Tech investor and Arizona Republican Senate hopeful  Blake Masters Blames 

Gun Violence on ‘Black People, Frankly’

Roger Sollenberger
Sun, June 5, 2022,

Gage Skidmore/The Star News Network/Wikimedia Commons

Tech investor and Arizona Republican Senate hopeful Blake Masters acknowledges that the United States has a gun violence problem. But he also has a theory about why there’s a problem—it’s “Black people, frankly.”

Masters boiled the issue down in an April 11 interview on the Jeff Oravits Show podcast, telling the host that “we do have a gun violence problem in this country, and it’s gang violence.”

“It’s people in Chicago, St. Louis shooting each other. Very often, you know, Black people, frankly,” Masters clarified. “And the Democrats don’t want to do anything about that.”

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It’s unclear why Masters—who has pushed the baseless “great replacement” conspiracy theory narrative—felt compelled to single out Black people. Moments earlier in the interview, during a discussion about Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearings, Masters told Oravits that “most Americans just, you know, just want to stop obsessing about race all the time,” adding that “the left’s biggest tool in their toolkit is just to divide people on the basis of race, and that’s really messed up.”

Republicans frequently cite urban gang violence, most often in Chicago, in attempts to tap out of the gun control debate. While their redirections are often as misleading as they are cliche, those officials aren’t always as forthright as Masters about the racial undertones.

But Masters, whom the white nationalist website VDARE fêted last year as an “immigration patriot,” was quite clear about his vision of two Americas.

After pinning gun violence on gangs and Black people—and saying, falsely, that Democratic administrations “don’t want to do anything” about gang shootings—the Stanford-educated libertarian went on to complain to Oravits that gun control efforts target “law-abiding people like you and me.”

“When they ban ‘ghost guns’ and pistol braces, that’s all about disarming law-abiding people, like you and me, that’s what it’s about,” Masters said, referencing government efforts to crack down on the surge in privately made, untraceable firearms. “They care that we can’t have guns to defend ourselves.”

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Masters—a Bitcoin evangelist who routinely hawks automated surveillance technology developed by his benefactor, billionaire tech mogul Peter Thiel—claimed that “it’s pretty rare” for homemade firearms to show up in criminal activity. But his information might be outdated.

Ghost guns aren’t just built and owned by technocrats, to be appreciated as physical instantiations of political theory. They’re also on the rise among criminals, including in gang activity, according to officials with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, as well as fresh police data VICE published this week, which documents a 90 percent increase in seizures last year.

The day of the Oravits interview, President Joe Biden announced a rule change to address the ghost gun problem. In response, Masters tweeted a photo of his own “ghost” gun kit, claiming that he would be a “felon” under the new rule if he made “another one just like it today.”

That’s not accurate. The Biden administration has not banned those weapons, which don’t have serial numbers and can be 3D-printed at home. The new rule doesn’t make it illegal to build your own gun; it applies to people who sell gun kits. Those sellers are now required to become licensed firearms dealers, run background checks on buyers, and include serial numbers on their kits.

The rule also targets violence in urban areas—a sore point for Masters—where ghost guns are multiplying.

Last year, police seized more than 225 of the weapons in New York City, along with 300 seizures in Baltimore and 455 in Chicago, CBS News reported. And government data shows that law enforcement agencies reported recovering 20,000 suspected ghost guns in criminal investigations last year alone—nearly as many seized over the previous four years combined.

GOP Congressman Who Backed Gun Control Drops Re-Election Bid

A Masters campaign spokesperson did not reply to a request for comment.

Back in the interview, Masters—who has likened federal campaign disclosure laws to Kristallnacht—veered into conspiratorial territory.

Democrats “don’t like the Second Amendment,” he said, because “it frankly blocks a lot of their plans for us”—an unhinged, fact-free statement that liberal officials have cooked up a plot to physically force conservatives to comply with some unarticulated maleficent regime, but have been bayed by fears that a constitutionally endowed populace will shoot them if they try.

Masters also tossed out misleading red meat gripes about crime in West Coast cities Los Angeles and San Francisco, where Masters lived much of his adult life before relocating to Arizona ahead of his Senate bid.

Those cities, he told Oravits, have “legalized crime,” claiming that “you can’t get arrested if you smash someone’s window and take a purse or an iPhone.”

It’s not immediately clear what Masters was referring to, but the riff appears to be a nod at Prop 47, which California voters passed at the state (not city) level nearly eight years ago. The Prop 47 coalition included Democrats along with libertarians like Masters, who wanted to roll back felony punishment for lesser offenses, including property crimes like shoplifting.

