“The so-called “freedom convoy” is nominally protesting a vaccine mandate for truckers, implemented in mid-January on both sides of the US-Canada border. But the demonstrations have swiftly ballooned into a broader far-right movement, with some demonstrators waving Confederate and Nazi flags. Protester demands include an end to all Covid-19 restrictions in Canada and the resignation of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
The demonstrators, which have included as many as 8,000 people at their peak, have terrorized Ottawa: blockading streets, harassing citizens, forcing business closures, and honking their extremely loud horns all night. Ottawa police, who have proven some combination of unwilling and unable to restore order, have even set up a special hotline to deal with a deluge of alleged hate crimes stemming from the protests. In the first week of February, it received over 200 calls.
Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson has declared a state of emergency, and Trudeau’s government has deployed hundreds of Royal Canadian Mounted Police to the protests. As the situation in Ottawa continues, the freedom convoy movement has expanded across the country. Demonstrators have shut down at least two border crossings between Canada and the United States.
But while the protests are generating a lot of noise and attention, the eruption actually points up a counterintuitive fact: The Canadian far right is weak and ineffectual, especially when it comes to pandemic restrictions.
Canada’s provinces have generally employed strict Covid-19 measures such as school mask mandates and vaccine passports, including during the recent omicron surge. They have enjoyed broad public support in doing so; even the strictest restrictions are less controversial in Canada than in the US. The current demonstration is quite unpopular with the general public, divisive even inside the center-right Conservative party.
This doesn’t mean the movement will accomplish nothing. It has already contributed to a revolt against the Conservative party’s leader and is serving as an important organizing node for far-rightists. The border crossing blockage is putting more stress on the US-Canada supply chain, costing (by one estimation) $300 million a day in economic damage. Internationally, the freedom convoy has inspired copycat efforts in both the United States and France.
But it’s important to understand the broader context in Canada. News coverage of the convoy, especially from sympathetic anchors on Fox News, may lead Americans to believe that Canada is in the midst of a far-right popular uprising. In reality, the mainstream consensus in Canada about Covid-19, and the nation’s institutions in general, is holding. The so-called trucker movement is on the fringe, including among Canadian truckers — some 90 percent of whom are vaccinated.”
“The film opens with soaring music, footage of white children laughing and playing, beautiful vistas of classical European architecture. Fifteen seconds in, the music turns dark. We see images of dark-skinned youth, chaos, and blood. Then there’s a foreboding black-and-white shot of a man in profile, hunched at a desk, the curvature of his nose prominent in silhouette.
He’s the one responsible for all of this, the brown assault on white tranquility. Europe, we are told, is this predator’s “main hunting area.”
This is the beginning of Tucker Carlson’s new “documentary” for Fox Nation, the right-wing media giant’s streaming service. It is titled Hungary vs. Soros: The Fight for Civilization, and it purports to tell the story of how a plucky little democracy in Central Europe has carved out a conservative model in the face of a relentless assault by the forces of global liberalism personified by George Soros, the Hungarian-American financier.
The story is a lie. Hungary is nominally a democracy but it has made a turn toward authoritarianism in the last decade; Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has painted Soros as a scapegoat whose allegedly nefarious influence justifies Orbán’s anti-democratic moves. The documentary amplifies this propaganda, treating the Jewish philanthropist as the spider at the center of a global web of conspiracy.”
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22902501/migrants-mexico-omicron-surge-health-care
“Justice Amy Coney Barrett had been a member of the Supreme Court for less than a month when she cast the key vote in one of the most consequential religion cases of the past century.
Months earlier, when the seat she would fill was still held by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Court had handed down a series of 5-4 decisions establishing that churches and other houses of worship must comply with state occupancy limits and other rules imposed upon them to slow the spread of Covid-19.
As Chief Justice John Roberts, the only Republican appointee to join these decisions, explained in South Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom (2020), “our Constitution principally entrusts ‘[t]he safety and the health of the people’ to the politically accountable officials of the States.” And these officials’ decisions “should not be subject to second-guessing by an ‘unelected federal judiciary,’ which lacks the background, competence, and expertise to assess public health and is not accountable to the people.”
