Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 274

A thwarted airport bombing receives little national press — and some activists cry foul

Michael Christopher Estes (Credit: Buncombe County Detention Center)

Major news outlets were remarkably quiet after last Friday’s arrest of Michael Christopher Estes, who planted an improvised explosive device in a North Carolina airport and later admitted he was “preparing to fight a war on U.S. soil.” That this homegrown terrorist slipped past major media outlets has some critics crying foul over the media’s double-standard for terrorists who don’t fit the popular image and narrative of what a “terrorist” looks like.

On Friday, October 6, just before 1 a.m., a man dressed in all-black walked into the Asheville Regional Airport and set down a unattended bag, as security footage shows, according to a criminal complaint filed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

“Based on a review of the video, the individual walked near the entrance to the terminal, went out of sight momentarily, and was then seen departing the area without the bag,” the criminal complaint read.

After a police dog sniffed out what was presumed to be explosive material, authorities at the airport closed the concourse and the street leading to the airport.

Inside the bag authorities found a cocktail of ammonium nitrate, fuel oil, and a Mason jar full of shrapnel — a common design of explosive device, as the FBI attested in the affidavit. This bomb design has been used “in a number of terrorist-related incidents around the world,” the criminal complaint continued. “When [ammonium nitrate and fuel oil] comes into contact with a flame or other ignition source it explodes violently. Nails or ball bearings are often items added to the device so as to increase the devastation inflicted by the explosion.”

A timer revealed that the bag was set to explode at 6 a.m. the following morning, and would have unleashed immense damage on travelers.

Critics suggest that the incident received little attention because the alleged terrorist, Michael Christopher Estes, did not fit the profile of a terrorist that feeds sensationalist and scaremongering headlines. Indeed, Estes was both white, and not a Muslim.

The profile of Estes is politically relevant, as President Donald Trump often jumps at the opportunity to declare violent acts “terrorism” solely because of the profile of the perpetrator. Trump has also ignored or washed over acts of terrorism when they are perpetrated by right-wing and/or white suspects.  Likewise, Trump has used fear of terrorism as a justification for banning travel from Muslim-majority nations.

“Sorry if it sounds like you’ve heard this story before,” wrote The Intercept’s Shaun King. “I’m as tired of writing it as you are reading it, but you know good and well that if Estes was a young Muslim — hell, if he had ever even visited a mosque in the past 25 years — that Trump would be tweeting about him right this very moment to tout how essential a Muslim ban is for American safety.”

“His actions aren’t an indictment of his whole faith, political outlook, and race. White people aren’t, thanks to Estes, suddenly labeled terrorists or seen as a threat to American safety in the way that would almost certainly happen had it been anybody other than a white man,” King added.

The situation draws similarities to the circumstances surrounding the recent mass shooting in Las Vegas, which was carried out by Stephen Paddock, a white man. Critics content that Trump’s reaction wasn’t comparable to how he would react were the assailant a person of color.

As Salon’s Chauncey DeVega wrote:

Whenever a white man commits an act of mass gun violence in America — politically motivated or otherwise — there is a cultural script that is closely followed by the mainstream news media, politicians and too many members of the public. This narrative is obvious and predictable. Alas, it provides some small measure of comfort to many, even if that familiarity is rooted in gross hypocrisy and flagrant contradictions.

[…]

When white folks commit horrible crimes their actions are often placed in a context where they are described as “good people” and “all American.” This is all so “surprising” and “unimaginable,” we are told, because this person was so “ordinary.” By comparison, when black or brown folks or Muslims commit horrible crimes they are usually depicted as one-dimensional monsters.

“American Horror Story: Cult” censored itself after Las Vegas, and won

Sarah Paulson as Ally Mayfair-Richards in "American Horror Story: Cult" (Credit: FX/Frank Ockenfels)

Gun violence is so thoroughly integrated into American popular culture that nearly every headline-making mass shooting is accompanied delayed film release or pulled television episode that features multiple shootings or contains a firearm-themed storyline.

This time, in the wake of October 1’s mass shooting Las Vegas, FX had to make a call with regard to “American Horror Story: Cult,” the seventh season of Ryan Murphy’s horror anthology series. This week’s episode, “Mid-Western Assassin,” is bookended by two perspectives of the same murderous shooting spree in the season’s suburban Michigan setting, one seen by a survivor, the other revealing its perpetrator. It was filmed two months ago.

FX could have chosen to delay the airing of “Mid-Western Assassin” — a standard practice in these increasingly common situations – but given the highly serialized format of “American Horror Story” pulling it completely was out of the question. Instead, Ryan Murphy and FX chose to make substantial edits to the opening scene, as FX announced via press release on Monday.

“American Horror Story: Cult” is, at its good moments, a politically-themed vivisection of the deterioration of America’s already battered and frayed cultural fabric. Murphy, co-creator Brad Falchuk and their writers cavort through a long list of symptoms and ills including political correctness run amok, the proliferation of fake news, divisive political rhetoric, racism, sexism, hollow promise of protection offered by guns. All of these have a common root in fear and its corrosive effects on reason and courage.

When faced with the depressing conundrum of what they should do of the upcoming episode, Murphy chose to keep as much of the opening scene as would be required to maintain the continuity of the tale.

“American Horror Story: Cult” sets up this turn in early in the season as phobia-riddled ultra-liberal Ally (Sarah Paulson) finds herself under siege on all sides by a gang of homicidal maniacs in clown masks. They’re everywhere – in the grocery store, in her home. They gruesomely butcher the neighbors, smearing the walls with their blood. Soon Ally procures a gun, thinking that will keep her family safe. Instead she accidentally shoots a friend.

A few episodes later arrives “Mid-Western Assassin.”

