the right has changed also, and even worse. I mean the right doesn't believe in democracy anymore. I mean, they've thrown their lot in with this sociopath named Donald Trump who only thinks elections count when we win."

Maher concluded the discussion by offering a few grim sentiments about Trump, alleging that the the former president is likely to stoke chaos regardless of whether he wins the 2024 presidential election.

“Donald Trump is not going to concede the election so what happens in January 2025 on the 20th when inauguration day rolls around and he didn’t win the election?” Maher said. “He’s not just going to go away. And if he wins and he’s the president on January 20, 2025, he’s never going to give that up.”

about this topic

Why we should revamp our misconceptions about sandwiches, according to aficionado Jason Skrobar

I have always adored sandwiches.

As I've written before, tuna sandwiches have a deep meaning in my life, but that adoration and importance also extends to open-faced hot turkey sandwiches, grilled cheeses, burgers, cold cut sandwiches and much, much more (the bulk of this was all imparted by my dad and I'd argue that my brother might actually like sandwiches even more than I do. We have even spoken about launching a sandwich shop of our own on multiple occasions!)

Everything I learned about building a better sandwich, I learned at my local bánh mì counter

Someone who shares this affinity is Jason Skrobar, the author of "The Book of Sandwiches," which goes beyond "simple, lunchtime fare" and into open-faced, chic and even dessert sandwiches, bypassing and revamping the idea of sandwiches as some sort of unexciting, bland food to hurriedly eat for lunch.

A sandwich can be so much more.

Salon Food spoke with Skrobar about what inspired the love letter to sandwiches, his favorite kinds, under-appreciated ingredients and his ideal ingredients for the absolute best sandwiches, bar none.

The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

The Book of Sandwiches by Jason Skrobar (Photo by Sébastian Dubois-Didcock/Appetite/Random House)

What would you say first sparked your love of sandwiches?

I would say my mum’s toasted tomato sandwich. She would make them for us throughout the summer months with tomatoes she would pick from our backyard. Homemade toasted sourdough bread would be slathered with creamy mayo and thick slices of freshly picked tomatoes would be piled high.

This sandwich is in the book, and it’s called "My Perfect Sandwich" — make it, and you’ll see why!

Do you have a #1 favorite sandwich?

I always say my favorite sandwich is the one I’m about to eat!

They’re all my children, so I don’t know how I could pick. But if you insist, a few favs would include "The Pretty Happy Drew" (named after the wonderful Drew Barrymore), which has perfectly crispy homemade potato chips, freshly grated beet, wonderfully salty grilled Halloumi, finished with a tangy and slightly sweet dressing — oh, and [it's] on a perfectly toasted brioche bun.

Another favorite is "The Big Dipper," my take on a French Dip. Crispy, crunchy fried shiitake mushrooms are piled high on a bed of shallot chilli butter, which sits on a crunch roll. The whole thing is dipped in a magical brothy mushroom jus. Delicious!

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The book is divided into seven sections — would you say you're especially partial to one?

I love them all equally! The great thing about each section is that there is a wide variety of sandwiches within each section: the Breakfast section doesn’t just work with bacon and eggs. We’ve got many unexpected ingredients: granola, cherry caramelized onions, kale chips, caramelized bananas, caviar, etc.

Each section was designed to surprise and excite.

What do you think is the best anchor — the best bread — for most sandwiches? Or does it depend on the "genre" of sandwich?

There is a rule I write about in the book that addresses this very question. In sandwich making, when working with a crunchy interior, think fried chicken, or anything fried for that matter; a pillowy soft bun is the perfect partner. That’s why you generally always see brioche as the bun of choice for fried chicken — a slice of baguette just would not cut it.

The opposite is true for when you’re working with a softer interior, say pulled lamb or pork — a crunchy exterior works best here — like a toasted baguette or ciabatta. But as with all rules, they’re sometimes meant to be broken. A PB&J sandwich is always pretty perfect on a plain slice of white bread.

Jason Skrobar (Photo by Sébastian Dubois-Didcock)

For some, the notion of a "sweet sandwich" is a wild concept: How would you break that section down?

Many people scratched their heads when I told them about the sweet section. But if you think about it, there are many iconic sweet sandwiches: ice cream sandwiches, cookie sandwiches, French macarons, and whoopie pies — all sandwiches. And I have versions of all of these in the book.