Prop 47 didn’t “legalize crime,” but reclassified certain felonies as misdemeanors. But after the recent rise in property crimes such as “smash and grab” robberies, most Californians support tougher sentencing laws, including overhauling parts of Prop 47.

“They talk about crime but I find it crocodile tears,” Masters said, an apparent reference to Democratic outrage over an unending drumroll of domestic massacres. “Because if they were actually tough on crime they would get serious about gang violence.” (Masters himself did not put forward a solution to gang violence in the interview.)

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Masters, 35, is a fairly new name in GOP politics, but he has benefited from powerful friends—including his mentor, Thiel, who threw $10 million into a super PAC backing his primary bid.

Thiel’s support went a long way to landing a recent endorsement from former President Donald Trump, who officially blessed Masters on Thursday. It wasn’t a surprise—Trump has a score to settle with Masters’ top opponent, Arizona attorney general Mark Brnovich, who resisted Trump’s pressure to invalidate his state’s 2020 election results.

But Masters isn’t MAGA, exactly. He’s more MAGA-adjacent, part of a loosely affiliated group of young, very online hyper-conservatives known as the “new right.”

Masters is fiercely anti-tech while being fiercely pro-tech, backs a national abortion ban, claims Democrats want to “import a million people every year to replace Americans who were born here,” has said that the media and big tech “conspired to manipulate the 2020 election”—which he claims “Trump won”—and calls the gender pay gap a “left-wing narrative.”

(The “new right” crowd also counts another Trump-endorsed Thiel protege: Ohio Senate candidate JD Vance.)

Masters won Trump’s endorsement on Thursday, nine days after an 18-year-old used a legally purchased semiautomatic rifle to slaughter 19 elementary school students and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas.

“Blake will fight for our totally under-siege Second Amendment, and WIN!” Trump wrote in his announcement. An hour later, Biden called on the country to support an array of gun control measures in a primetime national address.

'CHAINSAW'* JACK WAS HIS ORIGINAL MONICKER

'Neutron Jack' fired thousands of GE workers and helped the rise of 'Trumpism'. A new book explains why he was wrong

Ryan Hogg

Sun, June 5, 2022, 

NBC/Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images; Rachel Mendelson/Insider

• Jack Welch ran General Electric from 1981 to 2001 and helped reshape the US business landscape.

• In "The Man Who Broke Capitalism", NY Times reporter David Gelles evaluates Welch's legacy.

• Gelles says Welch was responsible for aggressive layoffs and populism that helped elect Trump.

Few people born since the 1980s have heard of Jack Welch. But they do know Trump, the Boeing 737 Max disasters and a US economic landscape that has led to populism and rising inequality.

"When people look around and say 'why is the system like this? why are things unfair?' there's actually a guy who made it happen. There was a guy who set a precedent for the economy today, and that guy was Jack Welch," says David Gelles, a reporter for The New York Times and author of a new book called "The Man Who Broke Capitalism".

Welch took over as CEO of General Electric in 1981 when it had 400,000 workers and was a reliable, innovative household name making lightbulbs but also more sophisticated equipment such as jet engines and power systems.

Coined "Neutron Jack" after the neutron bomb, which purportedly kills people while leaving buildings intact, Welch was a mascot for an age of deregulation and cheap thrills, which quickly unravelled in the recession of the late 200s.

Under his two-decade tenure GE expanded to be worth hundreds of billions of dollars and was the most valuable company in the world at one point. But, Gelles argues, he did so while rupturing the fabric of America, leaving not just GE but the US worse than when he found it.

A 'Vitality Curve' of fired workers

Welch was obsessed with growth and spent about $130 billion on nearly 1,000 acquisitions during his time running GE, although many of them failed. Under Welch the company's financial services division, GE Capital, became enormous but it later needed a $139 billion bailout from the US government following the 2008 financial crisis, as well as a $3 billion rescue investment by Warren Buffett, Gelles says.

Welch also pioneered the "stack ranking system," in which the bottom-performing 10% of employees were laid off each year, a practice he called the "Vitality Curve." Companies such as Goldman Sachs still use that approach to keep staff "motivated".

Welch slashed GE's workforce by 112,000 people between 1980 and 1985 as well as outsourcing and offshoring jobs to cheaper markets such as Mexico.

"What Welch did was fire people when things were going well," Gelles tells Insider. "And that was a rupture – the behavior of firing people to turn a bigger profit."

It was not economics that drove Welch's labor practices, says Andrew Mawson, co-founding director of Advanced Workplace Associates: "Firing 10% of under-achievers each year seems to me to be a poor way of overcoming an underperforming performance management system."

Others say that beyond harming morale and productivity, focusing solely on labor costs is inefficient. Simon Geale of supply chain consultancy Proxima tells Insider: "Some business leaders like it because the salary line is easy to measure and quick to action, but the reality of job cuts is that they address a proportionately low expenditure when compared to supplier costs in most industries."