Absent from the censored version that aired Tuesday night is around 45 seconds of content. The episode opens the same way, with a tight shot of the American flag fluttering in the wind as the season’s antagonist, city council candidate and cult mastermind Kai (Evan Peters) stumps at a campaign rally. Then the sounds of gunshots ring out. The scene cuts to the crowd and Ally’s wife Ivy (Alison Pill) attempting to flee before her neighbor Harrison (Billy Eichner) shoves her behind a fountain to take cover. She sits frozen, a hand clapped over her mouth, the cops close in and disarm the shooter, who appears to Ally.

In the original version, as Ivy is running, a man behind her takes a bullet and tumbles into the fountain. Another man gets up, crouching, and attempts to lead her to a safer place, only to be shot himself. Injured, he reaches for her, and as she takes his hand he’s shot again, this time fatally. All of this can be seen in the original edit, currently streaming online. Of course, you’d have to want to watch, and that’s a question you’ll have to answer for yourself.

Knowing that the full scene can be viewed anyway may lead some people to question why Murphy would make these cuts in the first place. If part of perpetuating American’s gun violence epidemic involves our unwillingness to face its consequences head on, why not leave the episodes as they are and let them air?

There’s no single answer to those question, because a matter of putting each episode, and event, into context.

Yanking or delaying television scheduled in close proximity to a mass shooting is a lot easier to do than editing one. In July 2016, the debut of USA’s television adaption of “Shooter” was postponed by a week after a sniper gunned down five police officers in downtown Dallas.

Days after the bombing of the Boston Marathon in April 2013, NBC’s “Revolution,” ABC’s “Castle, and episodes of “New Girl” and “Family Guy” were delayed or swapped out in a show of respect to victims. Even “Friends” had to reshoot a scene after 9/11 because of a gang involving a bomb. Before that, in April 1999, the mass shootings at Columbine High School prompted The WB to shelve two episodes of “Buffy The Vampire Slayer,” eventually airing them over the summer. The list is longer than this, expanding back to the earliest days of television to include “The Alfred Hitchcock Hour” and “The Joey Bishop Show.”

The case of “AHS: Cult” bears more similarities to a fate that befell a 2013 episode of NBC’s “Hannibal,” titled “Ceuf,” which was removed from the on-air schedule entirely following the Boston Marathon bombing. It was then sliced down to include only the elements necessary to bridge the plot between what happens in the hour before and what comes after, and surfaced online. Of course, like the original “Mid-Western Assassin,” if you want to see the entire meal you can track it down.

Mind you, there are cases where networks can overreact; as recently as June of this year, NBC pulled an episode of “The Carmichael Show” called “Shoot-Up-Able” after a gunman opened fire on a congressional softball practice session in Virginia. In it, the main character gets home late and blithely explains to his girlfriend he was held up by a mall shooting, intent on going about his day as if nothing unusual had occurred.

Similarly, “Shoot-Up-Able” is presented like a regular comedy episode, including peals of laughter from the studio audience, all of which feels weird and off-putting. Only by watching the denouement does the viewer understand that the disconnect between the comedy and the horror is done on purpose.

“Shoot-Up-Able” is a response to gun violence that posits anytime this happens, we’re all victims – and it warns that the sheer frequency of mass shootings can have the effect of numbing us to the depravity of it, of making it commonplace.

Editing “Mid-Western Assassin” serves a similar purpose, though with slightly different reasons. “AHS: Cult” is utterly baroque in its presentation gore. It hosts a Grand Guignol-level of exploitation, here to inflate the absurdity of America’s fetishizing of violence and blood and, yes, guns.

It also had the miserable coincidence of being scheduled a week after the worst mass shooting committed by a single yet in American history. It would have come at the tail of unceasing replays of mobile-phone footage of the horror as it happened, of analysts struggling to pinpoint a reason for it all, of waves upon waves of screaming about the appropriateness of gun control. Reality has already depressed many of us into a state of near catatonia, so what purpose would it serve to shows us fictionalized carnage on top of all that, in full?

FX and Murphy had the choice between editing and running Tuesday’s “AHS: Cult” episode, or cowering by delay or omission. They chose the former, and handling it with careful consideration, losing none of the horror for their efforts.

Right-wing Sinclair Broadcast Group snubs FCC, gets away with it

Sinclair Broadcast Group, Inc.'s headquarters (Credit: AP/Steve Ruark)

Sinclair Broadcast Group is planning to merge with Tribune Media Company, in a deal that would make it the nation’s largest broadcaster. Yet in the process, the conglomerate has refused to honor a request from the Federal Communications Commission: a list of TV stations it has to sell in order to meet ownership limits.

In a document filed on Thursday, Sinclair said licenses in at least two markets would have to be sold to meet current national TV station ownership limits, the Baltimore Sun reported.

The lack of transparency in the merger poses a unique and seldom-discussed threat to newsrooms across the country.

If the $3.9 billion merger with Tribune Media Co. is approved, the broadcaster would own 233 television stations and reach 72 percent of households in the country, the Sun reported.

HBO late-night host John Oliver previously blasted the broadcast group for its injection of right-wing viewpoints into news segments, as well as its “must run” segments, which feature Sinclair executive Mark Hyman and political analyst Boris Epshteyn, a former senior adviser to President Donald Trump’s campaign.

Oliver said more people should be aware of the “potential problems in corporate consolidation of local news.”

The relationship between news media and the federal government has been on the public’s mind lately. President Trump has been openly hostile towards journalists since his campaign days; he tweeted on Wednesday that NBC should have its broadcasting license revoked and told a reporter that he thought it was “frankly disgusting [that] the press is able to write whatever it wants.” Yet his animus towards news media extends only to those who are critical of him, and his administration is poised to quietly green-light a massive media merger for a company infamous for its strong conservative biases.

Meanwhile, rather than fulfill the FCC’s request to provide information on specific station sales, Sinclair hired the investment bank Moelis & Company “to help it identify potential buyers.”

