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Ken Paxton, the very corrupt Republican attorney general of Texas, doesn’t want any immigrants here, period. We know this because he has filed a lawsuit seeking to block an immigration program that legally brings Central American children to the U.S. to reunite with parents who are already here and have legal status. Not only does the policy help facilitate family reunification, but it also allows a child to avoid the often dangerous journey north.

The Central American Minors (CAM) program had initially been created under the Obama administration but was terminated by his fascist successor. President Biden announced earlier this year that CAM would be reinstated, with applications that were closed due to the program’s 2017 termination to be prioritized. It’s a smart, and humane program that has allowed thousands of kids to embrace their parents again. So Texas and seven other Republican-led states want it shut down.

“Paxton and the other attorneys general argue that Biden, a Democrat, lacks authority to institute the program without authorization from Congress,” Houston Chronicle reports. Joining Paxton in the litigation are Arkansas, Alaska, Florida, Indiana, Missouri, Montana, and Oklahoma.

The lawsuit further claims that one of the states suing, Oklahoma, “sits close to the southern border of the United States and sits on the Interstate 35 and Interstate 44 corridors, which serve as major arteries for the illegal immigration that CAM encourages and for related illegal drug traffic.” But this appears to be complete bullshit. 

“To my knowledge (which may be a month or two out of date), ZERO children have been admitted yet through the newly reactivated Central American Minors Program,” tweeted American Immigration Council policy counsel Aaron Reichlin-Melnick. Nor is CAM well known, either. “Yet Ken Paxton claims it’s one of the reasons people are coming to the border. What nonsense,” Reichlin-Melnick continued.

It’s all fucking cruel nonsense, yet the reason Paxton is suing is that he can—and he expects to win. 

Houston Chronicle notes this is the ninth immigration lawsuit Paxton has filed against the president. Just days into his administration, Paxton successfully blocked the much-sought 100-day deportation moratorium. In April, he sued for the reinstatement of the inhumane Remain in Mexico policy, and won that too. Both decisions were thanks to right-wing judges installed by the fascistic former president.

“The American judicial system has become an anti-immigrant judicial pipeline—and it’s on full display, and it’s dangerous,” former American Immigration Lawyers Association president David Leopold wrote in August. “The pipeline flows from Republican attorneys general, to hand-picked United States District Court Judges (usually Trump appointees in Texas), to the conservative Fifth Circuit and finally, to the United States Supreme Court.” He names Paxton as a main culprit in this scheme.

“There’s really one way around this pipeline: Prioritize federal district and circuit court nominations and expand the Supreme Court,” he continued. “The risk is worth taking because the stakes are ... well, everything,” Daily Kos’ Joan McCarter wrote last month.

Paxton’s latest lawsuit is particularly cruel in that he’s targeting children and saying making a dangerous journey alone is their only option. The State Department said in March that nearly 5,000 were safely reunited with families in the U.S. during the life of the program. Nearly 3,000 were set to be reunited before the previous administration shut down the policy. But in targeting a program seeking to expand lawful pathways, Paxton and Republican states are also admitting they don’t want immigrants to come here legally, either.

RELATED: Biden reinstates Obama-era program that allowed Central American kids to join parents in U.S.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Conversation: Twitter has on various occasions been accused of political bias, with politicians or commentators alleging Twitter's algorithm amplifies their opponents' voices, or silences their own. In this climate, Twitter commissioned a study to understand whether their algorithm may be biased towards a certain political ideology. While Twitter publicized the findings of the research in 2021, the study has now been published in the peer-reviewed journal PNAS. The study looked at a sample of 4% of all Twitter users who had been exposed to the algorithm (46,470,596 unique users). It also included a control group of 11,617,373 users who had never received any automatically recommended tweets in their feeds. This wasn't a manual study, whereby, say, the researchers recruited volunteers and asked them questions about their experiences. It wouldn't have been possible to study such a large number of users that way. Instead, a computer model allowed the researchers to generate their findings. [...] The researchers found that in six out of the seven countries (Germany was the exception), the algorithm significantly favored the amplification of tweets from politically right-leaning sources. Overall, the amplification trend wasn't significant among individual politicians from specific parties, but was when they were taken together as a group. The starkest contrasts were seen in Canada (the Liberals' tweets were amplified 43%, versus those of the Conservatives at 167%) and the UK (Labour's tweets were amplified 112%, while the Conservatives' were amplified at 176%). In acknowledgement of the fact that tweets from elected officials represent only a small portion of political content on Twitter, the researchers also looked at whether the algorithm disproportionately amplifies news content from any particular point on the ideological spectrum. To this end, they measured the algorithmic amplification of 6.2 million political news articles shared in the US. To determine the political leaning of the news source, they used two independently curated media bias-rating datasets. Similar to the results in the first part of the study, the authors found that content from right-wing media outlets is amplified more than that from outlets at other points on the ideological spectrum. This part of the study also found far-left-leaning and far-right-leaning outlets were not significantly amplified compared with politically moderate outlets. The authors of the study point out that the algorithms "might be influenced by the way different political groups operate," notes The Conversation. "So for example, some political groups might be deploying better tactics and strategies to amplify their content on Twitter."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The stars of The Bachelor want to sell you some NFTs.

Colton Underwood has worn many hats during his media career — Bachelorette contestant, Bachelor in Paradise contestant, first virgin Bachelor lead, first gay Bachelor lead, Netflix reality show person, and now … NFT guy.

In January, the athlete-turned-reality-star-turned-influencer launched a project called Pocket Friends, a collection of NFT cartoon character animals, such as Sonya the duck and Betty the hamster. The friends, each of which is supposed to represent a “childhood struggle,” will live on the ethereum blockchain. Each character is supposed to appear in a book, and with 13,000 characters planned, that sounds like a lot of books.

People can’t get the NFTs yet, but if and when they are able, they’re promised access to a “variety of benefits,” including a writers room — presumably for those many books — voting (it’s not clear on what), and “special access to events and celebrities.” For now, they can hang out with the Pocket Friends team, including Colton, on Discord. On Discord, participants are encouraged to invite as many others as they can to earn a spot on the “whitelist,” a sort of VIP list, and take part in a Twitter meme challenge to help Pocket Friends get followers. It’s all about building the community — and getting in early.

Underwood, 30, is hardly unique in his attempt to use his semi-celebrity to try to hop onto the crypto train and parlay his social media following into buzz around some sort of NFT project. He’s not the only member of the Bachelor franchise, which shot him into fame, to do so, either.

Former Bachelor star Matt James has taken a head-first dive into crypto, as evidenced by his Instagram profile with the laser eyes. Another former lead, Peter Weber, is trying to sell some sort of NFT playing cards of himself. Jade Roper Tolbert, who was with her husband one of the first franchise couples to really monetize their influencer status, is doing a lady-friendly NFT project called Sacred Skulls.

Nobody is on The Bachelor for the right reasons anymore, if they ever were. Most are there to be influencers and get Instagram followers, and there’s a bustling economy around being a Bachelor Nation member.

“It’s nothing new that celebrities bring dubious products to market or are spokespeople for things that seem a little shady or questionable. With influencers, the difference is that sense of intimacy and authenticity that comes from a place like social media,” said Erin Meyers, an associate professor of communication at Oakland University.

Bachelor stars are normie influencers who will often try basically anything for money. They’re also excellent promoters — and not particularly discerning ones. These are qualities that crypto and NFTs, still in their early phases, really need. User acquisition is key for making these social constructs something real — the pool of believers has to constantly expand for it to work.

Investors in the space are moving fast, and it’s a great fit for people who were built to shill. They are accustomed to pushing something even when there’s no there there — like the narrative that 30 men or women are going to all fall in love with a single suitor on live TV, or, as influencers, that their audiences are getting a full picture of their real, authentic lives.

You don’t know Colton, but you feel like you do. That gives him and others an avenue to you that more traditional advertisers maybe wouldn’t have — a path to get you to buy Calvin the chameleon, his new friend. Who is the child who wants one of Colton’s NFTs? It’s unclear.

Would you like an NFT with this rose?

The first rule of being on The Bachelor: The best-case scenario is generally to not win The Bachelor, but to come semi-close. The second rule is you’re not supposed to say the first rule. If you do, everybody gets mad at you for admitting you’d much rather be the next lead or get more Instagram followers, both more lucrative situations if the goal is to join the creator economy.

“You get more out of it if you don’t win, honestly, because it opens up avenues for you to do all of these influencer-type deals,” Meyers said.

“The contestants that come off the show that are in the top five, top three, typically come off with a very big following and an extremely engaged following,” said Ali Grant, the founder of Be Social, a communications agency focused on influencers. “It really matters what they do after that. A lot of them either do not much with the following and go back to regular life, or say, ‘Hey, I’m going to be an influencer, I’m going to monetize my social,’ and really make this a longstanding career.”