'Jack Welch rigged the game' for Trumpism

More damaging, though, was the thinking Welch inspired among other business leaders. Gelles says his approach was embraced by Jim McNerney, who as Boeing CEO was accused of embarking on a range of cost-cutting measures that contributed to the Boeing 737 Max disasters that killed 346 people five months apart.

"It was clear in talking with hundreds of Boeing employees over the last few years that it is just poorer because of the influence of Welch," Gelles says.

Jack Welch at a news conference for the Boeing 777-200X jetliner that used GE engines in New York in February 2000.Getty Images

Inevitably, actions on such a scale would have political ramifications. Gelles says the layoffs and outsourcing Welch initiated helped form "the rust belt" base that put Donald Trump into the White House.

"What Welch did with his series of mass layoffs and factory closures truly destabilized the American working class," Gelles says.

"And it was from this disaffected base that Trump found many of his most ardent supporters. But the reason they felt like it wasn't working for them was because Jack Welch rigged the game."

After Welch died in March 2020 Trump said they had "made wonderful deals together".

A turning point

Gelles thinks the US is at an inflection point, with the pendulum swinging back in favor of workers. He points to new models that have emerged, including the decision by former Unilever CEO Paul Polman to scrap quarterly guidance in pursuit of longer-term gains, and a move by PayPal CEO Dan Schulman to focus on benefits for his staff.

However, many companies are still geared towards short-term results, as evidenced by recent upheaval in the tech industry, with sliding share prices triggering job cuts.

"The fact that one or two bad quarters is resulting in mass layoffs is crazy to me. The fundamentals haven't changed much but CEOs feel like they need to be doing something," Gelles says, suggesting it would be a "decades-long battle" to offset the changes Welch helped to trigger.

Gelles adds: "These are choices that companies made, about how they were going to treat workers, what they were going to prioritize, and how they were going to show up in their communities, and it matters. It's going to take a long way to get back."

* CHAINSAW REFERRED TO HIS SLASH AND BURN OF JOBS 

From shipwrecks to an underground salt mine, 24 things to know about the Great Lakes

Gene Ware
Erie Times News

Thu, June 2, 2022,

Twenty-four facts you might not know about the Great Lakes:

1. Lake Huron was the first of the Great Lakes and was the first to be discovered by the early French explorers.

2. Lake Erie was the last of the French-discovered lakes.

3. All the other four Great Lakes, plus three more the size of Lake Erie, would fit inside Lake Superior.

4. Lake Erie is the fourth largest of the Great Lakes in surface area and the shallowest in water depth. It is the 11th-largest lake on the planet.

More: What makes the Great Lakes great? Take your pick of facts

5. Long before Europeans set eyes on the Great Lakes, indigenous tribes had found and learned about its abundant fisheries. Old archaeological finds indicate proof of robust fishing and the building of canoes.


6. Tribes fishing at the time usually used nets made with basswood and nettle. They would hang this net between two side-by-side canoes, trail it and catch whole nets full of fish.

More: Great Lakes heat waves are already causing chaos for fish — with worst to come

7. Due to their ocean-like characteristics, such as rolling waves, sustained winds, strong currents and great depths, the Great Lakes all could be considered inland seas.

8. The Great Lakes hold 21% of the world's freshwater.

9. Lake Michigan is the largest lake in the world located entirely within one country.

10. Glaciers melting at the end of the last ice age, 10,000 years ago, were responsible for creating the Great Lakes.

11. The shores of Lake Michigan are home to the most extensive freshwater dune system in the world. The lake has 300,000 acres of dunes along its shoreline.

12. Waves of more than 40 feet in height have been recorded on Lake Superior.

This is a July 15, 2021 contributed photo of Lake Michigan at Indiana Dunes National Park.

From the GoErie.com vault: The wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

13. Michigan's state stone is named the Petoskey stone. It is composed of fossilized coral and is the only place in the world such stones can be found.

14. Babe Ruth hit his first major league home run in Toronto at Hanlan's Point Stadium. The ball landed in Lake Ontario and was never found.

15. A lake on Saturn's moon Titan is named after Lake Ontario. It is called Ontario Lacus.

16. Not only is Lake Erie the smallest Great Lake when it comes to volume of water, but it also has the most industry surrounding it. Twenty metropolitan areas, each with a population of more than 75,000, are along the lake's shoreline.

More: Erie's port on the Great Lakes is entry point for hundreds of thousands of tons of cargo

17. The largest salt mine in the world is the Goderich Mine. Part of it runs underneath Lake Huron, more than 540 yards underground.