“Moelis has contacted a substantial number of potential buyers, consisting of both broadcasters and financial investor/management teams, many of which have signed non-disclosure agreements,” Sinclair said in the filing, the Baltimore Sun reported. “The outcomes of negotiations with potential buyers could impact the license divestitures Sinclair would make.”

The Sun elaborated:

The U.S. Department of Justice also is reviewing the proposed deal and is expected to complete that by the end of the year. Because the Justice Department could require specific divestitures of TV stations, it’s premature for Sinclair to finalize divestiture plans before then, the company said.

Approval of the acquisition has appeared likely because the FCC recently relaxed rules for broadcast station ownership. The proposal has generated opposition from groups such as Dish Network LLC, the American Cable Association, Free Press, Public Knowledge and Common Cause. Opponents say the deal will hurt media competition and consumers.

Regardless of Sinclair’s disregard for the FCC’s rules, the agency is likely to approve the merger.

Cara Delevingne details harrowing, homophobic encounter with Harvey Weinstein

Cara Delevingne (Credit: AP/Alastair Grant)

Following a day of bombshell revelations from Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie, Asia Argento, Rosanna Arquette, Mira Sorvino and others regarding film studio executive Harvey Weinstein’s history of abuse, British actress and supermodel Cara Delevingne shared a harrowing story of her own encounter with the increasingly friendless producer.

Via her Instagram account, Delevingne detailed a disturbing run-in with Weinstein that she claims happened some two years ago, one that involved not only unwanted advances and underhanded threats, but homophobic jabs from Weinstein. Delevingne was most likely 23 at the time — roughly the same age Paltrow, Jolie, Argento and others were at the times they allege he abused them.

“When I first started to work as an actress, I was working on a film and I received a call from‎ Harvey Weinstein asking if I had slept with any of the women I was seen out with in the media,” Delevingne wrote. Delevingne is bisexual and has been spotted with famous figures such as Michelle Rodriguez and St. Vincent (Annie Clark).

“It was a very odd and uncomfortable call,” she continued. “I answered none of his questions and hurried off the phone but before I hung up, he said to me that If I was gay or decided to be with a woman especially in public that I’d never get the role of a straight woman or make it as an actress in Hollywood.” This alleged statement is striking given that Weinstein produced the pro-LGBTQ film “Carol” and other enlightened projects.

“A year or two later,” she continued, “I went to a meeting with him in the lobby of a hotel with a director about an upcoming film. The director left the meeting and Harvey asked me to stay and chat with him. As soon as we were alone he began to brag about all the actresses he had slept with and how he had made their careers and spoke about other inappropriate things of a sexual nature.”

According to Delevingne, Weinstein then engaged in what has now become pattern familiar throughout the many allegations attached to him “He then invited me to his room,” she says. “I quickly declined and asked his assistant if my car was outside. She said it wasn’t and wouldn’t be for a bit and I should go to his room.”

“At that moment I felt very powerless and scared but didn’t want to act that way hoping that I was wrong about the situation,” Delevingne continued. “When I arrived I was relieved to find another woman in his room and thought immediately I was safe.” She was wrong.

“[Weinstein] asked us to kiss and she began some sort of advances upon his direction,” she says. “I swiftly got up and asked him if he knew that I could sing. And I began to sing . . . I thought it would make the situation better . . more professional . . . like an audition . . . I was so nervous.” The gambit did not quite work.

“After singing I said again that I had to leave,” claims Delevingne. “He walked me to the door and stood in front of it and tried to kiss me on the lips. I stopped him and managed to get out of the room.”

Unlike others, Delevingne avoided a full assault. Yet the effects were considerable. “I still got the part for the film and always thought that he gave it to me because of what happened,” she said. “Since then I felt awful that I did the movie. I felt like I didn’t deserve the part.”

The sole movie featuring Delevingne on The Weinstein Company’s slate is the long-delayed “Tulip Fever.” Delevingne was cast in 2014, the same year production on the film started and ended. It debuted in limited release this September.

From there, she mirrors much of what other women have been saying about Weinstein and what women everywhere say about their abusers. “I was so hesitant about speaking out . . . I didn’t want to hurt his family. I felt guilty as if I did something wrong. I was also terrified that this sort of thing had happened to so many women I know but no one had said anything because of fear.”

As new elements to Weinstein’s story continue to spill out at a frantic rate, Delevingne is not the only young star to have detailed such an encounter with the producer today. Among others is French actor Léa Seydoux, who claimed Weinstein assaulted her at the Hôtel Plaza Athénée around 2012. She would have been 25 at the time.

“We were talking on the sofa when he suddenly jumped on me and tried to kiss me,” Seydoux told the Guardian. “I had to defend myself. He’s big and fat, so I had to be forceful to resist him.” She continued, “I left his room, thoroughly disgusted. I wasn’t afraid of him, though. Because I knew what kind of man he was all along.”

“He tried more than once,” she added, “I pushed him physically. I think he respected me because I resisted him.” Seydoux described the producer, in his late 50s at the time, as “losing control.”

Again, Seydoux’s account aligns with many others. This was never going to be about work,” she said. “He had other intentions – I could see that very clearly . . . All throughout the evening, he flirted and stared at me as if I was a piece of meat. It was hard to say no because he’s so powerful. I’m an actress and he’s a producer. My agent at the time said to stay far [away from him] and be polite.”

She notes that she did not speak out due to fear of career repercussions, and saw him regularly at events. “We are in the same industry, so its impossible to avoid him. I’ve seen how he operates: the way he looks for an opening. The way he tests women to see what he can get away with.”

She ended, “That’s the most disgusting thing. Everyone knew what Harvey was up to and no one did anything. It’s unbelievable that he’s been able to act like this for decades and still keep his career.”

