Wings and a prayer: Monarch surge brings hope for butterfly recovery



Francine Kiefer
Mon, December 6, 2021

Naturalist Danielle Bronson is ecstatic. The butterflies are back. Specifically, the Western monarch butterfly – more than 20,000 of them hanging in clusters from branches in elegant eucalyptus trees or fluttering around this conservation grove on the central California coast.

Last year, the count in the Pismo State Beach Monarch Butterfly Grove totaled only 200, in what is a top overwintering spot for monarchs west of the Rocky Mountains. The entire recorded population numbered less than 2,000 last year – down from millions in the 1980s. Experts feared this year might mark their end. Instead, the butterflies are experiencing a resurgence, though no one knows exactly why or if their upward trajectory will continue.

“I’m thrilled, because having 2,000 as the entire population, it was a blow to the face actually,” says Ms. Bronson. As a schoolgirl, she visited this grove, awed by hundreds of thousands of monarchs so plentiful they covered tree trunks. The sight inspired her to a career with the state park service, where she now works as a park interpreter and educator. “Last year was devastating, but this year I’m very hopeful.”

Ms. Bronson calls monarchs “the Hollywood species,” celebrities in their own right, flitting about in gorgeous orange-and-black gowns designed by Mother Nature. As stars of the pollinator world, they also serve as high-profile messengers about what is happening to this all-important group.

Both Western and Eastern monarchs – indistinguishable in genetic makeup but distinct populations because of their location on either side of the Rockies – have suffered severe declines since the early 1990s. The Eastern monarchs, which migrate to Mexico where they overwinter and mate, have seen their numbers drop by about 70%. The Western population, which migrates from northern states and parts of Canada to the California coast, is much worse off, plunging by 99%. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is expected to add monarchs to the list of endangered species in 2024, says Sarina Jepsen, director of endangered species for the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation.

The society organizes an annual Thanksgiving count of the Western monarch, at about 250 overwintering sites throughout California, Mexico’s Baja California, and a few places in Arizona. Volunteers arrive at first light to count the butterflies in their clusters. Any later, and they risk an overcount as the sun warms up these cold-blooded creatures and they begin to fly about.

These monarchs are a special generation that lives for six to eight months. After overwintering and mating, the females fly off and lay their eggs on milkweed, usually inland, on which the emerging caterpillars feast until they turn into a chrysalis and, finally, butterflies. Those adults typically live for only 30 days, with successive generations traveling on before the fall migration begins again.

This year, the butterflies arrived early. A preliminary tally of the Thanksgiving count finds more than 100,000 Western monarchs, a stunning 4,900% increase over last year. The final result will be announced in January. It’s encouraging, but “not a recovery,” cautions Ms. Jepsen, who cites a tendency of insect populations to bounce around.

“We’re really grateful it didn’t bounce to zero. What it means is we have a little bit of time to work toward recovery, but it doesn’t mean the population has recovered,” she says. As a reference point, a population under 30,000 is considered to have entered the “extinction vortex,” she says.

Many factors contribute to the decline of the monarchs. Overwintering habitat is lost to development. There’s less milkweed – the only food that monarch caterpillars eat – and fewer nectar-producing plants to nourish the butterflies. Pesticides, wildfires, and climate change all play a role, according to the Xerces Society. Because of the many reasons for decline, it’s not possible to pinpoint what’s behind this year’s resurgence. “We really can’t interpret it,” says Ms. Bronson.

But experts do know that restoring habitat and planting nectaring plants and milkweed can help. The massive infrastructure bill signed by President Joe Biden in November included $10 million to fund pollinating plants along roads and highways. The Monarch Act, sponsored by Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley and California Rep. Jimmy Panetta would provide $125 million to save the Western monarch.

Individuals can play a role, says Ms. Bronson, though she explains that the messaging about milkweed is a bit complicated. It should be planted away from overwintering sites – if it’s too close, it will encourage the butterflies to come out of diapause and mate sooner than they should. And the plantings should be native milkweed. Tropical milkweed, often sold by big-box stores, can house a harmful parasite and should not be used, she advises.

The simplest way to help, she says, is to grow nectar-producing plants to give butterflies energy during their journey and while overwintering. “You really can’t go wrong on that one, because you’re not just helping monarchs, you’re helping all pollinators.” The Pismo Beach conservation site, just off of Highway 1, has a nearby garden with coyote bush and senecio, a flowering succulent, to feed the monarchs.

Visitor Suzi Goodwin got the message. A local, she often visits the grove at this time of year, especially if she has company. She is delighted with the noticeable increase in butterflies, and loves the grove for its peaceful feel and scent. She has put in plants friendly to butterflies and bees at her house in Santa Maria, about 20 miles from the grove. “We did our homework before we bought our plants,” says the retiree.

Of course Ms. Bronson hopes the monarch numbers will continue to go up. She wants her 2-year-old son to see what she saw as a little girl. “And not just my kid. I get utter joy when you have school groups coming out here, and the ‘oohs’ and the ‘ahs’ and the ‘wow.’ And the smile that you can see in their eyes. That also brings hope.”

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Granderson: Where are men on the demolition of abortion rights?

LZ Granderson
Sun, December 5, 2021

Abortion rights advocates demonstrate in front of the Supreme Court on Wednesday, when the court heard oral arguments about a Mississippi abortion law and overruling the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision. (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)

It’s been a while since I took a science class, but from what I can recall, humans do not reproduce asexually. I bring this up because we tend to talk about reproductive rights as if it’s a women's issue.

Sure, if the Supreme Court guts Roe vs. Wade next year, there will be a number of men who will not care. I could not imagine being a father or brother or son and thinking none of this has anything to do with me. But men, including many who called themselves “girldads,” a viral hashtag on social media after Kobe Bryant died, should care that a patriarchal government wants to force their daughter to give birth against her will.

And be not mistaken, at its core, that’s exactly what this debate is about.