18. Lake Erie has experienced more shipwrecks and sinkings than any other Great Lake. It has recorded more sinkings than the Bermuda Triangle.

More: Lake Erie isn't deep, but has depth of character among the Great Lakes

19. Singapore, Michigan, is a ghost town on the shores of Lake Michigan that was buried under sand in 1871. Because of extremely severe weather conditions and a lack of resources at the time due to the need to rebuild Chicago after that city's huge fires, the town was lost completely.

20. Lake Michigan was the location of the first recorded big Great Lakes disaster, in which a large lake's steamer with more than 600 people aboard collided with a schooner delivering timber to Chicago. The result was that 450 people died.

21. The Keystone State was one of the largest and most luxurious wooden steamships running during the Civil War. In 1861, it disappeared. In 2013, it was found in 175 feet of water just 30 miles from Harrisville, Michigan.

22. Scientists believe that Lake Erie has 2% of the water in the Great Lakes, yet is home to about half of all the fish.

23. Lake Huron has the most shoreline of any of the Great Lakes. This shoreline is 3,817 miles when you include its 30,000 islands.

The Blue Water Bridge stands over the mouth of Lake Huron, where it flows into the St. Clair River in Port Huron.

24. Some people in Cleveland claim to have seen strange things on Lake Erie. There have been quite a few reports indicating they have seen, at times, the Canadian shoreline as if it were just offshore. However, it is more than 50 miles distant. It has been surmised that this is a weather-rated phenomenon, just like the desert mirage.

Gene Ware is the author of 10 books. He serves on the board of the Presque Isle Light Station and is past chairman of the boards of the Tom Ridge Center Foundation and the Presque Isle Partnership. Email him at ware906@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on Erie Times-News: Shipwrecks, shorelines and other facts about the Great Lakes

Democrats must defeat Republicans who serve at the will of the gun lobby.

Robert Emmett Curran
Fri, June 3, 2022

In the wake of the latest slaughter of innocents in Uvalde, Texas, Republicans have rolled out their absurd talking points about the impossibility of passing any legislation which would regulate the access to guns, including the banning of military-style weapons which are, by far, the preference of those bent on maximizing casualties in their murderous rampages.

Central to their rationale for doing nothing is the so-called constitutional foundation for unfettered gun rights. As Senator Kevin Kramer of North Dakota declaimed immediately after the carnage in Uvalde: “It is a fundamental right for law-abiding citizens to protect themselves with firearms.” All these gun rights, of course, Republican apologists find enshrined in the Second Amendment. But by any literal reading of that amendment, with its vital conditioning phrase “A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state,” one is hard pressed to establish any individual rights to possess arms. And, indeed, until the current century, the Supreme Court had not attempted to do so. Then came Heller v. the District of Columbia in which a libertarian-oriented court, following the gun lobby, discovered an individual right which all its predecessors had failed to find. Former Chief Justice Warren Berger declared such an interpretation to be “one of the greatest pieces of fraud” ever perpetrated upon the American people.

Heller opened the floodgates for Republican-controlled legislatures to declare open season on gun restrictions. Now, with a new case challenging New York State’s banning the unconcealed wearing of weapons in public spaces, it seems inevitable that the conservative majority on the Supreme Court will decide that individuals have the inherent right to openly display weapons wherever they so choose.

The Court has taken us to this terrible place before. In March of 1857, Chief Justice Roger Taney, in the notorious Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, spoke for the Court’s majority in ruling that Congress had no power to ban slaveowners from taking their human property into any territory of the United States. Slave owners and their advocates hailed Taney’s ruling as a constitutional guarantee of the unrestricted right to take their bonded labor wherever opportunity or necessity bade them.

Four years later, with civil war imminent, Abraham Lincoln, in his inaugural address, pointed out that, in our form of government, the Supreme Court need not have the last word. “If the policy of the Government is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court,” Lincoln noted, “the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that . . . tribunal.” The president was reminding that Congress, the branch most beholden to the people, had the power to negate Dred Scott by their own legislation.

Once the war began, little by little, Congress began to whittle away at slave holders’ rights. In June of 1862, Congress took the decisive step of nullifying the Dred Scott v. Sanford decision itself by emancipating all slaves in the country’s ten territories.

We are now in our own civil war, divided by propaganda and disinformation. Every mass killing that gains national attention drives a paranoid minority to stockpile ever more guns, especially military-style ones. In a society ruled by politicians and judges to whom power, money, and individualism are the only things that matter, it should surprise no one that the gun culture prevails.