Currently, Weinstein has been fired from the company he founded; the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, the organization behind the Oscars, is working to revoke his membership. Even The Weinstein Company has announced it will change it name. Still, it took no less than 30 years of abuse, some of it well-documented, for any of that to happen.

Training new doctors right where they’re needed

(Credit: AP)

Dr. Olga Meave didn’t mind the dry, 105-degree heat that scorched this Central Valley city on a recent afternoon.

The sweltering summer days remind her of home in Sonora, Mexico. So do the people of the Valley — especially the Latino first-generation immigrants present here in large numbers, toiling in the fields or piloting big rigs laden with fruits and vegetables.

Meave’s sense of familiarity with the region and its residents drew her to an ambitious program in Bakersfield whose goal is to train and retain doctors in medically underserved areas.

She is now in her third and final year of the Rio Bravo Family Medicine Residency Program, operated by Clinica Sierra Vista, a chain of more than 30 clinics, mostly in the Central Valley. Meave, 34, graduated from medical school in Mexico and has pursued additional education and training in the U.S.

She plans to practice in Bakersfield after she completes her residency next year.

“The goal is for [doctors in training] to come for three years and stay for 20,” said Carol Stewart, director of the program.

Rio Bravo is one of eight teaching health centers in California and 57 nationwide that were created by the Affordable Care Act in 2010 to serve areas with large unmet medical needs.

This academic year, there are 732 residents in teaching health centers across 24 states.

Unlike the Affordable Care Act itself, these teaching centers enjoy bipartisan support among federal lawmakers, who say such hubs will alleviate the primary care doctor shortage. But long-term funding is still in question. Last week, Congress agreed to temporarily finance the teaching health centers through the end of the year while debating whether to extend funding beyond that. President Donald Trump later signed the temporary extension.

A residency is a stage of graduate medical training that’s required after medical school and before doctors can set up their own practices. Most family practice residencies last three years.

Traditional residency programs are generally based at large, urban hospitals in areas where there are typically a sufficient number of doctors to go around.

The first teaching health centers began training residents in 2011. They operate primarily out of clinics in rural communities and other areas where primary care physicians are in short supply.

The ideal ratio of primary care physicians to patients is about 1 for every 2,000, Stewart said. The ratio in east Bakersfield “is more like 1 to 6,000, so we have a lot of catching up to do.”

Though teaching health centers remain relatively new, experts say they’re already succeeding: Their residents generally stay in the regions where they trained, putting down roots in communities with a big demand for health care.

In June, the Rio Bravo program graduated its first class of six doctors. Two joined the staff at a Clinica Sierra Vista clinic in east Bakersfield. The other four are practicing in clinics serving low-income communities in Sacramento, Riverside and Los Angeles counties.

Stewart estimates that the six recent graduates together saw nearly 10,000 patients during their three years of training.

“That’s a significant contribution,” she said.

Though not all teaching health centers have affiliations with medical schools,

the Rio Bravo program has an academic partnership with the UCLA medical school, which helps develop its curriculum, Stewart said. It also coordinates with a local hospital, Kern Medical, where residents complete rotations in different specialties related to family medicine.

A 2015 survey by the American Association of Teaching Health Centers found that 82 percent of their graduates stay in primary care and 55 percent remain in underserved communities. By contrast, about a quarter of graduates from traditional residency programs remain in primary care and work in underserved areas, according to the same survey.

Many graduates of teaching health centers have an incentive to stay in these areas because they may qualify for other programs that offer perks, such as help with paying off medical school loans.

The centers take their patient populations into consideration when selecting applicants. For instance, Rio Bravo aims to train culturally sensitive doctors, given the large local immigrant population, Stewart said.

It looks for applicants with ties to the Valley or who come from the cultures — and speak the languages — that are familiar to patients they will serve.

Meave doesn’t have a personal connection to the Valley, but she worked with low-income patients in Mexico. She has found that the population in the Valley, and its needs, aren’t much different from those in her home country.

At Clinica Sierra Vista, she sees patients who haven’t been to a doctor in decades. “They’ve never had a physical exam, never had their eyes checked. … They just deal with their aches and pains,” she said. “I think they feel happy that I can understand them and excited that someone from the same background is providing them care.”

Teaching health centers are financed by federal grants administered by the Health Resources & Services Administration, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Congress determines the amount and duration of the funding. The current allocation, an extension of the two-year funding that expired Sept. 30, runs through the end of the year.

In July, U.S. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) introduced legislation that would fund the program for an additional three years at about $157,000 a year per student — a total of $116.5 million annually.

The amount proposed would be a 65 percent increase from the current funding of $95,000 a year per resident.

Lawmakers are likely to begin debating the funding measure this week, and it is still subject to change.

“I’m glad we moved forward with a short-term extension of the … program, but we also must advance a long-term solution to provide certainty for our teaching health centers, their residents, and their patients,” McMorris Rodgers said in a prepared statement. “Without a sustainable funding level … the program will unravel.”

Should that happen, California’s teaching health centers could draw from a pot of money administered by the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development to pay for the remainder of the current residents’ training.

Programs in other states may not have the same safety net.

“If [federal funding] went away, our residency program would have to close,” said Dr. Darrick Nelson, director of the teaching health center at Hidalgo Medical Services in Lordsburg, N.M.

Lordsburg, with a population of roughly 2,500, is a “small railroad town,” Nelson said, and like many rural towns desperately needs versatile primary care doctors.

“What you’re getting is three doctors for the price of one,” he said. “You get someone who can do pediatrics, someone who can do obstetrical care and someone who can do internal medicine.”

In California’s Central Valley, there is no medical school, and new doctors often avoid the area in favor of richer urban centers, where they can make more money.