But this sort of judicial humility no longer enjoyed majority support on the Court once Barrett’s confirmation gave GOP justices a 6-3 supermajority. Twenty-nine days after Barrett became Justice Barrett, she united with her fellow Trump appointees and two other hardline conservative justices in Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo (2020), a decision striking down the very sort of occupancy limits that the Court permitted in South Bay. The upshot of this decision is that the public’s interest in controlling a deadly disease must give way to the wishes of certain religious litigants.”
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“Before Roman Catholic Diocese, religious objectors typically had to follow a “neutral law of general applicability” — meaning that these objectors must obey the same laws that everyone else must follow. Roman Catholic Diocese technically did not abolish this rule, but it redefined what constitutes a “neutral law of general applicability” so narrowly that nearly any religious conservative with a clever lawyer can expect to prevail in a lawsuit.
That decision is part of a much bigger pattern. Since the Court’s Republican majority became a supermajority, the Court has treated religion cases as its highest priority.”
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“Several of the justices are openly hostile to the very idea that the Constitution imposes limits on the government’s ability to advance one faith over others. At a recent oral argument, for example, Justice Neil Gorsuch derisively referred to the “so-called separation of . . . church and state.”
Indeed, it appears likely that the Court may even require the government to subsidize religion, at least in certain circumstances.
At December’s oral arguments in Carson v. Makin, for example, the Court considered a Maine program that provides tuition vouchers to some students, which they can use to pay for education at a secular private school when there’s no public school nearby. Though the state says it wishes to remain “neutral and silent” on matters of religion and not allow its vouchers to go to private religious schools, many of the justices appeared to view this kind of neutrality as unlawful. “Discriminating against all religions,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested, is itself a form of anti-religious discrimination that violates his conception of the Constitution.
For many decades, the Court held the opposite view. As the Court held in Everson v. Board of Education (1947), “no tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion.”
But Everson’s rule is now dead. And the Court appears likely to require secular taxpayers to pay for religious education, at least under some circumstances.”
“Around one-third of food produced in the US is never consumed, ending up in landfills as waste.”
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“According to USDA data from 2010, Americans throw out 26 percent of meat, poultry, and fish at the retail and consumer level. Harish Sethu, a data scientist and author of the blog Counting Animals, says America’s meat waste problem means we’re raising about a billion chickens, more than 100 million other land animals (mostly turkeys, pigs, and cows), as well as capturing around 25 billion fish and 15 billion shellfish (mostly shrimp), only to have them wind up in a landfill.
While the data is over a decade old, the situation is likely worse now, as US meat production rose 10.3 percent from 2011 to 2018 while food waste only decreased by 1 percent.”
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““A lot of people think their food is bad when it’s actually still perfectly good to eat,” Dana Gunders, executive director of food waste nonprofit ReFED, told me. “The dates on food are really an indicator of when something is of top quality or it’s freshest, but they’re not telling you the food is bad or that you can’t eat it.”
Her general rule of thumb? “If it looks fine, smells fine, and tastes fine, it’s okay to eat.” She encourages readers to visit SaveTheFood.com, a consumer guide from environmental nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, for more information.”
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“Can’t eat it soon? Put it in the freezer. “Freezers are a magic pause button,” Gunders said.”
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““A lot of people are in the habit of freezing meat but you can freeze milk if you’re going away on vacation — it may separate a little but it’ll be okay. Eggs you can freeze if you crack them out of their shell and scramble them but don’t cook them.” When it comes to cheese, it’s best to shred it before freezing and then use it in cooking after thawing.
Lastly, plan ahead. “If you can, sketch out an accurate plan of your week and when you’ll eat at home, and have that in mind when you’re shopping,” Gunders said. “That’s really critical because shopping is where you commit to the food regardless of whether you eat it or not.””
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“Reducing waste at the farm level is vital because if meat companies can reduce their mortality rates — the percent of farm animals that die before they can be slaughtered — then they can conceivably reduce the number of animals they need to breed in the first place.
The biggest impact can be made in the chicken industry, simply because of its scale.”
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“Grocery stores, restaurants, and food manufacturers can also do a lot to reduce food waste.”
“By December 2020, as President Donald Trump was trying feverishly to overturn Joe Biden’s election win, his closest remaining advisers had broken into two warring camps.