And there are creations of mine that are entirely unique to the book: "Crème Brûlée Cookie Sandwich" — my take on the iconic crème brûlée, but in cookie form. "This One’s for You Mom" is an homage to my lovely mum! A dark chocolate carrot cake sandwich with a not-too-sweet mascarpone and cream cheese filling. [It's] possibly one of the more challenging chapters to write, but also one of the more rewarding.

Tell me a bit about what makes the "chic" sandwiches a bit fancier?

A "chic sandwich" could be defined as a stylish and sophisticated take on the traditional sandwich, featuring unique combinations that elevate it from the ordinary. It's not just about what’s inside the sandwich, but how I present it.

These sandwiches not only taste expensive, but also look like they’ve come from a high-end restaurant. They work well for dinner parties and when guests are in from out of town. I tried to elevate the everyday sandwich into a sophisticated and luxurious experience.

Want more great food writing and recipes? Subscribe to Salon Food's newsletter, The Bite.

I love an open-faced sandwich. Would you say there's a standout amongst those included in the book?

I adore this chapter for a few reasons. Not only was it a lot of fun to shoot these open-faced sandwiches (not having to deal with the tops felt so freeing!), but the flavor combinations in this chapter are out of this world tasty.

There is something for everyone in this chapter, from folks with a sweet tooth, savory friends and everyone in between. I may be in the minority here, but my love of anchovies would take the win with "A Shocking Hit! A Surprise Standout!" A buttery, toasty baguette is topped with a few jammy eggs, some tangy, salty white anchovies, and a pile of freshly chopped parsley and finished with a sprinkling of slightly spicy Aleppo pepper. Perfect!

The notion of a Hawaiian pizza sandwich is pretty bonkers. How did you ideate that one?

I love a salty-sweet moment, so I wanted to feature a sandwich that played with this flavor combination. After several failed attempts, my brain went to the much-maligned Hawaiian pizza. But I ditched the traditional ham you would typically use and opted for my favorite, mortadella.

Grilling the pineapple seemed the only way to go, and whipping up a small batch of slightly spicy tomato sauce rounded it all up. How can I forget a slice of melted provolone on one side and a slice of melted mozzarella on the other? It’s my way of giving thanks, in sandwich form, to my favorite slice of pizza (a Canadian invention, I might add!).

Would a gluten-free person still be able to cook out of your book?

Oh, for sure! The gluten-free options in the bakery aisles of every grocery store have improved dramatically in the past few years. The bread in every sandwich in the book can be swapped out for gluten-free. And in the sweet chapter, generally speaking, gluten-free flours are usually a 1-1 swap for all-purpose flour.

Sandwiches often feel lighter or lunch-y or simpler, but in some instances, the prep might exceed even most dinner recipes. What would you say is the most involved recipe in the book?

The prep time for the sandwiches in this book ranges from a few minutes to sometimes a good part of the day. That might scare some people, but generally, the sandwiches that require a lot more prep time are ones where part of the recipe needs to be cooked away either in the oven or on the stovetop, so it’s not active work time.

Recipes like my bolognese, the braised lamb, or the beef short ribs all need some time before you can enjoy the sandwich, but you can do other things while they work their magic in the oven. The falafel is another sandwich that requires quite a bit of work, but that being said, you can skip some of the steps.

Instead of making the pita, you could buy some. Instead of making the baba ganoush, you could buy some, and by skipping those two steps, you’ve saved a reasonable amount of time.

For Carm (Photo by Sébastian Dubois-Didcock/Appetite/Random House)

Is there any common misconception about sandwiches you'd love to debunk?

The biggest misconception about sandwiches is that they’re simple, lunchtime fare. There’s a whole chapter on breakfast sandwiches! And to that point, not all breakfast sandwiches need an egg or bacon to be called breakfast sandwiches. I say in the book, feel free to eat these sandwiches at any point in the day. And who wouldn’t want to have a delicious sandwich for dinner? I say sandwiches for breakfast, lunch and dinner — and even dessert, my friends!

What is the ideal grilled cheese?

Dare I say there is no ideal grilled cheese?! There are numerous grilled cheeses in the book, and if I wrote another book on sandwiches, I would include a whole chapter on grilled cheeses! I love them that much.