Earlier this year, lawmakers earmarked $465 million from the state’s new tobacco tax to boost payments for some Medi-Cal providers, which could help make poor areas like the Central Valley more attractive to doctors.

At Clinica Sierra Vista’s location in east Bakersfield, where Meave’s residency is based, 75 percent of patients are covered by Medi-Cal — the state’s version of the federal Medicaid program for low-income residents — and 15 percent are uninsured, Stewart said. Asthma, diabetes and other chronic conditions are major health problems.

Veronica Ayon, a former farmworker, is one of Meave’s patients. Like her doctor, she is a native of Sonora.

Ayon, 48, was treated for cervical cancer in 2010 and last year underwent surgery to remove a malignant brain tumor. She feels comfortable with Meave because of their similar backgrounds and language, she said.

“She is very special to me,” Ayon said, speaking in Spanish inside her home in the town of Shafter, about 20 miles north of Bakersfield. “She explains things at a level I can understand.”

This story was produced by Kaiser Health News, which publishes California Healthline, a service of the California Health Care Foundation.

White House confirms Stephen Miller was a right-wing creep back in high school too

Stephen Miller (Credit: Getty/Chip Somodevilla)

You remember Stephen Miller, don’t you? He’s the smug, dead-eyed presidential adviser the White House trots out when it needs someone to deliver its transparently dishonesttalking points about immigration. Miller’s track record as a racist xenophobe reportedly stretches back to his high school days, when he dropped a childhood friend for being Latino, showed up to meetings among students of color with the sole purpose of derailing their efforts, and suggested classmates do everything in their power to demean and humiliate janitors. Now, a New York Times profile adds one more gross detail to the Miller file, which was already thick with reasons to dislike the Roy Cohn lookalike.

[Miller] jumped, uninvited, into the final stretch of a girls’ track meet, apparently intent on proving his athletic supremacy over the opposite sex. (The White House, reaching for exculpatory context, noted that this was a girls’ team from another school, not his own.)

Just so we’re clear, the White House confirms that Miller’s latent resentment toward the women who wouldn’t date him in high school was so intense he tried to show them up by competing in a girls’ track meet. This was how he affirmed his self-worth at the time, between writing editorial takedowns of Maya Angelouand screeching about how racism didn’t exist. In college, he filled his time palling around with Richard Spencer and producing propaganda with titles like The Islamic Mein Kampf.

Here’s a video of Miller doing his thing, in case it had slipped your mind.

Let them eat caviar: When charity galas waste money

(Credit: Volt Collection via Shutterstock)

When the Arc of Palm Beach County rented Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate for its 2016 Cowboy Ball, the organization lured guests with promises of “a gourmet meal in a gilded ballroom, an exciting live auction, exhilarating casino action and mesmerizing entertainment.”

On the auction block to raise money to carry out its mission of assisting people with intellectual and developmental disabilities were yacht excursions, lunch with Bravo’s “Real Housewives of Miami” star Lea Black and a “power breakfast” during New York’s Fashion Week with a branding expert.

Why juxtapose calls to feed the hungry, house the homeless and cure cancer with champagne toasts and caviar hors d’oeuvres? As researchers who study charities, we understand why opulent bashes that raise money for good causes seem puzzling. These inherently contradictory events intended to help people in need double as vehicles for the rich and famous to show off their largesse.

Now that at least 25 nonprofits – including the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, the American Red Cross and the Palm Beach Zoo – have canceled plans to hold fancy fundraisers like the Arc’s and other events at Mar-a-Lago, we wanted to explore this ironic custom.

Why nonprofits hold galas

Since glitzy entertainment and swag are mainstays in the otherwise penny-pinching world of charity fundraising, nonprofits have long forked over as much as US$350,000 to hold galas at posh venues like Trump’s Florida home and club, which originally belonged to the Post cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post. Are they worth the steep bill?

In a sense, the surprise isn’t that rich people shell out $1,000 per plate for the privilege of hobnobbing with celebrities and their wealthy peers. It’s that accounting, legal and other factors give often cash-strapped nonprofits an incentive to hold such expensive events.

Charities have learned the same lesson as casinos, which splurge on great food and booze to make gamblers spend more on betting. Posh entertaining can coax giving in ways that other fundraising methods, like mass-mailing appeal letters, can’t.

Galas combine what researchers call key determinants of giving: awareness of needs, a direct ask for assistance, the psychological “warm glow” of appearing generous and peer pressure. That, plus the throw-caution-to-the-wind mentality an open bar stocked with fine whiskey can bring on, is meant to goose generous gifts from wealthy donors.

In short, the more fun attendees have, the more they give. What’s more, peer pressure can boost fundraising when donors gather and try to one-up each other.

Where the IRS draws the line

But these events can also be wasteful.

Perhaps the biggest problem with galas is that they frequently fail to raise more money than they cost to throw or barely break even, many nonprofit experts find. In those instances, only the venues, the entertainers and other vendors profit financially. It is true that even when they don’t make a dime, events may generate intangible benefits, such as strengthening ties between nonprofits and their donors and raising a charity’s profile. But the point is that there are more economical ways to accomplish those goals.

The first lines of defense in distinguishing real charity from partying while drawing attention to a good cause are legal and regulatory constraints. However, the IRS does little of this kind of policing, and its regulations are written and enforced in a way that encourages lavish events rather than discouraging them.

Federal tax law prohibits charities from operating businesses solely to deliver money to their particular cause. But U.S. tax regulations generally do not treat fundraising as a business – even when it looks a lot like a profit-making endeavor. When a nonprofit, say, sells trips to Paris to the highest bidder, the government sees this as just another way a charity raises money for its cause. Although it looks like forbidden for-profit activity, it doesn’t treat that nonprofit as a travel agent to penalize this businesslike behavior.

The IRS, however, might probe whether nonprofits that purchase goods and services from insiders – including board members – are overpaying them. That kind of practice would most likely violate both state charity law and federal tax law.

