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California’s two largest cities ban plastic foam

In a major victory against plastic pollution, city council members in Los Angeles and San Diego voted on Tuesday to ban the distribution of expanded polystyrene, the foamy plastic that’s used in disposable coffee cups and takeout food containers.

“Expanded polystyrene has no place in our city’s future,” LA councilmember Mitch O’Farrell told reporters on Tuesday.

Starting next April, large companies in California’s two most populous cities will be prohibited from giving out or selling dishes, cups, and other products made from plastic foam. The bans, which are expected to be signed into law by the mayors of each city, make some exemptions for products like surfboards and coolers that are encased in a “more durable material,”, and LA will give businesses with fewer than 27 employees an extra year to comply with its ordinance. San Diego’s ban grants a one-year extension to businesses that make less than $500,000 annually.

LA and San Diego will now join hundreds of jurisdictions around the country that have moved to phase out plastic foam, including eight U.S. states and other major California cities like San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland. And the material will soon be restricted across California, thanks to a state law passed earlier this year called the Plastic Pollution Producer Responsibility Act. The legislation stopped short of outright banning polystyrene statewide but will require plastic producers to demonstrate that at least 25 percent of it is actually recycled by 2025 — a “de facto ban,” according to some environmental advocates, since polystyrene isn’t recyclable at virtually any of the state’s material recovery facilities, and less than 1 percent of it is recycled nationwide.

The two cities’ bans were passed after years of lobbying from environmental organizations, which argued that the benefits of expanded polystyrene — mostly its light weight and low price tag — were far outweighed by risks to the environment and public health. Not only does it crumble into fragments of microplastic — tiny plastic shards that are being detected just about everywhere on Earth, including in people’s bloodstreams — expanded polystyrene is made of a building block called styrene, classified as “probably carcinogenic” by the World Health Organization. Research suggests expanded polystyrene containers can leach styrene into people’s food and drinks, and an Ipsos poll released in April found that 71 percent of California voters support policies to limit their use.

Still, restaurant and plastics industry groups fought the legislation in both cities. In San Diego, a polystyrene ban originally approved in 2019 was stalled for nearly four years as opponents sought a comprehensive assessment of the policy’s environmental impacts. The California Restaurant Association — which has about 22,000 members, compared to the 76,200 bars, coffee shops, restaurants, and similar establishments that were operating in the state as of 2018 — argued that replacing polystyrene with heavier products would lead to greater greenhouse gas emissions from transportation, a claim that proved to be technically true, albeit misleading. Christy Leavitt, plastics campaign director for the nonprofit Oceana, said it ignores greenhouse gas emissions from across the rest of polystrene’s life cycle. Like any plastic, polystyrene comes from fossil fuels and causes climate pollution when it’s produced, when it’s shipped, and — because virtually none of it is recycled — when it ultimately winds up in a  landfill, in an incinerator, or as litter in the natural environment.

On the whole, the 224-page environmental assessment requested by industry groups showed that the environmental benefits of phasing out polystyrene were more than enough to justify a slight increase in transportation emissions.

Craig Cadwallader, policy coordinator for the nonprofit Surfrider South Bay and a member of Reusable LA, a coalition of groups that supported the polystyrene ban, said the plastics industry also put out “a lot of misinformation” on the alleged economic toll of moving away from polystyrene. Industry groups’ statements implied that the policy would devastate mom-and-pop shops and restaurants, which are more likely than larger businesses to still be using plastic foam. (Most national and regional chains have dropped polystyrene following pressure from environmental groups.) 

LA council members “didn’t want to be seen as being detrimental to small businesses,” Cadwallader told Grist. But if bans were really as harmful as the industry says, he added, the 158 polystyrene-related ordinances already on the books in cities and counties across California would have “wiped out businesses in a big way” — something that has not happened. He said he’s been unable to find one example of a business that’s “gone under” from costs associated with phasing out plastic foam.

In addition to banning polystyrene, LA also passed additional ordinances on Tuesday expanding its ban on single-use plastic bags at grocery stores to include restaurants, hardware stores, and other retailers, and banning single-use plastics from city events and facilities. San Diego’s ordinance also included language preventing restaurants from giving out single-use cutlery and straws unless customers request them.

The ordinances fit into a broader push to limit single-use plastics statewide, supercharged by legislation that Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law this summer. Considered to be the country’s strongest plastic reduction policy, the Plastic Pollution Producer Responsibility Act will require California to cut single-use plastic packaging and foodware at least 25 percent below 2023 levels over the next 10 years.

Cryptocurrency was always a scam — powered by white male privilege

After the dramatic arrest of former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried in the Bahamas on Monday night, the Department of Justice laid out a series of fraud charges against him for allegedly running a massive cryptocurrency scam. It makes for some dry reading material: Wire fraud, misleading investors, violating campaign finance laws. Less dry, however, are the details of how Bankman-Fried was living on his alleged ill-gotten gains. As Fortune reported last month, the shorts-and-T-shirt enthusiast who claimed he was “not that much of a consumer” resided in a $30 million penthouse in a Bahamian community that offers such amenities as “an 18-hole golf course designed by Ernie Els, a 71-slip mega yacht marina and eleven closed-to-the-public restaurants.”

That’s pretty sweet for a guy who wanted his fans to believe he didn’t take showers and mostly slept in a beanbag at the office.

Reams of pixels have been shed in dissecting how Bankman-Fried purportedly told endless lies to reporters, investors and random audience members at TED Talk-style events, so we shall not recount that here. What’s more important is that despite all the massive hype — and the eye-rollingly earnest Super Bowl commercials starring Matt Damon — there have been plenty of people all the way along trying to expose not just Bankman-Fried but the entire world of cryptocurrency as the scam it is. For the most part, they’ve been ignored.

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This has been incredibly frustrating for the skeptics, because it really should have been obvious that crypto is silly nonsense. It’s fake money propped up not by a government with a central bank, but by, uh, a bunch of interlocked computers. Even the assets that have been linked to crypto, in order to create a semblance of real-world value — such as NFTs — are meaningless crap, one laptop tumble into a bathtub away from getting destroyed. Yet billions of dollars keep getting dumped into this scam, over and over, despite the endless cycle of scandals and crashes that remind us on the regular that this is bad business. 

How do they keep scamming people? James Block, who runs the crypto-skeptical newsletter Dirty Bubble Media, told the Atlantic that part of it is just about that old scammer trick, made-up jargon: “Crypto hides behind all this complexity, and people hear words like blockchain and get confused. You hear about decentralized networks and mining, and it sounds complicated.”

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Which is all true, but also, I can’t help adding that if a bunch of women or people of color started talking like that, they’d be laughed into oblivion without netting a cent. Technobabble sounds convincing — to some folks, anyway — only when it comes from people who fit the stereotype of the “computer genius” that has been built up over the past few decades: White, male and slovenly. 

Technobabble sounds convincing — to some folks, anyway — only when it comes from the mouths of “computer geniuses,” who by definition are white, male and slovenly.

The hoodies-and-shorts “computer guy” uniform should be understood as “slob drag,” and is just as much a costume as the high-femme presentation of Kim Kardashian or the high camp of Billy Porter showing up at the Met Gala draped in golden fabrics. It’s an overt signal that the slob is actually a “genius” who spends too much time doing brilliant stuff in his head to care about how he looks.

But it’s also about signaling white male privilege: the idea that this person is so high up the hierarchy that he need not care what others think of his looks. It’s a privilege not available to anyone else. Even Theranos scammer Elizabeth Holmes, despite explicitly modeling her look on Steve Jobs, knew well enough to wear makeup and keep her clothes and hair neat and clean. Sloppy women don’t look like “geniuses,” just slobs. 

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What especially telling about Bankman-Fried is how he used high-minded language about “effective altruism” and donations to the Democratic Party to purchase a kind of trust. The fantasy of the white male savior still holds a lot of sway. One can easily see how this might appeal to well-heeled “moderates” who don’t want to be associated with the Republicans — a party of bigots led by a half-literate sociopath — but would also prefer not to confront deeper questions about whether real social justice might mean redistributing more power to people who aren’t rich white men. It’s still more comfortable to tell a story about how the rich white guys will take care of everyone else, if we just get out of their way while they make even more money.

Of course, all of this turned out to be nonsense in Bankman-Fried’s case, and not just because of the expensive real estate. He has admitted that he also gave plenty of money to Republicans under the table, because he knew that his highly profitable image of benevolence might be damaged if those donations became public. If you dig even deeper into the discourse around “effective altruism,” things get even hairier. As Rebecca Watson of Skepchick pointed out in a recent video, the language of “optimizing” and “maximizing” humanity, especially when tied to the implicit assumption of white male genius, is a short leap away from arguing for eugenics. As she notes, a lot of these youthful zillionaires “also believe that their wealth and success and apparent intelligence are coded in their genes,” leading them to conclude that it’s their moral duty to outbreed supposedly lesser beings. 

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Indeed, Caroline Ellison, Bankman-Fried’s close associate who used her company as cover for some of FTX’s shady business deals, allegedly has a blog on Tumblr that alluded to exactly these beliefs. She reportedly wrote at length about her interest in “human biodiversity,” which is white supremacist code for the idea that some races are “naturally” more intelligent than others. This blog also approvingly quoted a user who wrote, “I breathe a sigh of relief every time someone makes a racist joke or mocks social justice, because it means I’m in a safe space.”

Bankman-Fried’s legal troubles are playing out alongside the ongoing headline-hogging by Elon Musk, another white-guy billionaire who has coasted on racialized assumptions of his “genius” and a collective credulity toward his assertions of good intentions. Musk has also, unsurprisingly, has played a major and self-serving role in propping up the crypto illusion. As Emily Parker wrote in the Washington Post last year, Musk has a habit of manipulating crypto markets, by driving his legions of fanboys to buy or sell on command: 

Not long after he announced in February that Tesla would invest $1.5 billion in bitcoin, the price of one bitcoin hit a high, crossing $50,000 for the first time. Then, this month, Musk changed tack: Citing the environmental cost of bitcoin mining’s use of computing power, he announced that Tesla would no longer accept payment in the currency.

Cryptocurrency is sold to gullible investors by exploiting cynicism about existing banking systems and government regulators, which is plenty understandable after the 2008 crash. But while congratulating their marks for supposedly being smart enough to see through the faulty “full faith and credit” of the U.S. government, crypto hucksters appeal to an even shakier basis for faith: White male privilege. Their audiences trust that a young white guy who eschews clean clothes and decent haircuts must be a genius who’s ready to show you the secret path to endless wealth.

All this certainly makes the marks of the cryptocurrency crash more difficult to sympathize with, but still, we should be concerned. The amount of money being lost to these scams will have shock effects well beyond the wallets of the suckers who keep on trading real money for the fake kind. Ideally, people would just get over the fantasy of the white male genius savior already. But that’s unlikely to happen soon. So here’s hoping that Bankman-Fried’s arrest at least leads to some real movement toward regulating these shameless grifters out of existence. 

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about Sam Bankman-Fried and the latest crypto crash

Kari Lake’s doomed legal battle: The holiday grift that keeps on giving

Failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake — who despite her defeat may yet be a Republican vice-presidential contender — has filed a new lawsuit ostensibly aimed at reversing her loss to Democrat Katie Hobbs. Lake appears to be going for a hat trick of courtroom defeats, which remains no match for her idol, former President Donald Trump, who lost more than 60 cases after the 2020 election. 

The first of Lake’s lawsuits, filed earlier this year, was dismissed in August. It sought to replace Maricopa County’s voting machines with paper ballots. 

Here’s the clincher: In a new order on Dec. 2, federal Judge John Tuchi described the complaint as filled with “false, misleading, and speculative allegations.” 

Lake and her co-plaintiff, defeated Republican secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem, were ordered to pay Maricopa County’s court costs for having to defend the frivolous suit. Her lawyers — who apparently  included former Harvard Law professor and Trump lawyer Alan Dershowitz — were sanctioned with their own fines.

Then came Lake lawsuit No. 2: On election night in November, an Arizona judge rejected a suit that she filed with other Republicans, finding “no evidence that any voter who appeared to vote at Maricopa County polling places was turned away from the polls.” 

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And now she’s back, filing another suit last Friday making the same claim all over again. ABC News called it a “lawsuit riddled with falsehoods.” There were rehashed attacks on mail-in ballots, There was plenty of rank speculation — something courts never accept — that signatures initially identified as possible mismatches might have been improperly accepted after review. There were paragraphs recounting discredited 2020 election allegations from a right-wing PAC, We the People AZ Alliance.

And here’s a juicy piece of poetic irony about Lake’s claims that her voters were disenfranchised. The Democracy Docket website run by Marc Elias, a leading voting rights lawyer, has pointed out that many of the complaints from voters who claim they couldn’t cast their ballots arose because of Arizona’s HB 2237, the Republican-sponsored bill enacted last May that erected new barriers to the ballot in an apparent effort to suppress the vote. 

A political party hoisted, as the saying goes, on its own petard.

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Does Lake truly believe that with her election litigation, the third time’s the charm? That’s highly doubtful.

She surely knows that courts don’t overturn elections where the loser fell short by more than 17,000 votes. In all likelihood, the point isn’t to win. It’s to keep her face in front of her audience and to dial for dollars. 

Her party’s de facto leader has taught her well. In today’s Republican politics, fiction sells. Lake will flood social media with messages asking for help paying her lawyers. Trump has demonstrated how well that can work to suck in small-donor cash.

Lake has learned well from her party’s de facto leader: Fiction sells. Flood social media with pleas for “legal defense,” suck up small-donor cash and propel herself toward Trump-Lake 2024.

She hopes to use the attention and the money to help propel her toward Trump-Lake 2024. Lawsuits are part of her Phoenix Fox 10 TV approach, what one adviser called her instinct to “sensationalize everything.”

Here’s the disturbing part: Her suit is just the latest in election denialism, rumors of whose demise are greatly exaggerated. 

Yes, voters thumped well-known Trump-endorsed candidates in competitive races, including Lake and fellow gubernatorial hopeful Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania. 

But more than 170 election-deniers won, like Ron DeSantis, Kevin McCarthy, Jim Jordan, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar. Get ready for a tent revival of denialism in the new MAGA House majority as it ramps up endless Benghazi-style hearings.

It’s all part of the run-up to 2024. Trump will dominate the party at least until then because, as the former George H.W. Bush speechwriter Peggy Noonan put it in the Dec. 10 Wall Street Journal, “only the voters can crush Mr. Trump.”

To keep that from happening, he, Lake and their allies will work overtime. They will subject voters to more and more election lies, including by litigation, amplifying them and trying to sow ever-increasing distrust of the entire electoral process.

And with Elon Musk having doubled down on his apparent strategy to make Twitter a right-wing haven by blasting out conspiracy theories, it may get worse before it gets worse.

Attention must be paid. As Timothy Snyder, the eminent historian of 20th-century totalitarianism, has written, Trumpism threatens our liberty. “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom.” 

“Post-truth is pre-fascism,” he writes.

Trump’s call for the “termination” of the Constitution because he was the “rightful winner” in 2020 made the case in a single social media post. He uses court filings the same way. 

Lake has jumped into the same swamp. Her suit, like Trump’s before her, will get tossed soon enough. But the dollars will flow as if from heaven, thanks to a true-believing audience that never tires, it seems, of being taken.

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about Arizona’s MAGA superstar

How John Roberts may slow-walk American democracy right off the cliff

It’s never an issue for this U.S. Supreme Court to move the goalposts, change the rules or simply make up them as it goes along. No knowledge of constitutional precedent, American history or even textualist theory is necessary to understand this radicalized court. An entrenched conservative supermajority has the power to bulldoze it all. And so they have.

This disciplined approach and fanatical agenda has had deep consequences. It has unleashed billions of dollars in dark money into our politics, eviscerated much of the Voting Rights Act, green-lit partisan gerrymanders that entrench one-party conservative rule, dismantled giant pieces of the regulatory state and demolished reproductive rights in much of the nation. 

Now this grim band of robed ideologues appears ready to march us deeper into minority rule.