Plenty of former contestants have taken that route, to varying degrees of success. As business and media trends change, so does what Bachelor Nation is trying to sell — hence the entrance of crypto.

Matt James, the first Black lead of The Bachelor, now that his season is over, has fashioned himself as a bit of a crypto connoisseur. In May 2021, a crypto company called BlockFi announced a partnership with James, saying he would participate in educational videos, collaboration events, and “other social media activities” as part of the deal. At the very least, they got some tweets out of the arrangement, with James ordering a pizza at one point with a BlockFi credit card.

James often talks crypto in interviews and tweets about bitcoin and NFTs. When cryptocurrency prices dropped in late January, James, like a lot of crypto bros, tweeted through it.

In public, he fashions himself as both a student and an expert in the space. It also appears that ABC Food Tours, a kid-focused nonprofit James and fellow Bachelor alum Tyler Cameron run, has been slightly refashioned to fold in crypto.

The organization rang the opening bell at the Nasdaq in early January, and James in an Instagram post at the time said its 2022 goal would be financial literacy — with a crypto twist. “Expect a wave of digital wallets being created and 50 percent of our education with students to take place in the Metaverse,” he wrote.

Jade Roper Tolbert gained much of her Bachelor-related fame after appearing in the spinoff Bachelor in Paradise, where she met her now-husband, Tanner Tolbert. Now she is dabbling in the NFT space. She’s the co-founder of Sacred Skulls, a women-led NFT project where the art is, as the name suggests, skulls. Her co-founder, Kayla Lane, is married to former Bachelorette contestant JJ Lane.

Like some other women-led projects in the crypto space, it coopts boss-babe, female empowerment language. Sacred Skulls says it is “empowering women through financial independence” and aims to fill in the gender gap in NFTs. “Having a huge following of women, Kayla and I were just like, ‘We want to empower women in this space, we want to give them financial freedom,” Roper Tolbert said in an interview with Vox. Lane emphasized that they want to make sure “there’s an opportunity for women to have a seat at the NFT table.”

The pair said they don’t think their status as influencers — particularly on Instagram — gave them much of a leg up in their NFT endeavors. “A lot of people who follow me don’t even know what NFT stands for,” Roper Tolbert said. While Sacred Skulls appears from time to time in her Instagram stories, she doesn’t post about it there the way she does on Twitter. “This isn’t influencing, I’m not shilling a product for people to buy. I’m not saying, ‘Hey, go use this toothbrush,’” she said. “It’s more that this is an opportunity for people to get into, more women need to be in here before it gets completely taken over.”

Jade and Tanner, who met on the Bachelor spinoff series in 2015, were among the first in the franchise to capitalize on the influencer game. In 2016, Us magazine ran a story about them making a combined $1 million for their sponsored posts. The pair have also raised eyebrows with their activities. In 2020, Roper Tolbert was stripped of a $1 million prize she’d won playing fantasy football after allegedly cheating.

Peter Weber, another former Bachelor lead, is selling collectible playing cards of himself on a platform called Gildable that sells “collectible NFT cards by cultural icons.” As of this writing, he’s sold 86 out of the 100 packs available.

There’s nothing especially wrong with Bachelor alumni getting into crypto or into NFTs. Plenty of people are dabbling in the space right now, including high-profile, mid-profile, and low-profile celebrities. The projects they’re working on aren’t particularly notable.

“You hear they’re getting into NFTs, you tend to assume it’s going to be one of the more dubious projects,” said Matt Stephenson, a PhD candidate at Columbia University who researches behavioral economics and NFTs. He added that influencers finding success in NFTs is probably the “least interesting thing” that NFTs can do.

NFTs are supposed to be in the camp of the decentralized “Web3” internet; influencers depend heavily on Web2, meaning centralized social platforms such as Instagram and Twitter. “Social media-style platforms that have enabled influencers to use their influence and profit are just going to extend their influence and profit in new ways. It’s not ultimately interesting or different, and so in some sense would not be what you’d hope to see out of NFTs.”

At the same time, NFT projects often need social media and influencers to get a chance to take off. I found Colton’s cartoon characters Discord channel because I follow Colton on Instagram. Crypto needs hype to keep it going, and it’s finding some friends in Bachelor stars. Maybe they really believe in the future of the project; maybe they recognize a money-making opportunity when they see it.

“Often it seems the line is this idea of do you, as the influencer, believe in what you’re selling? Or is this something authentic? And that’s a very fraught term,” said Megan Sawey, a PhD candidate at Cornell studying new media technologies. “At a certain point, we accepted that promotion was going to be part of the deal.”

If you insist on getting crypto advice from Bachelor people, you should know they’re being paid for it

I reached out to several experts to ask them what they make of Bachelor stars and, more broadly, influencers offering financial advice and pushing crypto online. Most told me the same thing: This isn’t really a question of Bachelor cast members’ choices, it’s a question of what regulators will do about any of this.

“Sure, it’s unfortunate and disappointing that influencers might choose to work with particular brands or shill products where claims aren’t necessarily proven. That’s disappointing, but I think the bigger issue here is a lack of regulation for this industry,” said Emily Hund, a research affiliate at the Center on Digital Culture and Society at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has rules around disclosures for social media influencers — basically, people are supposed to say if they’re being paid to recommend something. That’s why you see a lot of #ad and #sponsored tags on posts. But some experts say that’s not enough and worry that the FTC is behind the curve.

“As we’ve become more reliant on humans as living billboards … their job got much harder, and they haven’t kept up on technology,” said Nizan Geslevich Packin, an associate professor of law at the Baruch College Zicklin School of Business.

Packin specifically worries about fintech and platforms such as Robinhood that have made it much easier for an inexperienced trader to buy and sell stocks and crypto, often on the recommendation of someone they saw on TikTok or Twitter. “The decade that the FTC has sort of frozen, in terms of updates, is also the decade that fintech has exploded,” she said.

Technology and trends are moving much faster than the FTC does. Grant, from Be Social, estimates she gets approached by half a dozen companies a week seeking to launch an NFT with one of her creators or get one involved in some capacity. She says she advises her clients, which includes some former Bachelor contestants such as Cassie Randolph, to be discerning. “If you said yes to everything that came your way as an influencer, yes, you can make tons of money, so much money. But what you lose along the way is credibility, authenticity, and your biggest asset, your following.”

Maybe Colton’s animal NFT project will take off. Maybe it will fade away and everybody will forget. Maybe it will cost his followers money — many NFT projects will probably fail — and they’ll think twice about following him into his next endeavor.

The Court’s new death penalty order is almost too cruel to be believed.

Hamm v. Reeves, a death penalty order that the Supreme Court handed down Thursday night, is an epilogue to a longstanding tension between drug companies that do not wish their products to be used to kill people, and states that are willing to use unreliable drugs to conduct executions if effective sedatives are not available.

It’s also unsettlingly cruel.

The upshot of the Court’s 5-4 decision in Hamm is that a man was executed using a method that may have caused him excruciating pain, most likely because that man’s disability prevented him from understanding how to opt in to a less painful method of execution.

There is significant evidence that Matthew Reeves, a man convicted of murder that the state of Alabama executed after the Supreme Court permitted it to do so on Thursday, had an intellectual disability. Among other things, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted in a 2021 dissenting opinion, an expert employed by the state gave Reeves an IQ test and determined that “Reeves’ IQ was well within the range for intellectual disability.”

The Supreme Court held in Atkins v. Virginia (2002) that “death is not a suitable punishment” for someone with an intellectual disability. Nevertheless, in its 2021 decision in Dunn v. Reeves, the Supreme Court voted along party lines to effectively prevent Reeves from avoiding execution.

The issue in Hamm, the decision that the Court handed down Thursday night, is quite narrow. After Dunn, it was no longer a question of whether Alabama could execute Reeves. The only question was how Alabama could conduct this execution — and whether the state was allowed to use a method that may very well amount to torture, even over Reeves’s objection.

This time the Court split 5-4, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett crossing over to vote with the three liberal justices. But, in a Court with a 6-3 Republican supermajority, Barrett’s vote was not enough to save Reeves from the fate that Alabama chose for him. He was executed by lethal injection.

The Supreme Court’s decisions impose a terrible burden on death row inmates and their lawyers

Many states used to use a three-drug combination to execute people on death row. First, the inmate would be injected with sodium thiopental, an anesthetic that was supposed to prevent the inmate from feeling the effects of the drugs that would kill them. The inmate would then be injected with a paralytic drug, and finally with a lethal drug that would stop their heart.

But supplies of sodium thiopental dried up, at least for executioners, around 2010 — in part because pharmaceutical companies refused to sell the drug for use in executions, and in part because the European Union forbids companies from exporting drugs for such a purpose. As a result, some states turned to less reliable sedatives.