Built-in incentives

Ratings groups such as Charity Navigator and the Better Business Bureau have the power to exert some pressure to avoid wasteful charitable spending too. But the accounting reports that underlie their methods also encourage galas.

These accounting reports of charities split spending among three categories: programming, administration and fundraising. An organization that reports excessive spending on fundraising – especially relative to how much money it raised as a result – is a red flag for waste. However, this red flag is typically not raised for over-the-top entertaining.

Why?

The costs of a fundraising event attributable to things donors enjoy, including food, drink and auctioned items, don’t have to be recorded as fundraising expenses.

Instead they can, in accounting jargon, be “netted” against donations.

In other words, if a donor pays $1,000 to attend a gala but gets a swag bag of goodies that cost the charity $900, the event reflects a (net) donation of $100. It does not have to treat the $900 spent on the bag as a fundraising cost. That approach, in turn, helps keep the costs associated with throwing fancy galas under the radar of ratings agencies, since many of the costs are not considered fundraising expenses but instead are buried in the details.

And this routine accounting practice means that charities with incentives to be frugal are generally free to break the bank for special occasions.

The flip side of this is that donors who purchase European vacations at galas or enjoy fine dining and flashy entertainment at balls cannot deduct everything they spend for these events from their federal income taxes. Only the portion of those expenditures that exceed their fair market value are deductible.

Here’s the bottom line: While galas don’t automatically signal wasteful spending, you can’t count on the authorities or other experts to call it out when they do.

There are other options, such as holding “no-go galas” – a coordinated effort in which major donors give generously without having to get glammed up to see their money pay for champagne and lobster canapes. The St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and the Metropolitan Interfaith Association in Memphis have taken this route, as has EAH, an affordable housing group active in California and Hawaii.

Instead of refusing to hold galas at venues with baggage, these nonprofits are simply letting go of this fundraising ritual.

Philip Hackney, James E. & Betty M. Phillips Professor of Law, Louisiana State University and Brian Mittendorf, Fisher College of Business Distinguished Professor and Chair, Department of Accounting & Management Information Systems (MIS), The Ohio State University

 

12 foods chefs never order at a restaurant

(Credit: Shutterstock/Twinsterphoto)

If anyone knows what to order at restaurants, it’s chefs. Taking menus from their imaginative stages to physical manifestations on plates, chefs are experts on what to order in a way that those of us who have never managed a kitchen may never be.

However, with a few pointers in menu literacy, it is possible to order better at restaurants.

“I look for things that are eye-catching to me: Anything that I haven’t seen before or a flavor combination that I can’t imagine in my mouth,” chef Nini Nguyen of Brooklyn’s Cook Space said, explaining how she first approaches a menu. If nothing extraordinary stands out, she looks for classics she enjoys eating, like moule frites, onion soup or coq au vin (particularly at a French bistro).

Limited menus may also make ordering (and dining) easier.

“I love restaurants that only make a few things. It helps me because I am very indecisive and it gives the staff the chance to focus and really elevate those few things,” Nguyen said. She also tends to look at menus before visiting a restaurant, to get excited for the meal and perhaps pre-plan what she’ll order.

Of course, the specials can always mess up your ordering plan. And vague terminology, very popular on menus that would rather list pretentious ingredients than actual preparation methods, can lead you astray. To feel good about her choice, Nguyen looks for keywords for her favorite ingredients: Hazelnuts, mushrooms, bottarga, uni, yuzu, and anything shellfish. The only ingredient she truly avoids? Goat cheese. “I just don’t have the palate for it,” she said.

What else are chefs skipping when they dine out? We asked a few to share their insights.

1. Chicken

“I never order chicken at restaurants in general because the quality and availability of other birds such as quail and guinea hen, as well as rabbit, make for much more interesting dishes,” says Yosuke Machida, chef at San Francisco’s Chambers Eat + Drink. Unless the restaurant specializes in chicken, Machida goes with “something else.”

Chef Tadaaki Ishizaki of Salt and Charcoal in Brooklyn, also never orders chicken at a restaurant not specializing in chicken, noting that it’s probably just on the menu as a crowd-pleaser for unadventurous eaters. Besides the inherent misery endured by chickens raised at factory farms, there’s another reason to avoid poultry in general. “The amount of chemicals in chicken just personally scares me,” Ishizaki said. “If the menu doesn’t list the provenance of a chicken, don’t order it unless you want a plate full of hormones and antibiotics.”

2. Chicken parmesan

Chef Phil Pretty, of Long Beach’s Restauration is fine with ordering chicken — unless it’s followed by parmesan. “I would never, ever order chicken parmesan,” Pretty said. “It’s always frozen before cooked and tastes like a gross version of chicken nuggets.”

3. Corned beef hash

Iron Chef alum Jehangir Mehta and current executive chef and co-owner of New York’s Graffiti Earth says he would never order corned beef hash at a restaurant. His rationale? The dish was invented during wartime when beef was rationed in extremely limited quantities.

“Although I have never been in any of the world wars, I know that people were forced to eat [corned beef hash] out of necessity,” Mehta said. “I don’t see why you would choose it for brunch in 2017 … there are plenty of delicious other options.” Mehta applies the same rationale to spam and eggs.

4. Seafood pasta

“This is a very hard question for a chef because, for the most part, I like to eat everything,” said Tim Cushman, chef/co-owner of Cushman Concepts (o ya, Hojoko Japanese Tavern and Covina). Still, on Italian menus (and depending on the restaurant), Cushman has a specific category he avoids: Seafood pasta. “It’s usually served with a really thin noodle like angel hair and is one of the hardest pastas to cook perfectly.”