Last week, the court heard oral arguments in Moore v. Harper, a case from North Carolina brought by determined Republican lawmakers and funded by right-wing dark money. Those legislators in the Tar Heel Statehave spent the last dozen years drawing gerrymandered maps that guarantee their party more than 70 percent of the congressional delegation in what might be the America’s most closely divided state.

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North Carolina’s state supreme court, equally determined, struck that rigged map down this year as a violation of the state constitution’s guarantee that all elections must be free and fair. The court ruled that maps surgically drawn to ensure Republicans would win at least 10 of the state’s 14 seats in the U.S. House, regardless of how citizens voted, fell far short of that standard. 

Republicans bristled when the state court disallowed their tilted maps, and responded with a federal lawsuit asserting that the U.S. Constitution provides the state legislature with the sole power to manage the time, place and manner of federal elections. This notion has become known as the Independent State Legislature doctrine (or ISL), and it claims, wildly, that state constitutions and state supreme courts cannot constrain state legislatures at all when it comes to how elections for federal office — the House, Senate and, yes, the president — are administered. 

This insane and dangerous theory is not grounded in American history, basic checks and balances, constitutional theory, or the last 233 years of our politics. It was the underpinning for Donald Trump’s “Big Lie.”

It’s an insane and dangerous theory, not grounded in American history, basic checks and balances, constitutional theory, longstanding practices of judicial review, or even the reality of the last 233 years of our politics. This discredited and anti-democratic notion provided the underpinning for the “Big Lie” that sought to keep Donald Trump in power on Jan. 6, 2021, with phony slates of presidential electors from states Trump did not actually carry.

What’s more insane is that the Roberts court seems ready to embrace it, at least in some reading.

Most legal analysis of last Wednesday’s oral arguments has concluded that the court does not seem likely to endorse the most maximal reading of the ISL theory. While it’s never safe to predict outcomes based on oral arguments, it seemed apparent that three Republican justices (Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch) were ready to embrace ISL, three liberal justices (Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor) stood opposed and the three other conservatives (John Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh) appeared open to a more limited version of ISL.

But a compromise between reality and crazyville that stops just short of bonkers doesn’t provide any comfort. And any half-loaf ISL that emerges from Wednesday’s arguments is an egregious and intentional misreading of the actual threat to American democracy — and one that will make it even more difficult to address the real dangers. If you listen to the three hours of oral arguments in this case, you might come away thinking that the problem we face is a rash of runaway state supreme courts asserting extra-constitutional powers to thwart state legislatures from fairly drawing maps and administering elections. 

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But absolutely the contrary is true: State legislatures, after gerrymandering themselves into permanent power and insulating themselves from the traditional controls of the ballot box, then gerrymander congressional maps for their side, lawlessly brush aside citizen-driven ballot initiatives and constitutional amendments meant to rein in their powers, and embrace nonsensical conspiracy theories about voter fraud when there is no voter fraud. The ISL theory would worsen all of this dramatically, potentially freeing state legislatures from almost any constitutional checks and virtually guaranteeing that the nightmare scenario barely averted in January of 2021 has a better chance of succeeding next time.

This theory could also put an end to independent redistricting commissions and many other voter-driven electoral reforms won via statewide ballot initiative. Perhaps most importantly, in some states, supreme courts have been the last remaining avenues for citizens to reclaim their democracy from legislatures so gerrymandered that lawmakers need not listen to anyone. The ISL — in most any version, “compromise” or otherwise — could shut down the best path voters in North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and elsewhere still possess to restore representative democracy in states that have been tilted into minority rule by extreme gerrymanders. This is the very reason why this theory has surfaced now: State courts, state constitutions and citizen-driven initiatives have proven the only way around GOP gerrymanders that have blocked the will of the people in some states for more than a decade. This can be understood as the latest ploy in a relentless, systematic effort to shut down every avenue of reform that threatens GOP control.

Chief Justice Roberts is no institutionalist and incrementalist, trying to fend off the arsonists to his right. He’s trying to achieve the same destruction more slowly, pulling out the support beams one at a time. 

It is sadly unsurprising that the Roberts court, once again, appears to be siding with forces that would worsen our crisis of democracy. After all, this court has repeatedly struck the match and acted as an accelerant to constitutional crisis again and again, whether setting billions of dark money loose in the Citizens United decision, gutting crucial provisions of the Voting Rights Act or enabling this gerrymandering free-for-all.

But it’s both surprising and depressing that court watchers and the news media continue to portray Roberts as an institutionalist and incrementalist beset by conservative revolutionaries. In fact, the chief justice is not trying to stop the arsonists to his right, but only seeking to reach the same extreme destination more slowly, pulling out the foundational support beams one at a time rather than setting everything ablaze.

Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch have all previously intimated that they might be on board with some version of ISL, or were at least ISL-curious. Roberts has been more difficult to read. In his stinging dissent in a  2015 case that narrowly upheld the constitutionality of Arizona’s independent redistricting commission, the chief justice embraced an early version of ISL, insisting that the word “legislature” in the Constitution’s elections clause meant exactly and only that. But then in another redistricting case, 2019’s Rucho v Common Cause, Roberts wrote the 5-4 decision that closed the federal courts to partisan gerrymandering claims. He insisted, however, that he was not leaving complaints about unfair redistricting to howl into the void. State courts and state constitutions, he insisted, could tackle those by themselves..

That now looks to have been bait-and-switch. Last Wednesday, Roberts walked this tiny bit of hope from a brutal and poisonous decision all the way back — and media court-watchers who still portray him as a humble caller of balls-and-strikes rather than a savvy right-wing tactician missed it. Roberts insisted that those who took him at his word about state courts had misread his opinion in Rucho; he said the real point of his decision in that case was to highlight that there are no manageable standards to determine when a gerrymander has gone too far. He suggested that state constitutions are just as vague on that topic — musing, for example, that the clause holding that “elections must be free and fair” was itself profoundly unclear. For a so-called textualist and originalist, Roberts often seems not to say what he means, or to mean what he says.

Alito appeared just as disingenuous, asking at one point whether it would actually further democracy “to transfer the political controversy about districting from the legislature to elected supreme courts where the candidates are permitted by state law to campaign on the issue of districting.” 

This is a question worth breaking down. In states like Wisconsin, Republican lawmakers have embedded themselves into permanent near-super-majorities, guaranteeing themselves almost two-thirds of state legislative seats even when Democrats win hundreds of thousands more votes. That gerrymander is now well into its second decade. Transferring the political controversy to an elected supreme court and justices who are willing to act on behalf of voters, not politicians, would, in fact, be just about the only path to restore any hope of majority rule. 

All of this sets Roberts up to propose what too many Supreme Court reporters will call a compromise, but is actually just a slower walk off the cliff. Perhaps it will involve some new multi-part standard that makes it more difficult for state courts to interpret state constitutions on election issues. Perhaps it will make it easier for federal courts, now stocked with junior Federalist Society acolytes, to police state supreme courts that dare interfere with GOP gerrymanders. Then, the next time the issue appears before the Supreme Court, Roberts will push things just a little further, just as this court did with voting rights and redistricting. When the court dismantled the Voting Rights Act’s pre-clearance protections in 2013, the conservative majority insisted that Section Two of the act remained in effect and would prove sufficient. Then it turned its attention to eviscerating that in a series of new cases.

The ISL would empower legislatures that have already proven, time and again, that they cannot be trusted to draw representative maps. It could be enacted by a Supreme Court that continues to show it is unwilling to ensure free and fair elections.

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about the independent state legislature doctrin

A breakthrough in nuclear fusion may produce “near-limitless energy”

Even long before climate change made it clear that constant burning of fossil fuels was wreaking havoc on Earth’s climate, scientists and engineers wondered whether humankind might power our civilization with the same kind of energetic reaction that takes place in the sun. While fusion power, as it is known, is technically not a “renewable” form of energy like wind or solar, it is far more energy-dense. And unlike nuclear fission, which requires politically troublesome and hazardous uranium, nuclear fusion relies on lightweight elements, like hydrogen, which can be extracted from water.

Fusion happens in our sun through the constant collision of light elements like hydrogen, which are smashed together to form heavier elements. When this happens, it releases a burst of energy so powerful that it can fuel stars like our own for billions of years. It is also an efficient process: half of a gram of hydrogen could yield 500 megawatts of power. For comparison, the largest solar facility in the United States, the Copper Mountain Solar Facility in Nevada, takes up 4,000 acres of land and yet generates slightly more power (802 megawatts).

In theory, if a controlled nuclear fusion process could produce more energy than was put into it, the technology could be used to create an almost unlimited supply of safe, clean energy. The problem is in the engineering: creating such collisions requires heating plasma to millions of degrees, hotter than any vessel that might contain them could withstand. The workaround, historically, has been to energize powerful magnets that keep fusion-ready gases floating in a confined vacuum, sometimes while being bombarded with lasers that superheat them.

While humans have created controlled fusion reactions for short periods of time, getting out more energy than which is put into the reaction has proved exceedingly difficult.

“The experiment demonstrates unambiguously that the physics of Laser Fusion works. In order to transform NIF’s result into power production a lot of work remains, but this is a key step along the path.”

Now, according to an unconfirmed report first broken by the Financial Times, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California may have achieved a “net energy gain.” If this finding is true and can be repeated, it could pave the way for using nuclear fusion to provide unlimited energy to the planet.

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To be clear, the ignition (a term used for producing more energy than utilized in these contexts) was only 50 percent, which the Financial Times concedes is “far below what would be needed for a commercial reactor.” At roughly 0.4 MJ (megajoules), the ignition produced just enough energy to boil a tea kettle, which is hardly sufficient to base a viable commercial model. The hope, however, is that the recent breakthrough will inspire additional innovations that could one day take humanity to a future of almost-bottomless energy.

“Fusion has the potential to provide a near-limitless, safe, clean, source of carbon-free baseload energy,” explained Dr. Robbie Scott of the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s (STFC) Central Laser Facility (CLF) Plasma Physics Group in a statement to The Guardian. “This seminal result from the National Ignition Facility is the first laboratory demonstration of fusion ‘energy-gain’ – where more fusion energy is output than input by the laser beams. The scale of the breakthrough for laser fusion research cannot be overstated.”

Scott added, “The experiment demonstrates unambiguously that the physics of Laser Fusion works. In order to transform NIF’s result into power production a lot of work remains, but this is a key step along the path.”

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Another challenge in developing effective nuclear fusion-based energy sources is that scientists are not even sure which methods would be best. The NIF used a process known as inertial confinement, which creates an implosion — in their case, by focusing 192 laser beams on a fuel capsule containing hydrogen isotopes that is roughly the size of a peppercorn. However, most fusion labs instead use an approach known as “magnetic confinement,” one that entails holding those hydrogen isotope-fueled in a doughnut-shaped reactor by using powerful magnets.

“For either approach to lead to a cost-effective power station, almost every aspect of today’s experimental reactors needs transforming.”

“For either approach to lead to a cost-effective power station, almost every aspect of today’s experimental reactors needs transforming,” the Financial Times observed.

Nevertheless, experts and public officials are still hailing the latest development as good news.

“”his is such a wonderful example of a possibility realized, a scientific milestone achieved, and a road ahead to the possibilities for clean energy,” White House science adviser Arati Prabhakar, said during a news conference on Tuesday morning. “And even deeper understanding of the scientific principles that are applied here.”

This isn’t the first promising fusion news to emerge from NIF in recent history. Last year, the same reactor was able to produce 1.3 megajoules of energy through an experiment that focused the laser light onto a BB-sized target — generating more than 10 quadrillion watts of fusion power over a span of tiny fractions of a second.

“Gaining experimental access to thermonuclear burn in the laboratory is the culmination of decades of scientific and technological work stretching across nearly 50 years,” Thomas Mason, who directs the Los Alamos National Laboratory which helped with the project, said in a press statement at the time. “This enables experiments that will check theory and simulation in the high energy density regime more rigorously than ever possible before and will enable fundamental achievements in applied science and engineering.”

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about climate change

How the evolution of domestic cats traces the history of colonization

Human history is etched into the DNA of domesticated animals, which is when we bend the evolutionary trajectory of species to serve our own purposes. We primates have domesticated many animals, including (possibly) ourselves, but the domestication of the cat has especially intrigued scholars and feline pet owners alike.

Maybe it’s something about the innate mysteriousness and independence of cats, which often behave more like demanding roommates than pets. A popular theory is that cats actually domesticated themselves, possibly more than once — in other words, deliberately plopping down into our lives. If true, that would be a far cry from the laborious domestication process early humans may have undertaken with horses, dogs, cows and sheep.

Now, a new study in the journal Heredity investigated the genetic diversity of modern cat populations across the globe and put a date on when they morphed into the domestic animals we know today. The researchers believe our close relationship with cats came about around the same time humans began tinkering with agriculture, around 10,000 years ago. That’s a bit more recent than dogs, which are believed to have been domesticated in Siberia around 23,000 years ago — long before we undertook cultivating plants instead of scavenging for them. 

So why would cat domestication correlate with agriculture? As humans unlocked the ability to massively stockpile food, it attracted rodents and pests. Cats were likely magnetized to this abundant, consistent source of food. And we kept our new mouse security teams around. This research suggests it took relatively little time for humans and cats to agree to this relationship once we got the farm going.

It’s an interesting theory, but researchers at the University of Missouri can now back up this hypothesis with genetic analysis using nearly 200 different genetic markers. In retracing where the first domesticated cats came from, it also outlines the history of colonialism, or the long, bloody practice of nations controlling and exploiting other countries.

Related

Outdoor cats are an invasive species and a threat to themselves, scientists say

“We can actually refer to cats as semi-domesticated, because if we turned them loose into the wild, they would likely still hunt vermin and be able to survive and mate on their own due to their natural behaviors,” Leslie Lyons, a feline geneticist and professor at the University of Missouri’s College of Veterinary Medicine, said in a statement. “Unlike dogs and other domesticated animals, we haven’t really changed the behaviors of cats that much during the domestication process, so cats once again prove to be a special animal.”

Genetic evidence makes it clear that, as humans spread out, the cats followed.

To start, we need to go back to the beginning of the Holocene, an epoch marked by the end of the last major ice age around 12,000 years ago. Holocene comes from the Greek for “entirely new,” and it truly was a bold, new era as the glaciers slowly receded and saber-tooth tigers died out.

Around this period is when some of the earliest evidence for human agriculture appears. Humans were primarily hunter-gatherers prior to this development, but learning to farm allowed us to secure regular food sources (barring drought or famine), leading to an explosion in our population and the dawn of civilization.

Somewhere along the ride, a few kitties joined up with the humans. But first, they were wild, most likely descended from Felis lybica, the African wildcat. Feline domestication seems to have sprung up in many different places across the globe, including China and the Indus Valley of Pakistan, but it most likely all began in the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East. Genetic evidence makes it clear that, as humans spread out, the cats followed.

“One of the DNA main markers we studied were microsatellites, which mutate very quickly and give us clues about recent cat populations and breed developments over the past few hundred years,” Lyons said. “Another key DNA marker we examined were single nucleotide polymorphisms, which are single-based changes all throughout the genome that give us clues about their ancient history several thousands of years ago. By studying and comparing both markers, we can start to piece together the evolutionary story of cats.”

To get the cat DNA, Lyons and her colleagues swabbed the cheeks of cats and analyzed donated blood and gonad samples from neuter clinics, including four African wildcats and 10 hybrids of domestic and European wildcats. Most of these cats were “random-bred,” meaning they were semi-domesticated, lying “somewhere between ‘habituation’ and ‘commercial breeds and pets,'” the authors wrote.

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They ended up with more than 2000 samples of cat DNA from around the world, from places like Brazil, China, Italy and South Korea. The samples from Iraq were donated by the Medical Detachment Veterinary Medicine, who were deployed to occupy Iraq from 2007 to 2009. When this genetic data was distributed on a global map, it became clear that the more closely related a sample was, the more likely it originated near the Fertile Crescent, a region home to the some of the world’s earliest known settlements and civilizations, including the Babylonians, Sumerians and ancient Egyptians.

“Populations were significantly isolated by distance,” the authors wrote. “Among populations, the genetic distance increased as the geographic distance increased.”

