At last we see Trump’s tax returns: Untangling them is another matter

Six years of former President Donald Trump’s federal tax returns were finally released on Friday. They include thousands of pages of dense financial data, showing that Trump and his wife Melania paid very little in federal income taxes in the first and last year of his presidency — and suggesting that contrary to his previous claims, Trump accepted his salary as president at least for his final year in office.

The House Ways and Means Committee released the redacted versions of Trump’s returns for the tax years 2015 through 2020. The report comes days before Republicans are set to take control of the House, and ends Trump’s extended efforts to conceal his tax returns from the public.

Trump’s tax information will now be available for journalists, independent tax specialists and ordinary citizens to read, study and pick apart in the leadup to the 2024 presidential election.

The Ways and Means Committee also confirmed a report from the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) stating that Trump claimed significant business losses both before and during his presidency that he carried forward in order to reduce his tax burden. His returns show that he carried forward a $105 million loss in 2015 and $73 million in 2016.

Trump and the IRS: A massive tax cheat and a hapless, corrupt agency

The JCT found that the former president paid no taxes in 2020. The variability of Trump’s tax history is also noteworthy: He paid a combined $1.1 million in federal income taxes in 2018 and 2019 but just $750 in 2017.

The file released by Ways and Means contains numerous documents from Trump’s personal and business tax returns. One area that observers have flagged as potentially dubious is the interest Trump claimed he received on loans to his children, a possible indication that he was trying to hide gifts, according to the JCT.

In its report, the committee questioned whether “the loans were bona fide arm’s length transactions, or whether the transfers were disguised gifts that could trigger gift tax and a disallowance of interest deductions by the related borrowers.”

BREAKING:

The House Ways and Means Committee has officially released six Trump’s tax returns.

Read here: https://t.co/NVegOYNGuZ

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) December 30, 2022

The returns also show that Trump held foreign bank accounts in the U.K., Ireland and China while in office.

The Chinese bank account was tied to Trump International Hotels Management’s business plans in the country and was reported by the New York Times in 2020. That disclosure came during the election campaign, when Trump accused Joe Biden of being a “puppet” of China. Biden’s tax returns and other financial disclosures showed no deals or income from China.

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The Ways and Means Committee, which is responsible for writing tax policy and overseeing the IRS, found that the federal tax agency had failed to conduct mandatory audits on Trump, according to reporting from CNN.

The IRS opened only one of the required audits while Trump was presidency, for the 2016 tax year (which preceded his term of office). That audit did not even begin until the fall of 2019 — the committee’s report characterized the presidential audit program as “dormant.”

The JCT report also sheds light on some of the large charitable deductions that Trump claimed on his tax returns, which can reduce the amount of income tax owed. The returns do not show the full extent of Trump’s financial dealings, nor do they reveal his net worth.

Following the release of his returns to the public, Trump shared a videotaped statement on Friday with a request for campaign donations.

“Although these tax returns contain relatively little information and not information that almost anybody would understand — they’re extremely complex — the radical Democrats’ behavior is a shame upon the U.S. Congress,” he said.

The Ways and Means Committee’s top Republican, Rep. Kevin Brady of Texas, sounded an alarm after Trump’s returns were released, warning that the report will give future committee chairmen “nearly unlimited” power to make public the tax returns of “private citizens, political enemies, business and labor leaders or even the Supreme Court justices themselves.”

“In the long run, Democrats will come to regret it,” Brady said in a statement.

Trump was the first presidential candidate in decades to withhold his tax returns, and sued the committee in an attempt to keep them private.

New: House Ways and Means chair Richard Neal on release of Trump tax returns: “We are only here today because four years ago, our request to learn more about the program under 6103 was denied. This was the first time that this key oversight function was hampered.”

— Hugo Lowell (@hugolowell) December 30, 2022

After gaining access to Trump’s returns, the Democratic-controlled House passed a bill before the winter recess that would require the IRS to audit a president’s tax filings within 90 days of their inauguration. Democratic leaders were on a tight timeline, since Republicans will take majority control when the new Congress convenes on Jan. 3.

The House Ways and Means report can be viewed here.

about the tax returns of U.S. citizen Donald J. Trump

From “The Bear” to “The Menu,” this was the year pop culture faced the horrors of fine dining

There’s a Gordon Ramsay clip that I just can’t seem to escape. You’ve probably seen it, too: It features the chef holding television host Julie Chen Moonves’ head between two slices of bread while yelling at her. “What are you?” he screams.

“An idiot sandwich,” she replies.

“Still taboo”: Eating disorders are a silent epidemic in professional kitchens

The scene originates from “Hell’s Cafeteria,” a parody skit from an episode of “The Late Late Show with James Cordon.” It satirizes Ramsay’s own pugilistic and profane-laced television persona, which first achieved global attention through the 1999 BBC docu-series “Britain’s Most Unbearable Bosses,” and which he has continued to sharpen through programs like “Kitchen Nightmares” and “Hell’s Kitchen.”

Since airing in 2015, the top YouTube video featuring the clip has garnered over 13 million views. It’s become something of an internet meme — a GIF response at the ready every time someone says something inane on social media. Even Ramsay himself has cashed in on the popularity of the clip, releasing a short run of “idiot sandwich earmuffs,” with slices of bread serving as the ear coverings.

For a long time, verbal abuse in the kitchen, like the kind that Ramsay both perpetuates through his rant-filled programs and, alternately, satirizes in late-night appearances, has been framed as either something of a joke or a necessary evil to survive in an exacting industry (which Ramsay has ironically classified as being filled with “the rages and the bullying and violence”).

However, this was the year that prestige entertainment — from television to film to nonfiction books — focused its lens on the often-unspoken horrors of fine dining, including the verbal abuse and occasional threat of physical abuse that transpires in both the front and back-of-house. This comes after decades of essentially culturally elevating chefs to near-rock stardom, but is it possible that shining a light on the darker side of the industry could actually change it?

***

Why are you so slow? Why are you so f**king slow? Why? You think you’re so tough. Yeah. Why don’t you say this? Say, “Yes, chef, I’m so tough.”

In FX’s “The Bear,” this is how the nameless, fictional head chef (Joel McHale) berates protagonist Carmine “Carmy” Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) while he is working on the line at the very real Eleven Madison Park. While the series creators have remained mum with regards to who exactly that chef is supposed to represent, it’s not a stretch to assume that it’s meant to be a satire of Eleven Madison Park’s real-life chef/owner Daniel Humm.

As Genevieve Yam wrote for Bon Appetit, this scene proved particularly hard to watch for industry members.

“I could barely get through ‘The Bear,'” she wrote. “Not because I thought it was bad television—but because it was the most accurate portrayal of life in a restaurant kitchen I’ve seen in a while. It was so accurate that it was triggering: The details of spilling a whole Cambro of veal stock, your peers hiding your mise en place, and still others turning up the stove when you weren’t looking. It reminded me a little too much of what it was like to fend for myself in a chaotic, cutthroat kitchen. After watching, I spoke with other restaurant workers. We all agreed the show is a stark reminder of our trauma.”

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These are the corners of the industry that The Food Network doesn’t really touch, which is one of the reasons why Carmy’s eventual admission that he is struggling with processing his experience in fine dining is particularly poignant. As the character tells his sister, “I’m fine, I just have trouble breathing sometimes and I wake up screaming.”

This isn’t just a back-of-house — or fictional — problem, though. In September, two months after the debut of “The Bear,” Edward Chisholm released his nonfiction book “A Waiter in Paris: Adventures in the Dark Heart of the City.”

As Salon Food reported, Chisholm moved from London to Paris in 2011 and, despite having very little knowledge of the French language or culture, “he quickly fell in with a ragtag group of cigarette-fueled waiters at a fine dining restaurant.” Through Chisholm’s punchy prose, readers will be taken through his whirlwind career filled with demanding customers, squalid living conditions and panic attacks in the Pass.

He writes of his time in the kitchen:

Presiding over this terrestrial inferno is the Chef. The only white man in the entire kitchen. A Corsican, and a giant of a man who wields a knife so large it probably once belonged to Hercules himself. With this he points, prods, slicks, licks and hits metal surfaces. He’s a man full of frothing rage. Nothing is ever good enough. The little printer is constantly spitting out tickets which he rips off with such ferocity that it seems the machine will come off the wall. The orders he shouts violently into the ears of the cooks, as if he takes an intense pleasure from treating them with such disdain.

Chisholm recounts a time when he had to ask the Chef to recook a steak for a customer who wanted it more done, much to The Chef’s anger.

“When he turns back and sees me still there with the plate of steak in my hand I glimpse the exact moment when he’s consumed by rage: pure, total hatred,” Chisholm wrote. “Within an instant he has me up against the wall with his free hand on my throat and the point of the giant knife near my eye…Panic overcomes me as I still can’t breathe. I try in vain to remove his hand, which only angers him further, making him increase the pressure. His breath smells of cigarettes and cognac, and the wall smells of meat.”

He continued: “Time has never passed so slowly. I’m about to black out when… ‘Cramé, chef!’ shouts the cook nearest to us. Burnt.”

“The Menu,” Mark Mylod’s November horror film, plays with the idea of a chef driven to violence, too, albeit in a wildly different way. The dark comedy written by Seth Reiss and Will Tracy centers on the exclusive restaurant, Hawthorne, run by the eccentric Chef Slowik (Ralph Fiennes). A dozen customers — including foodie Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) and his unimpressed date Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy), critic Lillian (Janet McTeer) and a movie star (John Leguizamo) — pay obscene sums of money to partake in a precious and singular culinary experience. The night grows weirder and weirder until violence breaks out.

But “The Menu” doesn’t just satirize the way fine dining kitchens operate; it also skewers the way in which chefs are increasingly fetishized by those seeking an aspirational experience. As Gary M. Kramer wrote for Salon, “Mylod’s film is a shrewd clapback on privilege, hubris and pretension.”

“The diners all get their just deserts; Chef’s taco course includes tortillas imprinted with each customer’s sins,” he said. “Chef and his staff, led by the unflappable Elsa (Hong Chau), maintain precise control over the evening, as secrets and lies are exposed, and some unsavory things happen.”

***

Despite the fact that media surrounding food is broadening its lens to interrogate some of the more unsavory parts of the industry, it’s going to be tough to divorce those same aspects from professional kitchens at large.

As Salon Food reported in October, the culture of silence surrounding one’s feelings or struggles is baked into the very system used as a framework of organization in professional kitchens, known as the brigades de cuisine, or brigade system.

“It’s an oppressive system that exists within hospitality — and it’s existed for way too long — but it still penetrates our industry to this day,” Hassel Aviles, the executive director of the industry-based mental health nonprofit Not 9 to 5, said. “It is oppressive because it asks people to repress their humanity in the name of efficiency.”

As the name suggests, the brigade system is militaristic by design. It’s a dynamic hierarchy in which each member has a very specific role, from the plongeur (dishwasher) to the chef de cuisine (chief of the kitchen). Like the military, its adherents emphasize personal discipline as the key to achieving a collective goal; often, there’s the mentality, which is reminiscent of boot camp, that staff need to be broken down in order to be built back better.

“It is oppressive because it asks people to repress their humanity in the name of efficiency.”

That is the element of the brigade system that tends to captivate the most attention from those outside the industry, especially in Hollywood depictions of kitchen life like FX’s “The Bear,” the Bradley-Cooper fronted “Burnt” or even Disney’s “Ratatouille.” Through these depictions, as well as nonfiction projects such as Anthony Bourdain’s “Kitchen Confidential,” Gordon Ramsay’s aforementioned “Kitchen Nightmares” and the 1990 book “White Heat” — in which chef Marco Pierre White infamously detailed his habit of putting cooks inside trash cans to punish them, among other forms of intimidation — the hot-headed but brilliant chef archetype was cemented in pop culture as a kind of culinary bad boy.

Even among top chefs today, fostering toxic and abusive kitchen environments with no real repercussions is unfortunately common. Read, for instance, Hannah Sellinger’s 2021 Eater essay about working under Momofuku’s David Chang. She described his “wall-punching, desk breaking, violent threats and screaming” as well as a time a young cook was “brought to tears by Dave’s rage for cooking what was deemed a subpar family meal.”

“I will scalp you,” Chang screamed.

Chang himself has been relatively open about the fact that he was verbally abusive in his kitchens. His rage is an undercurrent through his memoir “Eat a Peach,” in which he details his depression and bipolar disorder. What’s unfortunate, however, is that the ugly effects of Chang’s mental health challenges don’t look that different from what some chefs still classify as paying one’s dues while working on the line.

It’s a step in the right direction that mainstream culture is spotlighting the ways in which our fetishization of the bad boy chef image — and the heralding of the traditional brigade system as the unimpeachable industry standard — especially following the first wave of the pandemic, when restaurant workers’ jobs were simultaneously lauded as essential and disrespected by increasingly hostile customers.

Perhaps next some cunning filmmaker can envision a fantasy film in which professional kitchens operate without abuse.

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Lauren Graham rethinks identity, from writing to directing: “I want to be the one to tell the story”

Hollywood, by nature, is a performative place. When you make it there by playing someone else on screen, and suddenly everyone wants to know the real you, you have to decide: Which version of your story do you tell?

Interviews often reveal bits and pieces of your personal life, but that can become performative, too. “I’ve struggled with that over the years,” Lauren Graham told me on “Salon Talks.” “I’m very private and if I’m going to tell something personal, how far do I go?”

That’s why the actress is dedicated to telling her story, her way — always with her dry wit, and frequently through 1990s nostalgia. Graham’s new collection of personal essays (her fourth book, out now) is called, “Have I Told You This Already?: Stories I Don’t Want to Forget to Remember.”

Before Graham landed her standout role as Lorelei Gilmore on “Gilmore Girls” more than 20 years ago and then became a familiar face on shows like “Parenthood,” “Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist” and now “The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers,” she was living the stories in “Have I Told You This Already?” Watch our “Salon Talks” episode here or read a Q&A of our conversation below to hear more about what her life was like before she landed her first TV role and why she frequently questions what the stories we tell ourselves mean.

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

“Have I Told You This Already?” is your fourth book and focuses much on stories from your early career. In a way, it’s your story of making it and the little moments that happened along the way. Why did you want to tell this story now?

Well, we had this little pandemic, and I needed to do something with my brain and I have celiac disease, so I couldn’t make sourdough bread. It was a function of having time, but it was also a function of getting to a place in my life where I’ve had dear friends for so long and family members who know all my key stories, or the stories I tell myself of how one thing led to another and how I got here, and it doesn’t even mainly have to do with show business. It’s just the me who’s here today and here are the building blocks of that.

I was particularly struck when I discovered the story that my father had been telling me about the day I was born had some complete misinformation in it. I was thinking thematically about memory and time and our ideas about ourselves. Was this story his version just because that’s how he remembered it, or was the true version, the right version? Is it a good idea to be so tied to our sense of ourselves in the past? Or do you need to constantly rethink how your past, how it made you?

You write about your early career and the experience of becoming a working actor, the dream of it versus the reality. Much of that, I thought, was really universal for anyone who’s a dreamer, for anyone who’s envisioning a career or a goal for themselves.

When I first got to Los Angeles, in particular, because that’s where I really started working, I made commercials in New York and I would get little things, little day or two on a soap or something, but once I got to LA I really started working and I can’t believe how much confidence I had. It was completely unwarranted.

Actually over time, as I learned more, I almost had to recalibrate what my sense of myself was because especially in the late ’90s in Los Angeles, everything was a half-hour sitcom, and those are just inherently fun, it’s doing a theater, you have a live audience, I’d have these little fun parts and my first job was on “3rd Rock from the Sun” with John Lithgow and Jane Curtin and I was so excited all the time and I was living with my friend Connie Britton and she was on the sitcom “Ellen” and we just were having so much fun and then it got more complicated.

Connie [Britton] was your roommate. How did you her meet and how did you end up sharing an apartment?

