Lily Salter's Blog, page 176
February 2, 2018
“The Trade” and the many faces of our opioid crisis
A scene from "The Trade" (Credit: Our Time Projects/Courtesy Of Showtime)
It���s Christmas time in Guerrero, Mexico, and under a bright if cloudy sky, a cheerful clown entertains a crowd of enthusiastic kids before introducing the kindly man sponsoring the party. On the outskirts of the gathering, men bring in large plastic sacks filled with toys, as he plaintively tells the smiling children that when he was little, he would hear about Santa Claus. He would wait for him and the Three Kings every year, he says, but they never came. It was just lies, he told himself. The sea of grins recede for a moment.
This, the kindly man continues, is the reason he wants to give something to all of the children. The men hand out the gifts. Nearby a group of masked people toting automatic rifles watches over the gathering. One young boy asks for a toy gun.
The man playing Santa is Don Miguel, boss of a modest stretch of heroin poppy fields that effectively employs an entire hamlet, one of many subjects filmmaker Matthew Heineman follows as part of his devastating five-part Showtime documentary series ���The Trade,��� debuting Friday at 9 p.m.
This is not light viewing, but the level of access Heineman and his directors of photography gain is extraordinary and, at times, anxiety-spiking. The danger and risks these filmmakers undertake to demonstrate the vast scope of the opioid crisis is absolutely palpable. So, too, is the desolation heroin has inflicted upon families north and south of the border.
In Atlanta, a mother wearily struggles to keep her son from relapsing. In Columbus, Ohio, detectives pull over a vehicle to catch desperate users, hoping to use them to get to the next link in a chain of dealers, distributors and kingpins that stretches all the way back to Mexico. The addicts Heineman follows are skeletal, sickly and anguished. Their families, worn out battling this demon that won���t let go, try everything from pleading to tough love to all-out enabling their hunger for a fix. Some stop fighting entirely. And this informs the motives and methods of detectives and sheriffs confronting users and even minor network bosses with calm but firm reason, even empathy in many cases.
���I���m depressed because I use dope. So I continue to use dope,��� explains Brittany, an addict introduced in the second episode. ���If that���s not insanity, I don���t know what is.���
All the while, whenever the storyline returns to Don Miguel he is warm with his subordinates, all of whom profess their loyalty to him. It���s all strategy and theater meant to keep an enterprise under threat by local gangs in his control �����and, one gets the sense, to prove to the Americans with the cameras that he is not like the other monsters sending drugs into America���s suburbs. He professes to care for the poor people in his town. He is the only option most of them have.
���Life in the mountains is complicated,��� one of his laborers observes. ���There isn���t any other work here. And the market for heroin keeps growing and growing. So we work to survive.���
As he did in the 2015 Oscar nominated feature documentary ���Cartel Land,��� Heineman and his crew insinuate themselves into the lives of his subjects and achieve a level of closeness that can be nakedly unsettling to witness. There are times when the camera almost feels too close; the camera doesn���t flinch as a syringe hangs from an addict���s arm, the needle still deep in a vein. Nor does the crew falter as they tag along beside the boss���s crew as they hunt interlopers, automatic weapons in hand, ready to meet violence with violence. Or as they interview a masked enforcer who says with no shortage of glee that he���ll dismember old women, minors, anyone who he needs to, ���for the heroin.���
Given all of this, although this observation may read strangely, ���The Trade��� is visually arresting. Heineman and his team carefully frame the poppy-strewn mountains as conscientiously as the dilapidation surrounding the men and women in the grips of the opioid thrall. Some of the most affecting scenes, actually, are wide shots of highways crowded with cars or cityscapes.
Documentaries use these shots to establish place and setting, but here, Heineman finds a way to make them reflect the Sisyphean nature of the struggle. Every time we patch one hole, a law enforcement official observes in voiceover, a new hole opens up. Endless traffic on a highway flowing like fluid through veins illustrates what he���s talking about: Any of those cars could be carrying drugs to a suburb. But which? What good is a patch against a broken dam pounded by a flood?
���The Trade,��� in the way of the finer fictional and non-fictional views of the drug war that have come before it, holds no simple answers because there are none. Indeed, watching four out of its five episodes leaves a person with the sense that there is no winning this war. That no matter how much money is spent or how tall the government can build that mythical border wall, hunger and desperation will ensure that heroin will find a way into the United States.
The need for a work as expansive and thorough as ���The Trade��� is urgent. Only recently, Mexico���s interior ministry reported a record 29,168 murders in 2017, higher than the homicide rate at the peak of the country���s drug war in 2011. The direness of Mexico���s situation is reflected in central Ohio, number one in the nation for opioid overdoses and, an official in ���The Trade��� reveals, a gateway for North American drug trade.