Seriously though, you can have so much fun with grilled cheese: Make all the ones in the book and then go hog wild and start creating your own versions using ingredients that speak to you. Have fun with it.

If you had to pinpoint the best sandwich sauce or spread, do you have a favorite?

All the sandwiches in the book have some sauce, whether it's a saucy sauce, a pesto, a jam, or a drizzle of hot honey — each one has some saucy component. But if I were to pick my favorite, it would have to be mayo. More sandwiches have mayo or a mayo-based sauce than anything else. I use mayo as a base for many sauces: spicy mayo, curry mayo, maple mayo, Russian dressing, lemon tarragon brown butter mayo, and more. Mayo for the win!

How did your love of sandwiches impact your career at large, leading up to and culminating in "The Book of Sandwiches?”

Great question! As a food stylist and recipe developer, I had already been working in this space for years and loved that I was able to make a career of it. The question of writing a cookbook had not only been in my head, but so many people would ask me about it. My love of sandwiches finally pushed me to do what I had always wanted to do: write a cookbook.

Being able to write this book has not only been a career highlight, but on a personal level, it is the thing I am most proud of. I hope everyone lovely enough to buy it loves it as much as I do!

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Major restaurant chains are cutting menu prices due to high food costs, decrease in consumer demand

Fast food has long been regarded as a convenient and affordable meal option. But over the past decade, a classic hamburger-and-fries combo has become increasingly unattainable for many Americans. Fast-flation — the term used to describe soaring fast food menu prices — continues to affect diners nationwide. So much so, that many consider fast food a “luxury,” and are choosing to eat more meals at home instead of dining out.

A recent study from FinanceBuzz found that average fast food prices have risen between 39% and 100% from 2014 to 2024 — increases that “outpaced” inflation during the given time period. Since 2014, McDonald’s had the highest price increases compared to other major chains with menu prices doubling (100% increase) across popular items. Earlier this year, the multinational fast food chain sparked a national debate after a McDonald’s in Darien, Connecticut, charged an astounding $18 for a Big Mac combo meal. The backlash compelled McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski to announce that the company would make affordability a priority in 2024 during a Feb. 5 earnings call.

“The battleground is certainly with that low-income consumer. And I think what you’re going to see as you head into 2024 is probably more attention to what I would describe as affordability,” Kempczinski said, per a transcript of the call, adding that he believes consumers prioritized “absolute price point” over “value.” Kempczinski reiterated similar sentiments in April, during the company’s first-quarter earnings call. “Consumers continue to be even more discriminating with every dollar that they spend as they face elevated prices in their day-to-day spending, which is putting pressure on the industry,” he said. “[I]t's imperative that we continue to keep affordability at the forefront for our customers.”

The death of the fast-food dining room

This month, McDonald’s announced a limited-time offer which is slated to drop June 25. The promo meal will include a choice of either a McChicken, a McDouble or four-piece chicken nuggets, small fries and a small drink — all for just $5.

Now other food retailers are following suit in hopes of winning back their customers. Giant Food announced in April that it would lower prices on its private label food staples, including bread, milk, bottled water, bacon, frozen vegetables and more. Just a month later, Aldi said it would cut prices on more than 250 items, like frozen fruit, granola bars and meats. The latest move plans to put $100 million back into customers’ wallets through Labor Day, the grocer specified in a press release.

This week, Target announced that it would cut prices on 5,000 different products, including fruit, milk, meat, peanut butter, pet food, paper towels and more. And on Tuesday, Wendy’s dropped its budget-friendly breakfast combo meal. For a limited time only, customers can get a Bacon, Egg, & Cheese English Muffin or a Sausage, Egg, & Cheese English Muffin with a small order of Seasoned Potatoes for a total of $3. Wendy’s said it’s “doubling down on better breakfast with unmatched value and quality on the go” with its latest meal deal, according to Food & Wine.

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The drastic menu price hikes are undoubtedly hitting consumers hard, especially low-income Americans. A January poll from consulting firm Revenue Management Solutions found that 25% of individuals who make under $50,000 were cutting back on fast food due to high costs. Adding to the decline in consumer demand is the widening gap between the prices of Food At Home (FAH) and prices of Food Away From Home (FAFH).