We were in the same acting class in Wynn Handman’s acting class in New York, which was a very incredible group of people, and Wynn was an incredible teacher and we were assigned to do a scene lifted from, or basically it was the J.D. Salinger short story, “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” which is two women who don’t know each other that well getting drunk together.

Naturally she came to my house and we drank and tried to learn lines. So we just became friendly, and then she did this movie “Brothers McMullen,” which was starting to do the festival circuit and we just didn’t know anything. She was going to LA ,and I had gotten a pilot and I was going to LA, and she had this house that we could illegally stay at, and we just thought that was fantastic.

“I can’t believe how much confidence I had. It was completely unwarranted.”

We went to LA and we rented horrible cars and we worked a little and just had fun, and I think both of us felt that early rush of, I’m getting to do what I hoped I got to do. It didn’t matter how big the part was, didn’t matter what the show was; that was that first level of, “all our dreams have come true,” and then of course you make new dreams once your dreams have come true.

Your sense of humor shines through in all of your writing, even in some of the darker moments, like when you write about rejection or needing your body parts to look a certain way to book in Hollywood. Do you always maintain a sense of humor?

I think luckily for me, my actual voice and my writing voice are quite aligned. I can only think in the way I would say it, and the way I tell a story is usually through a lens of, “Isn’t this insane?” I don’t even know that it’s finding the humor, I just think that’s how I’ve always been, and so I try to speak through my pen. I struggle with different things as a writer. I struggle with structure and plot, I would say mainly, but the voice is sort of there.

It sounds like you developed a love of storytelling just through being around your dad. You write how his stories were a part of growing up.

He would read to me at bedtime, but he was also, as I say, he had his stories that are the building blocks of his childhood that he goes back to and told to me and told to my brother and sister. I would say I come from a family of very dryly funny storytellers, on especially my dad’s side of the family. I have a lot of cousins who I spent a lot of time with growing up and just the car stories alone could fill an entire book of the cars that broke down. I mentioned this in the book, we lost a car once, no one knew who had it last and where it had died on the side of the road or who towed it. I come from a good family of storytellers.

Speaking of telling stories, you write about getting booked on late-night talk shows when “Gilmore Girls” was gaining traction and the moment you learned that some of these interview shows are actually rehearsed and the stories they want you to tell about yourself are somewhat exaggerated.

That was another piece of information that no one tells you is, and of course when you think about it, these shows are delineated by commercial breaks and of course you want a story that is completed within that amount of time and sometimes a tweak will help, but what I didn’t know is some people would have their writers, if they were on a half-hour show or something, they’d have their writers form their stories or they’d tweak the ending.

It caused me to question what else was not totally authentic and how I felt about [it]. Was it more important to tell the real story or was it more important to be funny on a talk show? Because sometimes in the moments where you’re supposed to be the most real, which is as yourself, it feels like a lie to change the story even if it’s for the impact, and I think I’ve struggled with that over the years. I’m very private and if I’m going to tell something personal, how far do I go? How much do I change? So I still don’t really have the answer, but I’m definitely asking the question.

Rachel Brosnahan thought she was bad at comedy until “Maisel” came along

It’s clear that writing is something you will continue to do. Is writing a way for you to cut through all of that and actually be yourself on the page?

I think so. And I think that’s why, before I really thought I am also a writer and that’s something I’m going to take seriously and do as another pursuit, I started asking when I’d get an article in something, can I write it? Can it be a question and answer? That they send me the questions and I write them down because I’m not always known of as or as articulate off the cuff, and I just wanted to not look at something and go, “That’s not how I said it or that’s not what I meant, or that feels false.” I think that instinct led to what I’m sitting here talking about today, and it’s not really injured by a misinterpretation necessarily, I’d just rather be the one, if I’m going to be wrong. I’d rather be wrong myself. I want to be the one to tell the story.

You write about what being camera-ready has meant to you over the years, including your love-hate relationship with health camps and why those are mostly about letting someone else have control. Can you talk a little bit about that and how that’s very different than wanting to have control over what’s said about you?

Well they’re probably related to one another, which is, it’s all public, private and it’s me, but then I’m the instrument too, so I’m playing a part, but that part has my arms and my nose, the part is my self, which involves my face and body, and I, of course, [I] always knew that, but it’s just quite a thing to wake up every day and worry about getting to work at six in the morning and feel like you’re bloated from the sushi you ate last night. It’s just like, it’s always on your mind, in terms of what I do with in my personal life affects my professional life, and so there’s a fatigue that can come with that.

I had a trainer once who used to say, “I’m not the dry cleaners, you can’t just drop yourself off and expect to be good as new. You have to be responsible on your own too.” I guess it’s a way of dealing with whatever the pressure is that at times I’ve just thrown up my hands, I’m not always living in like, “Oh God, what do I do about myself today?” But it’s there. It’s there in this career and so it’s just something to think about and maybe dispose of, or not think about anymore, or go to some hideous health camp. I think it’s just an ever-present issue. Some people have a much easier time accepting that, or I don’t know that everybody struggles, I mean there’s plenty of actresses who are those people you knew in high school who were just naturally ridiculous looking and they don’t have to worry about it. It’s just something to think about, especially as we get older.

You recently opened another door in your career, directing. Congratulations on directing your first TV episode on “The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers.” Why did you want to take that step?

I think once I luckily have been doing this a while, you just see the hole, it’s not even like, “Oh, I’d like to do this different job”, it’s like, I am doing this already in the day, I’m seeing how we could do this scene more efficiently, I’m seeing in the eyes of another actor what I think might help the scene I know because I’ve observed what the crew does and how maybe we could all be collaborating in a different or in a good way.

It’s another aspect of storytelling, but then you just get to be telling the bigger piece, and I think once you’ve done any of these jobs, which is why DP’s become directors, first AD’s become directors, once you see the whole, it’s hard not to step into that even in your imagination and think, “I would like to do this.” I think at a place, especially working with younger people, I just love them so much and I’m more interested in their day, in their work, in their growth. I am interested in lifting them up to wherever they want to go.

Somebody said to me, being an episodic television director is like being invited to somebody’s house for dinner, but you were cooking dinner and you were cooking it with only the ingredients they already have, there are limitations in that work because something has been established already and you’re there to serve that world, which is fantastic. I have enough careers but it’d be interesting to see what it would be like to direct a film as well, it’s just a different animal.

Before you go, I have to ask you about “Gilmore Girls.” You write in the book how filming the “Gilmore Girls” revisit episodes on Netflix was one of the “best, happiest, most rewarding experiences” of your career. The show is often talked about in terms of the fans and why it’s important to them, but I want to know why was it important for you to play Lorelei again?

Because I got to go back to something understanding how important it was to me and to other people as well. I don’t know how many times you get to do that. There was the doing of it, which was a frenzy and a certain time and you don’t have perspective, and then to go back because it has been appreciated, because there is a desire for it, because people wanted more, that was something I’d never had in that way where people were so excited.

“You make new dreams once your dreams have come true.”

We were so excited and we’d all grown and matured and it just felt like this collaboration. There was so much gratitude in the air and I got to have some of my friends play parts. It just was like, if you got to go to college again, but you know how to do it and you know how important all your classes are and you’re like, “Give me more tests,” you’re just so in a different mindset of appreciation. It was just mind-blowing.

You are a Masterclass subscriber and fan of learning new things. Is there one Masterclass we all need to take? What’s been your favorite?

Well, two and they’re very different. Ron Howard on directing is fantastic. Not surprisingly, but not everyone who’s fantastic at something is also a fantastic teacher. It’s its own thing. Ron Howard’s directing is so clear and so interesting and so creative and so helpful, and he breaks down scenes. It’s incredible. The other one, I’m going to forget the guy’s name, but is hostage negotiation, which is fascinating, and I don’t know how it applies to your real life and I don’t want to know, but it was just a really fascinating study of the human mind and how this person has learned to get people to do what he wanted them to do.

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Elon Musk’s net worth took a $206 billion hit in 2022

Twitter owner Elon Musk’s net worth has plummeted by more than $200 billion since November 2021 — an amount greater than the fortune of Bernard Arnault, who recently dethroned Musk as the richest man in the world.

The Independent reported on Thursday that Musk — who purchased the dollar-hemorrhaging microblogging platform for $44 billion earlier this year — has lost more money than the gross national product of Greece.

“Musk’s net worth peaked at $338bn in November 2021, according to Bloomberg, coinciding with the fortunes of Tesla,” the British outlet explained, adding that “the electric car maker has lost roughly 70 percent of its value in 2022 following production delays in China, vehicle recalls, and concerns among investors that its CEO has been distracted by his new role as head of Twitter. Tesla’s market cap is down by nearly $900bn since November 2021, causing it to drop out of the top 10 most valuable companies.”

Elon Musk must be stopped! If Twitter is to be a true “town square,” it’s time to socialize it

Despite this setback — if that term even applies to twelve-figure assets — Musk remains extraordinarily well off. Bloomberg estimates his net worth at $132,000,000,000 — or enough to give around $16 to every human being on Earth.

But Musk, The Independent pointed out, views his riches as a means toward the salvation of modern civilization.

“You should ask why I would want money,” Musk stated in 2018. “About half my money is intended to help problems on Earth and half to help establish a self-sustaining city on Mars to ensure the continuation of life (or all species) in case Earth gets hit by a meteor like the dinosaurs or WW3 happens and we destroy ourselves.”

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Musk also promised to bankroll the eradication of global hunger.

“If WFP can describe on this Twitter thread exactly how $6B will solve world hunger, I will sell Tesla stock right now and do it,” he tweeted on Halloween in 2021. “But it must be open source accounting, so the public sees precisely how the money is spent.”

The UN sent Musk a proposal:

The World Food Programme plan would spend $3.5 billion on food and deliver it to those most in need. This includes the cost of shipping, storage and transport by air, road and river, and security escorts to safeguard food distribution in conflict-affected zones. The money could provide one meal per person, per day for a year, keeping tens of millions of people from starvation.

A further $2 billion could fund cash and voucher programs in places with functioning markets, allowing people to choose the food they eat while supporting local economies.

A total $700 million is set aside for ‘country-specific costs’, such as setting up voucher schemes and building and securing local offices to ensure food assistance reaches the most vulnerable.

Management, administration and accounting for global and regional operations total $400 million, which includes coordinating supply lines, analyzing global hunger levels and appointing independent auditors.

As of May 2022, efforts to convince Musk to “step up” were still ongoing. He did, however, contribute $5.7 billion to an anonymous foundation in late 2021.

“Forbes speculated that this donation likely went to a donor-advised fund (DAF),” Snopes noted on Aprril 26, “which is essentially a holding account for money that will eventually be donated to philanthropic causes.”

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Who dares to mock Dark Brandon now? Joe Biden keeps rolling up the wins

When the 2020 presidential campaign was lurching into gear three years ago, former Vice President Joe Biden had led in the polls for months. Still, everyone kind of assumed he was a placeholder, a former office-holder with high name recognition whose campaign would nevertheless go the way of his two previous presidential bids, meaning nowhere. He was dull as dishwater compared to many of the others vying for the nomination, and nobody had ever really considered him presidential timber.

As the campaign took off, other candidates were winning in the early states even as Biden still led in national polls. Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg looked like the major contenders after Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, states where Biden did poorly. Then he pulled off a sweeping victory in South Carolina and shortly thereafter the race was effectively over. He went on to win the rest of the primaries handily. America was reeling during the traumatic first year of the pandemic and there was a sense that Democrats were happy to have the race settled so they could concentrate on taking down Donald Trump, which was considered Job One by every faction of the Democratic coalition.

Even so, nobody expected much of Joe Biden. He had his charms, but he was a longtime creature of Washington with an anachronistic fetish for bipartisanship. All we could realistically expect, it seemed, was some relief from the chaos and a reliable, experienced staff to help right the ship. When the Democrats barely held onto the House and squeaked out a 50-50 Senate “majority” (thanks to the runoff elections in Georgia and Trump’s constant whining) everyone assumed that the Democratic agenda promised during the campaign was pretty much dead. The best we could hope for at that point was to stop the bleeding and live to fight another day.

Will the ghost of Eugene McCarthy haunt Joe Biden’s path to re-election?

But Biden has turned out to be full of surprises. Rather than just acting as a kindly old caretaker president until the new generation can take the wheel, his administration has been a flurry of activity, passing more Democratic domestic legislation than any president since Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s. To name just a few, he signed into law the huge American Rescue Plan in the spring of 2021 (with no Republican votes); the $740 billion Inflation Reduction Act, with massive investments in climate policy and health care; the $280 billion CHIPS Act, funding a vital semiconductor industry in the U.S.; the PACT Act to help veterans; and the first federal gun control legislation in almost 30 years. In the big omnibus spending bill just passed during the lame-duck session, he got the Electoral Count Act included as a step toward avoiding another Jan. 6 debacle. Finally, Biden pushed through and signed the Respect for Marriage Act, offering at least some protection to same-sex couples against the inevitable assault from right-wing judges and legislators. Some of that legislation was even bipartisan, which seems like something out of an old black-and-white movie at this point.

These achievements really are impressive, and even more so because of the need to accommodate the two Senate divas — Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema — who needed to be the center of attention at all times and who were unfortunately crucial to passing legislation. It was often torturous watching the Senate sausage-making, with Biden himself often appearing unable to manage the negotiations despite his alleged mastery of the process. But somehow it worked.

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A lot of important items were left on the cutting room floor, of course, largely due to the aforementioned Diva Twins: No voting rights reform, no new child tax credit and no subsidies for the elderly. There are a dozen other worthy programs I could name. Important tax legislation was nixed by Sinema for inexplicable reasons. Nonetheless, what remained is substantial and meaningful, and frankly kind of miraculous considering the narrow Democratic majority and the toxic political climate.

Biden quietly led the party to those major wins but a lot of the credit must go to the Democrats in both houses who clearly appreciated that they had a unique opportunity to get things done before the batshit GOP regained some power. I wouldn’t have bet on that happening either.

Biden has also been getting federal judges confirmed as quickly as possible, outpacing both Obama and Trump. Just as important, these judges are all highly qualified (unlike the crew of misfits the Trump administration put forth), and are the most diverse group in history: Three-quarters are women, two-thirds are people of color and 11 are former public defenders, which is more than the number appointed by all previous presidents combined. As he promised, he nominated the first Black woman, the impressive Ketanji Brown Jackson, to the Supreme Court.

As for foreign policy, Biden inherited a global mess after Trump stomped all over the world like an orange Colossus, befriending every tyrant on the planet and treating allies like dirt. Biden has reset many of those relationships and as a result has been able to deftly manage U.S. involvement in Ukraine, unquestionably a delicate and dangerous crisis.

Democrats in both houses appreciated they had a unique opportunity to get things done before the bats**t GOP regained power. Nope, I wouldn’t have bet on that happening either.

The withdrawal from Afghanistan, which was proposed by both Obama and Trump but never actually carried out, was messy, but everyone knew it would be. Biden showed admirable resolve in going through with it anyway, even though he was hamstrung by Trump’s blunderbuss negotiations, and deserves credit rather than the outrageous moral preening by the press, which suddenly decided it cared about the Afghan people after ignoring them for years. That was a sickening bookend to the rah-rah cheerleading the media delivered when George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Afghanistan 20 years earlier.

Biden also decided, against the advice of the Beltway punditocracy and most Democratic strategists, to use the bully pulpit to fight the Republicans on their extremism and the obvious threat they posed democracy. Biden’s critics claimed that people don’t care about that stuff and the presidential bully pulpit is a waste of breath anyway. The results of the 2022 midterms suggest that they were full of it and Biden’s instincts were correct.

I think some of this success, paradoxically, is because Joe Biden is our oldest president, not in spite of that fact. There’s a certain YOLO quality to many people his age which he seems to have channeled into a willingness to take calculated risks that have largely paid off. Dark Brandon’s seen it all — he doesn’t scare easily.