5. Free bread

“I never eat the bread that comes before the meal. I’m usually too busy drooling on the menu. I love reading menus — it’s like a dorky foodie hobby of mine,” said chef Christena Quinn of Brack Shop Tavern in downtown Los Angeles. Plus, why fill up on bread when you’re at a restaurant for the dishes?

6. Super luxe ingredients

Chef Tim Carey of Pasadena’s Lost at Sea avoids high-end ingredients or menu add-ons like white truffles and caviar. “It’s cheaper for me to buy them wholesale and eat at home,” Carey said. Those who are not professional chefs may also find that buying these ingredients at specialty stores at retail pricing is still significantly less costly.

7. Fish on a Monday

Anthony Bourdain has since debunked his famous Kitchen Confidential adage that you should never order fish on a Monday, but plenty of chefs still exercise caution when considering what days of the week to dine out for seafood. “Fish markets are closed on Saturday so best case, the fish available over the weekend was caught on Thursday. Hence I never order fish on a Monday … unless I know the chef personally.” Kevin Adey, chef-owner of Brooklyn’s Michelin-starred Faro and former Le Bernardin cook said.

8. Seafood in general

“Unless I’m at a chef-driven spot, I generally don’t order seafood because I have trust issues,” said Chris Coleman, executive chef at Charlotte, North Carolina’s Stoke. “Freshness, quality and point of origin are sometimes questionable.” The environmental group Oceana estimates that one-third of all seafood sold in the U.S. is mislabeled.

9. Anything you can (easily) make at home

Eleven Madison Park chef Nini Nguyen (and current culinary director at Brooklyn’s Cook Space) is obviously pretty competent in the kitchen, but she’s not going to order anything off a menu that she can make at home easily. “If I order pasta, I want it to be freshly made pasta,” Nguyen said. “It doesn’t have to be fancy, it just has to be well executed and thoughtful.”

10. Any animal tattoed on the chef’s body

Chef Oscar Cabezas, of Teleferic Barcelona in Walnut Creek, California, also doesn’t order anything he can easily make at home and follows another rule for restaurants and his home cooking: He doesn’t eat any of the animals inked on his body. “It’s kind of a respect to them, like a deal: They offer me their protection and I protect them as well,” Cabezas said. His tattooed animals include rooster, snake, Mediterranean corvina (a fish), lynx and bald eagle (thankfully not popular on menus).

11. Artichokes

“Dining out is both a blessing and a curse for a cook,” said chef Claire Welle of Brooklyn’s Otway. “Being out means you’re not at work, you’re away from the kitchen and someone else is actually cooking the food for a change. But it also means that someone else is cooking your food, and somehow, a little guilt sets in. Out of pure respect, and, to be honest, a bit of irrational thinking, I’ll never order artichokes in a restaurant. The thistle is probably the most feared and time-consuming ingredient you can work with.”

Knowing that every order of artichokes that comes into a professional kitchen adds to cooks’ workloads, Welle can’t bring herself to order them at a restaurant.

12. Mesclun salad

Harold Moore of New York’s Harold’s Meat + Three stays away from mesclun salad on any menu because it “seems uninspired, generic and all too often not given any love.”

In Africa, boys think they’re smarter than girls. Boys think the same thing in the U.S.

(Credit: Getty Images)

A new study by humanitarian organization Save the Children finds that a striking number of fourth graders in the United States and West Africa believe fathers rule the household, boys are smarter than girls and girls need less schooling than their male peers.

The findings are announced in conjunction with The International Day of the Girl on Oct. 11.

The survey asked fourth graders if they agreed with a series of questions about education and social dynamics between males and females. Starting from the most basic assumptions, in the U.S., 37 percent of fourth-grade boys believe that boys are smarter than girls. In West Africa, two-thirds of boys believed the same thing.

This dynamic informs the opinion of the fourth graders that girls don’t need as much schooling as boys. About a quarter of American and West African students reported that girls don’t need as much school as boys (22 percent in the U.S. and 25 percent in Sierra Leone).

These assumptions may begin in the classroom, but they don’t end there. Ninety-four percent of boys and 92 percent of girls in Sierra Leone believe that the father is in charge of the home, and one-third of American kids agreed. In both Côte d’Ivoire and the U.S., two-thirds also believed women are better at childcare and domestic work.

When the kids leave the home, their social assumptions follow them still. Men are more equipped to be the boss at work, according to the assumptions of 17 percent of American children.

“These findings have been really useful because they put in concrete terms the kinds of issues that our teams who are on the ground every day dealing with these issues see,” said Jane Leer, Research Specialist in Save the Children’s Department of Education and Child Protection.

“What was surprising was that these norms were clearly in place from such an early age,” girls and boys age around 8 to 14. Leer is concerned that the children in the study are being socialized and internalizing the unequal gender norms.

The research was done as part of Save the Children’s program measuring the impact in areas of the world where they try to shift the views on gender equality in children. The data are based on a study of roles of girls in the classroom and society in the U.S. and the West African nations of Sierra Leone and Côte d’Ivoire.

“West Africa is one of the regions in the world where it’s most urgent that we focus on improving outcomes for girls and boys,” Leer said, since “West Africa has many of the countries where rates of child marriage are the highest, disparities in terms of primary and secondary enrollment are the highest, early and unwanted pregnancy and just discrimination more broadly.”

Save the Children has found that a girl under 15 is married every seven seconds. International Day of the Girl highlights those barriers and attempts to inspire girls to reach a higher potential.

“West Africa is by no means the only place where we see these kinds of biased attitudes,” said Leer. Which is why they compared the study to the U.S.

“Girls are worth far more than what the world tells them,” said Carolyn Miles, president & CEO of Save the Children. “Globally, we know that girls are more likely than boys to miss out on school, experience violence and live in poverty. That is why we need to invest in their education and do everything possible to delay early marriage and motherhood. By providing children equal opportunities and access to learning, every girl can realize what she’s truly worth.”