As humans spread across the Earth, we brought cats to places where they didn’t exist before, from the Silk Road to places in India and Sri Lanka and to colonies in the Americas and Australia, which has had huge outcomes for the local ecosystems. Cats are indiscriminate hunters and have been known to effortlessly drive some animals to extinction. This actually makes domesticated cats an invasive species, and their spread encapsulates some of the darker chapters in human history.

“Migration of cats rose with imperialism, exploration and colonization, which increased the number of ships traveling to the Americas,” Lyons and her colleagues explained.

But as cats moved around the globe, it created pockets for genetic diversity to spread out, which is a prevailing theory for why there are so many different cat breeds, from Sphynx to Persian and everything in between. These breeds and what regions they exist in can serve as reminders of the past.

“The data suggest cats in distant areas from the Near East, including Australia, the Americas, and colonial regions such as Tunisia and mainland Kenya, are close derivatives of Western European cats, reflecting Western European colonization,” Lyons and her colleagues wrote. “The admixed genetics from Western Europe and the Near East cats were subsequently spread to Portuguese colonies in the Americas.”

As large shipping vessels started spreading across the world’s oceans in the 1500s, cats came with merchants, creating a sort of feedback loop. Cats were so useful on ships, protecting stores from rats and other vermin, they made the process much easier and more profitable.

“Migration of cats rose with imperialism exploration and colonization, which increased the number of ships traveling to the Americas,” Lyons and her colleagues explained. Cats are some of our closest companions — we love them and their outsized internet presence for a good reason. But it’s clear that in many ways, their history is also our history.

Questions still remain about some of the origins of domesticated cats, with Lyons and her coauthors interested in the genetics of Felis lybica ornata, the Asiatic wildcat, which is native to Iraq, Iran and parts of India.

“Further studies on ancient, regional wildcat populations would further decipher cat origins,” the authors conclude. “The patterns of genetic diversity and differentiation observed in worldwide random-bred cats parallel those of other species, especially humans once they became farmers, suggesting human history is written in the DNA of domesticated species.”

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about domestication

Journalists call out NY Times’ Musk coverage: One tweet shows Elon’s a “right-wing culture warrior”

In late October, Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of Twitter went through — and the company has been in a state of chaos ever since. Musk has fired many of Twitter’s top executives, much of the content moderation team is gone, and overtly racists posts have become more common on the social media platform. On top of that, the Associated Press reported, on December 13, that Musk has “dissolved” Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council.

The Council, AP reports, “provided expertise and guidance on how Twitter could better combat hate, harassment and other harms but didn’t have any decision-making authority and didn’t review specific content disputes.” Patricia Cartes, who was a member of the Council, told AP that Council’s demise “means there’s no more checks and balances” at Twitter.

“He doesn’t really care as much about what experts think,” Cartes said of Musk.

Musk has also reactivated former President Donald Trump’s @realdonaldtrump account, which was suspended following the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol Building. Trump, however, has yet to return to Twitter and is continuing to use his own Truth Social as his primary social media outlet.

Twitter’s new owner hasn’t been shy about using the platform to troll the left, and articles published in The Daily Beast and The Atlantic focus on how much of a right-wing “culture warrior” Musk enjoys being.

In an op-ed published by the Beast on December 13, journalist Anthony L. Fisher explains, “The New York Times, this past weekend, published an analysis of Musk’s politics, playing the ‘it’s not so simple’ card by noting, as Musk does often, that his politics are unconventional, that he voted for (President Joe) Biden, and that he’s ‘more spiritedly anti-left than ideologically pro-right.’ I understand the Times’ confusion, but the culture war isn’t about conventional politics: e.g. Republicans are the ‘party of business’ and Democrats are the ‘party of labor.’ In the culture war, partisans throw such loyalties…. out the window. Nothing matters so much as eviscerating the enemy.”

The fact that Musk voted for Biden in 2020, Fisher argues, is irrelevant.

“Like (Jordan) Peterson, Musk is a right-wing culture warrior,” Fisher observes. “Which is to say he is less interested in policy debates and cross-partisan outreach than he is in whipping up outrage and scoring online dunk points — all while disingenuously positioning himself as a ‘rational centrist’ or somehow above all the partisan rancor. After asking his followers last month, ‘What do you think of the culture war?’, Musk tweeted, ‘I am neither conventionally right nor left…. The woke mind virus has thoroughly penetrated entertainment and is pushing civilization towards suicide. There needs to be a counter-narrative.'”

Musk’s rhetoric, Fisher adds, is very much that of a “hard-right culture warrior.”

In an article published by The Atlantic on December 11, journalist Charlie Warzel argues that a tweet Musk posted that day speaks volumes about his outlook. Musk tweeted, “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.”

Warzel says of that tweet, “If there’s one tweet that will tell you everything you need to know about Elon Musk, it’s this one from early this morning…. In five words, Musk manages to mock transgender and nonbinary people, signal his disdain for public-health officials, and send up a flare to far-right shitposters and trolls. The tweet is a cruel and senseless play on pronouns that also invokes the right’s fury toward Anthony Fauci, the chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, for what they believe is government overreach in public health policy throughout the pandemic.”

Fisher, in his Beast op-ed, compares that Musk tweet to a recent one by Jordan Peterson to show how similar their views are. Peterson wrote, “Dr. Fauci should spend Christmas alone. Encased in styrofoam and bubble wrap.”

Other recent Musk tweets, Fisher notes, include, “Humor relies on an intuitive & often awkward truth being recognized by the audience, but wokism is a lie, which is why nobody laughs” and “Many battles remain, but, yes, the tide is starting to turn on the mortal threat to civilization that is the woke mind virus.”

Fisher writes, “When you believe one side of the culture war is ‘pushing civilization towards suicide,’ does it really matter where you ‘conventionally’ fit on a political scale? When you’re sharing conspiracy theories from a fake news website about the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, who really cares how many times you’ve voted Democrat in the past? And when you’re making common cause and exchanging in friendly banter with notorious far-right trolls, what does that make you?”

DACA deal for “Dreamers” fizzling as Republicans prioritize border security

WASHINGTON — When President Joe Biden took office and Democrats took control of Congress, several Texas lawmakers had hoped this would be their shot to codify protections for migrants who came to the country illegally as children under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. But with only three weeks left in the legislative session in which Democrats have control of both chambers, they still don’t have a deal.

Over 100,000 DACA recipients live in Texas, and their status in the United States continues to be subject to legal challenges, including from the state of Texas itself. But the Texas Republicans who were previously open to a DACA deal say time is running out, and the state’s Democrats fear no progress will be made in the next legislative session when Republicans will have control of the U.S. House. The interest from the state’s Republicans to work out a deal on DACA is also quickly waning in favor of legislation to harden border security.

“This is like now or never for ‘Dreamers,'” said Rep. Sylvia Garcia, D-Houston. “I mean, they are hanging by the thread.”

Sen. John Cornyn, a key Senate Republican who had expressed early interest in passing a deal, said last week that he was now doubtful a deal will be able to get across the finish line in time. The House and Senate still need to pass a massive bill to keep the government funded by the end of the year — a critical priority occupying most of the legislative spotlight this month.

“Leaving all this in the last few days before the omnibus [appropriations package] is just impractical,” Cornyn told reporters. DACA legislation “is a very, very heavy lift. It’s unlikely to happen before the end of the year, and even next year it’s going to be very hard.”

The House passed the American Dream and Promise Act in March 2021, which would allow DACA recipients — or “Dreamers,” based on never-passed proposals in Congress called the DREAM Act — to apply for permanent residency and end the legal limbo that has repeatedly jeopardized their ability to stay in the United States. The program’s legality has faced legal challenges since its inception, with critics saying then-President Barack Obama didn’t have the authority to create such a sweeping program without Congress’ approval. Challenges in federal court appear to be leaning in the critics’ favor, with a federal appeals court blocking future applicants for the program last fall though it can continue for the time being.

Senate Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin, D-Ill., also introduced his own version of the DREAM Act in 2021 and appeared optimistic of its prospects in November. Durbin said he had at least four Republicans in mind who could support DACA legislation. He would need 10 to overcome the filibuster and vote it into law.

Cornyn showed some early support for a DACA deal with Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., Both are members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdiction over DACA. The two felt DACA was unlawful but recognized the logistical and humanitarian fallout that would result from a complete cancellation of the program and proposed an alternative plan that would offer protection only for active DACA recipients but wouldn’t expand the program to new applicants.

Since Obama introduced DACA in 2012, many DACA recipients have grown up and started families of their own. They have gone to college, entered the workforce and contributed to the country’s economy.

“We’re in a very inflationary situation, so the taking of 100,000 workers and people who are going to colleges and universities out of the workforce for a state like Texas that is booming would have very serious economic consequences,” said Glenn Hamer, president and CEO of Texas Association of Business.

But the Cornyn-Tillis plan never went through the legislative committee process to go to the floor. The last two years of Democrats’ legislative agenda was largely focused on passing Biden’s infrastructure, social program and climate agenda — a gargantuan to-do list passed through fierce negotiating that at times brought the party to the brink of an existential crisis. Immigration was pushed to the backburner.

Democrats were also widely bracing to have their ranks thinned in this year’s midterm elections, with Biden facing low approval ratings and the president’s party traditionally losing control of Congress in his first midterm elections. Democrats needed to show voters they could deliver on their legislative agenda, and a pathway to legal status was a step too far for conservative Democrats on their massive social spending package, to the chagrin of more progressive members.

Democrats ended up performing much better in November than expected, keeping control of the Senate and losing their House majority by only an eight-seat margin. With the election out of the way, Durbin came out in earnest to talk about a DACA deal in November.

“I’m prepared to sit down with any Republican in the Senate who wants to talk about this issue,” Durbin said at a news conference last month. “I’m inviting some in. We’re talking privately, we’re meeting and drawing our people together. We have to make sure that this is a high priority this month of December.”

Tillis and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, the former Arizona Democrat who last week left her party to be an independent, struck a rough deal that would provide a pathway to citizenship for 2 million immigrants who came into the country illegally as children, The Washington Post reported earlier this month. It would also target several Republican priorities such as added resources to speed up asylum processing, faster removal for migrants who don’t have credible asylum claims and a one-year maximum continuation of Title 42, which turned back migrants under the guise of trying to curb the spread of COVID-19. It would also provide more funding for Border Patrol. The points mirror many of the proposals in Tillis’ earlier agreement with Cornyn.

Texas House Democrats were keen to chime in on the proposal as its contours are still being worked out, particularly since they had been mulling similar ideas for increasing border infrastructure funding. U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, spoke with Sinema on Wednesday about the bill, though it is still in its early stages and the details remain in flux. Cuellar, Sinema and West Virginia’s Sen. Joe Manchin enjoy a close personal relationship as centrists unafraid to stick it to party leadership and work across the aisle.

But most Texas members have yet to see anything or have substantive discussions with Sinema on the bill. Cornyn said he hasn’t seen the plan. Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-El Paso, has reached out since October to the senator, but has so far not been able to schedule a meeting with her or her team.

“There are folks like me willing to make compromises and who bring new ideas to the table that would help agents, communities and migrants as well,” Escobar said. “I wish we had a seat at that table.”

Hannah Hurley, a spokesperson for Sinema, said the senator and her team “are working with leaders from border states on both sides of the aisle.”

The year-end government funding package is another avenue for increased funding for Border Patrol. Rep. Kay Granger, R-Fort Worth, is the top Republican appropriator in the House and said she was determined to ensure there was enough funding for Border Patrol in the spending package.

But she and other Texas House Republicans say the border must be fully secured from illegal crossings before they can do serious work on a DACA deal. Republicans assert the true humanitarian crisis is human trafficking at the border, which they argue has increased because of the Biden administration’s reversal of Trump-era immigration policies.

“I”l make sure we have the funds but we’ve added more funds and more funds and more funds, but it isn’t stopping what’s going on and it’s a tragedy,” Granger said.

Almost the entire Republican delegation unveiled a framework on border security Thursday that would invest in physical border infrastructure including a wall and patrol roads, require Border Patrol to turn away migrants without credible asylum claims and increase penalties for violating immigration laws. It would also reinstate one of the Trump administration’s more controversial immigration policies that required asylum-seekers to wait out their cases in Mexico. Biden overturned that policy shortly after taking office.

Rep. Chip Roy, R-Austin, one of the most conservative members of the Texas delegation, spearheaded the effort with the backing of all the state’s Republican members. The proposal wouldn’t be considered until next year when Republicans take control of the House and hold the levers on committee hearings and the legislative process. Roy guffawed at the idea of passing immigration or border security legislation before the end of the current legislative session.

“Oh, hell no,” Roy said.

Roy is a vocal critic of the procedural quirks that allow lawmakers to pass legislation outside of regular order and insisted any major bill on immigration or border security would have to go through committee hearings, debate and a vote on the floor. Given the long timelines that often entails, that in all likelihood means no DACA deal before the end of the session.

And unlike Democrats, Republicans are making it clear that immigration and border security will be top of the agenda when they take over. Border security, along with gas prices, has been among Republicans’ favorite attack points on Democrats and the administration since Biden first took office. Republicans accused the administration of being asleep at the wheel as a record number of migrants are apprehended at the border and they have demanded Biden visit the border for himself.

Republicans vow to launch investigations into Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, dangling the prospect of impeachment overhead. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Houston, is a top contender to lead the House Homeland Security Committee and would have a major role in any investigation of Mayorkas. Crenshaw said he has a long list of transition staffers he would want to probe, but stopped short of calling for impeachment without first conducting hearings.

Mayorkas has recently traveled to Latin America to negotiate with his counterparts on addressing migration and cross-border crime and will be visiting the border in El Paso on Tuesday. Mayorkas has made no indication of stepping down from his post.

But despite earlier interest from Senate Republicans in DACA legislation, it does not appear high on the party’s immigration list for the next year. During a Senate Judiciary hearing last month, Cornyn told Durbin that “the border is on fire and the American people are irate and entirely justified in being irate by this self-inflicted border crisis due to the inaction of the Biden administration. I just don’t see a path forward at this time” on DACA.

Rep. Mayra Flores, whose short time in office ends in early January, said Democrats blew their chance to pass meaningful DACA legislation in the two years they had control of both chambers and the presidency.

“Y’all keep using this issue with Hispanics just to get our support, just to get our vote. You’ve done nothing,” Flores said. “You’ve had an opportunity to do something about DACA and you’ve done nothing.”

Democrats, however, rebuffed the Republican proposal as tired policies that have been proven not to work. Escobar, who has also called for more funding for border processing infrastructure, said the Republican plan would cause overcrowding at detention centers and “create inhumane conditions for children” by going after the Flores settlement agreement, which limits the detention of migrant minors. And Escobar didn’t express much hope for a serious Republican proposal for DACA in the House in the next year, underscoring the need to pass legislation before Jan. 3.

Still, Cuellar didn’t give up hope on a deal between Senate negotiators, whether it be the Sinema-Tillis deal or something else. Even if there are only a few weeks left in the legislative calendar, Cuellar said protections for DACA recipients was sensible and urgent enough to have a chance of success.

“I’ve seen Congress move pretty fast,” Cuellar said. “If there’s an agreement, it can be done in one day.”

Disclosure: Texas Association of Business has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2022/12/13/texas-daca-border-security-republicans/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

Bombshell report finds hundreds of Oath Keepers at DHS — and it’s just the “tip of the iceberg”

Hundreds of Oath Keepers said they are or were employed by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, a report published Monday found—a revelation that comes about two weeks after two leaders of the far-right militia were convicted of seditious conspiracy in connection with the January 6 insurrection.

In a joint investigation with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) found that more than 300 people on a leaked Oath Keepers membership list described themselves as current or former employees of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agencies including the Border Patrol, Coast Guard, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Secret Service.

In a joint investigation with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) found that more than 300 people on a leaked Oath Keepers membership list described themselves as current or former employees of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agencies including the Border Patrol, Coast Guard, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Secret Service.

“One active law enforcement official joining a militia group is one too many,” Mike German, a former undercover FBI agent who has infiltrated white supremacist and far-right extremist groups, told POGO. “This probably represents that the tip of the iceberg as far as federal law enforcement officers that have been involved in or supported the activities of far-right, militant groups like the Oath Keepers.”