Not the morality of abortion, or religion, or state’s rights. No, this is the latest incarnation of government-sanctioned misogyny that was evident in the writing of the Constitution; evident in the 1927 Supreme Court case Buck vs. Bell in which the justices voted 8-1 in favor of forced sterilization; evident in state laws that punished women for seeking contraception until Griswold vs. Connecticut ruled such laws unconstitutional in 1965.

The phrase “pro-life”?

That’s just good PR. We all know in a country where universal healthcare is considered political poison and mass shootings are no longer shocking that being “pro-life” was never really our thing.

During her recent book tour stop in Los Angeles, Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of The 1619 Project, said “we have to stop letting the language hide the crime.” As an example she pointed at how the word “plantation” was just a way to rebrand the “slave labor camps” the nation’s wealth was built on.

The most recent example of this linguistic trick is watching elected officials use the word “rioters” to describe armed terrorists who overran Capitol police and sent members of Congress running for their lives. And so it is also true that the phrase “pro-life” distracts us from the fact that the same patriarchal government that once denied women the right to vote or own property wants to force them to give birth against their will. It is a scenario ripped from the pages of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

The reversal of a woman’s right to control her body — undergirded by religious fervor — moves the conversation away from routine partisan politics to being Taliban-adjacent.

Political analysts are already calculating how this issue will reshape the 2022 midterm election, which is a bit too cynical for my taste. What’s at stake here is not a policy fight but rather the morality of the republic.

We are on the cusp of trading in American ideals (even if often unfulfilled) for a society that forces rape victims to give birth because of the laws of a government overrepresented by men.

If we do that, the democracy banner we fly — already fraying because Republican members of Congress are pretending that Jan. 6 was nothing more than some rowdy tourists on Capitol Hill — will be left in tatters.

Roe vs. Wade may have become shorthand for abortion, but that Supreme Court decision meant so much more than that. It meant we were becoming a nation that valued women’s lives and their right to participate fully in this society. It signaled progress toward what America could be. Demolishing Roe is a big step back toward what America claims it is not.

@LZGranderson
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

Inside Dr. Oz’s Shameless Flip-Flop on Abortion

Roger Sollenberger
Mon, December 6, 2021

Photo Illustration by Kelly Caminero/The Daily Beast/Getty

When the Supreme Court heard arguments last week for a case that could upend abortion rights nationwide, Mehmet Oz—the TV doctor and accused “quack” turned Republican candidate for Senate in Pennsylvania—suggested he was at peace that the Supreme Court could overturn Roe v. Wade.

But only two years earlier, Oz characterized efforts to overturn Roe as a misleading and possibly conspiratorial crusade. Not only was Oz supportive of abortion rights, he seemed puzzled that people would spend time fighting abortion rights—going so far as to say that, as a physician, he was “really worried” about the anti-abortion movement and that eliminating Roe would have negative effects on women’s health.

“It’s, as a doctor—just putting my doctor hat on—it’s a big-time concern,” Oz said in the 2019 interview, which aired on the Breakfast Club radio show. “Because I went to medical school in Philadelphia, and I saw women who had coat-hanger events. And I mean really traumatic events that happened when they were younger, before Roe v. Wade. And many of them were harmed for life.”

Oz conceded that abortion “is a hard issue for everybody,” and he said that, on “a personal level,” he disliked abortion and would not want anyone in his family to have one. But he took a common pro-choice position in 2019 that his belief should not be forced onto others. He would not want to “interfere with everyone else’s stuff,” he said, “because it’s hard enough to get into life as it is.”

Oz’s defense of abortion wasn’t just a passing question. He held forth for seven minutes in this 2019 interview about the practice and was highly critical of anti-abortion advocates who argue that life begins at conception. His tone throughout the entire segment on abortion was one of concern that legislators might be passing abortion restrictions, and he seemed to endorse viability—generally thought of as about 24 weeks—as a popular limit for abortion.

“Just being logical about it,” he said, “if you think that the moment of conception you’ve got a life, then why would you even wait six weeks? Right, then an in vitro fertilized egg is still a life.”

Oz also questioned why restricting abortion access was so important to some people.

“There’s so much we gotta do already to take care of each other. To start picking fights on this—I always wonder about it,” he said. “It happens periodically. There are these moral issues that almost on purpose are inflamed.”

And yet, despite his full-throated support for abortion access in 2019, Oz said last week during an interview on WGAL in Lancaster that he was “OK with the Supreme Court making the right decision” on Roe, “based on what they think the Constitution says.”

Earlier that day, the high court heard arguments regarding a challenge to Mississippi’s prohibitive abortion law, with conservative justices signaling they were prepared to scrap Roe entirely.

But in the discussion with the Breakfast Club—hosted by rapper and political pundit “Charlamagne tha God”—Oz devoted several minutes to explaining why the resurgent anti-abortion movement concerned him as a physician, and why Roe was valuable and should not be overturned.

Dr. Oz’s Sick Journey From Political Joke to Senate Candidate

When The Daily Beast called Dr. Oz for comment, he picked up his phone and immediately ended the call. He then did not reply to a text message asking about his remarks in the abortion discussion.

But asked in 2019 about prohibitive laws like the near-total ban Alabama Republican Gov. Kay Ivey had signed earlier that month—a so-called “heartbeat” bill which outlawed abortion in almost every instance starting six weeks after conception—Oz denounced the idea as dangerous, unfair to women, and premised on misleading information.

At one point in the conversation, Oz, who has been vocal about his own Christian faith, also questioned why anti-abortion advocates cared so much in the first place.

“Is this really the way they want to spend their time?” he wondered. “There’s so much we gotta fix in the world.”

While the physician and herbal weight-loss supplement salesman acknowledged that true believers “gotta be heard,” he said “that doesn’t mean that’s what the rule of the land is.”

“If people thought about it and logically work through it, most Americans sort of already agree on what the right answer is”—a position that appears directly at odds with the conservative majority on the Court.

Asked by tha God whether he thought prohibitive anti-abortion laws were “healthy,” Oz replied, “I’m really worried about it,” and invoked his professional experience.