Heineman���s series takes us further than declarations and stats, however, and places us nose to nose with the human toll, speaking to every side of what seems to be an unsolvable conundrum.
���They are fighting a very large enemy called money,��� says that homicidal strongman. ���And against him, no one can win.���
There may not be a more effective way to understand the sinister pervasiveness of this crisis and the destruction it is wreaking in the United States and Mexico than to spend time with the different kinds of people it’s holding in its net, in addition to the people trying to destroy it and a few of the millions caught up within it. None of this makes ���The Trade��� easy to watch, but it is transfixing.
Hooray for hairy pits! “Babylon Berlin” gets this historical detail right
Club scene from Babylon Berlin (Credit: Sky 1/Sky Atlantic)
It’s not at all surprising that��eight minutes in to the first episode of��“Babylon Berlin,” the lavish new Netflix-by-way-of-German-television opus, there’s a moment of HBO-worthy group nudity. Nor is it even terribly unusual that the Weimar-era drama, faithful to its time, shows��a naked female sporting a full tuft of pubic hair. But when, in the second episode, a chorus of Josephine Baker-like showgirls in banana skirts��lift their arms to reveal that a few of them don’t shave their pits, it’s revelatory. Underarm hair! Now that’s authentic!
I can’t be the only person who watches shows like “Outlander” and “Game of Thrones” thinking, “Time travel and dragons, sure, but where are all these women getting shaved and waxed in these mythic worlds? Where do they even find the time?” Four years ago, Buzzfeed pondered��how, in spite of their perilous circumstances, characters like Katniss Everdeen, heroine of “The Hunger Games,” and every single woman on “The Walking Dead,” always manage to keep their underarms so stubble-free. And in the 1920s England of “Downton Abbey,” the ladies sported silky smooth armpits under their dresses and between the sheets.
The��lack of female body hair in period pieces isn’t always anachronistic, though. Women have been waging intermittent war with their follicles since at least ancient Egypt.��Renaissance ladies, meanwhile, fashioned crude depilatories out of quicklime and arsenic. The nudes of classical European art are frequently depicted��with��their hairy parts discreetly covered or extremely well-groomed, making clear��a preferred aesthetic. There’s no way that Botticelli’s Venus��hasn’t��done some serious bikini waxing,��and��Manet’s Olympia��sports only the slightest thatch of stubble.��But a recent Mental Floss examination of the history of female shaving noted that it was the advent of sleeveless attire in the jazz era��that proved, in many ways, the final nail in the coffin of natural pits. That’s when fashionable women decided they needed to heed the advice of Harper’s Bazaar and “remove objectionable hair.” (Even then, they generally didn’t catch on that their legs were similarly “objectionable” until the pin-up girl years of World War II.)
In the decadent fictionalized Germany of “Babylon Berlin,” the female heroine Lotte (in a star-making turn by newcomer Liv Lisa Fries) may be overworked and poor, but she’s trendy enough to��keep her underarms sleek. The dancers at the club where she moonlights, however, run a pleasing gamut of pit styles from bare to bushy. The first time I watched the series’ show-stopping musical number that revealed them, I had to pause my Netflix player to confirm what I was seeing and to��Google whether arm merkins are a thing. Even when popular entertainment magnanimously gives us women with pubes, it rarely depicts them with such genuine, old-fashioned pits.
So deeply mired are we in hairlessness��as the default that when an actress sports body hair in a film or television project, it’s enough to provoke style features on the wig-making process behind it. After all, as “Boardwalk Empire’s” makeup director Nicki Ledermann said in 2010, “Nobody really has hair anymore.” When Olivia Wilde donned a pubic wig for the short-lived “Vinyl,” she went on late night television to apologetically explain, “I was horrified background actors might think this was my real body hair. So I was walking around like ‘WHOA. Check this FAKE merkin out, everyone. It’s not real!'”
No wonder, then, that when a female celebrity audaciously flaunts any body hair outside of a role �����as Julia Roberts, Miley Cyrus, and Madonna have been known to do ��� it’s headline-making. When Moschino recently posted a photo of Cardi B in her retro��’90s ensemble at the Grammys, the Instagram troll population showed up to express shock and dismay at the thin line of hair rising up her abdomen ��� and was quickly schooled by her fans.
But female armpit hair, once all but taboo both on- and offscreen, has of late been making something of a comeback. A 2017 study by the analytic group Mintel found that nearly a quarter of millennial-aged women don’t shave their underarms ��� a dramatic shift from just five years ago, when 95��percent of women 16 to 24 reported they did. They’re shaving their legs less too. Could a pube comeback be far behind?