The result was botched executions, where inmates were visibly in excruciating pain during their executions. As Sotomayor wrote in a 2015 dissenting opinion, these unreliable execution drugs leave death row inmates “exposed to what may well be the chemical equivalent of being burned at the stake.”

But the Supreme Court’s Republican majority has not shown much sympathy for inmates who ask not to be tortured to death. Among other things, the Court has held that an inmate who objects to one form of execution must suggest an alternative method or their objection will fail. As Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the Court in Bucklew v. Precythe (2019), “a prisoner must show a feasible and readily implemented alternative method of execution that would significantly reduce a substantial risk of severe pain and that the State has refused to adopt without a legitimate penological reason.”

Meanwhile, some states have responded to these developments by authorizing new methods of execution. South Carolina, for example, recently enacted a law making electrocution the default method of execution in that state, and also permitting some inmates to be executed by firing squad.

Alabama, meanwhile, passed a law that nominally allows people on death row to choose a method of execution other than lethal injection, but only if they act within a very short window of time. As Justice Elena Kagan describes this Alabama law in her dissenting opinion in Hamm, “a recently enacted state law gave those inmates one month to select execution by nitrogen hypoxia” — where the inmate is placed in a gas chamber filled with nitrogen gas and asphyxiated — “rather than lethal injection.”

Many experts believe that nitrogen hypoxia is much less painful than lethal injection, especially if the state does not have access to reliable anesthetics. Although, for obvious reasons, it’s impossible to conduct an ethical experiment on actual people to determine if one method of killing is less painful than others.

The specific legal issue in Hamm concerns the paper form that the state gave inmates, which allowed them to choose nitrogen hypoxia over lethal injection. As Kagan notes, “the form was written in legalese, and according to unrebutted evidence, an inmate needed at least an 11th-grade reading level to understand it.” But Reeves had “cognitive limitations.” He had “the same reading ability as an elementary-school child,” and “one expert testified that Reeves’s ‘reading comprehension was at the 1st grade level.’”

A lower court determined that, under the Americans With Disabilities Act, the state needed to help Reeves understand the form before he could be executed. But five justices, in a two-sentence order that offers no explanation whatsoever of why they reached this decision, permitted Alabama to move forward with the execution — and to do so using lethal injection.

If you’ve read this far, your skin is probably crawling right now

The Eighth Amendment is supposed to prohibit “cruel and unusual punishments.” But the Court has held that the death penalty enjoys a kind of super-constitutional status that requires executions to move forward, even if there is no way to conduct them humanely.

This was the holding of Glossip v. Gross (2015), one of several Supreme Court decisions confronting the shortage of reliable anesthetics for use in executions. “Because it is settled that capital punishment is constitutional,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the Court in Glossip, “it necessarily follows that there must be a [constitutional] means of carrying it out.” (The name of the logical fallacy on display in Alito’s opinion is “begging the question.”)

So if the only available method of killing a death row inmate is “the chemical equivalent of being burned at the stake,” Glossip’s response to this dilemma is to allow the execution to happen anyway.

Several justices, moreover, have indicated that they have a different, more personal reason for denying relief to death row inmates. As an execution draws nigh, lawyers representing the inmate typically file a flurry of motions seeking to save their client’s life — or, at least, to make the execution less painful. Often, this last-minute litigation involves issues that neither the lawyers nor the client could reasonably have known about in advance. In one case, for example, a prison did not inform an inmate about key details of its execution policy until about two weeks before his execution.

But many of the justices appear quite bothered by the fact that they need to decide these last-minute appeals, which may arrive at the Court on a night when a justice has other plans. In Bucklew, Gorsuch complained that “last-minute stays should be the extreme exception,” and he claimed that death row inmates and their lawyers are engaged in “manipulation” of the system.

More recently, during an oral argument concerning the religious liberties of death row inmates, several justices complained that, if the Court honored the particular application of the First Amendment rights of the inmate in that case, it would open the floodgates to future litigation seeking to vindicate similar rights. As Justice Brett Kavanaugh complained to the inmate’s lawyer, “if we rule in your favor in this case, this will be a heavy part of our docket for years to come.”

One might think that, given the gravity of killing another human being, the courts should pay special attention to death penalty cases — if for no other reason than because an execution can never be reversed if a court later discovers that it was unlawful or unjustified. But that is not the attitude of this Supreme Court.

Scientists may have just found a source of missing methane in cities.

When we fire up a gas stove, we’re releasing a powerful climate pollutant into kitchens and beyond. But a new study found that this isn’t just happening when the stove is on. Even when turned off, a typical gas stove will send methane up to the atmosphere.

The new peer-reviewed study, published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, helps answer a particular question that’s been nagging scientists for years. The puzzle has been accounting for all the sources of methane as concentrations in the atmosphere have risen to record levels. They know the natural gas industry, and specifically leaks from its pipelines, is the biggest contributor (natural gas is mostly methane). Other well-documented sources are livestock and landfills.

But there was a mystery when it came to urban environments: In one study in Boston, researchers noted that pipeline leaks couldn’t explain the high levels of methane emissions they detected. There had to be other leaks, most likely from gas-burning appliances inside homes.

So Stanford scientist Robert Jackson, one of the study’s coauthors, set out to track down this missing methane inside homes and buildings. And he was surprised at what his team found.

Basically all stoves “leak a bit when they’re burning,” Jackson said. “And they all leak a bit when you turn them on and off, because there’s a period of time before the flame kicks in. The most surprising was almost three-quarters of the methane that we found emitting from the stoves came from when they weren’t running.”

In other words, the gas stove, a feature of 40 million American homes, is likely always releasing a greenhouse gas. Gas stoves are still a relatively small source of methane compared to pipelines and refineries, and they aren’t even the biggest gas-guzzling appliance in buildings — gas furnaces and water heaters use much more of the fuel through the day and night. But the methane emissions from stoves are roughly equivalent to the carbon dioxide released by half a million gas-powered cars in a year, the researchers found.

Methane also contributes to ground-level ozone that harms human health. Inside the home, the level of methane is low enough that the researchers don’t consider leaks to be a health threat. The bigger health problem is when the gas is lit, because that produces nitrogen dioxide as a byproduct. (The Stanford study didn’t measure other pollutants associated with gas stoves, like formaldehyde, particulate matter, and carbon monoxide.)

The Stanford study joins a small but growing body of work showing how gas appliances in buildings are releasing more climate and air pollution than previously understood.

“This is a really important study,” said Maryann Sargent, a Harvard research scientist unaffiliated with the study who has published research on methane readings in cities. “[It] is one piece that says these stoves are actually a pretty significant emitter. It’s filling in this gap of unknown emissions.”

The new data doesn’t just help scientists piece together a better understanding of gas stoves’ impact on climate change. It bolsters climate advocates’ arguments that the natural gas system is too leaky to continue. It could even hasten the transition away from gas reliance in cities.

The gas stove is responsible for methane, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen oxides in the kitchen

To figure out what was going on in the typical American kitchen, Stanford’s scientists knew they would have to go to people’s homes to test a variety of stove models to get as close to real-world conditions as they could. They ended up collecting measurements inside 53 California homes, rentals, and Airbnbs (because of Covid-19 precautions), using instruments that measure wavelengths of light to determine gas concentrations.

After installing big plastic partitions between the kitchens and other rooms (to block out other potential leak sources), they set out to measure three major pollutants coming from gas stoves and sometimes ovens when the appliances were off, turned on, and switched back off.

The main pollutant the scientists were looking for was methane, because that’s primarily what’s in natural gas. Methane has the power to warm the climate more than 80 times in a few decades compared to carbon dioxide, and it’s the second-biggest contributor to climate change. The stove emits the most methane with the puff of gas when it first turns on, and again when it turns off. Overall, they found that up to 1.3 percent of the gas that stoves use is leaked.

In addition to methane, the scientists also looked at how the gas stoves, when turned on, released some carbon dioxide, the single-biggest contributor to warming, too.

The third pollutant they looked at does not contribute to climate change, but it can harm human health. Nitrogen oxides are produced as a byproduct of burning methane, and increase risks of cardiovascular problems and respiratory disease when inhaled.

The study found that the bigger the burner, the worse the nitrogen oxide emissions. But in a small kitchen it only took a few minutes of usage for stoves (without range hoods) to generate levels above national health standards. (A separate study found that children in homes with gas stoves are 42 percent more likely to have asthma than children whose families use electric stoves because of relatively high levels of nitrogen dioxide.)

Even when the burner is off, it emits a small level of methane that the scientists called “steady-state emissions.” Jackson told me he suspected these steady-state emissions were coming from ill-fitting connections and leaky pipes feeding into the stove, though the study didn’t look for the exact source. The scientists didn’t find a correlation between methane leakage and how old the stove was or the model. And since most people only use their stove an hour or less a day, this slow trickle of pollution when the stove is off ends up adding up to most of the methane found leaking from the kitchen.