According to the report:

Despite its rhetoric opposing government oppression, [Oath Keepers] is seen by many as hostile to civil liberties and rights. It has deployed armed groups in response to protests against police brutality against Black people, such as in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 and 2015 and at Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. Many protesters and observers saw the Oath Keepers presence as intimidating and in opposition to calls for police accountability. Several members have left the group because they felt it was too extreme, according to several on the leaked list contacted by OCCRP and POGO. At least one prominent ex-member has decried racism within its ranks, even though the group’s bylaws bar members from “discrimination, violence, or hatred toward any person based upon their race, nationality, creed, or color.

The new report follows the November 29 conviction of two Oath Keepers—founder Stewart Rhodes and Florida chapter leader Kelly Meggs—on seditious conspiracy charges for their roles in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of former President Donald Trump and his “Big Lie” that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

“It’s men like this on the inside who can and do provide information to expose what’s going on,” Rhodes once wrote about infiltrating government agencies.

Rhodes also boasted that “now we can add a DHS patch to our display of patches that shows that there are Oath Keepers among them. That ought to get a few panties in a wad. Good fun!”

Previous reports have detailed infiltration by right-wing extremists and white supremacists of the U.S. military and law enforcement agencies.

Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., who chairs both the House Homeland Security Committee and the congressional panel investigating the January 6 attack, responded to the new report by saying that “extremism within our government is always alarming, but even more so in a department with a law enforcement and national security nexus like DHS.”

A ranking of bad Santas, from naughty to vice

When I was planning to attend the new David Harbour-fronted film “Violent Night,” out in theaters, a relative decided not to come. “I don’t want to see Sheriff Hopper as Santa being mean and hurting kids,” they said.

Rest a little easier, “Stranger Things” and Harbour fans. Santa is not that bad in “Violent Night.” It’s true, he starts the film at a bar, drinking heavily and spends much of the film with blood running into his mustache and beard (which are more sandy blond than white, indicating perhaps this is Santa in his dad bod, mid-life period). But in the long history of Christmas figures who are more wicked than winking, there are far worse Santas.

Related

Deck the halls with films of horror

In recent years, Krampus, a horned, punishing figure from European folklore, has captured Americans’ imaginations and interest in films like 2015’s “Krampus.” The 2010 Dutch film “Sint” is the dark legend of Sinterklaas, the patron saint of children, who’s not very saintly. But those are different figures from Santa proper. What about films with the big man himself being bad?

Salon ranks some bad Santas in recent fare, ranging from the slightly irate to the downright homicidal. 

07
“A Nightmare Before Christmas” 

Santa is pushed around a lot in this Tim Burton 1993 classic. Or rather, squeezed into sacks and questionable tubing to land in a dungeon. Under the circumstances, anyone would snap. But he remains his jolly, rotund self even as he’s kidnapped by Jack Skellington, the king of Halloween Town, which celebrates my personal favorite holiday all year round. Having grown tired of Halloween all the time, however, Jack devotes himself to the study of this strange holiday: Christmas, which includes a plan to abduct the character he believes to be known as “Sandy Claws.”

 

Taking on the role of Santa himself, Jack perhaps did not quite get the memo. Besides the not-so-jolly kidnapping, he also gives kids presents that are more frightening than festive. But all is not lost, as Jack sees the error of his ways and frees Santa, which allows Christmas to be recouped. In the end, both versions of Santa – the real and imposter – turn out to be giving in their own ways.

 

06
“Violent Night”

In the 2022 film, an obscenely rich family is taken hostage on their compound by a gang of criminals, led by John Leguizamo, intent on robbing them. It’s Christmas Eve and young Trudy’s (Leah Brady) estranged parents (Alex Hassell and Alexis Louder) have come together to bring her to her grandma’s lux estate. Her father gives her an old walkie-talkie with which he (wink wink) says she can talk to Santa. But tonight, Santa (Harbour) is on the job and right now, he’s on the premises. 

 

Harbour is a Santa with a past. Fortunately for Trudy and her wealthy relatives, that past involves fighting. Armed with his trusty, Thor-like hammer named Skullcrusher and sporting a man bun, Harbour straddles the line between jolly ho ho hos and fireman calendar hot. This Santa cusses and kills — but only those on his extensive, magically digitalized naughty list. He’s a fierce protector of children and as such, one of the least bad on this list. The same cannot be said about the script in this adult “Home Alone,” complete with some fairly grisly booby traps. 

 

05
“A Christmas Story”

This horror is real. The department store is crowded with holiday shoppers. The line to see Santa Claus is huge, winding and full of screaming kids and babies. There’s a weird kid in front of Ralphie, and Santa’s elves are sadistic. The department store Santa himself is grotesque in this 1983 film, easily giving Billy Bob Thornton (more on him later) a run for his money. Santa’s nose is red in a way that seems certain to come from drinking, and kids leave his lap screaming. The elves roughhouse them down a slide that definitely doesn’t appear to be up to code. Santa shouts in Ralphie’s face, his bloodshot eyes and nose huge. His voice slows like the devil on a record played backward. He pressures Ralphie into choosing something he doesn’t want for Christmas, then when Ralphie pulls himself together and asks for the BB gun of his dreams, Santa denies him, pushing him away with a literal boot to the face.  

 

Dreams crushed. 

 

04
“Futurama”

The Santa in “Futurama” is big, he’s roboticized and he has a Tommy gun (Harbour’s character only has a bloody red hammer). With shark-like jagged teeth, he’s designed to not only give those who are naughty no presents, but to destroy them, a kind of metal vigilante with a very low threshold for bad behavior. His list is noted with a feather pen, but he’s all cutting-edge technology — and cutting. He puts the red X in Xmas, takes his milk and cookies from “starving orphans” only, has Christmas tree-shaped bombs, and fires at Jesus. As this evil robot Santa says, “A mistletoe is no match for my T.O.W. missile” 

 

03
“Bad Santa”

The Santa of “Futurama” is an evil robot, but maybe an evil human is worse. Or, one who’s extremely gross and disappointing. As Willie T. Soke, Billy Bob Thornton is a career criminal who poses as Santa every Christmas. Well, it’s good to have traditions. Instead of a sleigh, Thornton’s Santa has a beat-up car where empty liquor bottles spill into the parking lot when you open the door. Most of this Santa’s badness is of the alcoholic, sexual depravity kind. With his dirty red suit hanging open and trademark white undershirt, this gruff, bedraggled Santa looks like a bear after hibernating. He jokes about STDs, has a violent, drunken temper tantrum in front of some small children and beats up some slightly older ones. His Christmas elf (Tony Cox) says it best, “You need many years of therapy.”

 

02
“Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale”

This 2010 Finnish film wins the category of best Christmas film that includes male nudity – it’s probably a small category — but this story is excellent. In the movie, evil forces are released after a company drills into an ancient burial mound, which was built to imprison something deadly. That something, frozen in snow, is Santa Claus. Or, Joulupukki, the Finnish figure from lore that developed into Santa. It’s mostly elves who dominate this film. They’re menacing (and naked) enough, like silent and evil sheep, stealing children in sacks. And Santa is more of the Krampus style: gigantic, with horns and all. But the film manages to be both dark and weirdly joyful and heartwarming, with Santa as a surprise in the ice. Let’s put it this way: the elves build their boss a nest. 

 

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01
“Silent Night, Deadly Night”

A graphic and exploitative slasher, “Silent Night, Deadly Night” was the subject of controversy upon its 1984 release, with advertising canceled and the film pulled from many theatres. As Matthew Rozsa writes, this was “[a]ll over a movie that the vast majority of protesters never saw.”

 

The film tells the story of a killer named Billy, whose severe trauma stems from Christmas. After his parents are brutally murdered on the night, Billy suffers more abuse from nuns in an orphanage, psychological damage which will cause Christmas to be a trigger for him. When he’s forced as a young adult to play a toy store Santa to keep his job, you can guess what occurs. This movie features several bad and murderous Santas, but the main one is Billy who slashes through the story indiscriminately. Many women, babysitters, bosses and cops fall under his ax. He gives a bloody boxcutter as a gift to a child, and his parting words could be the theme of this list: “You’re safe now. Santa Claus is gone.” 

 

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New special counsel subpoena shows DOJ opening new front in Trump investigation: reporter

The recently appointed special counsel has issued a subpoena to Georgia’s secretary of state for records related to Donald Trump’s effort to overturn his election loss, signaling a new direction for the federal investigation.

Jack Smith, who was appointed to oversee Trump-related investigations for the Justice Department, asked Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger for documents related to Trump’s request to state officials asking them to “find” exactly the number of votes he needed to undo President Joe Biden’s victory in the state — and NBC News correspondent Ken Dilianian explained the significance of this latest development.

“This is a very important moment in this investigation,” Dilanian told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “Until now, it hadn’t been clear that the Justice Department was aggressively pursuing the conduct in Georgia, given the fact that there’s a state investigate down there. That was always a mystery, though. If it was illegal in other states, or potentially illegal, Georgia was the best example, actually with the best evidence. They had the president of the United States on tape pressuring, trying to pressure Brad Raffensperger to find 11,780 votes, and if you remember from the famous conversation, Trump also tried to suggest that they knew the election was corrupt, and it was very risky not to act on that.”

“This is the guy in charge of the Justice Department at the time,” Dilanian continued. “He was almost hinting there was criminality if they didn’t do his bidding. Jack Smith is still in the Netherlands, the special counsel, recovering from a bike accident where he hurt his leg, but his influence is being felt in this investigation. Andrew Weissmann, our NBC News legal analyst who is known as a very aggressive prosecutor, said early on that Jack Smith is a golden retriever puppy compared to Andrew Weissmann, and you’re really seeing evidence of that, not only with this set of subpoenas to now a total of six states, but also with this secret battle going on in the grand jury where the DOJ is trying to hold in contempt the Trump team over Mar-a-Lago.”

“He’s moving forward quickly and aggressively, in terms of the subpoenas to the state, if you look at the subpoena, there’s a list of people,” Dilanian added. “Almost everyone we know of who was involved in the effort to overturn the election, Rudy Giuliani, Cleta Mitchell, John Eastman, Boris Epshteyn — the DOJ wants communications between those people and state and local election officials and they’re vacuuming them up.”

The ugly truth about declawing cats

Around 45.3 million American households have cats, attesting to the deep love that Americans have for our feline companions. Yet bringing cats into our homes often means compromises and frustrations, such as scratched-up furniture — or even, for particularly feisty cats, scratches on their humans’ bodies, which can cause disease. In searching for a solution to scratching, some cat owners seek out a surgical procedure known as an onychectomy — or declawing their cat. 

While declawing a cat might seem like a routine procedure for a veterinarian, it is not a routine experience for a cat. Unlike trimming one’s nails, a cat’s claws are embedded deep in the skin; when a cat is declawed, that cat is crippled for life. As one expert put it, the cat is as mangled as a human being would be if someone sadistically chopped off the tops of all their fingers.

“Declawing is actually an amputation of the last bone on each of their toes. It’s not simply removing the nail.”

“Declawing is actually an amputation of the last bone on each of their toes,” explains Alexandra Yaksich, a writer and veterinary technician who helped draft a bill in Québec to ban cat declawing. “It’s not simply removing the nail.” She notes that if a human underwent an analogous procedure, it would be like having both the last knuckles on their fingers and all of their toes cut off.

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“You may still be able to learn how to walk and do things manually, but this would drastically change your quality of life,” Yaksich explained. “If you were a piano player, or a runner, you may still be able to live your life and learn how to do activities you enjoy, but you would never reach your potential. You would never be able to fully express yourself.” In addition, the cat will experience constant physical awkwardness and even pain both due to their injuries and their body’s inability to properly engage in mechanical actions. The only way for a medical professional to declaw a cat, after all, is to permanently maim the animal’s paws. 

This is because, even though the term “onychectomy” makes the surgery seem anodyne, there is simply no way to “declaw” a cat with the same casual and harmless attitude that one might use to fill a tooth cavity or lance a boil. By virtue of what the procedure entails, it is inherently destructive.

“Declawing is an invasive surgery — a series of amputations of the last bones of the ten front (and sometimes, also, the eight rear) toes,” points out Sam Miller, the media relations manager at Humane Rescue Alliance. Cats are usually declawed with either a surgical scalpel, a guillotine clipper or with laser surgery. “It exposes the animal to the risks of anesthesia, infection, and blood loss as well as chronic pain, nerve damage and lameness.” That will be the case even if the procedure is performed competently, which is not always the case.

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In terms of the animal’s health, cats are programmed to naturally enjoy using their claws actively and creatively, just as humans are inclined to do things with our hands.

“Scratching is a normal feline behavior,” Miller observed. “It removes the dead husks from their claws, marks territory, both visually and with scent glands, and stretches their muscles.” Since using their claws is healthy for them, the only remaining arguments for declawing involve the owners’ personal preferences — and, as Miller noted, there are plenty of more humane (and cheaper) ways of dealing with annoying cat behavior than declawing.

“For cats who are causing property damage with their scratching, they can seek assistance with behavior modification training, performing regular nail trims, and the use of nail caps that fit over the nails as a humane alternative,” Miller pointed out. Even when it comes to ailments like cat scratching disease (which causes a fever and pustules), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) discourages declawing as a way to protect your cat, instead urging owners to do things regularly clean their cat and keep it indoors.

“Declawing involves lacerations of the tendon that joins the tip of the fingers to the beginning of the forearm.”

Indeed, when a cat is declawed, it will develop a host of lifelong problems that far outweigh whatever disadvantages existed because they have claws. By altering the biomechanics of how they move, the surgeons are taking the fundamental cat-ness away from the cat.

“If anyone has met a cat, you will know how stealthy and slick their movements are,” Yaksich explained. “Cats normally walk on the tips of their toes which makes use of many musculature structures to facilitate their movement.” When the declawing process is complete, they are left with countless lacerations on the tendons joining the tips of their fingers to their forearms. As a result, the cat will no longer be able to utilize their muscles properly. “The result is a weight transfer from the fingers to the palm.”

“Based on the animals observed, declawed cats are up to seven times more likely to have at least one behavioral problem.” 

Exacerbating matters, the cats’ now-limp finger bones are simply left to dangle, forming scar tissue that further hobbles them. What is left of their fingers are often left immobile, not even able to extend. To compensate, the cats carry their weight on whatever bones remain even though they lack adequate support. The paws become less coordinated and their higher muscle groups are taxed beyond their natural capacity.

“This alone results in a cascade of negative effects, namely, pain, and a change in the way they walk,” Yaksich pointed out. “Because they are forced to walk directly on a bone without support, we often see chronic back pain associated with declawing. It is very clear from many studies which show that declawing cats result in physical pain, from back pain to premature osteoarthritis, to pain associated with walking.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, cats who are thereby hobbled by de-clawing often develop personality problems. They are more likely to be aggressive and to refuse to use their letterbox correctly, as doing so is painful to their injured paws. Consequently, declawed cats are more likely to be abandoned at shelters because their owners find it difficult to adjust to their altered behavior. Ingrid Newkirk, the president of PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), perhaps the world’s most famous animal rights group, pointed to a 2017 study in the Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery.

“Based on the animals observed, declawed cats are up to seven times more likely to have at least one behavioral problem, including aggression, biting, overgrooming, or eliminating outside the litterbox,” Newkirk observed. “It’s a double whammy for cats: Not only do they suffer the pain and trauma of declawing, they also often end up homeless—surrendered to a shelter or dumped on the streets—when the same people who had them declawed grow frustrated by the behavioral problems caused by this mutilation.”

She added, “Recognizing the cruelty inherent in declawing, nearly two dozen countries—including Australia, England, and Japan—ban or severely restrict it, and it’s outlawed in many cities, including Denver, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. The American Association of Feline Practitioners, which represents 3,800 veterinarians, strongly opposes declawing, and a growing number of veterinarians refuse to do it. It should be banned everywhere.”

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NYC Mayor Eric Adams’s terrible plan to forcibly hospitalize homeless people with mental illness

On Nov. 29, New York City Mayor Eric Adams declared at a press conference that his “compassion” driven response to the city’s homeless crisis would be to enhance the state’s existing authority to involuntary commit the mentally ill in their ranks to ensure people “in desperate need” were no longer allowed “to slip through the cracks.”

“As a city, we have a moral obligation to support our fellow New Yorkers and stop the decades-long practice of turning a blind eye towards those suffering from severe mental illness, especially those who pose a risk of harm to themselves,” Mayor Adams said. “It is not acceptable for us to see someone who clearly needs help and walk past them.”

Adams, himself a former NYPD officer with extensive experience in the subway system, blamed the deepening humanitarian crisis on the existence of “a gray area where policy, law, and accountability” had become “unclear”. This, he reasoned, led to a “culture of uncertainty” that had caused “untold suffering and deep frustration” that he proclaimed he would not “allow” to continue.

Not highlighted in the mayor’s City Hall rollout was reference to New York State’s decades-old decision to close mental health facilities and neighborhood hospitals — nor the ongoing choices, made amid the pandemic, by the city’s wealthiest private hospitals to close their inpatient psychiatric units. Nor was there a recognition of how the increasing scarcity of psychiatric care and beds came as tens of thousands of affordable housing units disappeared while city housing increasingly became a luxury good.

In the press release that accompanied his address were boiler plate testimonials supporting the policy from mayoral appointees including New York City Police Department (NYPD) Commissioner Keechant L. Sewell and Fire Department of the City of New York (FDNY) Commissioner Laura Kavanagh. Missing entirely was the real-world, street-smart perspectives of the thousands of first responders, transport workers, social workers and healthcare professionals on the front lines of the deepening humanitarian crisis that takes a real toll on them as well.

As a candidate for mayor, Eric Adams emphasized his working-class public union roots — and the unions responded with their endorsement of the then-Brooklyn Borough President. Yet as mayor, his approach to governing and labor relations has resembled the pro-business worldview of Mayor Michael Bloomberg where the unions were expected to fund their own cost of living raises with concessions and givebacks. This rightward branding to ‘make do’ comes as the city he leads continues to unravel from the lingering consequences of a mass death event, as well as everything else ranging from declining student test scores to a mass exodus of key municipal civil service titles from cops to paramedics.

Now, some of the sharpest and best-informed criticism of the mayor’s latest signature policy comes from the leadership of the unions that were his earliest and most ardent supporters. In a Dec. 7  New York Times op-ed, Anthony Almojera, a lieutenant paramedic with FDNY EMS, and vice president of the DC 37’s Uniformed E.M.S. Officers Union, Local 3621 described a dystopian street-scape where his colleagues have been assaulted and even murdered by emotionally disturbed individuals that are also homeless.

“I’m not opposed to taking mentally ill people in distress to the hospital; our ambulances do this all the time,” wrote Almojera. “But I know it’s unlikely to solve their problems. Hospitals are overwhelmed, so they sometimes try to shuffle patients to other facilities. Gov. Kathy Hochul has promised 50 extra beds for New York City’s psychiatric patients. We need far more to manage those patients who would qualify for involuntary hospitalization under Mr. Adams’s vague criteria.”

Almojera continues, “Mr. Adams says that under the new directive, this patient won’t be discharged until a plan is in place to connect the person with ongoing care. But the systems responsible for this care — sheltered housing, access to outpatient psychiatric care, social workers, a path to reintegration into society — are horribly inadequate. There aren’t enough shelters, there aren’t enough social workers, there aren’t enough outpatient facilities. So, people who no longer know how to care for themselves, who need their hands held through a complex process, are alone on the street once again.”

“Our ambulances are simply the entrance to a broken pipeline,” Almojera writes. “We have burned down the house of mental health in this city, and the people you see on the street are the survivors who staggered from the ashes.”

The veteran FDNY EMS officer and author of the memoir  “Riding the Lightning: A Year in the Life of a New York City Paramedic” suggests that New York’s mayor look beyond “a superficial fix” to what is actually a national problem caused by a long “neglected” health care system and chronic underinvestment in “social services, housing and mental health care.”

According to the New York State Nurses Association [NYSNA], which represents 40,000 nurses, the contraction of available psychiatric beds has accelerated even as New York City sunk deeper into the latest crisis as COVID raged and killed tens of thousands of New Yorkers and over one million Americans.

“As the COVID-19 pandemic hit New York, Governor [Andrew] Cuomo suspended the Certificate of Need applications which require hospitals to go through a public process before closing or changing services,” according to a NYSNA fact sheet. “Consequently, hospital administrations have been emboldened, closing their inpatient psychiatric units, often without clarifying to nurses or the community whether these moves are temporary or permanent.”

NYSNA’s 2020 policy brief continues, “Private hospital systems like NY Presbyterian and Northwell are taking these services out of the community, despite decades of cuts to mental health care stemming from mergers and hospital closures. The Berger Commission and other efforts to shrink NYS hospital capacity, together with declining Medicaid reimbursements, and the reality that psychiatric patients simply aren’t as lucrative as other patients, have created powerful incentives for hospital systems to shed inpatient psychiatric beds.”

“Meanwhile, the city’s public hospital system and the correctional system are picking up the burden,” NYSNA observed. “This contributes a greater likelihood that individuals with serious mental illness will have a violent encounter with police. The acute underfunding of public hospitals means that the healthcare professionals in our public system are not provided the resources to treat this new influx of psychiatric patients, many of whom have complex diagnoses.”

At her Dec. 7 press conference before the City Council’s Stated Meeting, City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams was asked by Daily News reporter Michael Gartland if the Adams administration had offered the City Council any details on how the city would fund the additional psyche beds the new approach would likely require, she said the Council was “still waiting for a full, comprehensive plan.”

“The conversations do have to be much deeper,” Speaker Adams told reporters. “Conversations around mental health, preventative measures—the city’s need for deeper investments in our mental health infrastructure—how to deliver people the long-term help that they need. The first thing that comes to my mind is supportive housing. What are we going to do once we determine someone is going to be hospitalized or evaluated? What is the time frame?… It’s always going to come back to supportive housing.”

It’s impossible to have a real conversation about the homeless mental health crisis without examining how it’s a direct consequence of our winner take all scarcity-based housing market and for-profit health care system. Without addressing those issues the use of law enforcement to “improve” street conditions by forcibly taking the indigent mentally ill off of the street without a real plan becomes a blunt  force instrument that’s only guaranteed to inflict more trauma.

In doing so,  the city will be following a long tradition going back to the 1600s when England enacted it’s so-called Poor Laws that required vagrants to “be committed to a house of correction or fined.”

“The American colonies and state governments modeled their public assistance for the poor on the Elizabethan Poor Laws and the Law of Settlement and Removal,” according to the Virginia Commonwealth University’s Social Welfare History Project. While the mayor’s efforts no doubt springs from an authentic desire to relieve the suffering of the undomiciled mentally ill, it also re-enforces the public appearance that he’s taking strong action.

New York City-based sociologist Dr. Steven Pimpare is the founder and director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership Program and a Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire who previously taught at Columbia University, NYU, Simmons University, and the City University of New York. He is the author of Politics for Social Workers: A Practical Guide to Effecting Change, published in 2021 by Columbia University Press

“This is a quality-of-life problem for the affluent, not a humanitarian problem,” Pimpare said. “Demonizing the homeless is not new. There is no more manifest example of the failure of the system than bullying the vulnerable and criminalizing mental illness.”

Perhaps the Mayor would be well advised to consult more with the workers on the frontlines.

What’s the (cheesy, bacony) way to say “hygge” in French?

Every year without fail, when the first cold, rainy evenings begin to take hold, so, too, does a chorus among the French:

“Ce soir, on se fait une tartiflette?” Shall we make tartiflette tonight?

The simple, warming casserole hails from Savoie, a region nestled in the French Alps east of Lyon and west of Milan. Tartiflette is everything you’d want from a traditional, country-style winter dish: potatoes, onions, and bacon topped with nutty, funky Reblochon. The semi-soft cheese is the star of the dish, boasting the ideal marriage of the nutty flavors common to many Alpine cheeses and a whisper of the washed-rind funk familiar to fans of Epoisses. (Sadly, because it’s a raw-milk cheese aged for less than 60 days, true Reblochon isn’t imported stateside, but many Americans love to swap in similar washed-rind cheeses like pasteurized Le Délice du Jura, Préféré de Nos Montagnes, or even raclette.)

Belying its old-timey name, which is derived from local patois for “potato,” tartiflette has a relatively modern history, dating to the 1980s. Some say, in fact, that its invention was purely a marketing coup.

French food critic and co-founder of the Gault Millau guide Christian Millau claims in his “Dictionnaire amoureux de la gastronomie (Dictionary for Lovers of Gastronomy,” a collection of essays on French terroir) that we have the Syndicat Interprofessionnel du Reblochon — the Reblochon Interprofessional Trade Guild — to thank for tartiflette. The book states that the Guild invented the dish in the ’80s as a means of boosting cheese sales.

Not everyone agrees. Lucile Marton, Director of the Guild, refutes the story, telling Slate that the guild didn’t invent the recipe, “even if we can’t deny that we’ve benefited from it.”

The truth probably sits somewhere in the middle.

Tartiflette was indeed likely concocted in the ’80s as a way to market an overproduction of the Reblochon central to the dish. But Reblochon itself has a long history that starts on the border between modern France and Switzerland.

Reblochon has been made in the Alps since the 13th century, when it was invented as a way of skirting a local tax that local landlords levied on farmers according to the volume of milk they produced.

Farmers cunningly decided to under-milk their cows the day of landlords’ visits, reducing their owed tax significantly. Upon the landlords’ departure, they would milk their cows a second time, and with this richer, creamier milk, they made a cheese whose name stems from the local patois “reblocher,” meaning “to milk again.”

Reblochon was little-known outside the formerly independent region until France annexed it in 1860. The cheese’s popularity soon boomed nationwide. At several different points throughout history, however, farmers became a bit overzealous, producing Reblochon reserves that they ultimately had to destroy.

Which brings us back to tartiflette. In the ’80s, experts believe, an enterprising restaurateur at a ski resort in the Savoyard town of La Clusaz decided to take advantage of a surplus of cheese by combining it with bacon, potatoes, and onions. It was the ideal après-ski comfort food to warm up after a day on the slopes.

But he didn’t just pull the recipe out of the sky.

For centuries, locals in Savoie had been cooking up a hodgepodge of potatoes, cheese, and onions they dubbed “péla,” for the long-handled poêle or pan they made it in. While péla is made without bacon (and without peeling potatoes), one could assume that it was indeed the ancestor of tartiflette.

“You would traditionally add leftovers to [péla],” explains Anne-Lise Francoz, Communications Director of the Syndicat Interprofessionnel du Reblochon. Since Reblochon and péla are from the same area, she says, “we can assume without too much risk that Reblochon has always been the cheese used in it.”

These days, both péla and tartiflette boast as many variations as there are cooks who make them — and, of course, each cook thinks theirs is the most “authentic.”

“We all think we have the ‘real’ recipe,” says Frédéric Motte, owner of Pain Vin Fromages, a cheese-focused restaurant in the Marais district of Paris.

Motte’s version of the classic involves coating the baking dish with crème fraîche (a divisive addition that steadfast tartiflette fans eschew in favor of a purer cheese flavor). He then layers in potatoes and a mix of sautéed onions and smoked lardons. Last comes a full quarter-wheel of Reblochon, split through the center so its rind browns under the broiler. The creamy cheese drips down among the potatoes, so every bite is coated with its rich flavor.

Of course, given Reblochon’s central role in the dish, only the best will do for the discerning French palate. In France, producers make two different categories of Reblochon: One, with a green wax seal, uses the raw milk of one (or several) of only three permissible breeds of cow on the farm, as soon as the cows have been milked. The other, with a red seal, is made in a factory using milk from multiple farms.

The former, unsurprisingly, has far more character and flavor, and is preferred not just in tartiflette, but also on a cheese board.

And therein lies the rub: The dish that began as a method to use up a glut has subsumed Reblochon’s identity. These days, while Reblochon could easily star on a cheese board alongside popular French specialties like Camembert or Brillat-Savarin, it is often perceived as little more than a topping for tartiflette, a reality that many experts bemoan.

“It’s a cheese, not an ingredient,” says Francoz, noting that winter, which is prime tartiflette time, isn’t even necessarily when the cheese is at its best.

“Reblochon is made all year long, but it’s especially good when the cows are at altitude,” she says. As cows can only access these verdant pastures in summertime, that’s the best time to enjoy Reblochon — fresh, not baked.

Sandra Angelloz is another producer who disdains Reblochon’s “garnish” status. She makes green-label “Reblochon fermier” the traditional way: in the valley in winter and at altitude in the summer. Thanks to cows that graze for a full seven months out of the year, the cheese takes on a hazelnutty flavor and a shiny, creamy texture.

“Most French people think Reblochon equals tartiflette,” she says. “It’s a bit humiliating for small producers to know that our cheese ends up this way, seeing as at the beginning, it was just a cheese that was enjoyed simply.”

As for us, we’ll take Reblochon however we can get it. The very best wheels are delicious however you serve them: on their own, on a slice of good bread, or — yes — gratinéed atop a comforting tartiflette.

Hulu honors Octavia Butler’s “Kindred,” yanking a Black woman out of time to grapple with history

Octavia Butler created “Kindred” as a response to one of the prevailing notions in the 1970s Black Power movement regarding previous generations’ seemingly quiet forbearance under slavery and Jim Crow. To some who engaged with this school of thought, domestic work was looked down upon, similar to how enslaved cooks and housekeepers were viewed in hindsight as lesser than those forced into hard labor.

Butler’s “Kindred” heroine Dana is a corrective to this – a resilient young Black woman who has settled in Los Angeles and for reasons she can’t understand finds herself careening backward in time to a 19th century Maryland plantation for unpredictable periods before leaping back to her present.

When she isn’t trying her best to avoid the violent abuse of the plantation’s owner Tom Weylin, she gets to know the web of relationships that form the community of enslaved Black people working the plantation’s land and tending the needs of Tom and his cruel wife Margaret.

KindredMicah Stock as Kevin Franklin and Mallori Johnson as Dana James in “Kindred” (Tina Rowden/FX)

There is the cook whose appeasement is a strategy to keep her daughter at her side.  There is the man who works for a time as Weylin’s overseer, and the woman who is sexually abused for his pleasure. And there is the boy to whom Dana, a writer, teaches reading and writing, knowing those skills will eventually secure another level of freedom for him and those to whom he passes that knowledge.

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Butler wanted to depict how difficult it would be for Black people raised in the 20th and 21st centuries to survive chattel slavery.  In doing she also reclaimed a lost sense of honor for the women who ensured the survival of the people around them and made it possible for future generations to thrive.

KindredGayle Rankin as Margaret Weylin in “Kindred” (Tina Rowden/FX)

The second theme influences the direction award-winning playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins takes in his eight-episode television adaptation, emphasized in the creative additions he makes to Butler’s 1979 classic. That starts with the era: instead of placing Mallori Johnson’s Dana James in the 1970s, or even in 2022, her present day is 2016 – the year that Americans discovered on a grand scale just how much the United States detests women, and how many white women voted in agreement with that view.  

The topmost challenge “Kindred” contends with is to incorporate its genre plot within a history that is so easily transformed into spectacles of Black pain.

Dana’s family isn’t her fan, either. When she surprises her aunt Denise (Eisa Davis) and uncle Alan (Charles Parnell) by informing them she’s sold the family brownstone in New York and moved to Los Angeles to begin a career in screenwriting, they’re far from celebratory. On the contrary, they fear Dana’s rash decision is evidence of the same psychological instability that plagued Dana’s deceased mother Olivia (Sheria Irving).

But Dana is determined to press on with her plans until one day when she’s standing in her home and suddenly finds herself in a long past, running into a woman who recognizes her. At first, she believes it’s a dream…until the man she’s just begun to date, Kevin (Micah Stock), is present to witness an episode.