So��shave, don’t shave, dye it all turquoise like Lady Gaga ��� because female bodily autonomy isn’t just reserved for our insides. And take some inspiration from the new crop of binge-worthy fictional ladies of the past, raising their arms in the air like they were born before Nair.
Life after Beanie Babies: A plush toy titan’s second act
(Credit: Tyler Gillespie)
In the late ’90s, Mickey Krause found her Beanie Baby business starting to crumble. Krause had begun as a St. Louis-based collector, but then, as she says, she ���got caught up in the craze��� and ordered shipments of the plush toys to sell through her registered domain beaniebaby.com. After a lung disease diagnosis, she put the business�������storefront and all�������up for sale at nearly��$1 million.
The timing was unfortunate. The Beanie fad had already faded, and Krause also faced a lawsuit. Ty Inc. had sued her for trademark infringement and unlawful sales.
���I had��fifteen minutes of fame in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch,�����recalled Krause. ���There was a picture of me and a whole article about it.���
On the advice of a bankruptcy lawyer, Krause, then nearing age 50, fled St. Louis. The lawyer recommended she liquidate her assets, then move to either Texas or Florida, she said, because of those states��� homestead laws.
Krause, like many others who need a second chance, chose Florida.
���I sold everything, ended that business, and moved down here,��� she said. ���It was wild.���
Krause technically won the lawsuit. Ty Inc. eventually paid her $3,000 for the domain. But she���d spent so much in legal fees that she couldn���t afford the life Beanie had helped build.
���I was��50 years old and went through the process of figuring out what I want to do when I grow up,��� she said. ���I decided to be an artist.���
Krause took some local art classes and in 2007 pursued a BFA at Sarasota���s Ringling College of Art and Design. The formal school setting ultimately didn���t work for her as she’d hoped, so she withdrew and moved back to Pinellas County, where she��decided to open an art house specifically for disabled, elderly or veteran artists.
���Everyone has a lot on their plates�������disease or broken marriage�������and people are hurting,��� said Rand Marsters, 81, president of the Largo Art Association,��where he met Krause years ago. ���You can encourage people to participate in art where a life could be saved or regenerated.���
In 2014, Krause found a rundown building in Largo, the third largest city in Pinellas behind St. Petersburg and Clearwater. The building featured a painting of Betty Boop on the outside, and Krause mused it may have once operated as a bar. She took out a reverse mortgage on her house, then painted the building her favorite color: pink.
On a December afternoon, two contractors laid tile in a handicap accessible bathroom with a shower for future residents. Near them stood a functional area with a washer and dryer, a table for framing and places for supplies.
A backdoor led to a double lot, which, Krause said, may one day be turned into added storage and a room for a gallery and classes.
���Mickey is certainly someone who takes the ball and runs with it,��� said Marsters.��In 2016, on the advice of a mentor, Krause established the house as the nonprofit Art Lovers Place, Inc. She has since set up crowdfunding sites and partnered with Network for Good.
Interested artists will submit a portfolio. A board will choose the residents who will, Krause said, pay around $150 a month for a key to the house. Krause hasn���t yet put out an official call to other artists because she first wants everything ���to be done,��� which, she said, it almost is.
The process to open Largo Lovers Art House has proven slow ��� there���s currently a glitch with the city on handicap parking�������but it���s one through which Krause has learned much.
���I���m already into phase 2, even though I���m not even out of phase 1,��� she said. ���But that���s the vision I have.���
On top of everything, GOP stinginess could lead to a global pandemic
A microbiologist works with bacteria at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Credit: AP/Branden Camp)
After the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014,��the United States promised to help fight epidemics around the globe and Congress allotted��over $4 billion to quell the contagion and approximately $1 billion for general infectious-disease prevention.
Four years late, that money is nearly dried up, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is preparing to significantly curtail epidemic prevention in 39 countries, The Wall Street Journal first reported.
The five-year package from Congress was part of the Global Health Security Agenda public-health initiative, “a five-year international partnership to improve the health security of developing nations,” Ed Yong of the Atlantic wrote.��Tasked��to stop diseases at their source and prevent them from becoming epidemics, its��effects were substantial.
Yong reported:
Thanks to the GHSA, Uganda now has a secure lab for studying dangerous germs. Tanzania has a digital communications network so people can phone in information on potential outbreaks from remote locations. Liberia has more than 115 frontline disease detectives trained by the CDC. Cameroon shortened its response time to recent outbreaks of cholera and bird flu shortened from 8 weeks to just 24 hours. The DRC controlled an outbreak of yellow fever and built an emergency operations center (EOC)���a kind of war room for responding to outbreaks. But there is still much to do: The DRC, for example, still needs to train staff to run its EOC.
