Medical association banned Oz for two years over “shoddy study he was forced to withdraw”: report

Pennsylvania Senate hopeful Mehmet Oz was banned for two years from presenting research at the American Association for Thoracic Surgery conference after submitting a shoddy study that he ultimately was forced to withdraw.

The Washington Post reports that experts at the AATS raised “questions about the strength of the data used by Oz, a cardiothoracic surgeon, to reach an important medical conclusion” about undergoing a cardiac bypass with the aid of a heart-lung machine.

According to the Post, Oz based the conclusions of his research on a study that featured just 56 test subjects, which was far too low of a number to reach a definitive conclusion about such important research.

Bruce W. Lytle, an AATS official involved in the decision to ban Oz, said he made the decision based on “making it absolutely clear that the presentation should reflect the methodology as described in the abstract.”

Ivan Oransky, co-founder of Retraction Watch, told the Post that such bans on researchers are rare, particularly if they involve high-profile researchers such as Oz.

“It’s something they take very seriously and reserve for fairly significant issues, whether they’re behavioral or issues of scientific integrity,” Oransky said.

Texas Republican wrote a sequel to “Diary of Anne Frank” where she finds Jesus at Nazi camp: report

On Monday, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that Johnny Teague, the Republican running for Texas’ 7th Congressional District, wrote a novel in which he imagines that Anne Frank converted to Christianity and accepted Jesus Christ as her lord and savior in her final days.

Frank, a young Jewish girl whose diary detailed her attempts to hide from Nazi persecution in the run-up to the Holocaust, died in a German death camp in 1945.

“Johnny Teague, an evangelical pastor and business owner who won the district’s primary in March, in 2020 published ‘The Lost Diary of Anne Frank,’ a novel imagining the famous Jewish Holocaust victim’s final days in the Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps as she might have written them in her diary,” reported Andrew Lapin. “Published by Las Vegas-based publisher Histria Books, the speculative book attempts to faithfully extend the writing style of Frank’s ‘original’ diary entries into her experiences in the camps: it ‘picks up where her original journey left off,’ according to the promotional summary. Teague claims to have interviewed Holocaust survivors and visited the Anne Frank House, multiple concentration camps and the major Holocaust museums in Washington, D.C., and Israel as part of his research.”

“‘I would love to learn more about Jesus and all He faced in His dear life as a Jewish teacher,’ Teague’s Anne Frank character muses at one point, saying that her dad had tried to get her a copy of the New Testament. Anne’s father Otto Frank, who in real life did survive the Holocaust, seems to have been spared a tragic fate in Teague’s telling because of his interest in learning about Jesus,” said the report. “Later, Anne does learn about Jesus through other means, reciting Christian psalms and expressing sympathy for Jesus’ plight. By book’s end, Anne is firm in her belief that ‘every Jewish man or woman should ask’ questions like ‘Where is the Messiah? … Did He come already, and we didn’t recognize Him?'”

Teague — who also ran for Congress in 2020 — espouses Christian Nationalism heavily on his campaign website, claiming baselessly that U.S. law is derived from scripture. According to the report, an earlier version of his website even stated that fossil fuels were ordained by God.

Teague is challenging incumbent Democratic Rep. Lizzie Pannill Fletcher, who represents the western suburbs of Houston in Congress.

How a zombifying cat parasite called Toxoplasma gondii conquered the globe

Don’t freak out, but the human body — and probably your body — is swarming with tiny parasites. If we were to count every cell in your body, only about 43 percent would be human. The rest are bacteria, viruses, parasites and other single-celled organisms. Not all of them are bad guys — some can even be beneficial for your health. But one hitchhiking microbe called Toxoplasma gondii really gets around, with around one-third of the planet encountering this tiny pathogen in their lifetimes.

T. gondii isn’t a virus or a bacteria. It’s a protozoan, similar to the malaria parasite. In most people, T. gondii doesn’t cause any problems. However, in other mammals, especially rodents, it can change the behavior of its host, causing it to approach predators like cats. The felines appreciate an easy meal and the T. gondii appreciates being able to breed in the cats’ guts, spreading through its feces and repeating its life cycle. It’s a real world example of zombies, which is why this tiny bug has long fascinated people.

If toxoplasmosa gondii sounds familiar, that’s probably because you’ve seen it mentioned in wild headlines about cat owners being infected by their cats, and having their brains (possibly) altered by the parasite. Hence, toxoplasmosa gondii has been linked to psychosis, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder in humans.

But since toxoplasmosa gondii evolved to move between rats and cats, its neurological alterations are most prominent in those creatures.

“If you’re a rat, and you get infected with it, it makes it so that cat urine doesn’t smell bad. In fact, it smells good,” Athena Aktipis, an associate professor at Arizona State University’s department of psychology, told Salon in a recent interview. “It’s sexually arousing to the rodents, and makes them approach the territory of cats, which makes it much more likely that they’ll get consumed by the cat.”

Zombies abound in nature: Viruses and parasites can cause real-world zombification

Humans, especially those with pet kitties, are also susceptible to these infections, but in healthy people it’s usually not an issue. Those at greatest risk are pregnant people, unborn children and immunocompromised individuals, especially folks undergoing chemotherapy or with HIV.

Researchers at Stockholm University recently discovered how the parasite targets immune cells, hijacking their identity and using it to exist undercover. It’s perhaps the smallest example of a Trojan horse, but it can have big effects on its host.

“There’s been some work showing that there’s greater susceptibility to some mental disorders, especially if your mother was infected with it while you were in the womb,” Aktipis said. “There have also been a number of studies looking at changes in personality and behavior with Toxoplasma gondii infection. There’s some controversy around those, about whether the methods were sufficient to rule out alternative hypotheses. … It’s likely that it’s having some effect on humans, but I think that the research is still kind of early as to what exactly the nature is of those effects. Like, there’s no evidence that if you’re infected by Toxoplasma gondii, that makes you more likely to be a person with too many cats in your house.”

Now, scientists have uncovered the unique trick T. gondii uses that made it one of the most dominant lifeforms on earth. Researchers at Stockholm University recently discovered how the parasite targets immune cells, hijacking their identity and using it to exist undercover. It’s perhaps the smallest example of a Trojan horse, but it can have big effects on its host.

By understanding how T. gondii became so stealthy, we can exploit this relationship to develop new therapies. That’s potentially good news, because even though T. gondii infection — colloquially known as toxoplasmosis — is generally harmless, that isn’t always the case.

T. gondii uses a protein called GRA28 as a sort of disguise to “reprogram” the immune system and do its bidding.

“More than 40 million men, women, and children in the U.S. carry the Toxoplasma parasite, but very few have symptoms because the immune system usually keeps the parasite from causing illness,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which describes toxoplasmosis as a “neglected” parasitic infection because it has received little public health response. “However, women newly infected with Toxoplasma during or shortly before pregnancy and anyone with a compromised immune system should be aware that toxoplasmosis can have severe consequences.”

Such consequences include miscarriage, stillbirth or a baby born with abnormally enlarged or small heads. In some cases, it can cause severe eye infections that can lead to blindness if untreated. While humans can’t easily spread the parasite to each other, it can spread through cat feces, contaminated food and organ transplants.

So how does it get around our immune systems so well? New research in the journal Cell Host & Microbe elucidates this process, showing that T. gondii uses a protein called GRA28 as a sort of disguise to “reprogram” the immune system and do its bidding.

First, it encounters a phagocyte (a name which just means “cell eater”), a beneficial microbe like a white blood cell that protects the body from foreign invaders. The specific phagocyte T. gondii likes to attack is called a dendritic cell. T. gondii parasitizes the dendritic cell and tells it to migrate, hitching a ride on its back. In this way, T. gondii can spread throughout the body undetected, almost like getting its own police escort.

“It is astonishing that the parasite succeeds in hijacking the identity of the immune cells in such a clever way. We believe that the findings can explain why Toxoplasma spreads so efficiently in the body when it infects humans and animals,” Prof. Antonio Barragan, who led the study, said in a statement.

Other recent research published in the journal Nature Communications sequenced the genome of T. gondii and found that the domestication of cats and the globalization of trade both played a significant role in spreading this parasite around the globe. But we’re still only beginning to understand how T. gondii conquered the body. By taking a deeper look at how this stealthy protozoan travels through our anatomy, we can develop better tools at disrupting its devastating pathways.

about cats and parasites

Democrats passed a major climate bill. Why aren’t more political ads touting it?

In the weeks leading up to the midterm election on November 8, environmental groups have been trying to get the attention of the 2 million Americans who care about climate change but don’t usually vote. Their advertisements are appearing on Facebook feeds, popping up on Hulu, and getting delivered to mailboxes week after week. The main message? Your representative finally did something about climate change this year, so you should vote to keep them in office.

“It’s a real holy sh*t moment — in a good way,” says the narrator in an ad for Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat from Arizona. “Mark Kelly met the moment. Send him back.”

This summer, for the first time in history, Democrats managed to pass wide-reaching federal legislation to tackle climate change, putting $369 billion toward clean energy tax credits. Some think the measures in the bill could reduce emissions 40 percent below 2005 levels by the end of the decade. The League of Conservation Voters and Climate Power Action, two advocacy groups, have emphasized this point in their $15 million “Climate Voters Mobilization” campaign aimed at potential voters around the country, targeting tight races in Arizona, New Hampshire, Kansas, Georgia, Washington, and more than a dozen other states.

But in an election in which control of Congress is at stake, the Climate Voters Mobilization campaign is the exception. Most mainstream advertisements fail to mention anything about the overheating planet. The Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade and the threat to abortion rights has dominated Democrats’ messaging. Republicans, meanwhile, have emphasized rising inflation and crime. Some analyses of political campaigning don’t include climate change at all: In the Washington Post’s examination of more than 1,000 midterm ads since Labor Day, it didn’t even land in the 25 most common topics.

This is a reflection of polls showing that other hot-button issues are top of mind for Americans. But increasingly, climate change is making its way up their priority lists, potentially becoming a swayer of elections. This year, environmental groups are counting on climate voters being an important bloc.

“There are now a set of voters out there where climate is a ‘super-motivator’ for them,” said Pete Maysmith, senior vice president of campaigns at the League of Conservation Voters. “That’s the thing that is really going to help get them to the polls.”

If climate change is becoming such a big deal in elections, where are the rest of the ads touting the groundbreaking legislation that is the Inflation Reduction Act?

One explanation for the dearth of such messaging is that Americans think of climate action as something only a minority of people want, even if they themselves have been calling for such legislation for years. “There’s a misconception that it’s not as popular as it is,” said Heather Hargreaves, the director of Climate Power Action. A study published this summer found that people vastly underestimated public support for measures such as a carbon tax or a Green New Deal. Respondents imagined that a minority of people (37 to 43 percent) backed such measures, but real-life polling found that the vast majority (66 to 80 percent) actually supported them.

Politicians may be susceptible to the same misperceptions as the general public: Another study found that congressional staffers underestimated how many people in their districts wanted restrictions on carbon emissions. It only makes sense to campaign on climate action if you think your constituents care.

Part of the problem is that many people aren’t comfortable talking about climate change. There’s a phenomenon called the “spiral of silence” where people think they’re alone in their concern simply because they don’t hear others saying they’re concerned about it. On top of that, a tiny minority of climate deniers may carry outsized sway in people’s minds, simply because they do speak up.

Consider the growing threat of wildfires in the Western U.S. Many more acres burn compared to 30 years ago, partly because hotter and drier conditions have been spurring bigger, more severe, and longer-lasting fires. “People who don’t really want to grapple with climate change will say, ‘Well, there have always been fires, and there have always been big fires’ — and that’s true,'” said Peter Friederici, a communication professor at Northern Arizona University and the author of the new book Beyond Climate Breakdown: Envisioning New Stories of Radical Hope. “There have been all these ready-made counternarratives that are just sitting there, waiting for us, that encouraged us to think, ‘No, this is really not much of a problem.'”

Climate change can also take a backseat to other problems that appear more visible. For the most part, it doesn’t have “that visceral kick” that immigration, abortion, or the economy does, Friederici said. It’s not something people instinctively react to, like higher gas prices. For most of history, the climate was considered “a backdrop” for dramas with humans as the protagonists. It can be jarring when the background takes center stage.

The philosopher Timothy Morton has described climate change as a “hyperobject” — something so large that we can’t grasp it in an effective way. “It’s kind of everywhere and nowhere at the same time,” Friederici said. “But on some level, we know it’s everywhere, and it affects everything.”

Yet people talk about it, for the most part, like they talk about other issues: On the debate stage, the climate merits a quick question to candidates along with topics like the economy and public safety. “That’s where it becomes super politicized,” Friederici said. “‘Do you believe in it or not? Do you think we should get rid of all new fossil fuel exploration or not?’ And so it quickly turns into this political identity marker, rather than continuing to try to see the fullness of what climate change is, which is a really difficult thing to do.”

In previous elections, candidates who supported doing something about climate change sometimes saw their efforts used against them. Democrats are still “haunted” by the 2010 midterm elections, when two dozen members of the House of Representatives who had supported a cap-and-trade bill to limit greenhouse gas emissions were kicked out of their seats after a barrage of attack ads from conservatives.

But the calculus has changed. This election cycle, it’s hard to find Republican ads that skewer Democrats for supporting the Inflation Reduction Act, Hargreaves said. “We know that Republicans would be using that if they thought it was a working message, but it’s not.” In recent years, Republican strategists have worried that climate change could become an “electoral time bomb” because younger voters disapprove of the party’s stance.

For the 2020 election, the League of Conservation Voters ran a campaign to persuade undecided but climate-conscious swing voters to cast their ballots. The organization believes the effort resulted in a 5.6 percent increase in ballots cast for pro-environment candidates, which translates to nearly 90,000 votes.

Over the past decade, more and more people have come to name climate change as a top concern, according to polling by YouGov. In October 2012, only 3 percent of Americans considered it the most important issue facing the United States, compared to 10 percent today — tied with the number concerned about the economy, and beaten only by inflation. A poll conducted by the Washington Post and ABC News in September found that 51 percent of registered voters considered climate change very important, if not one of the most important issues, for their vote.

This rise in concern has coincided with the effects of a warming planet becoming more visible: monster storms, drought, and megafires that blanket parts of the country with smoke. Almost half of Americans now believe that global warming will harm them personally, according to data from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

With this in mind, environmental groups are taking a similar approach to 2020’s ad campaign this year. “We’re not trying to talk to everybody,” Hargreaves said. “We still think climate change messaging works with the vast majority of people, but it works best with a certain subset.” Young people and women are more likely to vote with global warming in mind, as are Black, Hispanic, and Asian Americans.

Aside from pointing out the success of the Inflation Reduction Act, the Climate Voters Mobilization’s ads highlighted the urgent need to address the devastation the climate crisis is causing as well as the need to modernize infrastructure to better handle extreme weather. These messages tested well in polling, Hargreaves said, increasing people’s enthusiasm to vote by 7 percent on average, and by 16 percent among Democrats.

“These are voters who we know are with us that are otherwise likely just to not show up,” said Maysmith of the League of Conservation Voters. “They’re likely to stay on the couch. And this is the issue that we have every reason to believe is going to get them off the couch and to the polling place.”

Doug Mastriano’s secret meme page filled with “xenophobic, transphobic, antisemitic” posts: report

In Pennsylvania’s gubernatorial race, the Democratic nominee, State Attorney General Josh Shapiro, and his supporters have run countless ads slamming GOP nominee Doug Mastriano as a dangerous, unhinged extremist. And it isn’t hard to do: Mastriano is a far-right conspiracy theorist who holds severe Christian nationalist views, embraces QAnon, believes that women who have abortions should face murder charges, falsely claims the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump, and associates with white nationalists and antisemites.

Mastriano’s willingness to associate with extremists has received a great deal of media scrutiny. But one association that hasn’t been reported until now is the Mastriano campaign’s connection to a fringe Facebook group called Mastriano’s Memes.

Journalist Roger Sollenberger, in an article published by the Daily Beast on November 1, reports, “Republican Pennsylvania governor candidate Doug Mastriano’s official campaign Facebook account is also helping with another group on the social media site: a Facebook group which has, for months, featured a stream of xenophobic, transphobic, and antisemitic memes. The campaign’s role in the public group — called ‘Mastriano Memes’ — has not been previously reported, but Mastriano’s official Facebook account was still an active administrator for the page as of Monday evening, (October 31).”

Sollenberger is the reporter who, in early October, broke the bombshell that MAGA Republican Herschel Walker — the U.S. Senate candidate and anti-abortion hardliner who is trying to unseat Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock in Georgia’s 2022 U.S. Senate race — impregnated a girlfriend back in 2009 and paid for her to have an abortion. Walker has vehemently denied that allegation, although the Beast has stood by Sollenberger’s reporting.

Sollenberger describes Mastriano’s Memes as “a firehose of right-wing online content.”

“Some of the most extreme content mocks trans people, fearmongers about migrants, and traffics in antisemitic tropes,” Sollenberger explains. “As an administrator, Mastriano — a state senator and dyed-in-the-wool election-denying conspiracy theorist — has control over what content stays up on the page. …. Recent posts make light of the would-be assassination attempt on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi this weekend, which left her 82-year-old husband with a skull fracture. One meme shared on (October 31) implies that President Joe Biden is a pedophile, and content…. likened abortion to a mother sacrificing her child to Satan…. The page also drifts into antisemitic territory.”

Sollenberger continues, “One post from September features an antisemitic trope depicting Democratic megadonor George Soros as a puppet master. And after Biden’s speech in Philadelphia that month, where the president called out the looming fascist threat posed by far-right Republicans, the page shared a photo of the event with swastikas superimposed over the background. Mastriano’s Democratic opponent, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, is Jewish.”

In Pennsylvania, a key swing state, Republicans and Democrats have been fighting it out in two major statewide races: the gubernatorial race, and a U.S. Senate race that finds Democratic Lt. Gov. John Fetterman up against Republican nominee Dr. Mehmet Oz. That race, according to some polls, appears to be much closer than the gubernatorial race.

Polls released in late October found Mastriano trailing Shapiro by 8 percent (Insider Advantage) or 9 percent (CBS News/YouGov). Shapiro was ahead by 23 percent in a Franklin and Marshall poll released on October 27.

Regardless of what the polls are saying, Shapiro’s campaign obviously isn’t leaving anything to chance — and Pennsylvanian residents are still being bombarded with anti-Mastriano ads attacking his extremist views.

Judge throws True the Vote election conspiracists behind bogus voter fraud claims in jail

Two leaders of True the Vote, which pushed conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, were jailed Monday for refusing to comply with a court order to provide information in a defamation lawsuit over their claims.

Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips were escorted out of the courtroom by Federal Marshals and were ordered to be held for at least one day or “until they fully comply with the Court’s Order,” U.S. District Judge Kenneth Hoyt wrote.

The two refused to release the name of a person of interest in the defamation and computer hacking case against them, who they claim is a confidential FBI informant, according to Votebeat Texas.

The Texas-based group is being sued by Michigan-based election management software company Konnech Inc. for claiming that Konnech and its founder, Eugene Yu, transferred sensitive poll worker information to China.

Konnech filed a federal lawsuit in September alleging that True the Vote’s viral social media campaign targeting Yu led to personal threats made against him and his family and damaged his company’s business.

Far-right “constitutional sheriffs” now turn to hunting “fraud” in midterm elections

The lawsuit accuses Engelbrecht and Phillips of “racism and xenophobia” by making “baseless claims” that “the Chinese Communist Party is somehow controlling U.S. elections through Konnech because its founder and some of its employees are of Chinese descent,” ABC News reported.

They also accused the founder of being a Chinese operative, but Yu immigrated to the United States decades ago and has lived in Michigan for more than 20 years, according to his attorneys.

Yu, whose company provides election software used to recruit and train poll workers, is separately facing felony charges of grand theft by embezzlement and conspiracy to commit a crime in California.

Los Angeles County prosecutors allege that Konnech violated its contract with the county by providing contractors in China, who helped fix Konnech software, access to election workers’ information that was supposed to be stored only in the United States, according to Votebeat.

Yu has filed a motion to dismiss the charges, arguing that even if the charges are true, they aren’t criminal. Los Angeles prosecutors have acknowledged receiving an early tip from Phillips.

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

The lawsuit also alleges True the Vote’s leaders illegally downloaded the personal data of 1.8 million U.S. poll workers from Konnech’s server. The company says all of its U.S. customer data is secured and stored on “protected computers within the United States.”

Hoyt issued a temporary restraining order last month, telling Engelbrecht and Phillips to return all data belonging to Konnech and provide the names of anyone who helped access it. But in a court hearing last week, Phillips declined to reveal the name of an analyst who reviewed the data.

Over the weekend, True the Vote published a post on Truth Social informing followers they expected to be jailed.

“Hi friends. Writing on the eve of what appears to be jail time,” the post said. “Still praying it doesn’t happen. But if it does, be assured we won’t be gone forever.”

True the Vote received millions in donations to investigate the 2020 election and also provided research for the widely discredited “2000 Mules” film that alleged widespread voter fraud in the last presidential election. Their claims of election fraud have been repeatedly debunked by election security experts.

about the GOP’s voter fraud crusade

John Roberts temporarily blocks release of Trump’s tax records to Congress

The United States Supreme Court on Tuesday temporarily stopped the Internal Revenue Service from handing over former President Donald Trump’s tax returns to a congressional committee.

Chief Justice John Roberts issued an interim stay of a ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit following an emergency request filed by the former president on Monday. Roberts ordered the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee, which is set to receive six years of tax returns for Trump and his companies, to respond to the former president’s emergency request by November 10.

According to SCOTUSblog:

The battle began in 2019, when the Ways and Means committee, led by Democrats, asked the IRS for tax returns associated with Trump and his businesses. A federal law, 26 U.S.C. § 6103(f), allows the committee to obtain “any return or return information” from the IRS, including tax returns for individual taxpayers.

When the Department of the Treasury under the Trump administration declined to turn over the returns, the committee sued. Before U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden ruled on the committee’s request, President Joe Biden was elected and took office in January 2021. That prompted the committee to renew its request, this time with more information about why it wanted the returns—specifically, as part of its consideration of legislation on how federal tax laws apply to a sitting president. This time, the Treasury Department said it would turn over the documents, leading the committee to seek to dismiss its lawsuit.

Trump then filed his own claims in a bid to block disclosure of his tax documents. After the full D.C. circuit court declined to reconsider a ruling against Trump, the former president turned to the Supreme Court, pointing to comments from congressional Democrats to argue that the committee’s motive is “exposing President Trump’s tax information to the public for the sake of exposure.”

Kari Lake blasted for “vile” joke about Pelosi attack — but it wasn’t even the worst part

Arizona GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake was on the receiving end of panel-wide condemnation on CNN on Tuesday morning after making a smirking joke about the violent hammer attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., at a campaign appearance.

While addressing a crowd in Scottsdale, Arizona, the controversial Republican quipped, “Nancy Pelosi, well, she’s got protection when she’s in D.C. — apparently her house doesn’t have a lot of protection,” which sparked laughter from the crowd.

After sharing a clip of Lake, CNN “This Morning” co-host Don Lemon began by calling it “vile” before CNN correspondent Audie Cornish took over.

“When it comes to Kari Like, to be honest, the thing that worries me most is the audience laughter. Not the comment. That’s on all of us,” she offered.

“The man sitting next to her, the moderator is just belly laughing because he thinks something like that is funny and the audience is laughing as well,” Lemon replied. “Here’s the thing: there have been some Republicans who have spoken out. [Senate Minority Leader] Mitch McConnell and others. [House Minority Leader Kevin] McCarthy, but for the most part, it’s been very muted, and there are people who are saying things, like Don Jr., tweeting stuff, don’t even put up the video of it. it is awful what they’re doing.”

“I think the issue is a constituency,” Cornish added. ” If there has been a radical shift in the base and what appeals to them, you’re going to see people basically playing to the crowd. There are votes for this support for this.”

“I think, in a way, they’re sort of feeding a beast,” she added.

Watch the video below or at this link.

“Carpetbagger from New Jersey”: Oz mocked for not knowing where Pennsylvania is on the map

Dr. Mehmet Oz, a U.S. Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, is being mocked for inaccurately claiming that the state of Pennsylvania borders the Atlantic Ocean.

On Monday, October 31, Oz appeared on Fox News with Sean Hannity where he discussed his electoral race against Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman (D) as they fight to replace Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa.

At one point during the discussion, he said, “Pennsylvania is too important. This is important, we do not have a Republican senator north of North Carolina on the Atlantic coast until you get to Maine if I don’t hold this seat. And there has been a Republican senator in Pennsylvania most of my life. I’m gonna keep one here as well.”

While Oz does have beachfront homes in Florida, Mediaite explains why his remarks on Pennsylvania are deeply inaccurate. “His Pennsylvania properties do not back up to Pennsylvania’s coastline because Pennsylvania has no coastline,” the news outlet notes.

“That did not stop Oz from pitching a very special message to voters Monday night,” Mediaite adds. “In essence, Oz asked them to make him the state’s next senator so the east coast can keep its Republican representation.”

Since Oz has been on the campaign trail, he’s defended himself amid accusations of him being a “carpetbagger from New Jersey who only registered to vote in the state in 2020,” the outlet reports.

Watch the video below or at this link.

Mehmet Oz: Pennsylvania, with its ‘Atlantic Coast,’ is crucial for Republicans this election. pic.twitter.com/wCLoQkz4gl

— Rob Tornoe (@RobTornoe) November 1, 2022

The time of day you eat your biggest meal has little effect on weight loss: study

Some of the most popular diet advice in recent years has centered around the idea that the right timing for your meals can make a big difference in the amount of weight you lose. It was long said that if you wanted to lose weight it was best to eat a large meal at the beginning of the day and keep any later meals smaller.

The logic behind this theory is understandable, especially given that almost every cell in the body follows the same 24-hour cycle that we do. Circadian clocks are found throughout the body and regulate the daily rhythms of most of our biological functions, including metabolism.

Because of these metabolic rhythms, scientists have proposed that the way in which we process meals varies at different times of the day. This field of research is called “chrono-nutrition“, and it has great potential for helping to improve people’s health.

Two studies from 2013 suggested that consuming more calories early in the day and fewer calories in the evening helps people lose weight. Yet a major new study has found that while the relative size of breakfast and dinner influences self-reported appetite, it has no effect on metabolism and weight loss.

To investigate the link between the size of breakfast and dinner and their effect on hunger, a team of researchers at the universities of Aberdeen and Surrey conducted a controlled study in healthy but overweight people. The participants were fed two diets, each for four weeks: a big breakfast and a small dinner, and a small breakfast with a big dinner. We kept lunches the same.

We provided all of the meals so we knew exactly how many calories study participants were consuming. We measured the participants’ metabolism, including monitoring how many calories they burned.

All study participants undertook both diet conditions so that the effect of meal patterns could be compared in the same people.

We predicted that a big breakfast and small dinner would increase calories burned and weight lost. Instead, the results of the experiment found no differences in body weight or any biological measures of energy usage between the two meal patterns.

Measures of energy usage included basal metabolic rate (how many calories your body uses at rest), physical activity and use of a chemical form of water that enables assessment of total daily energy use.

There were also no differences in daily levels of blood glucose, insulin or lipids. This is important because changes of these factors in the blood are associated with metabolic health.

Our findings are consistent with short-term (one to six days) meal-timing studies, where participants live in a laboratory respiratory chamber (a small, air-tight room equipped with basic comforts) for the duration of the experiment. Together, the research suggests that the way our bodies process calories in the morning versus the evening does not influence weight loss in the way that has been reported in other studies.

In our study, the only difference was a change in the self-reported feeling of hunger and related factors, such as the quantity of food they wanted to eat. Across the day, the meal pattern of big breakfast and small dinner caused participants to report less hunger throughout the day. This effect may be useful for people looking to lose weight, as it may help them better control their hunger and eat less.

As with all research, there were some limitations to our study. We only studied participants for four weeks for each meal pattern. Past research has shown the largest differences in the effects of early versus late energy intake after four weeks. However, the fact that neither calories eaten nor calories burned changed over four weeks shows that body weight is unlikely to have changed if the study was longer.

Participants in the study were also allowed to choose the exact time of each meal. Despite this, there was a negligible difference in timing in each meal pattern.

Chrono-nutrition remains an exciting research area, and there’s increasing evidence that meal timing can play an important role in improving the health of many people. However, our latest research indicates that the time of day you eat your biggest meal is not as important for weight loss as previously thought.

Jonathan Johnston, Professor of Chronobiology and Integrative Physiology, University of Surrey; Alex Johnstone, Personal Chair in Nutrition, The Rowett Institute, University of Aberdeen, and Peter Morgan, Chair professor, University of Aberdeen

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

Trump lawyers throw Allen Weisselberg under the bus as he prepares to spill the beans at trial

Lawyers for former President Donald Trump’s companies on Monday threw former longtime Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg under the bus during opening statements at a criminal trial over whether the company committed tax fraud.

Weisselberg and two of Trump’s companies were indicted in Manhattan last year after prosecutors said the company’s compensation to Weisselberg included perks like apartments, luxury cars and private school tuition for his grandchildren that were never reported on his taxes. Weisselberg in August pleaded guilty to 15 charges, including grand larceny, tax fraud and falsifying business records. He agreed to serve five months in prison, pay $1.9 million in back taxes and penalties and agreed to testify at the Trump Organization’s trial.

Prosecutors on Monday detailed his offenses and vowed that Weisselberg would give jurors the “inside story of how he conducted this tax scheme.”

“This case is about greed and cheating, cheating on taxes,” prosecutor Susan Hoffinger said in court, according to Politico. “The scheme was conducted, directed and authorized at the highest level of the accounting department.”

Lawyers representing two of Trump’s businesses at the trial, meanwhile, threw Weisselberg under the bus and suggested that Trump may be the real victim of the scheme.

“Weisselberg did it for Weisselberg,” Michael van der Veen, a lawyer for Trump’s payroll company, said in court.

“Devastating blow”: Weisselberg’s agreement to testify could mean “death penalty” for Trump Org.

Van der Veen argued that Weisselberg abused the Trump family’s trust after 50 years of working for the family.

“Given the decades he was there and the projects he worked on and that he was with this family when times were good and when times weren’t so good—he was trusted by everyone, he was trusted to protect this company,” he said, according to Mother Jones. “He was like family to the Trump family, and no employee was trusted more than he, but he made mistakes.”

He went on to claim that Trump only found out about Weisselberg’s efforts to avoid taxes when he was indicted.

“You were all here during jury selection and heard the D.A. repeatedly argue that Donald Trump was involved in or even knew what Allen Weissleberg was doing,” he claimed. “You will learn that Mr. Weisselberg hid what he was doing from the company and from the owners of the companies.”

But Weisselberg still remains on the company’s payroll, which van der Veen suggested was out of the goodness of the Trumps’ hearts.

“Since his crimes were discovered, he has been treated like a close family member who made serious and even criminal mistakes,” he said. “We all know the Bible story of the prodigal son—a man who put his own personal goals and desires ahead of his family’s—and when it all falls apart, he is taken back in by the same family and allowed to move forward.”

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Even though Trump signed the checks for things like private school tuition for Weisselberg’s grandchildren, it was only Weisselberg’s responsibility, he claimed.

“Allen Weisselberg has admitted to cheating on his taxes, his taxes!” van der Veen argued.

Susan Necheles, an attorney for the Trump Corporation, made a similar plea to jurors and argued that they should not let their opinion of the former president influence their verdict.

“You must not consider this case to be a referendum on President Trump or his politics,” she said. “It started and it ended with Allen Weisselberg. Allen Weisselberg did this.”

The two Trump companies are charged with nine felony counts, including criminal tax fraud, conspiracy and falsifying business records and could face a $1.6 million fine. Trump, his company and his three eldest children have also been accused of a decade-long tax fraud scheme by New York Attorney General Letitia James in a civil probe.

Trump himself has not been criminally charged in the Manhattan case but Hoffinger made clear that the alleged criminal conduct occurred between 2005 and 2017, when the companies were “owned by Donald Trump.”

“The evidence will show that when Donald Trump was elected president at the end of 2016, these companies finally had to clean up these fraudulent tax practices,” she said. “There was concern about extra scrutiny of these companies because of Donald Trump’s election.”

Hoffinger added that no one had more financial authority than Weisselberg “except for Donald Trump.”

about the Trump Organization legal battles

Disability activists say John Fetterman stroke controversy has veered into ableist territory

Ever since Democratic Pennsylvania Senate nominee John Fetterman suffered a stroke in May, his critics have relentlessly questioned his fitness for office. Fetterman himself acknowledged this during last week’s debate with Republican nominee Dr. Mehmet Oz, informing voters in advance that he “might miss some words” and “mush two words together” but that, despite being “knocked down” by the stroke, “I’m going to keep coming back up.”

Fetterman’s warning did not seem to change the conversation about whether his recent stroke should be relevant to his Senate campaign. The debate moderators repeated the controversial request that Fetterman release his medical records, and pollsters are either saying survey outcomes between Fetterman and Oz since the debate are either breathlessly close or suggest Oz has benefited from a slight bounce. The attacks on Fetterman are, stylistically, similar to the criticisms of President Joe Biden’s speaking style (he has a stutter and suffered two brain aneurysms in 1988). They are even reminiscent of how, more than a century ago, President Woodrow Wilson suffered a stroke so debilitating that his First Lady Edith Wilson had to help him run the country.

“Ableism exists in all corners of our society. People with disabilities are far too often judged because of their differences and underestimated for their abilities, which is why we see so few elected officials with disabilities.”

Regardless of one’s opinions on Fetterman’s politics, the state of his health is another question entirely. That is the opinion of disability activists, many of whom spoke to Salon about the way that Fetterman has been depicted in the media. The consensus among disability civil rights leaders is that Fetterman’s stroke, and his recovery, have lit up ableist assumptions that are normalized and under-discussed in our culture.

“This is a teachable moment,” Peter Berns, CEO of The Arc of the United States, told Salon by email. “People with disabilities are far too often judged because of their differences and underestimated for their abilities, which is why we see so few elected officials with disabilities.”

None of the disability rights leaders with whom Salon spoke denied that a stroke is impairing and often debilitating. Yet, as doctors and health experts have been quick to attest, a stroke does not automatically make one incapable of doing the same work as someone who did not have a stroke; it depends on the nature of the job and the specific details of the stroke in question. The American Stroke Association uses the acronym FAST to help people identify when they have had a stroke, or any condition in which the brain is damaged due to interruption in its blood supply: People should look for the Face drooping, Arm weakness and Speech issues before deciding that it’s Time to call 911. Strokes can cause long-term issues like difficulty speaking, confusion, issues with concentration and memory, and difficulty controlling motion in parts of your body. Stroke experts say that patients are more likely to recover if they have a good support network, access to quality resources and sought medical intervention early, all of which apply in Fetterman’s case.

Maria Town, President and CEO of the American Association of People with Disabilities, took Berns’ point one step further. After stating unequivocally that she does not believe Fetterman’s stroke renders him unfit for office, she questioned whether our culture’s very use of terms like “fitness” are inherently discriminatory.

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“It’s been said many times at this point that Fetterman’s stroke did not impact his cognition,” Town explained, referring among other things to reassurances from Fetterman’s doctor that he does not require work restrictions. “But even if it had, the fact of the matter is that people with cognitive disabilities should be able to run and serve in elected office. Instead of questioning whether or not John Fetterman is fit to serve, we should be questioning what we mean by ‘fitness for office.'”

Yet American culture has a curious attachment to the phrase “fit for office.” Many liberals questioned whether Trump was fit for office after he may have had a mini-stroke in 2020, though it was unclear whether he really did. California Senator Dianne Feinstein, who reportedly struggled recently with her memory, faced comparable questions for her fitness to serve. But often, less prominent candidates are deemed “unfit” because they have life experiences further outside of the norm of an upper-middle class D.C. politico — such as Chelsea Manning, the whistleblower who briefly mounted a campaign for a senate seat in Maryland in 2018; or former New York state governor David Paterson. Paterson, who is legally blind, was portrayed as incompetent and bumbling in a Saturday Night Live sketch.

“Determinations that people were ‘unfit for office’ have kept many people from marginalized communities from running for office,” Town noted.

“Unfortunately, a lot of people like to not disclose their disabilities because of the stigma. We have absolutely no idea if other candidates may already have a disability that they’re just choosing not to disclose.”

Eric Buehlmann, Deputy Executive Director for Public Policy at the National Disability Rights Network, told Salon that he sees ableism in the demands that Fetterman release his medical records. This demand treats Fetterman differently and worse as a stroke victim, Buehlmann noted, because other candidates are not asked to release their medical records.

“I don’t see a reason to treat people with disabilities different than people without disabilities,” Buehlmann explained. “Unfortunately, a lot of people like to not disclose their disabilities because of the stigma. We have absolutely no idea if other candidates may already have a disability that they’re just choosing not to disclose. Why are we going to say to one segment of society, ‘If you wanna participate, you have to disclose your disability?’ without saying that to everybody?”

Buehlmann knows what he is talking about when it comes to stroke recovery. While he was in his third year of law school and still working for the Senate, he suffered a stroke.

“This is not a medical diagnosis, but this is based on my experience and my recovery, and also my knowledge of the Senate,” Buehlmann told Salon. “As I’ve said before, and I’ve said to many people, I see nothing from my experiences in my recovery and my knowledge of the Senate that precludes [Fetterman] from being an effective senator. You do not need to be making split second decisions in the Senate and deciding if you’re gonna push the nuclear button or not.”

The underlying issue, Buehlmann said, is that our society has stigmas surrounding disabilities which it is unwilling to address.

“There are already enough problems and stigma and misconceptions around employing people with disabilities, and I think this just sort of fits into that mold,” Buehlmann said regarding the criticisms of Fetterman after his stroke. “I think it’s very similar to that. I think the misconceptions are that there are certain types of jobs that if you need accommodations, you’re therefore not capable of dong them.” He also explained that, unlike a broken leg or sprained ankle, stroke recovery “is an ongoing thing that over the next months, over the next year, he will continue to improve. As the brain heals itself and changes and you learn how to use your accommodations and learn to work with what you’ve got, then you continue to improve and you continue to get better.”

Town expressed concern that, if Fetterman does release his medical records, it would set a negative precedent for disabled people everywhere.

“I see nothing from my experiences in my recovery and my knowledge of the Senate that precludes [Fetterman] from being an effective senator.”

“I think the negative impacts of John Fetterman releasing his full medical records far outweigh any positives that might come from him doing so, and I worry about similar discriminatory standards that might be applied to other people with disabilities seeking accommodations in the workplace,” Town explained. “When asking for a job accommodation, people with disabilities are only required to disclose that they have a disability and that their disability impacts their work in specific ways. Documentation of the disability from a medical or rehabilitation is not always required, especially if the disability and the accommodation need are apparent. Job seekers and employees with disabilities are not required to disclose their full medical histories.”

Is it fair to question a presidential candidate’s mental fitness?

She added, “My concern is that the ableism John Fetterman is experiencing coupled with the continued calls for him to disclose more personal medical information than he already has will actually discourage other people with disabilities from disclosing their disabilities and seeking accommodations. Further, employers may feel emboldened to ask people with disabilities intrusive questions about their medical histories and personal health, creating conditions for hostile workplaces and discrimination.”

In Berns’ estimation, Fetterman’s disability could provide Americans with an object lesson in the fact that disabled individuals strengthen rather than weaken places where they work.

“The general public needs to understand that people with disabilities are capable of serving in any leadership role and that their perspectives make our country stronger,” Berns told Salon. “Disability is part of the human experience and accommodations should be accepted and integrated – without question or call-out – into all levels of our government and society.”

about ableism

The Pelosi attack was long foretold — and make no mistake, Republicans are thrilled

Words have consequences. For the last six years — if not the last two decades — the Republican Party, its media supporters and its core voters have almost literally painted a target on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s back. In this context, the heinous attack last Friday in which her husband was seriously injured by a home intruder — who has told police he intended to maim or torture Pelosi herself — should not surprise anyone.

Republican candidates, often armed with guns, have “hunted” Pelosi in campaign ads and “humorous” videos, and have made other none-too subtle threats against her.

The right-wing media echo chamber has made Pelosi into a larger-than-life villain and evildoer who must be removed from power, by any means necessary, in order to “save America.” The antisemitic QAnon conspiracy cult, with its deranged fantasies about Democrats and liberal celebrities who murder children and drink their blood, has also stoked hatred toward Pelosi.

Doomsday? Nearly half of “strong Republicans” believe it’s almost time for armed violence

In effect, there is an entire right-wing new propaganda machine feeding its consumers a fantastical narrative in which Pelosi is a starring villain — along with Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and other leading Democrats — and “patriotic” Americans face an existential struggle to save “their country” and its “traditional values” from socialism, wokeness, antifa, Black Lives Matter and so on.

Donald Trump, the leader of the Republican fascist movement, routinely incites or threatens violence — sometimes implicitly and sometimes directly — against Pelosi and other leading Democrats. As the Washington Post reported after the attack on Paul Pelosi:

For a wide swath of Republicans, Pelosi is Enemy No. 1 — a target of the collective rage, conspiratorial thinking and overt misogyny that have marked the party’s hard-right turn in recent years.

Among far-right extremist groups, the anti-Pelosi memes are often cruder and more violent, but the demonization of the Democratic House leader is no fringe phenomenon. Her face — sometimes adorned with devil’s horns or a swastika — was plastered on signs at all the national rallies that led up to the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol. Pelosi is such a frequent target that it’s common for right-wing pundits and protesters to refer to her only by her first name, as Jan. 6 insurrectionists did when roaming the halls of the Capitol searching for her while yelling: “Where are you, Nancy?”

Political violence trackers say the attack on Pelosi’s husband appears to be a high-profile version of the same threat that has simmered for months at the local level, with the targeting of election workers, librarians and school board members — virtually any public servant perceived as an obstacle to a hard-right agenda.

Among Republicans, Nancy Pelosi is one of the most hated people in American public life.

Polls and other research suggests that Trump followers and other Republicans have now embraced political violence — including the Jan. 6 attack, and potentially worse things than that — as an acceptable tactic for obtaining and keeping political power.

It is abundantly clear that on Jan. 6, many hundreds of Trump supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol had the intention of kidnapping or lynching Pelosi, as well as Vice President Pence, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and whoever else they deemed to be the “enemy.”

On Friday, we saw the consequence of all this when David DePape, a 42-year-old man with a recent history of pro-Trump and QAnon-related social media posts, allegedly broke into Pelosi’s San Francisco home and confronted Paul Pelosi, her husband. According to DePape’s own account, his goal was to torture and interrogate Nancy Pelosi, and then perhaps to maim or murder her.

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Nancy Pelosi was thousands of miles away in Washington, and ultimately DePape attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer, leaving him in critical condition with a fractured skull and other serious injuries. Paul Pelosi remains in a hospital in San Francisco. A federal affidavit released on Monday gave an account of what DePape has told police. The Los Angeles Times reports:

In a voluntary interview with San Francisco police after his arrest, DePape said he set out to hold Nancy Pelosi hostage and interrogate and torture her, according to the federal charges.

“If Nancy were to tell DePape the truth, he would let her go, and if she lied, he was going to break her kneecaps,” police said the suspect told them. DePape believed “that Nancy would not have told the truth,” according to a federal affidavit.

In the course of the interview, DePape said he considered Pelosi the “leader of the pack” of lies told by the Democratic Party. He later told investigators “that by breaking Nancy’s kneecaps, she would then have to be wheeled into Congress, which would show other members of Congress there were consequences to actions.”

DePape also said in the interview he wanted to use Nancy Pelosi to lure another individual to the San Francisco home.

DePape’s statements suggest a mentally vulnerable or unstable individual who has been indoctrinated and radicalized into violence and hatred by the right-wing propaganda machine.

The Washington Post reports that a “voluminous blog” apparently written by DePape was “filled with deeply racist and antisemitic writings — as well as pro-Trump and anti-Democratic posts.” As Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said in an MSNBC interview, this is not especially surprising: “There is absolutely no doubt that the data shows that the vast majority of incidents of domestic terror come from white nationalism. And that we are really, truly facing the environment of fascism.”

The rhetorical pivot almost universally adopted by Republicans — blaming the victim for their own suffering — is a standard propaganda tool of fascists and authoritarians. Joseph Goebbels would be duly impressed.

How did Republicans and the right-wing news media respond to the violent attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband? Largely with mockery and laughter, as well as invented scenarios in which the assault was a “false flag” or the result of an illicit sexual encounter. This attempted assassination has been repurposed by the right as another way to attack Pelosi and the Democrats as somehow responsible for acts of violence against them. This rhetorical pivot — blaming the victim for their own suffering — is a standard propaganda tool of fascists and other authoritarians. Joseph Goebbels would be duly impressed.

Meanwhile, much of the mainstream news media has defaulted to weak laments about how “political violence” and “polarization” are a serious problem in America on “both sides.” That framework deliberately refuses to name the Republican Party and the larger white right as being almost exclusively responsible for these serious acts of violence.

On Friday evening, hours after Paul Pelosi was brutalized in a politically motivated attack, Donald Trump sent out a fundraising email with the subject line, “The Left is coming after me like never before”:

The RAID on my Mar-a-Lago home was nothing more than unhinged POLITICAL PERSECUTION against ME, YOUR President.

For six straight years, I’ve been harassed, investigated, defamed, slandered, and persecuted like no one in American history — yet all I have ever wanted, and all we have ever fought for, is to simply MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. …

The people behind these savage witch hunts have no shame, no morals, no conscience, and absolutely no respect for the citizens of this country.

Everyone associated with this travesty will go down in history as scoundrels and arsonists who tried to demolish our justice system, shatter our most sacred traditions, and wipe out the very foundations of our democracy — for their own selfish partisan gain.

But no matter what our sick and deranged political establishment throws at me, no matter what they do to me, I will endure their torment and oppression, and I will do it willingly. They will NEVER get me to stop fighting for you, the American People.

How are these nonexistent existential threats from “arsonists” and “scoundrels” of the “deranged political establishment,” who are persecuting Trump “like no one in American history,” to be defeated? By any means necessary. Moreover, if Trump’s supporters resort to violence, it is understood to be defensive in nature and therefore justified. This logic, proposing a dangerous threat and the necessity of self-defense to legitimate pre-emptive violence, has been seen before — in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, for instance, as well as other societies that have succumbed to eliminationism and genocide.

For decades, Republicans, the “conservative” movement and the larger right wing have made no secret of what they intend to do in their revolutionary struggle against America’s multiracial, pluralistic democracy. For the most part, the Democrats, the media, the political class and too many members of the public chose to ignore those threats, or to convince themselves that all this was just “hyperbole” and overheated rhetoric. At this point, ignoring the right’s threats of violence can only be understood as a deliberate choice, or even a surrender.

What happened last Friday to Paul Pelosi was entirely predictable, as were the Capitol assault of Jan. 6, the kidnapping plot targeting Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, the violent rampage in Charlottesville in 2017 and the various mass shootings committed by Trumpists, white supremacists, antisemites, conspiracy-theory believers, and other right-wing extremists. We have been warned, repeatedly. Denial is unhealthy at any level: It is damaging to individuals in their personal lives, and has already done such severe damage to our democracy that it is likely past the point of recovery.

about the Pelosi attack and its aftermath

Elon Musk’s epic bumbling is a daily reminder that America is not a meritocracy

“He really is the living embodiment of the Dunning-Kruger effect,” a friend responded in a group text over the weekend. We had been sharing stories about the bouts of dumbassery on display, as Elon Musk starts his ill-advised reign of Twitter. And hoo boy, there was plenty to share. Did you see the one about Musk telling software engineers to print out 30 days of code, only to tell them to shred it when he likely realized this exposed how he doesn’t know what he’s doing? Or how he plans to take a bazooka to the content moderation team, even though doing so will likely send advertisers packing? Or how he thought carrying a sink around was a hilarious joke? Or how he tweeted an asinine conspiracy theory about the Paul Pelosi attack, only to delete it hours later?

None of this should be surprising. From day one, this entire saga has been a story of a man with far more money than brains. After all, this all started when Musk stupidly offered to buy Twitter at a price way over its valuation, for no other reason than a fit of trollish pique. It was only after he realized what a foolish idea it was to set $44 billion on fire that he started coming up with disingenuous excuses to escape the deal, only to discover that it was too late, legally, to back out.

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Yet, somehow, much of this still feels surprising. The idea that Musk is “smart” has persisted through years of very public evidence to the contrary. Even now, many of his critics offer pre-emptive caveats that they don’t think he’s stupid, before explaining why the latest of his endless string of idiotic choices is a bad one. This notion of Musk’s intelligence clings to the discourse around him for one simple reason: He is very, very rich.

Musk’s narcissism renders the diagnosis of his rational capacity terminal.

The myth of the American meritocracy is a stubborn one. Americans can’t help but believe that someone as rich as Musk must have something going on for him beyond dumb luck. To imagine otherwise is too unsettling. So many people block out what should be an obvious truth: You probably would have never heard of Elon Musk if he wasn’t a white man from a wealthy family that literally owned an emerald mine in South Africa.

To be fair, it’s entirely possible that, at one point, Musk wasn’t a total birdbrain. His resume suggests there was a time when he was relatively competent at computer science, though there’s no reason to think that such skills mean fluency in any other higher-functioning tasks. But regardless of what some IQ test from back in the day might have said about Musk, it’s clear that in the past couple of decades, his brain has turned to total mush.

The irony is that the very wealth and privilege that tricks people into thinking he must be a genius likely contributed to the current state of affairs. Being surrounded by nothing but flattery makes it hard to distinguish between thoughts you have that are smart and useful and thoughts you have (such as right-wing conspiracy theories) that are idiotic. Either way, the people in your life — and for Musk, his legions of fanboys on Twitter — are swooning over what a super genius you are. The lack of meaningful feedback would damage most people’s capacity for critical thinking. Musk’s narcissism renders the diagnosis of his rational capacity terminal.

Elon Musk uses Twitter to push Pelosi attack conspiracy theory that’s quickly debunked by police

One can only hope the daily updates on Musk’s antics will put some dent into the American myth of meritocracy. But then again, having to endure four years of a Donald Trump presidency didn’t seem to make much difference, even as he shared moments of Trumpian wisdom like telling people to inject bleach into their lungs to cure COVID-19 and trying to “correct” a weather map drawn by actual meteorologists because he felt it would better serve his ego for a hurricane to make landfall in Alabama. Trump was elected in no small part because he had convinced large numbers of Americans that he was a successful businessman and therefore smart. In reality, he was a historically terrible businessman whose wealth exists because other rich white guys spent decades bailing him out of his self-inflicted financial woes.

They want a system where white people can get twice as far while being half as talented.

The insidious nature of the meritocratic myth is on full display this week, as the Supreme Court heard arguments in a lawsuit over affirmative action at Harvard University. Unfortunately, polling shows that 63% of Americans oppose universities considering race in their admissions process, naively believing that ending affirmative action means some objective measure of “merit” will be used instead. In reality, the opposite is true: Far from being meritocratic institutions, Ivy League schools are largely devoted to elevating rich white kids at the expense of people who have more talent. As Mark Joseph Stern at Slate explains, “Harvard has a preference for four specific groups of applicants known as ALDC: athletes, legacies, those on the dean’s list (frequently because of family donations), and the children of faculty.” He continues:

In theory, ALDC preferences are colorblind. In practice, they operate as a massive affirmative action program for white applicants. Over a recent six-year period, 2,200 out of 4,993 admitted white students were ALDC—a figure significantly higher than the overall number of admitted students who are Black (1,392) and Hispanic (1,283). White ALDC students are not overrepresented because they happen to be more qualified; to the contrary, about three-fourths of them would have been rejected without the ALDC boost.

The existing race-based affirmative action program is mostly an attempt to make up for the diversity that is lost giving such a massive advantage to white applicants. And yet, somehow, you hear no complaints from most conservatives about the ALDC preferences. That’s because they don’t actually want a meritocracy. They want a system where white people can get twice as far while being half as talented. Or where the richest man in the world keeps getting called a genius, even as we can all see — if we’re willing to look — that he’s just another privilege-addled idiot who lost his capacity for critical thinking many billions of dollars ago.

about Elon Musk

Bolsonaro’s out: But now Lula faces a divided Brazil with a damaged economy

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has achieved a remarkable political comeback by regaining the presidency of Brazil. His narrow victory, in the second round runoff, was the closest margin of victory in an election since Brazil reverted to democracy in the late 1980s. The result was 50.9% for Lula and 49.1% for incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro — a difference of little more than 2 million votes out of almost 119 million valid votes cast.

Lula is now set for a third term, 12 years after ending his second term as an unusually popular president who achieved both economic growth and social inclusion between 2003 and 2010.

During the campaign the two contenders slugged it out over some familiar themes: Bolsonaro reminded voters of the corruption uncovered concerning several members of Lula’s administration. For his part, Lula criticised Bolsonaro for his poor handling of the COVID crisis, in which Brazil recorded the second-highest national death toll behind the United States.

A “Brazil of hope”: Leftist Lula narrowly defeats Bolsonaro in presidential election

But unlike in 2018, when Lula was ruled ineligible to run because of his 2017 conviction on corruption charges (since annulled) and Bolsonaro beat the inexperienced and relatively unknown Fernando Haddad, this was not an election in which corruption was a central issue.

Instead, the economy seemed to be the main concern of most voters. The core of Lula’s support is concentrated most heavily in Brazil’s impoverished northeast. Bolsonaro’s support is particularly strong within better-off households of the south, southeast and center-west.

Lula’s coalition of 10 parties was a broad coalition ranging from the left to the center-right. The campaign brought together two political forces that had been enemies in the 2000s: Lula’s Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, or PT) and politicians who had been or still were members of the center-right Social Democratic Party (Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira, or PSDB) and the Brazilian Democratic Movement (Movimento Democrático Brasileiro, or MDB).

Lula’s vice presidential running mate was Geraldo Alckmin, a conservative Catholic and former member of the PSDB. MDB member Simone Tebet, a presidential candidate in the first round, campaigned for Lula in the second round and will probably be offered a place in Lula’s cabinet.

One of the keys to the future Lula government is whether this coalition can stay together. It remained united during the campaign, when it had the shared goal of defeating Bolsonaro. Whether it will retain its unity in government is another question.

Fissures could appear when the administration has to make difficult choices about the management of the economy and the challenge of rebuilding state capacity in those areas most damaged by Bolsonaro’s administration. The damage is particularly evident in the environment, public health, education, human rights and foreign policy.

Bolsonaro backlash?

Bolsonaro has yet to make a pronouncement about the election result, either to concede or allege fraud. The coming days will offer a test of his character and the nature of the movement that brought him to the presidency.

That movement is sometimes characterized as a hard-right alliance of beef (agribusiness), Bible (evangelical Protestants) and bullets (parts of the police and military, as well as the newly enlarged ranks of gun owners).

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Bolsonaro could reprise what he said after the final debate (“Whoever has the most votes takes the election”) and concede defeat. But he could also emulate his hero and mentor Donald Trump and attempt to propagate a narrative about fraud, refuse to accept the legitimacy of Lula’s electoral victory and become the leader of a disloyal opposition to the new government.

Lula has defeated Bolsonaro, and the outgoing president will ultimately have to accept that. But his political movement, Bolsonarismo, isn’t going anywhere.

Under Brazilian law he has the right to contest the result by making a case to the supreme electoral court, as did the losing candidate in 2014, Aecio Neves of the PSDB. But he would have to submit compelling evidence. The result would probably be similar to the outcome after the 2014 election, when the court eventually ruled against Neves.

Lula reached out to the opposition in his acceptance speech on Sunday evening. He said something that Bolsonaro never said after his 2018 victory, nor at any time since: “I will govern for 215 million Brazilians, and not only those who voted for me.”

He also set out some of the goals of his future government. The most pressing are reducing hunger and poverty, accelerating economic growth and strengthening the industrial sector. Importantly, Lula also stressed the need to cooperate with international partners to slow down the rate of deforestation in the Amazon.

Challenges ahead

His government will have an uphill battle. Government coffers are emptier than they were when Lula was last president. Large increases in the minimum wage, which Lula appeared to commit to during the campaign, are likely to push up inflation, currently running at around 7%. Productivity remains stagnant and industry — which has shrunk as a share of the overall economy — is internationally uncompetitive in many sectors.

But Lula’s biggest challenge will probably be political. Bolsonaro may have lost the presidency, but many of his allies have won powerful political positions around the country. Five of Bolsonaro’s former ministers won places in the Senate, where Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party (PL) has the biggest bloc of seats. Three of Bolsonaro’s ex-cabinet members won places in the lower house of the national Congress, where the PL is also the largest party.

In the states, candidates aligned with Bolsonaro won 11 of 27 state governorships, while candidates aligned with Lula won only eight. More importantly, the three biggest and most important states in Brazil — Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro, and Sao Paulo – will be governed by pro-Bolsonaro governors from 2023.

Bolsonaro may be due to leave the presidency — but Bolsonarismo is not going anywhere.

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

about Brazil’s election

The latest on pay in America: For each $1 raise you got, executives got $500

Here’s the real news on your 2021 pay raise, thanks to exclusive reporting by DCReport.

The Executive Class received $500 for every dollar in raises you earned last year, my annual analysis of the latest official pay data shows.

If you worked full-time and made less than $250,000, your average pay increase last year was $1,600.

For the Executive Class paid $1 million or more, the average pay increase was $840,500—500 times as much.

Average pay increases for the 97.3% of full-time workers making under $250,000 fell far short of the 4.7% U.S inflation rate, rising just 2.7%. That means the vast majority of full-time workers lost almost $1,200 of buying power.

Meanwhile, Executive Class pay rose 40.7% in 2021, nearly nine times more than the inflation rate. And it wasn’t an isolated response to pandemic economics.

The number of Executive Class workers exploded in 2021, up from 184,631 in 2020. That’s a 29% growth in just one year for Executive Class employees compared to an overall growth rate in paid workers at any wage of 0.3%. In other words, the number of people in the Executive Class is growing more than 100 times faster than the overall pool of employees.

My analysis shows the Executive Class slowly pulling ahead over time. Then the Trump/Radical Republican tax “cuts” were enacted in December 2017.

I use scare quotes because there was no tax cut, only a deferral of unpaid taxes into the future. It was a classic Trumpian trick that only a few of the best journalists caught and reported as such.

Phony Tax Cuts

The seeming tax “cuts” were financed with borrowed money. That means interest is adding to the increased debt that financed the tax “cuts.” Republicans are citing that increased debt as a reason to demand cuts in spending, including phasing out Social Security and Medicare. That’s also a trick to expand the upward redistribution of income and wealth.

The Trump/Radical Republican scheme that slashed taxes paid by corporations is central to the rising pay of the Executive Class.

Corporate income tax revenue fell by one-third in 2018 when the law took effect. Trump and his allies promised the tax cut would result in new investment to create new jobs. Some of that happened, but much more significant was the use of tax “savings” for stock buybacks and huge paydays for the Executive Class.

The result is that pay for the Executive Class, which had been slowly taking a growing share of all American wages, salaries, and bonuses have taken off like a rocket, increasing much faster since the tax changes took effect than in the previous 16 years.

In 1991 the Executive Class—those making $1 million or more in inflation-adjusted dollars—got just 2% of all pay. By 2017, the last year before the Trump/Radical Republican tax law took effect, that share of all pay had grown to almost 4.7%.

Last year, just four years after the tax law changes, the Executive Class raked in 6.7% of all pay.

Growth Rate Triples

The awful truth is that the rate of growth in Executive Class pay tripled once the Trump/Radical Republican tax law took effect. It took 16 years to increase that group’s share of all pay by 2.7 percentage points but then just four years to increase by slightly more than 2 percentage points.

These numbers come from my analysis of the Social Security Wage Statistics report. Every year Social Security adds up every wage, salary, and bonus to the penny. This is the same data you get in your annual W-2 wage statement from your employer. And it is the same data that the Internal Revenue Service uses to verify what you put on your income tax return. There simply is no better source of pay data.

My analysis this year focuses on full-time workers, those making between $15,000 and $250,000. I then compared these nearly 119 million workers to the Executive Class, those paid $1 million or more.

Social Security breaks pay down into income categories or groups. I’ve been analyzing this report annually for more than a quarter century, documenting the flat to falling incomes of most workers while the Executive Class rolls in ever more dough.

This long-term trend of most people getting nowhere while those at the top grow much richer each year explains much of the venomous discontent infecting American politics.

The vast majority of Americans have no idea of this data or how government policies encourage more for the already rich because our major news organizations have, so far, largely ignored it. I retain hope that will change.

All that most American workers know is that they see on television more and more people who own many mansions and personal jumbo jets while they strain to make ends meet.

Threat to Democracy

Donald Trump and others who would end our democracy and impose a dictatorship exploit this understandable rage over economics without offering anything except to make things worse. That $500-to-$1 pay increase ratio will soar if we give up our democracy, as many tens of millions of Americans apparently are willing to do by supporting candidates who promise to stay in office regardless of what voters decide and, in some cases, to make Trump president for life.

Unless you read my reporting, you probably don’t know about how the Executive Class is sucking up so much of the increased pay in America. Even though the data is readily available, no one else in American journalism (or academia) takes the time to analyze this valuable source of data. That’s surprising because this is the most accurate and useful pay data in America.

Skeptical readers are invited to download the annual wage statistics, which go back to 1990, and test the accuracy of my reporting. Go to this web page and then adjust the year in the URL.

To be clear, what journalists from legitimate news organizations tell you is highly accurate. But it is also mostly based on what sources tell reporters, verbally or in press releases, and what critics say in response. I call that the “official version of events.” Solid, but superficial and limited in scope.

Many rich troves of highly revealing official government data never make the news because few journalists know where to find such data. I’m close to alone in sifting through such data and making it meaningful apart from TRAC, the clumsily named but highly valuable Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. TRAC is run by David Burnham, a former top New York Times reporter, and Susan Long, a business professor.

Average Is Misleading

To the extent that the annual Social Security report makes the news, all you are likely to hear about is the average wage.

In 2021 the average annual wage for all employees, from those who made just $1 to those making more than $100 million, was $58,129.99, up from $53,383.18 in 2020.

On the surface, that looks like a healthy increase of nearly 9%, roughly double the inflation rate.

But without analyzing the distribution of pay hikes, the average is misleading because pay at the top has no limit and that’s where the big raises are.

More than two-thirds of all people who earned a paycheck in 2021 made less than the average wage, Social Security noted. This number has been slowly rising for decades, a sign of top-end wage growth and stagnation below.

My analysis also shows that nearly all of the 2021 pay increases went to people up the income ladder, the one in eight employees making $100,000 or more.

Median Wage

One indicator of the way average pay distorts is shown by the median wage—half make more, half less. Economists consider the median a good indicator of typical pay.

Median pay last year was $37,586, up nearly $3,000 from 2020, when the median was $34,612.

But the median is also misleading because one in four workers made less than $15,000. They were all part-timers. We know that because the federal minimum wage is $7.25. If you worked 40 hours a week for all 52 weeks your gross pay would be $15,080.

Last year the 237,331 Executive Class employees made, on average, almost $2.8 million. Two decades earlier, the same group numbered just 55,823 and earned less than $2 million when measured in 2021 dollars.

Comparing Executive and Median Pay

In 2021, Executive Class average pay was $2,777,799, up 44% above inflation after two decades. In contrast, the median for all workers rose only about half that, 23% above inflation.

But keep in mind that most of the new Executive Class people were paid near the threshold of $1 million annual pay. That tends to hold down the average at the top.

To understand the explosive growth of Executive Class pay—that $500 to $1 pay increase ratio—we have to look at the highest paid of the Executive Class, including the hundreds of people whose average paycheck in 2021 was $151 million.

That will be explored in Part 2 of our series, while Part 3 will focus on the part-timers who make less than $15,000 annually.

How Google’s ad business funds disinformation around the world

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

Google is funneling revenue to some of the web’s most prolific purveyors of false information in Europe, Latin America and Africa, a ProPublica investigation has found.

The company has publicly committed to fighting disinformation around the world, but a ProPublica analysis, the first ever conducted at this scale, documented how Google’s sprawling automated digital ad operation placed ads from major brands on global websites that spread false claims on such topics as vaccines, COVID-19, climate change and elections.

In one instance, Google continued to place ads on a publication in Bosnia and Herzegovina for months after the U.S. government officially imposed sanctions on the site. Google stopped doing business with the site, which the U.S. Treasury Department described as the “personal media station” of a prominent Bosnian Serb separatist politician, only after being contacted by ProPublica.

Google ads are a major source of revenue for sites that spread election disinformation in Brazil, notably false claims about the integrity of the voting system that have been advanced by the incumbent president, Jair Bolsonaro. Voters in Brazil are going to the polls on Sunday with the outcome in doubt after Bolsonaro’s unexpectedly strong showing in the first round of voting.

The investigation also revealed that Google routinely places ads on sites pushing falsehoods about COVID-19 and climate change in French-, German- and Spanish-speaking countries.

The resulting ad revenue is potentially worth millions of dollars to the people and groups running these and other unreliable sites — while also making money for Google.

Platforms such as Facebook have faced stark criticism for failures to crack down on disinformation spread by people and governments on their platforms around the world. But Google hasn’t faced the same scrutiny for how its roughly $200 billion in annual ad sales provides essential funding for non-English-language websites that misinform and harm the public.

Google’s publicly announced policies bar the placement of ads on content that makes unreliable or harmful claims on a range of issues, including health, climate, elections and democracy. Yet the investigation found Google regularly places ads, including those from major brands, on articles that appear to violate its own policy.

ProPublica’s examination showed that ads from Google are more likely to appear on misleading articles and websites that are in languages other than English, and that Google profits from advertising that appears next to false stories on subjects not explicitly addressed in its policy, including crime, politics, and such conspiracy theories as chemtrails.

A former Google leader who worked on trust and safety issues acknowledged that the company focuses heavily on English-language enforcement and is weaker across other languages and smaller markets. They told ProPublica it’s because Google invests in oversight based on three key concerns.

“The number one is bad PR — they are very sensitive to that. The second one is trying to avoid regulatory scrutiny or potentially regulatory action that could impact their business. And number three is revenue,” said the former leader, who agreed to speak on the condition that their name not be used in order not to hurt their business and career prospects. “For all these three, English-speaking markets primarily have the biggest impact. And that’s why most of the efforts are going into those.”

ProPublica used data provided by fact-checking newsrooms, researchers and website monitoring organizations to scan more than 13,000 active article pages from thousands of websites in more than half a dozen languages to determine whether they were currently earning ad revenue with Google. (To read a detailed breakdown of how ProPublica obtained and analyzed the data, see this accompanying article.)

The analysis found that Google placed ads on 41% of roughly 800 active online articles rated by members of the Poynter Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network as publishing false claims about COVID-19. The company also served ads on 20% of articles about climate change that Science Feedback, an IFCN-accredited fact-checking organization, has rated false.

A number of Google ads viewed by ProPublica appeared on articles published months or years ago, suggesting that the company’s failure to block ads on content that appears to violate its rules is a long-standing and ongoing problem.

In one example, Google recently placed ads for clothing brand St. John on a two-year-old Serbian article falsely claiming that cat owners don’t catch COVID-19. Google placed an ad for the American Red Cross on a May 2021 article from a far-right German site that claimed COVID-19 is comparable in danger to the flu. An ad for luxury retailer Coach was recently attached to an April article in Serbian that repeated the false claim that the COVID-19 vaccines change people’s DNA.

Last August, the Greek edition of the Epoch Times, a far-right U.S. publication connected to the Falun Gong spiritual movement, published an article that falsely claimed the sun, and not increased levels of carbon dioxide, could be responsible for global warming. That story had multiple Google ads when ProPublica viewed it, even though it appears to clearly violate Google’s policy against climate disinformation.

A spokesperson for the Red Cross said its ad appeared on the far-right German site due to an automated placement it did not directly control.

“Please note that based upon our Fundamental Principles of impartiality and neutrality, the Red Cross does not take sides in issues of a political, racial, religious or ideological nature, so we would purposefully not advertise on a story or site such as the one you shared with us,” said a statement from the organization.

Coach and St. John did not respond to requests for comment.

Google’s policy is to remove ads from individual articles that violate its rules, and to take sitewide action if violations reach a specific undisclosed threshold. Google removed ads from at least 14 websites identified in the investigation after being contacted by ProPublica.

Google spokesperson Michael Aciman said the company has put more money into non-English-language enforcement and oversight, which has led to an increase in the number of ads blocked on pages that violate its rules. He declined to provide figures or to say how many people Google has working on non-English-language content and ad review.

“We’ve developed extensive measures to tackle misinformation on our platform, including policies that cover elections, COVID-19 and climate change, and work to enforce our policies in over 50 languages,” Aciman said. “In 2021, we removed ads from more than 1.7 billion publisher pages and 63,000 sites globally. We know that our work is not done, and we will continue to invest in our enforcement systems to better detect unreliable claims and protect users around the world.”

The data about ad removals comes from Google’s most recent Ads Safety report, which emphasized the removal of ads from more than half a million pages that violated policies against harmful claims about COVID-19 and false claims that could undermine elections. But Google does not release a list of pages or publishers it took action against, the countries and languages they operate in or other data related to its Ads Safety report.

Google has been vocal about its $300 million commitment, announced in 2018, to fight misinformation, support fact-checkers and “help journalism thrive in the digital age.” But the investigation shows that as one arm of Google helps support fact-checkers, its core ad business provides critical revenue that ensures the publication of falsehoods remains profitable.

Laura Zommer, the general director of the Argentina-based Chequeado, founded in 2010 as the first fact-checking organization in Latin America, said Google’s failure to invest in oversight of sites in languages other than English causes serious harm in emerging democracies.

“The problem is that disinformation that takes hold in less developed democracies can cause even more damage than the disinformation circulating in countries with more developed democracies,” said Zommer, who is also the co-founder of Factchequeado, an initiative to counter Spanish-language disinformation in the U.S.

In Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia, three Balkan countries where democracy is fragile, 26 of the 30 most prolific publishers of false and misleading claims in the region earn money from Google, according to data from local fact-checkers.

“If the world’s largest online advertising platform doesn’t care that it has made false information, hate speech and toxic propaganda profitable in societies like ours, and has no intention to do anything to change because it wouldn’t financially pay off, that is devastating,” said Tijana Cvjetićanin, a member of the editorial board of Bosnian fact-checking site Raskrinkavanje, which shared data with ProPublica.

A comparison with English-language outlets suggests Google is more rigorous in choosing its publisher partners in that language. ProPublica found Google placed ads on 13% of English-language websites that NewsGuard deemed unreliable for having repeatedly published false content or deceptive headlines and failing to meet transparency standards. In contrast, ProPublica’s analysis found anywhere from 30% to 90% of the sites most often flagged for false claims by fact-checkers in the non-English languages examined were monetizing with Google.

Along with unequal enforcement across languages, ProPublica found disparity across and within regions.

Africa Check shared a list of 68 active English-language URLs that had been fact- checked as false by teams in South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya since 2019, as well as 45 French-language articles that had been debunked by its French-language checkers. ProPublica’s analysis found that 57% of debunked English-language articles in Africa had ads from Google, while the percentage was higher, 66%, for French-language articles.

Alexandre Alaphilippe, executive director of the EU Disinfo Lab, a non-profit organization that researches disinformation, said Google should be required to equally enforce its policies across languages and regions and to be transparent about its oversight decisions.

“These companies have decided to go global in their services, and that was their own decision for growth and to make revenue,” he said. “It’s not possible to make this choice and not face the accountability needed to be in all of these countries at the same time.”

Google’s Global Ad Dominance

Google is the world’s biggest digital advertising business. Last year it generated a record $257 billion in revenue. Most of that money comes from companies paying to place ads on Google products such as search and YouTube. But in 2021 Google earned $31 billion by placing its customers’ ads on more than 2 million websites around the world. They’re part of what the company calls the Google Display Network.

These publishing partners range from major news outlets such as The New York Times to small sites run by individuals. In order to join the Google Display Network, a publisher must meet requirements that include publishing original content and adhering to policies against unreliable and harmful claims and sexually explicit content, among others. Once accepted, Google says, publishers in the network receive 68% of the money spent on each ad placed on their site.

Google’s ad systems are also used to place ads on websites that are not necessarily members of its Display Network. These publishers work with ad technology companies that have partnered with Google, and which use its technology to buy and sell ads. As with ads placed on sites in the Display Network, Google and the publisher both earn money.

Google places ads on publisher sites using an automated auction system called programmatic advertising. The process starts when a person visits a webpage or opens an app. As the page loads, the site or app owner collects information about the ad space available along with data about the user, which can include location, age range, browsing history and interests.

The data is sent to an ad exchange like the one operated by Google, where ad buyers — ranging from major brands like Spotify to smaller local businesses — can place a bid to show an ad to the specific user visiting the website or app. Bids are placed, or not, based on the user and publisher data shared with potential advertisers and the price an advertiser is willing to pay to reach that person.

In the blink of an eye, the top bidder wins the auction and the ad loads on the page. Money flows from the ad buyer to the ad exchange (and any other intermediaries involved in the transaction), eventually making its way to the website or app publisher.

In 2019, the Global Disinformation Index, a nonprofit that analyzes websites for false and misleading content, estimated that disinformation websites earned $250 million per year in revenue, of which Google was responsible for 40% and the rest came from other ad tech companies. NewsGuard, which employs human reviewers to evaluate and rate websites based on a set of criteria including accuracy, estimated in 2021 the annual ad revenue earned by sites spreading false or misleading claims is $2.6 billion. The report did not say how much of that Google might be responsible for.

How much of Google’s revenue comes from monetizing false and misleading content is difficult to estimate. Each of the billions of digital display ads placed every day by Google has a different price point that fluctuates based on the combination of advertiser, target website and the users the ad will be shown to. It’s all part of a complex, opaque and largely automated digital ad buying and selling process dominated by Google. This means advertisers have to rely in part on the mix of automation and human review Google uses to ensure its publisher partners don’t violate its rules.

The findings of fact-checkers could be used by Google to enforce its policy against placing ads next to content that makes unreliable and harmful claims. There are more than 350 fact-checking projects around the world that employ journalists, and in some cases scientists, to identify and investigate claims spreading on the web, on social media and in traditional media. Their articles and associated ratings are used by platforms including Meta to help enforce policies around false and harmful content. Google already highlights fact-checks in search and Google News results to direct people to trustworthy information. But the company does not use fact-checks to keep ads off of pages with unreliable or harmful claims. And unlike Meta and TikTok, it does not pay fact-checkers for the results of their research.

“When it comes to ads, they obviously monetize disinformation. Whether it’s without knowing or knowing, it doesn’t matter,” said Baybars Örsek, director of the International Fact-Checking Network. “There has never been a public announcement from Google’s side that has acknowledged fact-checking as a signal for their ads monetization business.”

Google’s Aciman declined to comment on Google’s relationship with fact-checkers.

Failed Enforcement in Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia

On Sept. 20, as he prepared to mobilize part of the country’s population to fight in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin met with Milorad Dodik, a member of Bosnia’s three-person presidency and Bosnian Serb separatist leader who has expressed strong support for the invasion.

The Putin meeting was a propaganda coup for Dodik. Even better for him, Google helped ensure it was lucrative.

After the meeting, the homepage of the Serbian media site ATV featured articles praising the meeting and quoting Dodik about plans for greater economic cooperation with Russia, while sowing doubt about genocide committed during the Bosnian war, a frequent Dodik talking point. A ProPublica reporter viewing those stories was served ads for Saks Fifth Avenue department store, New Balance shoes and eBay that were placed via Google’s ad systems. ProPublica also documented ads from brands such as Guess on false ATV articles claiming that Serbia had found a cure for COVID-19 and NATO was planning to deploy troops to Ukraine.

A Saks spokesperson said its ads were not supposed to have appeared on ATV, and that the company would block the site from future campaigns.

“It was not our intention to advertise on this site as it violates the brand safety guidelines we have in place with our ad partner,” said a statement from the company.

An eBay spokesperson also said its ad was not placed “intentionally” on ATV. Guess and New Balance did not respond to requests for comment.

Google is helping the site earn money by placing ads on false and divisive content in spite of the ATV website and its related TV station being sanctioned in January by the U.S. Treasury Department due to Dodik’s “corrupt activities and continued threats to the stability and territorial integrity” of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Dodik “exerts personal control over ATV,” approves content and corruptly funnels government contracts to the outlet, according to the Treasury Department’s sanctions announcement.

Google removed ads from the ATV website after being contacted by ProPublica, but declined to comment on its relationship with the site. “Google is committed to complying with all applicable sanctions,” Aciman said. ATV and representatives from Dodik’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

ATV is one of the 30 most frequent sources of false and misleading content published in the Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian language, according to data provided to ProPublica by Raskrinkavanje. Of the 30 sites most flagged by Raskrinkavanje for false claims, 26 made money with Google. The list included popular sites in the region, such as the websites of tabloid newspapers, as well as smaller operations that in some cases don’t disclose their owners or are run by fringe figures.

ProPublica also scanned close to 10,000 active articles that fact checkers in the three Balkan countries flagged for false claims since 2019. Just over 60% were earning money with Google. The articles included a range of falsehoods about national politics, the pandemic, vaccines, the war in Ukraine and other topics.

“It might just be a financial matter for Google, but for us it’s a corrosive influence on our already very fragile democracies,” Cvjetićanin said.

Dejan Petar Zlatanovic operates Srbin.info, a Serbian website that publishes pro-Kremlin propaganda copied from Russian state media, election conspiracies about the U.S. and anti-LGBTQ content. Its homepage features a prominent hyperlink directly to the official Kremlin website. Google ads abound there and on article pages.

Zlatanovic said in an email that Srbin.info earns between $5,000 and $7,000 per month, with Google ads providing a key portion of the revenue.

“The editorial policy of Srbin.info from the beginning was to offer relevant alternative news, not to brainwash people or to determine how they should live,” Zlatanovic wrote in Serbian. “All our lives we have lived in a communist and post-communist society based on single-mindedness and we got sick of single-mindedness.”

In April, Srbin.info published an article claiming that mRNA COVID-19 vaccines could change the genetic makeup of people and alter “human genetics forever.” The story cited debunked claims by an American doctor who falsely claimed children’s DNA could be altered by the vaccines.

Ads from Amazon Prime, BetMGM, Spotify, and StyleWe were shown to a ProPublica reporter who viewed the story. The companies did not respond to requests for comment. Google declined to comment on the Balkan sites and articles identified by ProPublica in the analysis.

Zlatanovic told ProPublica in an email that the vaccines article contained information he felt was “relevant for the public” because it came from a medical professional.

Google also placed ads on an article making a similar false claim when it spread across a set of sites in the region in late 2020, according to local fact-checkers. The false claim that mRNA vaccines can change “the genetic structure of a person” was reported by B92, which is among the 30 sites in the region most often flagged by fact-checkers. It eventually corrected its story, but has a history of publishing false claims and potentially harmful health content.

B92 has published articles claiming that baking soda can save your life; that watermelon can cure cancer but could be poisonous if the fruit is cracked (it later corrected this story); and that there’s a juice that can kill cancer cells in 42 days, to name some of the stories local fact-checkers have had to debunk. All had ads from Google when viewed by ProPublica, except for the cancer cure story, which was deleted by the site at some point after publication.

B92 did not respond to a request for comment.

The rampant anti-vaccine and COVID-19 disinformation appears to have contributed to low vaccination rates in the region. Just 25% of people are fully vaccinated in Bosnia, while 47% are vaccinated in Serbia and 55% in Croatia, among the lowest rates in Europe. A survey of unvaccinated Bosnians published in April by Raskrinkavanje’s parent company suggests conspiracy theories have taken hold among the population. Almost half of respondents agreed with the false claim that vaccines contain “dangerous nanoparticles,” and 38% believe the mRNA vaccines “alter DNA.”

Brazil’s Disinfo Boom

For at least four years, Brazilian president Bolsonaro has sowed doubt and spread disinformation about the country’s electoral process and the reliability of the country’s electronic voting system, leading to a 2021 Supreme Court investigation that documented his false claims.

Aiding his efforts are pro-Bolsonaro websites with big audiences — and a slew of ads courtesy of Google.

One of the largest is Terra Brasil Notícias, a two-year-old site run by a couple based in one of Brazil’s northeastern provinces. This summer, it published a story containing a clip from “Last Week Tonight” where host John Oliver explained the risks of electronic voting machines. The site used this to undermine confidence in Brazil’s electronic voting system. Brazil’s electronic voting machines do not use paper audits, but have repeatedly been proven secure, and there is no credible evidence of widespread voter fraud in the country.

On Oct. 2, the day Brazilians voted in the first round of the presidential elections, Terra Brasil Notícias was one of several pro-Bolsonaro websites threatened with a fine by the head of the country’s Superior Electoral Court for publishing a falsehood about Bolsonaro’s opponent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Terra Brasil Notícias and other sites spread the false claim that the leader of a criminal organization had said he’d vote for Lula.

Marie Santini, director of the Netlab at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, said the number of junk news and disinformation sites like Terra Brasil Notícias, as well as their audience, exploded in Brazil in part because Google ads make it easy for people to earn money from this type of content. She likened it to people who might drive for Uber to earn extra cash.

“You don’t need to make quality content or really work with journalists. You can copy things, you can use bots, you can recycle news, and you do it from your house and you receive some money,” she said. “It’s a way to make money for people that are without opportunity. But who is making money on a large scale? Of course, it’s the platform, Google.”

In response to the court’s finding, Terra Brasil Notícias took down the story that repeated the false claim about Lula. It also deleted its article about U.S. voting machines after Brazilian fact-checking organization Aos Fatos contacted the site last month. In an email, Aos Fatos listed eight recent articles from the site that it rated as false, and asked Terra Brasil Notícias to comment on its relationship with Google. In response, the site published the email from Aos Fatos and defended the articles. It later deleted all of them. As of this writing, it still earns money with Google.

Terra Brasil Notícias did not respond to requests for comment. Google declined to comment.

Santini’s Netlab team monitors thousands of right-wing and left-wing messaging groups and websites. They shared a list of 262 active Portuguese-language websites in Brazil that circulated in messaging groups and were labeled by researchers as publishing false or misleading information. ProPublica found that 46% of the more than 250 sites flagged for disinformation earn money with Google. When that list was compressed to the 30 most shared sites in WhatsApp and Telegram groups, ProPublica found that 80% of them earn money with ads placed via Google.

“This ecosystem of sites is very important for politics in Brazil,” said Santini. “They are very powerful because people consume this thinking that it’s journalism, but it’s only propaganda. And it’s paid by Google ads.”

Ads are also funding COVID-19 disinformation in Brazil. Google placed ads on a false October 2021 story from Stylo Urbano that claimed people could develop AIDS as the result of COVID-19 vaccinations; a false December 2020 story on the same site claiming that COVID-19 PCR tests have a 97% false positive rate; and a false February 2021 article on the site that said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “deliberately violated several federal laws” by inflating the number of deaths due to COVID-19.

After being contacted by ProPublica, Google removed its ads from the site. Stylo Urbano did not respond to a request for comment.

Brazil is one of several countries in Latin America where false claims are funded by Google ads. A coalition of fact-checking organizations in Latin America provided ProPublica with a list of websites they said are frequent sources of false and misleading claims. Of the 49 active sites on the list, 19 (or 39%) currently earn money with Google.

The coalition was led by Chequeado, the Argentinian nonprofit fact-checking organization. Zommer, its founder, said Chequeado has received support from Google over the years in the form of grants and training. But it and other platforms’ ongoing failure to enforce their policies in Spanish and other languages outside of English make their work more difficult, according to her.

“The fight against disinformation is unequal, as is the world,” Zommer said.

An Anonymous Network in Spain

Google’s enforcement failures in Spanish, a language spoken by roughly 550 million people, extend beyond Latin America.

On Sept. 22, the site Euskal News, based in the autonomous Basque region of Spain, published an article that suggested excess deaths in the Netherlands and other countries were the result of COVID-19 vaccines. The article, which was reprinted from another site, said the vaccines are possibly “causing deaths in a figure well above the average. The failure could not be more resounding.”

There is no evidence to support claims that COVID-19 vaccines are causing excess mortality. But the story is standard fare for Euskal News, a Google publishing partner that mixes anti-immigrant content and vaccine disinformation with warnings of an impending globalist and EU takeover.

Google placed ads on a May 6 article that falsely linked the presence of microplastic fibers in people’s lungs to mask wearing, even though the study in question was conducted pre-pandemic. Google also placed ads on a page on the site that falsely says Pfizer’s vaccine resulted in thousands of adverse effects. That claim, and the internal Pfizer documents it’s based on, has repeatedly been debunked by fact-checkers. Though it placed ads on that article, Google blocked them from another on the same site that falsely claims the Pfizer vaccine had 160,000 adverse effects.

ProPublica documented additional pages on Euskal News with vaccine disinformation where Google appears to have blocked ads. Google declined to say how many pages it blocks before examining its overall relationship with a site, but it did remove ads from the site after being contacted by ProPublica.

Euskal News, launched in the spring of 2019, does not list an owner, and its articles do not have bylines. However, research by a Spanish digital security and investigations firm identified connections between the site and a far-right Basque politician named David Pasarin-Gegunde. In a 2020 interview, he declined to say who runs Euskal News but said it’s a person from his “ideological environment.” The site lists its webmaster as Eneko Eastresana, but he and Pasarin-Gegunde did not respond to requests for comment.

Euskal News was one of 32 active Spanish sites flagged by the Brussels-based EU DisinfoLab as frequent sources of false and misleading claims. ProPublica found that 14 of the sites, or 44%, earn money with Google.

Alaphilippe, who runs the DisinfoLab, said the sites on the list “regularly publish misleading, deceptive or incorrect information and often lack credible or transparent sources.”

Google declined to comment on the Spanish sites and articles identified in ProPublica’s analysis.

Media Capture and False Content in Turkey

Over the past two decades, Turkey’s media environment has transformed dramatically.

National newspapers and TV stations have been taken over by people aligned with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, leading Reporters Without Borders to assess that 90% of Turkey’s national media is under government control. The outlets adhere to “a tight chain of command of government-approved headlines, front pages and topics of TV debate,” according to a recent Reuters investigation.

One byproduct of Turkey’s increasingly authoritarian information environment — RSF says there are currently nine journalists in jail in the country — is that once-reliable publications publish false articles about politics, the pandemic and a range of clickbait meant to attract and earn money from traffic coming via Google search, according to Emre Kızılkaya, chair of the International Press Institute’s National Committee in Turkey. He cited a study he produced for IPI revealing how Google search rewards pro-government outlets and the at times false information they publish.

“President Tayyip Erdoğan and his cronies used multiple tactics for media capture in the past two decades, enabling them to control most of the largest news outlets today. These outlets owe most of their digital traffic — and revenue — to Google Search,” Kızılkaya, who also edits a nonprofit news site that reports on Turkish media, told ProPublica.

ProPublica analyzed over 1,000 articles rated false by Turkish fact-checking operation Teyit since 2019, and found that 73% are earning money from Google ads. Of the 50 outlets contained in that data that were most frequently flagged by fact-checkers, 45 earn money with Google. That’s the highest of any country analyzed in the investigation.

“In Turkey, disinformation pays and propaganda works. Google is still a part of this problem, despite its promises to help solve it,” Kızılkaya said. “The ProPublica data confirm the findings in our recent studies that demonstrated Google’s algorithmic bias towards Turkey’s pro-government media outlets at the expense of endangering fragile communities here.”

Google declined to comment on its search and ad efforts in Turkey.

Monetizing the German Far Right

In Germany, the right-wing, anti-immigration website Freie Welt is run by the husband of Beatrix von Storch, the former deputy leader of Germany’s major far-right AfD party.

One of the website’s articles, which had Google ads on it, falsely argues that the shortage of wheat in Ukraine was a result of U.S. companies buying one-third of Ukrainian land suitable for cultivation. Another article with ads claimed that 44% of pregnant women in Pfizer’s vaccine trial miscarried, a lie that has been debunked by fact-checkers.

Freie Welt is one of 30 German-language sites the EU DisinfoLab identified as consistent sources of false and misleading content. A third of them earn money with Google.

The list includes Journalistenwatch, a leading platform of the “Neue Rechte,” a far-right political movement in Germany. Google placed an ad from the American Red Cross on an article falsely claiming that COVID-19 is like the flu. Another article falsely linking the decline in the birth rate in Germany to COVID-19 vaccines also earned money from Google.

Journalistenwatch and Freie Welt did not respond to requests for comment.

Some of the German-language sites identified by the EU DisinfoLab are based in neighboring Austria and Switzerland. One is Report24, an Austrian website that regularly spreads false information about COVID-19 measures and vaccination, according to fact-checkers. A ProPublica reporter was shown an ad for Hydeline, an American furniture retailer, on an article from June 2021 that falsely claims that the World Health Organization advises against children and teenagers getting COVID-19 vaccines.

Hydeline did not respond to a request for comment.

In response to questions from ProPublica, a spokesperson from Report24 who did not provide their name said the above articles were “carefully researched and contain all necessary sources — as every article on our website does.” They said ProPublica’s questions and findings are similar to “the biased, fake news producing, pharma industry funded fact-checkers.”

The site claimed that no Google ads appeared on the articles in question, and there hadn’t been any “for a long time.” The site did not respond after being sent screenshots showing Google ads on the article pages.

After being contacted by ProPublica, Google removed ads from Report24. The company declined to comment about the German sites and articles identified in the analysis.

Money for Falsehoods in French

Last October, just ahead of the United Nations global climate summit, Google announced it would no longer place ads on content that “contradicts authoritative scientific consensus” on climate change.

“Advertisers simply don’t want their ads to appear next to this content,” read a notice attributed to the Google Ads team.

But as with its policy about COVID-19 and vaccine misinformation, Google often fails to enforce its climate policy across languages. Science Feedback, a French nonprofit fact-checking organization that employs journalists and scientists, provided ProPublica with 427 active URLs of articles about climate change in French and other languages it has rated false since 2021. A fifth of them were earning money with Google, according to the analysis.

In just one example, the French site 1 Scandal published an article in January falsely stating that global warming is “statistically insignificant” and “the climate emergency is imaginary.” Google had placed multiple ads on the page when ProPublica reporters visited it, including for Caddis eyewear and Rove furniture, as well as a public service announcement about diabetes supported by the CDC, the American Medical Association and the Ad Council, an ad industry body.

Kathy Kayse, chief media strategy and partnerships officer for the Ad Council, said in a statement that the organization relies on donated media space to place ads for its public service campaigns. This means the organization did not pay to place its ad on 1 Scandal.

“Because of this model, we cannot always predict or control where our content will be placed,” Kayse said, noting that they were responding on behalf of the Ad Council and the American Media Association.

Caddis, Rove, the CDC and 1 Scandal did not respond to requests for comment. Google appears to have removed ads from the site in response to questions from ProPublica.

ProPublica also analyzed two sets of French-language articles rated false by IFCN-accredited fact-checkers in France and Senegal.

Among the recent fact-checked French links earning money with Google is a May article from InfoDuJour that falsely claimed people vaccinated against COVID-19 were experiencing an “increase in adverse effects.” The story cited other false claims, which have been the subject of multiple fact-checks, that warned people against receiving doses of the “harmful” vaccines.

The same site also recently published an article that claims athletes are dying in greater numbers and that the cause “most likely lies in the introduction of an experimental injection that was supposed to protect against Covid-19 disease, but which, on the contrary, caused untold damage to the immune system and cardiovascular problems.”

On Aug. 1, InfoDuJour published an article headlined “Anti-Covid vaccines finally recognized as dangerous!” The page currently brings up a notice from the site that says Google found the article violated its policy about harmful COVID-19 misinformation. “To meet the digital giant’s conditions and avoid penalty, we have decided to delete the article,” the page says.

Marcel Gay runs InfoDuJour from Nancy, a city in the northeast of France. He told ProPublica that his site’s coverage of the pandemic and vaccines provided it with unprecedented traffic.

“Our media has gained a lot of visibility,” he said in an online message sent via the site’s customer support tool. “Last July we recorded 3.2 million unique visitors. And the advertising earnings from Google, about €3,000!” — roughly $2,979 at current exchange rates.

Gay defended his site’s pandemic content, saying it is “taking care to balance the information and to give divergent opinions.” He complained that traffic has since fallen since Google and Twitter took action against his site, noting that it was removed from Google News and Google Discover, the latter of which highlights news stories in the Google app. He said he deleted some anti-vaccine articles in order to keep earning money with Google.

“This planetary censorship is unique in the history of humanity,” Gay said. “It is reminiscent of the Inquisition that prevailed in the Middle Ages.”

Google declined to comment on InfoDuJour and 1 Scandal.

Another French-language site earning money with Google, this time in Africa, is 24Jours.com. Two years ago, it was the subject of separate investigations by the EU DisinfoLab and fact-checkers at Les Observateurs that revealed it was part of a network of more than 10 sites publishing false information, reprinting Russian propaganda and stealing content from other outlets.

In the ensuing years the site continued to earn money from Google on articles with false claims that cunnilingus can help prevent cancer, a man killed over 20 pizza delivery men, and a woman named her children Corona and Virus. Ads from Google also appear on content that 24Jours.com copies word-for-word from other sites — even articles stolen from fact-checkers such as Les Observateurs.

The operator of 24Jours.com, who on WhatsApp identified himself as Kennedy and said he was in Cameroon, told ProPublica that he stopped posting “fake news” in 2019, and that many sites copy content from sources such as Reuters. After being informed that sites pay to license content from Reuters and other sources, Kennedy said he would remove the infringing content.

“Less than 10% of the content on my website are copied from other websites,” he said.

Kennedy estimated Google is currently blocking ads from 26 articles on his site. When told that ProPublica was reaching out to Google to ask about his site, he said he would disable Google ads.

Linda Villarosa lays bare an uncomfortable truth in U.S. health care

California Uncovered

The premise of Linda Villarosa’s book Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation is simply stated. “The poor health outcomes of the world’s wealthiest nation are often presented as a mystery, yet their root causes are hiding in plain sight,” she writes. Those root causes are inequality and discrimination, and feeding those roots is racism.

Villarosa asserts that poverty and racism are not interchangeable, even if they often overlap. Lack of money, education, information and access to health care “can be tied to being Black in America,” Villarosa notes. Even when accounting for income and education, Black health outcomes are still worse than those for other races. Racism, she writes, creates “physical vulnerability and systemic disadvantages that education, income, and access to healthcare can not erase.”

A former New York Times health editor and contributor to its 1619 Project, Villarosa teaches journalism at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. Villarosa spoke to Capital & Main about the toll that racism takes on health, and why addressing racism in both the practice of health care as well as an aggravator of illness is vital to closing the racial health gap in the United States.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Capital & Main: You distinguish race as a risk factor versus racism as the driver of health inequity. How do you explain that difference? And is that difference what motivated you to write this book?

Linda Villarosa: There has been a longstanding idea that something about being Black was causing unequal health outcomes for Black Americans. And there’s never been a time in the history of the country where Black people and white people have equal health outcomes. Ours have always been worse and generally worse than other people of color as well. And that started at birth, starting with infant mortality and maternal mortality, through most of the diseases we call lifestyle, like heart disease, the No. 1 killer, and diabetes and stroke all the way to the end of life and life expectancy, where Black people have always lived fewer years. And then with COVID, we found out that Black people had worse health outcomes, more hospitalization and death. The idea was that it was something about being Black, which meant race.

And the thinking behind that is [that] it is either something genetic, something wrong with the Black body, or something wrong with Black culture, a lack of education, too much poverty, all these things.

But as I was researching the book and interviewing people and really looking more closely, it became clear that this wasn’t just that.

What has not been looked at very well at all in our country is the effect of discrimination and racism on Black people’s health. It’s been undervalued and underreported.

In your book, you write about seeing this racism play out in your adult life when your father was not well.

That was in 1999. I was the health editor of the New York Times, and my mother called me. Both my parents lived in Denver, and she said, “You need to come home. Your father’s very sick and he needs you.” And she gave me these instructions, “Put on really nice clothes. Put your New York Times business card in your pocket and then I will pick you up at the airport and we will go right to the hospital.”

When my mom met me I said, “What’s going on?” She was very dressed up too, and I said, “What’s going on?” And she said, “Your father’s really ill.” And she said, “They’re treating him like an N-word and we need to go and make them see who he is.”

So we went to the hospital and my father looked terrible. His hair was not combed, he was wearing a dirty gown, and worse, he was restrained to the bed and was really upset.

It turned out he had colon cancer, but he didn’t know. And he was getting more and more upset about not being treated well and not having things explained to him. And it was super upsetting to see him looking like that.

We took the health care providers aside and said, “Wait a minute. Something’s got to change here.” We had gone home, we got his medals from his military service. He was a veteran, a hero. We got his degree. His college degree was in bacteriology. So he was actually a scientist. And if they had slowed down and explained things, he wouldn’t have been so fearful.

We showed them pictures of how he looked before he was ill. He was always impeccably dressed and just a quiet, soft-spoken, really kind person with a good sense of humor too. And we made them see him, not the disease, but him as a human being, which we should not have had to do. We should not have had to pull out some middle class respectability card, but we did it because that’s the card we had to play. But that started making me think this system is unfair to people, especially Black people.

This is a phenomenon, you said, of people not seeing patients as individuals. And there was another example where you followed a woman named Simone and saw the same thing happening.

In 2017 I was working on a story about infant and maternal mortality among Black mothers and babies. And I had interviewed Simone Landrum, who told me about the tragedy the year before of her baby daughter’s stillbirth. She named her Harmony. And Simone almost bled to death.

Then a year later she was pregnant, and this time she has a different doctor, she has a doula to help her with the birth and pregnancy. She’s at a different hospital. It was time for her to give birth. She and I and Latona Giwa, her doula, went to the labor and delivery room. And I was surprised by how badly she was treated.

So there were three of us in the room from the New York Times Magazine, Latona Giwa, a trained labor and delivery nurse, and Simone, the birthing mother who had had a tragedy the year before. A parade of nurses would come in and they’d ask her the same questions, “How many children do you have?” And she’d say, “I have two children. And then I had a stillbirth last year.” And then each time they said, “When was the demise? When exactly was the demise?”

To call that baby “a demise” was really upsetting for someone who was traumatized. Each time they said “demise,” you could see her getting more and more upset. Latona said, “Please stop calling what happened ‘a demise’ because it’s upsetting her. And also stop asking her the same thing over and over. It’s in the chart. Put it in the chart.”

She was in a lot of pain. She asked for an epidural. We left the room. When we came back, she was upset again because they were asking her kind of snarky questions like, “Oh, how many children do you have? Are you going to have room for this baby in your house?” And also, they gave her the wrong kind of epidural so her legs felt paralyzed. And when she complained, they said she was wrong. She was right.

Eventually, it’s time for the baby to come. And the doctor comes in; none of us have ever seen him. He was not the doctor I met who was a woman, and he was much older. So we didn’t know him. And then he just put his hands right inside of her without really talking to her or formally introducing himself. Then he leaves to change his gown, the baby’s about to come. And the young women who were residents and interns, maybe a medical student, were going, “Oh, it’s your turn to deliver the baby. It’s your turn.” And they were sort of taking turns and not focusing on her. There was one nurse. Me and Latona were focusing on Simone, who was really, really scared because she had lost a baby the year before.

The baby was fine. He’s 5 years old now, he’s great. But I just thought, I cannot believe I witnessed this kind of treatment for someone who had been so upset because of what happened previously. And also that there were no other health care providers of color from the doctor to the nurse to the intake person who were treating her in New Orleans, which is a city with such a high percentage of Black people. And I wrote about that for this story and I saw it and I never forgot that. It’s what motivated me to write Under the Skin.

So Simone was in a room with a New York Times editor and a person who knows their system very well and all that still happened.

Yes. Three Black women and all this happened.

How do we correct these kinds of situations?

One of the things I did for the book was go back to New Orleans because, as a reporter and a writer, sometimes you just go into a city and you write a story that is sort of investigative or negative and then you just leave and don’t go back. [I went] back and saw that there was a health equity group, a perinatal equity group that was trying to make a change. And they went back to that very hospital. They didn’t talk to Simone, but they talked to other women, Black women who had had difficult experiences with birth. And they listened to their stories, and sometimes the very people that caused the harm were in the room. And that was part of their sort of restorative justice training for the hospitals in Louisiana.

I listened to a woman who was treated badly and who had a very hard birth and her baby is disabled. She told her tearful story with the hospital folks listening. And after the hospital administrators heard what she said, they also had a positive story of treatment there. And they opened an OB-GYN emergency room — they hired four people, and they equipped it because of the stories that they heard. So I think listening to people’s stories and being proactive in making a change is one way to correct a system that’s broken.

And you also saw another promising example in California.

Kira Johnson, a Black woman, died at Cedars-Sinai [in 2016] as a result of a botched C-section. And so what happened in California is there was a sort of all-hands-on-deck change in the hospital system. Technical innovations and clinical protocols were put into place to really fix the system so that women in general weren’t dying or almost dying. But it didn’t affect the racial disparity.

So there was a bill passed before the pandemic to say, “Anyone who works with pregnant and birthing people in your state, in the state of California, must go through some kind of anti-racism or implicit bias training.” I think when the pandemic happened it was hard to see the real effects of this, but I think it’s an explicit nod towards saying we can’t doctor our way out of these problems. You have to look at race and confront race and racism head on. You can’t just change the system and expect it just to work out for everyone in a system that has discrimination and racism embedded in it. And it has been there for a long time.

You write about a study in Iowa that tracked the effects of an immigration raid that actually may have had an effect on health long after the actual event.

In 2008, in a town called Postville in Iowa, there was at the time the largest ICE raid in the history of our country. It was at a meat processing plant where there were almost exclusively Latin American immigrants working. Families were separated, people were arrested. There was fear throughout the community, especially for those who were undocumented, but even for everyone working there because so many people were busted and it was very public. People were taken away in handcuffs. I looked at the pictures recently. It’s really jarring to see that kind of mistreatment. There was also a lot of media coverage in Spanish language and other news in other media. So it reverberated to the community.

Dr. Arline Geronimus coined the term “weathering.” It describes the effects of systemic oppression on the body. Her theory is that what happens to the body as it tries to withstand and overcome challenges and insults from society, it has an effect at the cellular level and it kind of creates a kind of premature aging. She had a graduate student who was from Iowa, so they went to Postville and they looked a year later at the birth rate of the Latinx people, birthing people, comparing it to the white community and even those who are not directly involved in the ICE raid. And she found that the babies born of the Latinx women were 25% smaller.

So that meant they had a lower birth weight, which can be a precursor to losing a baby to infant mortality, but the white babies were the same size. She attributed it to the kind of coping that people had to do and real extreme stress that affected the mother’s body and also affected the baby’s birth rate. And [Geronimus] took it beyond Black people and looked at the idea that anyone who is oppressed and has to cope with that kind of challenge and insult, and how it can ravage health.

So what are some things that make you optimistic about the prospect for addressing racism in health care?

The most exciting thing for me is looking at the next generation of medical students, nursing students, public policy managers and creators and midwifery students who are really interested in making a difference. I am really impressed with them. It’s often the students themselves who are pushing for changes in the system and don’t want to be the same kind of health providers and policy makers that the past generation has been.

They did it on their own with little support or funding. Their group is called the Institute for Healing and Justice in Medicine. And I’m keeping an eye on them and other groups around the country of up and coming health care providers.

I’m also, this semester, teaching pre-med students at the City University of New York School of Medicine. I have a bunch of very engaged students, mostly of color, who are learning about how racism gets baked into the systems and institutions of society, including the health care system that they’re entering. It’s been a really rewarding challenge for me. Just to see how hungry they are, how open they are, how interested they are to learn and to do better, be better.

Suspect threatened to hold Nancy Pelosi hostage and “break her kneecaps” if she lied to him

The suspect who allegedly assaulted Paul Pelosi, the husband of the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, told police he wanted to hold the congresswoman hostage and “break her kneecaps” if she lied to him, according to a recent Justice Department filing.

The DOJ filed two charges in federal court against David DePape, who attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer in the couple’s San Francisco home.

Prosecutors charged DePape with attempted kidnapping and assault with intent to retaliate against a federal official by threatening or injuring a family member.

San Francisco police said DePape would also be arraigned on charges of attempted homicide, first-degree burglary, violent felony enhancement, assault with a deadly weapon, aggravated battery with serious bodily injury, elder abuse, inflicting significant bodily injury on elderly, and threatening a public official or family member, among others.

Behind the GOP gaslighting over Pelosi attack: They know it won’t happen to them

Before violently assaulting Paul Pelosi, the assailant reportedly entered the couple’s home in the Pacific Heights neighborhood shouting “Where is Nancy? Where is Nancy?” He planned to wait for the House speaker to return home while keeping her husband tied up. (In fact, Pelosi was thousands of miles away in Washington at the time.)

The new filing revealed that DePape said he would hold the Speaker hostage and only let her go if he told her the “truth”. If she “lied” he would break “her kneecaps.” The DOJ document continues:

In the course of the interview, DEPAPE articulated he viewed Nancy as the “leader of the pack” of lies told by the Democratic Party. DEPAPE also later explained that by breaking Nancy’s kneecaps, she would then have to be wheeled into Congress, which would show other Members of Congress there were consequences to actions. DEPAPE also explained generally that he wanted to use Nancy to lure another individual to DEPAPE.

DePape apparently broke into the Pelosis’ house by smashing a glass door by using a hammer. According to the filing, he told Paul Pelosi that “he wanted to tie Pelosi up so that [DePape] could go to sleep as he was tired from having had to carry a backpack to the Pelosi residence.”

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The assailant said he took out twist ties to restrain Pelosi and took him to his bedroom to stop Pelosi from moving toward another part of the house. During that time, Pelosi managed to dial 911, but DePape decided not to flee:

DEPAPE explained that he did not leave after Pelosi’s call to 9-1-1 because, much like the American founding fathers with the British, he was fighting against tyranny without the option of surrender. DEPAPE reiterated this sentiment elsewhere in the interview.

When police arrived, they went downstairs to the front door, DePape recalled. When Pelosi ran to open the door, he also grabbed onto DePape’s hammer, which remained in his hand, the filing said.

“At this point in the interview, DEPAPE repeated that DEPAPE did not plan to surrender and that he would go ‘through’ Pelosi.” DePape said that he pulled the hammer away from Pelosi and swung the hammer toward him. “Pelosi’s actions resulted in Pelosi ‘taking the punishment instead,'” the filing included, quoting DePape.

Pelosi remains in intensive care at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital after suffering a fractured skull and injuries to his right arm and hand, NBC News reported. Nancy Pelosi has said her husband is expected to make a full recovery.

With only eight days left before the midterm elections, the incident has raised fears about political violence and threats made against lawmakers. While the incident has been widely condemned, some people — including, at least briefly, Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter — have continued to spread and amplify conspiracy theories regarding the attack.

on the Pelosi attack

How Gaylor Swift conspiracists think like QAnoners

“We’re a crooked love in a straight line down.” What does this Taylor Swift lyric mean to you? If the answer is some variation of “not much” then you just weren’t meant to understand.

It’s not that Gaylors are spies uncovering a secret Swift wants hidden, but rather that Swift is trying to communicate her queerness to and only to a sympathetic audience capable of piecing together her hints.

For a hardcore group of Swift fans, who self-identify as “Gaylors,” the lyric is just another example of Swift sending the coded message to a select few that she is not straight. When I raised the Gaylor thesis with my undergraduate students a handful had heard it, but most seemed genuinely shocked. Beyond her amazing music career, Swift is best known (probably unfairly) for a series of bad breakups with famous male celebrities. For the Gaylors, this is all surface level; to know the truth, you have to dig deeper.

My introduction to #Gaylor was when I saw a video on TikTok and sent it to a friend. This shifted my algorithm so that I was suddenly receiving a seemingly endless supply of videos on the subject. I was down the rabbit hole. A particularly apt metaphor because Gaylors link Swift’s use of “Alice in Wonderland” imagery in her song “Wonderland” to a since-removed tattoo on “Glee” actress Dianna Agron that quoted the book. For Gaylors this was Swift’s way of letting them know about their relationship. Model Karlie Kloss, fiddle player Emily Poe, and country singer Kelly Pickler are some other women Gaylors link romantically to Swift via lyrics, statements and Instagram photos. For these fans, it’s not that Gaylors are spies uncovering a secret Swift wants hidden, but rather that Swift is trying to communicate her queerness to and only to a sympathetic audience capable of piecing together her hints. The obsessive decoding by Gaylors reminded me of a 20th century thinker known mostly in cloistered philosophy circles, but whose ideas are increasingly manifesting in public discourse.

Taylor Swift and Karlie Kloss walk the runway at the annual Victoria’s Secret fashion show at Earls Court on December 2, 2014 in London, England. (Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images)Although I have not seen any Gaylors explicitly reference his work, their method of decoding Swift’s communication has many similarities to the work of Leo Strauss, who breathed new life into the world of textual analysis when he suggested his colleagues were reading famous figures from the past far too literally. Strauss and his disciples suggest that what you learned about Plato or Machiavelli in your intro to Philosophy or Political Science classes misses the mark, because their true messages are hidden between the lines to protect them from government censors or a hostile public. Strauss and his followers believe great minds had to provide a bland acceptable take on the surface, but leave enough clues for similarly enlightened folks to decipher their true meaning. Strauss called this esoteric writing. The Straussians find esoteric clues in all kinds of surprising places, obscure references, irony or paradox, hyperbole, deliberate self-contradictions, even dubious brazenness – all can point to a deeper meaning only meant to be understood by a select few.

Breakup songs owe a lot to the lovelorn lyrics of the Romantics

Gaylors use a variety of Straussian techniques to read between the lines in order to understand what they view as the hidden esoteric meaning of Swift’s communications, ranging from her lyrics to the colors she dyes her hair in the video for her song “You Need to Calm Down.” An Instagram story where Swift calls Zoe Kravitz “THE CATWOMAN OF DREAMS,” points to something far from platonic. Her choice of the color lavender for the special edition of the “Midnights” album, becomes an opaque reference to lesbian movements. Swift saying she was inspired to write the lyrics “you can want who you want boys and boys and girls and girls” by the legalization of gay marriage in New York in a television interview despite the state not passing the law for another three years, was not a mistake, but instead a nod that the lyrics referred to her own queerness. For Gaylors, the fact that the average fan never makes these connections is not an argument against their theories, because they believe the esoteric messages are only meant for them, not the wider fan base.

look at that lavender haze https://t.co/SJDWml4HRM

— Target (@Target) October 21, 2022

QAnon movement has produced an endless amount of commentary deciphering what they view as the hidden esoteric meaning buried in ex-president Donald Trump’s tweets, posts and speeches.

Strauss argued that individuals turn to esoteric messaging when they fear persecution; for example, it was particularly popular among dissidents in the Soviet Union. Coming out will not likely see Swift sent to the Gulag, but she could fear it would damage her career. Swift got her start in country music, a genre known as the most conservative. She would have witnessed the excommunication of The Chicks in 2003 for opposing the Iraq war and Billboard booting (then closeted) Little Nas X’s “Old Town Road” from its country chart for including trap beats. (Little Nas X claims he was communicating his queerness to fans with his lyrics to “C7osure”and the artwork on his album, prior to his official coming out, which gives more credence to the idea that Taylor could be doing the same.)

Despite showing signs of being more open to queer people, many country stars claim their management told them to stay in the closet. Swift has transcended her origin as a country singer, but may fear a more explicit coming out could damage her cross genre appeal and spot as the only woman in the Top 10 Highest-Paid Musicians. One Gaylor reviews the intense reaction to a recent Rolling Stone article that discusses the Gaylor thesis as proof that a more explicit coming out would provoke a massive backlash among a sizable segment of Swift’s straight fans.

Of course, all these hidden messages could be nothing but the overactive imagination of a group of largely queer Swift fans that want to claim the singer as their own. The Gaylors refer to this as the “Hetlor” thesis (Hetlor being a deeply unfortunate portmanteau of heterosexual and Taylor). Just because people see hidden messages does not mean they are there.

Seven-time GRAMMY winner Taylor Swift kicked off her highly anticipated The RED Tour last night with a sold-out show in Omaha, Nebraska. (Christie Goodwin/TAS/Getty Images for TAS)Fandom is one thing when it comes to esoteric clues, but the QAnon movement has produced an endless amount of commentary deciphering what they view as the hidden esoteric meaning buried in ex-president Donald Trump’s tweets, posts and speeches. For the eponymous “Q,” Trump’s speech next to an Easter bunny references “Alice in Wonderland” and ultimately is a coded reference to a secret plan to ferret out all the blood-drinking pedophiles that have embedded themselves into the government. (Fans of esoteric writing love “Alice in Wonderland,” probably because its vivid imagery lends itself to allegorical interpretation). A picture posted on Trump’s former Twitter account of him and five supporters giving thumbs up to the camera become the points to a constellation-style outline of the capital letter “Q” and thus an endorsement of QAnon.

This was always a potential problem with Straussian thought. Were 20th century Straussians discovering hidden messages in ancient texts or imposing new meanings on the works of long dead figures that could never be definitively refuted? Even Swift declaring that LQBTQ was a “community that I’m not a part of” can be written off by Gaylors as part of her esoteric messaging.

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While some of the Gaylor arguments have a surprising amount of persuasive force, others are probably more reflective of pareidolia, the human ability to make patterns and meaning out of randomness. The overwhelming amount of content produced by the Gaylor and QAnon groups speaks to how Strauss’ theory of esoteric writing seems tailor-made to explain much of our current media environment. With a public figure like Swift putting so much information into the world – obviously songs, but also interviews, posts and fashion choices – creators on YouTube, TikTok and Twitter have an endless supply of material to mine for “hidden messages” they can turn into likes, subscribers and comments.

The release of Swift’s 10th album “Midnights,” did not coincide with an official coming out, as many Gaylors had predicted it would. Nevertheless, for Gaylors, “Midnights” has provided ample new evidence of Swift esoterically communicating her queerness. In “Question . . . ?” Swift sings:

Can I ask you a question?
Did you ever have someone kiss you in a crowded room?
And every single one of your friends was making fun of you
But 15 seconds latеr, they were clapping, too?
Thеn, what did you do?
Did you leave her house in the middle of the night? (Ohh)
Did you wish you’d put up more of a fight? (Ohh)
When she said it was too much?
Do you wish you could still touch her?
It’s just a question

For Gaylors this is a reference to a kiss that may have occurred between Swift and Kloss at a concert in 2014 and at the very least the use of feminine pronouns to describe her partner does align nicely with a queer reading of the song. In “Maroon” Swift sings, “The lips I used to call home, so scarlet, it was maroon.” Gaylors have pointed to this as a reference to lipstick, which would not fit with any of Swift’s male partners. One Gaylor says simply, “There is no heterosexual explanation” for this line. Detractors can respond that the lyrics are ambiguous or may not be sung from Swift’s perspective.

Ultimately the release of “Midnights” has left open the question of Swift’s sexuality, which means Gaylors will keep interpreting her work through a lavender haze.

about queer coding in pop culture

In praise of the “retro” candy apple and its connection to trick-or-treating

The other night, I had a sudden hankering for a caramel apple. Not sure if it’s the season, the fact that I hadn’t had one in maybe a decade, or my recent extensive coverage of the apple beat, but I wound up opting for a caramel apple covered in chocolate and flaky salt. It was, truly, one of the best things I’ve eaten all year. It was crisp and refreshing, it was bright and tart, it was salty and a little savory from the chocolate and caramel. I cut the apple into thin slices to make it easier to eat (as my brother astutely put it via text, his “teeth don’t really comport with caramel apples”) It then got me thinking of the caramel and candied apple itself: the history, the production, the waning popularity.

Teen O’Ween: Let older kids trick or treat

There’s certainly an autumnal, Halloween-y essence — along with things like bobbing for apples (which is clearly obsolete & truly petrifying to imagine in the COVID landscape) —which also then got me thinking about trick-or-treating and if there may have at some point been a connection to apples. As a late 80s baby, I grew up in the 90s as an excitable trick-or-treater who was spooked that there might be razor blades in my apples. I don’t believe I ever got any apples trick-or-treating, but this article certainly adds some veracity to the legend. (2022’s version might be candy-laced-with-fentanyl fear-mongering.)

Since I was a wee lad (and through my teenage years…), trick-or-treating was unquestionably one of the highlights of my year. I so looked forward to the absurdity of the annual custom: the ringing of doorbells, the cacophony of “trick or treat!,” the cavalcade of candy and chocolate, the heavy, laden pillowcases or hollow plastic pumpkins filled to the brim with stranger’s candy, the warm welcomes, the not-so-warm welcomes, the discomfort of the latex masks and hindered ability to see, the survey of the candy post-trick-or-treating, the leftovers enjoyed throughout early November — the list goes on and on. I would do my darnedest to crunch atop as many crisp, multicolored leaves as possible.

So how did this peculiar practice come to be? And were caramel or candied apples once a typical go-to for those handing out treats on Hallows Eve? Or were they more so generally enjoyed throughout the autumnal season, such as at festivals and fairs?

In an unexpectedly celebratory moment of pride in my home, I can state that the originator of the caramel apple hails from The Garden State: William Kolb developed the bright-red, brittle candied apple in 1908 in Newark. Originally a Christmas item with a sharp, cinnamon flair and a crackling, candy exterior, the apples sold for five cents throughout the state, from his storefront to the Jersey shore. By comparison, the caramel apple didn’t come to be until the 1950s, when Dan Walker of Kraft Food developed it by “experimenting with excess caramels from Halloween sales,” according to Gold Medal Popcorn.

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After melting them down and dipping the apples into them, the caramel apple came to be. As time has gone on, both products have changed considerably, tweaking recipes, adding additional flavors, toppings or inclusions and customizing as trends dictate.

As Annie Quigley writes for Food & Wine, “Candy apples also became fashionable to give out to trick-or-treaters during Halloween in the early 1900s and remained so until the 1960s and ’70s, when urban legends about hidden needles and razor blades cast them out of favor.”

Whether fake news or not, the rampant fears clearly minimized the presence of the candy and caramel apple as a veritable trick-or-treating offering, which increased the presence of individually-wrapped candies and chocolates for the little ghouls and goblins. Beyond caramel and candied apples, other homemade delights fell out of favor, such as cookies, brownies, or anything that was not clearly sealed at a factory.

For NPR, Alison Richards writes about the deeply entrenched meaning and symbolism between apples and autumn, relating them to Samhain, a Celtic festival. “It fell around the end of our modern October and marked the end of summer, the end of harvest and — revelers worried — perhaps the extinction of life itself,” stating that what soon became Halloween was thought to be a “liminal state [which] also allowed ghosts and mischievous spirits to visit the living.”

Apples were thought to be a sign of fertility, of good fortune and a brightness that juxtaposed the darkness of the fall and coming winter, so offerings were given and the apple was celebrated (and consumed) in every possible manner.

While there’s a vast difference between the beliefs of these historic colonists in the early Americas, Kolb’s making a candied apple in the early 1900s and the children who’ll soon be running amock this coming Halloween, there’s a clear link between the ubiquitous apple and the seasonality of the changing seasons from summer to fall and to the bleak, frigid winter. Savoring the apple when you can and possibly even encasing it in brittle, artistically-colored candy or rich, smooth caramel helps to preserve the brightness of that freshly picked apple, gleaming in the sun of an early harvest.

To delve a bit more into the origins of trick-or-treating, History notes a term called “souling” that originated around 1000 AD, which involved “poor people [who] would visit the houses of wealthier families and receive soul cakes in exchange for a promise to pray for the souls of the homeowner’s dead relatives.” While problematic, oddly disparaging and innately capitalistic, this practice (somehow) eventually involved into being a children-only event, in which they would go door-to-door in hopes of receiving gifts, primarily food, trinkets and beverages. This would almost always take place around November 2, which was All Souls’ Day, “a time for honoring the dead.” (All Souls’ Day soon became All Hallows’ Eve, before the nomenclature soon shifted to the now-commonplace Halloween.)

It should be noted that the “tricks” portion of the practice has more akin with the UK custom Guy Fawkes’ Day, frustrations arising from the Great Depression and “Mischief Night” hijinks involving lowkey vandalism and even outright violence. As Farmer’s Almanac notes, there was also a custom to literally put on a little show at a strangers doorstep, which was called “mumming.” Costumed people “would go door to door, singing, dancing and enacting plays in exchange for food and drink.” Clearly, this custom merged with a variation of ‘soulling,’ giving us the best of both worlds with trick-or-treating. The natural understanding was that the homeowner answering the door could opt to give out treats or receive a “trick,” which could either be a mini-performance or perhaps something more sinister, like being egged or pranked. Due to this, candy and chocolate became the primary currency on Halloween — and the rest is history. You can see how all of these customs coalesced into what is now the practice of trick-or-treating on Halloween.

Also interestingly enough, post-WWII culture consciousness involved an abrupt cut-back on sugar rationing, which the candy companies then immediately capitalized on. The “trick” fell out of favor (but is sometimes still practiced the night prior to Halloween), while the “treat” component became a well-known custom primarily because of corporate advertising campaigns and blatant attempts to sell sugar. What a world, huh?

While your child may not receive an artisanal caramel apple complete with flaky salt while trick-or-treating this Halloween, try to make one at home or pick one up from a nearby store. I promise that won’t regret it.

Happy Halloween!

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When monkeypox reaches rural communities, it collides with strained public health systems

When a case of monkeypox was reported in Nevada’s Humboldt County in August, it was the state’s first detected occurrence of the virus in a rural area. Soon, cases were found in other rural counties — Nye, Lyon, and Elko — posing another hurdle for public health systems that have been worn thin by the covid-19 pandemic.

Experts say the response to the monkeypox virus in rural America may be affected by the patchy resources and bitter politics that are a legacy of the pandemic, challenges that some worry could allow sporadic infections to gain a foothold.

“Your embers turn into a forest fire really quickly,” said Brian Castrucci, president and CEO of the de Beaumont Foundation, a national nonprofit focused on public health policy. “The challenge is: Do we have the infrastructure in place in rural America for an adequate response to monkeypox, to covid, to whatever is next on the horizon?”

In Humboldt County, local officials galvanized quickly after monkeypox was reported. The local health board issued a news release encouraging residents to be cautious about physical contact and outlining what symptoms to look for — painful or itchy rashes, fever, and headache, among others.

“I don’t think this is something we should be afraid of,” Dr. Charles Stringham, the county’s health officer, said in the news release, “but instead something that each of us can avoid by taking a few relatively simple precautions.”

Local health officials are in a “primary prevention role,” Stringham said during an interview. It’s a role that includes educating the community about the virus, monitoring the person who tested positive, and checking in with local physicians.

State and local public health officials in Nevada said the response in Humboldt County, where nearly 18,000 people live, and similar efforts in other rural communities follow guidelines set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. State and local health leaders meet monthly to discuss public health issues, which of late have included the monkeypox virus. They said they’re confident in local responses.

Still, some residents of rural Nevada said they have been confused about where to find vaccines or whether vaccines were available in their county.

Stevie Noyes, a resident of Winnemucca, Humboldt County’s largest city, who identifies as pansexual, said she wouldn’t know where to go to get a vaccine for monkeypox. She called a local retail pharmacy, where her family usually gets vaccines, in early September and was told the pharmacy didn’t have monkeypox vaccines. The pharmacist didn’t know where she could find one in town.

Noyes, a 34-year-old hairdresser, said she’s not urgently concerned about monkeypox because no other cases have been detected in the county. Should the virus begin to spread, however, she said, members of the local LGBTQ+ community would lean on one another, rather than local county or health officials.

County and health officials “take a lot of heat from the town” on the politics of responding to public health issues, Noyes said. “What I see a lot is that political influence to where it does curb what’s released and it does curb the steps that are taken.”

Despite the venomous discourse Noyes has witnessed, Stringham said that in his experience, the monkeypox virus has not been difficult to respond to politically, especially compared with covid.

CDC data shows that non-Hispanic Black and Hispanic men who have sex with other men are overrepresented in infections across the country. LGBTQ+ advocates have said they’re concerned that the government response wasn’t reaching their communities even though they are disproportionately affected.

In larger cities, such as Las Vegas, officials have partnered with LGBTQ+ community centers to promote awareness and to distribute educational materials and vaccines. But there is no similar center in Humboldt County, where 57% of voters opposed a ballot question in 2020 that reversed a provision in the state’s constitution that banned same-sex marriage. Statewide, the ballot measure was approved by 62% of voters.

Noyes said she’s more concerned about prejudice than the virus and fears that because the virus has been linked to men who have sex with men, it could spark retribution against people who identify as LGBTQ+ in Humboldt County. “A lot of these people, the more you interact with them, the more emboldened and, I mean, eventually dangerous they become,” she said.

Some people in Winnemucca have been outspoken about calling monkeypox a “gay virus” and making jokes on Facebook, she said.

In late September, Noyes helped host Winnemucca’s second Pride festival. Immunize Nevada, a nonprofit organization focused on providing vaccines across the state, was there to provide information about covid-19 and monkeypox.

“We’re hoping to combat it that way,” Noyes said.

Kristy Zigenis, program manager for the state’s immunization program, said responding to the monkeypox virus in rural places requires nuance. “If we were to hold a clinic in, say, a rural area, not all of those people might be ready to share with the world that they have participated in this behavior,” Zigenis said.

She added that public health officials have encountered affected people in Clark County, the home of Las Vegas, who weren’t prepared to share their sexual partners’ names during contact tracing or couldn’t identify their partners. “I think that probably crosses a bit into the rurals as far as what’s going on with the case count,” she said.

As of Oct. 26, there were 28,087 confirmed cases of the monkeypox virus nationwide, according to the CDC, and 298 in Nevada, putting the state in the second-highest tier for transmission. Most of the state’s cases are in Clark County, where more than two-thirds of the state’s residents live, but cases have been reported in four rural counties.

Because it’s unclear whether monkeypox has spread beyond the one detected case in Humboldt County, Stringham said he’s trying to provide enough messaging to keep residents informed, but not too much to cause burnout.

He said he thinks resources would be better directed toward prevention of covid, adding that the situation could change.

To make matters more difficult, the community health nurse, who is responsible for distributing the vaccine from a state-run clinic in Winnemucca, retired months ago, and her replacement, a nurse from Carson City, didn’t arrive until October.

“We’re working in a bit of a deficit in that respect,” Stringham said.

During the interim, Zigenis said, Humboldt County residents who met the eligibility requirements to receive a monkeypox vaccine needed to see an administrative assistant in the Winnemucca Community Health Nursing Services office, where 100 doses of the Jynneos vaccine were available. The state agency would then dispatch someone to Humboldt County to administer the vaccine.

Experts say that gap is emblematic of the kinds of difficulties that officials in rural communities across the country face when responding to public health issues.

“The challenge is there may be people who aren’t seeking primary care, so cases aren’t getting picked up,” Castrucci said. He added that the focus of resources on covid or monkeypox can cause other health issues to fall through the cracks, especially considering the lack of investment in local public health departments in rural America compared with departments in larger cities.

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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Employers are concerned about covering workers’ mental health needs, survey finds

Almost three years after the covid-19 pandemic upended workplaces, mental health coverage remains a priority for employers, according to an annual employer survey fielded by KFF.

Nearly half of surveyed large employers — those with at least 200 workers — reported that a growing share of their workers were using mental health services. Yet almost a third of that group said their health plan’s network didn’t have enough behavioral health care providers for employees to have timely access to the care they need.

As millions of employees were sent away from shuttered office buildings to work from home or risked infection while working on the front lines, mental health problems soared. Now, even as many workplaces have returned to a semblance of “normal,” some workers are still grappling with the changes of the pandemic years and seeking mental health services.

Although 4 in 5 employers reported that they had enough primary care providers in their health plan’s network, only 44% of all employers reported they had enough behavioral health providers, according to the KFF survey.

“That is the number that for me shows how bad access to mental health care providers is,” said Matthew Rae, associate director for the program on the health care marketplace at KFF. “That, in conjunction with the huge increase in demand for mental health services.”

The 2022 KFF Employer Health Benefits Survey, released Oct. 27, analyzed the responses of a random sample of 2,188 employers with at least three employees.

Overall, the survey found that this year’s premiums for health care coverage were remarkably similar to last year’s. Annual premiums for family coverage are $22,463, on average, this year, compared with $22,221 last year. On average, workers this year are paying $6,106 toward those premiums, while employers pick up the rest of the tab.

For single coverage, workers are paying $1,327 out-of-pocket toward their premiums, which average $7,911 in total. Employers pay the remaining portion.

The relative stability in premiums stands in contrast to overall inflation, which has been 8% so far in 2022, and workers’ wages, which have risen 6.7%, according to KFF’s calculation — perhaps, the report suggested, because the annual premiums were finalized in fall 2021, before price increases were apparent.

That trend may not continue.

“Employers are already concerned about what they pay for health premiums, but this could be the calm before the storm, as recent inflation suggests that larger increases are imminent,” Drew Altman, KFF president and CEO, said in a news release accompanying the report. “Given the tight labor market and rising wages, it will be tough for employers to shift costs onto workers when costs spike.”

Among large employers, 14% said more employees were using services to treat substance use in 2022, although about half said they did not know whether there had been an increase, according to the survey.

Among all surveyed employers with 50 or more workers, 17% said they had also seen an increase in the number of workers who had requested leave for mental health conditions under the federal Family and Medical Leave Act. That law allows certain employees at companies with 50 or more workers to take up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave annually without the risk of losing their jobs.

Although the use of telemedicine services has eased somewhat since early pandemic lockdowns, 90% of surveyed employers reported that they offered a plan that covers telemedicine services. More than half of large employers reported that telemedicine would be “very important” in enabling them to provide their workers with access to behavioral health services in the future. In contrast, only about a third of those employers said the same was true for providing access to primary care, while 24% said telemedicine would be “very important” in enabling them to provide access to specialty care.

Twenty-seven percent of large employers reported that this year they added mental health care providers to their plan’s network, either in person or through telemedicine.

In addition to covering mental and behavioral health care services, 81% of large firms said they have an employee assistance program for mental health services, while 44% said they offered employees mental health self-care apps.

This story can be republished for free (details).

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Republicans and Democrats see news bias only in stories that clearly favor the other party

Charges of media bias – that “the media” are trying to brainwash Americans by feeding the public only one side of every issue – have become as common as campaign ads in the run-up to the midterm elections.

As a political scientist who has examined media coverage of the Trump presidency and campaigns, I can say that this is what social science research tells us about media bias.

First, media bias is in the eye of the beholder.

Communications scholars have found that if you ask people in any community, using scientific polling methods, whether their local media are biased, you’ll find that about half say yes. But of that half, typically a little more than a quarter say that their local media are biased against Republicans, and a little less than a quarter say the same local media are biased against Democrats.

Research shows that Republicans and Democrats spot bias only in articles that clearly favor the other party. If an article tilts in favor of their own party, they tend to see it as unbiased.

Many people, then, define “bias” as “anything that doesn’t agree with me.” It’s not hard to see why.

‘Liberal bias’ in the media is a constant topic on Fox News.

‘Media’ is a plural word

American party politics has become increasingly polarized in recent decades. Republicans have become more consistently conservative, and Democrats have become more consistently liberal to moderate.

As the lines have been drawn more clearly, many people have developed hostile feelings toward the opposition party.

In a 2016 Pew Research Center poll, 45% of Republicans said the Democratic Party’s policies are “so misguided that they threaten the nation’s well-being,” and 41% of Democrats said the same about Republicans. A poll conducted in midyear 2022 by Pew showed that “72% of Republicans regard Democrats as more immoral, and 63% of Democrats say the same about Republicans.”

Not surprisingly, media outlets have arisen to appeal primarily to people who share a conservative view, or people who share a liberal view.

That doesn’t mean that “the media” are biased. There are hundreds of thousands of media outlets in the U.S. – newspapers, radio, network TV, cable TV, blogs, websites and social media. These news outlets don’t all take the same perspective on any given issue.

If you want a very conservative news site, it is not hard to find one, and the same with a very liberal news site.

First Amendment rules

“The media,” then, present a variety of different perspectives. That’s the way a free press works.

The Constitution’s First Amendment says Congress shall make no law limiting the freedom of the press. It doesn’t say that Congress shall require all media sources to be “unbiased.” Rather, it implies that as long as Congress does not systematically suppress any particular point of view, then the free press can do its job as one of the primary checks on a powerful government.

When the Constitution was written and for most of U.S. history, the major news sources – newspapers, for most of that time – were explicitly biased. Most were sponsored by a political party or a partisan individual.

The notion of objective journalism – that media must report both sides of every issue in every story – barely existed until the late 1800s. It reached full flower only in the few decades when broadcast television, limited to three major networks, was the primary source of political information.

Since that time, the media universe has expanded to include huge numbers of internet news sites, cable channels and social media posts. So if you feel that the media sources you’re reading or watching are biased, you can read a wider variety of media sources.

Thomas Jefferson described this partisan newspaper, The Gazette of the United States, as ‘a paper of pure Toryism … disseminating the doctrines of monarchy, aristocracy, and the exclusion of the people.’ Library of Congress, Chronicling America collection

If it bleeds, it leads

There is one form of actual media bias. Almost all media outlets need audiences in order to exist. Some can’t survive financially without an audience; others want the prestige that comes from attracting a big audience.

Thus, the media define as “news” the kinds of stories that will attract an audience: those that feature drama, conflict, engaging pictures and immediacy. That’s what most people find interesting. They don’t want to read a story headlined “Dog bites man.” They want “Man bites dog.”

The problem is that a focus on such stories crowds out what we need to know to protect our democracy, such as: How do the workings of American institutions benefit some groups and disadvantage others? In what ways do our major systems – education, health care, national defense and others – function effectively or less effectively?

These analyses are vital to citizens – if we fail to protect our democracy, our lives will be changed forever – but they aren’t always fun to read. So they get covered much less than celebrity scandals or murder cases – which, while compelling, don’t really affect the ability to sustain a democratic system.

Writer Dave Barry demonstrated this media bias in favor of dramatic stories in a 1998 column.

He wrote, “Let’s consider two headlines. FIRST HEADLINE: ‘Federal Reserve Board Ponders Reversal of Postponement of Deferral of Policy Reconsideration.’ SECOND HEADLINE: ‘Federal Reserve Board Caught in Motel with Underage Sheep.’ Be honest, now. Which of these two stories would you read?”

By focusing on the daily equivalent of the underage sheep, media can direct our attention away from the important systems that affect our lives. That isn’t the media’s fault; we are the audience whose attention media outlets want to attract.

But as long as we think of governance in terms of its entertainment value and media bias in terms of Republicans and Democrats, we’ll continue to be less informed than we need to be. That’s the real media bias.

This story is an updated version of an article that was originally published on Oct. 15, 2020.

Marjorie Hershey, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Indiana University

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