It need not be that way. The only way to break the gridlock that prevents Congress from taking the actions it desperately needs to take is for Democrats to defeat enough Republicans who serve at the pleasure of the gun industry. Given our current corrupt campaign financing awash with dark money, that will not be easy. But the Democrats’ great advantage is that voters overwhelmingly favor major gun reform such as universal background checks, as well as bans on assault weapons and ghost guns. For the upcoming mid-terms, Democrats need to laser focus on the Republicans’ anti-democratic and gun-crazy proclivities that have become such existential threats to our republic. More than ever, failure is not an option.

Robert Emmett Curran, Professor of History Emeritus at Georgetown University, is the author of the forthcoming American Catholics and the Quest for Equality in the Civil War Era.

ABOLISH THE DEATH PENALTY

Myanmar says it will carry out first executions in decades

GRANT PECK
Fri, June 3, 2022

BANGKOK (AP) — Myanmar’s military-installed government announced Friday that it will execute a former lawmaker from ousted leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s party and a veteran pro-democracy activist convicted of violating the country’s Counter-Terrorism Law, local media reported Friday.

Two online news outlets, Voice of Myanmar and NP News, said two other men convicted of killing a woman they believed was an informer for the military will also be executed, in addition to former lawmaker Phyo Zeya Thaw and activist Kyaw Min Yu, also known as Ko Jimmy.

Government spokesperson Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun was cited as saying the decision to carry out the hangings was confirmed after legal appeals by the four were rejected.

He was cited as saying the executions will go ahead in accordance with prison procedures. According to the law, executions must be approved by the head of the government. He did not say when the executions would be carried out.

The United Nations, which has advocated against the death penalty, called the Myanmar military’s decision to execute the two pro-democracy activists “a blatant violation” of the right to life, liberty and security guaranteed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said Secretary-General Antonio Guterres reiterates his calls for all charges to be dropped against those arrested for exercising their fundamental freedoms and rights and for all political prisoners in Myanmar to be released immediately.

The U.N. chief also calls for people’s rights to freedom of opinion and expression to be respected, and stresses that “the Universal Declaration of Human Rights enshrines the principles of equality before the law, the presumption of innocence, the right to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, and all of the guarantees necessary for a person’s defense,” Dujarric said.

The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, which tracks arrests and state-conducted killings, says Myanmar courts have handed down death sentences to 114 political offenders, including two children, since the army seized power from Suu Kyi's elected government in February last year.

Last year’s army takeover triggered nationwide popular protests, which turned into a low-level insurgency after nonviolent demonstrations were met with deadly force by the security forces. The Assistance Association estimates that 1,887 civilians have died at the hands of police and the military in crackdowns against opponents of military rule.

Some resistance groups have engaged in assassinations, drive-by shootings and bombings in urban areas. The mainstream opposition organizations generally disavow such activities, while supporting armed resistance in rural areas, which are more often subject to brutal military attacks.

The last judicial execution to be carried out in Myanmar is generally believed to have been of another political offender, student leader Salai Tin Maung Oo, in 1976 under a previous military government led by dictator Ne Win.

In 2014, the sentences of prisoners on death row were commuted to life imprisonment, but several dozen convicts received death sentences between then and last year’s takeover.

Phyo Zeya Thaw, the former lawmaker, also known as Maung Kyaw, and Kyaw Min Yu were given death sentences under the country’s Counterterrorism Law in January this year by a closed military court. They were found guilty of offenses involving explosives, bombings and financing terrorism.

Phyo Zeya Thaw had been a hip-hop musician before becoming as a member of Generation Wave, a political movement formed in 2007.

He was arrested last November on a charge of possessing weapons and ammunition, according to a report in a state-run newspaper at the time. It said he was arrested on the basis of information from people detained a day earlier for shooting security personnel.

Other statements from the military accused him of being a key figure in a network of dozens of people who allegedly carried out what the military described as “terrorist” attacks in Yangon, the country’s biggest city.

He previously was jailed in 2008 under another military government after being accused of illegal association and possession of foreign currency.

Kyaw Min Yu is one of the leaders of the 88 Generation Students Group, veterans of a failed 1988 popular uprising against military rule.

He has been active politically since then, and spent more than a dozen years behind bars. He was arrested in Yangon last October.

The state-run media said Kyaw Min Yu has been accused of “conducting terrorism acts including mine attacks to undermine the state stability” and of heading a group called “Moon Light Operation” to carry out urban guerrilla attacks.

He had been put on a wanted list for social media postings that allegedly incited unrest.

The other two men sentenced to die, Hla Myo Aung and Aung Thura Zaw, were convicted in April last year of allegedly torturing and killing a woman in Yangon. They targeted her as an alleged military informer and killed her in March 2021, according to an April 2021 statement from the Office of the Commander-in-Chief of Defense Services.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis reaches disgraceful new low in bullying Special Olympics | Opinion

Mike Freeman, USA TODAY

Sat, June 4, 2022, 

One of the hallmarks of a bully, of a cruel human being, is attacking people who don't always have the political power or resources to defend themselves. We saw a good example of this in 2019, when the Trump administration, in a remarkably cold move, attempted to kill federal funding for the Special Olympics.

If you've never seen the Special Olympics, which gives athletes with certain intellectual disabilities the opportunity to compete in several different events, it is a remarkable thing to watch. These Olympics don't just represent the best of sports. They represent the best of humanity.

The motto of the Special Olympics is: “Let me win, but if I cannot win, let me be brave in the attempt.”

So, with cruelty, coldness and exuberant indifference being the genome of the Trump Era, it wasn't a surprise when billionaire Betsy DeVos, former U.S. Secretary of Education, proposed cutting the $17.6 million budget of the Special Olympics.

Reported The Washington Post at the time: “Do you know how many kids are going to be affected by that cut?" Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) asked DeVos at a House hearing.

DeVos replied that she didn't. “I’ll answer for you,” he said. “It's 272,000 kids.”

The cruelty was the point then. Fast forward to just a few years later and another bully. The cruelty is also the point now when it comes to the actions of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis

It is true that DeSantis' cruelty and white nationalist-adjacency go beyond attacking the vulnerable. He attacks corporations and Major League Baseball teams. His actions, however, involving the Special Olympics are particularly awful.

The state of Florida threatened to fine the Special Olympics $27.5 million for requiring 5,500 participants at the USA Games in Orlando this weekend to be vaccinated against COVID. That threat caused the organization to drop the mandate, a mandate that potentially saves lives.

“We don’t want to fight,” the Special Olympics said in a statement. “We want to play.”

Like the Trump administration before him, DeSantis displayed a level of cruelty toward Special Olympians that is almost impossible to believe. But it's real.

DeSantis and his cultists will say the Special Olympics weren't following the law. But authoritarians like him don't really care about the law. He's in a culture war, building up his extremist CV to appeal to extremists and brutality fetishists.

In the past, DeSantis has appealed to racists and other Cro-Magnon types. With his actions in the case of the Special Olympics, he's appealing to anti-vaxxers. This group lacks critical thinking skills, but some of them do figure out how to work a voting machine, and DeSantis wants every voter he can get. Even the ones who diD tHEir OwNN rESSeArcH.

MORE: Special Olympics drops COVID-19 vaccine requirement after Florida threatens $27.5M in fines

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There are numerous pieces of proof that show DeSantis doesn't really care about rules, just revenge, or using whatever person or entity he can to score points. Just this week, DeSantis blocked money for the training facility of the Tampa Bay Rays after the team tweeted against gun violence.

Two days after a gunman killed 19 children and two adults at a Texas elementary school, the team said it would donate $50,000 to Everytown for Gun Safety. The group pushes for programs aimed at reducing gun violence.

"This cannot be normal," the Rays' tweet read. "We cannot become numb. We cannot look the other way. We all know, if nothing changes, nothing changes."

CNN reported that DeSantis didn't decide to veto the money for the training facility until after the tweet. That sensible, responsible tweet.

DeSantis' bullying ranges from kids to Disney to the LGBTQ community. But what he did to Special Olympians goes beyond bullying. It's possibly extremely dangerous.

The Special Olympics reported that the 2019 World Games included over 1,000 athletes with Down Syndrome.

Two years ago, a large study out of the UK showed that people with Down Syndrome who get COVID are four times more likely to be hospitalized, and 10 times more likely to die, than the general population. Studies since then have buttressed that research. Down Syndrome, or trisomy 21, is a genetic disorder caused by abnormal cell division that produces an extra chromosome.

The CDC last year updated its guidelines to include people with Down Syndrome at increased risk for severe COVID disease. By requiring that Special Olympians get vaccinated, you lower the risk of them catching COVID. This is highly elementary stuff.

But not in DeSantis' world. In DeSantis' world, you use whatever you can to make a political point. Even if it's disgusting. Even if it's horrible. Even if it's potentially deadly.

Even if it risks Special Olympians' lives.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Gov. Ron DeSantis bullies Special Olympics, hits disgraceful new low

Power to the People: A path forward out of the climate crisis

Neil Ever Osborne

Fri, June 3, 2022, 

Power to the People: A path forward out of the climate crisis

A post-carbon future is possible through self-determination.

That’s the central message emanating from the documentary series entitled Power to the People that follows activist Melina Laboucan-Massimo across Canada as she visits Indigenous communities revolutionizing the clean energy transition in response to the climate crisis.