But come September 2019, the money is set to run out. The CDC is already making preparations to downsize in countries notorious for infectious diseases,��including the Democratic Republic of Congo, which recently endured and beat its eighth Ebola outbreak, and China, which is currently experiencing a horrific H7N9 bird flu epidemic.��Haiti, Pakistan and Rwanda are also losing support. Officials say CDC will instead focus its efforts on 10 “priority countries” ��� India, Vietnam, Jordan, Kenya, Uganda, Liberia, Nigeria, Senegal and Guatemala ��� beginning October 2019.
Global health organizations caution that a reduction in epidemic prevention leaves the world vulnerable to future outbreaks and certainly threatens to turn local diseases into pandemics. (Even the flu continues to be deadly.) “We���ll leave the field open to microbes,”��Tom Frieden told the Atlantic. He’s a former CDC director who led the agency during the Ebola and Zika outbreaks and is now in charge of the global disease prevention initiative, Resolve to Save Lives. He continued, “The surveillance systems will die, so we won���t know if something happens. The lab networks won���t be built, so if something happens, we won���t know what it is. We can���t be safe if the world isn���t safe. You can���t pull up the drawbridge and expect viruses not to travel.”
The toll on taxpayers dollars would also be colossal. “The Ebola outbreak cost U.S. taxpayers $5.4 billion in emergency supplemental funding, forced several U.S. cities��to spend millions in containment, disrupted global business and required the��deployment of the U.S. military��to address the threat,” The Washington Post Reported.
Tim Ziemer, the White House senior director for global health security, has stated that the administration wants��the Global Health Security Agenda to continue to 2024. He wrote in October, “We recognize that the cost of failing to control outbreaks and losing lives is far greater than the cost of prevention.” But as of yet, Ziemer’s stated commitment has not been��back by a financial one. It’s possible that Congress will designate funding to GHSA in its next budget��slated for February 12. However, the CDC can’t operate on a possibility and health officials worry the reduction in funding will disrupt the important strides made in the last five years.
“Every time there is an epidemic, the question that always follows is: Why were we so unprepared?” said Nahid Bhadelia, an infectious disease physician from Boston University. “We can���t get rid of programs that literally work toward global-health security and expect that the results of the next epidemic will be any different than the last.”
Pentagon officials fears White House pushing for war with North Korea: report
(Credit: Getty/icholakov)
As if Donald Trump���s Twitter threats to North Korea��weren’t unsettling enough, a new report in the New York Times alleges there exists a��conflict between the White House and Pentagon��over how to handle rising tensions between��the US��and North Korea.
According to officials who spoke to the New York Times, the White House has become irritated��at the Pentagon for being reluctant to give the White House military options on how to address ��Kim Jong-un���s regime. Giving Trump ���too many options��� might ���increase the odds that he will act,” the report states.
The Times continued:
The national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, believes that for Mr. Trump���s warnings to North Korea to be credible, the United States must have well-developed military plans, according to those officials.
But the Pentagon, they say, is worried that the White House is moving too hastily toward military action on the Korean Peninsula that could escalate catastrophically. Giving the president too many options, the officials said, could increase the odds that he will act.
While the Times’ sources are anonymous, the article��references��a move the White House made this week which exemplifies the alleged Pentagon-White House conflict, which was to forgo nominating Victor D. Cha as ambassador to South Korea, as reported by the Washington Post. The nomination was allegedly dropped because Cha raised concerns over the possibility of a preventative strike, known as the ���bloody nose strategy.” According to the Wall Street Journal, the��“bloody nose strategy”��would be a plan in which the U.S. would ���react to some nuclear or missile test with a targeted strike against a North Korean facility to bloody Pyongyang���s nose and illustrate the high price the regime could pay for its behavior.���
Indeed this is aligned with Cha’s perspective. Cha wrote an opinion piece in the Washington Post that giving North Korea a ���bloody nose��� would likely ��kill ���tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Americans.���
Cha explained:
���Some have argued the risks are still worth taking because it���s better that people die ���over there��� than ���over here,��� On any given day, there are 230,000 Americans in South Korea and 90,000 or so in Japan. Given that an evacuation of so many citizens would be virtually impossible under a rain of North Korean artillery and missiles (potentially laced with biochemical weapons), these Americans would most likely have to hunker down until the war was over.���
An alternative plan, Cha suggested,��would be��to pressure North Korea to remove their nuclear weapons, but this plan would require more strategic, diplomatic steps from the U.S.���such as strengthen its alliance with Japan and South Korea and the coalition of U.N. member states.
���This strategy is likely to deliver the same potential benefits as a limited strike, along with other advantages, without the self-destructive costs,��� Cha wrote.