Longtime New Jersey Resident Dr. Oz Announces He’s Running in Pennsylvania’s Senate Race

“I’ve taken care of a lot of women who had issues around childbirth. The problem with the [Alabama] law as it stands now—and I think the law was really only passed to generate a Supreme Court challenge—but most women don’t know they’re pregnant,” he said, taking specific aim at the bad-faith effort to overturn Roe. “It’s two weeks past your last period when you have to decide by,” Oz explained, referencing the six-week line.

Oz, who rose to fame in the 2000s as a regular guest on Oprah Winfrey’s daytime television show, claimed he had guests on his own show “all the time” who did not know they were pregnant even “when they’re delivering.”

“So you’re asking women to decide almost instantaneously if they’re pregnant or not,” Oz said. “And it’s also banned in cases of incest and rape. So I don’t quite get it as a doctor.”

He then went to lengths to dismantle the spurious six-week “heartbeat” talking point.

“There are electrical exchanges at six weeks, but the heart’s not beating,” Oz said.

“If you’re going to define life by a beating heart, then make it a beating heart, not little electrical exchanges in the cell that no one would hear or think about as a heart,” he continued. To do otherwise, he said, misleads the average person into “envisioning a little acorn heart beating in there, and that’s not what’s going on at six weeks.”

The Mississippi law currently before the court is not as extreme as Alabama’s 2019 bill, banning abortions after 15 weeks, not six. But hours ahead of Oz’s interview, the conservative justices signaled they were open to a broad ruling that would legalize six-week bans.

Chief Justice John Roberts was the lone conservative to raise the question of a narrow decision, saying, “The thing that is at issue before us today is 15 weeks.” But Roberts would need to pick off at least two other conservatives, and none appeared eager to join him.

One of those justices, Samuel Alito, mused that “the only real options we have” are to uphold or overturn Roe.

And while Oz now seems fine with a conservative majority overturning Roe, as he faces a GOP primary field of anti-abortion Republicans, Oz was explicitly concerned by that prospect in 2019, and suggested abortion bans could result in a “big sucking sound of businesses leaving” states.

Dr. Oz: World’s Best Snake Oil Salesman

When Breakfast Club co-host Angela Yee expressed concern that if Roe were overturned, abortions would continue, but “in a dangerous way and it could actually kill you,” Oz backed that up with his own medical experience.

The abortion discussion was only one part of a wide-ranging interview on the Breakfast Club. Dr. Oz and the hosts also covered why it’s unsanitary to wash chicken before cooking it (“you spray the salmonella all over the kitchen”), why Americans should consume less meat (“what’s destroying our economy in many ways is the way we eat so much meat”), the medical promise of hallucinogenic drugs (“I don’t have a problem that I think it would help”), environmentally friendly wet wipe alternatives (“I take toilet paper; I spit on it, to moisten it, or use the sink”) and how liberals and conservatives are different “partly for genetic reasons.”

“Liberals primarily view freedom and the right to do what’s important to them as their primary drivers. Conservatives tend to use other factors in addition. For example, you don’t want people pissing in your neighborhood—that’s much more important to conservatives,” Oz explained.

An acclaimed thoracic surgeon and director of integrated medicine at one of the top med schools in the country, Oz long ago morphed into a controversial public figure straddling the worlds of health, media, and politics. He leveraged Oprah’s imprimatur into a multimillion-dollar celebrity doctor brand, racking up accusations of “quackery” along the way—promoting false theories about genetically modified foods and hawking “sham” weight-loss supplements, for which he at one point answered to Congress.

Dr. Oz watches as Oprah Winfrey shaves off the moustache of television personality Dr. Phil in 2010.
Lucas Jackson/Reuters

As the coronavirus pandemic descended last spring, Oz—a regular on Fox News—caught the attention of then-President Donald Trump, who wanted to connect with Oz after watching him speak positively about the unproven COVID treatment hydroxychloroquine.

In an interview two months before the 2016 election, Oz briefly quizzed then-candidate Trump on women’s reproductive health, touching first on birth control and following up with a fleeting discussion about abortion.

“What is your stand on abortion today?” Oz asked.

“I am pro-life,” Trump replied.

Oz had no other follow-ups.

In new poll, young voters say democracy has 'failed'

Dante Chinni

Sun, December 5, 2021

WASHINGTON — Last week, Harvard University's Kennedy School released a poll of young Americans ages 18 to 29 and found a generation of voters that looks a little different from what many people expected.

There was not a lot of youthful optimism in the data, and some findings showed that large divisions in the electorate over the last decade are still part of this generation. But other numbers suggest that this new group of voters may be charting a new course politically.

The best place to start may be the overall mood of the group. The survey shows a pretty sullen collection of Americans, not especially happy with how the country is working or where it is heading.

Only a quarter of those who were polled believe democracy in the U.S. is working as well as it should, and only one-third believe democracy is "healthy" or "somewhat functioning." Considering that this group of people includes the country's next set of leaders, those are somewhat concerning findings.

Yes, younger people tend to see flaws in the status quo and are often the spark behind change, but when more than half of 18- to 29-year-olds believe U.S. democracy is "failed" or "in trouble," it raises questions about how the next generation sees the future.

The poll also shows some divides around different levels of education.

The thought in some communities may be that "everyone goes to college" after high school, but the Kennedy School poll shows that nearly 60 percent of the respondents are not enrolled in college and/or do not have bachelor's degrees. About 1 in 5 are pursuing bachelor's degrees, while 22 percent already have them.

The numbers may have political consequences.

There is a growing partisan education gap in U.S. politics: Those with bachelor's degrees increasingly lean to the political left, and those without them tend to be on the right. It has become one of the dominant trends in political polling over the last decade. And the Kennedy School poll suggests that the ideological split may be carrying through to the younger generation.

Consider attitudes about Joe Biden's presidency.