None other than former Speaker Newt Gingrich issued a warning to his fellow Republicans not long ago that they’re making a big mistake if they underestimate Biden and his team. He said that they were being foolish to obsess over Biden’s age and need to recognize that they are “up against a very methodical machine which has done a remarkable job. … When you look at results, you may dislike them philosophically, but you have to be realistic that these people have been effective. And you have to assume that they’re going to go into 2024 with a pretty powerful machine, running a juggernaut.”

Whether that football-coach analysis is accurate remains up for grabs but there is no doubt that the Biden administration has gotten a whole lot accomplished in two years under exceptionally difficult circumstances. Underestimating this president has been a mistake ever since he entered the race back in 2019.

about the Biden presidency

Why 2023 will be a banner year for drug research

American drug policy suffers from a tremendous, harmful Catch-22: we don’t know how dangerous or beneficial some drugs are because they aren’t studied enough. And we can’t study them easily because the federal government considers them to be too dangerous, and hence, research is bogged down by red tape.

Since the days of President Nixon’s War on Drugs, which spawned the Controlled Substances Act in 1970, illicit substances have been placed into different categories or “schedules” based on their perceived harms and medical benefits. For example, cannabis, the psychedelic LSD and heroin are all lumped into schedule 1, a tier considered by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) to be substances with “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.”

Designating cannabis in this way is completely illogical given that cannabis-derived drugs like Epidiolex and Dronabinol are federally-approved medications. Clearly, cannabis has widespread and accepted medical use, even by many medical professionals, not in spite of the nearly 40 states that have legalized medical marijuana. (That doesn’t mean marijuana is harm-free, of course — only that it’s not a poison either.) Nonetheless, due to additional barriers specific to cannabis, marijuana (which is any intoxicating extract from the plant) is even harder to study than any other schedule 1 drug, including heroin.

In contrast, drugs like cocaine, methamphetamine and the synthetic opioid fentanyl are all schedule 2. They are still considered drugs with a “high potential for abuse,” but admittedly still have merits for health. It may sound strange to hear that meth has some medical benefits, especially for treating treat obesity, narcolepsy and ADHD, but it’s absolutely true, at least when the drug is pharmaceutical grade and prescribed by a doctor in low doses. Likewise, doctors can and do prescribe cocaine for nasal surgeries, though it is rare; fentanyl is commonly used every day in hospitals across America, but it’s very different from what is sold on the street. The point is, it’s much easier to study cocaine, meth and fentanyl than it is to study cannabis or psilocybin “magic” mushrooms.

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If this schema doesn’t make sense to you, you’re not alone. Scientists and public health advocates have been decrying this system for about as long as it’s been in place. In 2016, researchers writing in the American Journal of Bioethics wrote that “Schedule I amounts to an unsurmountable barrier to research,” which undercuts “important therapeutic potential for the relief of symptoms as well as for the management of the underlying chronic conditions. Without research, that potential cannot be detected or verified and the potential benefits cannot be dispersed.”

But in 2022, the United States saw a major shift in drug research — and next year promises to be even more substantial when it comes to studying intoxicants.

In early December, President Biden signed a marijuana research bill into law.

In fact, this was a record-breaking year for the number of scientific papers published about cannabis. According to a recent analysis by the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), researchers across the globe published more than 4,300 scientific articles about weed. That broke the previous record, set in 2021, when scientists published over 4,200 papers.

“Despite claims by some that marijuana has yet to be subject to adequate scientific scrutiny, scientists’ interest in studying cannabis has increased exponentially in recent years, as has our understanding of the plant, its active constituents, their mechanisms of action, and their effects on both the user and upon society,” NORML’s deputy director Paul Armentano said in a statement. “It is time for politicians and others to stop assessing cannabis through the lens of ‘what we don’t know’ and instead start engaging in evidence-based discussions about marijuana and marijuana reform policies that are indicative of all that we do know.”

There’s no reason to believe this pace will slow down, especially given the Biden Administration’s recent moves that could open doors to even more cannabis research. In early December, President Biden signed a marijuana research bill into law, which, according to Marijuana Moment, is “the first piece of standalone federal cannabis reform legislation in U.S. history.” It will remove barriers to research and could lead to the development of more effective cannabis medications.

A month ago, the DEA released its drug production quotas for 2023, which have increased significantly compared to previous years.

This year, Biden has also directed an administrative process, asking Attorney General Eric Garland and Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra to review how cannabis is scheduled and why. “We classify marijuana at the same level as heroin – and more serious than fentanyl. It makes no sense,” the president said in an October tweet.

Other drugs will become easier to study in 2023 as well. The DEA has the authority, for some inexplicable reason, to determine the volume of certain drugs that can be manufactured in the United States, whether for research or medical practice. It’s a little strange that an institution that is essentially the federal drug police can tell doctors and researchers how many drugs they can prescribe or study. This is partially why the U.S. is currently experiencing an Adderall shortage — the DEA limits how much can be sold. The agency also limits the amount of research that can be done by scientists on drugs like LSD, MDMA (also known as “ecstasy”) or psilocybin.

Then, a month ago, the DEA released its drug production quotas for 2023, which have increased significantly compared to previous years. Cannabis production for research is expected to double, jumping from 3.2 million grams in 2022 to 6.7 million grams next year. Many psychedelics will also see a boost, including obscure substances like MDA and 2-CB. Production of 5-MeO-DMT, a drug derived from toad venom, will more than quadruple, for example.

This is good news for researchers who want to learn more about how these drugs work and how they might help folks. It can also illuminate risks or side effects. We won’t know until we pay closer attention. Increasing research suggests that psychedelics can alleviate a myriad of mental health maladies, including depression, anxiety and PTSD. They aren’t panaceas, however, and these drugs can come with side effects or just fail to work for some individuals. Researchers have many open questions about what psychedelics can and can’t do, and the federal government’s outdated regulations are seen by some drug policy experts as holding back scientific progress.

2023 might even be a good year for researching illicit drugs that don’t get as much appreciation as psychedelics, specifically opioids. Despite their reputation for addiction and overdose, opioids are some of the most useful drugs on the planet. No one would want intensive surgery without them. They even have antidepressant properties, not they’re ever prescribed as such.

In October, US senator Cory Booker (D-N.J.) introduced the Temporary Emergency Scheduling and Testing (TEST) Act, which would examine the rationale behind scheduling certain fentanyl analogs. Illicit fentanyl is overwhelmingly driving overdose deaths in the U.S. and Canada, but the substance sold on the street often contains a medley of different drugs, many of them related to fentanyl but slightly different (an analog).

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As overdose deaths have risen to record numbers, foreshortening the average American lifespan, the DEA has temporarily placed many of these analogs into schedule 1, in the hopes that such bans will make it harder for these drugs to wind up on the street. That hasn’t worked much, as many clandestine chemists simply pivot to other analogs. There are nearly endless chemical variations that can be made out of the original fentanyl. The DEA tries to keep up in a game of cat and mouse, but despite their best efforts, the number of overdose deaths has only risen.

Meanwhile, many of these fentanyl analogs could have unknown medical value. The TEST Act would temporarily keep these analogs in schedule 1, but it would direct the Department of Health and Human Services to manufacture and study these drugs for any potential benefit.

More general drug research will likely also get a boost, as the National Institutes of Health’s budget was recently expanded by 5.6 percent to $47.5 billion. The budget increase was part of the recent $1.7 trillion spending bill passed by Congress, which also included an amendment giving FDA authority to approve new medicines that have not been tested in animals. So not only will drug research become more abundant in 2023, it could involve less animal suffering.

Though they are far from the only public health tool available, drugs are an important part of our society, for better or worse, and it’s important to understand what they can and cannot do. But for decades, a relic of drug policy fabricated by a disgraced president has kept scientific research on drugs expensive and tedious. Finally, in 2023, it will get a little easier to do some drug science.

about drugs

The hell with “compassionate conservatism”: In 2023, expect all MAGA sadism, all the time

Here are some snapshots of what the luminaries of the GOP, the cream of the Republican crop, have been up to since the predicted “red wave” of the 2022 midterms failed to materialize:

On Tuesday, Fox News host Tucker Carlson interviewed Chaya Raichik, who runs the vicious anti-LGBTQ Twitter acccount Libs of TikTok. Despite Raichik’s routine online pronouncements that she doesn’t hate anyone, she revealed herself to be an unreconstructed bigot in the Anita Bryant vein. “The LGTBQ community has become this cult,” she said, claiming that queer people are “just evil people, and they want to groom kids,” and that the only reason people are gay or trans is because they’ve been brainwashed. Carlson’s response to all this was simple: “Yeah.”

The Republican-controlled Supreme Court, which struck down nearly every emergency measure to slow the spread of COVID, finally found a pandemic rule they like: One that kills people, rather than saving lives. This week, the court forced the Biden adminstration to keep enforcing Title 42, which uses the pandemic as a pretext to expel refugees seeking political asylum, even though health experts say it’s not necessary to prevent viral transmission. This decision was in such obvious bad faith that even Justice Neil Gorsuch, a Trump appointee, took issue with it. Migrants who are turned away based on Title 42 are in danger of kidnapping, sex trafficking and murder.

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On Christmas Eve, the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, shipped a busload of migrants to Washington, D.C., dumping them outside Vice President Kamala Harris’ official residence without winter clothes or shelter in subfreezing weather. Indeed, Abbott routinely uses the word “dumping” to describe his tactic of transporting migrants elsewhere, making it clear that he sees them as human trash. That was only the latest of these “dumping” stunts conducted by Republican governors, usually accompanied with rhetoric that sounds distressingly like that used on neo-Nazi websites.

Earlier this month, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced he would ask the state Supreme Court to investigate “any and all wrongdoing” related to the COVID vaccination campaign. During his press conference, DeSantis and his anti-vaccine quack surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo, repeatedly suggested that drug manufacturers had lied about the safety of vaccines. Recent studies have demonstrated that anti-vaccine conspiracy theories have led to Republican voters dying at higher rates of than Democrats. “The Republican Party is unquestionably complicit in the premature deaths of many of its own supporters,” as Yasmin Tayag of the Atlantic concluded.

After the Pelosi attack, Republicans have quit pretending they oppose political violence

None of the central figures in these stories are obscure fringe characters. Carlson routinely has the most popular show on cable news, frequently drawing more 3 million viewers a night. Obviously, the justices on the Supreme Court and the governors of two of the biggest states in the country count as mainstream Republicans. DeSantis is enjoying a robust whisper campaign as a 2024 presidential candidate, and even leads Donald Trump in some polls of GOP voters.

It’s not rational at all for leading Republicans to lean even harder into MAGA nonsense — it’s purely vengeful, born of the growing realization that most Americans think they’re nuts.

Joe Biden and other Democrats were able to beat back a number of more colorful Republican candidates in the midterms by drawing a distinction between “MAGA Republicans” and the party’s supposed mainstream. But, as these examples show, the bug-eyed malice that characterizes the MAGA movement has suffused the GOP from top to bottom, so much so that Republicans will gladly let their own voters die of a preventable virus to own the liberals.

There was a brief moment of hope that the GOP’s poor results in the midterm elections might cause Republicans as a whole to “moderate,” or at least pull away from noxious MAGA extremism. After all, data demonstrates that entirely accurate perceptions of the party’s radicalism led independents — and even a small but crucial number of normally Republican voters — to break for the Democrats. But examples like these and countless others have made clear that the opposite is happening. Republicans aren’t backing away from MAGA. They’re doubling down. The cruelty that has come to define the party is only likely to intensify in the next year, resulting in more vicious attacks on LGBTQ people, more dehumanizing treatment of migrants, more deranged conspiracy theories, more pregnant people denied medical care with specious “pro-life” arguments, and more winking approval of political violence.

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There are many possible explanations for why the GOP is going so dark, most of which revolve around the fact that the party’s authoritarian base voters and its big-money donors have a lot more influence than potentially winnable independent voters do. But the unnecessary, gratuitous viciousness of so much of this stuff — seriously, no one asked Ron DeSantis to relitigate the pandemic! — makes that kind of bloodless explanation seem unsatisfying. It’s time to ask a different question: Is it possible that GOP leadership is composed of the same unhinged sadists as their voting base?

In rational terms, it doesn’t make a ton of sense for Republican leaders to lean even harder into MAGA nonsense. Both Abbott and DeSantis won re-election easily, but the overall trend-lines suggest that most voters are grossed out by overt cruelty. As David Graham at the Atlantic wrote last month, cumulative polling data suggests “the emergence of a big anti-MAGA coalition that started in the 2018 midterm.”

Worst Republicans of 2022: It’s just so hard to choose!

That’s exactly what is driving much of this GOP ugliness, I would argue. It’s an angry reaction to the growing realization that most Americans think they’re nuts. It’s not rational at all — it’s just vengeful. Since at least the days Ronald Reagan, Republicans have embraced the idea that they’re the rightful rulers of the U.S., and that any Democratic win is a fluke or the result of some kind of cheating. (As Heather Digby Parton has repeatedly pointed out in Salon, Trump’s Big Lie is just an expansion of the long Republican history of seeing any and all electoral defeats as proof of “voter fraud” conspiracy theories.) That sense of entitlement, however, is running headlong into a mountain of evidence that most Americans flat-out don’t like Republicans and don’t agree with their views.

America is a diverse nation, and also an increasingly liberal one in most important ways. Most Americans don’t relate to the sexual conservatism, mandatory Christianity, white identity politics or regressive taxation fantasies that define the Republican Party in the 2020s. Rather than strategically adjusting to this changing reality, Republicans — meaning not just the base but also the leadership — just feel outraged. How dare the rest of Americans say “no thank you” to the policy preferences of the resentful, prudish white minority who think of themselves as the only “real” Americans?

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I think often of the sputtering rage of Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing. Even though he lied through his teeth while denying that he tried to rape a girl at a high school party, I never doubted that Kavanaugh sincerely believed that a Supreme Court seat was his rightful due. His screaming, paranoid performance came straight out of the larger GOP mentality that the right kind of people deserve to be in charge, no matter what, and that any challenge to their domination is an insult not to be borne.

So it is across most of the GOP leadership. The ever-nastier behavior we saw after the 2022 midterms wasn’t a show performed for the benefit of the Fox News-drunk base, or at least not entirely. That’s just who these people are: privileged bullies who can’t stand the idea of treating people different than themselves as equals. The more they come face to face with clear evidence that they’re losing the battle for hearts and minds, the more they’ll use the authority they still possess — which is a lot — to enforce ever more baroque punishments on the most vulnerable people in our society, out of their misbegotten desire for revenge.

Elon banned me for calling him a “bologna face.” I’m a history professor with 139 followers

If Elon Musk steps down as Twitter CEO, as he claims, what will happen to all those banned accounts? Yes, I know the “mass unbanning of suspended Twitter users is underway,” as CNN boldly announced on Dec. 8. Even neo-Nazis and apologists for rape have been welcomed back, and all manner of hate speech is thriving on Musk’s new Twitter.

But “abusive behavior” still supposedly violates the Twitter Rules, and my account has been blocked for weeks for such crimes. Specifically, I called Elon Musk a “poopy pants.” Also a “bologna face.”

Others have been banished for lesser offenses, including a half-dozen prominent journalists. Their ousters provoked howls of protest, including threatened sanctions by the EU, but now they’re back to tweeting. Not me. I’m still banned, and no one has come to my defense. Not even one of my 139 followers.

In Elon Musk’s chaotic Twitter reign, right-wing extremists and conspiracy theorists are back

I don’t blame Musk. Twitter has standards, and it cannot countenance misinformation. You can’t have 139 people thinking Mr. Musk leaves toenail clippings on the floor, as I tweeted on Nov. 21. Or that he has personal possession of Hunter Biden’s laptop, as I posted the next day.