But finding these leaks is not so easy. Multiplied by 40 million kitchens that run on gas in the US, study coauthor Jackson said, “that’s a lot of methane. That’s a lot of natural gas reaching our air. And a lot of nitrogen oxides entering our homes for people who have asthma and health conditions.”

The Stanford researchers just looked at 53 homes. To figure out what the impact was nationwide, they extrapolated by using national survey data on how Americans typically cook.

The measurements from stoves alone suggest the Environmental Protection Agency is severely undercounting climate pollution coming from all residences, not to mention likely leaks coming from other gas appliances like furnaces, fireplaces, and water heaters.

Cities are starting to move to phase out the gas stove. And the gas industry is fighting back.

We don’t have to fix every leaky stove to eliminate this source of emissions because there’s already a better solution: Replace these stoves with ones that run on electricity. The best contender to replace the gas stove is the induction stove, which uses a magnetic field to heat pans.

But this transition to electric-powered cooking won’t happen without city, state, and even federal policy.

City councils have started looking at phasing out gas in new buildings across the country. In December 2021, New York became the largest city yet to begin to transition off of gas, banning hookups to gas in construction by the end of 2023. Now some states, including New York and California, are considering similar measures. These policies do not yet address how to transition away from the nation’s existing gas infrastructure, a much thornier topic that deals with retrofitting homes and remodels.

Though the gas industry is facing greater scrutiny of all of its operations, the stove is an important part of its strategy to beat back city climate action. The industry is counting on a steady stream of new customers for decades to come, and Americans’ devotion to the stove is its best hope to lock in new gas infrastructure. In the past, I’ve reported on the industry’s battle to stall city efforts banning gas hookups. In one case, the industry hired social media influencers to tout the benefits of cooking with gas. In other cases, gas lobby groups have worked to pass state laws that prevent cities from changing their building codes to discourage gas.

Not everyone agrees that the newly identified methane leaks from stoves are a significant factor in climate change. University of Illinois engineer Zachary Merrin, who was not affiliated with the Stanford study, noted these emissions overall are relatively small. Merrin did say the study yielded similar results as his own research, which looked at a stove while it was running, not when it was turned off. “This is very reassuring regarding the accuracy of the measurements,” he said over email. But, he added, “in my opinion, ultimately these emissions are small, and addressing them would be difficult.”

Merrin pointed out that some relatively larger leaks are coming from a small number of the stoves they measure: The Stanford study found that less than 10 percent of sites accounted for nearly half of the leaks, and those could be easily dealt with, he said.

“Stoves resonate with people,” Stanford’s Jackson said. “It is the only fossil fuel that we use where you’re standing right over the flame breathing everything that the stoves are emitting from their flame and from pipelines.” The advantage to electric or induction cooking is two-fold: “It not only cuts greenhouse gases, it makes indoor air safer to breathe.”

Americans have burnout on top of burnout on top of burnout. Now what?

What comes after burnout?

That’s the question facing a lot of Americans as we stagger into 2022 still carrying the burden of a pandemic on our shoulders, plus some other burdens including but not limited to the increasingly devastating effects of climate change, the real and disturbing threats to democracy, and the seeming inability of the highest levels of the US government to address these dangers. It’s even boring to talk about how much any of us — parents, students, cogs in the broken-down capitalist machine — are dealing with at this point: “Does Anyone Want to Hear About Burned-Out Moms Anymore?” Amil Niazi asked at The Cut. That was in August 2021.

Now, in January 2022, many Americans have been dealing with fear and stress for so long that it’s become a kind of numb fatigue permeating everything. “When you’re anxious all the time, it really just saps your energy,” Angela Neal-Barnett, a psychology professor at Kent State University, told Vox. “You don’t want to do anything.”

This lack of motivation obviously impacts our individual lives, but it also affects our communities and the country as a whole. Americans are disengaged from the news and numb to politics, our circuits overloaded from months of crises and coup attempts. Some experts say we’re losing our ability to empathize with one another; others say we’ve been steeped in badness for so long it’s become difficult to imagine a better world. At this point, “I wonder where people are getting their hope from,” said Kali Cyrus, a psychiatrist and professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Still, giving up all hope has negative consequences for individuals, society, and the planet. Meanwhile, our current habits of mind and body may be conditioning us toward further exhaustion and nihilism. We can feel better, Cyrus and others say, but it takes believing in a future that can sometimes be hard to see.

How we got so exhausted

The pandemic has been taxing our resilience from the beginning, but today, some 22 months since the United States first locked down and more than a year since the vaccine rollout began, it feels like something new is going on. It’s not just the Great Resignation (which may be more of a Great Reshuffling anyway). It’s an overwhelming sense of can’t even that pervades all aspects of personal and civic life.

You see it in “vaxxed and done” Americans who are all but giving up on Covid-19 precautions after months of punishing surges and repeated false dawns have sapped their will to be careful. Sixty percent of Americans, Republicans and Democrats alike, reported being “worn out” by Covid-19 in a December 2021 poll.

For some of us, the pandemic has sapped our will to … do anything. The beginning of 2022 was notable for its backlash against New Year’s resolutions, with memes warning us against getting too ambitious in this least auspicious of Januaries. As Vox’s Rebecca Jennings put it, “Growth? Change? Self-improvement? In this economy?”

American exhaustion is also visible in our engagement with the news, which has plummeted in the last year. According to the analytics company Chartbeat, traffic to news publishers dropped almost 20 percent between January and December 2021.

There’s also evidence that Americans are growing increasingly disengaged from politics. For example, American democracy remains at risk, with some experts even fearing the country could be headed for civil war. Yet while Republicans remain highly energized, passing laws at the state level to make it easier to overturn the next election, Democrats aren’t showing a comparable drive to protect election integrity. In one October poll, just 35 percent of Democrats said they believed democracy was under major threat, compared with 71 percent of Republicans (a majority of whom also erroneously believe that Donald Trump won the last election).

Part of the reason for relative Democratic inaction may be that there’s no adversary in the White House right now: “​​Trump personified the threat as an individual; changes to state laws or who administers elections are far less salient or likely to mobilize people to take action,” said Brendan Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth College, in an email.

However, sheer numbness may also play a role. “I do worry about people becoming desensitized to warnings of democratic erosion,” Nyhan said. Indeed, “there can be a boy who cried wolf problem — when the worst doesn’t happen, it’s easy for people to dismiss the warnings.” Since the January 6 insurrection didn’t actually install Trump as president, it was easy for some Americans to tune out — especially since they were so exhausted already.

Meanwhile, the energy for social change that defined much of 2020 seems to have dissipated to a degree, or at least changed shape, with public protests and social media campaigns a less prominent part of the ecosystem. Many activists were feeling burned out long before the pandemic, and are now trying to figure out how to continue their work in this new era, said Dom Chatterjee, founder of the group Rest for Resistance. “I don’t know that there’s a lot of people who have the energy to maintain that always-on, 24/7-doing-the-work activism anymore.”

It’s no surprise that many people are running on beyond empty at this point in the pandemic. Experts started telling us in mid-2020 that prolonged anxiety was taking its toll on our minds and bodies, and that was like three variants ago.

Now, many Americans have spent years in a psychological space that Neal-Barnett, the Kent State professor, describes as “not knowing what’s going to happen next and believing that something awful is going to happen next.” Being there for so long “really does sap your motivation,” she said.

In some ways, things were clearer early in the pandemic, when lockdowns shuttered businesses and schools and drastically limited what Americans could do. Now, a more open economy leads to more decisions — and more decision fatigue. While vaccines and improved testing have saved lives and made gathering easier, they’ve also made the day-to-day risk calculus more complex. “Early in the pandemic, the decision was skewed more toward physical health,” said Elaine Roth, a writer and mom of two, in an email. “Now, my children and I are vaccinated, so physical health is no longer the only focus. It means the decisions are more nuanced now.”

Making all those decisions adds up, especially for those, like Roth, who are raising kids on their own. “Any negative consequence — whether to physical or mental health — will ultimately be my fault, because it was my choice alone,” she said. “That’s a heavy burden to bear for nearly two years.”

Making matters worse is the sheer number of interlocking crises on top of the pandemic, from climate change to police violence to democratic collapse. “Covid in and of itself is enough, right? But then you add all of these other things to it, and it’s almost too much for people,” Neal-Barnett said. “That’s where you get people who are saying, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’”

What does rest even look like in 2022?

Of course, a significant number of Americans aren’t worried about Covid-19 at all. Among those who are, the burden of exhaustion falls harder on some than on others — health care workers and educators, for example, are experiencing unprecedented levels of burnout as Covid-19 once again strafes the nation. Black Americans and other people of color are more likely to live in communities hard hit by the virus, and less likely to have access to federal relief programs. LGBTQ+ Americans, especially young people who may be back living with family and cut off from friends and supportive networks, are also under extra strain, Cyrus, the Johns Hopkins professor, said.