Both factions, at this point, supported and encouraged Trump’s strategy to retain power: pressuring state legislatures, state officials, and members of Congress to throw out results in key states, claiming they were tainted by fraud. Both were even interested in using the federal government’s power to seize voting machines in key states.
But one camp, led by Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn, wanted to go even further and use the military to seize those machines — while the other, led by Rudy Giuliani, thought that was a bridge too far.
Think of it as a divide between the dangerously unhinged and the totally batshit.”
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“The story makes clear just how dire things were for democracy at this point. Everyone around Trump was recommending extreme measures that, if successful, would have amounted to stealing the election.
Yet even some of Trump’s unhinged, irresponsible, and conspiratorial advisers, like Giuliani, were still trying to steer him away from the even worse actions counseled by Powell and Flynn, who seem to have been totally unmoored from factual and political reality at this point.”
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“while some officials might have refused to go along with Trump’s whims, he did have the option to replace them but simply chose not to — due to his own calculations that this would be too far, or because other advisers talked him out of it. But there was no guarantee that Trump, who had been willing to push so far already, would back off here. If he were just a bit more stubborn and willing to stretch the boundaries of his power, the election 2020 crisis could have grown far worse.”
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““Mike Pence did have the right to change the outcome,” Trump said in a statement…“Unfortunately, he didn’t exercise that power, he could have overturned the Election!” That same day, he mused at a rally about pardoning January 6 rioters. In a battle between the unhinged and the batshit for Trump’s favor, the latter camp may be gaining strength.”
“It’s time to say goodbye to 3G, the wireless technology that gave our phones near-instantaneous access to the web and helped make everything from the Apple App Store to Uber an everyday part of our lives. More than two decades after its launch, wireless service providers are shutting down 3G to clear the way for its faster and flashier successor: 5G.
The expansion of 5G is welcome news for the growing number of people with 5G-enabled devices, and it could be a critical step toward more advanced technologies, like self-driving cars and virtual reality. But the 3G shutdown will also disable an entire generation of tech: everything from 3G phones to car crash notification systems. For the people who rely on these devices, this transition will cut off a cellular network they’ve depended on for years, and in some cases, disconnect crucial safety equipment.
“The number of 3G devices has been decreasing steadily,” Tommaso Melodia, the director of Northeastern’s Institute for the Wireless Internet of Things, told Recode. “Now it’s at the point where carriers are starting to say, ‘It doesn’t make a lot of sense for us to continue to use these precious frequency channels for 3G. Let’s turn it off.’”
Ideally, wireless providers could keep both 3G and 5G networks up and running, but the physics of the radio spectrum that cellular technology relies on means that companies have to make a choice. The radio spectrum includes a wide range of frequencies, which are used to connect everything from AM/FM radios to wifi networks, and is regulated by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Because there are a limited number of frequencies the agency sets aside for cellular service, wireless providers have to divide up the spectrum that they’re allocated to run multiple networks, including their 3G, 4G, 5G, and eventually 6G, services.”
“Honduras is in a tenuous political moment. It has operated as a narco-state under the right-wing National Party since 2009 when a military coup ousted then-President Manuel Zelaya, Castro’s husband. Persistent corruption, weak government institutions, climate change, high levels of violent crime, and rampant poverty have driven hundreds of thousands to flee the country in recent years, with many Hondurans seeking asylum in the US.
Change seemed to be on the horizon last November. Voters turned out in droves to elect Castro in a landslide win against the National Party’s Nasry Asfura — an ally of the outgoing president, Juan Orlando Hernández, who has been accused of taking bribes from narcotraffickers. Castro promised to create a coalition government to bring together the National Party’s political opponents, including her own center-left Libre party, under an agenda of combating corruption and promoting economic development.
As part of a joint initiative with the US government, American companies pledged to inject more than a combined $1.2 billion over a multiyear horizon into Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Those funds were meant to help reduce migration by providing new economic opportunity in the region. In Honduras, Castro’s incoming administration was seen as a reliable partner that could ensure the investments worked as intended.”
