Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 73

Gut feeling: Is climate change altering our gut microbes?

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This post originally appeared on Grist.

Those of us who believe in climate change (and maybe some who don’t) jokingly blame all kinds of things on it, from flat tires to summer hailstorms. Case of the flu? Climate change. Mudslide? Climate change. (Usually, we’re right.)

But I was mostly fooling the other day, when I once again said: “Must be climate change.” I was in yet another doctor’s office, doling out obscene amounts of money to be told yet another time that there’s no official diagnosis for what ails my stomach.

The doctor laughed, bemused and dismissive. He was the fifth person I’d seen on behalf of a tummy that no longer properly digested most of the ingredients in the modern American diet — especially the tastiest ones, like dairy, sugar, and wheat.

He mumbled something about the industrial food supply. Though the doc hardly seemed to believe what he muttered, I had a light bulb moment.

I thought about all I’d learned about the American stomach since mine decided to quit, the various ways our processed food-filled diets — not to mention our reliance on antibiotics and antibacterial products — have affected our guts.

As many as 70 million Americans suffer from gastrointestinal issues, with an ongoing increase in celiac disease, food allergies, irritable bowel syndrome, and much else. Until recently, these maladies had been largely confined to the American population. But as our junk food-y diets and hygiene-obsessed lifestyles have been unveiled in the developing world, so have our illnesses. Whatever’s wrong with our stomachs is undergoing a diaspora.

At the same time, there’s been an explosion of interest in the gut microbiome, sometimes called the microbiota — the collection of bacteria, good and bad, that, among many other things, help us digest food and regulate our immune systems.

So if climate change is altering our weather and food supply, I thought, could it possibly be messing up our microbiomes — and thus, our stomachs? My stomach?

The scientific community, it turns out, is just starting to ask similar questions. And as part of my desperate search to divine what ails me — and to follow up on my hunch — I dove into what they’ve found so far.

Extreme weather and extreme disease

From the department of the obvious comes this, per a study in The Lancet: “Climate change will affect human health in many ways — mostly adversely.”

That global warming will cause shifts in the quantity, frequency, length, and intensity of precipitation is established. And a place where that’s already happening is just outside the Arctic Circle. One investigation looked at how those shifts may affect infectious gastrointestinal illnesses, or IGI — salmonella, giardia, E. coli, and such — focusing on Inuit communities in Nunatsiavut, Canada. It found that large amounts of rainfall were associated with IGI-related clinic visits two and four weeks later.

So, more rain, more tummy ailments, at least for people living more than 1,000 miles north of me. If GI diseases are worsened by extreme weather, and extreme weather is on the rise, that suggests the answer to “Is climate change screwing up our tummies?” could be yes.

But if that answered how outside forces might affect, and infect, our tummies, it didn’t address the internal stomach shifts — or, you know, my own problem. I’m not hosting a bacteria or parasite in my belly, at least as far as I know. I have what seems to be a case of the microbiome blues — the kind that appear to be affecting more and more people in my part of the world.

The climate change within

Justin Sonnenburg, the co-author with his wife Erica of "The Good Gut: Taking Control of Your Weight, Your Mood, and Your Long Term Health" and an associate professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford, has come to a startling conclusion: We are losing bacterial species in our guts. Rapidly.

“We have remodeled our microbiota very recently, and this may be at the root of a lot of Western diseases,” he told me.

A 2016 study the Sonnenburgs co-authored in Nature found that our guts’ allotment of microbiota accessible carbohydrates (MACs) — the main ingredient in dietary fiber — “play a key role in shaping this microbial ecosystem, and are strikingly reduced in the Western diet relative to more traditional diets.”

Americans tend to eat low-fiber diets, thus most of our sugar-laden carbohydrates are not MACs. That’s one reason our tummies are ailing us: the good gut bacteria that we’re born with are dying off over time, and we’re not replacing them. (By the way, most of us inherit some of those good bacteria from our parents, so if your mom’s tummy has a messed-up microbiome, yours might, too. I apologize in advance to my kids.)

I asked what this had to do with climate change. To Sonnenburg, it was more of a metaphor than a causal connection. “There’s this interesting parallel,” he said. “There’s climate change occurring around the planet — it’s affecting the animals and plants that can live in various places. There’s also climate change in our bodies because we’re living in a fundamentally different environment.”

Was there something more concrete, I asked? “The two may be more fundamentally connected, as climate change changes our water supply and crops,” Sonnenburg conceded.

He may not have shown us — yet — how climate change per se is affecting the human gut, but he has shown us how these “cleaner” lives and low-fiber diets (bread, rice, juice, and pasta, anyone?) have led to an extinction within our bodies. “It all feeds into the gut microbiome,” he said.

That’s cold-blooded

Elvire Bestion has looked directly at the link between climate change and the gut microbiome. An associate research fellow at the University of Exeter, she published a last year reporting the results of an experiment where she warmed the environment of the common lizard (Zootoca vivipara) to see what happened in its gut.

The result: “We had diminution of diversity of species of bacterial specimens in the microbiota of the lizard,” she said when we spoke by phone.

Warming the climate 2 or 3 degrees Celsius causes a 34 percent loss of microbiota diversity. And with that diminution came poorer health generally. “Lower biodiversity could be correlated to lower survival,” Bestion said, summing up her work.

Pretty clear. Except not.

“It’s a corollary,” she quickly noted. “Corollary is not causation. It seems that at least there’s a link. We can’t prove it for certain.”

And even if she was able to prove causation, lizards are cold-blooded creatures. We warm-blooded mammals have a completely different physiology and may not have the same response to a suddenly warmer climate. “You can’t say, OK, what happened in a lizard is completely relevant to a mammal,” Bestion said.

On the other hand, if climate change is not going to mess up our stomachs, it’s still going to mess up the stomachs of most creatures on the planet. After all, Bestion noted that cold-blooded organisms represent the majority of the Earth’s fauna.

“These animals are making most of the biodiversity,” Bestion said. “And they really, really can be affected by climate change.”

Digging for answers

If trying to figure out the climate-related source of my busted gut based on studies of reptiles seemed like a reach, the next microbiome I looked to probably seems even more so: that of soil. Seems random, but soil plays a role in the life cycle of all of our food — even the meat we consume comes from animals that chow down on plants.

Back around the turn of the century, researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory shifted around soil from different elevations on a mountain slope in Eastern Washington state and monitored the samples for more than 15 years to see how the dirt responded to climate change. The results of the study, published in 2016, revealed that the microbial activity in the soil samples changed, sometimes slightly, sometimes significantly.

The shift, said Vanessa L. Bailey, a co-author of the study and senior research scientistat Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, left some soils “less able to breakdown certain types of organic matter.”

That sounds bad, but in fact, the news was pretty good overall. The function and activity of the bacteria changed, but their microbial composition didn’t, for the most part. “A healthy resilient community may have the capacity to adjust to new conditions,” Bailey noted.

Benjamin Bond-Lamberty, a forest ecologist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the study’s lead author, added that he was surprised to find the soils that were least able to adapt were those moved from lower, drier, and warmer elevations to higher, cooler, and wetter ones. “After 17 years, they just couldn’t get going at the upper site,” he said.

Bailey noted that this soil originated in an environment that was tougher to flourish in, one less hospitable to microbial diversity. And that might be the key. “The concern is that if you have a community that’s already stressed,” she said, “it might lose some fundamentally important capability that it needs.”

That’s potentially a concern for soils in the U.S. heartland, which Bailey suggested might have adapted various resistances to the current climate — or even pesticides and other chemicals used in farming — that they now thrive in. If global warming alters their environment, there’s a chance they won’t be able to adjust again. “You fear the breaking point,” Bailey explained. “You put enough pressure on a system and eventually it’ll lose that robustness and resiliency.”