On an individual level, what feels like fatigue and malaise for one person could be severe depression for another. On a population level, meanwhile, our collective exhaustion affects our ability to relate to one another. “People don’t have the wherewithal to be empathetic anymore,” Neal-Barnett said. “The things that we do to make our environments inviting and warm and supportive go out the window, and we’re people who are at each other’s throats.”

Moreover, for many people, Covid-19 has cut down on the day-to-day interactions that kept us from dwelling on our own troubles, from chats with coworkers to dinners with friends. People are lacking in both variability and versatility of experience, Cyrus explained: “You’re not interacting with different types of people and you’re not having different types of interactions.” That leaves many of us reliant on the internet, “which tends to be biased toward the negative,” Cyrus said. We’re all doomscrolling without anything fun to cleanse our palates.

There are, however, ways for us to cope with our exhaustion and even kick-start ourselves out of it — without becoming nihilists or burying our heads in the sand. Chatterjee, for example, has been thinking of Rest for Resistance as going through a “winter phase” where the work won’t stop, but may change. Burned-out activists may find themselves “needing to find rest from the movement itself right now,” they said, but “that doesn’t mean quitting.”

It may mean simply taking “a day where we’re thinking about ourselves through the pandemic and not the entire community,” Chatterjee said. A restful day can look different for everyone: It could be watching a movie, or cooking, or just taking a mental rest from the constant pressures of problem-solving. For some people, work can even be restful, he said, especially if it happens on their own terms.

“In acrobatics, in order to do these things that look superhuman and cool, you actually have to learn how to balance where the tension is being held in your body and where you’re letting go and actually resting,” Chatterjee said. “It’s not one or the other; we’re not resting or working.”

Among Cyrus’s patients, the ones who are doing the best at this point in the pandemic are working toward a goal or have something concrete to look forward to, the psychiatrist said. Cyrus herself has anxiety and depression, and what’s helped her is planning a winter trip for herself and her partner. “You have to find some sort of thing that feels new,” she said.

If you’re feeling too burned out to do anything more than the minimum right now, remember that goal-setting can also be about changing our relationship to time. “Things will get done at the pace they get done,” Cyrus said. “If it doesn’t happen that day, can you make it happen in the next seven days?”

Setting and executing goals, though, is a lot easier for people with the money and time to do things like planning a trip. It’s difficult “to be empowered and set a new goal if you don’t have the resources,” Cyrus said.

Unfortunately, part of the reason we’re so exhausted in the first place is that systems like paid leave and child care have failed to keep up with the pandemic or with the realities of our lives. Changing those systems will take time — and energy. The good news is that we’re not alone.

“Somebody could be thinking all week, ‘I just want to watch a movie’ or ‘I just want to cook a meal’ or whatever it is that they’re going to find restful,” Chatterjee said. “And it’s not until somebody says, ‘That’s a great idea, you should really do that,’ that they actually stop and go do that.”

“I’m really interested in that dynamic,” Chatterjee said. “How do we truly encourage each other to rest?”

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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ ongoing war on children got a thumbs-up in the state’s senate this week, when a committee approved an anti-immigrant bill that includes a provision that blocks transportation companies from bringing undocumented immigrants to the state.

That includes asylum-seeking unaccompanied children who are waiting to be placed with a sponsor. This could prolong their separation, because they may have to be sent to another state to wait even if their sponsor is in Florida. “Not one member of the public spoke in support, however, SB 1808 passed along party lines,” Florida Immigration Coalition said Monday.

How imagining the worst is the key to getting reform right.

The International Monetary Fund is pushing El Salvador to ditch bitcoin as legal tender, according to a statement released on Tuesday. CNBC reports: IMF directors "stressed that there are large risks associated with the use of bitcoin on financial stability, financial integrity, and consumer protection, as well as the associated fiscal contingent liabilities." The report, which was published after bilateral talks with El Salvador, went on to "urge" authorities to narrow the scope of its bitcoin law by removing bitcoin's status as legal money. In Sept. 2021, the Central American nation became the world's first country to adopt the cryptocurrency as legal tender, alongside the U.S. dollar. The IMF report went on to say that some directors had expressed concern over the risks associated with issuing bitcoin-backed bonds, referring to the president's plan to raise $1 billion via a "Bitcoin Bond" in partnership with Blockstream, a digital assets infrastructure company. Part of El Salvador's nationwide move into bitcoin also involved launching a national virtual wallet called Chivo that which offers no-fee transactions and allows for quick cross-border payments. For a country where 70% of citizens do not have access to traditional financial services, Chivo is meant to offer a convenient onramp for those who have never been a part of the banking system. IMF directors agreed that the Chivo e-wallet could facilitate digital means of payment, thereby helping to "boost financial inclusion," though they emphasized the need for "strict regulation and oversight." Many Salvadorans have reported cases of identity theft, in which hackers use their national ID number to open a Chivo Wallet, in order to claim the free $30 worth of bitcoin offered by the government as an incentive to open a digital wallet. For months, the IMF has bemoaned Bukele's bitcoin experiment. [...] El Salvador has also been trying since early 2021 to secure a $1.3 billion loan from the IMF -- an effort which appears to have soured over this bitcoin row. The country will need to figure out some other backstop to shore up its finances. The IMF predicts that under current policies, public debt will rise to 96% of GDP by 20216, putting the country on "an unsustainable path."

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Sinema’s political future is murky after her filibuster vote.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) is facing a series of rebukes from elected Democrats, progressive organizations, and members of her own state party after her refusal last week to support an exception to the filibuster to advance a major voting rights bill.

Sinema, along with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), spurned a Democratic effort to restore the talking filibuster for voting rights legislation in order to pass the Freedom To Vote and John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement acts, and the effort ultimately failed by a vote of 48 to 52 on Wednesday.

Now, however, her vote could cost her politically: Donors and progressive organizations have announced they are pulling their support this week, and Sinema could also face a serious primary challenge in 2024, should she run for reelection to the Senate.

Notably, Emily’s List and NARAL Pro-Choice — both national political organizations focused on electing pro-choice women to political office — withdrew their support for Sinema on Thursday.

“We believe the decision by Sen. Sinema is not only a blow to voting rights and our electoral system but also to the work of all the partners who supported her victory and her constituents who tried to communicate the importance of this bill,” Emily’s List president Laphonza Butler said in a statement Thursday, formally withdrawing the organization’s support for Sinema.

That announcement, notes Ben Giles, a reporter for NPR affiliate KJZZ in Phoenix, Arizona, is significant for multiple reasons. First, it’s unusual for pro-choice organizations to come out against the filibuster, because it’s historically been a tool used to protect abortion rights. Additionally — and perhaps more importantly for Sinema’s political future — Emily’s List was by far the largest donor to Sinema’s 2018 campaign, according to OpenSecrets, contributing nearly half a million dollars.

NARAL, which also backed Sinema during her successful 2018 Senate race, tweeted Thursday that “there’s no reproductive freedom without the freedom to vote” and said the organization would change its endorsement criteria to only endorse “senators who support changing the Senate rules to pass the critical legislation that will protect voting rights.”

“The freedom to vote underpins our fight for reproductive freedom and every other freedom we hold dear,” the group said in a statement following the vote on Wednesday. “Absolutely nothing should stand in the way of urgent action to ensure every voter has the freedom to participate in safe and accessible elections.”

According to Politico, 70 major donors to Sinema’s 2018 campaign also wrote Sinema a letter prior to Wednesday night’s vote, saying they would ask for their donations to be returned should she vote against filibuster reform, as she ultimately did.

“We must draw a line,” the donors wrote. “We cannot in good conscience support you if you refuse to use your office to protect our fundamental rights to vote, and we will be obliged to back alternatives for your seat who will do the right thing for our country.”

Most recently, the Arizona Democratic Party executive board voted Saturday to censure Sinema, setting up a potential vote of no confidence.

According to one Arizona Democratic operative who spoke with Vox on the condition of anonymity, the state party isn’t likely to take that step — but Sinema’s political future in the state could still be in trouble.

“I really don’t see a path for her to win the Democratic primary right now,” the operative told Vox, and even if she does, it’s not a sure thing the party will choose to support her in 2024. “I really do feel like we were forced into this position,” they said. “This isn’t about, ‘she isn’t progressive enough,’ it’s a pattern.”

Sinema has been frustrating Democratic leadership all year, particularly with her refusal to back elements of President Joe Biden’s proposed social spending and climate change bill, the Build Back Better Act. The senator initially opposed the bill’s $3.5 trillion price tag, which was whittled down to around $1.75 trillion by the time Congress took its holiday break, and she has also said she opposes an increase to the corporate minimum tax rate to help pay for the bill’s proposals.