I’m not your usual Twitter troll, if there is such a thing. I’m a history professor who writes sleep-inducing books and articles weighed down by pages of footnotes. Until mid-November, I had tweeted not more than three dozen times since 2016. I said nothing noteworthy. Most of my 139 followers are other historians. Imagine the drama.

So how did a Twitter nobody get banned? I’ll let you in on a secret: It was all part of my master plan.

I hatched my scheme shortly after learning that Musk had reinstated the account of former President Donald J. Trump, a man who had literally used Twitter to amplify threats against his own vice president and incite an assault on Congress. I was horrified, and decided to register my protest by deleting my account.

How did a Twitter nobody get himself banned for kindergarten-level name-calling, you ask? I will humbly confess it was all part of my genius master plan.

Then reality set in. What difference would that make? I had precious few followers. My infrequent posts had grossly violated Twitter etiquette by spelling words correctly and locating them within complete paragraphs. I also capitalized appropriately. With such a record, would anyone actually notice my protest? Also, I spent 30 seconds skimming an article about how to delete a Twitter account, and it looked like a pain. Who has the time?

That’s when it hit me. I’d try an experiment guided by a simple research question: Is it easier to quit Twitter or get banned? Behind that question lurked another, arguably more interesting one: Could I get myself banned for lobbying nothing more than silly schoolyard insults at Musk, the kind that I heard in kindergarten — “bologna face” being an example of the genre? I set some clear rules: no profanity, no political insults, no references to Musk’s real-world circumstances or personal life. I didn’t want anyone to think for a moment that I was the actual Elon Musk, and I wanted the “insults” to be banal and harmless, maybe even wholesome (if that’s a thing).

Inspired by the comedian Kathy Griffin, who had her account suspended for impersonating Musk, I made some changes. First, I deleted all my old tweets, one by one. (That did not take long.) Then I downloaded a picture of Musk, drew a mustache and glasses on his face, uploaded the new image as my avatar, and changed my screen name to “Elon Musk.”

I also edited my profile. My likes were now “the moon, working late, government subsidies, making people miserable, hate speech.” And my dislikes were “complete paragraphs, evidence, nice people.”

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I spent the first few days of Thanksgiving week tweeting, beginning most of my posts with “My name is Elon.” I’m sure it confused all 139 of my followers, who clearly must have believed I was the Elon Musk, especially with “@kennethosgood1” displayed conspicuously at the top.

I got little traction with anything resembling a mass audience, but I did get one retweet and two hearts for “My name is Elon. I am a poopy pants.” Hoping to get more attention, I turned to my tech-savvy teenager for help. She wrote my next Tweet: “My name is Elon. I like melon. Also, I like giant melon.” That got two hearts. It almost went viral!

My daughter suggested I “write more like Elon.” She came up with “Why do we bake cookies, but cook bacon?” No likes for that one. But I got one for “My name is Elon. I ski in jeans.” We’re from Colorado. Trust me, it’s a serious insult.

Over three days I posted about a dozen tweets. (I can’t verify the number because my account is locked.) I tried various things to get more reactions, including changing my photo again and adding “@elonmusk” to posts. Using advanced math, I deduced that my posts may have been liked or retweeted by as many as seven people.

Since I wasn’t getting noticed or banned, I thought I had the answer to my first research question: it must just be easier to quit. Coming up with pithy insults several times a day for three days straight exhausted me. Clearly I’m not cut out for Twitter.

Dejected, I didn’t log in to my account for weeks. When I finally entered my credentials, intending to quit for good, I was greeted with an ominous notice: my account had been “permanently suspended.” At last!

Now I’ve got another research question. How hard is it to get reinstated after posting abusive content? It looks easy. The rapper Ye was welcomed back mere weeks after grossly antisemitic comments, such as “death con [sic] 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.” By such standards, my time on the blacklist ought to be short.

Then again, I committed a more egregious offense. I offended the “chief twit.” Will @kennethosgood1 be extended amnesty? I certainly hope not. Then I’d have to quit.

about Twitter and its new proprietor

Hydrogen made a surprising comeback in 2022 — but it’s still not the green fuel of the future

One of the surprising climate stories of 2022 was the rapid emergence of hydrogen as an immediate, not just potential, decarbonization technology. Major and unprecedented investments, both from government and the private sector, were initiated this year in Europe, the U.S., China and Japan. But while hydrogen technology is growing in popularity, questions remain: Can it be one of the biggest breakthroughs for climate mitigation, or is it largely a distraction?

It’s likely a mixture: a viable, long-sought, low-carbon option for hard-to-electrify sectors like steel, chemicals and aviation, but also a clever oil industry ploy to extend the use of fossil fuels in sectors like power generation, road transport and home heating, which are more easily and affordably powered from the grid.

Only hydrogen that’s produced by using renewable power to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen can truly be called carbon-free. But that electrolysis process wastes about 30% of the renewable energy used.

California’s ban on gas-powered vehicles: Huge victory in the 50-year war for the electric car

Hydrogen sourced from fossil fuels — whether linked to efforts to capture and sequester the CO₂ or not — is not a reliably low-emission fuel.

To offer a genuine climate solution, hydrogen must be electrolyzed with either purpose-built renewable sources or drawn from renewable electricity flowing through grids that have already minimized their use of fossil fuel. Otherwise, making hydrogen as a fuel could well result in greater use of coal, oil or gas for generating electricity.

Even in the best case, hydrogen is a low-emission fuel, but not zero-emission. When combusted, it creates oxides of nitrogen. Even when used in fuel cells, climate risk remains. If leaked as a fugitive gas, hydrogen is itself a greenhouse gas, and it also interferes with the processes by which methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, is broken up and neutralized.

In the long term, the availability of green hydrogen is limited only by the amount of renewable generating capacity, access to water and the manufacturing capacity for ever greater amounts of electrolyzers, but that future state is still far away. No major current energy grid has sufficient surplus renewable power to warrant the diversion of wind and solar capacity on a large scale to hydrogen electrolysis.

Much of the focus on hydrogen, until recently, has been for transportation use. But electric batteries, which can use renewable power at much higher efficiency and continue to get lighter and cheaper with each year of innovation, are likely to be the dominant technology for powering road transport, from scooters and motorcycles to passenger cars to 40-ton long-haul trucks. But there are still transport uses where hydrogen’s lighter weight may make it useful. For example, hydrogen may prove necessary to long-distance aviation and maritime shipping, since battery solutions for those energy-intensive uses may remain prohibitively heavy well into the future.

Hydrogen can also be used to produce synthetic hydrocarbons for fertilizer and chemical production, and can be substituted for fossil carbon in the production of steel. In these cases, we can’t directly electrify — hydrogen would be replacing carbon-rich chemical feedstocks.

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Indeed, sectors that are difficult to electrify, and therefore likely appropriate for hydrogen, amount to 25% of end-use energy demand in advanced economies. So the investment in scaling up electrolysis, and the renewable energy needed to power it, remains a major, robust and worthwhile challenge.

Still, in many or most energy end-uses, direct electrification from the renewable generation is much more efficient than the roundabout process of turning renewable electrons into hydrogen or, even less efficiently, into a hydrogen-derived synthetic fuel.

Turning green hydrogen into methane and then regenerating power in a turbine wastes 80% of the energy originally captured from the sun or wind. Hydrogen fuel cells might be a niche long-term electricity storage technology, but not a power mainstay.
Using a hydrogen-derived liquid fuel to power a truck takes five times as much renewable electricity as charging the batteries needed to transport an equivalent amount of freight. Almost all trucking will be better off powered with batteries than hydrogen fuel cells.
Heating a building with e-methane originally sourced from renewable electrons takes 10 times as much energy as simply using a heat pump. We don’t need to keep our gas pipelines in place for the hydrogen future.

In other words, all proposals to use hydrogen for road transport, heating and cooling buildings, or as a primary generating fuel ignore hydrogen’s most effective role: It’s the caviar of alternative fuels, not the meat and potatoes.

Some current proposals for hydrogen are, in all honesty, overhyped delay tactics, somewhat akin to the coal industry’s decades-long campaign for the illusory promise of “clean coal.” Gas utilities in 26 states have asked for ratepayer funds to test “blending” hydrogen into methane pipelines to power plants, factories and other large buildings. They argue this is somehow an “efficient” reuse of their infrastructure. It isn’t.

The existing pipeline network can handle a mixture of only 6% hydrogen by energy, with the remaining 94% consisting of methane. Even if the pipeline blend can be increased through partial retrofitting, that 6% limit cannot be substantially exceeded until every single factory, power plant, furnace, water heater and stove on that segment of pipeline has been replaced with a hydrogen-compatible, high-temperature new model.

Of course the gas industry knows this. It hopes to keep on shipping methane to their customers for another 20 years while pretending to prepare for a replacement with “clean fuel.” Eventually its leading companies will concede that their pipelines and customer furnaces and boilers can only handle methane — and the cheapest way, even 20 years from now, to obtain methane will be … burning fossil fuels!

There is no identified low-carbon conversion strategy for retrofitting existing gas pipelines to to deliver hydrogen, or for households to burn it. We will, however, need to have hydrogen available in our industrial centers and at major ports and airline terminals. Those locations will also need superb grid connectivity for their electrical needs. Investing in an advanced grid to handle electrolysis would avoid the necessity of developing and building hydrogen pipelines. It’s much easier to ship electrons than gas — and then to turn them into gas only in the infrequent cases where we can’t more cheaply use electricity.

from Carl Pope on the green-energy future

Elon Musk fired Twitter’s janitorial staff and employees are left to supply their own toilet paper

On Thursday, The New York Times reported on the drastic cuts tech billionaire Elon Musk has made at Twitter since purchasing it for $44 billion and assuming control of the company.

One of the stranger cuts, noted reporters Kate Conger, Ryan Mac, and Mike Isaac: firing the janitorial staff and forcing employees to bring their own toilet paper.

“Early on Christmas Eve, members of the billionaire’s staff flew to Sacramento — the site of one Twitter’s three main computing storage facilities — to disconnect servers that had kept the social network running smoothly,” said the report. “Some employees were worried that losing those servers could cause problems, but saving money was the priority, according to two people who were familiar with the move but not authorized to talk about it.”

“The data center shutdown was one of many drastic steps Mr. Musk has undertaken to stabilize Twitter’s finances,” said the report. “Over the past few weeks, Twitter had stopped paying millions of dollars in rent and services, and Mr. Musk had told his subordinates to renegotiate those agreements or simply end them. The company has stopped paying rent at its Seattle office, leading it to face eviction, two people familiar with the matter said. Janitorial and security services have been cut, and in some cases employees have resorted to bringing their own toilet paper to the office.”

This comes as Musk has made a number of changes to the website’s policies itself, many of which have drawn intense backlash from users.

Earlier this month, Musk had Twitter block the sharing of links to competitor sites on the platform, like Mastodon, later relaxing this policy after outrage. Around the same time, Musk banned several journalists covering him, including some who referenced his decision to ban a user tracking the movements of his private jet, and even one who simply covers problems at Musk’s car company Tesla. These bans, too, were partially reversed after backash.

According to reports, Musk is in the process of looking for a CEO to run Twitter for him, after which he will step back from managing the platform.

George Santos seems to have lied about his mom dying on 9/11

United States Congressman-elect George Santos (R-New York), who is already under investigation for ostensibly lying to voters about vast chunks of his personal and professional background, is now facing additional scrutiny for making incompatible statements about the effects that the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks had on his family.

On Wednesday night it was discovered that Santos twice tweeted conflicting recollections of his mother Fatima Devolder’s death.

“9/11 claimed my mother’s life… so I’m blocking so I don’t ever have to read this again,” Santos posted on July 12th, 2021. Five months later, Santos wrote that “December 23rd this year marks 5 years I lost my best friend and mentor. Mom you will live forever in my heart.”

The Washington Post confirmed on Thursday that Devolder died on December 23rd, 2016, further noting that “while many first responders and people around Ground Zero later developed health problems, including cancer, because of exposure to the contaminated air, critics were quick to draw attention to the latest inconsistency in Santos’s personal story, as well as point out that 15 years was more than ‘a few years later.'”

The paper also explained that “as of 2021, at least 4,627 responders and survivors who enrolled in the World Trade Center Health Program from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had died. While not all of the deaths can be attributed to illnesses linked to Ground Zero exposures, researchers have identified more than 60 types of cancer as well as roughly two dozen other ailments linked to Ground Zero exposures, according to Scientific American.”

But the issue became even murkier on Thursday afternoon when a segment of an interview that Santos gave to BizTV while on the 2022 campaign trail appeared on Twitter. In it, Santos proffered yet another version of that fateful day’s events and declared himself a victim of a sinister liberal agenda:

I can’t believe that that’s the reality that we’re living in, that I have to hear somebody actually say that the 9/11 Memorial is canceled – the same memorial where many New Yorkers, Long Islanders, even New Jersey and Connecticut residents perished, first responders, law enforcement, everybody, you know, people working in the towers and media people – everybody just perished. And to – I get emotional.

My parents were both down there on the day of the attacks and fortunately, none of them had passed.

But to say that the families of those who lost their loved ones will be recused from having a ceremony – which like you said is part of their support group, taken away from them – just strikes to me as a very foolish attempt of [former Democratic New York Governor Andrew] Cuomo and the left trying to erase that history, that very recent history that a lot of us saw. All of us alive, most of us alive today saw it, Millennials included. I was fourteen at the time.

Watch below:

New: George Santos claimed *both* of his parents were at the World Trade Center on 9/11 and survived, and accused “the left” of “trying to erase that history.”

Santos: “I get emotional. My parents were both down there the day of the attacks and fortunately none of them passed.” pic.twitter.com/LtGA7AE6Tq

— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) December 29, 2022

MAGA blowhard Andrew Tate arrested for human trafficking and forming an organized crime group

MAGA influencer and former professional kickboxer Andrew Tate — along with his brother Tristan and two other suspects — was detained on Thursday under suspicion of human trafficking and forming an organized crime group.

According to a statement from prosecutors obtained from NBC, “The four suspects appear to have created an organized crime group with the purpose of recruiting, housing and exploiting women by forcing them to create pornographic content meant to be seen on specialized websites for a cost.”

One of the four suspects being held, who has yet to be named, has been charged with rape.

DeSantis goes easy on hotel sex trafficking violations

Prosecutors further that the Tate brothers are being held for 30 days after a raid on their five properties revealed that upwards of six women were being held for money-making sex purposes. According to The Guardian, the brothers have been under investigation since April.

Tate’s arrest comes a day after he made headlines for engaging in a heated exchange of words online with 19-year-old Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg. During the exchange, Tate bragged to Thunberg about his 33 cars and “their emissions,” a taunt which the young activist dismissed with one KO of a reply.

yes, please do enlighten me. email me at smalldickenergy@getalife.com https://t.co/V8geeVvEvg

— Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) December 28, 2022

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The exchange between Tate and Thunberg took place on Twitter, a platform he was recently allowed back on by Elon Musk after having been suspended in 2017 for tweeting that “rape victims ‘bear some responsibility’ for putting themselves in a position to be assaulted,” according to CNET. After that initial suspension, Tate attempted to sneak back on to the platform using different accounts, resulting in a now reversed “permanent ban.”

Reporter Alejandra Caraballo speculated on Thursday that Tate’s return to Twitter may have aided in his arrest.

“Romanian authorities needed proof that Andrew Tate was in the country so they reportedly used his social media posts,” says Caraballo. “His ridiculous video yesterday featured a pizza from a Romanian pizza chain, Jerry’s Pizza, confirming he was in the country. This is absolutely epic.”

Although the internet had a lot of fun with the unconfirmed pizza box theory — dubbed “PizzaTate” — with even Thunberg finding opportunity for one final jab, Tate had actually tweeted clues to his location prior to the pizza box video.

this is what happens when you don’t recycle your pizza boxes

— Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) December 30, 2022

In an update provided by The Washington Post on Friday, Ramona Bolla, a spokeswoman for the Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism puts the pizza box theory to rest and says “It was a hard job gathering all the evidence” [in the months-long investigation.]”