Each time Dana travels back in time coincides with a moment a young boy named Rufus Weylin (David Alexander Kaplan) is somehow in mortal danger. And she soon realizes that the bond she shares with Rufus is vital to her family’s history, making his safety and that of another long-gone relative her priority.

The topmost challenge “Kindred” contends with is to incorporate its genre plot within a history that is difficult to witness and so easily transformed into spectacles of Black pain. Several recent TV dramas that revolve around a similar setting achieved this in various ways, mainly by rooting the audience’s perspective within that of the story’s most determined figures. Shows such as “The Underground Railroad” don’t shy away from the savagery but, in large part, what occurs onscreen highlights the tragedy these people endured instead of retraumatizing their descendants.

KindredMicah Stock as Kevin Franklin and Mallori Johnson as Dana James in “Kindred” (Tina Rowden/FX)

In this regard, the writers and directors strike a balance between showing precisely what’s needed to convey the tortures dangling overhead for all the Black characters, not just Dana. These scripts traffic in tension more than physical violence and keep the epithets to a minimum.  When the n-word is used, the script gives it the weight and stink of brimstone, such as when a petulant, ringlet-coifed girl tests her limited power by assaulting Dana with it to see what she can get away with.

More dangerous, and complex, is Dana’s strained relationship with Sarah (Sophina Brown), the head of the cookhouse who resents newcomers’ attempts to help the community by, in part, assisting the Weylin family, in the unreasonable hope that their utility may one day be repaid by charity toward the people they exploit.

Butler’s novel structure likely defied simple adaptation until recent years when the whole “in media res” gambit became fashionable. But Jacobs-Jenkins’ additional creative tweaks further modernize the message of “Kindred” in obvious ways and others that keen viewers may appreciate.

In all, “Kindred” is a reasonable, economic realization of Butler’s classic story.

The showrunner foregrounds 21st-century white woman privilege in a way that Butler would have appreciated, drawing a solid link between the abominable behavior exercised by Rufus’ mother Margaret Weylin (Gayle Rankin) to the reflexive suspicion one of Dana’s new neighbors (Brooke Bloom) displays upon first meeting her. (She hears Dana’s screams upon returning to the present – which happens in the middle of being assaulted by a repugnant overseer – and immediately blames Dana for making too much noise in their quiet neighborhood.)

KindredBrooke Bloom as Hermione in “Kindred” (Tina Rowden/FX)

Such parallels may be a bit too obvious to believably play for some people, along with Jacobs-Jenkins’ choices to make Kevin a man who Dana is beginning to date instead of her husband, as he was in Butler’s novel, and featuring him in Dana’s adventures more prominently.  

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But Stock looks the part of the soft-edged white progressive, especially next to Ryan Kwanten’s violent, drunken plantation owner Thomas Weylin. Where Butler aimed to prove to her readers that a Black woman growing up in the post-Civil Right Era United States would struggle to survive the horrors of slavery, Jacobs-Jenkins’ adds to that argument by positing a white guy circa 2016 wouldn’t fare so well back then, either.

KindredMicah Stock as Kevin Franklin in “Kindred” (Tina Rowden/FX)

This script makes Kevin a musician instead of a writer, leading Weylin and his peers to constantly question his masculinity atop their distrust of his care for Dana’s safety. But this also gives the production a reason to have piano adaptations of modern songs such as Tears For Fears’ “Head Over Heels” playing in the background of a slavery-era party scene, which both adds some levity to a dark situation and augments the surreal nature of Dana’s predicament.

In all, “Kindred” is a reasonable, economic realization of Butler’s classic story grounded by Johnson’s naturalistic and potent performance, one whose strengths compensate for the strange lack of chemistry with Stock – who does a fine job, don’t get us wrong. But his is a performance that serves a theme better than his character fits with Johnson’s lead portrayal. They work well enough to keep the audience invested in their unexpected journey, even at its most harrowing, as well as buying our interest in the possibility of continuing beyond eight episodes. The season’s close doesn’t end Dana’s undaunted grappling with history, but at least she’s making an attempt to do so, which is more than can be said of most people.

All eight episodes of “Kindred” stream on FX on Hulu on Tuesday, Dec.13.

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Scientists uncovered the structure of the key protein for a future hepatitis C vaccine — here’s how

The hepatitis C virus, or HCV, causes a chronic liver infection that can lead to permanent liver scarring and, in dire cases, cancer. It affects around 71 million people worldwide and causes approximately 400,000 deaths each year. While treatments are available for HCV-related infections, they are expensive, hard to access and do not protect against reinfection. A vaccine that can help prevent HCV infection is a major unmet medical and public health need.

One major reason there hasn’t been an HCV vaccine yet is that scientists have yet to identify the proper antigen, or the part of the virus would trigger a protective immune response in the body.

Decades of research have pinpointed HCV E1E2, the only protein on the surface of the virus, as the most promising vaccine candidate. However, developing an HCV vaccine based on that protein is limited by uncertainty around what it looks like. Knowing the structure of the protein is necessary to figure out how the immune system responds to the virus.

So how do researchers capture the structure of single protein on a shape-shifting virus?

We are researchers who specialize in microscopy and vaccine design. With new technology, we were able to visualize the molecular details of this elusive protein, unlocking key insights into how this virus works and offering a potential blueprint for a future vaccine.

This is how we did it.

Challenges of capturing a shape-shifting virus

One reason it has been so difficult to capture the structure of the HCV E1E2 protein is that it is both flexible and fragile. It changes its shape so often and is so easily broken that it’s challenging to purify.

As an analogy, imagine a bowl of spaghetti drenched in tomato sauce. Now imagine trying to take a picture of each individual piece of spaghetti in the same position over time while the bowl is shaking. Hard to do, right? That’s what it was like to image the full E1E2 protein.

There were also technological barriers. Until recently, available imaging techniques were limited in their ability to view microscopic proteins. X-ray crystallography, for instance, is unable to capture molecules that frequently change and shape-shift, like HCV. Moreover, other options, such as nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, required cutting large parts of the protein or chemically manipulating it in a way that would transform its physiological state and potentially alter its function.

So to examine the structure of E1E2, we needed a way to extract and purify, stabilize and trap the entire shape-shifting protein into one configuration.

How to take a picture of protein

Cryo-EM, or cryo-electron microscopy, is a type of imaging technique that views specimens at cryogenic temperatures, in this case the boiling point of nitrogen: minus 320.8 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 196 Celsius). With temperatures that cold, ice freezes so quickly that it doesn’t have time to crystallize. That creates a beautiful glasslike frame around the protein of interest, allowing an unhindered view of every structural detail. Cryo-EM also requires very little protein to work, reducing the amount of material we would need to purify.

Winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize in chemistry and Nature magazine’s 2015 “Method of the Year” award, cryo-EM is superb for imaging biological macromolecules in their native, or natural, state in the aqueous environment of human blood. Cryo-EM was also pivotal for characterizing the structure of the COVID-19 virus and its variants.

Cryo-EM has allowed researchers to see complex proteins they weren’t able to before.

So how do you take a picture of a protein?

First, we embedded the genetic code to make E1E2 in human cells in a petri dish so we would have sufficient amounts of protein to study. After purifying the protein, we plunged it into liquid ethane followed by liquid nitrogen. Liquid ethane is used to freeze the protein because it has a higher boiling point than liquid nitrogen. This means it is able to capture more heat before turning to a gas, allowing the protein to freeze much more quickly than it would in liquid nitrogen and avoid structural damage.

Once the protein was vitrified, or in a glasslike ice state, we were able not just to see its overall structure, but also to capture multiple individual configurations of the protein that it takes when it shape-shifts, including its less stable forms.

At this point, our protein was ready for its close-up. We employed a microscope that uses a beam of focused, high energy electrons and a very fancy camera that detects how the elections bounce off the protein’s surface. This created a 2D image that we then mathematically transformed into a 3D model. And that was how we got the coveted “close-up” of HCV’s surface protein.

This video shows the newly identified 3D structure of the E1E2 protein on the surface of the hepatitis C virus. The two main subunits of the protein are colored in pink and blue. Sugar molecules are colored in green.

Our next step was then to assess the location of each amino acid, or building block of the protein, in 3D space. Because every amino acid has a unique shape, we used a computer program that could identify each one in our 3D map. This allowed us to manually reconstruct a high-resolution model of the protein, one building block at a time.

A new tool to design an HCV vaccine

Our 3D map and model of the HCV E1E2 protein supports previous research describing its structure while providing new insights into features that will help pave the way for a long-sought vaccine design against this virus.

For example, our structure reveals that the interface between the two main parts of the protein is stabilized by sugars and hydrophobic patches, or areas that push out water molecules. This creates sticky binding hubs along the protein and keeps it from falling apart — a potential site for protective antibodies and new drugs to target.

Researchers now have the tools to design antiviral drugs and vaccines against HCV infection.

Lisa Eshun-Wilson, Postdoctoral Scholar in Molecular and Cell Biology, The Scripps Research Institute and Alba Torrents de la Peña, Postdoctoral Fellow in Integrative Structural and Computational Biology, The Scripps Research Institute

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

Law professors raise ethics concerns as Kavanaugh parties with Republicans at “worst possible time”

Legal scholars raised concerns about the judicial code of ethics after a report from Politico that revealed Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh recently attended a private holiday party hosted by Conservative Political Action Coalition (CPAC) chairman Matt Schlapp.

Also in attendance at the party on Friday night was Stephen Miller, a top adviser to former president Donald Trump and head of the America First Legal Foundation, which has cases pending in court. 

Kavanaugh’s social appearances have raised questions about the code of ethics on the Supreme Court and have legal experts wondering: at what point does a justice’s personal relationships cross a professional line?

“Supreme Court justices should be extraordinarily careful in not only having no actual ethical difficulties but having no appearance of an ethical conundrum as well,” Emory University law professor Tonja Jacobi told Bloomberg Law. 

Jacobi added that the “legitimacy of the court at the moment is taking a severe beating,” which is in line with data that shows people are losing faith in the judicial branch. 

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Americans’ trust in the Supreme Court decreased by 20 percentage points in the past two years, according to a September poll from Gallup. Only 47 percent of US adults have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the judiciary, the poll found. 

Charles Geyh, a professor at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law, told Bloomberg that Kavanaugh’s attendance at a party with guests who “live, eat, and breathe conservative political action” is reflective of his insensitivity to Americans’ lack of trust, or his indifference to it. 

“This is the worst possible time for this,” Geyh explained. Supreme Court justices are not bound by the code of ethics for federal judges, but they do closely follow it, and the code dictates that judges should avoid impropriety, or even the appearance of it, in all circumstances. Geyh says that in the midst of the Supreme Court’s loss of public support and risk of de-legitimacy, Kavanaugh’s appearance was “at a minimum a poor idea and potentially a violation of judicial ethics.”

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The report came just a week after the House Judiciary Committee questioned Evangelical activist Rev. Robert Schenck who alleged that Justice Samuel Alito leaked the outcome of the Supreme Court’s 2014 decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores during a private dinner at the justice’s home. The decision allowed private companies to claim religious exemptions from a mandate in the Affordable Care Act that says corporations must cover birth control. 

Schenck’s claims, first reported in the New York Times, included stories that he recruited “stealth missionaries” for a project called Operation High Court which worked to strengthen the justices’ conservative views on issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage. He added that the vague ethics rules made it easy for him to form relationships with the justices, and that he achieved a rare level of access and intimacy with them. 

“In one instance, Justice [Clarence] Thomas commended me, saying something like, ‘Keep up what you’re doing; it’s making a difference,'” Schenck told the House Judiciary Committee.

In a Nov. 28 letter, Supreme Court Legal Counsel Ethan Torrey told Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., and Rep. Henry Johnson, D-Ga. that there was no evidence suggesting Alito violated ethics standards.

“Relevant rules balance preventing gifts that might undermine public confidence in the judiciary and allowing judges to maintain normal personal friendships,” Torrey told the lawmakers.

However, due to news of the leak and Kavanaugh’s recent party appearance, Democrats are investigating the links between conservative groups and the Supreme Court, and are trying to create an ethics code for the justices.

Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., addressed Schenck’s allegations in front of the House Judiciary Committee last Thursday and called for ethics reform. 

“While this breach of trust was undoubtedly a serious incident, made even more troubling in light of the leak of the Dobbs opinion earlier this year, it should not be the key takeaway from Rev. Schenck’s story,” Nadler said. “The moral of the story is this — Supreme Court justices can’t effectively self-police their own ethics. We shouldn’t expect them to.”

Reform advocates propose that justices must follow disclosure rules for gifts and that they should recuse themselves from cases that could impact their family or associates.

Legislative proposals from Democrats for a code of ethics in the Supreme Court have been unsuccessful thus far, and will likely be harder to pass with a newly divided Congress. 

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13 holiday classics turned into cookies

If you look forward to winter holiday desserts all year long, you’re not alone. I have sudden cravings for a cold glass of coquito in April, and sometimes think about a croquembouche festooned with drips of caramel in July. Now that it’s finally December, it’s time to dig into all those great seasonal goodies. But this year, we have a bit of a twist: Cookies Meet Classics, a baker’s dozen of your favorite holiday sweets as cookies.

We called up some of our favorite bakers, creators, recipe developers, and cookbook authors to shrink a banquet table of winter treats into a mailable cookie box. In other words, we cookie-fied the classics. That means that you can have the flavors of mulled wine in a two-bite snack, and a perfectly portioned Yule Log for one. These treats are ideal for sharing and dropping off at doorsteps, or just making into a festive platter for yourself. And if you have to dig out the recipes again in June, well, I’m not about to tattle on you.

1. Sufganiyot Cookies by Rebecca Firkser

Former Food52 editor Rebecca Firkser takes traditional Hanukkah doughnuts and turns them into soft, jammy cookies adjacent to thumbprints. “These pillowy sugar cookies are chewier than a snappy or crumbly shortbread cookie, thanks to brown sugar and egg yolks, and a hefty glug of olive oil makes them extra-tender, as well as calls back to sufganiyot’s fried origins,” Firkser writes. Fill them with strawberry or raspberry jam for a traditional version, or use any flavor of fruit preserve you prefer — no matter what, they’ll be delicious.

2. Coquito Cookies by Reina Gascon-Lopez

Coquito is a rum-based drink made with coconut and warming spices — and according to Reina Gascon-Lopez, it’s Puerto Rico’s “quintessential” holiday beverage. She writes: “Speaking from experience, my family always had coquito in the house during the cold winter months, sharing this rich and decadent coconut-based rum drink with friends, family, and neighbors alike.” Infused with coconut, cinnamon, nutmeg, and just a hint of rum, these coquito cookies get extra flair from a heap of toasted coconut on top of the glaze. Eat them with a cup of tea or coffee, or just dunk them in a punch glass of coquito if you want to be meta about it.

3. Black Cake Cookies by Jillian Atkinson

In the West Indies, Black Cake is a holiday staple, and here, Jillian Atkinson brings the flavor of that luscious cake into cookies packed with dried fruit and burnt sugar. “This recipe turns the dense, pudding-like cake into a crispy-edged cookie with a chewy pool in the center and delightful hints of nutmeg and cinnamon,” Atkinson writes. The cookies are a bit lighter on booze than Black Cake usually is, but they’re just as full of flavor.

4. Baesuk Thumbprint Cookies by Joy Cho

If you’re not familiar with baesuk, you should know that the term refers to two delicious Korean treats. One is a pear-based punch. In the other, whole pears are steamed or poached with spices.

“To mirror the flavors of the original dish, shortbread dough is spiced with cinnamon, ginger, and black pepper, and diced pears are cooked down with jarred honey jujube tea marmalade until they reduce together into a jammy compote,” developer Joy Cho explains. “The pear filling is spooned onto the grooved cookies after baking to better retain the shape of the centers, and a sprinkle of eye-catching pine nuts completes the look.”

5. Latke Cookies by Emma Laperruque

Latkes might not seem like the most promising candidates to turn into cookies, but leave it to Food52’s former food editor Emma Laperruque to work her magic and do just that. These cookies have only four ingredients, and are inspired both by latkes and coconut macaroons. She ditches the onion typically found in latkes and adds in a combination of sweetened condensed milk and butter. The result is a sweet-and-salty potato chip cookie that allows you to channel latke flavor without heating up a pan of oil.