There is fairly strong support for Biden among those in college or with degrees; his job approval is 54 percent with both groups. Among the non-college group, however, the picture is very different. Biden's approval number is 13 points lower, at 41 percent, with 57 percent disapproving.

On the whole, that might sound like a win for Republicans. The largest segment of this bloc of Americans is the non-college segment, and they are not fans of the Biden White House.

But that is where things start to look different. When you look more closely at the non-college group, respondents are not especially conservative, and they are even less likely to call themselves Republican.

Only a third of the non-college 18- to 29-year-olds say they are “conservative,” and only 22 percent self-identify as Republican. Meanwhile, members of the group are as likely to call themselves “liberal” as “conservative,” and 33 percent self-identify as Democrats, 11 points higher than the GOP number.

In other words, the non-college element of this group is not pro-Biden, but the data show that they are also not pro-GOP. They are more likely to call themselves “independent” and “moderate.”

Beyond questions of political partisanship and ideology, there appear to be areas of generational agreement about pressing issues, including climate change. Across all education levels, there is concern that climate change will affect future decisions, such as where they live and the kind of work they might do.

A majority of young voters in all education groups believe climate change will affect their lives. The numbers are highest among those with degrees — 70 of them percent say climate change will affect their lives directly — but 57 percent of current college students and 51 percent of the non-college group say they will be affected, as well. Across all the educational groups, one-third or fewer said climate change will not have an impact.

In addition, all those subgroups agree that the U.S. is not doing enough to address climate change, and they agree that the climate change challenge is not "hopeless." That suggests support for action on the issue.

There are a lot of unknowns for this next generation of voters. After all, they have come of age in a volatile era (from the turbulent Trump presidency to Covid), and it's not clear how much that has shaped how they see politics and how much their views could change as they grow older.

But even as some of the broader educational divides appear to be taking root with these voters, the data also show some important commonalities. They are disgruntled and dissatisfied, but they also seem to agree on some of the important challenges facing the country.

In a country where division reigns over nearly everything, that is a noteworthy difference.

People in counties that voted Trump more likely to die from Covid – study

Maya Yang
Tue, December 7, 2021

Photograph: Eric Baradat/AFP/Getty Images

People in counties that voted for Donald Trump are nearly three times more likely to die from Covid-19 than those who live in counties that voted for Joe Biden, according to a new study by National Public Radio.

Related:

Omicron brings fresh concern for US mental health after ‘grim two years’

NPR examined deaths per 100,000 people in about 3,000 counties across the US since May 2021. According to NPR, 1 May was chosen as the start date as it is roughly the time when vaccines became universally available to adults.

The study found that areas that voted for Trump by at least 60% in November 2020 had death rates 2.7 times higher than counties that voted heavily for Biden.

The study also found that counties that voted for Trump by an even higher percentage had lower vaccination rates and higher Covid-19 death rates.

Charles Gaba, an independent analyst who helped review NPR’s methodology, said that in October, the reddest 10th of the country saw death rates six times higher than the bluest 10th.

“Those numbers have dropped slightly in recent weeks,” he said. “It’s back down to 5.5 times higher.”

Hawaii, Nebraska and Alaska were excluded from the study because they either do not report election results by county or do not report county-level vaccine data.

The study only examined the geographic locations of Covid-related deaths. The political views of each person remain unknown. Nevertheless, according to NPR, “the strength of the association, combined with polling information about vaccination, strongly suggests that Republicans are being disproportionately affected”.

People in rural Republican areas, and white Republicans in general, tend to be more resistant to getting vaccinated. According to the latest data from the Kaiser Family Fund, the rate of Republican Covid vaccination has plateaued at 59%, while 91% of Democrats have been vaccinated.

Republicans have been found to be more likely to believe misinformation about Covid and vaccines. According to KFF, 94% of Republicans think one or more false statements about Covid and vaccines might be true, and 46% believe four or more statements might be true. Only 14% of Democrats believe four or more false statements about the virus.

The most widely believed false statement is that the government is exaggerating the number of Covid deaths.

According to Johns Hopkins University, more than 788,000 people have died of Covid in the US.

Numerous Republican governors have dismissed concerns about low vaccination rates and pushed for ending public health measures such as mask wearing and social distancing in favor of reopening businesses.

“We’ve seen lower levels of personal worry among Republicans who remain unvaccinated,” Liz Hamel, vice-president of public opinion and survey research at KFF, told NPR. “That’s a real contrast with what we saw in communities of color, where there was a high level of worry about getting sick.”

A lethal new weapon levels the playing field against the U.S. military

Ken Dilanian
Mon, December 6, 2021, 2:01 PM·9 min read

DUGWAY PROVING GROUND, Utah — The killer drone whooshed out of its launch tube, spreading its carbon wings and shooting into the sky.

Flying too fast for the naked eye to track, the battery-powered robot circled the Utah desert, hunting for the target it had been programmed to strike. Moments later, it sailed through the driver’s side window of an empty pickup truck and exploded in a fireball.

“Good hit,” exclaimed an operator from AeroVironment, the company that produces the drone and sells it to the U.S. military.

NBC News traveled to a military testing center for exclusive access to the first public demonstration of the Switchblade 300, a small, low-cost “kamikaze” drone made by AeroVironment, which sources said the U.S. military has used quietly for years in targeted killing operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.

The demonstration told a story of promise and peril.

Americans have become accustomed to images of Hellfire missiles raining down from Predator and Reaper drones to hit terrorist targets in Pakistan or Yemen. But that was yesterday’s drone war.

A revolution in unmanned aerial vehicles is unfolding, and the U.S. has lost its monopoly on the technology.

IMAGE: An AeroVironment operator prepares to launch the Switchblade drone at Utah’s Dugway Proving Ground. (NBC News)

Some experts believe the spread of the semi-autonomous weapons will change ground warfare as profoundly as the machine gun did.