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How the Democrats became the party of endless war

The Democrats position themselves as the party of virtue, cloaking their support for the war industry in moral language stretching back to Korea and Vietnam, when President Ngo Dinh Diem was as lionized as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is now. All the wars they support and fund are “good” wars. All the enemies they fight, the latest being Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, are incarnations of evil. The photo of a beaming Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Kamala Harris holding up a signed Ukrainian battle flag behind Zelenskyy as he addressed Congress was another example of the Democratic Party’s abject subservience to the war machine.

The Democrats, especially with the presidency of Bill Clinton, became shills not only for corporate America but for the weapons manufacturers and the Pentagon. No weapons system is too costly. No war, no matter how disastrous, goes unfunded. No military budget is too big, including the $858 billion in military spending allocated for the current fiscal year, an increase of $45 billion above what the Biden administration requested.

The historian Arnold Toynbee cited unchecked militarism as the fatal disease of empires, arguing that they ultimately commit suicide.

There once was a wing of the Democratic Party that questioned and stood up to the war industry: Senators like J. William Fulbright, George McGovern, Gene McCarthy, Mike Gravel and William Proxmire and House members like Dennis Kucinich. But that opposition evaporated along with the antiwar movement. When 30 members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus recently issued a call for Biden to negotiate with Putin, they were forced by the party leadership and a warmongering media to back down and rescind their letter. Not that any of them, with the exception of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, have voted against the billions of dollars in weaponry sent to Ukraine or the bloated military budget. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan voted present.

Ukraine, media censorship and the ruthless politics of permanent war

The opposition to the perpetual funding of the war in Ukraine has come primarily from Republicans, 11 in the Senate and 57 in the House, several of whom, such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, are unhinged conspiracy theorists. Only nine Republicans in the House joined the Democrats in supporting the $1.7 trillion spending bill needed to prevent the government from shutting down, which included approval of $847 billion for the military — the total is boosted to $858 billion when factoring in accounts that don’t fall under the Armed Services committees’ jurisdiction. In the Senate, 29 Republicans opposed the spending bill. The Democrats, including nearly all 100 members of the Progressive Caucus, lined up dutifully for endless war.

This lust for war is dangerous, pushing us into a potential war with Russia and, perhaps later, with China — each a nuclear power. It is also economically ruinous. The monopolization of capital by the military has driven U.S. debt to over $30 trillion, $6 trillion more than the U.S. GDP of $24 trillion. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year. We spend more on the military than the next nine countries combined, including China and Russia. Congress is also on track to provide an extra $21.7 billion to the Pentagon — above the already expanded annual budget — to resupply Ukraine.

“But those contracts are just the leading edge of what is shaping up to be a big new defense buildup,” The New York Times reports. “Military spending next year is on track to reach its highest level in inflation-adjusted terms since the peaks in the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars between 2008 and 2011, and the second highest in inflation-adjusted terms since World War II — a level that is more than the budgets for the next 10 largest cabinet agencies combined.”

The Democratic Party, which under the Clinton administration aggressively courted corporate donors, has surrendered its willingness to challenge, however tepidly, the war industry.

“As soon as the Democratic Party made a determination, it could have been 35 or 40 years ago, that they were going to take corporate contributions, that wiped out any distinction between the two parties,” Dennis Kucinich said when I interviewed him on my show for The Real News Network. “Because in Washington, he or she who pays the piper plays the tune. That’s what’s happened. There isn’t that much of a difference in terms of the two parties when it comes to war.”

In his 1970 book “The Pentagon Propaganda Machine,” Fulbright describes how the Pentagon and the arms industry pour millions into shaping public opinion through public relations campaigns, Defense Department films, control over Hollywood and domination of the commercial media. Military analysts on cable news are universally former military and intelligence officials who sit on boards or work as consultants to defense industries, a fact they rarely disclose to the public. Barry R. McCaffrey, a retired four-star army general and military analyst for NBC News, was also an employee of Defense Solutions, a military sales and project management firm. He, like most of these shills for war, personally profited from the sales of the weapons systems and expansion of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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On the eve of every congressional vote on the Pentagon budget, lobbyists from businesses tied to the war industry meet with Congress members and their staff to push them to vote for the budget to protect jobs in their district or state. This pressure, coupled with the mantra amplified by the media that opposition to profligate war funding is unpatriotic, keeps elected officials in bondage. These politicians also depend on the lavish donations from the weapons manufacturers to fund their campaigns.

Seymour Melman, in his book “Pentagon Capitalism,” documented the way militarized societies destroy their domestic economies. Billions are spent on the research and development of weapons systems while renewable energy technologies languish. Universities are flooded with military-related grants while they struggle to find money for environmental studies and the humanities. Bridges, roads, levees, rail, ports, electric grids, sewage treatment plants and drinking water infrastructures are structurally deficient and antiquated. Schools are in disrepair and lack sufficient teachers and staff. Unable to stem the COVID-19 pandemic, the for-profit health care industry forces families, including those with insurance, into bankruptcy. Domestic manufacturing, especially with the offshoring of jobs to China, Vietnam, Mexico and other nations, collapses. Families are drowning in personal debt, with 63 percent of Americans living paycheck to paycheck. The poor, the mentally ill, the sick and the unemployed are abandoned.

Melman, who coined the term “permanent war economy,” noted that since the end of the Second World War, the federal government has spent more than half its discretionary budget on past, current and future military operations. It is the largest single sustaining activity of the government. The military-industrial establishment is nothing more than gilded corporate welfare. Military systems are sold before they are produced. Military industries are permitted to charge the federal government for huge cost overruns. Massive profits are guaranteed. For example, this November, the Army awarded Raytheon Technologies alone more than $2 billion in contracts, on top of over $190 million awarded in August, to deliver missile systems to expand or replenish weapons sent to Ukraine. Despite a depressed market formost other businesses, stock prices of Lockheed and Northrop Grumman have risen by more than 36 and 50 percent this year.

Tech giants, including Amazon, which supplies surveillance and facial recognition software to the police and FBI, have been absorbed into the permanent war economy. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle were awarded multibillion-dollar cloud computing contracts for the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability and are eligible to receive $9 billion in Pentagon contracts to provide the military with “globally available cloud services across all security domains and classification levels, from the strategic level to the tactical edge,” through mid-2028.

Foreign aid is given to countries such as Israel, with more than $150 billion in bilateral assistance since its founding in 1948, or Egypt, which has received over $80 billion since 1978 — aid that requires foreign governments to buy weapons systems from the U.S. The U.S. public funds the research, development and building of weapons systems and purchases them for foreign governments. Such a circular system mocks the idea of a free-market economy. These weapons soon become obsolete and are replaced by updated and usually more costly weapons systems. It is, in economic terms, a dead end. It sustains nothing but the permanent war economy.

“The truth of the matter is that we’re in a heavily militarized society driven by greed, lust for profit, and wars are being created just to keep fueling that,” Kucinich told me.

In 2014, the U.S. backed a coup in Ukraine that installed a government that included neo-Nazis and was antagonistic to Russia. The coup triggered a civil war when the ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine, the Donbas region, sought to secede, resulting in over 14,000 people dead and nearly 150,000 displaced, before Russia invaded in February. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, according to Jacques Baud, a former NATO security adviser who also worked for Swiss intelligence, was instigated by the escalation of Ukraine’s war on the Donbas. It also followed the Biden administration’s rejection of proposals sent by the Kremlin in late 2021, which might have averted Russia’s invasion the following year.

This invasion has led to widespread U.S. and EU sanctions on Russia, which have boomeranged onto Europe. Inflation ravages Europe with the sharp curtailment of shipments of Russian oil and gas. Industry, especially in Germany, is crippled. In most of Europe, it is a winter of shortages, spiraling prices and misery.

“This whole thing is blowing up in the face of the West,” Kucinich warned. “We forced Russia to pivot to Asia, as well as Brazil, India, China, South Africa and Saudi Arabia. There’s a whole new world being formed. The catalyst of it is the misjudgment that occurred about Ukraine and the effort to try to control Ukraine in 2014 that most people aren’t aware of.”

By not opposing a Democratic Party whose primary business is war, liberals become the sterile, defeated dreamers in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Notes from the Underground.”

A former convict, Dostoevsky did not fear evil. He feared a society that no longer had the moral fortitude to confront evil. And war, to steal a line from my latest book, is the greatest evil.

more from Chris Hedges on the true cost of war

James Cameron threatens to tell only “Avatar” stories from now on, despite the harm done

Asked by Empire Magazine if James Cameron regretted spending so many years – about a quarter of a century – on one story, that of the Na’vi, giant blue humanoids who live in accordance with nature, the director gave a surprising answer: “The world of ‘Avatar’ is so sprawling that I can tell most of the stories I want to tell within it [Pandora].” He went on to say, “Secondly, yes . . . our time as artists is finite. I will always mourn some of the stories that I don’t get to make. But I feel a great satisfaction when other directors want to explore some of my ideas.”

Back to the first part of that statement. Is Cameron really at peace with centering the remainder of his career in one so-called embarrassing world? Since the original “Avatar” was released in 2009, Cameron has shot two sequels to it, including “Avatar: The Way of Water,” which opened in December and parts of the third film, as well as developing two other sequels. Variety writes, “It’s quite possible the 68-year-old Cameron only directs ‘Avatar’ movies for the rest of his career. Not that that’s a problem for Cameron.”

He may be fine with it, but in the wake of accusations from Indigenous people about cultural appropriation and harm from the films, are we? No one asked for more “Avatar.” No one, except Cameron himself.

“That’s not the way to make movies”: James Cameron wants the Marvel Universe to grow up

Much has changed in the years since “Avatar.” One thing that hasn’t changed is James Cameron.

The original “Avatar” tells the story of Marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) who is a paraplegic. It’s the future. Earth’s resources have been depleted. Somehow, we made it to 2154, which already seems highly improbable, but fine. To replace his deceased brother, Jake is sent on a mission to the moon Pandora, which greedy Earth folk want to mine for unobtainium. There’s a problem. Pandora is populated by a “primitive” humanoid species who live in harmony with their natural world and don’t take kindly to strangers. Jake infiltrates the group by assuming an avatar that looks like them. This also allows him to move without his wheelchair. But Jake falls in love with the Na’vi, their ways, and one of them in particular.

Obviously, the original “Avatar” had some issues. One is that it’s basically “Heart of Darkness” with Jake as a white savior. The other is that it stinks of ableism. Much has changed in the years since “Avatar.” One thing that hasn’t changed is James Cameron.

Ronal (Kate Winslet), Tonowari (Cliff Curtis), and the Metkayina clan in “Avatar: The Way Of Water.” (Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios)“Avatar: The Way of Water” is set more than a decade after the first film. Jake has a family with the Na’vi, but our old threat returns and he must lead the Na’vi to defeat their shared enemy. The new film has garnered tepid reviews, with most critics praising the visuals but lamenting the paltry story and dialogue, and using their reviews as a chance to get bitingly creative without sparing the puns. The Guardian called it “soggy” and “twee,” describing it as a very expensive “screensaver.” The Los Angeles Times went with “Na’vi gazing” while The Telegraph said watching the film “feels like being waterboarded with turquoise cement.” That was a one-star review, if you were wondering.

It’s a hodgepodge of stolen things.

But the most damning criticism comes from Indigenous people, with many calling for an all-out boycott of the film. Indigenous people, like Navajo artist Yuè Begay, object to the film’s romantic view of colonialism and its sweeping generalizations about Native people. Stories and communities have been twisted and maligned to create the Na’vi, which writer and filmmaker Jason Asenap describes as a “curious mixture of surface Indigeneity signified from a white man’s perspective: long braids and dreadlocks attached to foreign bodies, the bodies laden with “exotic” ta moko-style tattoos.”

Jack Champion as Spider in “Avatar: The Way Of Water.” (Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios)It’s a hodgepodge of stolen things, and Cameron himself hasn’t helped. In comments from 2010, which have now resurfaced, he told The Guardian he was inspired by the “plight” of Native people, saying, “This was a driving force for me in the writing of ‘Avatar‘ – I couldn’t help but think that if they [the Lakota Sioux] had had a time-window and they could see the future . . . and they could see their kids committing suicide at the highest suicide rates in the nation . . . because they were hopeless and they were a dead-end society – which is what is happening now – they would have fought a lot harder.”

South Dakota State Senator Red Dawn Foster told Native News Online, “James Cameron’s comments are wholly inaccurate. He has fallen into the trap of viewing the Lakota as the ‘ignorant savage.'” Native News Online also quoted Dr. Kyle Hill, a Turtle Mountain Chippewa (enrolled), psychologist and assistant professor, who said, Cameron’s “generalization about suicide is problematic and lacks accuracy. The colonizer mentality that we were in those circumstances is us being doomed is wrong, but for us, we passed on our knowledge and our stories when snow was on the ground. That was a promise of survival.”

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When do such mischaracterizations, overgeneralizations and appropriations such as Cameron’s become dangerous? Native women already face rates of violence two to three times higher than women of any other race. The 2021 Hollywood Diversity Report found Native representation in film was only 0.6%. Meanwhile “Avatar: The Way of Water,” directed and co-written by a white man, has made over 1 billion globally. America especially loves easy stories, stories where a white man is a hero, where a disabled body is cured, where Indigenous people are magic. But real people are saying these stories are damaging; they are asking audiences to listen.

Nobody wanted more “Avatar” movies. We are paying for them in ticket prices and paying for them, long-term, in harm to actual people. It’s fine if you spend the rest of your life on Pandora, James Cameron. But we don’t have to go with you.

about “Avatar”

Jan. 6 committee withdraws Trump subpoena after failing to beat the clock

The subpoena issued to Trump by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol has officially been withdrawn after failing to beat the clock on the committee’s allotted time frame.

In a letter from committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson issued to Trump’s attorney he states, “In light of the imminent end of our investigation, the select committee can no longer pursue the specific information covered by the subpoena. Therefore, through this letter, I hereby formally withdraw the subpoena issued to former President Trump, and notify you that he is no longer obligated to comply or produce records in response to said subpoena.”

We all feel Trump fatigue — and he’s in serious trouble. But don’t look away

The committee’s vote in favor of serving Trump with the subpoena came in mid-October 2022 after Rep. Liz Cheney named the former president as a “central player” in the J6 insurrection and Rep. Thompson voiced his opinion that there was necessary and relevant obligation to hear from Trump himself regarding his actions and influence surrounding the events of Jan. 6.

As CBS highlights in their coverage of the committee’s withdrawal of the subpoena, Trump “gave no indication he would comply” to it in the first place.

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Last week the J6 committee released the last of their reports and when January brings a turnaround in Congress, their authority to delve any deeper will come to an end, leaving Trump for the DOJ to contend with next.

Had Trump appeared before the committee, he would have been called upon to produce emails, text messages and phone records — specifically those relating to his claims that the 2020 election had been “stolen” from him.

Reacting to news of the withdrawal, Trump posted a message to Truth Social on Wednesday saying “Was just advised that the Unselect Committee of political Thugs has withdrawn the Subpoena of me concerning the January 6th Protest of the CROOKED 2020 Presidential Election. They probably did so because they knew I did nothing wrong, or they were about to lose in Court. Perhaps the FBI’s involvement in RIGGING the Election played into their decision. In any event, the Subpoena is DEAD!”

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Herpes vaccine tests underway by company that made COVID-19 vaccines

Ever since BioNTech and its occasional corporate partner Pfizer announced they had developed an mRNA vaccine for COVID-19, biotech researchers have salivated over the promise of using mRNA vaccines on other pathogens. That speaks to the promise of mRNA vaccines: unlike conventional vaccine platforms, mRNA vaccines can be much more easily modified to treat new viruses. That has opened the doors for the possibility of vaccines against viruses that had eluded immunologists, including retroviruses like HIV — for which researchers are already working on an mRNA vaccine.