Bailey also pointed me to research by a team at Ohio State University, which found that climate change in the Arctic and just south — back around Nunatsiavut in Canada — may be increasing a plant chemical that thwarts leaf-eating moose from getting the energy they need. The team, however, is testing a hypothesis that something in the moose’s microbiome is allowing it to resist or degrade that chemical and thrive, despite the material change to their diet.

To my shock, these studies seemed relatively hopeful. Maybe if the moose’s four-part stomach could adapt, so could my relatively simple one.

Conclusion: inconclusive

No one I spoke to definitively said, “Climate change is ruining our stomachs.” In fact, causation is going to elude us for a while, in part because the research is inchoate at best — and in some areas nonexistent. But considering the fervor over the gut microbiome and the continuing pressure to address climate change, it’s my assumption that a connection is in the offing.

As Bond-Lamberty told me, “This is why scientists tend to write, ‘Clearly more study is needed’ at the end of many of their papers.” Even the study on the Canadian Inuit communities resulted in a call for more research, not action. The study, the authors wrote, “illustrates the need for high quality temporal baseline information to allow for detection of future impacts of climate change on regional Inuit human and environmental health.”

As much as I’d like to, I cannot blame my own ailment on climate change — at least not yet.

Neither could my doctor. When I went for my follow-up appointment, I spewed out some of these facts to him: how warming changed the gut bacteria of lizards, how our own guts are undergoing climate change and killing off our good bacteria. What did he think, I asked, about the real relationship between climate change and the recent breadth of stomach woes?

“The climate is always changing,” he said, turning his back to me and fiddling with some papers.

“Wait — are you a climate change denier?” I asked, sitting upright on the padded table, wondering if I could possibly trust anything that came out of this guy’s mouth.

“The climate is always changing,” he repeated, this time with a hint of a smirk, before telling me that the results of my last test — which evaluates, get this, excess bacterial growth in the gut — pointed, once again, to no conclusive diagnosis.

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Exclusive: “NCIS: New Orleans” showrunner Brad Kern, subject of #MeToo complaints, is out

Getty/Frederick M. Brown

Murmurs of career second acts for high profile abusers exposed by #MeToo reporting — men like Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer, Mario Batali and Louis C.K. — have been circulating of late. Such is the way of the entertainment industry, a business that loves a comeback story especially if there’s money to be made on it.

We hear about these men because they are household names, thereby making it all but impossible for any career moves they make to go unnoticed. Responses to any purported attempts to direct a second wind into their sails run from vehement disgust to fatigued eye-rolling. But as much as advocates for the #MeToo movement may take heart in knowing these felled stars remain benched, well-positioned men behind the scenes continue to do damage.

One such example is Brad Kern, who has been the showrunner on the CBS hit “NCIS: New Orleans” since January 2016.

Kern provides a case study in the limitations of Time’s Up and #MeToo, and one of the few to survive a damning and deeply sourced Variety report on his abusive behavior published in December 2017.

Kern was the subject of two separate HR investigations at CBS within a year of him taking the reins on “NCIS: NOLA.” Included in the allegations are reports that Kern sexually harassed and discriminated against his female employees, targeting working mothers in particular, in addition to making racist comments.

Jump forward to May 2018, as CBS touts its status of being the most-watched network for the 10th season in a row, and for 15 out of the past 16. “NCIS: New Orleans” remains one of its most popular dramas. And Brad Kern was able to finish the 2017-2018 season as its showrunner, even after the report emerged.

But according to a source within CBS, Kern’s tenure as the “NCIS”-offshoot’s showrunner has come to an end. “Brad no longer showrunning,” a message obtained by Salon reads.

Taking over as showrunner for the 2018-2019 season, according to an industry source with close knowledge of his work who asked not to be named, is executive producer Chris Silber.

“It's gratifying to hear that [Kern] will no longer be a showrunner at ‘NCIS: NOLA,” one industry veteran who worked with Kern years ago as a low level writer told Salon after hearing the news. “The writers, cast, and crew deserve better.”

The veteran continues, “As someone who has sold pilots to CBS before, I'd like to believe that moving forward they will foster working environments that are inclusive, supportive, and safe for women.  This is a small step in the right direction.  Their next order of business should be working with more female creators and showrunners.  Unfortunately, at CBS, women are still woefully underrepresented.”

That said, the CBS source adds, Kern will “still be involved with the show.” In what capacity remains unknown at the time of this writing. That’s an important factor to know.

If Kern is kept on as a “consulting producer,” the industry veteran explains, he could be “stashed away in post (editing, etc) until he rides out his overall deal with CBS. “They might want to put him to work,” the source notes, “but not in the room.”

If he maintains his executive producer credit, this gives Kern the ability to remain much more involved in the day-to-day production.

When asked for official confirmation and clarification about this report on Wednesday, CBS TV Studios could not be reached for comment.

All of the sources Salon interviewed for this story still work within the industry, and asked for anonymity in order to protect their careers and preserve their future employability.

Former “Charmed” co-executive producer Nell Scovell, who declined to be interviewed for this story, put a finer point on this in a tweet posted on Wednesday:

If CBS is so committed to a "safe work environment" on the @NCIS_CBS franchises then why do they allow Brad Kern to run @NCISNewOrleans after being sued 2X for sexual harassment? I personally saw him harass and make racist comments on another show. pic.twitter.com/dqstnVUptN

— Nell Scovell (@NellSco) May 16, 2018

But the fact that Kern remained involved with the series at all following the Variety report, particularly in light of the negative press generated by outgoing “NCIS” star Pauley Perrette’s series of tweets alleging “multiple physical assaults,” is puzzling in itself.

To be utterly clear, “NCIS,” or as insiders call it, “the mothership,” is a completely separate production from “NCIS: New Orleans,” run by a different staff and contending with a disparate set of concerns.  It’s also the tentpole of the strongest drama brand on television, not only in the U.S. but worldwide.

Its spinoff “NCIS: New Orleans” was a successful series before Kern joined the staff, and will likely continue to be under Silber.

Silber has been with “NCIS: New Orleans” since 2015, and has worked on various series at the network since 2005, when he began is TV writing career at “NCIS.” He recently signed a two-year overall deal with CBS TV Studios.

Kern, meanwhile, has served as a showrunner for series such as “Charmed,” “New York Undercover” and “Human Target,” but has never created a show that went to series. As another source who previously worked as support staff under Kern for a past show describes him, “He’s not a guy that invented a franchise. He’s the guy you bring in to keep the franchise running.”

As several sources noted to Salon, Kern’s time with “NCIS: NOLA” was never meant to extend past this season, which coincides with the end of his contract.

Again, this leads a person to wonder why CBS would keep him at the network despite a number of deeply troubling accounts revealed in Variety’s story.

One particularly disturbing account reported in the article and backed up by numerous sources, cites a female employee and a recent mother who had to leave the writers’ room to pump breast milk on a regular basis:

Once, while she was gone, Kern told the rest of her colleagues that she should pump her breast milk in the room, in front of everyone, because “cows in the field” are sometimes milked out in the open. He then began miming the motions of milking a cow.

When she returned to the room, multiple sources say Kern questioned her at length about why she did not pump in front of her colleagues, and whether the process hurt. He then made the hand motions again.

In a statement to Variety in December, CBS representatives confirmed that CBS was aware of the allegations and took them seriously. “Both complaints were acted upon immediately with investigations and subsequent disciplinary action," the statement reads. "While we were not able to corroborate all of the allegations, we took this action to address behavior and management style, and have received no further complaints since this was implemented.”

In both cases CBS concluded there was no evidence of retaliation, harassment, discrimination or gender bias but told staffers that Kern had received sensitivity training.

This was enough to keep him in a position of power. And the article notes that in less than two months after the second investigation ended, the writer who was pumping breast milk — the worker who brought that complaint to HR — was fired by Kern.

What grants cover to people like Kern is that he straddles the line between a public and a private persona. The average person wouldn’t recognize him on the street.