They can leapfrog traditional defenses to strike infantry troops anywhere on the battlefield, and they cost just $6,000 apiece, compared to $150,000 for the Hellfire missile typically fired by Predator or Reaper drones. That capability could help save the lives of U.S. troops, but it could also put them — and Americans at home — in great danger from terrorists or nation-states that haven’t previously had access to such lethal and affordable technology.

“I think this is going to be the new IED,” or improvised explosive device, said Shaan Shaikh, a missile expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It’s something that we can see that is going to be a problem, and we have some defenses, but not enough.”

Dubbed kamikaze, suicide or killer drones, these unmanned aircraft don’t fire missiles — they are the missiles. But unlike typical missiles, they can circle above a target, wait for the ideal moment and strike with incredible precision.

The U.S. military couldn’t have fought the way it did in Iraq or Afghanistan if the enemy had had killer drones. The next battlefield opponent is likely to have them. And terrorists will eventually get them, too — a possibility that has homeland security officials scrambling to find a solution, given that there is no surefire defense against them.

“There are over 100 countries and nonstate groups that have drones today, and the technology is widely proliferating,” said Paul Scharre, a former Army Ranger who is a scholar at the Center for a New American Security and the author of “Army of None,” a book about autonomous weapons. “It levels the playing field between the U.S. and terrorist groups or rebel groups in a way that's certainly not good for the United States.”

Today’s small lethal drones are difficult to detect on radar, and they can even be programmed to hit targets without human intervention, based on facial recognition or some other computer wizardry. And while the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security are spending billions of dollars to come up with “counter drone” technology, experts say there is, as yet, no foolproof version of it.
Taken into battle in a backpack

Weighing just 5½ pounds, including its small warhead, the Switchblade can be taken into battle in a backpack and fly up to 7 miles to hit a target. The 300 model is designed to kill individuals, while a larger version, the 600, can destroy armored vehicles. AeroVironment isn’t yet allowed to show the bigger one to the public.

They are called “Switchblade” because their bladelike wings spring out on launch.

“It allows our warfighter to have a battlefield superiority, which our enemies can't see, can't hear, can't tell it's coming, and really precisely achieve a specific mission effect,” said Wahid Nawabi, AeroVironment’s Afghan-born CEO.

Nawabi said he has been told that the Taliban and others who have been on the receiving end refer to it as an angry bird or a buzzing bee.

Public procurement data show that the Switchblade 300 costs a small fraction of a Hellfire missile’s price tag, let alone the total cost of keeping Reaper drones in the air, flown by pilots in Nevada.

The Switchblade has a feature that allows the operator to adjust the blast radius, so it can kill the driver of a vehicle but not a passenger, for example. The weapon can be “waved off” up to two seconds before impact, AeroVironment says, in the event of a mistake or a risk to civilians.

That wave-off capability is notable in light of the catastrophe in September when the military killed 10 civilians, seven of them children, in a drone strike in Afghanistan that officials now say was a tragic mistake. A Pentagon review found that the strike team was unaware of the presence of children when it decided to fire. Officials said that a child was observed through a video feed of the target area after the launch but that by then the Hellfire missile couldn’t be recalled.

The Switchblade has cameras that show a target seconds before impact. But for a better view of the battlefield, it’s often used in conjunction with a small surveillance drone.

For the NBC News demonstration, AeroVironment used the Puma, which is launched by hand like a large model airplane and provides high-resolution color imagery of the ground. The images beamed back from the Puma’s cameras made it clear that an operator could see the expression on the face of a target in the seconds before the Switchblade struck.

Portable drones provide air support to small ground force units even when overhead assets — fighter jets, helicopters, larger drones — aren’t available, Scharre said.

“The ability to have something that's small and tube-launched that's in your backpack, that the squad leader has access to, that they don't have to get on the radio and call in close air support ... that is a real game changer from a military capability standpoint,” he said.

It’s a game changer not just for the U.S.

The Switchblade may be the most advanced of the genre, but Russia, China, Israel, Iran and Turkey all have some version of a killer drone. Iranian-backed militias have used small drones in 10 attacks this year on U.S. bases in Iraq, the military says. No U.S. personnel have been hurt or killed, but it is only the beginning.

IMAGE: An AeroVironment operator prepares to launch the Puma surveillance drone. (NBC News)

The tiny country of Azerbaijan used small Turkish-made drones to devastating effect against the Armenian military last year, bringing a decisive end to a stalemate over a disputed enclave that had gone on for years.

Video released by Azerbaijan shows the drones pummeling artillery, tank and troop emplacements surrounded by trenches that offered no protection whatsoever from the fiery death raining down from above.

Russia and Ukraine have used armed drones in fighting over a disputed region, and Iranian-backed Houthi rebels used them to blow up Saudi oil facilities in 2019.

Drones, Scharre and other experts say, may usher in the largest transformation of ground war tactics since the advent of the machine gun at the turn of the 20th century, which quickly put an end to sending large formations of troops marching into gunfire.

Drones “are making the battlefield a much more dangerous place for ground troops,” Scharre said. “Now, hiding behind a wall, hiding in a trench line, is not enough to protect you from the enemy.”

U.S. troops in Iraq are experiencing that danger firsthand. Iranian-backed militias have used small drones in nine attacks on U.S. facilities in Iraq this year, a U.S. military spokesman said. No one has been hurt or killed, but it’s only a matter of time.

A suicide drone attack on an oil tanker linked to an Israeli billionaire killed two crew members off Oman in the Arabian Sea on July 29.

“We have found that every time we come up with some way to defend ourselves against [drones], the technology rapidly advances to the point where it defeats our defensive capabilities,” said Michael Patrick "Mick" Mulroy, a retired Marine and former CIA officer who was deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East from 2017 to 2019.

Mulroy, an ABC News analyst, said that drone defenses include electronic jamming and various methods to shoot them down but that there are technologies and tactics to bypass every possible defense.

IMAGE: AeroVironment CEO Wahid Nawabi and Ken Dilanian at in a demonstration of the Switchblade drone (NBC News)

The military, for example, can sometimes shoot high-powered weapons at incoming drones on a battlefield.

Inside populated areas, however, small, explosives-laden unmanned aerial vehicles pose a more vexing problem.

In a war zone, “you could do more things with electronic warfare ... with using high-powered microwaves that might be very disruptive in a domestic context,” Scharre said. “You could shoot bullets on the sky in a war zone, and you might be less concerned about where they're going land out in the desert than in a major American city.”

Meanwhile, all the barriers put up in cities to keep truck bombs away from buildings are useless against drones.

So far, no terrorist group is known to have used a suicide drone. But experts believe it’s only a matter of time. The Islamic State terrorist group put explosives on hobbyist drones and used them to harass and occasionally injure coalition forces in Iraq and Syria.

The specter of a swarm of explosives-packed drones buzzing toward a crowded U.S. sports arena keeps homeland security officials up at night.

But the government has been slow to react. It was only in 2018 that Congress granted the Department of Homeland Security and other law enforcement agencies the authority to take down drones deemed to be threats inside the U.S.

Since then, DHS has been contracting with outside companies and testing technologies to defeat the drone threat.

A spokesman declined to comment when asked for an update from DHS’ Science and Technology Directorate on the state of domestic counter-drone programs.

In an article on DHS’ website in July, the agency discusses some of its counter-drone efforts and notes that tests have been conducted. But the article doesn’t say whether the tests showed that any of the technology works consistently.

In 2018, the head of DHS’ intelligence division at the time told Congress that drones posed a major threat.

“Commercially available drones can be employed by terrorists and criminals to deliver explosives or harmful substances, conduct surveillance both domestically and internationally against U.S. citizens, interests and assets,” said the official, David Glawe. “This threat is significant, and it's imminent, and it's upon us.”

Shortbelly rockfish an example of fishery management under climate change

Katie Frankowicz, The Daily Astorian, Ore.
Mon, December 6, 2021

Dec. 6—A small, spiny fish no one wants to catch has started to appear in trawl nets off the Oregon Coast.

Shortbelly rockfish are common off California but were rare in Oregon until recently. Boosted by several strong reproductive years, their apparent expansion into new territory triggered a discussion among West Coast fishery regulators and raised concerns for conservation groups.

It has also provided a working example of exactly how tricky it could be to manage fisheries as species and ocean conditions shift under climate change.


Shortbelly rockfish — a relatively shorter-lived type of groundfish that travels in large schools — has little market value. It has been decades since anyone even seemed interested in developing a fishery around them and they are not in danger of being overfished, state biologists say.

When the shortbelly rockfish is caught by accident in other fisheries, its only commercial use is as fishmeal or fish oil, products made from fish byproducts, low-value fish and fishery bycatch that are used as fertilizers and animal feed and in aquaculture.

But shortbelly rockfish is a critical source of food for many seabirds, which face challenging overall population declines, as well as for Chinook salmon and other marine species.

The shortbelly's expansion north puts them in the path of the state's midwater trawl fisheries. The Pacific whiting fishery began to record increased encounters with shortbelly rockfish beginning in 2017.

Most tows that snag shortbelly may only land around 10 pounds of the rockfish, but every once in a while there will be a big tow — a lightning strike — of over 100,000 pounds.

Triggered a review

The rising number of shortbelly landings triggered a review by the Pacific Fishery Management Council.

The council, which recommends fishery management measures in federal waters off California, Oregon and Washington state, took several interim steps in 2019 and 2020 to protect the fish. They raised the annual catch limit and designated the rockfish as an ecosystem component species, a title that recognizes shortbelly's value in the ecosystem as a forage fish but does not come with specific fishery management measures.

Conservation groups argued that more proactive protection was needed.

The Audubon Society and Oceana urged for a prohibition that would prevent the creation of a fishery targeting shortbelly rockfish.

Right now, shortbelly is nearly useless to fishermen. Vessels in the Pacific whiting fishery actively try to avoid them. When a vessel does hit a school of shortbelly, the spiny fish tangle in the net, creating frustrating work for crew and sometimes damaging more valuable fish around them.

But as interest in aquaculture opportunities and demand for fishmeal and fish oil grows, conservation groups worry about what the future could hold.

In November, the council further limited catch of the fish and could consider examining a prohibition on a directed fishery for shortbelly next year.

It's a partial win, said Joe Liebezeit, a scientist and avian conservation manager for Portland Audubon.

Anna Weinstein, the director of marine conservation with the National Audubon Society, agrees. She said the council's action provides some truly meaningful safeguards and breaks.

But in light of climate change, "It's just more important than ever to be proactive about the foundation of the food chain that supports all the species we care about," Weinstein said.

The council does not want to see targeted fishing on shortbelly rockfish either. However, a prohibition takes work and would require extensive analysis of data, some of which is not readily available for shortbelly. There has not been a stock assessment of the fish since 2007.

"It seems like we should just be able to say, 'Thou shalt not go out and target shortbelly rockfish,'" said Maggie Sommer, with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, and a Pacific Fishery Management Council member.

It's not that easy. Fishery managers need to be clear about what they are requiring and what they are enforcing. They need to understand how changing management for one species might impact and impede other fisheries.

It isn't clear yet why shortbelly rockfish are so abundant off the Oregon Coast now — though warmer ocean waters associated with a marine heat wave that began in 2015 are likely a factor. What is obvious is that shortbelly rockfish have experienced several very good reproductive years and expanded north of their historical range.

Caren Braby, the marine program manager with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, has been involved in council discussions about various climate change scenarios for West Coast fisheries.

With shortbelly, she sees parallels to Oregon's emerging market squid fishery.

Landings of market squid surged off Oregon in the past five years after decades of being almost nonexistent. Boats that fish for the squid in the animals' more typical range off the California coast have headed north to take advantage of the boom.

The situation caught regulators off guard. Oregon had no established quota and no set season for market squid. Suddenly, as landings continued to come in strong and the number of participating vessels increased, fishery managers needed to discuss a whole new suite of management details.