According to the New York Times, the alleged conflict between Pentagon officials and White House officials dates back to last summer. However,��Pentagon press secretary told the Times that reports of a delay in providing the White House with military options were ���false.���
Fear and��the ongoing threat��of preventative attack��linger in some parts of Asia though.��On Jan. 22, Tokyo conducted its first missile drill since World War Two.
Mo’Nique’s Netflix deal was way worse than previously thought
Mo'Nique (Credit: AP/Willy Sanjuan)
New details have emerged about comedian and actor Mo’Nique’s negotiations with Netflix for a comedy special. After previously calling for a boycott of the industry-leading��streaming service��for gender and racial bias,��the performer has come forward with a��screenshot��of what she alleges is the contract it offered her. If these are indeed the terms offered, their revelation casts the company in the worst of lights.
Not only does the email containing the terms��show��that Netflix offered the��Oscar-winning and veteran comic��$500,000 for a one-hour special as she claimed before, but the stipulations for this deal are questionable and exhaustive.
For a year following the special’s premiere, the terms��would have barred��Mo’Nique from taping or negotiating another comedy special with any third party.
As well, Netflix would have retained rights��of first��negotiation once those 12 months were upand she would only be able to tape a special with��another company if Netflix passed. Essentially, this was not a contract for��one��show. Rather, Netflix would have owned her broadcast rights for up to two years or more.
It doesn’t end there. For the two years after the premiere of her special, Netflix asked that “Mo’Nique not perform or use the material from our special in any recorded program (audio-only or audio-visual work), then we ask for a first negotiation/first refusal right after the 24 months in the event that she does want to use the material elsewhere.” More or less, Netflix wouldn’t have just had possession of the produced show, but the content therein, forcing her to develop entirely new material for touring, which is the lifeblood of any working comedian. Here,��Netflix is essentially proposing to own the comedian and her jokes for the next two years for $500,000 ��� a��very��bad deal.
A post shared by Mo’nique (@therealmoworldwide) on Jan 31, 2018 at 8:50am PST
On January 19, Mo’Nique posted an Instagram video asking people to boycott Netflix alleging��alleging color and gender bias.��There, Mo’Nique shared��few details, other than��that she had been��offered $500,000 for a comedy special, while other comedians like Amy Schumer were offered $11 million, and even negotiated $2 million more, and Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle were offered $20 million. It is fully unclear if those performers also had to sign their jokes and future broadcast rights away.
�� #BOYCOTT#NETFLIX FOR #COLORBIAS AND #GENDERBIAS. PLEASE STAND WITH ME. I LOVE US. �� A post shared by Mo’nique (@therealmoworldwide) on Jan 19, 2018 at 5:54am PST
From the beginning, many on social media responded��negatively to Mo’Nique’s call for a boycott.��Some questioned her relevancy, especially compared to the comedy stars she mentioned (though there was little reference to Dave Chappelle’s decade-plus hiatus). A few days after Mo’Nique came forward, however, comedian Wanda Sykes revealed that she too was lowballed by Netflix and offered $250,000 for a comedy special. It’s unclear what terms were included in her contract.
.@moworldwide, thank you for speaking out. @netflix offered me less than half of your $500k. I was offended but found another home. #EPIX
— Official Wanda Sykes (@iamwandasykes) January 21, 2018
Jada Pinkett Smith also fired off a couple of nuanced tweets saying, “You don���t have to like Mo���Nique���s approach. You don���t have to agree with her boycott but don���t allow all of that to make you blind to the fact that non-white women and impoverished white women are underpaid, underrepresented and undervalued EVERYWHERE by EVERYONE.”
You don���t have to like Mo���Nique���s approach. You don���t have to agree with her boycott but don���t allow all of that to make you blind to the fact that non-white women and impoverished white women are underpaid, underrepresented and undervalued EVERYWHERE by EVERYONE.
— Jada Pinkett Smith (@jadapsmith) January 23, 2018
Still, the backlash continued for Mo’Nique. Reports began circling (albeit on gossip blogs) that she was offered $3 million; that she was asked to audition for Netflix’s staff; that the money was reflective of her reputation for being hard to work with. But as comedian Liz Barlow wrote for Huff Post, “we do not need her to be perfect to say that she is correct about systematic inequality. . .��Paying black women less than a man or a white woman to do the the same job is as American as apple pie.”
In the era of Time’s Up, where gender pay disparity has become a more pressing question in the��TV and film industry, acknowledging and addressing the double oppression suffered by women of color ��� and black women entertainers��specifically ��� face seems more necessary than ever. Some are taking steps to do exactly that.
Recently, white actor��Jessica Chastain tied her compensation to black actor Octavia Spencer’s�� while negotiating pay for an upcoming film.��There, listened to Spencer’s, and women of color’s experiences at large of pay disparity, and used her privilege to ensure both stars were compensated fairly. But none of that would have been��necessary if more people were geared to listen to and believe black women when they speak on their own behalves.