That means it’s up to corporate entities such as CBS to protect subordinates from further abuses by removing people from positions that allow them to derail the careers of the people who work under him.

That said, there is hope that Silber’s tenure will create a better atmosphere in the writers’ room going forward. “Chris WILL be an improvement,” a former staffer on one of Kern’s shows told Salon. “He treats people better than Brad and he's ready to be a showrunner.”

As for the news that Kern will still be involved with “NCIS: NOLA,” the former staffer said, “what we know now going into next season is that the person who made those statements is still on the show where he made those statements [reported in the Variety story] with many of the same people who were in the room when those statements were made.

“And if he's still in the position of maybe not the ultimate authority, but he is still an authority figure on that staff . . . it feels like publicly the best face hasn't been put on this,” this former staffer added, “ to send a message to people who may one day have to weigh if they're going to come forward with that kind of allegation . . . I don't know if I can trust that coming forward will help me or hurt me, because I don’t see any consequence of that in front of me.”

In studying brain activity, a neuroscientist begins to crack the Yanny/Laurel mystery

Getty/Salon

It’s been three years since the public debate over the color of “the dress” split up friendships and divided families. (For the record, it was black and blue.)

This week, a similar viral debate emerged online — and this time, it's an aural illusion rather than a visual one.

A two-syllable audio clip of a computerized voice has made waves on the internet, sparking a debate: Does this clip say “Laurel” or “Yanny?” The answer is — well, it's whichever of the two you think you hear, though there have been some reports of people hearing “Yammy” too.

If you haven't heard it yet, click below:

What do you hear?! Yanny or Laurel pic.twitter.com/jvHhCbMc8I

— Cloe Feldman (@CloeCouture) May 15, 2018

Celebrities and public figures have weighed in on the head-scratching debate over how two different-sounding words could be interpreted from the same audio clip.

Literally everything at my show just stopped to see if people hear Laurel or Yanny. I hear Laurel. https://t.co/efWRw1Gj0L

— Ellen DeGeneres (@TheEllenShow) May 15, 2018

I only hear Yanni ;) hahaha https://t.co/WrMMVvl8iX

— Yanni (@Yanni) May 15, 2018

I hear #yanny so clearly... but if I listen closely I can hear a deep quiet ghost saying #laurel.... so there... anyone else hear both?

— Emmy Rossum (@emmyrossum) May 16, 2018

Cloe Feldman, a social media influencer, tweeted the clip after her sister, Sage, discovered it in a Reddit thread and sent it to her. Feldman told Salon she did not know who the original poster was, but was hoping to find the person to properly attribute the viral meme to its original creator.

On Wednesday, the New York Times traced the origin of the audio — which was posted on Reddit by user RolandCamry — back to 18-year-old Roland Szab, a high schooler in Georgia. He told the New York Times that he discovered the audio clip on the vocabulary.com page for the word “laurel.” While working on a story project, he played the clip through his computer speakers, which led the room to disagree on what the artificial recording was saying.

So why do some people hear one sound, and others hear another? No one knows definitively, but scientists and audiologists are already studying and speculating on the Yanny/Laurel phenomenon.

“’I’m not sure if we will ever fully know what exactly is going on because, to be honest, we don’t fully understand how our brains understand and perceive speech,” Gretchen Perkins, an audiologist at Sound Speech and Hearing in San Francisco, told Salon.

One auditory neuroscientist, Gabriella Musacchia, has already run some brain scans to try  to get to the bottom of it. Musacchia is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Audiology at the University of the Pacific, and a research scholar in the Department of Otolaryngology at Stanford University.

When she walked into her lab today, she set out to get to bottom of this enigma.

“I came in this morning and I asked my students [via email]: ‘Who is a ‘Laurel’ and who is 'Yanny'?’” she told Salon. Musacchia sorted her students based on what they heard, and found one student who had heard both. She performed brain scans while the student listened to the audio using frequency following response (FFR) method. FFR involves using electrodes to observe how sound waves are reflected in the brain's electrical activity. (If you're curious, you can watch a YouTube video from Northwestern University's Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory that explains how the scan works in more detail.)

Musacchia observed that the brain decides within a fraction of a second what it will hear (either Laurel or Yanny) and found the student could hear either "Yanny" or "Laurel" at will, with no changes to the audio clip's pitch. (Many have observed that changing the pitch seems to force a change in one's perception of the clip.)

“What I saw was that when 'Yanny' was intelligible, her brain response followed the frequencies of the Y sound,” Musacchia explained. “When 'Laurel' was intelligible, her brain followed the frequencies of the L sound.”

The difference in Yanny-Laurel perception relies on mid-range frequencies at the very beginning of the sound, she observed.

“What happens is that our brain decides within the first 100 milliseconds whether or not you will hear Y or L based on how well your brain responds to the frequencies between Y and L,” she added.

Musacchia shared with Salon her observational data that shows the difference in auditory brainstem response for the different words. The audio frequencies that the brain perceives actually look quite different depending on which word you hear, as you can see:

If the Yanny/Laurel debate comes down to how well your brain responds to the sounds of a Y or an L, this raises the bigger question about what we hear and why. Are our brains always deciding what we are going to hear just before it becomes intelligible?

“We use statistical probability to make almost all of our perceptual decisions,” Musacchia explained. “We hear what we have been trained to hear for the most part. We listen for speech sounds in a certain range.”

Perkins, like other audio experts, said she thought it could have something to do with those who have high-frequency hearing loss, something that normally occurs as humans age.

The New York Times has an interactive version of the audio where a user can modify the frequency range, but if Musacchia’s theory is correct, that tool could just be a subjective mind game, too.

Musacchia emphasized this illusion is not only about the frequencies, but what word is focused on by one's mind.

"Just like you are what you eat, you hear what you listen for," she said.

Musacchia’s experiment today is just the beginning of a larger study. She said she’s going to conduct a study on this mystery, and hopefully publish a paper on her findings, as there are still many unanswered questions.

“Some people can change their perception and some people can’t. What does that mean? What is it about those people who can change what they hear?” she asked.

We are trapped in a news cycle that tracks like a disturbing Mescaline flashback

AP/Getty/Salon

In just the last few days:

Jared and Ivanka gave happy-talk speeches at the Grand Opening of the new American Embassy in Jerusalem, sharing the stage with two Trump-loving, Jew-hating, Muslim-hating, Catholic-bashing conservative Protestant “ministers,” James Hagee and Robert Jeffress, who were called upon to offer up “prayers” blessing the new embassy. At the same moment, less than 40 miles away, along the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip, 52 Palestinian protesters were killed by Israel Defense Forces in demonstrations against the embassy opening.

The man who berated China as a “currency manipulator” and for its unfair trade practices and theft of American jobs during his campaign , lifted trade restrictions on the Chinese telecommunications giant, ZTE, which had been sanctioned by the Department of Commerce only a month ago from using American components in its smartphones. Three days previously, a Trump businesses concern was the beneficiary of a $500 million loan from the Chinese government for a project in Indonesia that will feature Trump-branded hotels, a golf course, and condo developments, laying waste to the meaning of the emoluments clause of the Constitution.

The Trump White House, which only weeks ago was denouncing as “filthy” and “mean” the jokes told by comedian Michelle Wolf at the White House Correspondents Dinner, refused to apologize for a “joke” by aide Kelly Sadler, who told fellow White House staffers that they didn’t have to worry about John McCain not supporting Gina Haspel for CIA Director because “he’s dying anyway.” The current president of the United States took advantage of no less than five deferments, including a doctor’s diagnosis of “bone spurs” on his heels, to avoid being drafted during the time John McCain was locked up for five and a half years as a POW in a North Vietnamese prison camp.

Senator McCain still cannot raise either of his arms above shoulder level due to injuries he received while being shot down and tortured in North Vietnam. President Trump has spent 114 days walking around his golf courses on his “bone spurs” since taking office in January of 2016.

Through the looking glass, anyone? Up is down, and down is up? Is that Wavy Gravy over there with the face-splitting grin, or is it Jared Kushner? Can anybody tell anymore?

If every day in Trumpland feels like a mescaline flashback, it’s because we’ve been here before.

Richard Nixon ran for office in 1968 talking about “peace in our time” and a “secret plan” to end the war. In March of 1969, just one month after taking office, he ordered the secret bombing of Cambodia, dropping more bombs on that country in the next 14 months than we dropped during all of World War II. The 48th anniversary of the shootings at Kent State, when “to keep the peace,” National Guardsmen opened fire on student demonstrators, killing four and wounding nine was just over a week ago. One month from now will be the 46th anniversary of the break in by the White House “plumbers” at the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. in 1972, a crime overseen by the man who ran for the presidency on a platform of “law and order.”

The levels of lying, duplicity, hypocrisy, and outright criminality are about the same, and covering Trump is unnervingly reminiscent of covering Nixon. There is the same feeling that the whole thing is a mescaline dreamscape from which you can’t come down. Everything is too bright, too fast, too weird. Every time you think you’ve reached a pinnacle in the story, it keeps going up and up and up. Revelations about Russian oligarchs morph into tales about strippers and Playboy playmates, which morph into secret meetings on islands in the Indian Ocean, which turn into millions of dollars skimmed off billion dollar Russian oil deals.

It was the same way covering Nixon. I remember getting ready to fly down to Miami to cover the Republican National Convention in August of 1972. I had a handful of large capsules of mescaline I had received as a gift  in Colorado Springs a few years earlier and packed them into my carry-on, thinking I would need them that week (No TSA inspections then, nothing even close). That was the way we did it back then. Just wade completely twisted on mescaline into a whole fucking city filled with blue haired women waving American flags and paunchy golfers in straw boaters covered in Nixon campaign buttons and let the whole thing wash over you in waves of weirdness.

I went down to Miami for the Saturday Review, a magazine published weekly at that time. I arrived a few days before the convention got underway, so there wasn't much to cover right away. Delegates from dusty Republican outposts in Kansas and North Dakota were trickling into the Fontainebleau Hotel. Busses were arriving out on Collins Avenue filled with cherry-cheeked Young Republicans, who were being dispatched by Nixon campaign workers to a nearby office where they were put to work filling helium balloons and scribbling on placards. The Nixon campaign wanted their campaign signs to seem authentically homemade on the convention floor a few days hence.

My friend Hunter Thompson, who was there for Rolling Stone, and I were sipping margaritas in the Poodle Lounge just off the lobby in the Fontainebleau Hotel when a young woman with a bouffant hairdo ran in off the street and yelled out that Sammy Davis Jr. was checking into the Doral Hotel next door. We didn’t have anything else to do, so we decided to walk over and see if we could get an interview. Sammy Davis Jr. had recently endorsed Nixon, one of the few stars of music or screen to do so. Looking around the lobby for Sammy, we instead found two Young Republicans dressed in red, white, and blue shirts with big “NIXON” buttons directing reporters to a press conference. The Republican National Committee was using the occasion of a slow news day to introduce "Celebrities for Nixon."

The press conference was crowded with reporters and TV cameras, since there was nothing else to cover that day, and everyone wanted out of the steam bath-like August heat in south Florida. Thompson and I took a couple of seats in the back as the "celebrities" filed in: Glenn Ford, John Wayne, Kitty Carlisle, and Mary Ann Mobley, a washed-up former Miss America. That was it.

RNC Chairman Bob Dole took the mike and introduced his sterling crew of "celebrities" and then took questions. The graybeards of the national press corps sitting up front tossed a few softballs to Glenn Ford and John Wayne, and the whole thing was starting to lag when Thompson turned to me and said, "nobody's asking about Watergate."

He was right. The biggest story of the day . . . hell of the decade . . . was being completely ignored by the national press. Thompson stood up and yelled out "When is Nixon going to fire John Mitchell?”

Mitchell was chairman of CREEP, the Committee to Re-elect the President, and was being named in stories about the burglary. Dole chuckled, ignoring the question, and turned to the reporters for the national newsweeklies and major papers in the front rows. “What about the slush fund?” Thompson yelled.

I jumped up and asked about the “Howard Hughes’ $100,000,” cash that was reported to have been passed from Hughes to Nixon through Nixon’s pal, Bebe Rebozo, and was thought to have been used to pay off the burglars after they had been arrested to keep them quiet.

We were asking questions about arcane details of the Watergate scandal that were just being revealed, but which indicated that the conspiracy reached right into the Nixon White House. But this was the first press conference of Nixon’s coronation at the upcoming convention, and Dole wasn’t having any of it. Neither were the reporters seated upfront. At least a dozen of them turned around in their seats and told us to sit down and shut up. “Show us your press credentials!” one of the reporters cried out. “Let’s see yours!” Thompson shouted back. He stayed on his feet and yelled out to John Wayne: "Mr. Wayne, you're a big supporter of the War in Vietnam. A group of Vietnam Veterans are just down Collins Avenue. Will you walk down there with us to meet them when this is over?" Wayne managed a thin smile and said . . . this is a quote . . . "Why sure, pardner."

Thompson was referring to a nearby encampment of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

The reporters up front kept shouting at us to sit down and shut up, but we remained standing. I was yelling, “what about Watergate?” and Thompson looked like he was about to climb over the empty chairs in front of us and go for the throat of the loudest asshole telling us to shut up. The “celebrity” press conference had devolved into a shouting match by the time Bob Dole grabbed a mic and called out that it was over.

Thompson and I followed Wayne and Ford out a side door and when we caught up with them, Thompson asked Wayne if he was ready to meet with the Vietnam vets. Wayne stopped and laughed right in his face: "You don't think I was serious, do you, son?" Ford joined in laughing, Wayne threw his arm around his friend and they headed down the hall. "I need a goddamned drink," Wayne said as they pushed through glass doors into the sunshine.

A couple of days later there were demonstrations outside the Fontainebleau. The cops broke them up with night-sticks and tear gas until the VVAW came marching down Collins Avenue in their jungle boots and fatigue jackets in total silence. They reached the front of the Fontainebleau and lined up in neat ranks, completely blocking traffic on Collins Avenue, but the cops did nothing. Several vets spoke out against the war, and then they gave a hand-held loudspeaker to Ron Kovic, and angrily, but calmly and with great dignity from his wheelchair, he gave his famous speech denouncing the old men who had sent so many thousands of boys to death and disfigurement.

Nine thousand miles away in Vietnam 25,000 US combat troops were still fighting and dying. The South Vietnamese Army suffered 25,000 deaths that year. 140,000 NVA and VC were killed. Nobody knows how many Vietnamese civilians died.

Less than a month later, a story in the Washington Post by two young reporters, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, linked Nixon campaign chairman John Mitchell to a slush fund used to pay the burglars at the Watergate and he was fired from the campaign. A year later he was indicted for various Watergate crimes and a couple of years after that he was convicted and sent to jail. Nixon of course was caught covering up the Watergate crime, was impeached and less than two years after the Republican Convention and his re-election, resigned in disgrace.

Yesterday I re-read the story I wrote in The Saturday Review and Thompson’s piece on the convention, collected in his book, “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail,” looking specifically for references to either of us taking drugs during the time we were in Miami. I remember right after I got to Miami being up in Thompson’s suite at the Fontainebleau comparing stashes. We were both well prepared. But I didn’t find a single reference to mescaline or anything else.

Reality was weird enough. Everything was happening at once, and faster than we could keep up: the war in Vietnam; the Watergate break-in; Nixon's re-election; demonstrations against the war and against Nixon; the endless investigation of Nixon and his henchmen in the White House; the firing of Mitchell; the firing of Haldeman and Ehrlichman; the “Saturday night massacre” firing of Elliot Richardson and William Ruckelshaus; the firing, indictment and trial of dozens of White house hangers-on and factotums; the impeachment of Nixon; his resignation; the ascendance of Ford and his pardon of Nixon.

You don’t need mescaline now, either. Trumpland is every bit as weird as Nixonland.

Newly-uncovered disclosure form catches Trump in a lie about Stormy Daniels hush money

Getty/Chip Somodevilla

New financial documents reveal a discernable reference to President Donald Trump’s $130,000 reimbursement to Michael Cohen—which he reportedly paid to guarantee the silence of Stephanie Clifford, better known as Stormy Daniels, the actress and model who claims to have had an affair with Trump.

The reference to the payment can be found in a footnote on the 45th page of the 92-page Personal Financial Disclosure report, released by the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) and published by the Washington Post. The note does not explicitly say what they payment was for, but it does appears to match up with Cohen’s alleged hush money story.

“In 2016 expenses were incurred by one of Donald J. Trump’s attorneys, Michael Cohen,” Trump reported on the financial disclosure in a footnote. “Mr. Cohen sought reimbursement of those expenses and Mr. Trump fully reimbursed Mr. Cohen in 2017. The category of value would be $100,001 — $250,000 and the interest rate would be zero.”

This interesting reference corroborates the tale recently told by former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, who now sits on Trump’s legal team, during his infamous interview with Sean Hannity. Giuliani said that it took Trump four months or more to pay the bill. Cohen “funneled it [the $130,000] through a law firm and the president repaid it,” Giuliani explained.

According to Politico, The Office of Government Ethics said on Wednesday that payment should have been noted on his financial disclosure from last year. David Apol, the OGE's acting director, sent a letter Wednesday to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein regarding the matter.

"OGE has concluded that, based on the information provided as a note to part 8, the payment made by Mr. Cohen is required to be reported as a liability," Apol wrote. "You may find the disclosure relevant to any inquiry you may be pursuing regarding the President's prior report that was signed on June 14, 2017."

It is not clear if the Department of Justice is investigating the lack of disclosure, according to Politico. The Department of Justice reportedly declined to comment.

In April, Trump told reporters he did not know about the $130,000 personal payment to Cohen.

“You’ll have to ask Michael Cohen,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One. “Michael is my attorney. You’ll have to ask Michael.”

It is precisely Trump’s denial that has complicated the Trump-Stormy saga. Daniels has claimed that the nondisclosure agreement which she signed—in return for the $130,000 payment—is null and void because the president himself didn't affix his signature to the document. Trump's declaration that he didn't know about the payment would confirm her story.

"You can't have an agreement when one party claims that they knew nothing about the agreement and did not sign the agreement," Michael Avenatti, Daniels' lawyer, told Salon in April.

Avenatti tweeted today that Trump’s disclosure proves the American people were deceived by Trump and his cronies.

“This was NOT an accident and it was not isolated,” Avenatti said on Twitter.

Mr. Trump’s disclosure today conclusively proves that the American people were deceived by Mr. Cohen, Mr. Trump, Mr. Schwartz, the WH, and Mr. Giuliani. This was NOT an accident and it was not isolated. Cover-ups should always matter. #Basta

— Michael Avenatti (@MichaelAvenatti) May 16, 2018

 

How I learned to stop worrying and love the sous vide machine

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The Machine sits at an odd angle, dorm room microwave sized, almost obscured from view in our small converted closet of a pantry. It is openly laughing at me through its greasy front plate, a pile of tea towels wreathing its flat metal head like a badly wrapped turban. It’s on the second shelf, back right, nestled against a collection of “it seemed a good idea at the time” purchases and well-meaning gifts for a solid home cook — a brown and yellow terracotta “sombrero” style conical chicken roaster, a poultry trussing kit and cradle, a bag full of gaudily colored and impractically large “traditional” dried pasta from an un-ironically named gourmet food shop in northern New Jersey, a probably-now-rancid container of olive oil from a country that doesn’t really make olive oil.

Over the years, The Machine has been shellacked with a thin crust of mop dust, pulverized breakfast cereal flakes and dog kibble debris, all centrifuged and eventually aerosolized by the carefree footsteps of a hyperkinetic wrecking ball of an eight-year old. The difference between The Machine and the rest of the occupants of the closet is that it, The Machine, a first rate sous vide (“under vacuum”) unit and vacuum bag sealer, is itself, actually a good idea. I am terrified of and embarrassed by The Machine.

Every couple of months I’ll grab a roasting pan or similar tool from off of one of the build-in kitchenwire shelves and I’ll make eye contact with it — I swear, after a few glasses of wine, I’ve seen it raise a chrome eyebrow at me. The message is clear: “don’t really have the chops you think you do, huh, kid?” — I usually pull one of the towels down to cover its mocking face. I threw an ice cube at it once.

Now, I understand that I should be able to just watch a couple of Youtube videos and learn how to use it like Brooklyn’s answer to Eric Ripert, but for some reason the haughty presupposing instructions and sleek Germanic modernist casings provoked a primal fear of kitchen inadequacy and culinary performance anxiety. Luckily, there’s Shortychef — a one man kitchen-mounted Viagra dispenser, come to lay a smackdown on any paralytic panimpotence.

I’ve known Shortychef — aka Josh Eden — since the 1990s. He’s a study in the unity of opposites. On the one hand he’s the chilliest dude you’ve ever met. He’s really funny and unfailingly polite, he likes to watch the Mets, plays fantasy sports, doesn’t drink but likes the chronic, listens to jam bandy classic rock, goes to the track, enjoys a round of golf, is a big time dog lover, generally quiet in a crowd and always seems to be smiling.

On the other hand, he’s a shaved-head assassin of a kitchen boss. He made his bones when we still thought Patrick Ewing was going to win this city an NBA championship. He’s been one of Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s main guys on and off for years, but he’s also worked with and for some of the biggest names in New York and global gastronomy (although he’s too modest to tell you that unless you asked him straight up) and has run a number of his own spots, including the successful Shorty’s .32 in SoHo which served the best braised short ribs that I have ever eaten.

When Vongerichten opens a new resto in some exotic locale where the food has to be Fed-Exed in every morning, more often than not, Shorty is on a plane to get it up and running. He’s a cook, chef and go-to problem solver. He’s a calm, pleasant professional and proven kitchen hit man in a world once full of unstable pirates and knife throwing, abusive misanthropes. He’s the Victor the Cleaner of the Vongerichten food empire. He’s also one of the hardest working human beings I’ve ever met — when he had Shorty’s .32 he didn’t take a night off for months in a row. The guy is no joke.

But, because he’s also tender-hearted and generous, there he was ammenably in my kitchen on a rare day off, smiling tolerantly as my undertrained and oversized spastic lovemush of a rescue dog, Frankie slobbered all over him, drinking ginger beer out of a take-out one pint soup container and eyeing my pre-prepared third-rate mise en place skeptically. “Need anything, bro?”, I asked, my voice cracking with gleeful anticipation and some back notes of nervousness.

“Blades? Salt?” he gently asked. A rush of relief and self-importance. On that score, I had him covered. Like most wannabes, I emphasize the tools of the trade to over-compensate for a lack of skill in actually using them (real soldiers don’t fetishize their gear). So my knives are frigging beautiful. I have a bunch of gorgeous cutlery, including a custom CutBrooklyn 10” chef’s blade that’s so slick it looks like it was made in Wakanda. Before Shorty arrived, I honed the knives to razor sharpness and laid them out, ready to rock and roll.

Shorty looked all seven of my knoves over quickly and for a fleeting second, a pained expression flitted across his face. His eyes lit up as they settled on a stained, ground down and battered old boning knife, half the size of my trophies. My mom had acquired the knife in the 1960s. He grabbed it. I presented him with several containers of fancy “for the foodie in your life!” varieties of salt (think “organic Portuguese tidal sea salt infused with cork tree pollen”). The slightest hint of a gentle and tolerant crinkly-eyed smile before he reached past the individually-curated-flakes-of-artisanal-hand-harvested-Brittany-truffle-salt and grabbed the jar of Diamond Brand Kosher. “Yeah, we’re good,” said Shorty. And we were off.

Our small group gathered around the kitchen island as Shorty got to work. We were doing three separate proteins with sides, all done in The Machine. An improbably expensive piece of wild salmon from Fish Tales on Court Street, from Staubitz in Cobble Hill two beautiful bone-in ribeyes and one pork shoulder, also bone in. After an initial round of asking annoying and intemperate questions designed to telegraph my "massive” knowledge of cookery and generally getting in the way, a novel and uncharacteristically bright idea occurred to me: Just shut up, be helpful and get out of the way.

We chopped, we cleaned and cleared; we listened as Shorty broke down the process and the proteins. The shoulder got deboned in about a minute, the glorious chunk of pig was split in half, one side chopped and seasoned for chili tacos, the other scored, trussed and rolled as a roast, with us all taking a turn at screwing up the really simple cross stitching which Shorty patiently undid and fixed. The steaks went into the seal bags with garlic, seasoning and olive oil; the fish was cut into perfect five-ounce chunks and bagged with Provençal herbs and butter. We cranked up the soundtrack, leaning heavily on what I hoped were Shorty’s favorites: the Allman Brothers, the Black Crows and Government Mule. Bottles of cold cava, North Fork Cab Franc and  mid-range rosé Minervois were popped and sucked down, everything got turned up to 11.

Well, everything but Shorty.

As we got louder, jollier and more inexact, Shorty went in exactly the opposite direction — his station somehow always immaculate despite the chaos, his movements precise, controlled, directed. He showed us how to use the prep sealer to lock in a fat (olive oil or butter), a protein and flavoring agents; told us how we could economize by slicing one of the vacuum bags in half with a shears and sealing the ragged side, demonstrated how to set the temperature on the bath, and explained generally why this was worth all the fuss.

The most salient point for me is that the method is largely idiot-proof. You cook your food to an exact predetermined temperature that The Machine maintains for you for a precise amount of time. You set that time when you start. You can’t overcook anything as it holds the temperature for you no matter how easily distracted you are in the kitchen and rather than shrinking and drying out, the longer you cook in sous vide, the more tender your food gets — things are just getting good an hour into the process when your cooking at about 100 degrees. We did the pork and the steak at the same time, fish and veggies next. Once the proteins come out of the bath, you slice the bag open and either just serve or use a secondary cooking technique to add texture.

The steaks got finished on the stove top, sparkling luxuriously in herb butter; the pork roast went in the oven on high heat for a bit; the taco meat took a quick turn in a sauté pan with some more chili and garlic powder before meeting diced raw onion, cotija cheese and lime in pre-heated corn tortillas; the potatoes crisped up with olive oil and oregano under a broiler. The fish we served as is.

We ate standing in the kitchen, dog crashed out and snoring under the table, early spring lavender twilight visible through the kitchen windows, chatting excitedly, sharing plates and passing them around as Shortychef finished each dish. All of us ate more than we would normally eat in an entire day. For me, the steaks were the star of the show — the combo of the perfect internal rare-medium-rare temperature, amazingly juicy interior and a buttercrispalicious salt and pepper shell was killer. The pork roast was remarkably tender and flavorful, the tacos the same, the fish delicate and subtle. More wine, more laughing, stories about the time Shorty cut off his thumb mid-dinner rush and didn’t want to go to the hospital because the kitchen was “really slammed and in the weeds,” about the time we ran out on the check at a fancy restaurant by accident (“wait, I thought YOU paid?!?!”), just joyful tales of life in front and behind the scenes at the dinner table. It was an absolute feast, and I can’t remember ever enjoying a standing meal as much in my life.

Throughout it all, Shorty’s kind demeanor and patient smile never wavered. I guess if you’ve cooked on the line at full rush Saturday night dinner service with Jean-Georges Vongerichten breathing down your neck, teaching a few eager but clumsy ham-and-eggers how to use an ultimately fairly simple machine isn’t that much of a challenge. But asking a chef to cook for fun on his day off is a big lift. Shorty made it look easy and did it with grace and humor. Like Chef Auguste Gusteau says “anyone can cook,” but not everyone can cook well. Shortychef delivered a masterclass.

Donald Trump, Jr. testimony epitomizes everything wrong with the Russia scandal

Getty/Chip Somodevilla/Jeff Vinnick

Now that the Senate Judiciary Committee has released 2,500 pages of congressional testimony pertaining to Russiagate, it is time for President Donald Trump's critics to admit something they may not want to hear: There is no smoking gun contained inside.

"I don't know that there are going to be massive political implications," Dr. Larry J. Sabato, founder and director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, told Salon on Wednesday. "Any fair-minded person who reads a summary of what the testimony says understands that Donald Trump, Jr. really is a chip off the old block. That is: At best, he doesn't tell the full truth. At worst, he's lying."

In terms of what is revealed in the testimony itself, one of the best summaries was written by The Washington Post. As Aaron Blake noted, key findings include that Trump, Jr. confirmed to Congress that he had been talking about opposition research when he wrote that he would "love it" if Kremlin-connected lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya could give him dirt on Hillary Clinton when they met at Trump Tower in June 2016; that other witnesses confirmed that Trump, Jr. had opened the meeting seeking dirt on Clinton; and that Trump had, at least in a small capacity, attempted to influence the public's image of the meeting after it came to light.

Trump, Jr. claimed that nothing of value was gleaned from the meeting. If proven otherwise, the president's eldest son could potentially face potential legal trouble, but there is no evidence right now to suggest otherwise. At the same time, there is nothing in the newly-released testimony that dismisses ongoing concerns about the numerous connections between the Trump campaign and Russia. In other words, today's release does not change the narrative in any meaningful way.

That doesn't mean that we cannot learn something from the Trump Jr. transcripts. Rather, we are learning more about ourselves than we are about the Russia scandal.

"We're seeing what we want to see — all of us are — whatever our biases and prejudices may be about this," Sabato told Salon. "There is no hard-core proof in this, but there are clues that would lead a real investigative team — which is what Mueller has — to ask further questions and maybe — just maybe — get some real answers."

During our conversation, I observed to Sabato that we are living in a political climate where even hard facts would not necessarily change strong opinions. If a smoking gun is found, Trump's supporters would possibly deny what is fuming right in front of them — or find a creative way of spinning it. If it is determined that there was no smoking gun, Trump's critics might seemingly begin to see wisps of smoke everywhere they look.

"We don't know what is 'capital T' truth," Sabato said. "I mean, one side is closer to the truth, but neither side really knows it. They think they know it, but they don't know it. But people are so dug in, they're in their trenches, they're not going to crawl out across No Man's Land to get into the trench on the other side. They're just not going to do it. Everybody has decided what they think — at least about Trump."

And Trump, Jr.'s testimony, according to Sabato, had done little to clear things up.

"We're going to get back to Bill Clinton, and 'it depends on the meaning of 'is,'" Sabato told Salon. "It depends on the meaning of 'collusion.' I'm not sure, because, as I read this, there's contradictory information in there from people who are not necessarily lying. What actually did take place in that meeting that would produce collusion? I don't know. Because if the 'collusion' is about that act regarding adopted children [the Magnitsky Act], nobody's going to care."

"Is it 'collusion' about providing negative information about Clinton or money that would be used in the campaign?" he continued. "Well, this really doesn't address that or it doesn't provide proof that that happened. Now Mueller may have gone well beyond this."

And, as Sabato agreed, this writer's "smoking gun" analogy works all too well in this situation.

"You're asking a guy who, as you know, has spent a lot of time on the Kennedy assassination," he said. "They will find a picket fence. They will find a puff of smoke. They will find a policeman who may be real or may be shadows cast by the sun through leaves."

This article is not being written to dismiss Trump, Jr.'s testimony. It is certainly an important piece in a puzzle that has not yet fully started to form, and it may take on greater significance as additional pieces fall into place. At some point, though, it behooves the media to acknowledge not only what we know and what we do not know, but also how that knowledge will or will not impact the news cycle.

One thing remains certain: In our current hyper-partisan climate, it is exceptionally unlikely that the Trump, Jr. transcripts will change anyone's mind.

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Trump nominates Mitch McConnell’s brother-in-law to run pension benefit agency

AP/Manuel Balce Ceneta/Getty/Chip Somodevilla

President Donald Trump tapped political novice Gordon Hartogensis to lead the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., a Labor Department agency that pays back dissolved pensions. While Trump's pick has no government experience, he is the brother-in-law of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and McConnell’s wife, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao. Chao’s sister is married to Hartogensis.

The government agency Hartogensis is slated to lead "protects the retirement incomes of nearly 40 million American workers in nearly 24,000 private-sector defined benefit pension plans," according to its website. The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. collects insurance premiums from employers who sponsor pension plans and takes the payments over when companies cannot pay the promised benefits. If confirmed by the Senate, Hartogensis would replace a Barack Obama administration employee, W. Thomas Reeder Jr., who has held the position since 2015.

Some Trump supporters are in favor of Washington outsiders entering politics, like the president — a message Trump honed during his campaign, with promises to "drain the swamp" of Washington of its politically connected insiders. But Hartogensis' family ties, combined with his inexperience, raises questions about the standards of the nomination.

"The White House’s process for naming and vetting candidates is flawed," Scott Amey, the general counsel for the Washington-based Project on Government Oversight, told the Washington Post. "This seems to be another example of who you know rather than what you know."

Amey added that Hartogensis' nomination is a "pattern for this administration that raises red flags about how seriously they’re taking the daily operation of the government."

The White House countered that Hartogensis' background as an investment manager makes him an ideal pick and they feel confident that he will rectify the agency's mounting deficit, a number that has doubled in the last five years. A statement from the White House announcing his nomination was succinct: "Hartogensis is an investor and technology sector leader with experience managing financial equities, bonds, private placements, and software development."

The Post reported that Hartogensis' LinkedIn page shows his current employment is managing his family's trust. There seems to be no evidence that the former investment manager has government or public service experience, or a background that corresponds to the agency's purpose, which is to preserve retirement security and protect the pensions of millions of workers and retirees.

Prior to the current director's appointment, Reeder was a partner in the national employee benefits practice group and then worked for three administrations in the office of Benefits Tax Counsel in the Department of the Treasury. Reeder also joined the staff of the Senate Finance Committee and served as point in several legislative initiatives regarding employee benefits, according to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation website.

For Hartogensis, his past experience falls primarily in the technology industry. Though his task, if confirmed, would be to direct "the agency as it struggles with a number of crises, particularly one caused by the growing number of multi-employer plans that are severely underfunded and projected to become insolvent," the Post reported. The agency faces a multi-billion dollar deficit for both multi-employer pensions and single-employer plans.

"We will continue to work with the Administration, Congress, and the Multiemployer Plan community to create solutions so that PBGC’s guarantee is one that workers and retirees can count on in the future," Reeder said when the fiscal report published. "The longer the delay in making the changes needed to improve the solvency of the Multiemployer Program, the more disruptive and costly they will be for participants, plans and employers."

“I don’t need employees. I don’t need a store, or a warehouse”: 19-year-old online entrepreneur

By the time he was a high school senior, Beau Crabill had already built an online sales business so successful that he was outearning his teachers.

“I was making good money,” Crabill says. “But I wasn’t too focused on growing the business. That wasn’t much of a priority, because my intention was to be a college athlete.”

After receiving a track scholarship, he arrived for training camp as a freshman last summer. Before classes even began, he had left campus and created a new plan.

“I realized that being a student athlete took up a lot of time, and I was running several businesses, so it would have been impossible to keep doing it all,” Crabill says. “I decided to quit college and keep growing my businesses.”

Eight months later, the 19-year-old is bringing in $100,000 per month selling name-brand items (think Sony and Mattel) to Amazon buyers from his home in Olympia, Wash, the retail giant’s backyard. The entrepreneur’s next million-dollar idea is to teach you how to do the same.

After his YouTube videos describing his business best practices led to more consulting work than he could handle last spring, Crabill created a 16-hour on-demand training course to teach wannabe Amazon entrepreneurs his secrets.

“The principles of selling have always been the same,” Crabill concedes. “But you have to know what products to sell. In 2018, you can get a lot of data and analytics from places like Amazon, where they tell you what’s selling. There are more sellers today, but there are also more shoppers selling online.”

Crabill got his start selling products online at age nine when he helped his dad post items for sale on eBay. By 12 years old, he had his own successful eBay business selling trendy Nike socks to other middle schoolers. That led to buying and selling other items via garage sales and Craig’s List before transitioning to his current business model, which Crabill maintains is easier to scale.

“There are sellers doing over $100 million a year in the same business model as me,” he says. “I don’t have to physically ship products; I don’t need employees; I don’t need a store; I don’t need a warehouse. So it’s something that the average person can start without a crazy amount of money.’

Why on-demand videos work

Crabill believes that on-demand, online programming is the best way to teach the online sales business because the format makes it easy for him to update the program to keep up with any changes to the Amazon program.

“I’m not offering a CD or a book that I can’t change, because the information I teach right now could be totally different a year from now,” Crabill says.

Twenty-one-year-old Hayden Hogan stumbled on the course while researching business opportunities after being laid off from a seasonal job. He and a friend purchased the course on February 22 and made their first Amazon sale on April 1. They did $57,000 in sales last month.

The Sarasota, Fla., resident credits his quick success with the online course format. He watched the entire course three times in the first week, and then went back to it often as he was setting up his business.

“He has live examples, so I can go back to any video and watch how he does something,” Hogan says.

Opportunity for entrepreneurs

As e-commerce continues to grow, so do the number of entrepreneurs building huge businesses that take advantage of online platforms for sales. RXBar, the protein bar producer sold last year to Kellogg for $600 million began in 2013, with the first two years of sales occurring almost exclusively on Amazon.

“The secret was we didn’t have any resources,” founder Peter Rahal told Chicago Magazine in October. “Instead of going to investors and taking a bunch of risk and making 100,000 bars, we went straight to consumers. There’s less pressure and you can pivot a lot easier.”

Beau Crabill's on-demand, online course, Beau Crabill's Online Retail Mastery course is available here.

Fatal motorcycle tire blowouts not enough to prompt Goodyear recall

AP Photo/Tony Dejak

This article originally appeared on Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting

Steven Morris and his wife, Patricia, were headed to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, to celebrate their 26th wedding anniversary when the back tire on their Harley-Davidson motorcycle failed.

Patricia, seated at the rear, was thrown from the bike and later died.

“All of a sudden, the tire just let go; there was no warning, no nothing,” said Steven Morris, 59, an experienced motorcycle rider who co-owns a car and motorcycle repair shop in Cape Coral, Florida. “It all happened so fast. It took my life away from me. She was my life.”

The 2008 blowout, which involved a Dunlop D402 tire made by Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., prompted Steven, who was driving, to lose control of the motorcycle, Georgia police reported.

Besides Patricia Morris, at least four other people have died and 22 have been injured since 2006 after D402 motorcycle tires on Harleys failed in 11 states, according to a review by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting of state and federal court filings and police reports.

Nearly all these cases have sparked lawsuits against Goodyear. The company prevailed in two cases and reached settlements in eight others. Three more lawsuits are pending.

The nation’s top auto safety regulator should act, experts say.

“Absolutely, five deaths and 22 injuries from the same tire on motorcycles made for Harley-Davidson is a significant number and warrants an immediate investigation by NHTSA,” said Joan Claybrook, a former administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the federal agency that sets safety regulations for motor vehicles and equipment, including tires, and can request that manufacturers recall vehicles and tires with safety defects.