“Mr. Robot” in the age of resistance

Rami Malek in "Mr. Robot" (Credit: USA/Michael Parmelee)

Nearly all of Elliot Alderson’s problems are created by his compromised ability to relate to the world around him. The unsettled protagonist of USA Network’s “Mr. Robot,” returning Wednesday at 10 p.m., is a man split in two, with one psyche operating with cold certainty of his mission and near total disregard for the collateral damage caused by his actions.

But when Elliot (Rami Malek) believes he’s in control, he actually isn’t. A cyber-security engineer and gifted hacker, Elliot relates to the world via programming code, ciphers and algorithms, languages useful for interfacing with system mainframes and machines but that don’t account for the unpredictable nature of human reasoning. Gargantuan ambition, unchecked greed, equating entire classes of people’s right to exist with the collective net worth — these are not errors Elliot can correct with one subversive action.

He knows that now, having tried in season 1 with a hack known as “5/9” implemented by the once-mysterious Mr. Robot (Christian Slater) and his team of rogue hackers called fsociety. The idea was to create a new order, putting power back into the hands of the people by wiping out all corporate balance sheets and debt: Elliot, Mr. Robot and his friend Darlene (Carly Chaikin) set out to be techo-warriors styled after Anonymous hacktivists. As Elliot viewed things, they would be heroes.

Except for the fact that Elliot’s psychological state, initially diagnosed as social anxiety disorder, is far more fractured than series creator Sam Esmail originally presented. Elliot has done little else but show us, his invisible friend, the ways that technology caters to the individual’s ego, even as it divides the whole, making it easier for conglomerates like E Corp (the multinational Elliot refers to as Evil Corp) to shape our collective will to suit their ends. The viewer is inclined to trust him, since, as far as we can tell, he’s the good guy.

But in the way of all system updates, Esmail introduces bugs in “Mr. Robot” that drastically shift Elliot’s paradigm and change the course of a narrative that was challenging to begin with. The end of season 1 revealed that Darlene is in fact Elliot’s sister; that Mr. Robot wears the face of their deceased father Edward and is a figment of Elliot’s delusions.

Elliot and Mr. Robot are a single entity — and throughout the second season, Elliot begins to realize that Mr. Robot is running his life and could destroy the modern world as we know it. Elliot attempts to stop his alter ego from destroying the office building housing E Corp’s paper records, killing everyone inside, and takes a bullet for his efforts. He doesn’t believe the man aiming the gun at him, Tyrell Wallick (Martin Wallström), is real. But he is. And Tyrell, a former adversary, pulled the trigger on Mr. Robot’s orders, indicating that Elliot has less of a grasp on reality than he ever did.

So Esmail jammed the fabled red pill and blue pill from “The Matrix” down our throats at the exact same time, in other words. Provided this didn’t wipe your memory, it was an impressive if not altogether solid gambit.

For all of these reasons and others, “Mr. Robot” can never be characterized as a passive viewing experience. Esmail constructs the storyline with the tortuous complexity of a massive multiplayer game in which he’s the only player in with a controller. The plot’s twists, reversals and restarts are simultaneously mesmerizing, befuddling and irritating in various degrees.

Neither is purely escapist, given Esmail’s employment of political issues and cultural figures only slightly removed from our present. If not for the vibrant writing and superior performances by a cast that now includes Bobby Cannavale as a quirky facilitator, the show’s depiction of America’s accelerating slide into chaos would be draining. Esmail’s brilliant and consciously stylized directing carries a significant load as well; every shot is framed to serve as a noticeable, silent chorus, coupled with masterful sound editing designed to lock us inside Elliot’s head.

This conspicuous partnership between the writing and sensory aesthetics is in keeping with the spirit of a tale about control and the illusion, peddled on a massive scale, that We the People still have some of it. These themes remain at the core of season 3, although they’re more centralized in Elliot himself as he wrestles with the damning realization that everything he believes about the world may be wrong.

The second season repeats the refrain that nothing seen by Elliot or the audience — we also exist as a mute observer inside his head — can be trusted. Not even Elliot’s best friend Angela Moss (Portia Doubleday) is a reliable ally. And Elliot/Mr. Robot’s fsociety plan proves massively faulty. Now fsociety is in the crosshairs of law enforcement officials, with FBI Agent Dominique Dipierro (Grace Gummer) at the head of the hunting party.

And “5/9” may have cleared the way for the presumably malignant “Stage 2,” enacted by the secretive Whiterose (B.D. Wong) and the faceless zealots of The Dark Army, whose objective may be to embolden the very global conglomerates Elliot sought to take down.

Realizing that he’s created a viral fear with his intended act of liberation, Elliot wonders aloud, “Did my revolution just bury our minds instead of freeing them?”

Although the drama’s timeline places it well before the 2016 presidential election, Esmail uses it to speak to our dark present as the third season kicks off. Every thoughtfully written series does this, and in Elliot, Esmail has a shrewd mechanic of the human condition as it is processed by mobile apps, social media and search engines – those powerful predictors of human behavior and tools of mass manipulation.

Still, the drama’s portrayal of what’s really going on behind the digital curtain is particularly captivating now, when the veil between conspiracy and fact is thinner than single-ply tissue. Recent warnings made by the people who engineered the detrimental and addictive nature of social media sound a lot like the very poison Elliot rails against in voiceovers dripping with disconnected fatigue. Ongoing investigations as to the extent Facebook was intentionally used by foreign actors to mislead the American electorate shouldn’t shock anyone who watches this show.

Reality, as we know it, is frightening. But as viewed through the lens of “Mr. Robot,” Esmail makes the fictionalized version of our increasingly dystopic existence palatable, even exciting. Elliot is getting an idea that we may never be okay again, as are we. But who knows for sure if any of this is real?