Wendy’s breakfast deal isn’t the only price-conscious promotion the fast food chain will offer its customers. Wendy’s is looking to compete with McDonald’s via its “Wendy’s Wednesday,” which awards customers free six-piece nuggets with any mobile app purchase every single Wednesday. There’s also Wendy’s Nuggs Party Pack, a 50-piece order of all white meat chicken nuggets that’s available every day of the week in select participating locations. The Nuggs Party Pack Map — which details which stores are serving up the crowd-sized meal — was designed by Rashiq Zahid, who created the McBroken website to expose McDonald’s so-called “broken” ice cream machines.

“We don’t break under pressure…fans can always count on Wendy’s for a Frosty® treat, and now a Nuggs Party Pack,” Wendy’s assured its consumers.

about the fast food industry:

Biden is blowing a huge chance to fight inflation — and possibly prevent a global economic meltdown

By some accounts, President Joe Biden has already missed the deadline to close a regulatory loophole — blamed for inflation and identified as a systemic risk to the global economy — without fear that Pres. Donald Trump can blast it back open.

Any time a presidency may be nearing its end, regulators scramble to finalize rules early enough that they’re not easy to undo if the other party takes control. Federal law says regulations passed near the end of the congressional session can be undone with just majority votes in the next Congress — and the signature of the next president.

Some estimates pegged yesterday, May 22, as the deadline to lock in new regulations safe from the next Congress. But the deadline also might be as late as September, because the timeline is determined, according to the Congressional Review Act (CRA), by the number of days Congress is in session, which we won’t know until the session is done.

Last month, the American Prospect took a look at the regulatory race now under way. But there’s one regulation no one’s mentioned so far that could not only curb inflation, but possibly prevent a global economic meltdown.

And the warning lights have been flashing red for more than two years.

My source for this claim is Michael Greenberger. He’s now stepping down from running the University of Maryland Center for Health and Homeland Security that he founded and led, but remains on the university’s law school faculty. I got in touch with him two years ago because of his previous job as director of the Division of Trading and Markets at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).

I called him after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine triggered a spike in oil prices. I wanted to know whether the spike was consistent with supply-and-demand issues.

I asked Greenberger specifically because he had raised this flag before, identifying the Enron Loophole for deregulating oil futures trading, causing oil to hit record prices back in 2008. I reported on this at the time for Countdown with Keith Olbermann. Both presidential candidates, Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Barack Obama (D-IL), pledged to close the loophole. Obama did, and prices came down.

Was something similar happening now, in 2022?

Greenberger had said no a month before I called him, when a Senate staffer asked him the same thing. But now, by the time I came along, his answer had changed.

In fact, I was late to the game. On March 24, 2022, Public Citizen Energy Program Director Tyson Slocum had warned of “evidence of excessive [Wall Street] speculation” after two years of “an extraordinary surge in commodities market volatility.”

On April 28, 2022, The Guardian’s Antonia Juhasz wrote that once-minor blips in oil supplies were now causing outsized reactions. She quoted an industry analyst who said supply-and-demand “fundamentals have been rendered almost irrelevant.”

When I spoke with Greenberger for my report the following month, he identified one, single regulatory loophole — based on Footnote 563 of a CFTC policy statement — as the culprit. It turned out that Greenberger had already written a substantial paper on the dangers that Footnote 563 posed to the global economy.

By making hundreds of billions of dollars in bets on commodity prices invisible, Wall Street had effectively recreated a dynamic in which yet again the markets were sufficiently opaque that one shaky domino could send the rest tumbling down. Again.

Greenberger’s warning about this scenario had been endorsed by no less august a figure than former Federal Reserve Chair Paul Volcker.

With gas prices rising, Greenberger now believed that the volume of Wall Street bets was so high, those bets weren’t just threatening the future of the economy, they were already driving prices. The few traders who actually sold or bought actual, physical oil — instead of just betting on it — were so outnumbered it didn’t matter what price they set; their price would disappear along with their tiny drop of oil into the vast virtual casino without a ripple.

And it wasn’t just oil. It was everything. Agricultural products. Meat. Fruit. Grain. Minerals.

I reported all this for The Young Turks on May 11, 2022. Neither the White House nor the CFTC responded.

Others did. As I reported the following month, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and other congressional Democrats were joining various watchdog groups raising flags around Footnote 563 and its role in rising prices. Greenberger had privately advised some of the groups that gas prices could come down as much as 25% with just a few choice words from Biden to scare off the Wall Street traders.