Presented with Reveal’s findings, Goodyear insisted the tires are safe.

“We take all incidents involving our products very seriously,” Laura Duda, a Goodyear spokeswoman, wrote in an email. “Every incident is unique, and each claim is thoroughly examined and analyzed.

“In the case of Dunlop D402 motorcycle tires, there are no defects related to motor vehicle safety,” she added. “In fact, most motorcycle tire issues are the result of underinflation, overloading or damage from road hazards.”

Duda said Goodyear reports all death and injury claims to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. There is no set number of complaints the agency must receive before opening an investigation or asking a manufacturer to issue a recall.

No recall for D402 tires has been ordered by federal safety regulators.

An investigation by Reveal published in December found that Goodyear’s lax approach to safety contributed to the deaths of motorists on the road and workers in its plants. The tire giant ranked among the top five manufacturers in the United States for worker deaths since 2009, according to Reveal’s analysis.

In addition, at least four motorists over the last seven years have died in vehicle accidents after tires made at Goodyear plants failed. Those tires were manufactured in plants where intense production demands and leaks in the roof have endangered both workers and consumers.

The story detailed how some protections for factory workers are being dismantled. The Trump administration has rolled back and postponed Obama-era protections in keeping with goals laid out by the National Association of Manufacturers. Richard Kramer, Goodyear’s chairman, chief executive officer and president, serves on the association’s board.

Reveal’s investigation prompted an immediate response from Goodyear in which a company spokeswoman called the company’s safety record “unacceptable.”

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s top post has been vacant since President Donald Trump took office, leaving its enforcement policy hanging in the balance. The Trump administration included $914.7 million for the agency in its proposed budget for the 2019 fiscal year, up from its current budget of $905.2 million.

The agency’s deputy administrator, Heidi King, was appointed last fall and Trump recently announced plans to nominate her to fill the top job, subject to Senate confirmation. She previously trained as an economist and research scientist and served as a regulatory policy analyst in the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. An agency spokesman declined to make King available for an interview.

Appearing before a subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee in February, King told lawmakers that “NHTSA is acting on its mission of saving lives. . . . Safety is, safety remains the department’s top priority.”

But Claybrook said the agency “is grossly underfunded.”

“It does not have the resources to do its job nationwide,” she said. “Therefore, it’s very cautious about whether it opens an investigation, and therefore, it tries not to.”

Sean Kane, founder and president of Safety Research & Strategies, a research organization based in Massachusetts, said the federal agency’s lack of leadership has created a void.

“If you don’t have clear policy direction from the top, you will have constant swings,” he said. “Those swings can affect how things are dealt with from a safety and public health perspective.”

An expert witness for motorists who have sued Goodyear has blamed manufacturing defects, which he says have caused tires to leak pressure or come off their rims, prompting drivers to veer and lose control.

“They negligently let defective tires go out the door,” said William Woehrle, a tire expert in Michigan who has been paid as an expert witness in about a dozen cases involving D402 tires that failed. “They have had a systemic problem with manufacturing Dunlop D402 motorcycle tires.”

Between mid-2003 and early 2015, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined the plant where the tires were made more than $20,000 for seven safety violations — all but one of them serious.

Motorcycle riders are especially vulnerable to injuries in the event of a tire blowout. Unlike companies that produce passenger cars, motorcycle manufacturers are not required to install tire pressure monitoring systems to warn drivers when tires are underinflated, which can lead to tire failures. The monitors became standard in cars and SUVs manufactured since 2007. And unlike rules for vehicle tires, federal rules do not require the rim on motorcycle tires to contain the tire when it develops a flat.

In 2008, when the tire blew out on Steven Morris’ motorcycle, the bike zigzagged between lanes and careened off the highway into the scrub grass. As the bike skidded onto its side, Patricia Morris fell off, smashing her head on the pavement in the breakdown lane. She was flown to a hospital in Atlanta, where she died several hours later. She was 50 years old.

Steven Morris broke his ankle, three ribs and scapula. He also suffered a concussion, leaving him with permanent short-term memory loss. Both Patricia and Steven were wearing helmets.

The Dunlop D402 tire that blew out had just 700 miles on it. It had been “defectively manufactured” less than a year before the wreck, according to Gary Derian, a mechanical engineer hired to testify in a lawsuit Morris brought against Goodyear Dunlop Tires North America Ltd. and Harley-Davidson Motor Co., the Milwaukee-based motorcycle manufacturer. The tire was made at what was then the Goodyear Dunlop plant in Tonawanda, New York, near Buffalo.

Sumitomo Rubber Industries Ltd. acquired Goodyear’s 75 percent interest in Goodyear Dunlop, including ownership of the Tonawanda plant, in 2015. (Prior to that, Sumitomo had a 25 percent interest in Goodyear Dunlop.) All the tires involved in the accidents examined by Reveal were made at the plant before 2015.

“Inspection of the tire reveals an adhesion defect in the tire cords that led to its failure,” Derian wrote in a report submitted as part of court documents in Morris’ lawsuit.

Goodyear Dunlop argued that the tire was underinflated and overloaded. Morris later settled in 2010 with Goodyear Dunlop and Harley-Davidson for undisclosed amounts.

Failures of D402 tires stretch back at least a dozen years, records show.

In one of the earliest cases identified by Reveal, Stephen Gageby, who was 50, was killed in 2007 after the back tire on his motorcycle failed on a highway just east of Missoula, Montana. Gageby’s wife, Karla, 57, was thrown from the bike. She spent the next two months in the hospital, where she was treated for a ruptured spleen, broken scapula and traumatic brain injury.

She later brought a lawsuit in Montana against Goodyear, Goodyear Dunlop Tires North America and Harley-Davidson, alleging that a defective tire caused the crash. The lawsuit claimed that the edge of the tire that connects to the rim, called the bead, leaked, causing the blowout.

Karla Gageby’s expert witness in the case was Woehrle, who blamed a manufacturing defect. The tire deflated because of “leaks between the tire bead and the rim flange,” he wrote in a report submitted as part of the case.

Goodyear argued that the motorcycle was overloaded. The case was settled in 2010 for an undisclosed amount.

“I lost my husband,” Gageby said in a phone interview. “Obviously, that had the biggest impact. It totally messed my life up. I believe the tire was defective.”

She still struggles with memory problems, confusion, anxiety and fine motor problems. Doctors initially told her that she wouldn’t be able to function as she did before the crash, but she was able to return to her job as a case manager for the state’s Office of Public Assistance. Ultimately, the lasting effects of her injuries forced her to retire in 2015.

She and her husband were longtime members of a local Harley-Davidson group. Stephen Gageby was known as an outspoken advocate for safety, pulling new riders aside to give them pointers and imploring others to wear protective gear.

“My husband was also a truck driver, so he was always checking the pressure on the tires,” Karla Gageby said.

However, on the day of the accident, he was not wearing his helmet, which Gageby — who was wearing hers — says was out of character.

In the most recent fatal accident, in April 2016, Brett and Angela Nielson were returning from a vacation in Nevada to their home in Utah when the back tire on their Harley blew out, records show. The bike wobbled before veering off the highway and rolling over, catapulting the couple into the air.

Brett, 50, a longtime sheriff’s sergeant for the Millard County Sheriff’s Office, hit a post and died. Angela, then 48, landed in sagebrush. She was flown to a Utah hospital, where she was treated for breaks in her pelvis, neck vertebrae, both legs and ribs and other injuries.

Authorities appeared to blame the tire failure for contributing to the wreck.

“Inspection of the motorcycle and tire marks on scene suggest that the rear tire of the motorcycle failed causing the driver to lose control,”according to a Utah Highway Patrol report.

When the officer inspected the back tire, he found the sidewall on its right side was blown out and “the tread appeared to have numerous cracks and signs of separation.”