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“The future the GOP wants for all of America”: Texas gun law unleashes deadly mayhem

“Insanity.”

“Utter madness.”

These are just some of the ways critics are describing Texas’ new law allowing people to carry handguns in public without a permit—a Republican achievement that many local officials say has already led to a spike in spontaneous shootings in highly populated parts of the state.

In one high-profile case earlier this year, Tony Earls “pulled out his handgun and opened fire, hoping to strike a man who had just robbed him and his wife at an A.T.M. in Houston,” The New York Times reported Wednesday. “Instead, he struck Arlene Alvarez, a 9-year-old girl seated in a passing pickup, killing her.”

A grand jury declined to indict Earls, agreeing with his lawyer that “everything about that situation, we believe and contend, was justified under Texas law.”

As the Times noted, “The shooting was part of what many sheriffs, police leaders, and district attorneys in urban areas of Texas say has been an increase in people carrying weapons and in spur-of-the-moment gunfire in the year since the state began allowing most adults 21 or over to carry a handgun without a license.”

“Far from an outlier, Texas, with its new law, joined what has been an expanding effort to remove nearly all restrictions on carrying handguns,” the newspaper continued. “When Alabama’s ‘permitless carry’ law goes into effect in January, half of the states in the nation, from Maine to Arizona, will not require a license to carry a handgun.”

“But Texas is the most populous state to do away with handgun permit requirements,” the Times pointed out. “Five of the nation’s 15 biggest cities are in Texas, making the permitless approach to handguns a new fact of life in urban areas to an extent not seen in other states.”

“In the border town of Eagle Pass, drunken arguments have flared into shootings,” the newspaper reported. “In El Paso, revelers who legally bring their guns to parties have opened fire to stop fights. In and around Houston, prosecutors have received a growing stream of cases involving guns brandished or fired over parking spots, bad driving, loud music, and love triangles.”

“Who could’ve predicted arming folks without a license would result in this type of chaos?” columnist Wajahat Ali asked sardonically on social media.

Another person tweeted: “This is the future the GOP wants for all of America. Vote accordingly.”

Peer-reviewed research published Wednesday showed that Americans are more likely to die early if they live in states dominated by right-wing lawmakers, and weak gun safety measures were among the factors driving up state-level mortality rates.

No statewide data on shootings has been released since the law—passed by Texas Republicans last spring—went into effect last September, but many law enforcement officials say the presence of firearms on the street has increased while handgun permit applications have decreased.

“It seems like now there’s been a tipping point where just everybody is armed,” said Sheriff Ed Gonzalez of Harris County, which includes Houston.

As the Times reported: “Recent debates over gun laws in Texas have not been limited to handgun licensing. After the elementary school shooting in Uvalde, gun control advocates have pushed to raise the age to purchase an AR-15-style rifle. And after the [United States] Supreme Court struck down New York’s restrictive licensing program, a federal court in Texas found that a state law barring adults under 21 from carrying a handgun was unconstitutional. [Republican] Gov. Greg Abbott has suggested he agreed, even as the Texas Department of Public Safety, which oversees the state police, is appealing.”

Meanwhile, the Texas GOP’s assault on gun control is just part of a “state-by-state legislative push,” which “has coincided with a federal judiciary that has increasingly ruled in favor of carrying guns and against state efforts to regulate them,” the Times reported.

With their June decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the high court’s reactionary justices—most of whom were appointed by Republican presidents who lost the popular vote—struck down New York state’s restrictions on the concealed carry of firearms in public. In the process, journalist Mark Joseph Stern argued, they enlarged the scope of the Second Amendment and made it harder for voters around the U.S. to protect communities “by enacting gun safety laws through the democratic process.”

Calling it “a revolution in Second Amendment law,” Stern wrote that “the Supreme Court has effectively rendered gun restrictions presumptively unconstitutional.”

Before the ruling was handed down, journalist Jay Michaelson shed light on the right’s “preposterous misreading of the Second Amendment, funded largely by gun manufacturers,” in a Rolling Stone essay:

“Contrary to what you may have been led to believe, until 2008, no federal court had held that the Second Amendment conveyed a right to own a gun. On the contrary, the Supreme Court clearly said that it didn’t. […] And what had once been a fringe view rejected by the Supreme Court—that the Second Amendment gave individuals a right to own guns—gradually became Republican Party gospel when the fringe took over the party. Former Chief Justice Warren Burger (a conservative appointed by Richard Nixon) described it as ‘a fraud on the Amer­ican public.'”

Years before making it easier to carry handguns in public, Texas Republicans turned their state into one of the 29 nationwide with so-called “stand your ground” laws. These laws, also known as “shoot first” laws, upend the common law principle of a “duty to retreat,” enabling individuals to use deadly force in purported self-defense as a first, rather than last, resort.

A study published earlier this year found that “shoot first” laws are associated with hundreds of additional firearm homicides each year.

Although Texas was one of the few states where the enactment of “shoot first” laws did not lead to a significant change in gun homicide rates between 2000 and 2016, it remains to be seen if its new permitless carry law will generate a surge in violent encounters between armed parties claiming “self-defense.”

Last week in Florida, which became the first state to enact a “shoot first” law by statute in 2005, a man and his teenage son were arrested for attempted murder after allegedly shooting at a woman whom they suspected of being a burglar.

There are more guns than people in the U.S., and due to National Rifle Association-bankrolled Republicans’ opposition to meaningful gun safety laws, it remains relatively easy for people to purchase and carry firearms in many states.

As a result, there have been thousands of mass shootings since 2012, and guns recently became the leading cause of death among children and teens in the United States.

Studies have shown that gun regulations with high levels of public support, including bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, help reduce the number and severity of fatal mass shootings.

“We don’t have to live this way,” mom, teacher, and Democratic Minnesota House of Representatives candidate Erin Preese said Monday after a deadly school shooting in St. Louis. “Vote for lawmakers who will stand up to the gun lobby. Our kids’ lives depend on it.”

Man who assaulted Paul Pelosi with a hammer shouted “where is Nancy?”: report

New details are still coming in on the assault of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, and a new detail seemingly increases the likelihood that it was a politically motivated attack.

Sources who have been briefed on the attack CNN’s Ana Cabrera, the alleged attacker shouted, “Where is Nancy?” at Paul Pelosi after breaking into his house.

Afterward, the assailant allegedly beat Pelosi with a hammer, which required him to be taken to a nearby hospital to receive medical treatment. Doctors say he is expected to make a full recovery.

Earlier on Friday, the Associated Press reported that law enforcement officials had learned that the assailant specifically targeted Pelosi’s house, although they still have not released the attacker’s identity.

Nancy Pelosi, who was a frequent target for violent rhetoric by multiple Trump supporters who rioted at the United States Capitol on January 6, was not present in the house at the time of the assault.

Steve Bannon: GOP will teach Democrats a lesson “by bayonet”

White nationalist and twice-convicted felon Steve Bannon told Kash Patel — who served as chief of staff to the acting secretary of defense under former President Donald Trump — that Republicans are going to go after Democrats “with a bayonet” if the GOP wins majorities in the United States House of Representatives and the Senate in the November midterm elections.

“What word of advice would you give to leadership in the House in the next two weeks and then after they take power?” Bannon asked Patel on Wednesday’s edition of “War Room: Pandemic.” Patel proceeded to reference COVID-19 conspiracy theories and threaten Democratic Capitol Hill lawmakers.

“It’s simple. I said, I have no problem going around the country campaigning for you because you care about America First values. And you better not forget the things that you campaigned on: accountability, destroying the two-tiered system of justice, and ending the politicization of law enforcement in our military. Gone are the days where you force individuals who are brave enough to serve this country to choose between faith and a fake China virus jab. These things have to be front and center. Reinstating those law enforcement military personnel that were removed from their positions because they chose faith over a jab that wasn’t fully tested,” Patel replied, noting that Representatives Adam Schiff (D-CA), Eric Swalwell (D-CA), and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) are among the lawmakers that the right-wing would like to get rid of.

“But what I’m going to remind these people of that we’re sending to Washington — the [Nevada GOP Senate candidates][Adam] Laxalts [Nevada], the Blakes [Masters of Arizona], the JDs [Vance of Ohio] and everybody else — is that you guys, on these committees, with the majority, have to come in and subpoena everybody and every record and put them out for the American people, not keep them to yourselves. Two: you got to kick all these people off the committees like they did to us,” Patel continued. “Watermelon head Schiff, Swalwell and company, AOC, and the whole squad have no business touching the American Constitution because they have lit it on fire for the last five years. And they will not be permitted to have leadership positions of any kind.”

Patel also said that Republicans “will conduct a full-scale overhaul of the intelligence and law enforcement communities, whether it’s with — through a Church-like commission or otherwise. Every member of Congress and every senator needs it be known that when they’re sworn in on January 1st, they were sent there for these reasons. This is why the American public sent you there. And if they forget, I’m going to come on your show and remind them, by name.”

But Bannon thought that harsher measures are necessary. “No, we’re going to do it by bayonet,” he stated. “By the way, MSNBC, you want something to complain about, about Kash Patel? Just – we’ll cut this segment. You just listen to what he just said ’cause that’s gonna be reality.”

Watch below via Media Matters for America or at this link.

What killed off billions of Alaska’s snow crabs?

For the first time in recorded history, snow crab season was canceled in the Bering Sea off the coast of Alaska.

On October 10, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and the National Marine Fisheries Service cited concerns about the reduction in the snow crab population, which numbered in the billions before their recent mysterious decimation. As the population fell by over 90 percent, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G)  canceled the season to allow the population to rebound in hopes that it would return to replacement levels by next year. 

The report says that NOAA does not mention overfishing and aggressive scraping of the ocean floor as a main reason behind decreasing crab numbers.

“Understanding crab fishery closures have substantial impacts on harvesters, industry, and communities, ADF&G must balance these impacts with the need for long-term conservation and sustainability of crab stocks,” the official advisory says. “Management of Bering Sea snow crab must now focus on conservation and rebuilding given the condition of the stock.”

But while experts know that the snow crab population has decreased tremendously, the cause is not entirely clear. But among the culprits, global climate change perhaps looms largest.

Divergent hypotheses

While the scientific community is torn on the precise cause of the Bering Sea crabs, the majority of the blame falls on global warming. Yet some think the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) — the governing body of U.S. fisheries and marine conservation efforts — played a larger role in the snow crab’s disappearance than they publicized.

Related

Enjoying that expensive crab? It might be fake

A whistleblower who once worked with NOAA released a report in 2021 in Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, detailing supposed data falsification and other dishonest activities NOAA conducted. The report claims that “scientific fraud” is why the snow crab population fell to such extreme lows.

The report says that NOAA does not mention overfishing and aggressive scraping of the ocean floor (where snow crabs lay their eggs) as a main reason behind decreasing crab numbers. Instead, they “attributed the sudden loss of millions of crabs to ‘a drastic increase in natural mortality’ and ‘massive die-offs,’ claims for which no evidence ever materialized.” 

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Spencer Roberts, a writer and ecologist, published a now-viral Twitter thread on the snow crab population collapse, where he questioned NOAA’s reliability as a data source. “There is an institutionalized corruption problem within NOAA, in which fisheries management councils and advisory panels, who play instrumental roles in setting quotas and issuing permits, require a given proportion of their seats be occupied by representatives of the fishing industry,” he writes.

Following a request for comment, NOAA referred Salon to a statement: “Stock assessments and data sources are subject to a public, transparent, and rigorous, peer-review process. External experts are an important part of the review process to ensure that the integrity of the science and management responses are appropriate and based on the best scientific information available.”

The peril of warming waters

Although the alarming drop in crab population seems sudden, it has been tracked, researched and predicted for years. 

In the 2021 survey, snow crab numbers had fallen dramatically — there were just enough snow crabs to open the crabbing season that year. This year, numbers fell short of the set threshold.

The deeper ocean waters that snow crabs favor to produce offspring — waters that usually aren’t frequented by predators due to the cold temperatures — are warming. This has opened the door for predators, such as the Arctic cod, to attack snow crab nursery waters. The optimal temperature range of snow crabs isn’t being satisfied in this environment, which breeds disease, and worse issues. In addition, commercial crabbing ships are trawling the deep waters, causing critical damage to the snow crab’s breeding grounds.

In other words, human-caused environmental change, such as warming waters, are creating ricocheting effects on marine life. Natural selection has always governed the success of some and failure of others to reproduce. When conditions are changing as fast as they are now, organisms that are well-suited to the conditions and specific microenvironment they are adapted to cannot make this change as fast as they must. As the temperature ranges in the Bering Sea shift farther and farther away from the ideal, the snow crabs are forced to adapt or die. 

Where are the crabs? (And lobster, and fish?)

Philip Loring, an ecological anthropologist whose research delves into the multi-pronged issues facing Alaskan fisheries, predicted snow crabs to be one of the first species affected by warming waters. 

“Many critics of current approaches to fisheries management have been saying it’s just a matter of time before we see a high profile fishery experience dramatic changes because of climate change,” he says. “If it was just climate change, in all its complexity, that doesn’t absolve the fisheries management system, because we’ve known climate change is going to be dramatic for decades.”

Alaska isn’t the only fishing industry hit hard by the warming climate — it’s an issue of global scale. Fisheries are essential to the international food supply. Approximately 500 million people, in some capacity rely on fisheries for their livelihoods, and in some developing nations, up to 50% of animal protein consumption comes from marine organisms.

However, human demand has far outpaced supply. According to sustainable marine systems researcher Éva Plagányi, the “wild capture fisheries yield has likely already reached its natural limits.”

Yet, commercial fisheries aren’t able to meet the global demand either. Facing the same warming environmental conditions and myriad of related issues, fisheries are becoming less productive. In the Bering Sea, waters are warming faster than snow crabs can adapt, and overzealous fishing boats are squandering chances of population recuperation in the Bering Sea. 

“Climate change created an opportunity for the fishing industry. In the same way that the fossil fuel and shipping industries exploit opportunities created by sea ice declines, the fishing industry does as well,” Roberts says. “It’s important that media report on the impacts of climate change, but we should also be wary of the way that climate change can be used to excuse or obscure the impacts of extractive industries.”

Read more

about America’s fisheries

380 million tons of plastic are made every year. None of it is truly recyclable

No plastic is truly recyclable — not even the water bottles and milk jugs that people usually toss into their blue bins.

According to a new report released on Monday by Greenpeace USA, no plastic product meets a common industry standard for recyclability, even though they bear the familiar “chasing arrows” recycling symbol. The report says industry-backed recycling labels on yogurt cups, ketchup bottles, food trays, and other products perpetuate a “fiction” that recycling will ever scale up to handle the 380 million tons of plastic that companies churn out every year. The U.S. plastic recycling rate has never topped 10 percent, and a report from earlier this year revealed that it has now fallen to just 5 percent.

“Corporations are hiding behind plastics recycling and hoping that it will completely solve the plastic waste crisis that they have helped create,” said Lisa Ramsden, a senior oceans campaigner for Greenpeace USA. She called on companies to scale down plastic production and replace single-use products and packaging with reusable alternatives, like bottles that can be refilled.

Greenpeace’s report, titled Circular Claims Fall Flat Again, builds on a previous report the organization published in 2020. Back then, the group found that only certain kinds of bottles and jugs met the federal government’s definition for “recyclable” and could legally bear the chasing arrows symbol: Those bearing the numbers 1 and 2 to indicate the kind of material they’re made of, polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and high-density polyethylene (HDPE), respectively.

The same is still true today: Most recycling facilities don’t accept or recycle plastics numbered from 3 to 7, like polyvinyl chloride (PVC), polypropylene, and polystyrene because they are difficult to sort and often contaminated with toxic chemicals. But Greenpeace’s most recent report also highlighted an abysmal recycling rate for those that meet the government’s definition of recyclable, which only considers whether people have access to recycling facilities for a given kind of plastic. According to the organization’s analysis, the actual reprocessing rate for bottles and jugs made of PET (number 1) is only 21 percent, and about 10 percent for HDPE (number 2).

These numbers fall far short of an industry-backed standard from the nonprofit Ellen MacArthur Foundation, or EMF, which defines a product as recyclable only if it is recycled 30 percent of the time. Hundreds of major companies — from Clorox to the food giant Mondelez — have signed a commitment agreeing to this definition, yet their products continue to feature the chasing arrows symbol.

Although industry groups insist that plastic recycling can be improved with better collection infrastructure, Greenpeace says this is a fallacy. All plastics share similar problems: They’re extremely difficult to collect and sort, they release hazardous chemicals during the recycling process, and they are often so contaminated with toxic chemicals that they must be “down-cycled” into lower-value products, sent to a landfill, or incinerated. These challenges make plastic recycling too costly for corporations. “It’s just cheaper to buy new plastic,” Ramsden said.

Instead of doubling down on recycling, Greenpeace calls on companies to reduce their plastic packaging by at least 50 percent by 2030, either by eliminating it altogether or by replacing it with reusable materials. For example, a soft drink company could move toward the “milkman concept,” as Ramsden put it — a refillable system in which consumers return glass bottles once they’re done using them. The report also says companies should eliminate single-use plastics altogether, release annual data on their plastic packaging use and reduction rates, and push governments to adopt policies to slash plastic production, including the global plastic treaty that U.N. member states are planning to negotiate by 2024.

“Plastics recycling is absolutely not the solution” to the plastic pollution crisis, Ramsden said. As a first step, she encouraged companies to remove the recycling symbol from plastic products, since most of them are never recycled. The chasing arrows are “deceptive to consumers,” she said, “who assume that the plastic packaging they’re buying can be recycled, but it cannot be.”

“Dangerous for us all”: Elon Musk’s business past offers worrying signs for Twitter’s future

Tesla CEO Elon Musk completed his $44 billion purchase of Twitter on Thursday after a chaotic, months-long buyout process, leaving the richest man on the planet in control of one of the world’s most widely used social media and communication platforms.

Musk wasted no time imposing himself on the company, swiftly firing several top executives including CEO Parag Agrawal.

“The bird is freed,” Musk tweeted late Thursday.

A self-described free speech absolutist who has proven in practice to be anything but, Musk has yet to fully detail his vision for Twitter, but critics of the takeover fear that the billionaire’s suggestions thus far—including reversing the permanent bans of former President Donald Trump and potentially other figures such as the hate-spewing conspiracy monger Alex Jones—could further deluge the platform with disinformation ahead of key elections in the United States and Brazil.

As The New York Times observed, “Twitter said it would prohibit misleading claims about voting and the outcome of elections, but that was before Mr. Musk owned it.”

“Elon Musk’s plans for Twitter will make it an even more hate-filled cesspool, leading to irreparable real-world harm,” said the Stop the Deal Coalition, an alliance of groups that includes Accountable Tech, Friends of the Earth, Public Citizen, and the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. The coalition has urged Congress to investigate Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. (The purchase is reportedly already facing an investigation by federal regulators.)

“Musk’s plans will leave the platform more vulnerable to security threats, rampant disinformation, and extremism just ahead of the midterm elections,” the coalition said. “Elon Musk has a thirst for chaos and utter disregard for anyone other than himself and should not own Twitter.”

The coalition noted that, to fund the Twitter purchase, Musk is “accepting financing from Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Al Saud and the sovereign wealth fund of Qatar—two countries run by repressive regimes.” Saudi Arabia and Qatar are hardly bastions of free speech: Earlier this month, the Saudis sentenced 72-year-old U.S. citizen Saad Ibrahim Almadi to 16 years in prison over tweets criticizing the regime.

Almadi’s son told The Washington Post that the kingdom has tortured his father in prison.

“Elon Musk owning one of the world’s most powerful communication platforms is dangerous for us all,” the Stop the Deal Coalition continued. “As Musk runs Twitter to the ground, let this serve as a warning to other platforms that they will be held accountable for ignoring public safety and dismantling the guardrails designed to protect our information ecosystem.”

In a statement posted to Twitter Thursday morning, Musk said the reason he purchased the company “is because it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence.”

But Musk’s stated openness to free expression appears not to apply to his employees, Tesla customers, or journalists covering his companies.

“In November 2020, former Tesla employee Stephen Henkes said he was fired from his job at Tesla on August 3, 2020 after raising safety concerns internally then filing formal complaints with government offices, when the company failed to fix and communicate accurately with customers over what he said were unacceptable fire risks in the company’s solar installations,” CNBC reported Thursday.

“Musk and Tesla have also sought—not always successfully—to silence customers,” the outlet added. “For example, Tesla used to compel customers to sign agreements containing non-disclosure clauses as a prerequisite to have their vehicles repaired,” the outlet added. “In 2021, Tesla asked customers to agree not to post critically to social media about FSD Beta, an experimental driver assistance software package that some Tesla owners could test out using their own cars and unpaid time to do so.”

Musk, like other billionaire CEOs, is also a union-buster.

Last year, the National Labor Relations Board upheld a judge’s ruling that Tesla unlawfully fired an employee involved in union organizing. The labor board also affirmed the finding that Musk illegally threatened workers “with the loss of their stock options” if they decided to form a union.

David Nasaw, emeritus professor of history at the CUNY Graduate Center, wrote in a column for the Times on Thursday that “Musk is the face of 21st-century tech-based, extreme capitalism, just as the robber barons, who built our railroads, and Andrew Carnegie, who supplied those railroads and the builders of modern American cities with steel, embodied the exuberant and expansive industrial capitalism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.”

“Mr. Musk has exploited the opportunities emerging in a rapidly disintegrating regulatory state apparatus and acquired a small army of investors and a fleet of lobbyists, lawyers, and fanboys (known as Musketeers),” Nasaw continued. “He has sought to position himself as a tech genius who can break the rules, exploit and excise those who work for him, ridicule those who stand in his way, and do as he wishes with his wealth because it benefits humanity.”

“It is not unreasonable to expect that a Musk-owned and controlled Twitter will, in the name of free speech, allow disinformation and misinformation to be tweeted ad infinitum so long as it discredits his political opponents and celebrates and enriches himself and his allies,” Nasaw added. “Elon Musk is a product of his—and our—times. Rather than debate or deride his influence, we must recognize that he is not the self-made genius businessman he plays in the media. Instead, his success was prompted and paid for by taxpayer money and abetted by government officials who have allowed him and other billionaire businessmen to exercise more and more control over our economy and our politics.”

5 things to know about Montana’s ‘Born Alive’ ballot initiative

Montana voters will decide Nov. 8 whether to approve a ballot initiative declaring that an embryo or fetus is a legal person with a right to medical care if it survives an abortion or delivery. The measure would impose severe penalties on health workers who don’t provide that care.

Legislative Referendum 131 was approved for next month’s election by state lawmakers in 2021, more than a year before the U.S. Supreme Court removed federal protections for abortion in June.

Abortion remains legal in Montana because of a 1999 state Supreme Court ruling that protects it under the state constitution’s right-of-privacy provision. Three laws passed by the Republican-led legislature in 2021 to restrict abortion have been blocked while a legal challenge proceeds, arguing that they violate the constitutional provision.

But lawmakers sent LR-131 directly to voters to decide whether it should become law.

Here are five key things to know about the ballot measure:

1. What would the initiative do?

LR-131 would impose criminal penalties of up to 20 years in prison and up to a $50,000 fine on any health care worker who doesn’t try to save a “born-alive infant.” That term is defined as a legal person who breathes, has a heartbeat, or has voluntary muscle movement after an abortion or delivery.

The measure would require health care providers to “take medically appropriate and reasonable actions” to keep the fetus or infant alive, but it doesn’t define or give examples of such actions. The health care workers liable under the initiative would be doctors and nurses but also any “individual who may be asked to participate in any way in a health care service or procedure.”

The initiative includes a mandatory reporting requirement, which means that any employee or volunteer at a medical facility who is aware of a violation must report it to authorities.

2. Where did the initiative come from?

House Bill 167, the 2021 legislation that authorized the referendum, was sponsored by state Rep. Matt Regier (R-Kalispell), chair of the panel that oversees the state Department of Public Health and Human Services’ budget.

“We need to make it abundantly clear that here in Montana, the protection of all life is available,” Regier said while introducing the bill in January 2021.

The bill is very similar to model legislation created by Americans United for Life in 2018 as a template for state lawmakers nationwide. So far, 18 states have provisions along those lines, and more are considering them, according to the group. Its president and CEO, Catherine Glenn Foster, testified in support of Montana’s bill during the 2021 legislative session.

The Montana measure does not include a provision in the model legislation that gives an infant’s parents the right to refuse medical intervention if the treatment isn’t necessary to save the infant’s life, would only temporarily prolong the infant’s death, or carries risks that outweigh the potential benefits to the infant.

The Montana measure also excludes a clause in the model legislation that exempts parents and guardians from criminal and civil liability. The Montana initiative doesn’t address parental liability.

Bradley Kehr, Americans United for Life’s policy counsel, described the ballot initiative as “well tailored to the needs of Montana.”

3. What does the initiative have to do with abortion?

Regier’s bill says the purpose of the referendum is to protect infants who have survived abortions from being denied medical care and being left to die.

The measure’s passage would move the Family Research Council’s classification of Montana’s “born-alive” protections from “weak” to “strong” compared with the rest of the nation, according to Connor Semelsberger, director of federal affairs for life and human dignity for the nonprofit organization, which advocates for anti-abortion measures.

Montana is not among the nine states that require health providers to report when an infant is born alive during an abortion. The Family Research Council lists the states that do as Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Texas.

Instances of fetuses surviving abortions are very rare. In Minnesota, which the Family Research Council points to as having the strongest protections in the U.S., five of the 10,136 abortions performed in 2021 resulted in a live birth, according to a state health department report. None of the five survived.

The number of abortions in which a fetus could survive is small, too: The point at which a fetus can survive outside the womb is generally considered to be after 22 weeks of pregnancy, and about 1% of all abortions in the U.S. happen at or after 21 weeks.

The leaders of two Montana clinics that provide abortions said the initiative’s passage would not affect their operations, as Montana law restricts performing abortions after a fetus is viable. The law does not define viability.

Nicole Smith, executive director of Blue Mountain Clinic in Missoula, said her clinic provides dilation-and-evacuation abortions that would not result in a live birth. “We do not provide obstetric or labor-and-delivery care,” she said, adding that she would refer a patient who needed that kind of care to someone who specializes in high-risk pregnancies.

Helen Weems, director of All Families Healthcare in Whitefish, said her clinic does not perform abortions after 12 weeks. LR-131 “is designed to look like an anti-abortion measure, but it has no relevance” to her clinic, she said. “There would never be an occasion in my practice where there would be an infant born alive,” Weems said.

4. If clinics that provide abortions won’t be affected, who will?

The initiative also covers any natural birth, induced labor, or cesarean section.

That could present obstetricians and gynecologists with an ethical dilemma of having to choose between their obligation to provide the best available medical care to their patients or the potential of facing legal penalties, according to a position paper by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists opposing the Montana measure.

The organization said LR-131 could require an aggressive course of treatment in extremely complex and often tragic medical situations. It opposes the measure as government interference in the patient-physician relationship that would impose additional trauma on families.

Smith said the initiative would apply to miscarriages and to hospital deliveries in cases when parents know their child won’t live but want to complete the birth for a chance to hold the baby and say goodbye.

Opponents of the ballot initiative use the example of an early labor and delivery at 20 weeks. They say that rather than allowing the family to hold, say goodbye to, or baptize the baby before it dies, the measure would require health care workers to remove it in an attempt to save its life.

A study of nearly 5,000 infants born before 27 weeks of gestation found that all 129 infants who were born before 22 weeks and were included in the study died. Two received active medical treatment. Of those born in the 22nd week, 5% survived. Most of the 24 hospitals in the study provided treatment to all infants born at 25 or 26 weeks. Those born at week 26 had an overall survival rate of about 81%, and 59% survived without moderate or severe impairment.

5. What does existing federal and state law say?

Under Montana law, it’s already a felony to purposely, knowingly, or negligently cause the death of a viable, premature infant. A federal law passed in 2002 says a person includes “every infant member of the species homo sapiens who is born alive at any stage of development.” It defines “born alive” as evidence of a heartbeat, breathing, or voluntary muscle movements, but does not include any additional provisions.

Opponents of the Montana measure point to those laws as evidence that LR-131 is unnecessary and is instead meant to drive conservative voter turnout. “This cruelty is being forced on already grieving families for the cold, calculated political gain of extreme-right politicians,” Weems said.

Regier, the legislator whose bill authorized the referendum, said current Montana law does not go far enough to protect infants.

Semelsberger, of the Family Research Council, said the same about the federal law and that it has lacked enforcement. The organization supports a federal bill introduced by U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) that would add requirements to save the life of an infant, though with up to five years of maximum prison time, instead of the 20 years in Montana’s measure.

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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“Holy Spider” examines a “serial killer society,” in which Iranian sex workers are targeted

The gripping Iranian serial killer film, “Holy Spider” is set in the holy city Mashhad, where Saeed (Mehdi Bajestani) is murdering sex workers. (The pre-credit sequence depicts his ninth victim). While the police have no clues, Rahimi (Zar Amir Ebrahimi), a journalist arrives to cover the case and help catch the killer.

“I do think it is a topical movie or a women’s rights movie; it’s a film noir.”

Directed and co-written by Ali Abbasi (“Border”), “Holy Spider” is a very unusual Iranian film in that it features sex and nudity as well as some very explicit violence. (It was filmed in Jordan, not Iran.) The story is based on a real-life case about Saeed Hanaei, who killed 16 women between 2000 and 2001. He did this as an act of cleansing vice from the streets and is celebrated as a hero for his actions by many citizens.

Meanwhile, Rahimi encounters nothing but difficulties from men, starting with her trouble checking into a hotel alone where she had made a reservation, to harassment from members of the police force, to feeling threatened when she walks down a street alone at night.

Abbasi’s strength as a filmmaker is that he makes viewers understand and care about all of the characters — from the sex worker who is murdered in the opening sequence, to the determined Rahimi and Saeed, a war veteran with a wife and three kids. Their storylines alternate until they intersect. 

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“Holy Spider” also features some very intense and provocative moments not just involving the crimes, but also in how women are seen and treated in Iran. Once Saeed is caught and brought to trial, the film provides another critical look at Iranian society.

Abbasi and Amir Ebrahimi, who won Best Actress at Cannes this year for her performance, chatted with Salon about “Holy Spider.” 

Ali, how did you find this story and decide to make a film about it? Was Rahimi’s character part of the real-life case or created for the film? 

Ali Abbasi: She was a part of the real case, and this was a big, very infamous case at the time. It was national news, even if the government didn’t want it to be on the front page. This is not the story of [Saeed]. It’s inspired by his story, so we have taken certain creative licenses. Rahimi’s character does exist. She did follow the investigation, but she didn’t go undercover, as in the movie. But she was there during the sequence in prison. I took that from a transcript of a report. 

Zar, how did you come to play this role and develop Rahimi’s character? 

Zar Amir Ebrahimi: I started my work on this film as the casting director. I wasn’t supposed to play any role in the film. Ali and I had many discussions about each role and the whole script. I knew every character in the film very well. When it came to this journalist, I was always looking for some motivation — what is her motive to risk her life at this point? I never had a real answer when I was explaining this role to other actresses. The actress who was supposed to play the role decided not to do it a week before shooting. I didn’t think I was right for the role, physically, but I got explosive about the actress leaving and Ali saw another side of me. He finally said, “I want to go with you.”

I looked into her childhood, her parents. Is she a feminist? Once I had this character in my hands and started doing some research. I called my friends who were working as journalists, and it was interesting, because I thought being a journalist means you have a voice, and no one can bother you or annoy you or harass you. If anyone does something, you can just write about it. I was shocked it was not like this, and these journalists, especially women, are facing many problems in their daily life with their editor, the people they interview, with authorities and colleagues. It’s the same in Europe. They told me very sad stories related to harassment. Then I connected myself and own experience of life in Iran as a woman to those journalists and this journalist and then I found her motivation. When I went in front of the camera, she was inside me. 

Did you meet with the real reporter to prepare for the role? 

Amir Ebrahimi: I knew the reporter and I didn’t talk with her. Ali was in contact with her. I avoided direct contact so as not to be influenced by the real person. The journalist is the role model, but she is fictionalized in the story. I wanted to find something more personal for her.

“To show the underbelly of a violent place, you can’t do it with a feather pen.”

We had a background that she is not able to work with every newspaper because they talk about her. She didn’t play the game. She only has this one editor who will work with her. She is really independent and she has only this card to play in her professional and personal life. 

Ali, what decisions did you make about alternating Rahimi’s and Saeed’s points of view, which show how men are privileged in Iranian society, but women are often victims or need to “know their place”? 

Abbasi: I do think it is a topical movie or a women’s rights movie; it’s a film noir. It is about these two characters, who are, in their own way, both pretty relentless. They believe in what they are doing. The balance came in the editing. We shot a lot of materials with Mehdi, who plays Saeed, and going into his head with his hallucinations and fantasies. But to keep this balance it should be a two-hander. I don’t see one person as the main character. You start with one character, then Saeed, then jump to Rahimi, then end somewhere else. We tried to have a Big Brother perspective than one or two characters. That 50/50 balance helped tell the story.

Rahimi can perhaps infiltrate spaces where cops cannot. What are your thoughts about Rahimi putting herself at risk to catch Saeed rather than leave it to the police to handle?

Amir Ebrahimi: She is a special character. I’m not sure every woman has this access, that if you go to this street in this city, you can meet these women and talk with them, especially as a journalist. They don’t trust you. You can write about them. When Rahimi goes to a sex worker’s mother’s house, she doesn’t want her to speak with her. When Rahimi asks a sex worker about Saeed, she doesn’t answer. They don’t trust you, which is why I needed that motivation. This journalist had to stay in the street and make these girls trust her. As a woman, I want to get to the truth, but for me, it is about taking care of myself and being a support to other women to make society safer for all of us.

Holy SpiderZar Amir Ebrahimi in “Holy Spider” (Utopia)

I cared so much about the first victim in the film, even though she only gets 10 minutes of screen time. Ali, you show enough of her life that we see what is lost when she becomes a murder victim.

Abbasi: We had conversations that there have been so many movies about a genius serial killer who is killing numbers of women. These women are not numbers. It was important to have an introduction to this specific way of life. To hook you emotionally, and make you care about these people in this strange country, with strange rules. You have to have this hook on the humanity.

“Holy Spider” opens with that potent sequence that depicts nudity, fellatio and violence. This is not something seen in Iranian cinema. I was surprised by the sex scene Saeed has in the film as well. Ali, what can you say about depicting this, and did you feel the need to include this knowing that it would provoke attention?

“The last 50 years of Iranian cinema is the result of severe censorship.”

Abbasi: I think there has been countless movies about sex workers both in Iran and in Hollywood and many times it is being shown as a glamorous job, or not as bad as you think, or in the end, you find a good rich husband as in “Pretty Woman.” The actual thing in Iran is much, much harsher and it’s a place where these women are not being treated as human beings. To show the underbelly of a violent place, you can’t do it with a feather pen. You need to have a sense of what is going on. 

It’s a question brought up by everyone from the folks who financed the film to the crew and distributors and festivals: Is it necessary? I think there are two ways of looking at it. Is this necessary in the context of the movie itself? That is debatable. Every scene is dispensable or not. But is this necessary in the context of Iranian culture, which tends to hide stuff and talk about things metaphorically. The last 50 years of Iranian cinema is the result of severe censorship. What you have come to accept as the picture of Iran in contemporary Iranian movies is heavily censored and retouched. So, in that context, it is absolutely necessary to serve people with a few bites of raw reality. You might see movies about middle-class families playing piano in Tehran, but that’s not the whole truth. 

Both Rahimi and Saeed are bound by truth and duty. They behave the way they do because they feel not just an obligation but also a sense of righteousness. Can you talk about this idea?  

Amir Ebrahimi: I think Saeed is looking for his truth somehow. He finds the truth in his actions, and Rahimi finds it in another way. Both characters, even Saeed’s wife, they are all victims of this society. Rahimi is having difficulties every day with every step she takes she has to deal with many things. 

Can you talk about Rahimi’s search for truth?

Amir Ebrahimi: We are in a patriarchal society and suffer misogyny. This film is more universal than just being an Iranian social-political movie. But living in Iran, we are telling a story that takes place in a religious society in Mashhad, with this government. I understand people who are living in Mashhad and support someone like Saeed because they have no education and have no idea about sex workers. But we know there is sex work there, in a city where people go there to pray. But the government hides it, and they don’t want us to talk about it.

“This film is not about the serial killer but about the serial killer society.”

Rahimi is looking for that truth and in this film, we show this reality. It’s a mirror to that society. Ali says this film is not about the serial killer but about the serial killer society. This is what I felt and experienced in Iran as a woman. We can easily be a serial killer society because of all this pressure we have had for 40 years because of religion. I never thought Rahimi was looking for a truth. I thought she was fighting for herself and her rights. She was not there to find a killer, but to save these women. The hardest scene where I interview Saeed’s wife, Fatima (Forouzan Jamshidnejad). Who am I? Am I journalist? Am I an Iranian woman? Am I the woman risking her life in this house two night before? It was a complicated scene for me, and she played her shame and support for her husband at the same time. She sees the truth in Saeed’s wife, and that she’s a victim, too. But it is hard to have a dialogue with someone supporting the killer. Maybe I was looking for our truth as women.

What about film’s themes of purity and corruption? We get a sense of this when a female sex worker touches Saeed’s beard and he reacts by washing it and praying. But there is also the cynical episodes where Saeed meets with men who are working to free him behind the scenes. I think it is a critical film, but I also think it is cynical.

Abbasi: I think it is a movie about a cynical society. I don’t think, as a filmmaker, my job is to give you bouquet of flowers, it’s more of a slap in the face. I think that is sometimes needed. There is no point in retouching this image that is, as I said, rotten. It is no secret that these things happen in Iran or the way they happen. We were in the unique position to actually be able to depict them — we have the means and the possibilities of showing this. If I was really cynical, the idea that there is a sense of justice would make me overtly optimistic. It’s not a movie about heroes, but this circle of violence that encircles everyone, which is the problem.

I’m curious about the portrait of Mashhad as both beautiful and brutal. There is the idea this being a holy city and the crimes being part of a fatwa or done for religious reasons. There are the female victims, and the graphic violence as well as the grittiness of the urban nighttime environment. 

Abbasi: The city of Mashhad is the second largest city in Iran, and it is an interesting city because it’s the Vatican meets Las Vegas. There’s a big shrine, the biggest mosque in the world, which combines pilgrimage and business, but these people need to have fun. Where there are a lot of men in the same place, there is prostitution, for sure. In the city, there are sex workers in the street, and this is tolerated as something that is good for business. My friends who live there are musicians, but they are not allowed to have concerts because [the authorities consider] that as vice. But prostitution is tolerated because they decided you can’t control it, because it is a tourist city. It is a relatively wealthy city, but there is an underbelly because there has been a lot of immigration there. It is also a hub for drug trade from Afghanistan. It’s a real noir city. It has one surface during the day — dusty and controlled and people are going for the pilgrimage and every is coming for the religion, then at night, it transforms and becomes sin city.

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The film opens with the quote “Every man shall meet what he wishes to avoid.” That is perhaps reference to death, but it could also be seen as Saeed encountering the sex workers that he wants to rid society of. What can you say about this concept?

Abbasi: I think it’s interesting that this happened in this city. With so many contrasts in this city that can inhibit this whole theme. That is one of the reasons why we are having problems with Iranian government. Maybe the Italians had the same thing with The Vatican — you are not allowed to make movies that are critical of what happens in the Vatican because that would be blasphemous or an insult against Christianity. That’s how they look at things, but at the same time, that is the reality. Am I being cynical for pointing out the obvious? I don’t think so. I just don’t buy the propaganda narrative they present — and neither should you!

“Holy Spider” is playing in select theaters starting Oct. 28.

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“Motivation for the attack is under investigation”: Nancy Pelosi’s husband “violently assaulted”

This is a breaking news story… Check back for possible updates…

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, was “violently assaulted” during a break-in at their San Francisco home early Friday morning, the Democratic leader’s office said in a statement.

“Early this morning, an assailant broke into the Pelosi residence in San Francisco and violently assaulted Mr. Pelosi,” said Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill. “The assailant is in custody and the motivation for the attack is under investigation. Mr. Pelosi was taken to the hospital, where he is receiving excellent medical care and is expected to make a full recovery. The Speaker was not in San Francisco at the time.”

“The Speaker and her family are grateful to the first responders and medical professionals involved, and request privacy at this time,” Hammill added.

Citing unnamed people familiar with the ongoing investigation, the Associated Press reported that “Pelosi, 82, suffered blunt force injuries to his head and body.” The assailant used a hammer, according to the outlet.

“The attack was not random; the assailant specifically targeted the home,” AP added.

Can the Republicans really impeach Joe Biden? Yes they can!

With Republicans convinced that they have the midterm elections in the bag they are hauling out their big guns. As I’ve mentioned before, they have unveiled plans to hold the debt ceiling hostage in order to force President Biden to give tax cuts to their wealthy benefactors (which explains why so many of them are pouring late money into the campaign) and also to reestablish their old-time conservative movement bonafides by gutting Social Security and Medicaid.

In that article, I also mentioned in passing that a GOP House majority will have investigations and impeachments on the front burner. Yes, I do mean plural. They’ve got a long list of Biden administration official they believe should resign or face impeachment. They’ve been talking about doing this since Biden’s first few months in office when the Freedom Caucus (which should just rename itself the MAGA Caucus at this point) held a press conference to announce its plans.

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First on the list for impeachment is Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, for alleged failures at the border, and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, for the withdrawal in Afghanistan. (I’m not sure why they hold Blinken responsible for that military botch-up, but whatever.) They’ve also called for the resignation of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley, as well as Biden himself, of course. They didn’t actually mention impeaching Biden in that initial press conference, which was slightly odd. But by then their illustrious colleague, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, had already filed the first of her five impeachment resolutions — on Biden’s first day in office, in fact — claiming that he had abused the power of his office by allowing his son Hunter “to influence the domestic policy of a foreign nation and accept benefits from foreign nationals in exchange for favors.” Did that happen sometime between the parade and the inaugural address?

Given the cast of characters involved, especially Greene, it’s easy to dismiss this as backbench folderol. But Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who seems to think he’s got a second career as a stand-up comic or late-night talk show host in his future, told his podcast audience in late 2021 that there was a good likelihood that a Republican House majority would seek to impeach Biden. He admitted there was no specific high crime or misdemeanor he could point to, admitting that it would simply be an act of raw partisan power:

And whether it’s justified or not… the Democrats weaponized impeachment. They used it for partisan purposes to go after Trump because they disagreed with him. And one of the real disadvantages of doing that… is the more you weaponize it and turn it into a partisan cudgel, you know, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

Yes, we’re into the dreary old cycle of “you started it.” In fact, impeachment articles have been filed against every president, of whichever party, since Richard Nixon. The first of those that actually got off the ground was the impeachment of Bill Clinton, which I’ve always seen as the long-delayed retaliation for Nixon (who was not technically impeached but only avoided it by resigning). Republicans hadn’t really had a chance to take their pound of flesh, since they held the presidency for 12 years under Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, but when they finally got a Democratic president to attack they went for it.

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It was an exceedingly thin case, consisting of a charge of perjury against Clinton for lying in a deposition — in a case that had been dismissed — and obstruction of justice for his feeble attempts to cover up the affair with Monica Lewinsky. The public rallied to the president’s side and the Republicans lost seats in the next election. If anyone weaponized impeachment it was the Republican Party of the 1990s, and it backfired.

Donald Trump’s two impeachments were of an entirely different order, and were definitely not meant to avenge Bill Clinton, whom Democrats, in the wake of the #MeToo movement, would just as soon let pass into history without further comment. But the revenge cycle was bound to continue after the Trump impeachments. Vengeance forms the core of his psyche, as he has proudly admitted for years. Here’s what Trump told the supposedly devout Christian student body of Liberty University in 2012:

Since he remains the de facto leader of the Republican Party and 2024 frontrunner, it’s easy to see where this is heading. Trump will demand, in no uncertain terms, that House Republicans impeach Biden. I have never doubted this for a moment.

Kevin McCarthy can probably see that for Republicans to behave like lunatics, with Trump egging them on, during the months leading into the presidential campaign might not be a good look. But he’s too weak to prevent it.

The Atlantic’s Barton Gellman, who correctly predicted Trump’s Big Lie strategy and the national strategy to manipulate the electoral system going into 2022 and 2024, reported this week that impeachment looks almost certain. He spoke with a number of GOP officials and political advisers and they believe it’s inevitable, even though Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the presumptive House speaker if Republicans win the majority, clearly considers it risky. Apparently McCarthy can see that Republicans behaving like lunatics while Trump eggs them on, in the months leading up to the presidential campaign might not be a good look. (Maybe someone reminded him how things turned out in 1998.) As Gellman puts it:

But there is little reason to think that McCarthy can resist the GOP’s impulse to impeach once it gathers strength. He is a notably weak leader of a conference that proved unmanageable for his predecessors Paul Ryan and John Boehner. If he does in fact reach the speakership, his elevation will be a testament to his strategy of avoiding conflict with those forces.

Watching McCarthy flail about, trying (and failing) to control the wild beasts of the Republican caucus, will be one of the few enjoyable aspects of GOP House rule.

Gellman asked around to see what House Republicans might come up with to rationalize their impeachment revenge strategy, and nobody was quite sure. It could be about Hunter Biden, which seems to be the favorite, although impeaching a president over something he allegedly did years ago as vice president seems like a stretch, especially when there’s no tangible evidence he did anything wrong. (Which certainly won’t stop them.) Some GOP members suggested the Afghanistan withdrawal, the border crisis or Biden’s extension of the eviction moratorium, all of which have already been mentioned by Marjorie Taylor Greene in her various articles of impeachment — which may reveal who’s really running this show.

As Gellman points out, these are policy disputes which in vaguely normal times would never be considered high crimes and misdemeanors. But as Gerald Ford said when he was House minority leader, there is no clear constitutional standard for impeachment, and “an impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.”

With this crowd there is only one reason that matters. Biden’s impeachable offense was the high crime of winning the election, and it will not go unpunished.

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“We’ve waited long enough”: Appeals court rules in favor of releasing Trump’s tax returns

A federal appeals court on Thursday rejected former President Donald Trump’s bid to reconsider a ruling requiring the Treasury Department to turn over his tax returns.

The full D.C. appeals court denied Trump’s request for the court to rehear the case. A three-judge panel on the court in August unanimously denied Trump’s appeal of the lower court decision that cleared the way for House Democrats to obtain his tax information from the IRS. The brief order on Thursday said there were no noted dissents.

Trump, who broke with decades of tradition by refusing to publicly release his tax returns, has battled the House Ways and Means Committee over the release for years. The committee first asked the Treasury Department to turn over the tax returns in 2019 after they won control of the House, citing a federal law giving the panel authority to obtain any taxpayer’s documents.

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The Treasury Department under Trump fought the request until he left office. After President Joe Biden took over, Ways and Means Chairman Richie Neal, D-Mass., issued a new request for Trump’s tax returns from 2015 to 2020 for an inquiry into how the IRS audits presidential tax returns. The Justice Department issued a memo in July saying that the Treasury is required to turn over the information.

Trump’s lawyers sought an injunction to block the request, arguing that it served no legitimate legislative purpose and accusing the committee of political motivations. U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden, a Trump appointee, finally issued a ruling in December 2021, two and half years after the House brought the case requiring the department to turn over the records.

“Even if the former president is right on the facts, he is wrong on the law,” McFadden wrote. “A long line of Supreme Court cases requires great deference to facially valid congressional inquiries. Even the special solicitude accorded former presidents does not alter the outcome.”

The three-judge appeals panel upheld the ruling in August.

“It is not our place to delve deeper than this,” the appeals panel wrote. “The mere fact that individual members of Congress may have political motivations as well as legislative ones is of no moment.”

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Rep. Bill Pascrell, D-N.J., who sits on the Ways and Means Committee, noted on Twitter that Thursday’s ruling came 1,303 days “since we made a legal request for Trump’s tax returns — nearly as long as the Civil War.”

“Americans deserve to know exactly how far trump’s crimes go,” he wrote.

Neal in a statement said that the “law has always been on our side.”

“Former President Trump has tried to delay the inevitable, but once again, the court has affirmed the strength of our position,” he said. “We’ve waited long enough — we must begin our oversight of the I.R.S.’s mandatory presidential audit program as soon as possible.”

But it’s not clear that Neal and the Democrats will actually get to see the tax returns if Trump is able to run out the clock.

Trump is likely to appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court, where at least four justices have to vote to take up the case. “The litigation will almost certainly remain unresolved by January,” The New York Times reported, when Republicans are likely to take over the House. “The House under G.O.P. control is virtually certain to drop the request.”

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Drivers in decline: A shortage of volunteers complicates access to care in rural America

Several times a month, Jim Maybach drives 5 miles from his house in Hay Creek, Minnesota, toward the Mississippi River.

When he reaches Red Wing, a city of nearly 17,000 people, the 79-year-old retired engineer stops to pick up a senior whom he then delivers to an appointment, such as a dentist visit or an exercise class. When the appointment ends, Maybach is there to drive the person home.

It’s a route and routine he repeats a handful of times each month.

Maybach is unpaid, a volunteer among a cadre organized by Faith in Action in Red Wing, a nonprofit that relies on retirees to ferry residents to essential services.

The riders, mostly seniors, are people who don’t have immediate access to transportation, especially in rural areas where public transit options are either limited or nonexistent.

There are several such programs serving rural counties in Minnesota, but, as with other services across the country, their existence has become precarious because the number of volunteer drivers has steadily declined, according to transportation advocates. Volunteers either get to a point where, because of age, they can no longer drive, or the costs associated with their volunteerism are no longer sustainable. For decades, Congress has refused to increase the rate at which the drivers’ expenses can be reimbursed.

Experts say that with public transit in rural areas already insufficient and the long distances that residents in rural communities must travel to access health care, a decimated volunteer driver network would leave seniors with even fewer transportation options and could interrupt their health management. Already, social service organizations that rely on volunteers have begun to restrict their service options and deny ride requests when drivers aren’t available.

Recognizing the need for drivers in their community is often what got volunteers to sign up in the first place, but as car insurance and gas costs increase, the commitment is not “the attractive win-win that it once was,” said Frank Douma, director of state and local policy and outreach for the Institute for Urban and Regional Infrastructure Finance at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs.

Volunteers, like Maybach, are eligible for a reimbursement of 14 cents per mile, which generally doesn’t come close to covering the cost of gas and wear and tear on a vehicle. And while the Internal Revenue Service increased the business rate from 58.5 cents per mile to 62.5 cents per mile in June, it did not raise the charitable rate because it is under Congress’ purview and must be set by statute. The charitable rate was last changed in 1997.

Despite the long-standing charitable rate, United Community Action Partnership, a nonprofit that runs a volunteer driving program in southwestern Minnesota, had for years been reimbursing drivers using the business rate. The program’s administrators didn’t realize the IRS could count volunteers’ reimbursements that exceed the charitable rate as income.

The organization experienced its “first major drop” in the number of volunteer drivers before the covid-19 pandemic, after it found out about the IRS rule and told volunteers about the tax implications of higher reimbursement rates, said Shelly Pflaum, the driving program’s administrator.

And although the nonprofit continued to reimburse at the business rate, the remaining drivers were frustrated that as gas prices spiked in the spring, the rate remained only 58.5 cents per mile, which did not cover the cost of gas or maintenance.

“When you’re paying nearly five dollars for gas, it is no longer helping,” Pflaum said. “So, there were some concerns: ‘With what I’m spending to drive my vehicle, this is no longer reasonable for me — I can’t afford to volunteer’ essentially is what it was coming down to.”

The IRS business rate bump in June was enough to convince most drivers to stay, but Pflaum said she lost a volunteer who had been driving for nearly 20 years.

The issue of unequal rates has gained bipartisan attention in Congress, with the introduction of two bills — both sponsored by Minnesota representatives who propose increasing the charitable mileage reimbursement rate to the business rate. Similar proposals have been made in Congress before and failed.

According to 2018 research by the Volunteer Driver Coalition, Minnesota had 1,900 volunteers that year who collectively served 77,000 riders.

One persistent hurdle that volunteers face is convincing their auto insurers that they are, in fact, volunteers and not drivers-for-hire like Lyft or Uber drivers. Otherwise, the insurers could require them to buy more expensive insurance meant for commercial ride-hailing drivers.

An AARP Public Policy Institute analysis found that, as of September 2020, seven states had implemented laws barring insurance providers from denying or canceling insurance or increasing rates because the driver is a volunteer. Only two states had differentiated for-hire drivers from volunteers in insurance statutes at that time.

Last year, Minnesota passed legislation that distinguished volunteer drivers from drivers-for-hire. Legislators also reduced the drivers’ potential in-state tax liability.

In southeastern Minnesota, the driver shortage prompted a program at the nonprofit Semcac to cut back on the types of rides it offers. It limits users to two nonmedical trips per month.

“We would allow more if we had the drivers to do those, but we don’t want to take the drivers on nonmedical rides and then somebody doesn’t get to their doctor appointment,” said Jessica Schwering, operations manager at Semcac. “There’s way more of a need than what we can provide for, and it’s only getting worse.”

If Semcac cannot arrange a driver for a community member in need of a ride, the person must look for an alternative, such as a ride from a family member, or have their health insurance provider find one. Semcac has partnered with certain insurance providers to get their clients to medical and dental appointments. Not all volunteer driver programs have this structure.

Schwering manages 53 drivers spread across six rural counties. About half of them are in Winona County, a nearly 650-square-mile swath southeast of Minneapolis along the Mississippi River. She estimates that the average driver is 80 years old.

Schwering said volunteers who stop driving for her nonprofit most often cite medical reasons, such as not getting cleared by their doctor.

Douma, from the University of Minnesota, said the average age of volunteers is also a factor in the decline. “When the baby boomers were retiring, they were driving people from the Silent Generation and the Greatest Generation, who were less numerous than baby boomers, so you had more people available to do the driving for fewer people,” he said. “But now that the baby boomers are aging, those who may be most eligible to drive them are Gen X — and that’s a much smaller generation.”

Jim Maybach started driving for Faith in Action after retiring in 2011. Six years later, his wife, Judie, now 78, joined him after she retired from nursing. They have trouble imagining stopping anytime soon.

Still, their volunteer program has begun planning a new recruitment strategy to bring in a much younger base, stay-at-home parents.

“We were just trying to think, ‘Well, who else can we get?'” said Katherine Bonine, executive director of Faith in Action. “Because when we have our senior citizens, we’ve had some transfer from being a volunteer into a recipient as they grow older and their driving capabilities change.”

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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NASA is convening a panel to study unidentified flying objects. What do they hope to find?

Months before he died, former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) famously told the world that the Pentagon had denied him access to materials which had supposedly been recovered from an unidentified flying object (UFO). Reid’s story, though unusual in coming from a powerful American politician, nevertheless feels rote: There have been a number of public UFO sightings confirmed by the Pentagon itself, and as recently as last month the Navy admitted it had UFO videos that it would not release on the grounds that doing so would “harm national security.”

Yet given the growing public clamor (and congressional clamor, for that matter) for information about UFOs, NASA felt compelled to provide the public with some answers. Consequently on Monday the federal agency launched a new study with 16 members for the purpose of determining the best way for NASA to further study what the scientists refer to as “UAPs” (unidentified aerial phenomena). They will not seek to determine exactly what they are, however.

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Why one Harvard scientist believes alien technology may be sitting on the ocean floor

So what is the panel actually doing? So far, they’re a bit mum on the matter. When Salon reached out to several of the panel members for comment, an account representing Scott Kelly told Salon that “I would be happy to talk to you once we have something to report. Follow up with me towards the end of the study.” When asked, Kelly replied that it would be in May.

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Salon also reached out to a scientist who is critical of the new panel: Harvard theoretical physicist Dr. Avi Loeb, who studies cosmology and astrophysics. He told Salon that, although he had recommended NASA establish a committee of this nature in June 2021, he was told that he could not be part of it because he is also studying UAPs through his own organization The Galileo Project. The Galileo Project hopes to report preliminary results from its “new suite of instruments” by summer 2023, by which time the NASA study report will have determined whether or not to recommend funding for additional study.

“We will be collecting and analyzing new data while the committee is trying to assess whether NASA should fund the collection and analysis of such data,” Loeb noted. He also pointed out that the NASA panel, according to his understanding, will look at all of the unclassified data about UAPs.

“The NASA panel will examine only unclassified data that we are already familiar with,” Loeb wrote to Salon. “Most of the interesting data from the past is classified. Interesting data from the future year will be collected by the Galileo Project.”

Notably, Loeb is not a die-hard believer in the mould of Fox Mulder: the esteemed physicist was critical of reports of Ukrainian UFOs as being of alien origin, and wrote a detailed scientific examination which arrived at the conclusion that such oft-sighted objects over Ukraine were almost certainly man-made. 

Because of videos like those released by the Pentagon, no credible observer can deny that there are unidentified flying objects.

When asked if the new panel would be open to the possibility that UFOs/UAPs are extraterrestrial in origin, Loeb expressed skepticism.

“Some members of the panel expressed explicit views against scientific research on UAP,” Loeb told Salon. “Their selection raises concern about the neutrality of the panel.”

Loeb’s concerns speak to a deeper rift in the scientific community. Because of UAP videos like those released by the Pentagon, no credible observer can deny that there are unidentified flying objects, some of which (like the interstellar object CNEOS 2014-01-08) actually landed on Earth. Yet for every scientist like Loeb who argues that alien intelligence should be considered as a possible explanation, there are other scientists who dismiss any such proposal as fantastical. One of them, astrophysicist and science writer Dr. Ethan Siegel, criticized Loeb’s work to Salon in August when discussing Loeb’s expedition to retrieve pieces of CNEOS 2014-01-08 to figure out what it could be.

“[Loeb’s] alien technology hypothesis is so far-fetched that there is no scientific reason to consider this as anything other than someone with no evidence crying wolf when there is no wolf that we have ever seen before,” Siegel told Salon. “Saying that it is alien technology, to me, is an absolute travesty for the hundreds upon hundreds of legitimate solar system scientists who are doing excellent work studying what actually exists.”

Siegel argued that there are more credible hypotheses, such as that “this is an object that came from our solar system that, with a poorly measured impact velocity, simply came from our solar system like everything else that hits Earth from space”; or, that “this is one of many, many, many interstellar objects that we know need to be out there that pass through our solar system, and this one happened to strike Earth and it, again, would be a naturally occurring small object.”

For now, we will have to wait until May to see if NASA’s curious panel takes a similarly dismissive view of such phenomena. 

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about UFOs

All that plastic in the ocean is a climate change problem, too

When you think of plastic pollution, you might imagine ocean “garbage patches” swirling with tens of millions of plastic bottles and shopping bags. But unfolding alongside the “macroplastic” pollution crisis is another threat caused by much smaller particles: microplastics.

Microplastics — tiny plastic fragments that are less than 5 millimeters in diameter, a little less than one-third the size of a dime — have become ubiquitous in the environment. They form when larger plastic items like water bottles, grocery bags, and food wrappers are exposed to the elements, chipping into smaller and smaller pieces as they degrade. Smaller plastic fragments can get down into the nano territory, spanning just 0.000001 millimeter — a tiny fraction of the width of a human hair.

These plastic particles do many of the same bad things that larger plastic items do: mar the land and sea, leach toxic chemicals into the food chain. But scientists are increasingly worried about their potential impact on the global climate system. Not only do microplastics release potent greenhouse gases as they break down, but they also may be inhibiting one of the world’s most important carbon sinks, preventing planet-warming carbon molecules from being locked away in the seafloor.

Matt Simon, a science journalist for Wired, details the danger in his forthcoming book on microplastics, A Poison Like No Other. He told Grist that it’s still early days for some of this research but that the problem could be “hugely important going forward.”

To understand the potential magnitude, you first have to understand an ocean phenomenon called the “biological carbon pump.” This process — which involves a complex network of physical, chemical, and biological factors — sequesters up to 12 billion metric tons of carbon at the bottom of the ocean each year, potentially locking away one-third of humanity’s annual emissions. Without this vital system, scientists estimate that atmospheric CO2 concentrations, which recently hit a new record high of 421 parts per million, could be up to 250 parts per million higher.

“The biological carbon pump helps to keep the planet healthy,” said Clara Manno, a marine ecologist at the British Antarctic Survey. “It helps the mitigation of climate change.”

The pump works like this: First, carbon dioxide from the atmosphere dissolves into water at the surface of the ocean. Using photosynthesis, tiny marine algae called phytoplankton then absorb that carbon into their bodies before passing it onto small ocean critters — zooplankton — that eat them. In a final step, zooplankton excrete the carbon as part of “fecal pellets” that sink down the water column. Once these carbon-containing pellets reach the ocean floor, the carbon can be remineralized into rocks — preventing it from escaping back into the atmosphere.

So where do microplastics come in? Unfortunately, at every step of the process.

Perhaps most concerning to scientists is the way microplastics may be affecting that final stage, the sinking of zooplankton poop to the bottom of the seafloor. Once ingested, microplastics get incorporated into zooplankton poop and can cause fecal pellets to sink “way, way more slowly,” said Matthew Cole, a senior marine ecologist and ecotoxicologist at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory in the U.K. In a 2016 paper he published in Environmental Science & Technology, he documented a 2.25-fold reduction in the sinking rate for the fecal pellets of zooplankton that had been exposed to microplastics. Other research has shown that plastic-contaminated krill fecal pellets can sink about half as quickly as their purer counterparts.

This reduced sinking rate is a result of microplastics’ buoyancy — especially those made of low-density polymers like polyethylene, the stuff used in grocery bags and likely the most common polymer in the surface ocean. Slower sinking rates mean fecal pellets may spend up to two or even three days more than usual drifting through the water column, presenting more opportunities to be intercepted.

“They’re more likely to break apart, they’re more likely to be eaten by other animals,” Cole said, making it less likely that the carbon will reach the seafloor and become permanently sequestered. 

There are other worries too, about the way microplastics can affect phytoplankton and zooplankton health — potentially compounding the stresses already posed by rising carbon dioxide concentrations, which are making the oceans warmer and more acidic, and are contributing to the expansion of oxygen-depleted “dead zones.” High concentrations of microplastics in water are toxic to phytoplankton, and lab experiments have shown they can cause up to a 45 percent reduction in some species’ growth. Cole’s experiments on copepods, a common kind of zooplankton, have shown that ingested microplastics take up space in copepods’ guts, causing them to eat less real food, produce smaller eggs that are significantly less likely to hatch, and live shorter lives. 

Researchers are still trying to come to grips with what all these laboratory observations could mean on a global scale. But the worry is that a planet-wide population of smaller, shorter-lived ocean algae and zooplankton may not be able to take up as much carbon as their ancestors — exacerbating the problems associated with buoyant fecal pellets. 

“There is something there that we should worry about,” Manno said, stressing the need for more research. To that end, she’s working on a multiyear field study, with research expeditions planned for the microplastics-laden Mediterranean Sea and the moderately cleaner Southern Ocean. Manno said she’s hoping to collect real-world plastic and fecal pellet samples and get a better look at how microplastics interact with zooplankton in the open ocean.

The goal, Manno explained, is to quantify the decline in carbon sequestration related to microplastics and translate that into a dollar cost to society. “The ocean provides us this ecosystem service,” she said. “If something stresses these processes … this is a kind of social benefit that we cannot use anymore.”

If her hypothesis is correct — that microplastics are inhibiting the biological carbon pump — it will add even more weight to a growing recognition of plastic and microplastics as a major climate disrupter. Scientists already know that plastic production and incineration cause massive greenhouse gas emissions, and in A Poison Like No Other, Simon notes emerging research on the way microplastics release exponentially increasing amounts of planet-warming methane and ethylene as they break down.

“They continue emitting forever,” said Sarah-Jeanne Royer, the oceanographer and postdoctoral researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography who is conducting that research.

To mitigate their damage to ecosystems and the climate, Royer called for policymakers to double down on removing microplastics from the ocean. But that’s a tall order. Despite some early-stage experiments involving plastic-eating mussels and bacteria, Simon said there are currently no viable, scalable ways to remove all the microplastics that have already accumulated in the environment.

“We have so much microplastic and nanoplastic in so many places on the planet — in the air and the land and the sea — that there’s just no way to pull it all out,” Simon said. “I wish there was a nice, happy solution like a magnet that you could drag through the environment and attract all the microplastics, but unfortunately that just doesn’t exist.”

Instead, he called for people to take steps to limit the release of microplastics into the environment — like by installing a filter on their washing machine — as well as government-mandated caps on plastic production. “We have to stop producing so much goddamn plastic,” he said. “It is out of control at this point.”

Michigan GOP candidate Tudor Dixon wants a new book ban: No divorced characters

With so many radical Republicans running for office across the country, there’s been relatively little coverage of Tudor Dixon, the Trump-endorsed Republican nominee for governor in Michigan, who’s running against incumbent Democrat Gretchen Whitmer. But Dixon, whose name admittedly should belong to the socialite villainess of a Harlequin romance novel, is definitely one to watch in the “how far-right can Republicans get” sweepstakes that is midterm-watching. She has described working women as having “lonely lives,” declared a 14-year-old incest victim to be a “perfect” candidate for forced childbirth, and, unsurprisingly, backs Trump’s Big Lie. During her debate with Whitmer on Tuesday night, Dixon accused Michigan schools of distributing “pornographic” books. 

Naturally, Dixon’s idea of what constitutes pornography was lurid but entirely vague, such as “books describing how to have sex.” Which could mean anything from actual sex education books to books that simply have sex scenes, a category that encompasses classics like “Romeo and Juliet” and also the Bible. (Neither of which are pornography, a commodity readily available on the internet should Dixon desire to grasp the distinctions.) Whitmer responded by noting that there are many opportunities for parents to be involved in children’s education, but also that there’s a “duty to make sure that all children feel accepted and safe and can learn and play when they are in school.”

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So there was plenty of vagueness all around, but a Democratic PAC called American Bridge 21st Century dug up an audio clip demonstrating how expansive Dixon’s views are when it comes to controlling what students are allowed to read. In it, she proposes that books featuring divorced characters are just too spicy for most kids.

Dixon complained that her daughter had checked out a book “about having two different homes” and how the very idea of divorce “caused an unnecessary anxiety.” 

“Why was this something she was just able to pick up off the shelf?” Dixon inquired. She allowed that a kid whose parents are divorcing might find some use-value in such a book, but evidently believes all other kids should be kept blissfully unaware about this widespread social reality.

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GOP nominee Tudor Dixon describes single women in the workforce as having “lonely lives”

Of course, as any educator worth their degree would tell you, this is exactly backward. We don’t read books to learn only about our direct experience, but to expand our horizons and learn about the larger world. Dixon’s daughter surely has classmates and friends with divorced parents. It’s unlikely any child psychologist would say that the best for her is to remain ignorant about their experiences. Frankly, Dixon’s unwillingness to explain the reality of divorce to her daughter sounds like it’s about Dixon’s own level of discomfort, not about the best interests of her child. Books are an excellent way to help kids learn these crucial lessons about the lives of people who aren’t exactly like them. 

Tudor Dixon’s unwillingness to explain the reality of divorce to her daughter sounds like it’s about Dixon’s own discomfort, not about her child’s best interests. Unfortunately, she’s not alone.

This isn’t just conjecture. Psychological research has shown time and again that reading, especially reading fiction, can increase empathy and make people more considered thinkers. A novel, even (or sometimes especially) one written for children, can help us walk at least a few feet in someone else’s shoes. Which may be exactly why an authoritarian like Dixon feels so much fear and hostility toward books. As she herself explained, the book her daughter read offered a glimpse of a life unlike her own. It seems very much as if actually thinking about how other people live — and perhaps having feelings about it — wasn’t an experience Dixon especially wanted her daughter to have. 

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Unfortunately, Dixon has a lot of sympathy in this, at least among Republican voters. New polling from the Pew Research Center illuminates how drastically different Republican and Democratic parents feel about the purpose of education. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida may claim that Republicans oppose “indoctrination,” but the Pew data suggests the opposite is true: Republican parents are far more likely to demand that schools forgo actual education in favor of training kids to hold close-minded and blinkered views, and to censor factual information that might contradict what parents want to believe, no matter how unhinged or disconnected from reality. 

The two big questions Pew used to measure authoritarian, truth-hostile attitudes in parents were about gender identity and the long-standing impacts of slavery on American society. On both, strong majorities of Republicans insisted that schools should conceal facts from students in order to impose the ideological preferences of the right. Only 9% of Republican parents agreed that students should be allowed to learn that trans people exist. A whopping 66% of Republicans disagreed that schools should teach that the legacy of slavery still affects Black people today. In addition, while a majority of parents overall believed that schools should not lead students in prayer, nearly six in 10 Republican parents supported mandatory prayer in school. 

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“Statewide book bans” are coming to Florida’s classrooms, enforced by the far right

All these stances flow from the same larger authoritarian view, according to which conservative ideology should trump reality and the American ideal of equality is viewed, shall we say, as highly conditional. Much as conservatives may not like it, trans people actually exist and the persistent racial inequalities in American society are a demonstrable result of the lasting legacy of slavery. Leading children in prayer cannot help but send a message that non-Christians are less American than Christians. 

Dixon’s anger that her child learned something about the lives of kids with divorced parents is clearly a pretty extreme example. But as the Pew study shows, it’s on a continuum of Republican hostility toward a fundamental tenet of modern education, which is that it’s important for students to learn about the world that exists outside their own homes and families. Thriving in the diverse, dynamic world of 21st-century America means learning not just that there are people who aren’t exactly like you, but how to get along with them. Forcing kids to remain ignorant about the legacy of racism or the existence of queer people (or divorced people!) might temporarily make life easier for parents who don’t want to have uncomfortable conversations. For the kids themselves, however, it’s a hurtful failure to offer them basic tools for life in the real world.

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about America’s red-hot education wars

Kanye West is finally canceled. Now what?

White lives do matter, and Kanye West proved it. Not just by affirming it verbally, and not just by wearing it on a shirt, as if the whole world doesn’t already know that white lives mattering is a given. 

Before getting into this, I think it is only reasonable to acknowledge that I am a Black American and I speak from my perspective. I do not know what it’s like to be Jewish and would never offer an opinion on a Jewish person’s response to antisemitism. And even though West himself is Black, in this instance he is the source of a common headache for Black people, Jewish people and Black Jews. West, the 45-year-old multiplatinum-selling rapper and clothing and sneaker mogul, had an OJ in the white Bronco on the beltway kind of week, after coming under fire for his White Lives Matter shirt at the Paris Fashion Week YZY show and making a series of hateful antisemitic statements (“I’m going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE”) this month. 

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Kanye West and the smug cruelty of the anti-“cancel culture” movement

The fallout began with Ye being suspended from both Twitter and Instagram. (Instagram has welcomed him back.) Then JP Morgan Chase cut ties. LeBron James and Maverick Carter scrapped the episode of their HBO show “The Shop” that featured Ye as a guest. His agency, CAA, dumped him, along with the fashion house Balenciaga, who deleted his likeness from everything, as did GAP. That led up to the biggest blow — the termination of his partnership with Adidas, which knocked him off the Forbes billionaire list.

TJ Maxx vowed to remove Ye’s products from their stores. (But also, who in the hell knew TJ Maxx even carried Kanye’s designs? I bet TJ Maxx didn’t know TJ Maxx carried Ye shoes and apparel.) Peleton kicked him off their cycling playlist. Even Skechers, the OG of dad shoes — which you probably couldn’t have paid Ye to wear before last week — escorted him out of their California office on Wednesday after he popped up uninvited, looking for a new home for his designs. 

“Skechers is not considering and has no intention of working with West. We condemn his recent divisive remarks and do not tolerate antisemitism or any other form of hate speech,” said the shoemaker’s statement. “The Company would like to again stress that West showed up unannounced and uninvited to Skechers corporate offices.” 

Kanye’s vile, insensitive words, his incoherent thoughts, his cheap, right-wing loser talking points — straight from the book of confused, clout-chasing Candace Owens — have already hurt many people. Ye has a history of using hate speech or playing on racial sensitivity when he’s hungry for the headlines needed to bring attention to a new product. Let’s not forget the time he stitched a Confederate flag on his green Yeezus Tour flight jacket, or when he called Trump his father, or that ridiculous 2018 rant when he said slavery was a choice. Black people should have had him canceled a long time ago. But Adidas stayed by his side after the slavery rant, maintaining that “Kanye has been and is a very important part of our strategy and has been a fantastic creator,” although, as CEO Kasper Rorsted said in an interview with Bloomberg TV, “there clearly are some comments we don’t support.”

“Kanye and Yeezy is a very important part of our brand from a revenue standpoint,” Rorsted added. “It’s a very important part of how we promote our products, particularly in the U.S. and other parts of the world.” Rorsted ended that conversation by saying the idea of dropping Kanye over his statement didn’t come up in a meeting. It’s not hard to see why — Black lives don’t matter. White lives do. 

Black people should have had him canceled a long time ago.

When I say Black lives don’t matter, I am not thinking about the #BLM hashtag or the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation’s mansion purchased with donor funds. I am definitely not agreeing with Kanye. When I say Black lives don’t matter, I’m talking about the way America consistently fails Black people with a smile. We can see Black lives don’t matter by looking at schools in poor Black neighborhoods and the food deserts surrounding those communities. We don’t matter because opportunity has been historically limited to us. When I say Black lives don’t matter, I am talking about state violence against victims such as Michael Brown, Sandra Bland and George Floyd, who Ye falsely claimed died because of fentanyl, saying the cop’s knee “wasn’t even on his neck like that.” Kanye is so eager to prove white lives matter he not only dismissed the evidence the medical examiner shared with the public, he overlooked the actual video of disgraced officer Derek Chauvin resting his knee on Floyd’s neck. White lives matter so much to Kanye he is ignoring visual evidence in real time. And why is Ye doing this? We already know white lives matter. 

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After Trevor Noah says Kanye needs therapy, rapper spews racial slurs that gets him suspended online

I am reminded white lives matter when I look at television, when I walk through the offices of the companies that published my books, when I watch cable news, when I rush to the post office only to find it closed because of Columbus Day, when I’m searching for Black dolls for my kid, and even when I look at the faces on my cash. Take a walk through any major university and you will see that white lives matter just by looking at the people schools choose to hang on the wall. My city, Baltimore, is a predominately Black city, and it is full of statues of white men on streets named after other white men, even the same white men already memorialized as statues. We know white lives matter. 

White lives, white history and white perspective matter. Tell us something we don’t know, Ye. 

And though people of many backgrounds have their own foods, cultures, rituals, traditions and belief systems, in America if they share the same skin color, they are widely seen and treated as white. This is a white country, no matter how diverse we claim to be. A white person born in the U.S. is simply referred to as American, even if they are well aware of their Irish or Italian lineage, whereas a Black person born here is African American, even if their family has been in this country since its origin. White lives, white history and white perspective matter. Tell us something we don’t know, Ye. 

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“Racial identity become the paramount spatial mediation of modernity within the newly reunited nation. Race nevertheless became the crucial means of ordering the newly enlarged meaning of America,” Grace Hale wrote in her 1999 book “Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940,” which documents the period after Reconstruction when the U.S. begin to shift from a European ethnic melting pot to white:

“This happened because former Confederates, a growing class, embattled farmers, western settlers, a defensive northeastern elite, woman’s rights advocates, and the scientific community simultaneously but for different reasons found race useful in creating new collective identities to replace older groundings of self. As important these mass racial meanings were made and marked at a time when technological change made the cheap production of visual imagery possible and the development of a mass market provided financial incentive, selling through advertising, to circulate the imagery”.

Hale noted that this new way of advertising was responsible for exposing products cheaply to the masses, painting a new picture of America and what it should look like. She explains the way affluent whites masterfully executed that American vision by enforcing Jim Crow, practicing white versus colored, and always portraying Black people in the media as slaves, servants and clowns.

The creation of these different types of racial boundaries was only half of the battle. The other half can be recognized in the way white people, in power or not, never fully challenged those boundaries, but rather easily accepted mass lynchings, laughing at and participating in blackface and holding onto a culture of discrimination. Ye is a spawn of that culture, likely so poisoned and full of self-hate he actually thinks he has to save white men by speaking up for them.

What if we all took Ye’s offensive comments and performed self-audits on ourselves and how we reacted?

“There’s nobody that gets judged more than a straight white male.” Kanye told Piers Morgan on his show “Uncensored.”  “The straight white male has the least amount of a platform to even speak.” 

White men — still the highest-paid group in America, who made up 45 out of the 46 American presidents — are doing pretty OK without Ye’s help.

But this controversy could potentially lead to some good in a different way. What if we all took Ye’s many offensive statements and stunts and performed self-audits on how we reacted? Did you get upset when he disrespected women? Or when he celebrated the Confederacy and denigrated Black people? Or when he publicly defended R. Kelly and disrespected abuse survivors, or made antisemitic statements and directed hate toward Jewish people, or aligned himself with homophobia?

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Kanye West is the latest — and most famous — example of the misogyny-to-fascism pipeline

Maybe all of it upset you equally all along, or maybe it’s been a gradual process for you, separating your admiration for his art from his public persona. I know his comments against Black people and his praise for Trump, who is clearly anti-Black, bothered me the most because I am a Black man. It reinforced the reality that there are still no consequences for anti-Blackness. These feelings make me guilty of selective outrage. But we should extend each other grace for our selective outrage. Most people are going to identify strongest with joy and pain directly connected to their experience; however, we all have the ability to recognize that every group, no matter how relative we may perceive our own pain to another, needs to be loved and considered and supported, especially when they are choosing unity over empty hate like what Ye is spreading.

I’m sure a racial and religious apology tour is in the works for Ye. People tend to become more remorseful when their money disappears. But we should take a note from his playbook and make this moment about us — all of us banding together in unity across different races, genders, religions, classes and lived experiences — not him and his self-destruction. 

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about Ye:

“We regret to inform you” that Donald Trump is cashing in on white America’s death wish

Donald Trump is a white terrorist. This is true in both the literal sense and on a more metaphorical level. As part of Trump’s coup plot he incited his followers to attack the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. It’s also true that throughout his presidency and beyond, Trump and his agents have used the propaganda tactic known as “stochastic terrorism” — in which a leader encourages violence while maintaining vaguely plausible deniability.

This is part of a larger pattern of behavior. Trump’s behavior and rhetoric repeatedly emphasize destruction, violence, conspiracy theories, apocalyptic imagery and threats of other dire outcomes if he and his neofascist movement are not returned to power.

Trump effectively channels the ways that whiteness, which was invented with European colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade, has functioned as a force of terror, violence, intimidation and existential threat against Black and brown people all over the world. One of Trump’s favorite tactics is white victimology. His ability to frighten white people about their personal and collective safety — and to present himself as their protector and savior — is one of his greatest powers.

As shown in a recent fundraising email, Donald Trump is using that dark and evil power to great effect. That email begins with the ominous phrase, “We regret to inform you…”, which is familiar to too many Americans who have lost family members and other loved ones in service to their country. Those words, however, simply direct users to a site where Trump solicits donations for his fascist campaign — or, just as likely, his PAC and legal defense fund.

That Trump and his acolytes would use such a tactic as part of their fascist grift — when, in reality, Trump despises all the best aspects of America as a nation and society — is vile even by his standards. Let us not forget that this man avoided military service during the Vietnam War by having a doctor lie for him about nonexistent bone spurs. Or that he mocked Sen. John McCain, a genuine war hero and Vietnam POW who refused to abandon his men in the infamous “Hanoi Hilton,” as a “loser,” saying, “I like people that weren’t captured.” Credible reporting also suggests that Trump has called U.S. troops killed in combat “losers” and “suckers.”

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The GOP’s Ayn Rand death cult: Trump’s party is literally killing the American people

But condemning Trump’s behavior is in no way sufficient to defeat him and the neofascist threat he represents. You can’t shame those who have no shame. Trump and the current Republican Party have repeatedly shown that they do not care about human decency or virtue; they worship power above everything else, and delight in provoking outrage and disgust among their political opponents (and decent people in general).

Democrats all too eagerly walk into this trap, and then wonder why they are losing the battle to save American democracy. Rick Wilson, the prominent Republican strategist turned “Never Trumper,” explained this to me in our recent Salon interview: “We’re in a post-shame world, a post-hypocrisy environment. You can’t shame Republicans anymore.”

The political work of stopping Donald Trump and the Republican fascists requires understanding how and why their appeals to fear, violence and terror are so effective, and then developing the strategy and tactics to counter them.

White Americans who have greater anxieties about death are more likely to support Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. Authoritarians are also more fearful of social change, difference, ambiguity and those outside their “tribe.”

What do we know? Social psychologists and other researchers have repeatedly shown that white Americans who have greater anxieties about death are more likely to support Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. Republicans and other “conservatives” are also more likely to exhibit social dominance behavior and to have authoritarian personalities. Such personality types and cognitive orientations translate into a tendency to fixate on negative and frightening images and concepts. Authoritarians and others driven by social dominance behavior are also more fearful of social change, difference, ambiguity and those outside their “tribe,” in-group, close family and imagined community.

Social scientists have shown that the white supremacist “great replacement” conspiracy theory is believed by a majority of Republicans and Trumpists. This is rooted in the fiction that white people are in danger of annihilation or imminent destruction by Black and brown people. It has motivated numerous violent crimes, including the massacre by a white supremacist of ten Black people in a Buffalo supermarket last May.

White right-wing evangelicals and Christian nationalists are the most loyal members of the Republican base and Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters. Their religious mythology emphasizes “end times” and other eschatological fantasies and magical thinking, focused on visions of widespread destruction, death and calamity. Some believers actually hope to see mass death and suffering as a sign of the coming “Rapture” and their eternal salvation.

Social demographers have repeatedly shown that there is actually more early death, suicide, murder, criminality, poverty, prescription drug abuse and other forms of human misery and suffering — on a per capita basis — in “red state” America than in more cosmopolitan, progressive, affluent and dynamic “blue” cities and regions.

Because so many Trumpists and “conservatives,” especially in rural America, are surrounded by suffering, they are hypersensitive to threat and anxiety about their own mortality. Moreover, many people who live in damaged red-state communities incorrectly generalize that the entire country is suffering in the same ways they are. Such fears and anxieties about death and mortality are reinforced and amplified throughout the right-wing echo chamber.

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The resulting impact becomes even more intense because so many Americans are locked in ideological and cultural silos, and rarely communicate or have any meaningful contact with those who possess different values. In a new essay for the Nation, historian Stephen Berry explains how whiteness, violence, rage, and fear came together on Jan. 6, 2021: 

“I didn’t know something could be so terrifying and embarrassing at the same time,” tweeted the comedian Jess Dweck. The riot may have been a saturnalia of stupid, but we need to take it seriously. There is abroad in the land an entitled minority, marinating in grievance, convinced that something is being stolen from them. What is being “stolen” — an election, a “way of life,” a “birthright,” a “Lost Cause,” Christmas — doesn’t matter. Always it is a defensive white male fantasy based on insecurity, helplessness, and rage….

At the base of most contemporary American conspiracy theories is a white male fantasy that indulges the feeling of being aggrieved, abused, dominated, or violated, precisely to justify the legitimacy of the ensuing white male vengeance and demonstration of power and control. Nothing tastes better in the white male mouth than indignation — not a job and not a paycheck. The historian Gordon Fraser calls it the “libidinal pleasures of paranoia” and traces the impulse from the “Illuminati Crisis” in 1798 to Pizzagate in 2016.

White fears of annihilation, destruction and obsolescence, set against an increasingly diverse society, are fueled by how the Republican Party and larger “conservative” movement have, for decades, advocated and enacted policies that have literally caused physical and emotional harm to their own voters. As a practical matter, this perverse incentive structure functions to create more white rage and white despair at “the system,” “elites,” “big government” and so on, which Republicans weaponize and redirect against Black and brown people and anyone else deemed to be the Other or somehow un-American.

If working-class whites fear annihilation and obsolescence, that’s not entirely irrational: For decades, Republicans have advocated and enacted policies that harm their own voters.

This is an old American story, built on divide-and-conquer tactics and the “psychological wages of whiteness.” White people with money and power know how easy it is to manipulate poor and working-class white people through appeals to white supremacy, racial resentment, entitlement and fear. In the immortal words of Lyndon Johnson, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

In that sense, Trump and the Republican fascists are not doing anything new. Sinclair Lewis famously warned that fascism would come to America wrapped in a flag and carrying cross. That was prophetic; one can’t expect Lewis to have predicted the MAGA hats. Instead of running away from Trump and what he represents, tens of millions of white Americans are instead cheering him on as their herald, hero, and savior. Such mass delusions are a defining feature of fascism and other such destructive political ideologies and visions.

America is being consumed by a compulsion towards self-destruction. Time is running out. Will the American people choose life or death? They will soon find out.

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about Trump and the Republicans

Trump’s lawyers could go down with him

On Thursday’s edition of MSNBC’s “The Beat,” anchor Ari Melber issued a stark warning to the attorneys representing former President Donald Trump that they could be in legal jeopardy themselves.

Trump has already left a trail of problems in his wake for lawyers who represented him, from Michael Cohen, who went to prison for tax fraud over a hush payment he organized for the former president, to Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman, who have faced professional sanctions for false claims and illegal advice. And similar problems could befall the lawyers representing Trump in the national security case surrounding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, said Melber.

“There’s still more than one open criminal probe involving former President Trump,” said Melber. “We turn to a twist in one of them, new video, which basically shows three Trump lawyers doing what lawyers never want to have to do, which is go into the federal courthouse, not to litigate, which is why they usually go to court, but because they’re caught up at witnesses to potentially some kind of wrongdoing. This is a secret hearing that involves DOJ lawyers and the Trump lawyers.”

“Now, it is reported that it’s about stolen documents. The Mar-a-Lago case, according to CNN,” said Melber. “Also what’s notable is that legal team typically would appear in New York, or Florida. I’m only telling you what we’re gleaning but it sounds like a more high-level meeting. Prosecutors want testimony to figure out what Trump claims is declassified and whether anyone has been lying to the government about that.”

Even so, said Melber, these lawyers are in dangerous territory.

“As I’ve told you before, you can go on TV and lie all you want,” said Melber. “We’ve heard Trump aides say, he declassified it all. Abracadabra. They are lying. But if they say that in public, so be it. You start saying it in court or to prosecutors or the FBI or the National Archive — you can see the list is getting long — you might be committing a crime. And if you are a lawyer, you are not immune from being held accountable for crimes.”

Watch below:

Trump won’t give up on 2020 election conspiracy theories

Former President Donald Trump is not done spinning conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election. In fact, he recently took those unfounded claims to a new level.

According to HuffPost, the former president participated in a podcast discussion with Dinesh D’Souza, a far-right commentator and known conspiracy theorist who was pardoned by Trump in 2018 after admitting to illegally donating to a Republican political candidate.

During the discussion, Trump attempted to spin a new bizarre claim insisting “people voted 28 times in the 2020 election to cheat him out of a second term in office, HuffPost reports.

At one point, D’Souza asked the former president: “It seems to me that what you’re saying is that you think that there was cheating all different ways.”

Trump responded with a reference to D’Souza’s documentary titled, “2,000 Mules,” before claiming some voters cast multiple votes.

“Yeah, ‘2,000 Mules’ was one way,” Trump replied. “That was a very conclusive way because you were taking government tapes. … And then, of course, they voted six, seven, eight times. As much as they could in the local area. Some of the people went back, I guess they said 28 times in one day, to vote at different places.”

Although Trump has lauded D’Souza’s film, which claims to uncover incidents of voter fraud, it has been described as “endlessly debunkable” by fact checkers.

Trump did not offer a reference for the quoted figure. However, HuffPost notes that “an executive producer of ‘2,000 Mules’ claimed on Fox News earlier this year that the average amount of visits by said mules was 38.”

Trump also insisted the so-called “ballot stuffers” refrained from overdoing the scheme so it wouldn’t be uncovered. “They’re very smart,” he said.

Although Trump was defeated two years ago, he is continuing to spread lies about the 2020 election as he mulls another run in 2024.

Plunger, espresso, filter? Just because your coffee is bitter, doesn’t mean it’s “stronger”

Coffee – one bean with many possibilities. A big choice is how to brew it: espresso, filter, plunger, percolator, instant and more. Each method has unique equipment, timing, temperature, pressure and coffee grind and water needs.

Our choices of brewing method can be cultural, social or practical. But how much do they really impact what’s in your cup?

Which is the strongest brew?

It depends. If we focus on caffeine concentration, on a milligram per milliliter (mg/ml) basis espresso methods are typically the most concentrated, able to deliver up to 4.2 mg/ml. This is about three times higher than other methods like Moka pot (a type of boiling percolator) and cold brewing at about 1.25 mg/ml. Drip and plunger methods (including French and Aero-press) are about half that again.

Espresso methods extract the most caffeine for a few reasons. Using the finest grind means there is more contact between the coffee and water. Espresso also uses pressure, pushing more compounds out into the water. While other methods brew for longer, this doesn’t impact caffeine. This is because caffeine is water soluble and easy to extract, so it’s released early in brewing.

But these comparisons are made based on typical extraction situations — not typical consumption situations.

So, while espresso gives you the most concentrated product, this is delivered in a smaller volume (just 18–30ml), compared to much larger volumes for most other methods. These volumes of course vary depending on the maker, but a recent Italian study defined a typical final serving of filter, percolator and cold brews as 120ml.

Based on this math, cold brew actually comes out as the highest dose of caffeine per serving with almost 150mg — even higher than the 42–122mg totals found in finished espresso. Although cold brew uses cold water, and a larger grind size, it is brewed with a high coffee-to-water ratio, with extra beans needed in the brew. Of course, “standard servings” are a concept — not a reality. You can multiply servings and supersize any coffee beverage.

With the rising price of coffee, you might also be interested in extraction efficiency — how much caffeine you get for each gram of coffee input.

Interestingly, most methods are actually pretty similar. Espresso methods vary but give an average of 10.5 milligrams per gram (mg/g), compared to 9.7-10.2mg/g for most other methods. The only outlier is the French press, with just 6.9mg/g of caffeine.

“Strength” is more than just caffeine

Caffeine content only explains a small part of the strength of coffee. Thousands of compounds are extracted, contributing to aroma, flavor and function. Each has their own pattern of extraction, and they can interact with each other to inhibit or enhance effects.

The oils responsible for the crema — the rich brown “foam” on top of the brew – are also extracted more easily with high temperatures, pressures and fine grinds (another potential win for espresso and Moka). These methods also give higher levels of dissolved solids, meaning a less watery consistency — but, again, this all depends on how the final product is served and diluted.

To further complicate matters, the receptors that detect caffeine and the other bitter compounds are highly variable between individuals due to genetics and training from our usual exposures. This means the same coffee samples could invoke diverse perceptions of their bitterness and strength in different people.

There are also differences in how sensitive we are to the stimulant effects of caffeine. So what we are looking for in a cup, and getting from it, is dependent on our own unique biology.

Is there a healthier brew?

Depending on the headline or the day, coffee might be presented as a healthy choice or an unhealthy one. This is partly explained by our optimism bias (of course we want coffee to be good for us!) but may also be due to the difficulty of studying products like coffee, where it is difficult to capture the complexity of brewing methods and other variables.

Some studies have suggested that coffee’s health impacts are brew-type specific. For example, filter coffee has been linked to more positive cardiovascular outcomes in the elderly.

This link might be a coincidence, based on other habits that coexist, but there is some evidence that filter coffee is healthier because more diterpenes (a chemical found in coffee that might be linked to raising levels of bad cholesterol) are left in the coffee and the filter, meaning less make it to the cup.

The bottom line?

Each brewing method has its own features and inputs. This gives each one a unique profile of flavor, texture, appearance and bioactive compounds. While the complexity is real and interesting, ultimately, how to brew is a personal choice.

Different information and situations will drive different choices in different people and on different days. Not every food and drink choice needs to be optimized!

Emma Beckett, Senior Lecturer (Food Science and Human Nutrition), School of Environmental and Life Sciences, University of Newcastle

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

16 unique ways to use apple pie filling (that aren’t pie)

Apple pie filling is a vastly under-appreciated fall ingredient, whether you have a few jars of the canned variety taking up space in your pantry or you inadvertently make too much from scratch (thanks to a surplus of fruit from apple picking).

Often an amalgamation of sliced apples, an acid of sorts (usually lemon juice), a sweetener of sorts (usually granulated or brown sugar, but sometimes honey) and apple pie spice (or only cinnamon), the good news is that apple pie filling isn’t an inherently challenging or difficult mixture to throw together.

For many, the actual challenge is the “pie” part, no matter if that entails going the store-bought route or making fresh, homemade pie crust or dough at home. To simplify matters, we’ve erased that part of the equation. Now, all you have to focus on is the filling itself (which is perhaps exactly as it should be?). 

Feel free to experiment by using unusual types of apples, cutting the fruit in different manners, leaving the peeling on or off, adding interesting spices, limiting the sweetness, throwing in a bit of apple cider and so on and so forth. Customize to your heart’s content . . . or simply go the traditional route with a cherished family recipe.

The best part? It’s all up to you, and no matter the journey you choose, it’s bound to be delicious. It would be quite the feat to “mess up” that divine combination of apples + sweetener + spices + acid.

1. Make a crisp or crumble.

The two go-to apple desserts beyond those ubiquitous pies, crisps or crumbles (the difference is essentially infinitesimal) consist of apple pie “filling” topped with a blend of oats, brown sugar, butter, cinnamon, salt and a touch of flour. Exceptional when topped with high-quality vanilla ice cream, these cozy classics are easy as pie (no pun intended) to make and come in handy when you’re craving a quick, homemade treat.

There’s also no fussiness with pie crust crimping or making anything look exorbitantly high-level, which makes these desserts even more appealing. They’re throw-it-all-together affairs that yield something magical in the blink of an eye. It doesn’t hurt that they’re reliable, not too sweet, texturally interesting and downright outrageously delicious.

Related

How to embrace the apple in its entirety — peels and all

2. Try your hand at taquitos.

While apple pie filling has an inherent sweetness, you can always opt to dial back on the sugar content and veer into savory territory. These taquitos call for nothing more than the tortilla of your choosing (corn, flour, store-bought or homemade) to be stuffed with apple pie filling and rolled up tightly.

Keep in mind that apple pie filling is quite loose and can ooze out of the ends of the tortilla. Thus, we wouldn’t recommend deep frying as the method of choice, but rather baking or pan-frying. Pair with applesauce, caramel, dulce de leche or nothing at all (because they’re already pretty spectacular). 

3. Keep it traditional with hand pies or turnovers.

Essentially handheld, portable versions of apple pie, these aren’t especially inventive, but they sure are flavorful. Use pie crust, puff pastry or whip up a batch of fresh pie dough to form a crust around the filling. Cut slits before baking, then top with a shower of confectioners’ sugar.

4. Fry ’em up.

Add a whisked, large egg and some flour to your apple pie filling base — just enough until the “dough” starts to hold itself together. Using a large spoon, carefully scoop balls of dough. Add to a large pot of frying oil or an air fryer and cook until the fritters or quasi-donuts have become brown and slightly crisp. While still warm, toss in cinnamon sugar and serve right away. These will undoubtedly go like hotcakes.

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5. Bake into a moist cake.

Whether you’re using boxed cake mix or making your favorite cake batter from scratch, simply add a cup of apple pie filling to the batter and stir until just combined. Up your bake time by 5 minutes or so — and voilà! You’ll be in awe of the soft, warm pockets of spiced, tender apple, as well as how much the apple moistens the cake.

Any type or flavor of cake batter or mix works with this method. Try it out with chocolate, Funfetti, red velvet, spice, white or yellow and see which one is your favorite.

6. Top a cheesecake.

This may be the easiest option on this list. If you have a luscious cheesecake on hand, simply top the cheesecake with apple pie filling before slicing it. The apple pie filling adds a whole new texture and consistency to the cheesecake and provides another “layer” in addition to the crust and cheesecake itself.

7. Elevate a quick bread.

Consider adding some apple filling to any quick bread recipe. This concept is similar to the above cake idea, but it yields slightly firmer and more savory results. Another great option would be adding apple pie filling to a banana, lemon-poppy or pumpkin bread, which deepens the flavor and creates a unique mash-up guaranteed to appeal to anyone with a sweet tooth.

8. Incorporate into bread pudding.

You can’t go wrong with bread pudding made with croissants, but if you don’t have any on hand, use whatever leftover, slightly stale bread is in your kitchen right now. Mix dried-out bread cubes with apple pie filling, dairy (half-and-half, heavy cream or milk), a few eggs, a touch of sugar and some vanilla extract. Stir until the whole shebang is well moistened and bake either in individual baking dishes or as a large, family-style “loaf.” Serve with ice cream or a quick zabaglione for a special dessert.

9. Amp up the fall flavors in beloved breakfast foods.

French toast, pancakes and waffles are amazing vessels for apple pie filling. Whether you’re topping French toast or adding some finely diced apple pie filling into your pancake batter, the soft sweetness of the filling pairs so well with these hearty breakfast classics. Note that you may have to cut back or possibly even entirely omit the requisite maple syrup, though, which might make the dish just a bit too sweet.

10. Purée into a smoothie or milkshake.

Apple pie filling pairs well with dairy or non-dairy milk or yogurt, fresh fruit, cocoa powder, as well as herbs and vegetables. The sweetness of the filling will permeate the drink. Conversely, blend apple pie filling with your ice cream of choice and a touch of cream, half-and-half or milk. Top with cinnamon-infused whipped cream for an aesthetically pleasing (and seasonally flavored) dessert.

11. Level up your favorite muffin batter.

You’ll be wowed by the moistness if you add some chopped or puréed apple pie filling to your favorite muffin recipe. An apple spice crumble is a fantastic option for the topping, too. Conversely, go a bit sweeter and make cupcakes topped with salted maple-cinnamon frosting.

12. Incorporate into cookies.

A bit of puréed apple pie filling will add a bright, punchy flavor no matter if butter, chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin, pumpkin, shortbread or sugar cookies are on the menu. A little goes a long way here, so don’t add too much . . . or else it may throw off your bake time.

13. Transform oatmeal, yogurt or even ice cream.

Another easy option! For a simple breakfast, toss apple pie filling with warm oatmeal (and another generous sprinkling of brown sugar, cinnamon or maple) or enjoy some with any flavor of yogurt. (This editor is partial to a lightly salted plain Greek yogurt with apple pie filling and a bit of granola.)

For more of a dessert-type situation, stir apple pie filling (that has been lightly chopped) into your favorite ice cream, mix well and enjoy. I’d say this is best with plain vanilla, but any variation should work well.

14. Get fancy with a quasi tarte tatin.

While an actual tarte tatin is a bit of a process, this shortcut version nearly approaches the heights of the classic. Blind bake off a large tart shell before filling it with a shallow amount of apple pie filling. Drizzle with brown sugar or caramel and pop it back in the oven until slightly brown. While this won’t have the visual appeal or be exactly the same flavor-wise, it will be a close approximation that undoubtedly satisfies.

15. Make tarts.

Purchase or make mini-tart shells, fill with a dollop of apple pie filling and top with salted sour cream or whipped cream. Using sour cream will make these slightly more savory, which also offers an unexpected flavor profile since these tarts look pretty dessert-centric at first glance. You can also top them with fresh fruit, such as berries or kiwi slices, to help bolster the brightness and freshness.

16. Enjoy with granola.

Easy as pie: Simply toss apple pie filling with granola (either homemade or store-bought) for an extra special breakfast or snack. On its own, apple pie filling almost entirely lacks texture. As a result, mixing it with granola adds a stellar amount of crunch.

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about apples and fall

Are butter boards bad for you? An expert weighs in on the latest food trend

In an unexpected twist, butter seems to be back on the menu. After years of being a maligned ingredient that many people shied away from, butter has now become the latest food trend on social media, thanks to the recent popularity of “butter boards.”

These are sort of the meat-free equivalent of a charcuterie board. Butter is whipped then spread onto a chopping board, sprinkled with a variety of toppings — from sweet to savory — and served with an accompaniment of choice (such as bread or a toasted baguette).

But although they may be delicious, butter is still full of saturated fat — which many of us know can be harmful to our health. Here’s what you may want to consider before whipping up a butter board of your own.

Is butter really that bad?

Butter is made from cream, the fat-rich part of milk. While it’s usually made from cow’s milk, it can also be made from other milks such as goat milk.

The reason that butter has been seen as a no-go for so many years is because it’s one of the ultimate sources of saturated fat. Butter contains around 80% fat, of which about two-thirds is saturated fat. It contains little else nutrient-wise.

Saturated fats should be avoided in large amounts as they’re linked with many health problems, including heart disease and shorter life expectancy. Clinical trials have also shown that saturated fats can have a negative effect on blood cholesterol levels.

When it comes to butter on its own, it appears that eating it has a relatively small or neutral effect on the risk of heart disease. But research that compared butter to olive oil (another source of saturated fat) found that butter can increase levels of LDL cholesterol, which is sometimes called “bad” cholesterol as it’s linked to greater risk of heart disease.

But the majority of the butter many of us consume in our diets comes from other foods such as biscuits, cakes and pastries. Alongside butter, these foods tend also to contain high amounts of sugar, while being low in other nutrients. High intakes of these types of foods is also linked with greater risk of heart disease.

Overall, sharing a butter board with friends every now and then is unlikely to cause much harm to your health. But doing it often, or eating very large quantities, could raise cholesterol levels and increase your risk of cardiovascular disease somewhat.

It’s also worth bearing in mind what toppings you serve your butter board with. Certain foods (such as processed or cured meats) also contain saturated fats and should only be enjoyed occasionally.

Butter alternatives

Since butter is very calorific and fat-rich, some people may want to look at using butter alternatives for the base of their butter board.

The first substitute many people might look to is margarine. Margarine is chemically very similar to butter. Depending on the product though, it only contains around 40%-70% fat, making it a lighter alternative with a possibly similar taste.

In the past, the processes needed to make margarine solid resulted in the production of trans fats, which have been linked to increased risk of heart disease. But these processes have since been improved so margarine no longer contain trans fat. So it may be a good option for people wary of the amount of fat they consume.

Another alternative people may look at using is ghee, also sometimes known as clarified butter. A staple of Indian cooking, this is still made from milk, but the fat is much more concentrated as most of the water has been simmered away. This means it won’t have the same creamy texture as butter.

Grass-fed ghee is as rich in saturated fats as butter. It also contains naturally produced trans fats. However, these trans fats are different to the industrially produced types which are bad for our health. But since ghee contains more calories than butter, it may not be the best choice for a butter board, especially if you’re looking for the best flavor.

Cultured butter may also be a choice for your butter board. This is made from cream which has been fermented like yogurt. However, no research to date has looked at whether the probiotics in cultured butter provide the same health benefits as those in yogurt and other fermented foods. Nutrition-wise, it contains the same amount of fat and calories as regular butter.

All in all, butter is not bad. But since it’s very high in calories and cholesterol, you may want to try not to have too much. Sharing a butter board with some friends or loved ones every now and again is unlikely to have any long-term negative impact on your health.

Duane Mellor, Lead for Evidence-Based Medicine and Nutrition, Aston Medical School, Aston University

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

“American Horror Story: NYC” has a too many villains problem

Have you ever had one of those dreams where you spend eight hours trying to find your way back home, circumventing what feels like endless obstacles and distractions to get there? In your dream rationale, your mission is clear, but suddenly your feet stop working, or your car doesn’t have a steering wheel. Or, if you eventually do make it “home,” it’s a warped version of it and you can’t get in anyway because you can’t find your keys. That’s what “American Horror Story: NYC” feels like so far, and I haven’t yet determined if that’s a good or bad thing.

“AHS” creators Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk knew that they were on to something when viewers reacted as favorably as they did to the show’s first season, “Murder House,” back in 2011, and they’ve remained rather formulaic in the seasons that followed in an effort to hold on to their loyal fans by not fiddling around too much with something that clearly works. This is a simple and yet effective method that showrunners, more often times than not, can’t help themselves but to go against and then later regret. Good examples of this would be “Twin Peaks,” which pulled viewers in with a dark mystery and then solved that mystery too soon; or “True Detective,” which gave us one of the best first seasons of a show ever and then followed it up with two additional stand-alone seasons that had no hope of ever being as good as the first.

Murphy and Falchuk know what their core audience wants — light to medium horror with toe-dips into total bleakness, new themes each year with occasional throwbacks to previous seasons, and the implied promise that Evan Peters, Sarah Paulson and Jessica Lange will never be too far away. But, due to conflicts in scheduling, or the need to take a break from the show, shake-ups started happening in the cast after Season 4, “Freak Show.” First we lost Lange, who did come back briefly in her role as “Murder House” character Constance Langdon for “Apocalypse” in 2018, but has made no promise to come back again. And then Paulson and Peters became less of a given starting with Season 9, “1984.” But the biggest changes in “AHS” started happening last year with Season 10, “Double Feature,” which veered from the show’s standard format by breaking the season into two parts, “Red Tide” and “Death Valley.” Although that season was, overall, a success, this huge change in format had a built-in problem because, by the time Part 2 rolled around, we’d spent so much time trying to figure out how it tied in to Part 1 that when we realized it wasn’t going to, and wasn’t at all supposed to, we were left disappointed over investing in a storyline that, on its own, paled in comparison to Part 1. Murphy and Falchuk’s idea to do a two-part season wasn’t a bad one, but it ended up feeling like one due to the lopsided quality of what we were given. You can’t come out swinging with genius pill-popping vamps and then peter out to human/alien hybrids. I mean, you can. They did. But it didn’t work, and robbed us of what could have been four more episodes of “Red Tide.” 

With “AHS: NYC,” Murphy and Falchuk are making another big change in an attempt to freshen up what really doesn’t need refreshing by, for the first time ever, doling out the season’s episodes two at a time which, after the first four episodes, kinda feels like heaping handfuls of a big ‘ol mess.

Related

In “American Horror Story: NYC” Ryan Murphy is out here murdering gay men again

The first two episodes, “Something’s Coming” and “Thank You for Your Service” set us up with the basic premise for a bunch of different premises. It’s 1981 in New York and gay men are being attacked at all sides. There’s “Big Daddy,” the leather clad killer who may not even be real. There’s the Mai Tai Killer, a former military man who drugs men and then tortures and kills them, unless they’ve also been in the service, such as in the case of Gino (Joe Mantello). There’s a sadistic rich perv named Sam (Zachary Quinto) who lures men into his home and commits unspeakable and questionably consensual sex acts on them. There’s a weaponized virus of some sort that leaves gay men covered in sores and pustules that may or may not be a metaphor for AIDS. And now, there’s cats. It’s all, to say the very least, a lot, which may end up being the point.

For the gay community, during this time, or any time, really, it can be hard to not feel like the whole world is out to get them. And in AHS: NYC . . . it very much is.

For the LGBTQ community in the ’80s, their mere existence was seen as a threat to normie society as a whole and, in return, they faced daily danger with little help or understanding from anyone outside their own close circle of friends and family. For the gay community, during this time, or any time, really, it can be hard to not feel like the whole world is out to get them. And in “AHS: NYC” . . . it very much is.

Episode 3, “Smoke Signals,” gives us a big clue that this season is a symbolic showing of how terrifying it can feel to navigate life as a gay person when Fran (Sandra Bernhard) sits with Dr. Hannah Wells (Billie Lourd) in a diner and tells her about a weaponized virus she learned of while working as a lab assistant.

“Ever heard of Operation Paperclip?” Fran asks. “It was a post-war program where the U.S. used Nazi scientists against the Russians during the Red Scare. They’d cross-breed contagions, test them on patients. Mix animal diseases with human ones. They were looking for something that could be used as a weapon.”

When Hannah reminds her that all of that happened in the ’50s, and asks what it has to do with now, Fran says “The Cold War is heating up. A year ago they started bringing out some of the golden oldies and testing them again.”

This not only really brings me back to a theory I made in my recap of Episodes 1 and 2, that this season might be an origin story for the pill in “Red Tide” from last year’s season, but hammers it in that the true theme of this current season is that being gay can be very terrifying because most everyone and everything is more foe than friend which, judging by the 2023 GOP candidates, is truer than ever.

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While the messaging in “AHS: NYC” is compact, the delivery is wider than Central Park itself. We’re running from this guy, we’re running from that guy. More than one villain is using public pay phones as a lure, which sure wouldn’t work now. Who the hell answers the phone? I don’t think I’ve answered my phone on purpose in 15 years. There are blackouts, disease-ridden cats scurrying about, women muttering cryptic warnings in the subway stations. And, all the while, the memory of David Berkowitz (aka the Son of Sam) still lingers in the atmosphere, waiting for a passing dog to give the next killer the go-ahead to fire at will.

Given the era and setting for this season, it was only a matter of time before we heard a name-drop for Berkowitz, and we got it in Episode 3. By 1981 the Son of Sam had already been behind bars for several years after being given six life sentences for shooting and killing six people in the NYC area, and wounding 11, but that fact didn’t take away from the gut punch of hearing his name here though, and adds to the nightmarish feel of the episodes we’ve seen so far. 

Episode 4, “Black Out,” cranks the nightmare up even further when rolling outages in the sticky heat of NYC summer provide further opportunity for already illusive dangers to evade policeman Patrick (Russell Tovey) as he taps into his own sexual hungers and secrets while seeking to expose those around him. In this episode “gay panic” is shown as a literal rash that both cops and medical professionals are, as of now, attributing to cat scratch fever.

In this episode “gay panic” is shown as a literal rash . . . Gays being seen as essentially having cooties is very on the nose here.

Gays being seen as essentially having cooties is very on the nose here.

As Gino leads the hunt for the Mai Tai killer, getting captured by him once again, this time in the city hospital, the “big bad” of the previous episodes, Big Daddy, feels like the lesser of all evils, and at the center of it all is Dr. Hannah Wells who, not only seems to personally know the Mai Tai killer, but is seemingly pregnant with Adam’s (Charlie Carver) baby? As we’ve seen in previous seasons of “AHS,” including both parts of “Double Feature,” children are anything but bundles of joy in this show. Having a child in the midst of abject horror? Talk about a nightmare.

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Why “Red Table Talk” is the closest inheritor to Oprah’s mantle as TV’s great celebrity confessional

The last time award-winning journalist Jemele Hill visited “Red Table Talk” – the Facebook Watch magnet hosted by Jada Pinkett Smith, her mother Adrienne Banfield-Norris, and daughter Willow – was in October 2020. In that third season episode, Hill and her friend and former ESPN colleague Cari Champion examined why women, particularly Black women, can be so mean to each other.

When the discussion came around to betrayals, Hill admitted that the woman who betrayed her the most deeply is her mother, Denise, whose substance abuse led to her frequently letting her daughter down. So it makes sense that when Hill returned to the Smith family’s table this week – two years after that initial revelation, almost to the day, Denise would be seated beside her for their first-ever broadcast interview together.

Hill’s new memoir “Uphill” came out this week, but that matters less to Pinkett Smith, Willow, and Gammy (as “Red Table” viewers know Banfield-Norris) than Hill’s representative power as a living story. Being let down by their mothers is a deeply rooted feeling that Pinkett Smith and Hill have in common. The more important part is the fact that both daughters found it in themselves to forgive their mothers and move forward.

Mothers are imperfect and fallible, as Pinkett Smith and Gammy are constantly reminding their guests and viewers, many of whom are among the 11 million followers of the show’s Facebook page. That factor also enables people to open up to the hosts, as Denise does when she candidly talks about the sexual assaults she endured when she was younger and the fact that she lives with PTSD.

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If you weren’t aware of “Red Table Talk” before March of this year, there’s a strong chance you heard about it in the wake of Will Smith’s slapping Chris Rock onstage at the Oscars. The Smith family went silent afterward, leaving it to the paterfamilias’ PR team to do damage control via press release. He’s since resigned from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and was banned from attending the Oscars for the next decade.

Enough about him. The carefully managed statements from his professional squad mattered less than what the Smiths would ultimately come to say around the infamous table where, among other revelations, the couple set the record straight regarding the state of their marriage and Pinkett Smith confirmed that while they were separated, she engaged in an “entanglement,” as she meme-ably put it, with hip-hop star August Alsina.

It was expected, then, that the fifth season premiere in April would be devoted to addressing how that event impacted “Hollywood’s First Family of Putting It Out There,” as New York Times’ Jon Caramanica describes the Smiths. But that would not fit the brand.

Red Table TalkJemele Hill and her mother Denise on “Red Table Talk” (Red Table Talk/Facebook Watch/Jordan Fisher)

To the casual “Red Table Talk” cruiser, whose exposure to the show mainly comes via outtakes written up on various sites, it certainly would seem to. But this forgets what makes this fine Smith media product different from other celebrity-hosted daytime talk shows as we know them. 

For five seasons, healing and journeys have been the main thrust of this show, albeit presented under different headlines.

“Red Table Talk” has less in common with “The (Insert Celebrity Name Here) Show” than some combination of an empathetic, fly-on-the-wall unscripted series like “Intervention” and a Kardashian vehicle. It takes the gritty realistic conversations and situations of the former type of show and filters them into a safe space with good lighting and a top-shelf makeup artist, and through famous people who have, you know, done “the work.”

Therefore, when the season opened with a title card reading, “Considering all that has happened in the last few weeks, the Smith family has been focusing on deep healing. Some of the discoveries around our healing will be shared when the time calls,” there was little reason to doubt that statement’s authenticity. For five seasons, healing and journeys have been the main thrust of this show, albeit presented under different headlines.

In the many years that have passed since Oprah Winfrey abandoned her daytime post the question of which celebrity would succeed her as High Confessor to the Stars. Nobody has proven up to the task save for Winfrey herself – and even now, she mainly flexes her power not to seek forgiveness for famous wrongdoers but to provide a select, royal few a platform to “set the record straight,” as it were.

People once joked about her role as Hollywood’s sin launderer but the fact that hosts like Ellen DeGeneres failed to fill those shoes proves how difficult that is.

“Red Table Talk” comes close, although is decidedly not a platform for celebrity apologia or a waystation on one’s quest for absolution. The artist formerly known as Kanye West will not find much welcome here, although the people who survived him might if their story is appealing enough. Rather, it is a place where stars bare their souls to persuade and remind us of their vulnerability, and more than this, their relatability.

This begins with the hosts themselves. As careful as the Smiths are to give their guests the spotlight – that is, in the weeks that aren’t tangentially about their lives – scenes are edited to feature Pinkett Smith’s, Gammy’s and Willow’s and their guests’ reactions as they process what’s being said.

The emotionally expressive responses to the spontaneous pearls of wisdom that spill around the table, whether from famous people or the experts brought in to offer insight and counsel, are as vital to the conversation as what’s being said.

“I think, you know, our stories aren’t unique,” Pinkett Smith observes in this week’s episode. “Sharing our journeys helps people understand how to navigate their own journeys.”

And if emotional journeys and tearful conversations we witness come off as unscripted and natural because, especially in cases like Hill’s mother Denise, they are. This is also why the “Red Table Talk” guest list is light on congressional officials or political candidates, unlike “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” That was a place where politicians could masquerade as regular folks and the host would play along.

That doesn’t fly with “Red Table Talk,” although it works well when the family uses its platform to elevate discussions that need to be had concerning social justice and inequality. Politicians need showmanship to survive, which is why so many agree to endure “The View” during campaign season.

Lonita Baker, Tamika Palmer, Ju’Niyah Palmer and Kenneth Walker on “Red Table Talk” (Red Table Talk/Facebook Watch/Jordan Fisher)

People working for the causes of civil rights win by making their case a personal intimate concern to people who would hear them. The “Red Table Talk” episode featuring Breonna Taylor’s mother Tamika Palmer, her sister Ju’Niyah Palmer and her boyfriend Kenneth Walker, is the most moving fifth season episode so far for that reason.

The Smiths take viewers step by step through the New York Times’ examination of Taylor’s fatal shooting on March 13, 2020, as she and Walker were sleeping, and the subsequent Louisville police cover-up without softening any terms around the cops’ culpability.

Jada, Willow and Gammy excel at creating a safe therapeutic space for household names to let their guard down.

“Red Table Talk” also brought in activist Tamika Mallory and CNN analyst Laura Coates, along with other legal experts, to further validate their assertions that justice still has not been served. (Among the facts of which we’re reminded is that Walker, one of the victims in this case, is the only person involved to have served jail time. A judge has since permanently closed the case against him.)

The beauty of having a show with no ads or corporate sponsors is that Taylor’s loved ones were able to speak freely about the psychological toll they’ve borne without the producers fearing any partisan backlash.  So far the episode has garnered 6.4 million views.

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In the longer term, this expertly packaged authenticity also serves the Smiths and their careers. In a profile for The Cut, Pinkett Smith said that “Red Table Talk” was a way for her to revitalize her career after she turned 40, that age when actresses, along with most women, suddenly become invisible. In other words, it’s an intentionally charted journey upon which she’s brought her daughter and mother, and occasionally her son Jaden and her husband.

But the fact is that she, Willow and Gammy excel at creating a safe therapeutic space for household names to let their guard down. This also means that when and if that time ever “calls” for the family to bare their souls about the Oscars incident beyond Pinkett Smith’s stated hope that “these two intelligent, capable men have an opportunity to heal, talk this out and reconcile,” whatever they say will likely be taken by many at face value.

That is the benefit of sculpting a show where the brand is one’s truth and honesty – a power wielded sparingly and to impressive effect, and one they trust their audience to believe because they work to make it believable.

“Red Table Talk” episodes stream on Facebook Watch.

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