Sinema’s continued defense of the filibuster, however — even at the cost of major Democratic legislation which Sinema herself supports — proved to be a step too far for many Democrats. As Norm Ornstein, a political scientist at the American Enterprise Institute, explained in conversation with Vox’s Li Zhou earlier in January, Sinema’s filibuster rhetoric bears little resemblance to the rule’s actual function.

“We’re finally seeing, I think, a level of frustration, over the misuse of the filibuster, not as an infrequently applied tool by a minority on an issue about which they feel very, very strongly, but as a cynical weapon of mass obstruction,” Ornstein explained. “Certainly there was a time when we had well-established norms in the Senate that fostered problem-solving and bipartisanship. That time is long gone.”

Is Sinema really at risk in 2024?

In addition to the immediate backlash to her stance on the filibuster, Sinema’s long-term political prospects could be in jeopardy. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has already voiced support for a potential primary challenge against Sinema, and Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), who is considered a likely candidate to challenge Sinema in 2024, says he has spoken with multiple Senate Democrats about doing so.

Gallego also called out Sinema by name in a floor speech earlier this month, following Sinema’s announcement that she would not support an exception to the filibuster for voting rights. “We won’t shrink from protecting our democracy and the voting rights of all Americans,” Gallego said. “It’s past time for the US Senate and Senator Sinema to do the same.”

On Sunday, Sanders also told NBC’s Chuck Todd on Meet the Press that he supports the Arizona Democratic Party’s decision to censure Sinema. “That was a terrible, terrible vote,” Sanders said. “And I think what the Arizona Democratic Party did was exactly right.”

In an emailed statement to Vox, Sinema press secretary Hannah Hurley defended Sinema’s record and reiterated her support for voting rights legislation, despite Sinema’s decision to oppose changes to the filibuster.

“Kyrsten has always promised Arizonans she would be an independent voice for the state — not for either political party,” Hurley said. “She’s delivered for Arizonans and has always been honest about where she stands.”

The Arizona Democratic operative, though, told Vox that Sinema’s stance is particularly out-of-step with the reality of Arizona’s political climate when it comes to voting rights.

“The stakes are incredibly high,” they said. “We are ground zero for voter suppression.”

Sinema’s support among Arizona Democrats has already begun to flag in recent months in some polls. In September, 56 percent of Democrats viewed her favorably, according to a poll from OH Predictive Insights with a sample size of 882 Arizona voters, but a January 18 poll from Public Policy Polling of 554 Arizona voters found only 15 percent of Democrats viewed her favorably.

“All I’ll say is that she created the circumstances she now finds herself in,” Tré Easton, the deputy director of Battle Born Collective, a progressive advocacy group, told Vox via text message regarding a potential primary challenge to Sinema. “The people of Arizona deserve better — either from her or another Democrat.”

And while Sinema hasn’t lost all of her backing — she still has substantial support from big donors in the pharmaceutical and financial industries — it may not be enough to keep her seat come 2024. In addition to a potential primary challenge, Arizona is a purple state where the eventual Democratic Senate nominee will likely find themselves in a close general election race, and the state has been home to aggressive voter suppression efforts by Republican state officials.

It makes for a puzzling stance from “one of the smartest people in Arizona politics” and someone who’s previously been seen as a long-term thinker, the Arizona Democratic operative told Vox.

“A lot of folks are really struggling to answer the question of, ‘What is the strategy here?’” they said.

Update, January 23, 9:10 pm ET: This story has been updated to include a statement from Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s office.

The court is now the key policymaking arm of the Republican Party.

If there is one group of Americans in agriculture who deserve to be taken care of, it’s the nation’s Black farmers. But just as this group was poised to receive desperately needed relief, Texas Republican Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller challenged the law, blocking the farmers from the money they were rightfully due. 

Tucked into President Joe Biden’s massive $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill is the Emergency Relief for Farmers of Color Act, a provision that includes $5 billion for “socially disadvantaged farmers of color.” It includes Black, Latino, Indigenous, and Asian American farmers, and $4 billion would go toward covering up to 120% of outstanding debt, with $1 billion designated for outreach, training, education, technical assistance, and grants.

The money has the potential to begin to right the wrongs of over a century of abuse of Black farmers by the government and a plethora of corrupt, biased agencies. 

In April, Miller—along with several other white litigants—told The Texas Tribune that the program is “facially illegal and constitutionally impermissible.” He added: “Such a course will lead only to disunity and discord.”

“Shame on the Biden Administration for authorizing a program it knows was unambiguously illegal, instead of enacting a proper relief bill that complies with the laws and constitution of the United States.”

Miller is just one person among countless bodies of racist organizations that have kept their feet on the necks of Black farmers for generations. Black farmers have lost over 12 million acres of farmland since the 1950s thanks to systemic racism and exclusionary practices by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)—even more recently when former President Donald Trump doled out nearly all of the $28 billion designed to offset the trade war with China to exclusively white farmers. 

According to the USDA, the number of Black farmers had plummeted from 925,000 in 1920 to about 18,500 by 1997. And the USDA has unrelentingly denied Black farmers loans. CNN reports that in 2021, the USDA rejected 42% of loan applications for Black farmers and only 9% for white farmers. 

“It’s common knowledge that white ranchers have access to credit that Black ranchers don’t have,” Brandon Smith, a Black rancher, said in a declaration submitted to the court. “That’s the way it’s always been.”

Smith applied for a motion to intervene in Miller’s lawsuits via the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund.

Igalious “Ike” Mills is a Black farmer in Nacogdoches and director of the Texas Agriforestry Small Farmers and Ranchers. He says Miller’s suit has destroyed what crumb of trust Black farmers had in any government programs claiming to help them.

The money from Biden’s farm program would have gone a long way toward repairing historic wrongs that date back to America’s legalization of using enslaved people to build its economy and line the pockets of white slaveholders for generations. 

“There is a long history of racism at USDA. It’s a lot to unpack,” USDA Press Secretary Kate Waters told the Tribune. “We’re on the case and we’re here to regain trust.”

It took an Oklahoma judge revoking the bond of an accused murderer to slow the benefits of white privilege for a Logan County businessman accused of killing one of his employees and burying his body in a septic tank. Still, Daniel Triplett was granted a $500,000 bond and sent home on Jan. 14, wearing an ankle monitor in lieu of being jailed until his trial over the death of Brent Mack, ABC-affiliated KOCO News reported.

“This man is off the streets. He shouldn’t have been on the … streets to begin with,” the victim's son, Brendon, told KOCO.

Triplett was only sent back to jail after violating the terms of his release and going to a bank, gas station, and restaurant. The bank teller recognized Triplett and reported him to authorities, KOCO reported. “What you saw here was a man who had an opportunity to get privilege," the Mack family attorney Demario Solomon-Simmons told the news station. "He was given a bond based upon a privilege of who he was, and yet he’s so arrogant he couldn’t even adhere to those rules.”

Solomon-Simmons said the bank teller had been working at the business for 21 years. “She has a relationship with Mr. Triplett, yet she saw the gravity of his crimes so bad that when he came through, she said, ‘Oh, I can’t allow this,’” Solomon-Simmons said.

Triplett is next expected to appear in court on Thursday, KOCO reported.

Triplett's attorney actually tried to excuse his client's violating conditions restricting him to travel for attorney's appointments, medical care, and court hearings, according to Oklahoma News 4. The defense called the gas and food stops “minor,” and said he only went inside of a Waffle House restaurant for about two minutes.

“If Brent Mack had killed Dan Triplett, shot him in the back and buried him underneath a septic tank, and then lied about it to his family for over a month, do you believe Brent Mack would get bond?” Solomon-Simmons asked in a statement The Associated Press obtained. “What other answer can you point to? I think the fact that he was (a) prominent white businessman who killed an African-American man played into the decision.”

Triplett’s attorney, Charles Mullen, didn't respond to the news wire's request for comment.

Authorities learned of Mack's disappearance when his daughter, Raychelle Wilson, reported him missing to the Guthrie Police Department on Sep. 29, nine days after anyone had seen or heard from him, News 4 reported. “He worked with Dan for roughly about three years, and they had kind of a love-hate situation, I would say,” Wilson told News 4.

Triplett told Wilson that he fired Mack, paid him $1,000 in severance, and dropped him off in front of a laundromat, according to a probable cause affidavit News 4 obtained. Surveillance footage didn't substantiate Triplett's claim.

“Lt. Bruning asked Dan about locations where he dropped Mack off and Dan changed the location several times,” authorities stated in the affidavit. “Dan was shown a copy of the video footage showing him driving by the Holiday Laundry and not stopping. When confronted with the inconsistencies in the story, Dan became very red-faced and appeared to be angry.”

Triplett also claimed that he and Mack last worked together in Crescent, which is about 40 miles north of Oklahoma City, but authorities confirmed the two actually were last seen together in surveillance footage from Sep. 20, at a home about 20 miles northwest of Crescent in Mulhall. “It was apparent that two people arrive at the job site on Sep. 20, 2021, in Dan’s vehicle, but only one person is seen leaving,” authorities said in the affidavit. 

A local medical examiner later determined Mack had been hit with “a projectile in the chest cavity with an entry wound in the upper-left back,” according to the affidavit.

Triplett was charged with first-degree murder and desecration of a corpse, News 4 reported.

Mack's family along with District Attorney Laura Thomas have fought to keep Triplett in jail. “We had strenuously objected when the judge set (bond) and were stunned she did,” Thomas said. “We are relieved that this first-degree murder defendant is back where he should be, and the family is also.”

RELATED: Rittenhouse makes mockery of justice system. Then, Proud Boys make mockery of NYPD

The Supreme Court announced Monday it’s taking up another big culture war case, bringing affirmative action back in another look at overturning Supreme Court precedent. Of course they are, because when Federalist Society born-and-bred Republicans are asked about it by senators in their confirmation hearings, they lie.

The Court will be taking up two challenges in a consolidated oral argument that will be heard in the term starting in October, Students for Fair Admissions v. President & Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina. In 2003, the court issued a landmark decision in Grutter v. Bollinger in which it held that the University of Michigan could use race as a criterion in admissions to ensure it was creating a diverse student body. The court reaffirmed the constitutionality of affirmative action in 2016 in Fisher v. University of Texas, when it ruled the university could consider race in undergraduate admissions.

That was then, this is now. In the Trump court, the promises of Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett that cases like this one—with “precedent on precedent”—could not be casually overturned have proven empty. The court even decided to expedite the UNC case, which hadn’t yet been taken up by an appeals court. That’s another feature of that new conservative-dominated court.

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It’s also worth pointing out that Students for Fair Admissions and founder Edward Blum have a long history of fighting affirmative action as well as voting rights. SFFA also brought the Fisher case. The supposed non-profit SFFA says its mission is to help “restore colorblind principles to our nation’s schools, colleges, and universities.”

Blum, a failed congressional candidate who lost a challenge to Barbara Jordan back in the 1990s, has made his career since centered on white supremacy. He backed the challengers in Shelby County v. Holder back in 2013 in the Supreme Court decision that gutted the core of the Voting Rights Act with another group he founded, the Project on Fair Representation, a supposedly non-profit “legal defense fund program that is designed to support litigation that challenges racial and ethnic classifications and preferences in state and federal courts.” 

Combined with using the shadow docket to decide some of the most controversial and extreme rulings with no public argument and no transparency, this Trump-packed court is looking more radical by the day.

Radical and unprincipled and with a serious legitimacy problem. That was brought home once again in this well-researched and devastating profile of Ginni Thomas—spouse of Justice Clarence Thomas—by the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer. Mayer details Ginni Thomas’s long history of associations with extremist far-right groups and her many and close ties to the groups driving the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Just to underline all the ethical problems a Supreme Court justice with an exceedingly partisan and active spouse can bring, Thomas not only failed to recuse himself from participating in the recent Trump documents case, but he also provided the only dissent. The court ruled 8-1 that White House documents relating to Jan. 6 cannot be shielded from the congressional select committee investigating the insurrection. What could be in those documents that he wants to remain secret, I wonder.

There are a few things that have to happen to save the country from this extremist, increasingly white supremacist court. One should be relatively easy and non-controversial, which is to force the justices to adhere to the code of conduct every other federal judge is bound by. 

The second is to expand the Supreme Court with thoughtful, legitimate nominees who are not bound to the extreme Republican party. 

Newly released emails reveal a sinister conspiracy to overthrow President Joe Biden’s win in Arizona and bestow it upon his unworthy opponent. 

First obtained by the watchdog group American Oversight and then provided to Rolling Stone magazine, the emails reveal a labyrinth plan for MAGA cronies to attempt to undermine the 2020 election. 

Two Trump advisors, in particular, campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis and legal adviser Bernie Kerik,  appear to be on multiple emails. Ellis was a ubiquitous figure at Trump rallies, standing alongside Trump attorney Rudy Guiliani, while Kerik played a more underground role in records showing his determination to find election fraud. Both have been subpoenaed by the Jan. 6 select committee. 

The emails show involvement by numerous MAGA crew, including Mark Finchem, a candidate for secretary of State in Arizona, which is terrifying because should he win, he would oversee elections in Arizona. But equally important the emails attempted to make the case to GOP lawmakers in Arizona about how to find alleged election crimes and how to challenge the outcome. 

Bill Gates, the Republican chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, stood his ground following Biden’s win, much to the danger of himself and his family, who were threatened and harassed. 

According to Rolling Stone, after Gates reviewed the emails he said they showed MAGA supporters and lawmakers  “trying to figure out that hail-mary pass” to overturn the election. “They’re drawing up the hail-mary pass that obviously culminated on January 6,” he adds. “This is part and parcel of it.”

Gates also acknowledged that the efforts came from outside of the state. 

“This is obviously people from outside, along with Trump and his lieutenants, pushing this.”

The emails are primarily crafted by a man named James P. “Phil” Waldron, a retired Army colonel, and bar owner. 

Waldron appeared on a conservative Christian podcast and told the podcast hosts the usual conspiracy nonsense—cabals of evil organ snatchers, George Soros, hacked voting machines in the U.S.—blah, blah, blah.

The Jan. 6. House committee subpoenaed him, demanding information about a damning PowerPoint he crafted and then circulated on Capitol Hill and to Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff. 

The infamous PowerPoint presentation explained how Republicans could overthrow the elected government of the U.S. 

As reported by Daily Kos’ Mark Sumner, Waldron’s 36-slide PowerPoint presentation was made to Republicans in Congress. In response to this, Congressmembers not only texted Meadows in apparent eagerness to comply but provided their own suggestions for how events could be accelerated.

Not a single voice was raised in protest.

In the new emails, Waldron then reached out to multiple Republican Arizona lawmakers, pushing them to find evidence of fraud. 

On Dec. 8, Waldon emailed Arizona state Sen. Sonny Borrelli, a Republican, telling him, “We have the capability to identify fraudulent ballots via optical scanning technology,” Waldron wrote. The gist of his plan, Waldron wrote, was this: “This will allow us to pull invalid votes out of the totals ‘By Candidate’ so that your state can certify normal elections and potentially not have to take extra legislative action.”

Sen. Borrelli forwarded the email to every Republican in the Arizona Senate, Rolling Stone reports. 

Three days later, on Dec. 11, Waldron emailed three Arizona Republican lawmakers—Borrelli, Finchem, and Sen. Eddie Farnsworth, a Republican who chaired the judiciary committee—offering pages of “evidence” to use to prove the Dominion Voting Systems were creating “fraudulent” ballots or ballots that “were not cast by voters.” Despite the fact that Gates, found errors in the emails, Sen. Farnsworth decided to subpoena information about Maricopa County’s software and hardware provided by Dominion. 

All of this forced the Arizona Senate to hand-count over 2 million ballots in 2020, costing millions and ultimately ensuring Biden’s victory. 

But, as we’re learning more every day, despite the fact that Trump lost most of the 62 lawsuits filed in one of six states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—the point wasn’t ever to overturn Biden’s win but to set the stage for an elaborate excuse to disenfranchise Black and brown voters. 

“Trump’s ‘big lie’ has given Republicans in the states a permission framework to try to gain an advantage by changing the rules,” said Chris Sautter, a Democratic election lawyer based in Washington, DC.

“This is all about Republicans creating a more favorable playing field for them to win in ‘22 and ‘24,” Sautter told Al Jazeera.

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Former New York Times journalist Donald G. McNeil Jr. wrote an article on Medium that stated what everyone with an ounce of intelligence already knows, but wouldn’t dare put in print: Not only is Donald Trump losing hundreds of voters each day to COVID-19, their deaths are already surpassing the margins the GOP can possibly hope to attain in the swing states. Maybe it seems ghoulish to post the political ramifications to a human life, to which I reply that Democrats aren’t the ones killing these people—their own right-wing disinformation machine is. Hell, we are trying to save them despite the political ramifications. 

Trumpists simply don’t believe in wearing masks, or social distancing, and are so anti-vaxx that they won’t even listen to Trump himself as he tries to tout the vaccines. GOP leaders are also undermining public health directives aimed at protecting their own people. Trump did have a change of heart about promoting the vaccines only because someone impressed upon him that the deaths are his voters. He really needs as many as possible in 2024, but it’s too late—and it’s getting worse. 

Multiple studies from the AP, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and even Texas’ health services have shown that the deaths are almost entirely among the unvaccinated, and most of these individuals identify as Republican. The profile of a typical COVID-19 victim is now an older unvaccinated person who is obese and lives in a rural area, far from a hospital. In other words, lots of common ground with a Trumper. Obviously, this has already had a major political impact.