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“Castro’s proposed reforms could be transformative for Honduras, a country where corrupt economic elites have long ruled. She has vowed to institute an anti-corruption commission backed by the United Nations, similar to one that was shut down in Guatemala in 2019, and to convene a National Assembly seeking to rewrite the country’s constitution to guarantee social democratic rights. And she has promised a “new economic model” that would reduce inequality and the cost of living and would involve building an environment more conducive to private investment.
But the future of that agenda is in flux due to a constitutional crisis wracking the Honduran Congress.”
“It’s been over a year since Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube banned an array of domestic extremist networks, including QAnon, boogaloo, and Oath Keepers, that had flourished on their platforms leading up to the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot. Around the same time, these companies also banned President Donald Trump, who was accused of amplifying these groups and their calls for violence.
So did the “Great Deplatforming” work? There is growing evidence that deplatforming these groups did limit their presence and influence online, though it’s still hard to determine exactly how it has impacted their offline activities and membership.
While extremist groups have dispersed to alternative platforms like Telegram, Parler, and Gab, they have had a harder time growing their online numbers at the same rate as when they were on the more mainstream social media apps, several researchers who study extremism told Recode. Although the overall effects of deplatforming are far-reaching and difficult to measure in full, several academic studies about the phenomenon over the past few years, as well as data compiled by media intelligence firm Zignal Labs for Recode, support some of these experts’ observations.
“The broad reach of these groups has really diminished,” said Rebekah Tromble, director of the Institute for Data, Democracy, and Politics at George Washington University. “Yes, they still operate on alternative platforms … but in the first layer of assessment that we might do, it’s the mainstream platforms that matter most.” That’s because extremists can reach more people on these popular platforms; in addition to recruiting new members, they can influence mainstream discussions and narratives in a way they can’t on more niche alternative platforms.”
“While this is the first experiment in giving unconditional cash transfers to formerly incarcerated people, numerous studies in the US and elsewhere have shown how guaranteed income can benefit vulnerable members of society.
Stockton, California, gave 125 people in neighborhoods at or below the median income $500 per month, which led to mental health improvements and increased likelihood of finding a job. The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians Casino Dividend in North Carolina gives all tribal members a cut of gambling revenue that amounts to $4,000 to $6,000 per year; research has seen improvements in mental health and education and decreases in crime and addiction. Other studies around the world have shown benefits to health and food security, and reduction in crime.
Studies consistently show that recipients aren’t more likely to spend money on alcohol and drugs (as some have feared) — in fact, spending on “temptation goods” decreases in many cases. People also didn’t stop working in the vast majority of guaranteed income experiments (though there have been studies that tilted in the other direction).
The Florida experiment is especially intriguing because it will chart how guaranteed income can affect outcomes for a group that’s especially at risk of financial calamity.
A similar study shows promising results: Vancouver gave people experiencing homelessness $7,500 and found recipients moved into stable housing faster and were able to save money. The program was designed by formerly incarcerated people, and the team decided that the first month out of prison is particularly important because of the search for housing and a job, which is why it starts with an initial higher payment of $1,000 and then goes down to $600 in the following months. (Durham, North Carolina, is also running a similar guaranteed income pilot for formerly incarcerated people starting this March.)
There are also broader benefits of guaranteed income for families, communities, and society. A guaranteed income experiment in Kenya found benefits to the entire local economy as people spent money on neighboring businesses. While Alachua County in Florida is not Siaya County, Kenya, the researchers are hopeful that guaranteed income can help mitigate the negative effects incarceration has on communities.”
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““I think the question is,” says Couloute, “do we all deserve safer communities? If the answer is yes, then that means we want to do everything we can to ensure people with felony records live crime-free lives and don’t recidivate. If we can help folks leave our criminal justice system and get jobs, pay taxes, and become great tenants and homeowners, and so on and so forth, that only contributes to our society rather than detracting from it.”
These are lofty goals, and we won’t know the effects of this program for another couple of years. Scott hopes that this pilot can draw attention to the linkages between incarceration and poverty while Couloute discussed potential wide-ranging implications for anyone struggling with economic stability and social disadvantage.
The benefits are most obviously targeted at the 115 recipients. But if the results pan out, this experiment could bolster the case for a broader policy shift.”