That rationale for optimism is because these solutions already exist, according to Laboucan-Massimo, who hosts the 13-part episodic series that depicts how Indigenous communities are using renewable energy initiatives involving wind, solar, tidal, biomass, and geothermal to generate their own independent power.

From her traditional homelands in Little Buffalo, AB, Laboucan-Massimo knows too well the consequences of fossil fuel extraction, as Episode 1 examines through a first-hand account of an oil spill.

“The community wasn’t even told of the immensity of this spill until five days after … so I set out to find a helicopter to at least fly over so we could take pictures from the air. We wrote up a press release and every major media outlet in Canada came because it was one of the biggest oil spills in Canada’s history.”

Power to the People oil spill

28,000 barrels of crude oil — 4.5 million litres – stained the land and rivers close to Laboucan-Massimo’s community near Little Buffalo, AB. (Image provided by Power to the People)

But, Laboucan-Massimo and the series don’t linger on the past for long. There’s too many success stories to focus on instead. Net-zero housing, run-of-river hydroelectric projects, and green transportation initiatives are uncovered in Power to the People, among other solution stories that set the course towards energy autonomy — all being shaped by Indigenous values, cultures, and communities.

“We need to be the leaders in our own projects” Laboucan-Massimo says in Episode 2. What she means is that at the crux of the climate crisis is the need to paint a picture of the path forward.

Power to the People does just that.

Power to the People

New Episodes Weekly from June 17-July 22

Read a summary of the upcoming episodes below and check back weekly to see updated links for new chapters of the Power to the People documentary series.

June 17 Episode 1: Little Buffalo Growing up in the Lubicon Lake Band in Little Buffalo, AB, Melina Laboucan-Massimo has experienced the detrimental effects of oil sands extraction. Today, it has made her one of Canada’s leading climate change campaigners and the host of Power to the People.

June 24 Episode 2: Gull Bay For some remote Indigenous communities north of Thunder Bay, connecting to the Ontario hydro grid will never be a reality. Gull Bay First Nation found the means to create their own ‘micro grid’ using solar energy to offset their use of diesel power.

July 1 Episode 3: Atlin There are roughly 300 off grid Indigenous communities across Canada, who continue to rely on diesel-generated power. The Taku River Tlingit Nation in northern BC is one of the few First Nations who have successfully replaced diesel power through their implementation of clean, renewable energy.

July 8 Episode 4: Six Nations Home to the largest First Nations population in Canada, Six Nations of the Grand River established a corporation to manage economic opportunities on behalf of their people. That effort now sees Six Nations invested in some of the largest wind and solar power plants in the nation.

July 15 Episode 5: Haida Gwaii Surrounded by the Pacific Ocean and off the BC hydro grid, the Haida Nation relies on diesel generators to power their communities. Now, a homegrown group is looking to the wind, sun, and sea to offset their reliance on fossil fuels.

July 22 Episode 6: Tofino Geothermal energy is generated by heat stored below the earth’s surface. The Tla-o-qui-aht Nation is harnessing this renewable energy through a geoexchange system to cost effectively heat and cool their homes and buildings.

To learn more about the Power to the People documentary visit powertothepeople.tv

"fake meat that grows in a peach tree dish"

Marjorie Taylor Greene pulls lab-grown 

meat into the culture wars

U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) holds a news conference about her suspended Twitter account and the impending sale of Twitter at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, U.S. April 28, 2022.

 REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst 

Tim Carman

Fri, June 3, 2022,

When Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., used part of her Memorial Day weekend to insinuate that the government is monitoring your movements to make sure you're eating "fake meat that grows in a peach tree dish," and not a real cheeseburger, the internet reacted as you'd expect. Jokes. Memes. Mockery of the congresswoman's pronunciation of "Petri dish."

But those in and around the world of "fake meat" - whether meats grown from stem cells in bioreactors or processed from plants to mimic meat - reacted much differently. Some suggested Greene was off in her own universe, disconnected from the bipartisan efforts to diversify the country's meat supply for the potential benefit of the environment, animals, food security and human health.

Others, however, suggested Greene was expanding the culture wars into the esoteric world of alternative meats as a way to stoke fears about what the future might bring to conservative communities: a kind of "great replacement theory" but for beef, pork and chicken. Some say her baseless claims around the subject of alternative meats, like those around vaccines and the presidential election, will become talking points among mainstream conservatives, especially those from agricultural states.

"I think that her position on alternative proteins . . . is actually quickly becoming very standard, especially within the GOP," said Jan Dutkiewicz, a policy fellow at the Animal Law and Policy Program at Harvard Law School.

"There's already this discourse around the fact that meat is all-American," Dutkiewicz added. "It's a sign of freedom. ... It's related to supporting American farmers, American ranchers, American traditions. Where alternative protein seeks to disrupt that, it becomes a really easy target."