As with shortbelly, there are gaps in the data and uncertainty about how new management could impact fisheries or benefit the animals in question.

Dilemma

It is the kind of dilemma council members like Braby expect to see more of under climate change and it further highlights the need to be nimble and flexible, she said. With climate change and shifting ocean conditions, some species will thrive and others will fail. Many are expected to move into new areas.

There is one really easy question, Braby says: "Are we going to see new species emerge in our landings?"

"And the answer," she said, "is, 'Certainly.' This is an example."

"So the question really becomes are we prepared with our management to lose species?" she added. "Are we prepared with our management to gain species? And the answer is, 'Not yet,' but we're thinking really hard about it."

After Rittenhouse verdict, advocates demand justice for Chrystul Kizer



Char Adams
Mon, December 6, 2021

Wisconsin’s self-defense law led to Kyle Rittenhouse's acquittal on homicide charges, sparking protests across the state and the country. Now, advocates are calling for justice for a child sex trafficking survivor in the state, holding that if Rittenhouse could successfully claim self-defense, then she can, too.

A group of demonstrators gathered this month at Kenosha’s Civic Center Park to protest the Rittenhouse verdict and highlight the case of Chrystul Kizer, who is awaiting trial on charges of killing her alleged sex trafficker three years ago, when she was 17. She says she shot him in self defense.

Kizer is charged with five felonies, including first-degree intentional homicide, for killing Randall Volar III. Her attorneys say she lashed out after years of abuse, and Kizer has said she was underage when he sexually assaulted her.

“My heart and my concern is with Chrystul Kizer. She is not forgotten,” one protester, Lorna Revere, said Sunday, according to The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “The anger that hits all people, Black people, white people, that are concerned about the racism that this country faces, is like — it just stabs you in the chest time and time and time again.”

A jury this month found Rittenhouse, 18, not guilty of all charges in the fatal shootings of Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, and Anthony Huber, 26, and the wounding of Gaige Grosskreutz, 27, during protests last summer in Kenosha over the shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man, by a white police officer.

Prosecutors said Rittenhouse was an aggressor, traveling from his Illinois home to Kenosha with plans to add to the chaos in the city. But Rittenhouse’s attorneys argued that he went to Kenosha to protect businesses amid the August 2020 protests and was defending himself from attackers. The jury accepted the self-defense claim. According to Wisconsin law, “a person is privileged to threaten or intentionally use force against another for the purpose of preventing or terminating what the person reasonably believes to be an unlawful interference with his or her person by such other person.”

Following the Rittenhouse verdict, demonstrators chanted Kizer’s name along with the names of the men Rittenhouse shot as they marched through the downtown area to protest the acquittal, according to the Journal Sentinel. Social media users have also called for justice for Kizer, comparing her case to Rittenhouse’s.

Kizer was held in jail until June 2020, when several groups raised $400,000 for her bail. Her attorneys are invoking a state law known as “affirmative defense,” which means Kizer’s act was a “direct result” of her having been a victim of sex trafficking. An appellate court ruled that Kizer may be able to use the defense, according to Kenosha News, and the state Supreme Court is now reviewing that decision. This particular self-defense argument has never been used before in a homicide case in Wisconsin, according to NPR.

Julius Kim, an attorney in Wisconsin and a former prosecutor, said the Rittenhouse case used a “more traditional self-defense claim” than Kizer’s because video showed him in “imminent danger.”

“The reason the state balked at this particular use of affirmative defense is, they’re saying they don’t think that affirmative defense should apply to first-degree intentional homicide cases because that sets off a dangerous precedent,” Kim said. “What they’re saying is if someone commits a first-degree intentional homicide but shows some evidence they committed as a direct result of trafficking, that essentially gives people a license to kill their traffickers.”

Kim added: “I understand why supporters of Chrystul Kizer feel like Chrystul Kizer should be allowed to avail herself to the affirmative defense that she wants to … A lot of people are watching this case because they want to see whether it’s going to have implications for other” affirmative defense cases.

The Kenosha County district attorney’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Kizer was 17 when she shot Volar in the head and set his home on fire before stealing his car in June 2018. Kizer said she met Volar, then 34, through Backpage — a now-shuttered sex ads website — and he sold her to men for sex. Kizer said Volar had been filming his abuse of her since she was 16 and she acted in self-defense after he pinned her to the floor when she refused to have sex with him. Prosecutors have argued that Kizer simply wanted to steal Volar’s car. But in a 2019 Washington Post interview from jail, Kizer said that she shot Volar in self-defense.

It was later revealed by The Washington Post that both prosecutors and Kenosha police had evidence that Volar, who is white, had abused Kizer and other underage Black girls. Just months before his death, a 15-year-old girl accused him of drugging and threatening to kill her, according to the Post. And police found exploitative videos of Volar abusing girls who appeared as young as 12, the Post reported.

Kizer’s attorneys did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Before last summer’s George Floyd protests renewed interest in Kizer’s case, advocacy groups had been working to release her. An online petition to free Kizer has amassed more than 1.4 million signatures and, along with advocates, Tarana Burke, founder of the #MeToo movement, and actor Alyssa Milano voiced their support for Kizer online. Several advocacy groups, including the Chicago Community Bond Fund, Survived & Punished, the Chrystul Kizer Defense Committee, and the Milwaukee Freedom Fund, raised her $400,00 bail, according to WITI.

“It was only because of the outpouring of support following the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and so many other Black people in the United States that we were able to post a bond this large,” Sharlyn Grace, former executive director of the Chicago Community Bond Fund, told Wisconsin Public Radio last year.

Kizer is one of many “criminalized survivors,” people imprisoned for killing or injuring their alleged abusers. Cyntoia Brown spent 15 years in prison for killing a man who solicited her for sex when she was 16. Marissa Alexander was convicted of aggravated assault in 2010 for firing a warning shot in her Florida home to scare off her allegedly abusive estranged husband. In New York, advocates are demanding that authorities drop all charges against Tracy McCarter, who faces 25 years to life in prison for killing her estranged husband.