6. Yule Log Cookies by Hetal Vasavada

A traditional Yule Log or buche de Noel is a wonderful centerpiece — but hard to fit into a cookie box. These Yule Log cookies look like miniature versions of the classic, right down to the chocolate swirl in the center. Break out your fanciest sprinkles to give them extra pizazz.

7. Strawberry and Pistachio Knafeh Cookie by Reem Kassis

“The Arabesque Table” author Reem Kassis takes knafeh, a sweet cheese and shredded phyllo treat widely enjoyed across the Middle East, and transforms them into these gorgeous holiday cookies, accented with crushed pistachios and floral orange-blossom- and rose-waters.

8. Espresso Martini Cookies by Reina Gascon-Lopez

A craze in the ’90s that has once again become the it drink, espresso martinis are everywhere, including in these boldly flavored cookies. Garnish them with flaky smoked salt or, if you’re feeling extra, give them a dip in white chocolate, sprinkle with chopped chocolate-covered espresso beans, and serve in a martini glass. Like its namesake cocktail, this cookie hits just the right balance of sweet and bitter notes — meaning it’s the perfect recipe for those who don’t have the biggest sweet tooth but still crave a holiday treat.

9. Fruitcake Cookies by Briana Riddock

Use whatever dried fruit you have on hand to make these glorious fruitcake cookies, a riff on the holiday classic that is as beloved as it is divisive. This recipe takes the best parts of a fruitcake — the combination of chopped, dried fruit and warming spices — but transforms it into a crispy-edged, chewy cookie. You can customize it to whatever your favorite fruit flavors are, but don’t skimp on the spices, which give the warming backbone to these sweets.

10. Rum Ball Cookies by Nik Sharma

If you love rum balls but want them to be more cookie-like — cookbook author Nik Sharma has you covered. He describes the flavor here as “boozy chocolate baklava sans the pastry,” and that’s exactly what they taste like. It doesn’t hurt that these cookies come together without the use of an oven or stove, making them the ultimate no-bake treat.

11. Pannetone Cookies by Grant Melton

Think of these as the slice-and-bake version of pannetone, just perfect for keeping in the fridge or freezer to bake off when loved ones arrive. “In true holiday spirit, I like to serve them with a nip of Amaretto,” Grant Melton, a former Food52 producer, writes. The shortbread base is also endlessly customizable: Melton puts a combination of golden raisins, dried cherries, and candied orange peel in his, but you could use dried pineapple, cranberries, or any other fruit instead.

12. Roasted Chestnut Cookie by Jillian Atkinson

You might know of roasted chestnuts primarily from Christmas carols, but these thumbprint cookies, which combine the nuttiness of chestnuts with fig jam, will convince you that they’re worth keeping around for more than just the novelty. This recipe employs the mild, starchy nut in two ways: First, chestnuts are pulsed into a meal and used to replace some of the flour, giving the cookies an ultra-tender texture. The rest coats the cookies’ exteriors, giving them a toasty, crunchy finish.

13. Mulled Wine Ka’ak by Reem Kassis

These cookies take the Palestinian tradition of making ka’ak and mamoul cookies and infuses them with the wintry flavors of mulled wine. Mulling spices can be found in many grocery stores this time of year, but, with a mix of ground cinnamon, cloves, allspice, and orange zest, you can just as easily make your own.

“I don’t like this”: RNC chief squirms after Fox host corners her on Trump’s midterm failure

Fox Business host Stuart Varney grilled Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel after she refused to blame former President Donald Trump for GOP losses in the 2022 midterms.

“Would you publicly say that Donald Trump bears any responsibility for some of the losses in the midterm elections?” Varney asked McDaniel amid efforts to replace her as chair.

“You know, I don’t like this,” McDaniel complained. “I don’t like these parceling out because he supported Ted Budd, who won. And he supported J.D. Vance, who won.”

The RNC chair attempted to deflect criticism of Trump by blaming Republican voters who split tickets to vote for some Democrats.

“But why are Republicans going and voting for one Republican and not the other?” she wondered.

“Trump,” Varney answered. “Isn’t that the answer to your question? You actually posed a question. The answer is Trump. Isn’t it?”

“I’m saying I’m not into the blame game right now,” McDaniel replied. “I think we’ve got to do an analysis. I think it’s too quick.”

Watch the video below from Fox Business.

What our love for widower rom-coms says about our flawed search for love

Are you a rich, handsome dad with dark brown hair? 

Did your late wife, whose existence proves that you’re not afraid of commitment, conveniently die just when you were approaching prime silver-fox age? 

Does the fact that you’re traumatized by her death explain why you’re such a Grinch and signal that you have a sensitive side, thus endearing you to viewers? 

If you answered yes to the questions above, then congratulations: You may be entitled to a princess. She’ll light up your life, raise your kids for you (because heaven knows you can’t do it yourself), and, for reasons that will become clear soon enough, you can kiss your curtains goodbye.

[The widower] and his quirky beloved enter each other’s lives conveniently, almost accidentally, without actively searching for romance.

You may be one of the following people: Captain Georg Von Trapp (Christopher Plummer) in “The Sound of Music,” Maxwell Sheffield (Charles Shaughnessy) in “The Nanny” or Robert Philip (Patrick Dempsey) in Disney’s “Enchanted.” These characters have all lost wives, either through death or, in Robert’s case, abandonment. The fact that they were married in the first place gives them a fundamental innocence. Their dark hair represents their seriousness and practicality, which later contrasts with the whimsy of the young women — Maria, Fran and Giselle — who end up winning them over. The fact that viewers cheer on and even idolize these relationships speaks to our deep societal discomfort around any situation where someone seeking love actually has to expose themselves as being capable of desire.

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Here’s what characterizes the romances of a heartthrob widower: He and his quirky beloved enter each other’s lives conveniently, almost accidentally, without actively searching for romance — a quest that would ruin their aura of innocence. The eccentric young woman brings new energy to the lives of the widower’s languishing children: Maria (Julie Andrews) teaches Captain Von Trapp’s kids to sing and dance, Fran (Fran Drescher) wins over Mr. Sheffield’s kids with her flashy sense of style and New York Jewish sense of humor, and the simple fact that Giselle (Amy Adams) is a real-life princess sends Robert’s daughter over the moon. 

And as go the children, so go their fathers, who start out as emotionally closed-off, jaded middle-aged men and then, thanks to the women who’ve fallen into their lives, blossom into people capable of enjoying the beauty and fun of everyday life. But it’s not only the men who change; in “Enchanted” and “The Sound of Music,” the women change, too. Love tames them, and as each movie goes on, they go from being utterly ridiculous to having only vague hints of a sense of wonder. Giselle starts straightening her hair.

The Sound of MusicJulie Andrews and Christopher Plummer are flanked on all sides by their children, all members of the singing Von Trapp family, in this publicity handout from the 1965 adaption of the Rogers and Hammerstein musical, The Sound of Music (Bettmann/Getty Images)

Part of what makes the widowers so appealing to viewers is their innocence and passivity. At the time “The Nanny” begins, for instance, Mr. Sheffield has gone on very few dates since his wife’s death. As the series progresses, he’s reluctant to pursue a relationship with Fran because he’s concerned for the children, who sometimes seem to have coped with their mother’s death better than he has. 

Mr. Sheffield’s timidity when it comes to relationships, and the extent to which his sexuality takes the back seat, makes him an almost blank slate onto whom Fran — and the viewers — can impose their own desires. He doesn’t want to kiss “Miss Fine,” but if she kisses him, he’s pleased. He doesn’t want her to act unprofessional, but when she does, he falls deeper into a love for her that he struggles to express. In real life, someone with these issues would likely never find love — neither would a person who expected this sort of behavior from potential partners.

And while pop culture’s favorite widowers, like Mr. Sheffield, may struggle to share their feelings with the object of their affections, they and their convenient love interests tend to fall for one another with unbelievable synchronicity — their feelings appear to progress at exactly the same rate. In real life, part of being a human being means navigating and trying to reconcile people’s differing but still valid desires. The stories of these happy widowers appear to ignore that fact. 

In “Enchanted,” the trope of the widower-dad combines with traditional representations of women in Disney princess movies — where love finds and saves them without their having to do anything at all — to build up to a climax of mutual passivity. 

Just as, in “Sleeping Beauty,” Aurora zonks out, only to be awoken by her knight-in-shining-armor, near the end of “Enchanted,” Giselle falls victim to an evil witch’s spell that conveniently puts her to sleep. When the clock strikes midnight, she’ll die — unless, Robert realizes, she gets “true love’s kiss. It’s the most powerful thing in the world.” After Giselle’s fiancé tries making out with her to no avail, proving that he’s not her “true love,” he encourages Robert to give it a try. Even Robert’s girlfriend yells at him to just do it already. He hesitates. “It’s not possible. Couldn’t be me,” he says, knowing full well it’s him.

Apparently, since Giselle and Robert are both in relationships with other people, the only way that they can have their “storybook ending” is if a literal evil witch provides the perfect excuse for them to avoid expressing their emotions in a healthy way.

Mr. Sheffield’s timidity when it comes to relationships, and the extent to which his sexuality takes the back seat, makes him an almost blank slate.

Passing out and hoping that a hot guy makes out with your unconscious body is, it’s safe to say, a pretty impractical way to find your true love. Yet, the only way Giselle and Robert can finally hook up without it being a bad look is if the circumstances surrounding their first kiss are non-consensual on both sides — one party asleep, the other party being yelled at to kiss the woman or else risk her death.

As audience members who love these characters for their purity, some of the clear toxicity of their relationship is on us. It’s hard to face the fact that in real life, there is no magical way to force together two people who are unwilling to state their feelings. And it’s worth wondering why we’re so passionate about love stories that play out so passively.

Would we still like Mr. Sheffield if, instead of using his children as an excuse to keep Fran at arm’s length for years, he boldly pursued the love for her that he so obviously felt? And would we forgive Maria if she weren’t a virginal wannabe nun — if, instead of looking embarrassed after she shares a romantic moment dancing with Captain Von Trapp, she actively courted him?

The similarities between “The Nanny” and “The Sound of Music” are intentional. According to Cheat Sheet, when Fran Drescher was pitching her show to the head of CBS, this was her logline: “Imagine ‘The Sound of Music,’ but instead of Julie Andrews, I come to the door.”

Throughout the series, “The Nanny” displays self-awareness by playing with this trope. In the pilot episode, for example, when Mr. Sheffield tells his son to give the new nanny candidate a chance, Fran says “Yeah, I haven’t even sung ‘Climb Ev’ry Mountain’ yet,” referring to a song from the movie.

What makes “The Nanny” unique is the breath of fresh air brought by curly-haired, mini-skirted Fran, with her yenta mother and her senile yet groovy Romanian immigrant grandmother. Whereas Maria is, to some degree, proper and ladylike in her focus on the children’s wellbeing, Fran is forward and intentional about reminding members of the Sheffield household of her desire for “a husband and a house in Great Neck.” To Fran’s credit, she constantly complains to Mr. Sheffield about his unwillingness to commit, and once he does, she keeps being her wacky self. But the premise of the romance remains fundamentally similar to the one in “The Sound of Music” — a traumatized widower falls in love with a stranger who just shows up at the door.

It’s worth wondering why we’re so passionate about love stories that play out so passively.

These three works are far from the only rom-coms where a woman falls into the arms of a sensitive widower. It’s become quite the rom-com subgenre (not to mention the festive iterations for Hallmark Channel-type movies).

In “The Holiday,” Jude Law’s widower is minding his own business when a house swap delivers Cameron Diaz to him, and his appeal only increases when he “confesses” that he can’t bring a woman into his daughters’ lives unless the relationship has a future. In “Sleepless in Seattle,” a child meddles in his widower-dad’s romantic life to literally force him to meet with a woman he shouldn’t have had to be forced to meet. And then there’s the very smart episode of “Sex and the City” where Charlotte picks up a widower at a cemetery, only to find by the end of the episode that the guy played up the traumatized-widower angle on purpose to get dates with multiple women.

Ultimately, it’s worth questioning why someone as magical as Giselle would fall for an embittered muggle like Richard in the first place, why Maria would be attracted to someone as mean as Captain Von Trapp, and why the lively and delightful Fran would be into an emotionally repressed man who never lets her meet the celebrities he works with (even though she would surely work her Flushing charm on them). 

Most of all, it’s worth asking: What does it say about us viewers that we fall for the bit? Instead of idolizing and aspiring to passivity, maybe we should accept that love sometimes means learning to be brave, say how we really feel, and accept that the response might not be the one we hoped for.

[CORRECTION: A previous version of this story incorrectly labeled Robert from “Enchanted” as a widower, although in fact his wife had abandoned him and his daughter. This has been clarified.]

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How Medicare Advantage plans dodged auditors and overcharged taxpayers by millions

In April 2016, government auditors asked a Blue Cross Medicare Advantage health plan in Minnesota to turn over medical records of patients treated by a podiatry practice whose owner had been indicted for fraud.

Medicare had paid the Blue Cross plan more than $20,000 to cover the care of 11 patients seen by Aggeus Healthcare, a chain of podiatry clinics, in 2011.

Blue Cross said it couldn’t locate any records to justify the payments because Aggeus shut down in the wake of the indictment, which included charges of falsifying patient medical files. So Blue Cross asked the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services for a “hardship” exemption to a strict requirement that health plans retain these files in the event of an audit.

CMS granted the request and auditors removed the 11 patients from a random sample of 201 Blue Cross plan members whose records were reviewed.

A review of 90 government audits, released exclusively to KHN in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, reveals that health insurers that issue Medicare Advantage plans have repeatedly tried to sidestep regulations requiring them to document medical conditions the government paid them to treat.

The audits, the most recent ones the agency has completed, sought to validate payments to Medicare Advantage health plans for 2011 through 2013.

As KHN reported late last month, auditors uncovered millions of dollars in improper payments — citing overcharges of more than $1,000 per patient a year on average — by nearly two dozen health plans.

The hardship requests, together with other documents obtained by KHN through the lawsuit, shed light on the secretive audit process that Medicare relies on to hold accountable the increasingly popular Medicare Advantage health plans — which are an alternative to original Medicare and primarily run by major insurance companies.

Reacting to the audit findings, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) called for “aggressive oversight” to recoup overcharges.

“CMS must aggressively use every tool at its disposal to ensure that it’s efficiently identifying Medicare Advantage fraud and working with the Justice Department to prosecute and recover improper payments,” Grassley said in a written statement to KHN.

Medicare reimburses Medicare Advantage plans using a complex formula called a risk score that computes higher rates for sicker patients and lower ones for healthier people.

But federal officials rarely demand documentation to verify that patients have these conditions, or that they are as serious as claimed. Only about 5% of Medicare Advantage plans are audited yearly.

When auditors came calling, the previously hidden CMS records show, they often found little or no support for diagnoses submitted by the Advantage plans, such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diabetes, or vascular disease. Though auditors look at the records of a relatively small sample of patients, they can extrapolate the error rate to the broad population of patients in the Medicare Advantage health plan and calculate millions of dollars in overpayments.

Overall, CMS auditors flagged diagnostic billing codes — which show what patients were treated for — as invalid more than 8,600 times. The audits covered records for 18,090 patients over the three-year period.

In many cases, auditors found that the medical credentials of the health care provider who made the diagnosis were unclear, the records provided were unacceptable, or the record lacked a signature as required. Other files bore the wrong patient’s name or were missing altogether.

The rates of billing codes rejected by auditors varied widely across the 90 audits. The rate of invalid codes topped 80% at Touchstone Health, a defunct New York HMO, according to CMS records. The company also was shown to have the highest average annual overcharges — $5,888 per patient billed to the government.

By contrast, seven health plans had fewer than 10% of their codes flagged.

Registering Excuses

One Medicare Advantage health plan submitted 57 hardship requests, more than any other insurer, though CMS approved only six. In three cases, the health plans said the records were destroyed in floods. Another cited a warehouse fire, and two said the records couldn’t be turned over because a doctor had been convicted for his role in illegally distributing millions of oxycodone pills through his network of pain clinics.