Now that Mo’Nique has proof of Netflix’s proposed contract,��maybe a few more will be ready to do that.
Football is as popular as ever, and dying
Philadelphia Eagles' Destiny Vaeao hits Minnesota Vikings' Jerick McKinnon. (Credit: AP/Patrick Semansky)
Two new polls reveal that, while Americans continue to love watching football, lingering concern about the long-term impact of concussions is changing their outlook on the game.
Forty-eight percent of all Americans and 46 percent of all parents say that they would encourage a child interested in playing football to pursue another sport, according to a new poll by NBC News/Wall Street Journal. This��marks an increase of nine percentage points among all parents and an increase of eight percentage points among all Americans since 2014. The figures also included 53 percent of mothers and 39 percent of fathers who said that they would want their child to play a different sport to avoid concussions. Only 33 percent of fathers would support their child’s decision, meaning even that even among that comparatively favorable group, there were still more of them opposed than supportive.
The poll also found that Americans tend to disapprove of how the NFL has addressed concerns about concussions. There was a drop in eight percentage points since 2014 in the Americans who believed that the NFL had taken meaningful action to reduce and prevent concussions, from 41 percent to 33 percent. By contrast, 28 percent said that the NFL has not taken meaningful action, an increase in eight percentage points since 2014.
Even the legendary, hard-nosed, hard-driving quarterback Brett Farve has become among��those who doubt football’s future as a youth sport, saying that he cringes when he sees, “little kids out playing, and they���re all decked out in their football gear and the helmet looks like it���s three times bigger than they are. It���s kind of funny, but it���s not as funny now as it was years ago, because of what we know now.” He continues, “I just cringe seeing a fragile little boy get tackled and the people ooh and ahh and they just don���t know. Or they don���t care. It���s just so scary.”
What this points to is a future of possibly fewer children��entering the game, fewer teens becoming fully fluent in it by high-school graduation, fewer collegiate athletes reaching the same levels of excellence as had been seen in previous generations and thus, in time, a poorer final product at the professional level, one that may not be able to sustain the outsized ratings and profits the league currently maintains. Should this grim vision come to pass, it would create a feedback loop of lessened general interest leading to successive generations of smaller talent pools and play of diminished quality, thus leading to even less interest.
Yet not all of the recent polling has bad news for the state of football. PRRI’s 2017 and 2018 annual sports and society poll found that 38 percent of Americans prefer to watch football over any other sport, which is just 3 percentage points shy of the��combined��percentage of Americans who prefer auto racing, baseball, basketball, hockey and soccer (41 percent).
In the end, football is still America’s game, but��it’s future in America is appears very much in doubt.
The Nunes memo raises far more questions than it answers
Devin Nunes; Donald Trump; Paul Ryan (Credit: Getty/AP/Salom)
Friday’s release of the controversial Republican memorandum discussing the early stages of the federal investigation into connections between Russia and the 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump stirred up a media fuss but the Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee seem only to have invited more questions about their document than they answered.
Congressional Democrats pushed back vigorously against the memo’s conclusions that the FBI had relied heavily on information compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele in seeking court authorization to monitor the communications of former Trump aide Carter Page. They also accused House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., of instructing his staff to deliberately omit key information that ran counter to his conclusions when writing the document.
���Unlike almost every House member who voted in favor of this memo���s release, I have actually read the underlying documents on which the memo was based. They simply do not support its conclusions,��� said Virginia Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
In a call with reporters, Rep. Adam Schiff, Nunes’ Democratic counterpart on the House Intelligence Committee and a fellow Californian, accused Nunes of utilizing ���cherry-picked information��� from classified testimony delivered by former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe about how heavily the agency had relied upon the Steele dossier. According to Schiff, McCabe had said that the investigation would have started and continued independently of Steele’s allegations.
The Nunes document admits that the FBI had utilized other information sources in its first October 2016 request to spy on Page but claims that when it later applied for a court renewal of its surveillance, it referenced Steele’s research without fully disclosing that it had been paid for by the Democratic National Committee.
Page came to the attention of U.S. intelligence agencies after he made several contacts with individuals believed to be agents of the Russian government. In July of 2016, he traveled to the country and gave a strongly pro-Putin speech. Initially, some former Trump associates claimed to have not known of his trip but after Page testified before the House Intelligence Committee, they acknowledged he had informed them of the trip. The New York Times reported that in 2013, Russian operatives had tried to develop Page, a former energy investment fund operator, into an intelligence asset. According to the Times, they eventually abandoned their efforts, allegedly calling Page an ���idiot.���
Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain, chair of the chamber���s Armed Services Committee, expressed anger at unspecified ���partisan attacks on the FBI and DOJ��� which he said improperly undermined confidence in the Russia investigation of special counsel Robert Mueller.