McNeil did the math:

As of this week, about 1,800 Americans a day are dying of Covid; the C.D.C. expects that number to rise above 2,600. Virtually all are adults. If 95 percent were unvaccinated and we assume that 75 percent of those were Trump supporters, that’s 1,300 to 1,900 of his voters being subtracted from the rolls every single day.

Donald Trump lost Arizona by a mere 10,000 votes. He lost Georgia by 12,000, He lost Wisconsin by 21,000. He lost Nevada by 33,000. Right now, about 60 Arizonans, 36 Georgians, 34 Wisconsinites and 14 Nevadans are dying of Covid each day. Seventy five percent of 95 percent of that would be minus 103 Trump voters per day — just in those four swing states. Week after week. That adds up.

The hospitals here in Florida are at the breaking point. The state broke the record with 430,297 cases last week. Also, Florida deaths rose from 184 the previous week to 470 just last week, the most since early November. Gov. Ron DeSantis is so far gone that he is arguing that Trump was too sane and honest about COVID-19 and should have ignored it even more than he did.

At this point I reiterate that Trump has not even tried to expand his base, and he is going into 2024 much weaker than he was in 2020. He is no longer the incumbent, his mental state has been called into question, and his supporters have never trusted elections less. Then there’s the small matter of the insurrection attempt to overthrow the government that has turned off quite a few people, which has now become his legacy. On top of all of this, the GOP has officially become a death cult. The data is in: The stronger a state’s support for Trump was in 2020, the higher the COVID-19 infection rate for that state.

People of color were, at one point, less likely to get the vaccine, but that has been changing. The only people going in the other direction, trend-wise, have been white Republicans. They have fallen further and farther into the anti-vaxx conspiracy, among other kinds of conspiratorial thinking. It’s shocking how far down the rabbit hole they fall. Every day, Kos posts a daily column on COVID deaths here on Daily Kos from anti-vaxxers who start out posting snarky memes, but then always end up running to the hospital when they get sick. Even after suffering in unbearable pain, many of them cling to the disinformation that is making them suffer as they breathe their final breath.

The articles always seem to end the same: with a GoFundMe page begging for money, followed almost immediately by an obituary. It’s a very cruel death, and one that is completely unnecessary. Every one is also a vote for Trump and the Republican agenda that is forever lost. The GOP knows this, which is why they made protecting voter suppression their top priority. It’s really all they have.  

Of course, if the GOP were smart, they would promote the vaccine as much as we do. A simple jab would save them from an untimely and painful death. Many, however, will follow their right-wing messiahs right off the cliff.  Ironic that if Trumpists really wanted to “own the libs,” they would do everything in their power to keep from getting sick so they could vote. As a moral human being, I feel obliged to remind them of this so they can stay alive, but I will have absolutely no guilt when they choose not to listen. 

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The Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday sued to block Lockheed Martin’s $4.4 billion acquisition of engine-maker Aerojet Rocketdyne, saying the move would allow Lockheed to "jack up the price the U.S. government has to pay."

The move is the Biden administration's first decision involving a large defense acquisition and will be closely watched by other companies as they weigh future corporate mergers against potential blowback by the FTC.

The FTC announcement noted this was the group's "first outright challenge to a defense merger in decades."

“If consummated, this deal would give Lockheed the ability to cut off other defense contractors from the critical components they need to build competing missiles," FTC Bureau of Competition Director Holly Vedova said in a statement Tuesday. "Without competitive pressure, Lockheed can jack up the price the U.S. government has to pay, while delivering lower quality and less innovation. We cannot afford to allow further concentration in markets critical to our national security and defense.”

The FTC simultaneously filed for a preliminary injunction in Washington D.C. federal court and filed suit in the agency’s in-house court. Copies of the court documents weren’t immediately available. The FTC’s administrative proceedings are traditionally stayed until after the federal court rules on the injunction request.

Earlier on Tuesday, Aerojet said in a statement that the commission’s “concerns regarding the transaction cannot be addressed adequately by the terms of the proposed consent order.”

Lockheed said in an SEC filing that it will review the lawsuit and evaluate its options. "We may like to defend the lawsuit or terminate the merger agreement."

“In general, it is our practice not to comment on pending litigation. As we said on our earnings call, we are reviewing the FTC’s complaint and will respond in due course,” a Lockheed Martin spokesperson said in a statement.

Aerojet said it "continues to believe in the benefits of the transaction for the United States and its allies, the industry, and all of the company’s stakeholders.”

Temperature check: The FTC’s decision serves as a barometer for similar agreements under the Biden administration, said Byron Callan, managing director at Capital Alpha Partners. Other companies will view the deal as a signal for what they can and cannot do while Biden is in the White House.

"I still don't think it will have a chilling effect on the overall [mergers and acquisitions] sector,” Callan said. “But it will maybe suggest some guardrails around what the largest contractors can do, and how interested DoD is in preserving competition in some of these different sectors.”

Pros and cons: Lockheed Martin is the world’s largest defense contractor and manufactures everything from hypersonic weapons to ships to fighter jets. Aerojet Rocketdyne is a top propulsion provider and has been involved in every U.S. space and missile project since the beginning of the space age.

Lockheed argued that acquiring Aerojet would mean lower prices for the U.S. government. In addition, according to a company fact sheet, the deal would accelerate future missile programs and ensure a long-term supply of propulsion products for the military.

Critics of the deal argued that Lockheed Martin’s promise of ensuring Aerojet will remain fair in future negotiations with other defense vendors is not good enough and they should remain separate companies.

The acquisition would have reshaped competition for liquid and solid rocket propulsion used for hypersonic engines, electric power and propulsion for space products. Besides Aerojet, Orbital ATK, acquired by Northrop Grumman in 2018, is the only other solid-rocket motor supplier in the U.S.

Raytheon Technologies, which opposed the Aerojet acquisition, told the FTC the merger would hurt its propulsion systems business because Aerojet supplies 70 percent of its components and 100 percent of what is needed for its anti-ballistic missile systems. Raytheon was concerned the acquisition could allow Lockheed to increase the price of the components in future deals.

Aerojet's customers include Lockheed Martin, Raytheon Technologies and United Launch Alliance.

Hill influence: Raytheon wasn’t alone in opposing the deal. Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, whose home state of Massachusetts is the headquarters for Raytheon, expressed concern the acquisition would stifle competition.

The senator pointed to the Northrop Grumman-Orbital ATK deal. At the time of the acquisition, the company said Orbital’s solid-rocket motors would be made available to all vendors in future competitions.

But since the acquisition went through, the FTC has launched an investigation into Northrop’s handling of subsequent competitions.

“I support the FTC taking aggressive action to oppose further corporate concentration in the defense industry that could threaten U.S. national security," Warren said in a statement Tuesday. "The FTC’s lawsuit to block Lockheed Martin’s proposed acquisition, which has unanimous, bipartisan support from the Commissioners, is critical."

Connor O'Brien contributed to this report.

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"Netflix's stock has tumbled 41% from the all-time high it hit just two months ago," reports CNN Business. "It's gaining subscribers at a painfully slow pace. Competition is heating up. The company's answer to all that: It just raised prices on North American customers." Netflix ended 2021 with 221.8 million subscribers. That's significantly more than others in the streaming marketplace, including Disney, one of its closest competitors. Disney had 118.1 million subscribers as of October, and it grew subscriptions 60% between October 2020 and October 2021. During that same period, Netflix grew just 9%. Disney hasn't yet reported its financial results for the last three months of 2021. But Netflix's growth slowed even further in the fourth quarter to just 8%. (And Disney's growth last quarter spooked Wall Street too....) The problem with relying exclusively on subscriptions for revenue is: after a while, you run out of people who haven't subscribed. That's bad news for Wall Street investors who are mostly concerned with companies' abilities to grow. Zak Shaikh, vice president of programming at research-based media firm Magid, believes that Netflix's fall is more of "a Wall Street thing" rather than "something that reflects the business is in trouble.... They still added subs, and they still have the same high usage and viewing metrics," he added. However, even Shaikh pointed out that in the long term, "Netflix will have to deal with the fact that you can't keep adding subscribers." One way the company has tried to offset its slowing growth is by investing in other verticals, such as gaming. Another way is to raise prices, but that could prove difficult as fierce competition ramps up. Although price increases will probably help to offset its sluggish sign ups, they could also lead to more stagnation for Netflix. For some consumers, price increases — even small ones — are a lot to ask considering that so many competitors are at Netflix's gates. Michael Nathanson, a media analyst at MoffettNathanson, specifically predicted to CNN Business that 2022 will be a year "of concern about growth and competition for Netflix."

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To his horror, he discovers he has a steady job at a local law firm and several hundred dollars in Starbucks gift cards.

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