Here’s what the different “phases” of vaccine production really mean

Such is the case with BioNTech’s latest endeavor with mRNA vaccines: Developing an inoculation for herpes, for which a vaccine has never existed.

It is estimated that more than 1 out of 9 Americans between the ages of 14 and 49 have an HSV-2 infection.

Last week the German vaccine manufacturer announced they are commencing their first-in-human Phase I trials for a vaccine developed to prevent herpes simplex virus-2 (HSV-2) and potentially herpes simplex virus-1 (HSV-1) as well. HSV-1 is linked to oral herpes, while HSV-2 is linked to genital herpes, although both can exhibit outbreaks in other parts of the body.

The novel vaccine effort is the fruit of a joint research project with the University of Pennsylvania that began in 2018 with the goal of developing mRNA vaccines for a wide range of diseases.

Because this is Phase 1, it means that BioNTech has developed a vaccine candidate which shows promise of being both effective and safe. At the same time, the pharmaceutical company has yet to expand their tests to a large cohort of patients, which is known as Phase III. At the first stage, the company is only beginning to start testing the vaccine on humans. If the Phase I trials succeed, the company will gradually test the vaccine on an increasing number of patients to prove that it succeeds in preventing herpes infections.

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One of the intrinsic advantages of mRNA vaccines is that they are more malleable than conventional vaccine platforms. Traditional vaccines will take all or part of a given pathogen (a microorganism that causes disease), insert a dead or weakened version into the body, and thereby stimulate the immune system to build up antibodies (pathogen-fighting cells) that are specifically designed to destroy them. While this method of developing vaccines is usually safe and effective, it can put scientists at a disadvantage when they need to create new inoculations that keep up with different mutated variants of a given disease. mRNA vaccines, by contrast, create synthetic versions of mRNA, a single-stranded RNA molecule that complements one of the DNA strands in a pathogen’s gene. By injecting a bespoke version of the mRNA into the body, immune cells will produce proteins like those found in a given virus or bacteria and train the immune system to fight the pathogen in question before it can make a human sick.

Regardless of whether the BioNTech vaccine ultimately proves effective, its mere existence is in one sense a testament to the power of Big Pharma marketing. Before the late 1970s, herpes rarely received public attention because it rarely poses a serious health risk to people who suffer from it; the vast majority of herpes patients are either asymptomatic or only display mild symptoms. Indeed, it is estimated that more than 1 out of 9 Americans between the ages of 14 and 49 have an HSV-2 infection. When herpes infections are symptomatic, the most common problems include painful urination, urinary discharge, pain and itching around the genitals and — most infamously — sores that can appear around the mouth and genitals. There are also possible links to health issues among infants born to infected parents.

While few would argue that genital herpes is pleasant, it was not widely regarded as a particularly onerous disease until the advertising campaign by a medical research company known as Burroughs Wellcome Co. (now known as GlaxoSmithKline PLC). Because Burroughs Wellcome Co. had developed a first-of-its-kind treatment for genital herpes, Zovirax, they implemented an aggressive marketing plan that downplayed their drug and instead attached a stigma of shame to having genital herpes. This campaign included the then-unusual act of a pharmaceutical company paying for full-page ads in national magazines that depicted genital herpes as embarrassing. The goal was to “encourage people with herpes to visit their physician,” according to a Burroughs spokeswoman at the time.

Flash forward more than four decades and now medical experts believe they may have developed the ultimate herpes treatment. The upcoming study is expected to be observer blinded and placebo-controlled, with the patients including 100 healthy volunteers who do not have any current or past history of symptomatic genital herpes infections. If the Phase I trials succeed and a vaccine is ultimately released to the public, genital herpes may become a thing of the past.

about mRNA vaccines:

The best TV title sequences of 2022, from dance numbers to dystopic workday dreams

Defining excellence in a title credits sequence should be easy in the streaming era. Now that it’s possible to skip a show’s opening text and images with the click of that “Skip Intro” button, any credits you’d willingly sit through each time should qualify as a winner. Right?

If only! That innovation has only upped the creative stakes for producers to the point that now, in 2022, we have a surfeit of shows with aggressively toothsome opening sequences. Some of that greatness heavily bites other titles, mind you – which isn’t a crime.

Giving art world fans something to swoon over in the Magritte-influenced opener to “Irma Vep” or the Saul Bass-flavored titles for “The Afterparty” is a blessing. Where the too-familiar opening titles for “House of the Dragon” may have underwhelmed, the homage paid to it at the top of “Guillermo Del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities” was magical. The courtroom illustrator-influenced drawings for “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law” captured the tongue-in-cheek sparkle of its tone.

We could go on, but instead, let’s look at the title sequences that rose above the best examples of the art form for reasons beyond visual appeal and examine why we savored each of them every time they crossed our screens.

The 6 best TV episodes of the year, from beignet bites to a deadly dance

“Our Flag Means Death,” HBO Max.

Top expressions of creativity don’t always employ elaborate digital effects polished by a team of illustrators. Sometimes the best ones look like they were made by human hands, using tangible and possibly found objects to capture the story’s essence. In the case of this droll comedy about a wealthy 18th-century gentleman turned bungling buccaneer, that requires visualizing many different feelings.

From one week to the next, viewers could never be sure whether the title would appear on a flag, which it did a couple of times, or be rendered in seaweed or children’s toys, or carved into wood or a skull or a dead man’s chest. Each was practically created by the art department save for one week’s title, where it’s engraved on the moon. These moments are sweet and brief enough to view skipping them as a crime worse than piracy.

“The White Lotus,” HBO.

Salon spoke with Katrina Crawford and Mark Bashore of studio Plains of Yonder regarding the meticulously placed symbolism throughout the wallpaper-inspired opening credits of Season 1. In the second season, the pair goes even deeper and more intricate by taking inspiration from the Italian setting to paint ominous hints and clues within their homage to classic paintings and frescoes.

Passionate analysts likely recognized a few crossover images from the first season; in each of them, monkeys feature prominently, but only in the second season they’re fancily dressed. They also may have recognized a few personality Easter eggs insinuated in images such as the backbiting bird on the card listing Aubrey Plaza’s credit, corresponding to the mood of her prickly vacationer Harper. And there are scenes of dominance entwined with sexuality: rutting goats, lovers spied in bed together. One, however, achieves the height of its enjoyability only after the season finale. We won’t specify why beyond saying: beware of cats toting fish.

“Star Trek: Strange New Worlds,” Paramount+.

Some shows seem to take their franchise familiarity for granted to the point of approaching their credits sequences as an afterthought, acknowledging that we’re there for the universe and not the details. That is not the case with the opener to “Strange New Worlds,” a series that boldly dared to expand the U.S.S. Enterprise’s voyage to tell the story of Captain Kirk’s mentor and predecessor Christopher Pike. Given that the show hired Anson Mount to establish Pike as the universe’s No.1 Space Zaddy, it’s all but required that the credits equal his ability to get us all tingly.

That they do through Jeff Russo’s opening theme, which incorporates notes from the original series’ melody with dreamy images of prismatic colored nebulas, jewel-like asteroid belts, and other mesmerizing sights along the Enterprise’s cruising path. Together this sequence taps into the fandom’s bottomless well of affection and memory while promising to honor the classic’s spirit with an unexpectedly fresh vision.

“Peacemaker,” HBO Max.

The Internet is brimming with dancers choreographing moves to their favorite TV themes, so if James Gunn’s decision to provide a dance for everyone to emulate, set to Wig Wam’s glam rock extravaganza “Do You Wanna Taste It,” is the definition of fan service.

Charissa Barton’s choreography does something special, which is creating a crisp dance number out of a succession of moves that amount to truly terrible dancing. But it’s also a dance that anyone can learn quickly. (Even Eagly gets a sweet moment.) Curiously, that wasn’t Gunn’s intent in playing John Cena in the spotlight position of the opening number. In the first episode of the official “Peacemaker” podcast, Gunn explains that it takes on an ulterior significance as the series progresses. “You’ll see as our story gets darker, deeper, and more sad, that the dance itself kind of becomes more sad and more serious and less funny,” he tells the hosts.

Even if it doesn’t, there’s no way you won’t want to taste it every time you tune in.

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“Severance,” Apple TV+.

Weeks before the audience was made aware of the true nature of the “severance” process, let alone what Lumon Industries does, we got what Ben Stiller was saying about the fallacy of work-life balance – mainly because we either live in that lie or have in the past. The notion of surgically separating your psyche into “innie” and “outie” identities sounds more oppressive than bearing the workday. An “outie,” who only knows life outside of work, doesn’t get to experience much of life beyond the few hours that they’re awake. But an “innie” never sleeps or creates memories of life beyond the workplace. That describes Hell.

Artist Oliver Latta, who goes by the moniker extraweg, captures that strange existence in his Emmy-winning opening title sequence featuring an eerily accurate likeness of Adam Scott’s Mark. Mark’s “outie” stumbles through life in his pajamas while his suit-dressed “innie” pilots his body at his cubicle. As the sequence progresses, the two halves find it increasingly impossible to keep out of each other consciousness, and chaos spills into order like an upended cup full of coffee . . . or Marks.

“Pachinko,” Apple TV+.

Gorgeously filmed and blessed with an exceptional cast of actors, “Pachinko” stands as one of the year’s most satisfying visions. In no way can it be described as light fare, suitable to a story about a Korean family’s endurance during the era of Japanese occupation, both in their mother’s birthplace and their eventual adopted home country of Japan.

But the jubilant opening credits remind viewers at the top of each episode of the story’s unifying outlook in the brightest way possible: the truth that nothing in life is certain or guaranteed. Nestled between archival footage from the past and historic photos, including shots of younger versions of these characters, are scenes of every cast member rapturously dancing to The Grass Roots’ 1967 tune “Let’s Live For Today” in the aisles of a rose-colored pachinko parlor.

Its marriage of style and genuine exuberance make it impossible to pass up and is a steady reminder that regardless of the struggles we witness this family facing, the chance to live that kind of joy makes it worthwhile.

Year End Stories

The 8 best beverages to buy at Costco

As we’ve stated before, Costco is arguably the single best one-stop-shop for bulk groceries and that convenience is especially welcome during the holiday season. Costco has no limitations when it comes to the sheer breadth of its products, and when it comes to beverages, they truly run the gamut. From coffees and teas to sodas and plant-based milks, Costco has you fully covered when it comes to your drink needs, for both the holiday season and beyond.

Here, we’ve outlined some of our favorite options (and deals). You really can’t go wrong with these items, which appeal to any and all dietary restrictions, preferences or tastes. Bonus? They all taste terrific — and they’re all fantastic deals, too.

The 10 best Costco bakery goods being sold this autumn

Have these on hand this holiday season and your guests (and you) are sure to be very pleased with the selection of beverages in the house.

This list adds to Salon Food’s growing library of supermarket guides. If you’re in the market for particularly festive snacks, check out this list of Aldi’s best holiday offerings.

Kirkland Signature Organic Non-Dairy Oat Beverage

No matter if you’re purposely eschewing dairy milk or if you’re just in the mood to test out this nondairy milk as it soars in popularity, this super affordable pack of six (!) cartons of oat milk is a great deal. The Costco website notes that it’s “kosher, non GMO, USDA Organic and 100% vegan” and that it’s “made with super tasty rolled oats.”

You can sip on this as you would a regular dairy milk, add it to your cereal or coffee or even bake with it.

DEAL: $13.99 for a 6-count of 32-ounce cartons.

IZZE Sparkling Juice Beverage

Featuring sparkling apple, sparkling mango, sparkling blackberry and sparkling clementine as noted by Costco.com, this variety pack, well, packs a wallop of flavor in an effervescent sparkling juice with “no added sugar and no preservatives,” according to the item’s packaging.

It’s hard to find another product as refreshing. With the fizz and “pop” of seltzer or soda, but the flavor of juice, you’ll reach for one of these during practically every meal (or snack).

DEAL: $18.99 for a 24-count variety pack of a 8.4-ounce beverages.

Naked 100% Juice Smoothie Blend

For years, Naked Juice has been a go-to for me whenever I’m feeling under the weather. This variety pack offers some terrific flavors. Costco notes that it’s a “100% juice smoothie blend” with “no sugar added” and “no preservatives added.” Also, it ships chilled and comes in Strawberry Banana, Mighty Mango, Berry Blast and Blue Machine flavors. It’s a great way to start off your morning, but truthfully, it can be consumed with vigor at any point throughout the day.

DEAL: $19.99 for a 12-count variety pack of 10-ounce bottles.

Pressed Cold-Pressed Juice & Shot Bundle

These pressed juices are super popular — and for good reason. Featuring nine bottles and nine “shots,” and containing no sugar or added water, these kosher juices have no preservatives and are made from 100% fruits and vegetables.

The Costco website notes that these juices contain carrots and beets which are “known for their rich color and sweet flavor … [and] promote liver health, fight free radicals, soothe the nervous system, protect your eyesight, and more!” In addition, the citrus juices and green juices are “perfectly blended,” and their shots are a quick hit of nutrients and flavor.

DEAL: $69.99 for nine 12-ounce bottled juices and nine 2-ounce shots.

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Bai Antioxidant Cocofusion

These sweet, creamy drinks are not what they first appear to be.

“Just like our other Bai flavors, our Cocofusion® beverages have 1 gram of sugar, no artificial sweeteners and are infused with antioxidant goodness,” Costco’s website notes. “At Bai, we’ve reimagined and expanded water’s superpowers beyond basic hydration.”

These drinks are essentially flavored water with no artificial flavors or sweeteners, but they boast amazingly unique flavors such as Madagascar Coconut Mango, Molokai Coconut and Puna Coconut Pineapple. Each bottle also only contains ten calories and one gram of sugar!

DEAL: $23.99 for a 15-count variety pack of 18-ounce bottles.

Kirkland Signature Colombian Cold Brew Coffee

Rich, slightly acidic and bold, this cold brew blends beautifully with creamers of any ilk or flavor and they give a pretty robust burst of caffeine to power you through the day. The cans are 11 ounces and are 100% Colombian cold brewed coffee. You can sip right from the can or enjoy it poured over ice in a large glass before adding cream that cascades throughout the glass. You can’t go wrong with this coffee option.

DEAL: $18.99 for a 12-count of 11-ounce cans.

Celsius Sparkling Energy Drink

With the effervescence of seltzer but the boost of an energy drink, Celsius is a fascinating combination. The drinks are entirely sugar-free, as well as gluten-free, kosher, non-GMO and vegan, according to Costco.com.

The site also notes that they are a “clinically proven dietary supplement” and they come in three flavors: orange, kiwi guava and wild berry.

DEAL: $31.99 for an 18-count variety pack of 12 -ounce bottles.

Ito En Oi Ocha Unsweetened Green Tea

Pure and smooth, these green teas are bold, but subtle, with no added sugar. They are non-GMO and made in Taiwan, according to Costco.com. If you’ve been on the hunt for an iced tea that doesn’t taste cloying, this is a perfect drink for you.

DEAL: $15.89 for a 12-count pack of 16.9-ounce bottles.

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From Lizzo to Megan Thee Stallion, 2022 was the year of survival for Black women in the public eye

Lizzo scripts a simple question into her current tour performances that doubles as a meaningful pause button, punctuating a set break: “When was the last time you said something kind about yourself?”

It’s an effective one because, for the briefest of moments, a sold-out arena full of fans went dead quiet, smacked silent by the question mark hanging in the air. She doesn’t leave her faithful hanging for long, breaking the silence by laughing and gently suggesting people change that. Since it’s her, they might actually listen.

All told, 2022 has been pretty great for Lizzo, whose real name is Melissa Viviane Jefferson. Her latest album “Special” is nominated for multiple Grammy Awards, and its popularity netted her an invitation to become the first person since the early 1800s to play a crystal flute that was gifted to James Madison, the fourth president of the United States. Its lead single, “About Damn Time,” made her TikTok’s top music artist of the year and snagged her a spot on Barack Obama’s playlist of favorite music from 2022.

Lizzo’s commitment to flood the field with positivity swelled into a tsunami this year: “Lizzo’s Watch Out for the Big Grrrls,” her Prime Video reality series that came out in March, netted her an Outstanding Competition series Emmy. She performed on “Saturday Night Live,” went day drinking with Seth Meyers for “Late Night,” and is closing the year with the release of her first biographical documentary on HBO Max, “Love, Lizzo” and, on New Year’s Eve, a live televised concert broadcast.

Having said that, it’s inaccurate to measure how well 2022 went for Black women by simply pointing to her success, as certain people tend to do whenever the inequities Black women face are raised in conversations about systemic injustice. She’s a glittering example of excellence, in a range that includes and is anything but limited to Megan Thee Stallion, Brittney Griner and that other Meg, the one known as the Duchess of Sussex.

All these Black women made headlines outside of the usual election cycle. Whether they’re doing so by standing for something, standing up for themselves or simply existing, they are very public examples of the ways misogynoir is used against high-achieving Black women to attacking broader constituencies — including but not limited to Black women en masse.

2022: A year of unpredictable losses

And 2022 is far from the first year featuring multiple instances through which scapegoating Black women provided an entry point to attacking other marginalized people.

As Catherine Knight Steele, a communications professor at the University of Maryland, explained in a recent interview with NBCNews.com, “being anti-Black woman, using Black women as scapegoats or villains, works for a variety of audiences, white audiences, Black men audiences and, most, unfortunately, in spaces where Black women use misogynoir to distance themselves from the negative implications of being associated with other Black women.”

2022 is far from the first year featuring multiple instances through which scapegoating Black women provided an entry point to attacking other… people.

In context, Steele is referring to the way Megan Thee Stallion has been subjected to widespread condemnation, ridicule and disbelief for naming fellow hip hop artist Tory Lanez as the person who shot her in July 2020. Megan, whose real name is Megan Pete, initially told police who arrived at the scene that she’d cut her feet on glass. In April of this year, she explained to CBS’ Gayle King how close the shooting occurred to George Floyd’s murder, saying that “for some reason I was just trying to protect all of us, because I didn’t want them to kill us. Even though this person just did this to me, my first reaction still was to try to save us. I didn’t want to see anybody die.”

Host & musical guest Megan Thee Stallion during SNL Promos in Studio 8H on Tuesday, October 11, 2022 (Rosalind O’Connor/NBC)Despite posting explicit, disturbing images of what her feet looked like after having bullet fragments removed from them on social media, several prominent hip hop artists, including 50 Cent, joked about her assault and cast doubt on her testimony. “It might be funny to y’all on the internet and just another messy topic for you to talk about,” she tweeted in July 2020, “but this is my real life and I’m real life hurt and traumatized.”

Part of moving through that process informed the creation of her second critically acclaimed album, “Traumazine,” released in August; it landed in the No. 8 position on Rolling Stone’s list of 2022’s best hip hop albums. This, too, is part of what could be considered a stellar year, professionally speaking, for her: In the fall, she became the second female hip hop artist to serve as host and musical guest on “Saturday Night Live” since Queen Latifah did the honors in 2004.

That came long after she premiered in her first Super Bowl commercial, became the first woman to rap onstage at the Academy Awards, took home the Top Female Rap Artist prize at the Billboard Music Awards, slayed the red carpet at the Met Gala, and enjoyed a delightful cameo in “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law.” As of Dec. 23, she saw another win: Lanez was found guilty on all three felony charges related to the case, including assault with a semi-automatic firearm, possession of a concealed, unregistered firearm and negligent discharge of a firearm. He faces up to 22 years in prison.

Surviving all of this took such a toll on her mental health that during her testimony, she admitted, “I don’t want to be on this Earth . . . I wish he woulda shot and killed me if I knew I would go through this torture.”

This echoes what Meghan Markle admitted to Oprah Winfrey during their CBS interview last year. A shameful number of people didn’t believe her either.

Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex (MICHELE SPATARI/AFP via Getty Images)Markle has received even less sympathy related to the revelations she and her husband Prince Harry dropped in their docuseries “Harry & Meghan.” One vein lays bare the obscene levels of spite directed at Markle by white people, demonstrated most recently by “The Grand Tour” host Jeremy Clarkson. He penned a column for a prominent British tabloid in which he professed to be “dreaming of the day when she is made to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds chant ‘Shame!’ and throw lumps of excrement at her.”

For what reason? Does there need to be one, beyond the fact that Markle occupies a Black woman’s body? As is the case with Megan Thee Stallion and Lizzo, this leaves her open to figurative and actual assaults and suggestions of violation that would merit punitive consequences had they been made against white women. White western culture has long perpetuated the notion that Black women are less feminine and therefore less worthy of protection.

The corporations that employ figures like Clarkson continue to provide harbor and validation for them. He apologized because he was forced to after thousands of complaints were made regarding his column, which The Sun pulled. As of now, there’s no indication that he’ll lose his TV job over the controversy, joining a too-large contingent of people who view expressing a desire to harm a Black duchess as perfectly acceptable.

If women of Markle’s or Megan Thee Stallion’s stature can be branded liars and have their mental health dragged through hell, what hope do ordinary survivors have of receiving true assistance or justice?

Their experiences tell stories about Black women’s bodies in other ways too. Lizzo is a fashion icon who constantly faces days when she’s simply “minding my fat Black beautiful business,” only to be assaulted by evil comments about her weight and looks by women and men, including Black men — particularly antisemitic rapper Kanye West, who likened her body image positivity to a “genocide of the Black race.” Has-been comic Aries Spears also went after Lizzo, mainly because people stopped looking for him years ago.

Lizzo attends the 63rd Annual GRAMMY Awards at Los Angeles Convention Center on March 14, 2021 in Los Angeles, California. (Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for The Recording Academy)She addresses such attacks in her lyrics for “Special”: “If it wasn’t me then would you even get offended? /Or is it just because I’m Black and heavy?”

If women of Markle’s or Megan Thee Stallion’s stature can be branded liars and have their mental health dragged through hell, what hope do ordinary survivors have of receiving justice?

Megan, for her part, brings up the role her body plays in people’s willingness to believe her in a Rolling Stone profile that published in June, two months before “Traumazine” debuted. She mused to the writer, “I wonder if it’s because of the way I look. Is it because I’m not light enough? Is it that I’m not white enough? Am I not the shape? The height? Because I’m not petite? Do I not seem like I’m worth being treated like a woman?”

WNBA player Brittney Griner might have asked those same questions in reaction to the response to her release after her 10-month detainment. Griner, the star center for the Phoenix Mercury, was detained by Russian officials after their security found vape cartridges containing cannabis oil she says she mistakenly packed in her luggage, and for which she has a prescription. For that, she was sentenced to nine years in that country’s brutal prison system.

She’s also a 6-foot-9 Black woman whose release after nine months was viewed by right-wing pundits as being at the expense of securing the return of Paul Whelan, a former Marine and white businessman also being held by Vladimir Putin’s government.

U.S. officials clarified that wasn’t the case, that it was a “one or none” deal offered in exchange for a notorious arms trafficker Viktor Bout, who served less than half of his original 25-year sentence. Doesn’t matter. Tucker Carlson reduced the intricacies of the deal to Griner’s being prioritized because she’s Black and a lesbian. Other smears went lower and dumber, such as TheBlaze’s Steven Crowder calling Griner “a tattooed lesbian middling WNBA player,” adding, “She’s not the best among us.”

Griner is an eight-time All-Star player and served as the captain of the U.S. Olympic team, with two gold medals to her name.

WNBA basketball superstar Brittney Griner arrives to a hearing at the Khimki Court, outside Moscow on June 27, 2022. (KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP via Getty Images)She’s also a Black woman whose professional stature makes her stand out, and explains why she was a target of interest to the Russians. Immediately following her release, the conservative media’s reaction fed into an ongoing cycle of homophobic messaging. With additional consideration, sports journalists and other professionals cite her story as a reason to address the expansive pay disparity between women’s professional basketball players and their male counterparts. After all, Griner wouldn’t have been in Russia at all if not for the opportunity to make more and better money in her off-season than she does as one of the WNBA’s top players.

Griner was cheered for declaring her intent to play in the upcoming WNBA season, a show of her resilience and defiance, something nobody should expect anyone who survived hard labor under freezing conditions in a Mordovia republic penal colony to undertake. Those who understand what it means to be a Black woman accustomed to crushing society’s expectations of her probably get why she’s doing it.

Speaking to the burdens Black women bear in terms of moving justice forward, Lizzo admits in her HBO Max documentary, “I wish that wasn’t always kind of put on us, because I know how easily that, as a Black woman, I can wear that burden and let it weigh me down like a mule. And I don’t want to be anybody’s f*****g mule.”

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In 2022, she definitely could not be called that – not while using her explosive success to challenge stereotypes that have always been hung around the necks of women like her. 2022 was her year, and Megan Thee Stallion’s, Markle’s and Griner’s, in very different ways and through disparate experiences, some of them publicly painful. But each in her way and by her example shares her life and story as a means of constructing emotional shielding for themselves and others who share some part of their experiences — as survivors, and people who are vilified and persist, as Black women.

Therefore, Lizzo’s question asking when the last time was that you said something kind about yourself is designed to hit a Black person differently, and Black women very specifically, than every other type of person in the stadiums she’s filling.

It’s a good question, connected to the advice Megan provides on her track “Plan B” by warning, “Ladies, love yourself ’cause this s**t could get ugly” and the examples Markle and Griner set by refusing to retreat. Not all of them would make every website’s year-end superlative list, but considered together, they may be the most accessible examples of counteroffensives against misogynoir in 2022 — and very likely in 2023, too.

2022 in review

Best of 2022 | I got hooked on Uber Eats. Not as a customer — as a delivery driver

It’s a Saturday night, and I’m stopped at a red light on Sunset Boulevard. My gaze travels to strangers on patios laughing, drinking and eating delicious looking meals. I’m achy from being stuffed into my driver’s seat for hours. Hunger burns a hole in my stomach. My jeans are uncomfortably snug, reminding me it’s an inconvenient time for another bathroom break. Many restaurants won’t let me use their restroom when I’m picking up an order, so I have to hold it until one that will. My car smells like the last three things I delivered — Japanese seafood, barbecued meat and the Chick-fil-A I just dropped off at a Bel Air mansion. I’m a vegetarian.

I should log off the app and go home to my basic Hollywood one-bedroom, where budget-conscious meals I prepared myself wait in my fridge. But it’s still the dinner rush, and my phone goads me with the familiar chime of incoming offers. Declining them seems like refusing money waved in my face. As someone who recovered from abusing substances years ago, I recognize the signs of being hooked: I can’t stop even when I want to or when it would be in my best interest. And, through “gamification,” delivery apps encourage and exploit this compulsion.

I started delivering food several months ago after my unemployment ran out. I still hadn’t replaced the salary I’d lost in a layoff from my full-time editing job. After I was laid off, I wasn’t getting enough pet-care gigs, which I loved, to pay the bills. Despite sending out tons of resumes and constantly hearing about how “everyone’s hiring right now,” I’d gotten only a handful of interviews and no offers.

The 30 weirdest items forgotten in Ubers over the past year

At first, I was thrilled by the freedom and the novelty. With no set schedule and no boss, I could hop in my car anytime I wanted, turn on the app and start delivering. I felt like I was engaged in underground anthropological research. I’d previously been ignorant of the existence of citizens willing to fund a $15 taxi for a single bag of gummy snakes. Sometimes I’d get a charming surprise, like when the giant Beverly Hills cupcake order went not to a socialite but to an old folks’ home.

As a relative newcomer to Los Angeles, I got a thorough education about huge swaths of the city’s streets, real estate and eateries. I had glimpses into the lives of the famous and privileged as well as the ordinary. I’d get just enough delivery information — first names, last initials and addresses — that, combined with Googling, I could concoct some pretty tasty blind items: “Which gated luxury tower resident likes her Mexican fast-food like her husband’s reality TV programming — burgeoning and bad for you?” “What Rodeo Drive fashion designer wrote in their Buffalo Wild Wings delivery notes: ‘If you come thru front door rather than alley, I PROMISE I will give you no tip and a thumbs down!’?” (I changed the specifics for the sake of privacy. I love juicy details, but I’m not mean.)

I found I genuinely enjoyed “delivering happiness” by bringing people their favorite comfort foods. My 100% approval rating suggested my customers could tell.

Just like when I used to drink and smoke pot at home alone, delivering becomes repetitive and sad.

The downsides quickly became apparent. My beloved red Prius was weathering heavy mileage and wear and tear. As a hybrid, it wasn’t the worst gas guzzler, but fuel costs — in addition to a hefty 15% state self-employment tax — ate a chunk of my already modest earnings. I was horrified to learn in an online drivers’ group that I’d unwittingly gone the first two months with zero accident insurance because my carrier didn’t cover me while I was on the job. When I switched to one that did, my premium went up 40%. Besides putting my car and my body at risk, the job was a dead end. It wasn’t something I’d admit on my resume or even at a dinner party. Not that I had a social life. Although the city was waking up as the pandemic waned, my friends understandably wanted to meet at mealtimes and weekends — also the busiest hours to drive.

So here I am, another Saturday night on the road. The driving isn’t awful; it’s parking that’s a nightmare. I must do it twice for every order, upon pickup and at delivery. Now when I see a street festooned with blinker-flashing, double-parked cars, I don’t leap to judgment. I think, “Greetings, my brethren.” Where that’s not an option, I repeatedly circle blocks hunting for a space (often while the customer, who can trace my path on the app, sends me texts I can’t answer demanding to know what’s going on). I spend my own money on meters and, as a last resort, negotiate dreaded gargantuan parking structures. Some apartment buildings are so vast I voice record directions from the concierge to the customer’s unit. “Staircase to mezzanine. Sharp left all the way to double doors. Turn right after the pool. Take the second elevator bank to the 12th floor after you cross the footbridge to building J.” A round-trip labyrinth, all the while worrying whether the car I left behind will be ticketed (three times so far) or towed (mercifully not), makes what seemed like a decent payout not actually worth it once the extra time and stress are factored in.

Just like when I used to drink and smoke pot at home alone, delivering becomes repetitive and sad. My car radio plays my favorite indie station. But the same tunes on repeat make a soundtrack to vehicle-bound isolation and shame. In one song, a folksy singer intones “I am but a writer, so writing’s what I do.” I swear it plays every time I begin a delivery shift, reminding me of the dream I could be pursuing instead of dead-end gig labor. So why can’t I quit? The same reason I used to robotically call my dealer after swearing I was done. My conscience has great suggestions: “Work on your script! Do yoga! Send out resumes for a real job!” Meanwhile, an imaginary pusher man whispers: “Screw it. Just drive.”

Clean and sober now for 13 years, I’m still human. If I’m conditioned to get a short-term boost in my brain’s reward center, it’s a hard pattern to break.

Creative goals and self-improvement are hard, requiring sustained effort and faith despite an uncertain payoff. Delivering food is a numbing escape I can pretend is good for me because hey, I’m earning money. The app is designed to keep me hooked. A familiar three-note chime sounds when an offer pops up. It flashes a dollar amount — the expected fare and tip I’ll receive if I accept. Who can resist money set to music? I’m like a trained Pavlovian puppy salivating about the riches coming my way when I hear those notes, even if it’s just $10 to bring Taco Bell to a stoner. As I rack up the deliveries, the app flashes a running total in real time. It knows that the ever-increasing number, even if the actual rate after expenses is paltry, will motivate me to stay on the road.

The real-time map of the city is also configured to get me hyped to drive. Pale blue during off hours when it’s slow, it turns a rosy pink when things are heating up close to mealtimes. During busy surge hours, it bleeds into a saturated rush-hour purple so intense it implies money is raining from the sky and I just need to bring a bucket. I may as well have won at the slot machine for the dopamine it’s engineered to produce in me. It’s the same thing behind Instagram likes and Facebook notifications that keep users scrolling. I’ve rushed out to deliver based on these sudden peaks, only to find sporadic and lackluster offers.

Clean and sober now for 13 years, I’m still human. If I’m conditioned to get a short-term boost in my brain’s reward center, it’s a hard pattern to break. Some drivers I encounter in online forums are worse off. One guy switches to a second app when the first cuts him off after he’s driven the 12-hour limit. Others are ashamed of neglecting their children because they can’t stop driving.

After decent initial earnings, I noticed the payouts declining. Some said it was inflation or an oversaturation of drivers, others that the algorithm is messed up or it’s an ongoing slump in a stagnant economy.

Recovering from my first addiction gave me the tools to save myself from this one.

I didn’t feel like doing anything healthy or worthwhile after delivering — just consuming TV and junk food. The same as when I’d get stoned, delivering is a conduit to oblivion. And since my higher self knows this, I needed to keep numbing myself in a vicious circle to blot out this truth.

But if my first addiction gave me the tools to spot when I was falling into those old patterns, my recovery also gave me the tools to save myself from this one. It wasn’t the most dramatic consequences of using — lost jobs, injuries, poor health — that spurred me to get sober. It was the hole in my soul and hitting bottom emotionally. Likewise, my first-ever car accident (colliding with another delivery driver) wasn’t the last straw for me in this job. Neither was wiping out on an uneven sidewalk: The customer got their pizza intact, but I went home with a sprained ankle. The change came later, when I could no longer push away the truth. One day a cop tried to write me a parking ticket, and the built-up stress made me burst into tears. “Why don’t you just do something else?” he asked. I asked myself the same thing.

I still drove part-time for extra money for months after that, but with strict boundaries — only after completing more important creative, self-care and job-search tasks, and never on a sudden whim to check out from life. I knew I was done using driving as a mindless escape. It’s not what I was put here to do.

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Fried chicken, kakigōri and one very good waffle: The best meals Salon staffers ate in 2022

As 2022 comes to a close, the Salon Food team asked the Salon team at large, “What were your most significant, enjoyable food memories of the year?” This question yielded some fascinating responses, as you’ll soon see.

Food, of course, has an amazing way of distilling or clarifying a complex memory or moment into something immediately recognizable: a personal moment that happened to occur during an otherwise unexciting meal, an especially elevated meal that crystallized a social occasion that meant something to you, a dish you cooked yourself or something else entirely, like a food gift that you appreciated or something with deep personal meaning.

Creamy, comforting and cheesy: Salon Food’s 10 most popular recipes of 2022

Did you have any especially noteworthy meals — whether cooked by you or someone else — this year? Please e-mail us and let us know! In the meantime, here were some of our favorites.

Hanh Nguyen, senior culture editor

“I’m always a sucker for a new dining experience on top of just the pleasure of eating out, but when my two friends recommended going to a skewer restaurant, T-kebab, I was intrigued. While I’ve had yakitori and other skewers served to me, this place asks you to place your raw ingredients on a motorized, mechanized spit that accommodates multiple skewers. It’s a mesmerizing sight watching your protein of choice shifting and rotating before you, juices dripping with a satisfying sizzle below. I don’t eat beef and pork at home, so I got my fix here, and I was able to indulge in my rare craving for kidneys as well – all dipped in a tongue-numbing dry spice blend. Along with a cold beer and company, it was one of the most satisfying meals I’ve had in a long time.”

Kelly McClure, nights and weekends editor

“I had my first vegan chik’n sandwich from Turkey and the Wolf on my birthday in May and have thought about it ever since. It’s a good thing this place is pretty far from my house or else I’d eat here every single day.”

Mary Elizabeth Williams, senior writer

“After a long day of cold rain, multiple trains, and more Bruegels than I ever knew existed, I found myself in the most beautiful train station in the world. I bought a waffle that was smothered in whipped cream and chocolate, with a little Belgian flag stuck in it for good measure. Then I went across the street, where I promptly collapsed on the bed of my Antwerp hotel room, flicked on the TV to an episode of ‘Repair Shop,’ cracked a bottle of minibar chardonnay, and somehow had the most wonderful meal of all my travels and my entire year. It was a very, very good waffle.”

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Amanda Marcotte, senior politics writer

“La Chinesca is both the name of the Chinatown in Mexicali and of the new Philly restaurant that serves the Chinese-Mexican fusion that comes from that neighborhood. Everything there is fantastic, but they usually have some form of mushroom tacos that are absolute perfection. I realized, too, that putting salsa verde on a General Tso’s tofu dish is the best thing ever.”

Justin Wohl, chief revenue officer

“This year I found comfort in repetition – I more regularly ordered fried chicken sandwiches and BLTs than any year in memory. Spurred on by the never ending ‘chicken wars’, I sought out who my personal chicken champion might be. Turns out the best of the gourmet approaches and the whole slew of Nashville Hot Chicken purveyors can’t stand up to how reliably good Popeye’s Spicy Chicken sandwich really is.”

Ashlie D. Stevens, deputy food editor

“In early January, I kicked muddy snow off my boots and slid into a warm booth facing the open kitchen at Penny’s Noodle Shop, a Chicago institution since 1991 that’s located less than half a mile from Wrigley Field, home of the Cubs. Stephen — my partner in both life and dining — had been talking about this place since we made the decision amid the pandemic to boomerang back to Chicago together after respectively spending years away. While I had miraculously never visited, it was his go-to place for about a decade and I had heard him wax poetic more than once about their lad nar. Sometimes written as lard na or laad na, Penny’s version features ‘stir-fried broccoli, carrot and ginger in a light gravy served over crispy pan fried wide rice noodles.’ Sounds simple, right? And it is.

But sitting there, with the light rumble of the L track overhead, it felt like I was absorbing Stephen’s memories of the neighborhood through a kind of culinary osmosis. We’ve returned a bunch over the last year — after I learned to ride a bicycle through busy Wrigleyville traffic, after we got our Chicago library cards — to make some new memories, too.”

Erin Keane, editor in chief

“The most heavenly kakigōri at Nashville’s Locust. Come for chef-owner Trevor Martin’s sublime dumplings, made with heritage pork fed to marbled perfection on sake byproduct, yes. But stay for the kakigōri: a loaf-shaped shareable dessert of delicately shaved ice layered over rotating complex flavorful fillings — mousse, cream, curd — then finished with a drizzle of syrup.”

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“$7 billion taxpayer bailout”: Sanders tells Buttigieg to hold Southwest’s CEO accountable for greed

Sen. Bernie Sanders on Wednesday urged the Transportation Department to ensure Southwest’s chief executive pays a price for mass U.S. flight cancellations that have left passengers and employees stranded around the country, throwing lives into chaos and drawing further attention to the company’s business practices.

“Southwest’s flight delays and cancellations are beyond unacceptable,” Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote on Twitter. “This is a company that got a $7 billion taxpayer bailout and will be handing out $428 million in dividends to their wealthy shareholders. The U.S. Department of Transportation must hold Southwest’s CEO accountable for his greed and incompetence.”

Bob Jordan, who has worked for Southwest for decades and became the company’s CEO earlier this year, acknowledged on Tuesday that the airline needs to “upgrade” its outdated scheduling system and other technology that flight attendants and pilots have been warning about for years.

“For more than a decade, leadership shortcomings in adapting, innovating, and safeguarding our operations have led to repeated system disruptions, countless disappointed passengers, and millions in lost profits,” the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association (SWAPA) said in a statement Wednesday. “The holiday meltdown has been blamed on weather that had been forecast five days prior, but this problem began many years ago when the complexity of our network outgrew its ability to withstand meteorological and technological disruptions. SWAPA subject matter experts have repeatedly presented years of data, countless proposals that make Southwest pilots more efficient and resilient.”

Instead of investing more heavily in such critical upgrades, Southwest pumped billions of dollars into stock buybacks in the years leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Jordan took over as chief executive in February, receiving a generous compensation package that could amount to $9 million for the year. Earlier this month, just weeks before the airline began canceling thousands of flights per day, Jordan announced that the company would reinstate its quarterly dividend, which was suspended at the beginning of the pandemic.

The current payout of 18 cents per share, set to reach shareholders next month, will cost the company $428 million a year.

In an internal message to employees on Tuesday, Jordan said of the ongoing meltdown, “This stops with me.”

“I’m accountable for this and I own our issues and I own our recovery,” Jordan added.

Like Southwest’s management, the Transportation Department—headed by Pete Buttigieg—knew there was potential for a holiday travel crisis. The department is currently investigating the ongoing flight cancellations.

“Before the debacle, attorneys general from both parties were sounding alarms about regulators’ lax oversight of the airline industry, imploring them and congressional lawmakers to crack down,” The Lever reported Wednesday. “Four months before Southwest’s mass cancellation of flights, 38 state attorneys general wrote to congressional leaders declaring that Buttigieg’s agency ‘failed to respond and to provide appropriate recourse’ to thousands of consumer complaints about airlines’ customer service.”

“Weeks before that, New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) sent Buttigieg a letter warning of ‘the deeply troubling and escalating pattern of airlines delaying and canceling flights’ particularly during holidays,” the outlet added.

In November, Buttigieg leveled fines totaling $7.25 million against six airlines for “extreme delays in providing refunds” to customers whose flights had been canceled or significantly altered.

But critics said the punishment was far from adequate, and neither Southwest nor its main competitors were among the companies ordered to pay penalties. The Lever noted Wednesday that Southwest “has spent more than $2 million on lobbying since Biden took office and Buttigieg became secretary of Transportation,” and he has faced withering criticism for refusing to take on the increasingly consolidated airline industry.

A quick 🧵on what power the @USDOT actually has to protect airline passengers from corporate greed and holiday travel fiascos. ⬇️

— Katie Van Dyck (@CapitolKVD) December 28, 2022

According to Bloomberg, Buttigieg told Jordan on Tuesday that the Transportation Department “expects that Southwest will meet its obligations to passengers and workers and take steps to prevent a situation like this from happening again.”

The Christmas travel crisis isn’t the first time this year that U.S. airlines have faced backlash over mass cancellations. Around the July 4 holiday, major airlines including Southwest canceled or delayed thousands of flights amid a travel surge.

At the time, Sanders wrote a letter calling on Buttigieg to strengthen federal regulations to impose a fine of “$27,500 per passenger for all domestic flights that are delayed more than two hours and all international flights that are delayed more than three hours when passengers are forced to wait on the tarmac.”

The senator also urged the Transportation Department to fine airlines “$55,000 per passenger if they cancel flights that they know cannot be fully staffed.”

Buttigieg has yet to do either.

Sen.-elect John Fetterman (D-Pa.), who joined Sanders in calling for a crackdown on the airline industry earlier this year, wrote on Twitter Wednesday that “airlines have a responsibility to their customers.”

“When they fail,” he added, “we must hold them accountable.”

5 foods that are traditionally eaten for luck in the New Year

New Year’s Day is just around the corner, meaning it’s time to write your resolutions and partake in the Greek custom of smashing plates before the clock strikes twelve. The special day is all about good fortune and prosperity. So, if you’re looking to usher in more luck in 2023, be sure to also enjoy a plateful of lucky foods!

Per Southern superstition and traditions, black-eyed peas, greens and cornbread represent coins, paper money and gold, thus guaranteeing a year of financial success. There’s also the Spanish tradition of eating 12 grapes at midnight on New Year’s Eve for good luck and the Irish tradition of banging fresh baked bread against a door to get rid of any misfortune.

31 New Year’s Day dinners for good luck

Here’s a look at five foods that are commonly eaten for luck in the New Year:

Black-Eyed Peas

Initially, the earthy beans were used as food for both livestock and slaves in the South. But they were regarded as lucky during the Civil War, when the Confederate Army survived the harsh cold on nothing but black-eyed peas.

Today, the beans are enjoyed in Hoppin’ John, a Southern dish that features black-eyed peas cooked with rice, pork (be it ham, hambones or bacon), seasonings, chopped onions and hot sauce. There’s also Texas Caviar, a cold dip made with Black-eyed peas, pinto beans, black beans, diced celery, diced green bell pepper, corn and tomatoes; and a simple Black-Eyed Pea Salad.

Grapes

In Spain and parts of Latin America, 12 green grapes are eaten exactly at midnight to ward off bad luck. The tradition is said to have begun in the early 1990s, but newspaper articles suggest that it actually started in the 1880s, when Madrid’s bourgeoisie copied the French tradition of eating grapes and drinking champagne on the last day of the year.

“Before long this custom had been adopted by certain madrileños who went to Puerta del Sol to see the bells chime at the turning of the year and, most likely in an ironic or mocking manner, to eat grapes like the upper class,” wrote Jeff Koehler at NPR.

In addition to eating them as they are, the grapes can be enjoyed in salmon with red grape agrodolce, an Italian meal of salmon and grapes seasoned with herbs de Provence before being broiled, grape and prosciutto crostini or a grape galette with orange marmalade.

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Pomegranate Seeds

According to USA Today, pomegranate seeds are commonly enjoyed in the Middle East on New Year’s when they are at peak ripeness. The seeds also have “symbolic power,” per food historian Megan Elias, and are associated with both life and fertility.

In Brazil, seven pomegranate seeds and seven grapes are eaten for financial prosperity and good luck. If you don’t want to eat the pomegranate seeds on their own, try incorporating them in cranberry pomegranate margaritas, pomegranate orange muffins or pomegranate gelato.

Dumplings

It makes sense why dumplings are considered lucky in Chinese tradition, considering that they resemble pouches filled with money and coins. Dumplings also symbolize both prosperity and longevity.

For a list of dumpling meals, check out Brinda Ayer’s list of 24 cozy dumpling recipes. There’s sweet and spicy sesame dumplings, savory potato and onion knishes, shish barak (Lebanese Lamb Dumplings in Yogurt Sauce) and beet casunziei.

Lentils

In the same vein as black-eyed peas, lentils resemble coins that represent good luck and prosperity. “Lentils are served on New Year’s Eve after midnight. The lentils, with their coinlike shape, represent luck and prosperity,” wrote Kristofor Husted for NPR. “The dish is often served with cotechino, a spicy pork sausage, and zampone, a deboned pig trotter stuffed with sausage meat.”

Lentils are best enjoyed in rustic soups and stews and dal chawal, which is lentils curry over basmati rice.

Whatever your tradition is, there’s plenty of lucky foods to enjoy amid the holidays.

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Trump promotes article urging him to run as third-party candidate if GOP dumps him

Former President Donald Trump on Wednesday promoted an editorial suggesting that he run as a third-party candidate if the Republican Party does not make him its 2024 presidential nominee.

On his Truth Social website, Trump posted a link to an editorial from the pro-MAGA publication American Greatness in which author Dan Gelernter compared Trump to the late Teddy Roosevelt, whose unsuccessful third-party bid in 1912 handed the White House to Democrat Woodrow Wilson.

Gelernter concedes that Trump running as a third-party candidate in 2024 would likely also hand Democrats the White House, but suggests it would be worth it to teach the Republican Party a lesson about defying its base.

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“I have no intention of supporting a Republican Party that manifestly contravenes the desires of its voters,” he writes. “The RNC can pretend Trump isn’t loved by the base anymore, that he doesn’t have packed rallies everywhere he goes. But I’m not buying it: Talk to Republican voters anywhere outside the Beltway, and it is obvious that he is admired and even loved by those who consider themselves ‘ordinary’ Americans.”

To further emphasize this point, Gelernter states later in the editorial that “if the Republican Party thinks it’s not big enough for Trump, it’s not going to be big enough for me either.”

Although Trump was once the overwhelming favorite to be the GOP’s 2024 nominee, recent polls have shown him losing to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, which has caused him to lash out and accuse the polls of being “fake.”

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