Still, nothing happened.

Biden said he had tasked his entire administration with finding levers to pull and knobs to twiddle that might reduce inflation. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said in early 2022 that because of rising gas prices, Democrats were “picking up the hood and shining a spotlight on how these corporations price and function.” But “these corporations” were oil companies, not the Wall Street firms who were Schumer’s constituents. Democrats were looking under the wrong hood.

They still are. On Tuesday, the White House announced it will release a million gallons of gas from a federal reserve to ease prices as summer travel season starts. That move, however, presumes prices follow supply — at a time when the U.S is producing more gasoline than any country in history.

For example, back in October 2022, OPEC announced production cuts to drive prices higher. It would have worked if supply and demand were holding the tiller. But prices went down, just as Greenberger predicted.

Even before prices started sliding, he told me that jacking prices up too high, even with the alibi of production cuts, wasn’t in Wall Street’s interests. If the markets went totally haywire, someone would catch on and shut the party down.

When the gas companies reported record profits, I asked Greenberger whether those profits were driven by Wall Street’s use of Footnote 563 — rather than by a sudden onset of Big Oil greed, as Democrats said. “Yes,” Greenberger said.

But Greenberger was virtually the only voice blaming Wall Street, and The Young Turks was the only outlet reporting it.

Nothing happened.

One irony here is that Democrats almost killed Footnote 563 once before, under similar circumstances. It was in the fall of 2016. The CFTC thought they could finish their work during the first term of President Hillary Clinton. No one thought Trump would win.

He did, taking control of regulatory agencies after promising in his campaign to undo the Dodd Frank Wall Street reforms. Trump ordered two regulations killed for every new one enacted. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin signaled that he wanted the CFTC to keep Footnote 563’s loophole right where it was.

In 2019, Trump appointee Heath Tarbert took the reins at the CFTC. A former law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and former undersecretary for Mnuchin, Tarbert did what Mnuchin wanted.

By the end of 2019, Tarbert cemented Footnote 563 in place by killing the plan to close it: “The Commission is today withdrawing the 2016 Proposal.”

Biden has had three-plus years to close Footnote 563, but he was late off the mark. He took a long time getting his CFTC nominees to the Senate Agriculture Committee, which took a long time to confirm them.

In 2022, I asked Slocum, of Public Citizen, about the prospects for killing Footnote 563. Slocum told me, “We’ll see what [CFTC Chair Rostin] Behnam is able to do.”

Slocum served — and still does — on two CFTC advisory councils. But even his pleas went unheeded.

When I spoke with him again in October 2022, five months later, Slocum told me, “We continue to have radio silence from Chairman Behnam.”

The country’s entire financial regulatory regime had found itself distracted by the shiny new object known as crypto-currencies.

So yesterday, in light of the coming regulatory deadline, I checked in with Slocum yet again: “No action by the CFTC.”

I also asked Greenberger, referring specifically to the deadline that Biden and the CFTC may now have missed to undo Footnote 563 without having to fear the Congressional Review Act (CRA) next year. Here’s what Greenberger told me yesterday:

“The Trump campaign has made it clear — and especially clear for purposes of raising campaign funds — that it wants to attract campaign funds by promising to loosen greatly financial regulations designed to lessen financial collapse or inflation. The CRA would thus become a weapon to destabilize the U.S. and world economy by giving [the] biggest banks and biggest hedge funds whatever they want to the utter hindrance of anti-inflation and systemic risk controls.”

Of course, there’s an environmental cost to lower gas prices: People will burn more fossil fuels. Biden could address that more vigorously than he has — while still lowering prices on other commodities.

And there’s still time for Biden to act. He or his regulators could do something simple by merely addressing Footnote 563 publicly. That alone would cool Wall Street’s gambling streak.

In fact, lots of Democrats could do this, with similar effect. Committee chairs. State attorneys general could contemplate investigations or lawsuits. There are many levers and knobs to pull when it comes to Wall Street’s role.

Even if a new regulation isn’t set in stone in time, putting it on the books in time would at least attach a political cost to killing it. Closing Footnote 563, however late in the game, would still force Republicans in a second Trump presidency to vote publicly on whether to let Wall Street continue driving inflation.

The final irony, of course, is that acting now on Wall Street-driven inflation might boost Biden politically enough that there won’t be a second Trump presidency.