Dutkiewicz, who studies conventional meat production and the alt-meat industry, noted that politicians have already railed against efforts to cut back on meat consumption or reduce the impacts of animal agriculture. Such as when then-Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, held up a hamburger during a 2019 news conference, saying that if the Green New Deal went through, "this will be outlawed." Or when Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, introduced a bill in 2016 that would ban "Meatless Mondays" at military mess halls. Or when Nebraska Republican Gov. Pete Ricketts proposed a "meat on the menu" day last year.

"While meat is one of the most nutrient-dense foods you can eat, there are radical anti-agriculture activists that are working to end meat production and our way of life here in Nebraska," the governor said in a release.

Greene's comments, part of a Facebook Live segment, were not far removed from Ricketts's statement, at least in terms of bottom-line messaging: that someone wants to take away your traditional meats.

The U.S. government, the congresswoman said, wants "to know if you're eating a cheeseburger, which is very bad because Bill Gates wants you to eat his fake meat that grows in a peach tree dish. So you'll probably get a little zap inside your body, and that says, 'No, no, don't eat a real cheeseburger,' " Greene said.

By invoking Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft and an investor in alternative meat companies, Greene was relying on a well-worn political playbook, Dutkiewicz said.

She is "basically riding this wave of critique, which I think ultimately aims to appeal to a specific constituency that is conservative in the sense of being afraid of change," he said. "Here you've got Silicon Valley or Bill Gates investing in these novel products which are somehow nefarious or worse for you or seek to undermine the American way of life or American agriculture."

Greene's office did not respond to a call seeking comment. But what she might not know is that America's largest food and meat producers - companies such as Cargill, Tyson Foods and ADM - have invested heavily in alternative meats, said Bruce Friedrich, founder and chief executive of the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit that works to create a "world where alternative proteins are no longer alternative."

"All of these companies are involved in both plant-based meat and cultivated meat, and it has everything to do with the bottom line," Friedrich said. "So I think that the worst thing that can happen for alternative proteins is to have it conflated with anyone telling anyone else what to eat. It's literally the opposite of that."

Cultivated and plant-based meats, Friedrich said, are about giving consumers more choices, not less.

Andrew Noyes, head of global communications and public affairs for Eat Just, the company behind the plant-based Just Egg, suggested that politicians on both sides of the aisle see the potential of alternative proteins.

"When we talk to lawmakers and staffers about cultivated meat, issues like job creation, innovation and American competitiveness are top of mind, regardless of how red or blue the district is that they represent," Noyes said in a statement.

Greene's antipathy toward lab-grown meats can't be attributed to campaign cash: Her coffers aren't lined by Big Meat, although top donors to her 2022 campaign included Paul Hofer, an owner of Hofer Ranch in California, who gave $7,900, according to data from OpenSecrets.org. Tassos Paphites, chief executive of BurgerBusters - which owns 80 Taco Bell franchises around the country - was another big giver, with donations totaling $6,000.

Greene's attempt to drag alternative meats into America's culture wars comes at a sensitive time for the industry. Nine years after a lab-grown hamburger made its debut in London to lukewarm reviews, the cultured meat industry has made a lot of progress - including a taste test in which experts couldn't tell lab-grown chicken from a conventional bird - but it's still far from large-scale commercial viability.

In 2020, Singapore became the first government to grant regulatory approval to a lab-grown product, a chicken nugget that Good Meat, a division of Eat Just, grew from stem cells. The nugget was first served in December 2020 at a Singaporean restaurant.

Since then, China, the Netherlands, Qatar and other countries have started to lay the groundwork for a future of lab-grown meats. The United States, meanwhile, gives mixed signals about alternative proteins. State and federal lawmakers have proposed or passed laws to limit how companies can label and market their mock meats, potentially hurting the commercial viability of the products. At the same time, the U.S. Agriculture Department and the Food and Drug Administration continue to work out rules on how to regulate the forthcoming multibillion-dollar industry.

There's a concern among insiders and advocates that without more government support, the U.S. alternative-protein industry, currently considered the world leader, could cede ground to companies in other countries where officials are pumping money into innovation. Pointed commentary from politicians such as Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and Greene might not help, as they steer the debate away from alternative protein's potential merits and into a stultifying culture war.

But Dutkiewicz, the Harvard researcher, doesn't think Greene and Massie are trying to influence legislation as much as they're planting tribal flags.

"There's sort of a conservative zeitgeist they're tapping into," he said. "They're signaling a sort of an allegiance to American traditionalism and opposition to coastal elites and opposition to technological disruption of ways of life. It's more signaling a worldview."

MILKWEED

The Washington Post's Emily Heil contributed to this report.