���The latest attacks on the FBI and Department of Justice serve no American interests ��� no party���s, no president���s, only Putin���s,��� he said in a statement. ���The American people deserve to know all of the facts surrounding Russia���s ongoing efforts to subvert our democracy, which is why Special Counsel Mueller���s investigation must proceed unimpeded. Our nation���s elected officials, including the president, must stop looking at this investigation through the warped lens of politics and manufacturing partisan sideshows. If we continue to undermine our own rule of law, we are doing Putin���s job for him.���
Christopher Anders, a lobbyist with the American Civil Liberties Union, said that the allegation that federal investigators withheld relevant information about the funding and motivation of Steele’s investigation were “serious charges” but he did not believe that Nunes memo included enough information to substantiate the allegations.
���Rather than one side or the other cherry-picking facts, all Americans deserve to see all of the facts, including both the minority report and the underlying documents,��� he said.
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., commended the release of the Nunes memo but called for the de-classification of the Democratic response.
���I am glad that this memo helps to provide greater transparency, and I reiterate my support for the similar release of the minority���s memo once it is properly scrubbed of all intelligence sources and methods,��� he said.
Many members of Ryan���s caucus have been promoting the GOP intelligence committee memo for weeks, claiming it would lead to many firings. Several right-wing media outlets have extended those criticisms much further, even to the point of claiming that law enforcement officials and Trump���s political opponents are guilty of ���treason��� and deserve the death penalty.
Scott Pruitt had climate change removed from EPA website: report
(Credit: AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki, File)
In the past year, the Environmental Protection Agency has methodologically removed references to climate change and the long-term effects of carbon pollution on the environment from the EPA website. According to a report, that purge was not only intentional, it was partially orchestrated by EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt.
The internal messages from April 2017 were released this week due to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Environmental Defense Fund, according to CBS News. In those messages, employees��said that Pruitt wanted updates to the EPA’s website to be completed as quickly as possible by the career staffers. He even offered specific suggestions about what he wanted to see.
Pruitt’s deputy associate administrator for Public Affairs sent an email to staffers on April 1, insisting that they promote Trump’s directive rescinding the Clean Power Plan.
“We need to start building an updated page for the clean power plan ASAP with the goal of having it go live sometime on Monday. Is there any way we can get a little time put in on this project over the weekend so that we’re off on the right foot on Monday morning?” Pruitt wrote.
Those emails were part of a larger series of changes that included removing data regarding man-made climate change, which Trump and Pruitt have both long denied exists. Among other things, this philosophy caused Trump to eliminate the climate change page from the EPA’s website in January 2017, pursue a policy wish list on environmental issues recommended to him by a powerful energy executive and pull America out of the Paris climate accord. Pruitt himself has been criticized for regularly meeting with energy executives.
Turning point in fight to stop child deaths from window blinds
(Credit: AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Sales of most corded window blinds and shades ��� products blamed for the strangulation deaths of more than 300 U.S. infants and toddlers since 1981 ��� will come to an end late this year.
The decision last week by the window covering industry to quit selling the items in the U.S. and Canada is a milestone following decades of stopgap safety measures and public clamor to do more to protect children. It means that, starting Dec. 15, retailers will stop offering most window coverings with pull strings and cords, unless the cords are placed in a way that keeps them out of the grasp of children and other consumers.
However, the industry decision to embrace what is the latest version of a voluntary safety standard falls short of complete victory for consumer advocates. It won���t apply to custom-order blinds and shades, which the industry says account for about 20 percent of the market, although these products will be subjected to some new safety requirements.
The custom-order exclusion was a disappointment for Linda Kaiser, president of Parents for Window Blind Safety, a grassroots group that she founded in 2002 after her daughter Cheyenne was killed in her crib. Kaiser also expressed concern about how strictly the ban on standard blinds and shades will be enforced. Still, she said she was hopeful that eliminating cords on standard window coverings will reduce future deaths and injuries.
In addition, Kaiser views the decision as a reversal for an industry that safety advocates say has long exploited a loophole in the federal rule-making process to avoid making more substantial improvements. As Kaiser put it, ���They finally said ���uncle.������
Window blind injuries were first identified in medical literature in 1945. In 1981, federal regulators cited window blind cords as a cause of strangulation deaths among children under five. A Consumer Product Safety Commission report at the time called the cords ���a particularly insidious hazard.���
Deaths of at least 332 children
Since then, at least 332 children, most under the age of two, have been fatally strangled by window cords, according to federal data. Kaiser���s group has identified another 177 cases where children have suffered grievous injuries, including permanent brain damage or quadriplegia requiring lifelong care and therapy.