“The reality is that Chrystul Kizer was not kept safe by police and prosecution and incarceration," Grace said. "And, in fact, after she was forced to defend herself and she chose to survive, she was then further harmed by those systems.”

CORRECTION (Dec. 6, 2021, 10:49 a.m. ET): A previous version of this article misstated when Kyle Rittenhouse had the AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle used in the Kenosha shootings. Rittenhouse acquired the weapon in Wisconsin, it was revealed at his trial; he did not leave his home in Illinois with it.

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Patagonia calls out corporate sector that is ‘full of s***’ on climate crisis: ‘There’s a special place in hell’




Sravasti Dasgupta
Tue, December 7, 2021

Patagonia CEO Ryan Gellert has called out big businesses for their alleged duplicity on the climate crisis as well as their opposition to the Biden administration’s ambitious Build Back Better Act.

“The [corporate] sector has historically been full of s***, and the sector is still full of s***,” Mr Gellert told Fast Company on Monday.

“They all say they’re all in on climate to their customers and to their employees, and the members of those two groups—and I’ve seen the strategy docs, so this isn’t rumor or innuendo—are actively seeking to undermine the current package from the Biden administration, which includes really ambitious climate commitments,” he added.

Mr Gellert, 48, who was named CEO of the California-based outdoor clothing company in September 2020, said that his focus was on the Senate vote on the Build Back Better Act, including how major corporations have reacted to it.

Last month, the House of Representatives voted to approve the $1.75 trillion (£1.3 trillion) bill. The bill includes the largest-ever investment costs for climate change with goals like bringing greenhouse gas emissions at least 50 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030, earmarking $70 billion to upgrade the electricity grid, and $7.5 billion to build a network of electric vehicle charging stations.

It will now go to the Senate, where it faces opposition from the Republicans.

Big business like the American Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable have sharpened their attack on the bill recently. They are trying to lobby House Democrats saying the bill needs a closer budget analysis.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk too said on Monday that the bill adds to the Federal budget deficit and would end up with the government incentivising only certain businesses.

But climate experts and industry analysts alike have celebrated the Build Back Better Act—which invests billions in fighting environmental racism, handing out climate block grants, reducing pollution in ports, and funding a Civilian Climate Corps—as an important step in meeting US international commitments to maintaining a habitable climate amid global heating.

Mr Gellert said that he has no patience for corporate giants that have opposed the bill on the basis of corporate taxes. On one hand, these corporations talk about sustainability, but on the other, they undermine it by staying away from large investments to deal with climate crisis, he said. “That is a huge issue.”

“Where I come down on it is, define for me what you mean when you say ‘all in’ [on climate]. Because you’re saying that and then hiding over here, and it’s bulls***. There’s a special place in hell for people doing that. It’s the kind of thing that has to change.”

Patagonia is known for supporting progressive issues. In 2018, founder Yvon Chouinard changed the company’s mission statement to “Patagonia is in the business of saving our home planet.”

In October, the company renewed calls to major corporate firms to boycott social media giant Facebook which, it said, must “prioritise people and planet over profit”. It had first started boycotting the platform in 2020 amid concerns that it “spread hate speech and misinformation about climate change and our democracy”.

The company also announced in April this year that it would no longer put corporate logos on its apparel.

Musician Grimes wants Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant to stay open. ‘This is crisis mode’


Kaytlyn Leslie
Mon, December 6, 2021

Who had “Canadian electro-pop musician rallies to save nuclear power plant” on their 2021 bingo cards?

In a video shared by local clean energy advocates over the weekend, musician Grimes — known for tracks like “Visions” and “Oblivion” — voiced her support for keeping Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant open.

“California is in an energy and climate crisis, and closing Diablo Canyon will make us reliant on fossil fuels,” Grimes said in the quirky video, which also features a person sitting in the background reading a large red book and wearing dark sunglasses who never speaks. “This will push the state backwards instead of forwards in its goal to be 100% reliant on clean energy.”

It’s not as strange as one might think for the musician to weigh in on an environmental issue.

Grimes has previously said she wants “to make climate change fun” and in 2020 released a concept album loosely themed around an “anthropomorphic goddess of climate change.”

In her Diablo Canyon video, Grimes added that pushing the closure back by a decade, as was recommended in a recent Stanford and Massachusetts Institute of Technology study, would “help the state decarbonize faster, and make the transition to clean energy faster and cheaper.”

“This is crisis mode, and we should be using all the tools we have — especially the ones sitting right here in front of us,” she said before making something between a chef’s kiss and a mind blown gesture for the camera.

The video was shared with media outlets by a group of local clean energy advocates who held a rally in downtown San Luis Obispo on Saturday to keep the nuclear power plant open.

A “Save Clean Energy” rally held on Saturday, Dec. 4, 2021, in San Luis Obispo called for keeping Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant open. Group members walked a miniature blimp down Monterey Street.

More than 100 people gathered in front of the SLO County courthouse, under the banner of a “Save Clean Energy” rally.

Speakers at the event included Supervisor Dawn Ortiz-Legg — whose district includes Diablo Canyon. In the wake of the Stanford and MIT report, Ortiz-Legg partnered with fellow legislator Assemblyman Jordan Cunningham to explore ways to keep the plant open.

PG&E announced its plans to shutter the power plant back in 2016, saying it did not plan to renew its nuclear reactor licenses once they expired in 2024 and 2025.

The California Public Utilities Commission approved the joint proposal to close the plant in 2018, and PG&E has since begun preparing for decommissioning.

The company has repeatedly said it does not plan to reverse course on closing the plant, in spite of the recent revival in interest to keep it open, saying that California has been clear on its desire to transition away from nuclear energy across the state.

“As a regulated utility we’re required to follow the energy policies of the state of California. We are committed to California’s clean energy future,” PG&E spokeswoman Suzanne Hosn told The Sacramento Bee on Thursday. “That is our unwavering position.”