Other Medicare Advantage health plans argued they had no luck retrieving medical records from doctors who had moved, retired, died — and in some cases been arrested or lost their licenses for misconduct.

CMS found most excuses wanting, telling health plans they granted exceptions only in “truly extraordinary circumstances.” CMS said it receives about 100 of these requests for each year it audits and approves about 20% of them.

The Medicare Advantage plan issued by Minnesota Blue Cross won its appeal after it relied on Aggeus Healthcare for diagnoses of vascular disease for 11 of its patients who got podiatry care.

Dr. Yev Gray, a Chicago podiatrist who owned the Aggeus chain that operated in more than a dozen states, was indicted on federal fraud charges in Missouri in October 2015.

The indictment accused him of creating an electronic medical record that fraudulently added billing codes for treatment of medical conditions patients didn’t necessarily have, including vascular disease.

Gray pleaded guilty in May 2017 to charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States and making false statements related to health care matters. He was sentenced to 90 months in prison.

Blue Cross said it “terminated” its network agreements with Aggeus about two weeks after learning of the indictment. Jim McManus, director of public relations for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota, had no comment on the case but said the insurer “is committed to investigating credible cases of fraud, waste, and abuse.”

Dara Corrigan, a CMS deputy administrator, said that as a “general matter,” its Medicare Advantage audits “are not designed to detect fraud, nor are they intended to identify all improper diagnosis submissions.”

Protecting Taxpayers

The costs to taxpayers from improper payments have mushroomed over the past decade as more seniors pick Medicare Advantage plans. CMS has estimated the total overpayments to health plans for the 2011-2013 audits at $650 million, yet how much it will eventually claw back remains unclear.

Payment errors continue to be a drain on the government program. CMS has estimated net overpayments to Medicare Advantage plans triggered by unconfirmed medical diagnoses at $11.4 billion for 2022.

“This isn’t a partisan issue,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). “I’ve requested a plan from CMS as to how they plan to recoup these taxpayer-funded overpayments and prevent future overbilling.”

Leslie Gordon, an acting director of health care for the Government Accountability Office, said CMS needs to speed up the audit and appeals process to get quicker results.

“That is money that should be recovered,” Gordon told KHN.

As Medicare Advantage faces mounting criticism from government watchdogs and in Congress, the industry has tried to rally seniors to its side while disputing audit findings and research that asserts the program costs taxpayers more than it should.

AHIP, an insurance industry trade group, criticized KHN’s reporting on the newly released audits as “misleading,” while the pro-industry group Better Medicare Alliance said the audits were “in some cases, more than a decade old.”

Jeff De Los Reyes, a senior vice president at GHG Advisors health care consulting group, said he believes the health plans have improved their documentation in recent years. But, he said, “coding is never 100% perfect and there will be errors despite the best of intentions.”

Rep. Katie Porter, a Democrat from Southern California and a critic of Medicare Advantage, countered: “When big insurance bills taxpayers for care it never intends to deliver, it is stealing our tax dollars.”

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

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Biden tries to save Child Tax Credit by caving to Joe Manchin — but experts say it could backfire

In a last-ditch bid to revive the expanded Child Tax Credit in some form by year’s end, the White House has reportedly suggested to congressional Democrats that it is willing to accept a compromise deal that adds more stringent work requirements to the anti-poverty program—a reversal of President Joe Biden’s previous opposition to such restrictions and a move that some progressives condemned.

The Child Tax Credit (CTC) boost enacted in 2021 did not contain a work requirement, meaning the poorest families were eligible for the CTC for the first time. But the CTC enhancement, which brought about historic reductions in U.S. child poverty, expired at the end of last year due to the opposition of Republicans and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., who refused to support a renewal of the expanded CTC unless a “firm work requirement” was added.

At the end of 2021, the CTC reverted to its previous form, which essentially already contains a work requirement given that only families with at least $2,500 in yearly earned income are eligible for the credit—a regressive design that excludes the very poorest from benefits.

Biden publicly opposed Manchin’s 2021 push to add a work requirement to the boosted CTC, but Politico reported Monday that the White House has “privately signaled to Democrats that it would support a compromise deal to revive the expanded Child Tax Credit, even if it includes work requirements.”

Research indicates that work requirements do little to boost employment, the purported goal of those who support adding them to social programs. However, work requirements do often succeed at denying benefits to vulnerable people, including many who are eligible.

“The evidence shows the red tape associated with work requirements can cause people to lose access to vital supports, even when they are working or should be exempt,” Elaine Waxman and Heather Hahn of the Urban Institute observed last year. “Unfortunately, work requirements are not merely a mechanism for program integrity to prevent ineligible applicants from receiving services—they can also be an intentional mechanism to reduce program access for people who are eligible.”

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has estimated around 80% of the child poverty-reducing impact of the boosted CTC was attributable to the provision that made families with zero or very little earned income eligible for the full credit of up to $3,600 annually per child. That money was paid out in monthly sums, helping families afford food and other necessities amid the pandemic and resulting economic turmoil.

“Just a complete disconnect from the reality of who benefitted from this policy and why,” Rebekah Entralgo, managing editor of Inequality.org, tweeted in response to news of the Biden White House’s about-face on work requirements. “The expanded CTC lifted millions of children out of poverty precisely because it was fully available to families too poor to pay income taxes.”

Politico’s reporting came amid growing pessimism that congressional Democrats—who hold a slim majority in both chambers until next month—will be able to secure a tax-related deal with Republicans before the end of the year. Republicans have been pushing for a batch of corporate tax cuts, which Democrats have said they’re willing to entertain in exchange for a revival of the CTC enhancement, which the GOP has opposed.

“The package, which negotiators are hoping to slip into the omnibus, would be less substantial than the Child Tax Credit expansion Democrats passed in 2021, due to cost limitations and the need to win over 10 Senate Republicans,” Politico reported Monday. “Whereas that 2021 version boosted payments across the board, for example, this time the focus is more on expanding the percentage of recipients who qualify for the current $2,000 yearly maximum, according to those involved in the process.”

“The parents of roughly 19 million children don’t receive that full amount as of now, either because they earn too little or aren’t working at all,” the outlet added.

Murshed Zaheed, a progressive strategist, argued Monday that “reviving an anti-poverty measure… shouldn’t come at the expense of giving more corporate tax breaks and adding cruel work restrictions demanded by Manchin—especially after passing an $800B+ military bill.”

“This would be a shameful cave by Biden and Democrats,” Zaheed added.

“Desperate and delusional”: Legal experts rip Kari Lake’s “poorly written” election lawsuit

Failed Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake’s lawsuit seeking to overturn the 2022 midterm election will likely be thrown out due to the generic claims it makes, which are not supported by any evidence, legal experts say. 

Lake, who was endorsed by former President Donald Trump, lost by more than 17,000 votes to Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs. She filed the 70-page lawsuit in Maricopa County Superior court late last week, claiming that the election in the county was flawed by “intentional misconduct.” 

The suit also alleges the “hacking” of election equipment to disenfranchise Republican voters and the inclusion of “illegal ballots [that] infected the election.” Lake has demanded that the court either declares her the winner or invalidate the results of the election and conduct a new one.

The first hearing for Lake’s suit is set for Tuesday, but legal experts say that it should be swiftly dismissed as it fails to make specific claims. 

“It is poorly written, frankly,” Democratic election attorney Jim Barton told the Arizona Mirror. “It’s so long and meandering. I think the underlying claims are terrible and the lawsuit is terrible and it’s, frankly, embarrassing that this kind of thing can get filed.”

Related

Judge giving Kari Lake painful lesson that courts are “not a toy” for “partisan theatrics”: reporter

Barton, whose former clients have included candidates and ballot campaigns, said that Lake’s claims do not provide the level of specificity needed to file a lawsuit. He added that lawsuits challenging the results of elections must be “tightly created”, because “airing generic grievances does not work in this context.”

State law usually dictates that election challenges must be based on misconduct by election boards, ineligibility of a candidate, bribery or another offense, illegal votes, or an erroneous vote count.

This is in stark contrast to some of the generic claims Lake makes in her suit, which includes no actual evidence, but rather anecdotes of “chaos” at the Maricopa County polling locations on Election Day, the inclusion of “illegal ballots,” and supposedly “hacked” election equipment.

“I don’t think this case will go very far and will probably be dismissed pretty quickly,” University of Iowa Law professor Derek Muller said in an interview with the Mirror. “She lost by a significant margin. There are very few specific details. There are lots of details that are trying to relitigate the 2020 election.”

Muller added that he was “surprised” by just how much of Lake’s lawsuit regurgitated claims from the 2020 election challenges. “There’s just not a great path forward based on the speculative kinds of claims that are being made in this complaint,” he said.

Lake also asserts that some mail-in ballot signatures did not match the ones on file, but does not cite any evidence to back up the claim. The only example of a mismatched signature that she provided actually came from a 2020 ballot. 

“There’s no sign that the processes were not followed for how signature-matching is supposed to occur,” Muller explained. “It just sort of says the numbers look funny to them and, without more, that’s really hard to demonstrate.” 

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Usually, election suits show evidence of fraud and include testimony from witnesses who describe instances of voter intimidation or provide evidence of stolen ballots. However, Muller says that these are lacking from Lake’s complaint — instead, she focuses on the type of voting machines used and what ballot envelopes looked like.

Muller also believes that Lake’s legal team is not experienced when it comes to election disputes. Her lawyers include Scottsdale divorce attorney Bryan Blehm, who previously represented Cyber Ninjas in an “audit” of the 2020 election in Maricopa County, and D.C. corporate lawyer Kurt Olsen, who attempted to toss out the results of battleground states that Trump lost in 2020. 

The suit starts by citing polling numbers from Rasmussen Reports, which asked voters across the country if they agreed that the Maricopa County election was “botched.” Of those that responded to the poll, 72 percent of likely voters said they agreed with Lake, but her lawyers failed to understand that public opinion has no weight in a case like this. 

“The citation to polling numbers is bizarre,” Barton said. He said that the references to the polling data had more to do with publicity than the outcome of the suit, to which Muller agreed. 

“Some complaints are written to double as press releases,” Muller explained. “You will see complaints, with tone and rhetoric, that are designed to sort of gain public attention.” 

University of Texas Law professor Stephen Vladeck added in an email to the Mirror that Lake’s rhetorical posturing is similar to that of the election lawsuits in 2020. “Unfortunately, it’s become a common tactic among election deniers,” he said. “Fortunately, it hasn’t been a successful one. And I suspect Lake’s lawsuit is heading for a similar fate as all of the 2020 election cases — not succeeding.”

Former federal prosecutor and University of Baltimore law professor Kimberly Wehle also slammed Lake’s “garbage” lawsuit in an article published by The Bulwark, a conservative news outlet. 

“Kari Lake, the loser of the Arizona gubernatorial race, has filed suit in Arizona state court against Katie Hobbs, the governor-elect and current secretary of state, along with a slew of election officials, challenging the election outcome à la the Big Lie 2020,” Wehle writes. “Like Donald Trump before her, Lake is attempting to use the courts to create political soundbites to feed the base — despite an apparent absence of supportive facts or law.”

Wehle adds that Lake has yet to receive traction from the MAGA base, despite using Trump’s tactics from 2020. “Her legal case looks like a loser, too,” Wehle says. “We know this in part because Lake already tried a pre-election lawsuit, back in April.” 

In the April suit, Lake asked a federal court to require that Arizona only use paper ballots for the November election, alleging that electronic machines are more vulnerable to fraud due to hacking. 

“Trouble is, Arizona doesn’t even use the kind of touch-screen system her lawsuit sought to decommission,” Wehle explains. 

Wehle also pointed to how U.S. District Judge John Tuchi sanctioned Lake’s lawyers — including Alan Dershowitz — earlier this month for filing their claims without conducting “the factual and legal pre-filing inquiry that the circumstances of this case reasonably permitted and required.” 

Related

“False, misleading”: Judge sanctions Kari Lake lawyers for “baseless” election lawsuit

“What the likes of Trump and Lake understand — and what evades non-lawyers — is that litigants can file any sort of garbage to initiate a lawsuit,” she writes. “There’s no automatic gatekeeper at the courthouse door banning bogus cases that have no basis in fact or law.”

Arizona Republic columnist Laurie Roberts also examined Lake’s “desperate and delusional” suit in her Monday column, explaining that the claims were devoid of any substance.

“In a nutshell, her lawsuit is 70 pages of grievance and disbelief, sprinkled with frequent flights of fancy,” she writes. “A lot of woulda couldas about the many ways in which Hobbs and Maricopa County election officials stole Lake’s victory. The only thing missing is any actual evidence that they did.”

Like Muller, Roberts believes that Lake’s attorneys are inexperienced, and writes that the usual group of Republican attorneys that work on election disputes are notably absent from her team.

“It’s easy to spot their handiwork,” Roberts says of the work of Lake’s attorneys in the lawsuit, which includes conspiratorial language and implicates other Arizona Republicans.

“According to the lawsuit, [Governor elect Katie] Hobbs and Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer were part of a ‘secret censorship operation’ coordinated by the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency,” she writes, adding that Lake’s lawsuit is “destined” to fail.

Read more

about Kari Lake

Midwest soil is eroding faster than ever. Modern farming could be to blame

Midwest soil is eroding at an alarming rate according to new, first-of-its-kind research. 

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts found that the rate of soil erosion in the Midwestern US is 10 to 1,000 times greater than it was before modern agriculture practices reigned supreme across the region. The study found that before modern agriculture, the rate of soil erosion was vastly smaller than what is now deemed an acceptable amount of erosion by the United States Department of Agriculture, or USDA.

“The Midwest is losing soil, for most of these sites, about 100 times faster than it’s forming,” Isaac Larsen, a geoscience professor at the University of Massachusetts and a study co-author, told Grist.

Larsen, an Iowa native, said the loss of soil is a concern across the board, from the fragility of food production to concerns over groundwater pollution. He said the rich soil the Midwest is known for has been eroding and replaced with synthetic chemicals like fertilizers and pesticides. 

A different study, released earlier this year by Larsen, found that the Midwest lost roughly two millimeters of soil per year—which is double what the USDA deems acceptable—in the last 160 years. 

University of Massachusetts researchers found a method to get data on how much soil has been lost since before mass machinery and man disrupted the Earth’s surface. 

By studying the amount of beryllium-10, a rare element found in stardust that makes its way to the Earth’s surface after distant stars explode, scientists were able to find untouched Midwestern fields and prairies with rich amounts of space dust. When compared to fields used for corn and soybean production across the Midwest, which included sites in Iowa, Minnesota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas, the tilled fields had far less concentration of beryllium-10.

Larsen said the Midwest has lower, natural erosion rates compared to other regions, but agriculture has sped up these rates drastically. 

“If we can find ways to still have agriculture but with erosion rates that are comparable to these long term erosion rates, we’re able to sustain thick, organic, rich soil,” Larsen said.

The push for climate-smart agriculture and farming solutions has grown. Millions of dollars have poured in from private corporations and nonprofits in recent years and now the federal government is pushing for $20 billion for farmers to adopt “climate smart” practices. 

Generally, two methods seen to help protect soil health are cover crops, fusing vegetation not meant to be harvested in between harvested crops to protect the soil from erosion, and no-till farming, where growers try not to disturb the soil during planting and harvesting as much as possible, to ensure nutrients stay locked into the ground and erosion doesn’t occur.

Both of these methods are used in combination with changes to harvests, such as planting perennial crops, across the country as the nation’s agricultural industry adapts to a warming climate. While the effectiveness of popular methods like cover crops has been challenged, despite more and more Midwest farmers using them, agriculture advocates continue to push for more farmers to adopt less intrusive methods to stop erosion. 

Dr. Cathy Day, climate policy coordinator for National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, or NSAC, an advocacy organization, said climate adoption and soil health vary by region, from the growth of agroforestry to a push for no fertilizer, but across the board, more funding is needed for farmers to learn and adopt practices to prevent soil loss. She said federal legislation was at the top of her mind to help farmers and growers look to change their methods.

“We’re asking that they put a priority on soil health, and put a priority on climate mitigation and adaptation as well,” Day said.