The mounting deaths and injuries have highlighted weaknesses in the ability of the CPSC to protect the public. Under the law, the agency is required to defer to industries that are developing manufacturing standards voluntarily rather than imposing mandatory federal rules; the theory is that industries have a strong incentive to keep their products safe.
From 1994 to 2012, an industry trade group, the Window Covering Manufacturers Association, invoked the voluntary standards process a half-dozen times. It recommended design and other changes to window blinds and shades, but refused to banish cords, which consumer groups and CPSC staff saw as key to saving lives. In 2014, the CPSC began developing a mandatory government standard that would have required all window coverings to be cordless or have inaccessible cords. That work never was completed, however, and with the commission heading toward switching to a 3-2 Republican majority under the Trump administration, experts believe the initiative is dead.
Paul Nathanson, a spokesman for the manufacturers association, said new developments in cordless technology finally have made it possible for the industry to take its new voluntary safety action.
The longtime barrier was the presence of ���thousands of types of window covering products. We could not wave a magic wand and make them all cordless,��� Nathanson said. But now, he added, ���Technology has got to the point where we can offer what consumers demand.���
“Significant and immediate impact”
In a press release, Ralph Vasami, executive director of the manufacturers association, said the steps the industry has adopted ���would have the most significant and immediate impact on reducing the strangulation risk to young children.���
Safety advocates, though, said there was no justification to ban cords on some products but not others. They predicted it would lead to consumer confusion, and more tragedy.
���We have known about this hazard for more than 70 years,��� said Gary Smith, a pediatrician who heads the Center for Injury Research and Policy at the Nationwide Children���s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. ���The fact that the industry will not go the final step and simply eliminate all products that access cords just is beyond my comprehension.���
Smith co-authored a new study in the journal Pediatrics that counted 16,827 window blind-related injuries among children younger than age 6 who were treated in emergency departments from 1990 to 2015. Among those, 11.9 percent, or more than 2,000, involved entanglement injuries. While many injuries were minor, others required hospitalization or were fatal.
The manufacturers association said some corded blinds are ���needed by a wide range of consumers, including the elderly and those with disabilities, those short in stature, and those with windows in hard to reach locations.��� While industry officials noted that many custom blinds are available without cords, retailers said consumers are likely to buy ones with cords because they are much cheaper than equivalent cordless models.
���People are going to choose by price, and buy the product with the cord,��� said Al Silverberg, CEO of SelectBlinds.Com, an online retailer that two years ago decided to quit selling corded blinds for safety reasons. Sales were so poor, he says, he was forced to reinstate corded options to stay afloat.
Jeremy Eastburn���s daughter, Presley, died in December 2016 after being strangled on a custom window blind the family bought for their new home near Houston. He said the seller provided assurance that the corded blinds were safe. Presley, 4, was watching cartoons in the media room, while Eastburn���s wife , Carolyn, was folding laundry in the bedroom down the hall.
���She had been separated from my wife for maybe 10 minutes,��� Eastburn said. ���My wife went into the room ��� and my daughter was hanging from the cord in the window.��� Presley died at a hospital four days later.
Eastburn took little comfort in the industry���s new safety plan. He says it, like previous voluntary standards, has no teeth. With window blinds, he said, ���up until now, the only consequences have been our dead children.���
Vasami, of the manufacturers association, said in the press release that companies will have to comply with the new voluntary standard ���or face enforcement action by the CPSC��� and other possible legal action.
But unlike a mandatory federal standard, the agency can only enforce a voluntary standard by going to court and showing that the non-compliance was unreasonable. Consumer groups doubt that the CPSC, once it switches to Republican control, would have much interest in doing that.
“So much more work to do”
Elliot Kaye, a CPSC commissioner who chaired the agency during the Obama administration, said ���it was extremely unfortunate and misleading��� for the industry to claim in its news release that the new voluntary standard ���was on par with a mandatory standard because it isn���t.���
���There���s no doubt this is a positive development. It would be disingenuous to say otherwise,��� he added. ���But there is so much more work to do.���
���They made a commitment to keep going and finish the job,��� Kaye said, referring to a new task force the industry said it was creating to study further safety enhancements for custom products. ���We expect them to live up to that commitment.��� Kaye would also like the industry to offer incentives for consumers to swap out hazardous old blinds for safer cordless ones.
Kaiser said she is concerned that a flood of corded window blinds will be dumped on the market this year at deep discounts and bought by consumers unaware of, or not concerned about, the safety hazards.
Nathanson, the manufacturers association spokesman, said he doubts that will happen. ���We have responsible members,��� he said. ���This has been in the works for a long time. I think manufacturers knew this was coming, and as always, they will respond in a responsible manner.���
