Florida weighs allowing concealed carry guns without permit

Politico

Florida weighs allowing concealed carry guns without permit

Matt Dixon – January 30, 2023

Phil Sears/AP Photo

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Florida is set to become the 26th state to allow citizens to carry firearms without a permit under legislation outlined Monday by Republican House Speaker Paul Renner.

Conservatives and gun rights groups in Florida have long pushed to give Florida residents to ability to carry firearms with a permit, known by supporters as “constitutional carry,” but past legislation has routinely gotten bogged down. This year’s efforts are bolstered by Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has repeatedly said he would sign a permitless carry bill if lawmakers sent it to his desk.

As the 2023 legislative session approaches, though, the Renner-led House appears to be taking point on getting the bill through the Legislature.

“Florida led the nation in allowing for concealed carry, and that extends today as we remove the government permission slip to exercise a constitutional right,” Renner said Monday during a news conference, where he was flanked by a handful of county sheriffs.

Renner spearheaded the press conference, a signal it’s a clear top priority for the speaker, but the bill is being sponsored by state Rep.Chuck Brannan (R-Lake City) and state Sen. Jay Collins (R-Tampa). Lawmakers did not formally file a bill at the time of the news conference but are expected to by Monday afternoon.

Under the proposal, the state will no longer require individuals to get a permit from Florida to own a gun. The state also won’t mandate other provisions, including a training requirement needed to get a permit. Permits would still be an option for gun owners who want to get them, something needed to be able to legally carry a gun in states that do not have permitless carry.

The proposal does not address whether people will be allowed to openly carry firearms in public. Under current Florida law, gun owners are not allowed to carry guns in the open.

In 2021, Texas approved a similar “open carry” law that allows most gun owners 21 and over to carry a handgun in a holster without a permit. The Texas law allows citizens to carry the gun in the open or concealed.

Democrats blasted the bill that they say will flood the state with gun owners who are not properly trained. Shortly after Renner’s press conference, Democrats pledged to fight to defeat it during the 2023 session — but Republicans have supermajorities in both the House and Senate, giving them near unchecked power.

“We are united in opposition to this policy proposal,” said Rep. Christine Hunschofsky (D-Parkland), whose district includes the scene of the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School mass school shooting that left 17 people dead.

Democrats also see the proposal as another in a long line of culture war-infused bills DeSantis will champion during the legislative session to further energize his conservative base as he prepares to run for president. In the past few week alone, DeSantis has asked lawmakers for a sweeping criminal justice bill packed with policies generally supported by conservatives, rejected an Advanced Placement course focused on African-American history, a move that has gotten him national criticism from those who think he is whitewashing American history and signaled he will push for legislation cracking down on teacher’s unions, which are the last bastion of reliable political support for Florida Democrats.

“This is another effort to appeal to his conservative base as he runs for president,” said state Rep. Anna Eskamani (D-Orlando).

DeSantis was not at the Tallahassee press conference, instead holding his own at the same time in Orlando focused on transportation budget requests.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this report misstated one of the cosponsors of the bill. State Rep. Chuck Brannan is co-sponsoring the bill.

Florida GOP leaders want to get rid of gun permits

Associated Press

Florida GOP leaders want to get rid of gun permits

Brendan Farrington – January 30, 2023

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — Saying gun owners don’t need a government permission slip to protect their God-given rights, Florida’s House speaker proposed legislation Monday to eliminate concealed weapons permits, a move Democrats argue would make a state with a history of horrific mass shootings less safe.

Republican leaders, including Gov. Ron DeSantis, have expressed support for the idea, so the bill should not have a problem passing in a legislature with a GOP a super-majority.

“What we’re about here today is a universal right that applies to each and every man or woman regardless of race, gender, creed or background,” Speaker Paul Renner said at a news conference.

Democrats immediately responded that the proposal could lead to more gun violence and accidents. They said that the bill supporters call constitutional carry will allow people to buy guns with no training or background checks.

“Untrained carry is what it is,” said Democratic Rep. Christine Hunschofsky, who was mayor of Parkland when a former Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student fatally shot 17 students and faculty. “You are not making our communities, our schools or any places safer with this.”

Renner said law-abiding gun owners will take safety seriously.

“Anybody that is a gun owner and uses guns knows that safety comes first,” Renner said. “That’s important, but it’s not required. So the permit and all aspects of that permit will go away.”

Manuel and Patricia Oliver became advocates for tighter gun regulations after losing their 17-year-old son Joaquin in the 2018 massacre at the Parkland high school. They said with more people carrying guns without restrictions, Florida will become a more dangerous state.

“How about a little paperwork, some norms, before we take that step. It’s not right and it’s not protecting (the carrier) from anything. It is actually putting in danger a lot of people,” Manuel Oliver said.

Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey said people who want to do harm to others won’t be stopped by the permit requirement.

“Criminals don’t get a permit. Not one of them. They don’t care about obeying the law. Our law-abiding citizens have that immediate right, guarantee and freedom to protect themselves,” Ivey said.

About half the states allow people to carry a gun without a permit, a movement that has been growing particularly among conservative states.

Florida handgun owners would still have to conceal their weapons in public, though there has been discussion to allow gun owners to openly carry weapons.

Associated Press writer Terry Spencer in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, contributed to this report.

Family of Newlywed and Activist Decapitated at Utah’s Arches National Park Awarded More Than $10M

People

Family of Newlywed and Activist Decapitated at Utah’s Arches National Park Awarded More Than $10M


Melissa Montoya – January 30, 2023

A federal judge awarded more than $10 million to the family of a Ugandan human rights activist who was decapitated while on a visit to Arches National Park in 2020.

Esther “Essie” Nakajjigo’s husband Ludovic Michaud will receive $9.5 million while her mother Christine Namagembe will receive $700,000, according to the judgment filed in federal court. Essie’s father John Bocso Kateregga will receive $350,000.

Nakajjigo’s husband and parents filed a $270 million administrative claim against the National Park Service in 2021 over her death.

Nakajjigo and Michaud spent June 13, 2020, at Arches National Park in Utah as a way to celebrate their one-year anniversary of when they first met, according to the Associated Press.

The newlyweds were on their drive out with Nakajjigo in the passenger seat when a strong wind pushed the park’s entrance gate into the road, and sliced through their rental car “like a hot knife through butter,” the claim said, according to the AP.

The activist was decapitated.

Zoe Littlepage, a lead attorney on the case, told The Salt Lake Tribune, that “on behalf of the family, we are very appreciative of the judge’s attention to detail, the time he spent working on this, and for the value he put on the loss to this family of Essie.”

Esther Nakajjigo
Esther Nakajjigo

Esther Nakajjigo/Twitter Esther Nakajjigo

In a statement to the newspaper, U.S. Attorney for the District of Utah Trina Higgins, said Nakajjigo’s family was entitled to damages.

The trial began Dec. 5 in Utah and was meant to determine how much money was owed to the family, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.

During the trial, a U.S. attorney representing the government said, “The United States was 100 percent at fault. … And we want to express on behalf of the United States our profound sorrow for your loss,” per the newspaper.

RELATED: Boy, 14, Killed at North Carolina Rodeo During First Bull Ride: ‘My Lil Cowboy’

“We respect the judge’s decision and hope this award will help her loved ones as they continue to heal for this tragedy,” the statement read. “On behalf of the United States, we again extend our condolences to Ms. Nakajjigo’s friends, family and beloved community.”

“Essie was a remarkable humanitarian and champion for women and girls. This verdict, though the largest by a federal judge in Utah history, cannot replace the immeasurable loss suffered by her husband and family. We are grateful that Judge Jenkins honored Essie’s life and legacy with this award,” Littlepage said in a statement to PEOPLE.

Higgins did not immediately return PEOPLE’s request for comment.

Nakajjigo was Uganda’s ambassador for women and girls, and ran a health center in her home country that she set up when she was just 17 years old to provide free health services to adolescents.

She was also the brains behind two reality TV shows that aimed to empower young mothers and encourage girls to stay in school.

She reportedly moved to Colorado for a social entrepreneurship program at the Watson Institute in Boulder.

Absence from work at record high as Americans feel strain from Covid

The Guardian

Absence from work at record high as Americans feel strain from Covid

Melody Schreiber – January 29, 2023

<span>Photograph: Jae C Hong/AP</span>
Photograph: Jae C Hong/AP

For many Americans it feels like everyone is out sick right now. But there is a good reason: work absences from illness are at an all-time annual high in the US and show few signs of relenting. And it’s not just acute illness and caregiving duties keeping workers away.

About 1.5 million Americans missed work because of sickness in December. Each month, more than a million people have called out sick for the past three years. About 7% of Americans currently have long Covid, which can affect productivity and ability to work, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Related: China claims Covid wave has peaked with severe cases, deaths falling fast

The last time the absentee number dipped below a million Americans was in November 2019.

Last year, the trend accelerated rather than returning to normal. In 2022, workers had the most sickness-related absences of the pandemic, and the highest number since record-keeping began in 1976.

In 2022, the average was 1.58 million per month, for a total of 19 million absences for the year. The largest spike was in January 2022, when 3.6 million people were absent due to illness, about triple the pre-pandemic number for that month.

Parents and caregivers also saw the highest rates of childcare-related absences of the entire pandemic in October 2022 as illnesses surged amid relaxed precautions and lower vaccination rates among children.

Patterns in absenteeism correspond with rises and falls in the spread of Covid. But long Covid is probably contributing to sick leave rates as well.

One analysis in New York found that 71% of long Covid patients who filed for worker’s compensation still had symptoms requiring medical attention or were unable to work completely for at least six months. Two in five returned to work within two months, but still needed medical treatment. Nearly one in five (18%) of claimants with long Covid could not return to work for a year or longer after first getting sick. The majority were under the age of 60.

Workforce participation has dropped by about 500,000 people because of Covid, according to one study that looked over time at workers who were out sick for a week. But the actual number could be higher, because not all workers are able to take time off during their illnesses, Bach said.

“It’s likely that long Covid is keeping somewhere around 500,000 to a million full-time-equivalent workers out of work,” said Katie Bach, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Some affected by long Covid have reduced their hours, while others have left the workforce temporarily or permanently – a metric not captured by work absence data, but calculated in labor participation statistics.

Patients who are very sick with long Covid often “try to work for some amount of time and then eventually they drop out”, Bach said.

Between death and disability, the workforce has been reduced by as much as 2.6% during the pandemic, with 1bn days of work lost, McKinsey recently reported.

Those who stay in their jobs may need more sick leave than before because of new chronic illnesses.

“People who are on the less-sick end of long Covid, maybe they can keep working, but every now and then they might need a day or two off just because they have overdone it or something happened that triggered a symptom flare,” Bach said.

Nearly one in five Americans developed long Covid after their initial infection, with some 7.5% of all American adults currently experiencing long Covid, according to the CDC. The CDC began collecting data on how many people have long Covid in 2022.

Much more research still needs to be done on the causes of and treatments for long Covid, the researchers said. Some patients do eventually recover, for instance, but it’s not clear why or how long they will be sick.

“We don’t know how long it’s taking them to recover. There’s a lot of uncertainty there,” said Alice Burns, associate director of the program on Medicaid and the uninsured at the Kaiser Family Foundation.

The more immunity people have, from vaccines and recovery from prior cases, the less likely they are to get sick in the first place, which reduces the risk of developing long Covid. But it is still possible to have long Covid even after mild or asymptomatic infection.

All of this means the US may continue to see higher-than-normal workplace absences.

“Some people just really need flexibility from their employers,” Burns said. That can include telework, unscheduled leave, flexible schedules and reduced hours.

“The challenge with that is, those supports are a lot more likely to be available to workers who have office jobs, higher-paying jobs, who are pretty well-established in the labor market,” Burns said.

“Covid in general, and long Covid too, are more likely to affect people who are minorities, who have lower levels of education, [who have] likely lower levels of income. So there may be, for many people, a mismatch between the people who need some of these employment-related supports and the types of jobs they are in.”

Employers can adjust to this new normal by offering as many accommodations as possible, both for those suffering initial bouts of Covid infection and those experiencing longer-term symptoms, Bach said. Again, some of the jobs where people are most at risk might be the least accommodating – it’s usually easier for office workers to telecommute than it is for fast-food workers – but there are still steps employers can take.

“Companies have to get creative, like: can we offer more frequent breaks?” Bach said. “Can we as a society convince Medicare and Medicaid to reimburse a little bit more where companies are employing people with long Covid? What memory aids can we put together?”

If long Covid continues to affect 7% of the country, that’s 23 million people at any given time who may require accommodations under laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act.

“But there isn’t a lot of clarity about what is a reasonable accommodation” under the law when it comes to Covid and long Covid, Burns said.

While Covid has thrown the country into disarray in every realm, including work, it is also shining a more intense light on the ways chronic illness affects productivity and workforce participation – a change that disability and chronic illness activists say is long overdue, Bach pointed out.

“My hope is that it’s big enough that we can rethink how we research and treat these diseases, and how we approach workplace accommodation,” Bach said. “In a world where any of your workers could suddenly become disabled, I think you have to be more flexible.”

‘I use it because it’s better’: why chefs are embracing the electric stove

The Guardian

‘I use it because it’s better’: why chefs are embracing the electric stove

Whitney Bauck – January 29, 2023

The evidence that gas stoves are bad for human health has grown so staggering over the last few years that the US Consumer Product Safety Commission recently announced that it would consider banning the appliances. Though a conservative backlash prompted the White House to rule out the possibility of a nationwide ban, and some states have passed pre-emptive laws that prohibit cities from ever passing gas bans, other cities including Berkeley, New York and San Francisco have already moved to bar new gas hookups due to health and environmental concerns.

Related: Are gas stoves really dangerous? What we know about the science

One study from earlier this month found that one in eight cases of childhood asthma in the US is caused by gas stove pollution. According to the lead author on the study, Talor Gruenwald, a research associate at the non-profit Rewiring America, that means that living in a home with a gas stove is comparable to living in a home with a smoker. Gas stoves release pollutants so harmful that the air pollution they create would be illegal if it were outdoors, and that’s not just true when you’re actively cooking – gas stoves continue to emit harmful compounds like methane even when turned off. Beyond the adverse health impacts, those emissions are greenhouse gasses that also contribute to the climate crisis.

But solutions are within reach. “The most surefire way to eliminate risk of childhood asthma from gas stoves is to move to a clean cooking alternative like an induction stovetop or electric stovetop,” said Gruenwald.

Switching over to electric isn’t just a boon to your health and the planet – it also makes for a better cooking experience, according to a growing number of professional chefs. Read on to hear from three who have embraced electric and are loving the results.

Jon Kung: wok cooking that’s ‘more of an authentic experience’

Though he may be best known these days for TikTok videos showing off his kitchen prowess, deadpan humor and the occasional thirst trap, Jon Kung had been working as a chef professionally for more than a decade before pandemic lockdowns prompted him to start posting cooking videos on the internet. He was first introduced to induction cooking, which uses a magnetic field to efficiently heat pots and pans, while working in a commercial kitchen in Macau, China. He began relying heavily on induction burners in his current home of Detroit, Michigan, because he was often working pop-ups in spaces with limited ventilation.

“There was no altruistic intent in my decision to adopt induction. I use it because it’s better,” he said. “Induction stovetops are easier to clean, they’re more responsive, and they are just as powerful, if not more powerful, than gas. My induction burner can boil eight quarts of water within 11 minutes – it’s super fast.”

These days, Kung uses induction “100% of the time”. He often works on an induction wok, which features an induction cooktop with a bowl-shaped surface that a wok perfectly fits into, and rejects the critique that gas stove bans would prohibit chefs from cooking Chinese food authentically.

“You can buy a curved induction wok burner specifically made for woks and it works better than cooking on a wok on a western gas range,” he said. “That wok burner was literally made by Chinese people to cook Chinese food – when I cook in that it’s more of an authentic experience than cooking on a KitchenAid or a Viking range could ever be.”

Still, Kung admitted that there will be a learning curve for chefs when they initially make the switch. The biggest difference, he noted, is that gas stoves offer both “visual and tactile” feedback about how hot the cooking surface is, while induction cooktops require users to rely on numbers on a screen to know what temperature they’re working with. He recommended cooking with eggs when you’re first switching over to quickly get the kind of visual feedback that will help you learn to use an induction burner.

And for the small handful of dishes that truly require fire – think crème brûlée or charring peppers – he keeps a blowtorch in his kitchen. “I think flame should be a seldomly used tool for specific purposes in my kitchen, instead of putting my health at risk all the time because of these few times I need to actually use fire,” he said.

Christopher Galarza: quicker, easier to clean and a low barrier to entry

Christopher Galarza spent a decade working in conventional kitchens before he had his first experience in an all-electric commercial kitchen as an executive chef at Chatham University, a Pittsburgh institution known for its focus on sustainable food systems. Going electric changed his and his staff’s experience of working in the kitchen, partly because working with gas stoves can be a sweltering experience.

“I had a meat thermometer in my chef coat at one old restaurant job, and I looked down one day and noticed that my thermometer read 135F,” he said. In contrast, the all-electric kitchen he worked in at Chatham stayed pleasantly in the low 70s even on summer days when it was 90 degrees outside and the kitchen was in full production mode. “We were able to drastically reduce the temperature in the kitchen, which made us all more comfortable,” he added. “And for me personally, I can tell you that my mental health was better.”

He’s convinced that’s a benefit that got passed along to the guests eating the food he was cooking. “People can feel when you’re stressed,” he said, “and they can tell when you’re relaxed and happy.” But there was also a benefit to the bottom line, in that induction stoves are much quicker and easier to clean, which allowed him to spend less money on harsh cleaning chemicals and to send his kitchen staff home earlier while the “dollar per labor hour went way up”.

He cites other studies showing that the utility costs of operating a gas-powered or electric-powered kitchen are pretty similar, and notes that even for home chefs, the barrier to entry is low: “You can go on Amazon and buy an induction burner for $60 that plugs into the same outlet that you have your coffeemaker in,” he said.

Galarza is so convinced that electric is the future of professional cooking that he’s started a consultancy to help other kitchens make the switch. “Every international culinary competition in the world, from the Bocuse d’Or to the Culinary Olympics, is all electric,” he said. “The metric by which the international cooking community judges each other is on induction. And those are the best chefs on the planet.”

Even though rightwing politicos have been inciting a culture war around gas stoves in the US, he dismisses much of it as political posturing. “Ultimately, no one’s going to come into your home with a crowbar and take your stove, just like no one’s kicking down your door and checking your house for asbestos or lead paint,” he said. “The gas stove is this generation’s equivalent of lead paint. It’s something we thought was OK, that we later found out is a hazard. And now we have an opportunity to make it right.”

Tu David Phu: no better way to sear meat

Before Chef Tu David Phu worked in the kitchens of top-tier restaurants like New York’s Daniel or San Francisco’s Acquerello or appeared on shows like Top Chef or Chefsgiving, he was a “first-generation Vietnamese American kid from Oakland who grew up food insecure”, he said. His experiences with food at both ends of the economic spectrum – from childhood in a food desert to an adulthood that has included cooking for the world’s wealthiest people – have deeply shaped how he sees sustainability conversations in the context of food and cooking.

He became familiar with induction cooking in fine dining kitchens, which he said prioritized electric stovetops because they allow for chefs to work in small spaces and with greater precision – the pastry department at one of his old jobs was particularly fond of induction’s capacity for melting chocolate or making syrups without burning them. But Phu is adamant about breaking down the idea that kitchen electrification only concerns the privileged.

“I feel very passionately about including working class and poor people in this electrification movement,” he said. Black, brown and Indigenous communities are already disproportionately at risk for pollution-related health impacts, due to “modern-day redlining” that locates polluting industries in BIPOC neighborhoods, he said; they shouldn’t also be saddled with the health impacts of not having any other option than to cook on gas. “Decarbonization as a whole, not just electrification, is a justice issue,” he said. He commends the Inflation Reduction Act provisions that allow for low-income households to get as much as $840 in rebates toward electric stoves, but wants to see more initiatives focused on spreading the word about these options to the communities that need them most.

On a personal level, the Orange county, California-based chef uses induction cooktops “religiously” in his own home, and argues that there’s no better way to sear meat than by using a cast iron stove on an induction cooktop. His biggest tip for successful induction usage is to remember that induction cooktops can get to the smoking point in about 15 seconds, so he recommends staying in the low to medium power range when cooking, unless you’re boiling water.

He recognizes the importance of personal and cultural identities that get tied up in food, but he doesn’t think they should be a barrier to making changes that are necessary for the health of people and the planet. “My response to the resistance from some in the Asian community saying they can’t cook ‘authentic’ food without gas is: it doesn’t matter if you can cook a certain way or not if you don’t have an ozone or fresh air to breathe,” he said. “Throughout the course of all of our histories, we’ve prioritized our survival first, and we adjusted and modified our identities and cultures around that, because survival is more important.”

How Reagan Convinced Himself He Didn’t Sell Arms for Hostages

Daily Beast

How Reagan Convinced Himself He Didn’t Sell Arms for Hostages

Philip Taubman – January 28, 2023

Photo Illustration by Erin O'Flynn/The Daily Beast/Getty Images
Photo Illustration by Erin O’Flynn/The Daily Beast/Getty Images

Shocking news about secret arms-for-hostage deals rocked Washing­ton in late 1986. The first hint came with a White House announcement on November 2, that David Jacobsen, an American held hostage in Lebanon by Iranian-directed Islamic forces, had been released. As Secretary of State George Shultz read a draft White House statement about the development, he noted that it referred to freed “hostages,” with the “s” crossed out. That told him that the White House had expected Jacobsen would not be alone. Shultz suspected that the news meant that clandestine White House efforts to free captive Americans in the Middle East by send­ing arms via Israel to Iran might be responsible. He had first heard about the possibility in mid-1985.

Within a few weeks, the dimensions of the story expanded exponen­tially with word that some Iranian payments for American arms had been secretly diverted to the rebel Contra forces in Nicaragua that Washington hoped would topple the leftist Sandinista regime. The funding was in clear violation of a congressional cutoff of aid to the Contras. Overnight, the affair, quickly dubbed the Iran-Contra scandal, engulfed the White House.

Shultz realized that President Ronald Reagan faced an explosive crisis similar to Watergate that might upend his presidency. The fiasco staggered Shultz. It exposed his own failure to stop the arms-for-hostage dealing at several critical moments when he heard about pieces of it, objected to it but stopped short of forcefully intervening. He had delib­erately kept his distance, telling the White House officials who managed the arms shipments to Iran that he did not want to know the details.

Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan: The Ultimate ’80s Power Couple

The scandal also forced Shultz to face up to Reagan’s weaknesses as president, for the affair, at its core, was a colossal blunder. As Shultz confronted the issue, he struggled mightily to remain loyal to Reagan while simultaneously protecting his own reputation and legacy. In doing so, he barely escaped indictment for obstruction of justice.

The sudden crisis had been a long time in the making, born of two international flashpoints that the Reagan administration struggled to manage: the Middle East and Central America. The U.S.-Iran skirmish opened on November 4, 1979, when a mob of young Iranians overran the American embassy in Teheran and seized fifty-two Americans as hostages. On January 20, 1981, after 444 days in captivity, the hostages were freed moments before Reagan was sworn in as president. In the years that followed, the Khomeini regime supported Shiite proxy groups in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East that killed or kidnapped Americans.

Although Reagan administration policy clearly barred making con­cessions to hostage takers, Reagan yearned to free them. He also bought the untenable proposition that by selling arms to Iran he could establish a less adversarial relationship with the ayatollahs and turn Iran into a mod­erating Shiite influence in the region. Israel, for its part, offered to sell American arms in its arsenal to Iran to secure the release of hostages.

While the Middle Eastern plot was taking shape, the American officials who favored it—including CIA Director William Casey, National Security Adviser Bud McFarlane, and marine lieutenant colonel Oliver North, a National Secu­rity Council staff member—grew increasingly concerned about Soviet and Cuban inroads in Central America. When congressional Democrats cut off American support to paramilitary forces trying to overthrow the Nicaraguan government, these men first looked to Israel and South Africa as potential sources of money for the Contras. Over time, the Middle East and Central America vectors converged. The result was an elaborate plot in which Israel sold American weapons to Iran in exchange for hostages, and profits from the arms sales were funneled to the Contras. Reagan enthusiastically endorsed the arms sales but was not informed about the diversion of money to the Contras.

Shultz’s first inkling about irregular activity came in mid-April 1984 during administration debates about Central America policy and possible third-country aid to the Contras. Shultz wanted to maintain American assistance to the guerrilla forces, but not by funneling foreign money to them. He preferred to persuade Congress to extend American aid, if pos­sible. When Casey suggested enlisting South Africa’s help in April 1984, Shultz was appalled, fearing covert foreign funding might lead to the impeachment of Reagan.

The arms-for-hostages operation came up formally in a July 13, 1985, McFarlane memo to Shultz. The national security adviser described an Israeli proposal to ship American arms to Iran to encourage a political dialogue and dislodge hostages from captivity. To get the dialogue started, Iran wanted one hundred American antitank missiles. Shultz told McFarlane to “make a tentative show of interest without commitment.” Shultz neither opposed nor supported the missile transfer—he did not address the question. He advised McFar­lane to manage the initiative personally. Reflecting later on his response to McFarlane, Shultz said, “I was uneasy about my response, but I well knew the pressures from the president to follow up on any possibility of gaining the release of our hostages. I felt that Bud would in fact go ahead no matter what I said and that I was better off to stay in close touch with him and thereby retain some influence over what happened.”

Eight days later, McFarlane outlined the Israeli proposal at a White House meeting. Shultz, apparently reluctant to reiterate his earlier equivo­cation, objected to the arms transfer, arguing that it brazenly violated the administration’s firm stance against trading guns for hostages or making any concessions to terrorists. Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger agreed. The meeting ended incon­clusively, but two days later Reagan told McFarlane to move ahead with the plan. On August 20, Israel shipped 96 antitank missiles to Iran, followed by another 408 two weeks later. One American hostage, Benjamin Weir, was soon freed. Upping the ante, Iran requested a shipment of more powerful weap­ons, medium-range surface-to-air HAWK missiles. When Israel could not deliver the larger weapons directly to Iran and efforts to ship them via a third country failed, Oliver North enlisted the help of the CIA.

Reagan enthusiastically supported the effort, acting on a humanitarian conviction that the United States should do everything possible to gain the release of the hostages. In doing so, he persuaded himself that the United States was not trading arms for hostages but instead was engaged in a noble attempt to save the lives of his countrymen..

Once news of the deal broke into the open in November 1986, Shultz’s attempts to dent the Reagan illusion grew frantic—and perilous for him. His challenge was threefold: convince Reagan that McFarlane, Vice Admiral John Poindexter (who had succeeded McFarlane as national security adviser), Casey, and North had misled him; end the arms-for-hostage strategy; and help Reagan survive the firestorm. Reagan did not want to hear that he had approved an arms-for-hostage strategy. On November 6, three days after the Lebanese newspaper report about the McFarlane mission to Teheran, Reagan declared that news coverage of the trip had “no foundation” and denied that the U.S. was exchanging arms with Iran for the release of hostages.

Shultz tried repeatedly to convince Reagan that his administration was trading arms for hostages and brazenly violating its own policies for dealing with terrorists. Reagan repeatedly rejected his appeals and grew increas­ingly impatient with Shultz. As the tension escalated, Shultz ruminated about his own failure to act more decisively in 1985 and 1986 as evidence of the operation caught his attention. “I felt I should have asked more, de­manded more, done more, but I did not see how,” he recalled. “Did I have myself to blame for the aggrandizement of the NSC staff? I agonized. Ever since my first days as secretary of state, I had sought to make the national security adviser my channel to the White House and, on day-to-day mat­ters, to the president.”

On one level, he was right. Secretaries of state cannot operate indepen­dent of the White House and the national security adviser. But on another level, Shultz was wrong. His willingness to rely on the White House national security staff after repeated setbacks caused by the incompetence and ideological rigidity of the staff does not make for a persuasive defense of his failure to act more decisively to stop the Iran-Contra affair before it reached critical mass.

Shultz’s assertion at the time that he was unaware of many incremental developments in the arms-for-hostage operation, a defense repeated in his memoirs, does not conform with detailed notes kept by Charles Hill, Shultz’s executive assistant. The memory lapse can be explained by the dizzying demands that descend daily on a secretary of state and Hill’s failure to capture all the relevant infor­mation about Shultz’s awareness of the Iran-Contra activities when he re­viewed his notes for Shultz to help prepare Shultz’s congressional testimony. But Shultz’s selective memory also evoked Richard Nixon’s years-earlier warning to Reagan that Shultz had “a wonderful ability to, when things look iffy or are going wrong, he’ll contend he never heard about the issue and was never briefed and was not a part.”

Shultz’s defective memory, compounded by Hill’s handling of his notes, nearly proved disastrous when Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh discovered that Shultz had withheld relevant information about the Iran-Contra affair in his 1987 congressional testimony, delivered under oath. Walsh weighed charging Shultz with obstruction of justice but ultimately found that “Shul­tz’s testimony was incorrect, but it could not be proven that it was willfully false.”

Shultz’s faith in Reagan was shaken by the scandal. The president’s refusal to acknowledge the reality of exchanging arms for hostages was dumbfounding. In a nationally televised address on November 13, 1986, Reagan said he had authorized a small shipment of arms to Iran but was not bartering arms for hostages. “We did not—repeat—did not trade weapons or anything else for hostages, nor will we.” After the speech, Shultz tried to make sense of Reagan’s blind spot. “The president’s speech convinced me that Ronald Reagan still truly did not believe that what had happened had, in fact, happened. To him the reality was different. I had seen him like this before on other issues. He would go over the ‘script’ of an event, past or present, in his mind, and once the script was mastered, that was the truth—no fact, no argument, no plea for recon­sideration, could change his mind.”

On November 16, Shultz made a fateful appear­ance on the CBS News Sunday-morning interview pro­gram Face the Nation. When host Lesley Stahl repeatedly pressed Shultz to state whether any further arms shipments would be made to Iran, he re­plied, “Under the circumstances of Iran’s war with Iraq, its pursuit of terror­ism, its association with those holding our hostages, I would certainly say, as far as I’m concerned, no.” Stahl then asked if Shultz was speaking for the entire administration. “No,” he answered. It was a stunning moment—the secretary of state acknowledging that he could not speak for the U.S. gov­ernment.

He barely survived his candid answer. The White House announced that Shultz did speak for the administration and that Reagan had “no desire” and “no plans” to send further arms to Iran. Yet Reagan continued to defend the operation privately. Meanwhile, Poindexter and North kept working on plans for new arms shipments. Sensing that Shultz’s persistence was annoying Reagan, Casey urged the president to select a new secretary of state.

The same day Casey urged the president in writing to do so, he joined Bush, Shultz, Weinberger, Poindexter and others at the White House for a National Security Planning Group meeting with Reagan to hear from Attorney General Edwin Meese. Reagan had commissioned Meese to investigate the arms-for-hostage operation. Reagan brushed aside Shultz’s ob­jections.

That evening, as Shultz lamented the latest developments, Poindexter, who had strongly defended the operation earlier in the day, called from the White House. His tone was entirely different—mild, even meek. The change in tone pleased but puzzled Shultz. Two days later he learned the reason behind the turnabout: Meese aides had discovered the secret payments to the Contras. When top officials gathered again at the White House, Meese told the group that between $10-30 million dollars had been sent to the Contras. Reagan had not ap­proved the diversion or even known about it. As a result, Poindexter was out and North reassigned. On November 26, three weeks after the first news reports about the deals broke, Shultz and Reagan stilled the rancor that had agitated their relationship and agreed Shultz should stay on as secretary of state through the end of the Reagan presidency.

Excerpted from “In the Nation’s Service: The Life and Times of George P. Shultz” by Philip Taubman, published by Stanford University Press, ©2022 by Philip Taubman. All Rights Reserved.

Philip Taubman is a lecturer at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. Before joining CISAC, Taubman worked at the New York Times as a reporter and editor for nearly 30 years. He is the author of The Partnership: Five Cold Warriors and Their Quest to Ban the Bomb (2012); Secret Empire: Eisenhower, the CIA, and the Hidden Story of America’s Space Espionage (2003); and In The Nation’s Service: The Life and Times of George P. Shultz (2023).

There’s almost unlimited clean, geothermal energy under our feet. New tech could help unleash that potential in New Mexico.

Albuquerque Journal, N.M

There’s almost unlimited clean, geothermal energy under our feet. New tech could help unleash that potential in New Mexico.

Kevin Robinson-Avila, Albuquerque Journal, N.M. – January 28, 2023

Jan. 28—Canadian company Eavor Inc. drilled an 18,000-foot well bore this past fall in southwest New Mexico to prove it could hammer its way through deep-underground, hard-granite rock to reach previously untapped geothermal energy.

Eavor’s well now stands as the deepest hole ever drilled in New Mexico, successfully demonstrating that the company’s new technology can potentially crack open access to vast subsurface hot-rock formations that offer massive amounts of clean, renewable energy.

Eavor’s success is just the latest achievement in what could soon become a global renaissance in geothermal development that’s got both industry experts and public officials hyped about the potential for unleashing a virtually unlimited source of clean energy for electric generation, and for heating and cooling of homes and buildings.

“We have massive geothermal resources sitting below our feet, but it’s been elusive to tap into the deep subsurface areas we need to reach to extract that energy economically and use it,” Eavor Vice President of Business Development Neil Ethier told the Journal. “… Our drilling project in southwest New Mexico showed that our technology can unlock that geothermal potential, and it’s now ready for commercial development.”

In fact, the company is preparing to break ground in Nevada on its first 20-megawatt geothermal power plant in the U.S. using its new technology to exploit deep hot-rock formations. The project will supply power to local utility NV Energy, pending approval by state regulators in Nevada.

That project could be the first of many new power plants Eavor expects to build in western states, where geothermal energy is more readily accessible at levels closer to the surface than in other places. Eventually, that could include New Mexico as well, which has the sixth-highest geothermal potential in the nation, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado.

“New Mexico’s geothermal resource is very good,” Ethier said. “It’s a wonderful opportunity for New Mexico to develop clean, firm, baseload electricity that employs New Mexicans.”

Eavor is one of many companies now aggressively pursuing geothermal development with modern drilling technologies that allow them to tap into the deep underground rock formations that eluded the industry in years past.

Texas-based Fervo Technologies, for example, has also signed new power purchase agreements in western states to build modern geothermal power plants, including three separate projects with utilities in California for a combined total of nearly 100 MW of generation. And, as that company perfects its drilling techniques — and as economies of scale kick in to lower costs — Fervo expects to target a lot more places for geothermal development, including New Mexico, said Fervo Senior Associate for Policy and Regulatory Affairs Laura Singer.

“We definitely see New Mexico as an opportunity for the future once we get our drilling costs lower and our techniques fully hammered out,” Singer told the Journal.

State legislation

Both Eavor and Fervo met with a geothermal working group last year that state Sen. Gerald Ortiz y Pino, D-Albuquerque, formed to explore local development potential, paving the way for newly proposed legislation in this year’s session to promote the industry.

Ortiz y Pino has filed the Geothermal Resources Development Act, Senate Bill 8, to provide $25 million in state money for grants and loans for research and development of geothermal energy projects around New Mexico. And he filed a second bill, SB-173, to offer up to $10 million annually in tax breaks for new geothermal projects.

The legislation could inspire more investment in both geothermal electric generation, and use of geothermal energy to heat and cool homes and buildings.

Heating-and-cooling technology is well developed. But it requires more education and promotional incentives to encourage broad market adoption and deployment.

In contrast, geothermal electric generation based on today’s emerging technologies that target deep hot-rock formations is still evolving. But it’s nearing the commercial break-out point.

“We’re on the cusp of it,” Ortiz y Pino told the Journal. “Eavor just drilled a hole nearly 19,000 feet deep to show it can do this. That opens the door to a lot more potential development as other energy companies jump in.”

Both of Ortiz y Pino’s bills have bipartisan support, with two Republican senators co-sponsoring them. And more bipartisan backing is likely, Ortiz y Pino said.

That’s because, apart from offering clean “baseload” energy that can operate 24/7 all year long, today’s emerging technology could also create direct employment opportunities for workers in the oil and gas industry as the state diversifies away from fossil fuels.

Drilling for heat, not hydrocarbons

Indeed, it’s the modern drilling technologies developed by the oil and gas industry that are opening the gateway to deep underground geothermal energy, making the drilling rigs and skilled workforce that manage today’s oil and gas operations essential for companies like Eavor and Fervo to bust through hard, subsurface granite to reach hot-rock formations.

“We’re piggybacking off technology advancements in oil and gas drilling,” Ethier said. “But instead of drilling for hydrocarbons, we’re drilling for heat. Fifteen years ago we couldn’t do this.”

Modern hydraulic fracturing methods that include hardened drill bits to crack open tough shale beds — plus advanced seismic sensor technology and data analysis to pinpoint and accurately target underground hydrocarbon deposits — all contributed to the shale gas revolution, allowing the industry to exploit previously untapped oil-and-gas reservoirs.

More recently, horizontal drilling technology has pushed oil and gas operations into unprecedented levels of development, permitting operators to penetrate laterally into shale beds stretching in all directions to reach more pockets of hydrocarbons.

Now, those same drilling techniques — combined with further technology development by the geothermal companies themselves — is creating a paradigm shift that, for the first time, lets developers dig far below the shallow hot water aquifers that the geothermal industry has traditionally targeted to instead bore deeper down into hot-rock formations.

That capability opens up access to far more geothermal energy in many more places, because developers are no longer limited to exploring and developing around volcanos and fault lines where natural subsurface fracturing has created pools of relatively shallow, underground reservoirs. Such conditions are relatively rare and are concentrated in certain places, such as the western U.S.

“The industry has been historically limited to conventional wet, steamy reservoirs where developers look for the steam and natural fault lines,” Singer said. “We don’t need steam now. We look instead for hot rock at reasonable depths. Subsurface heat exists everywhere — it’s just a matter of how deep it is.”

Nearly 20 years ago, extensive research showed that intense subsurface heat is ubiquitous and basically inexhaustible nearly everywhere below the Earth’s crust, with heat level depending on depth, said Shari Kelly, a senior geophysicist and field geologist with the state Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources.

“We came to realize that no matter where you are in the U.S. — even if it’s Connecticut — if you drill deep enough you can reach temperatures that are usable for heat and electricity,” Kelly told the Journal. “… That really shifted the perspective on geothermal development.”

The challenge, however, has been lack of adequate drilling technology that could slice through hard rock to reach the necessary depths while also withstanding extreme subsurface temperatures that can shut down drilling equipment.

“Today’s drilling technology allows developers to reach those deep depths,” Kelly said. “It’s a game changer.”

Advancing the technology

Companies like Fervo and Eavor are now building on oil and gas drilling technology to develop techniques and methods specifically geared toward deep geothermal development.

Fervo, for example, has developed advanced data analytics using down-hole fiber optics to gather and analyze real-time data on flow, temperature and performance of geothermal resources, Singer said. That provides much greater insight into subsurface behavior, allowing the company to precisely identify where the best resources exist and optimize well performance.

Once the hole is drilled and fracked, the company pumps cold water down into the well bore, where it’s heated to between 350 and 400 degrees Fahrenheit and then brought back to the surface to create steam to run a turbine generator.

Conventional wells that tap into existing hot water aquifers usually don’t penetrate below 3,000 feet down, and those wells generally only produce between 200- and 300-degree heat. In contrast, Fervo is targeting rock formations at 8,000-10,000 feet down, providing much greater heat for more efficient and abundant generating capacity.

“Some companies are looking to drill extremely deep into extremely hot rock,” Singer said. “We’re not. We’re targeting more moderate depths that allow us to use existing oil and gas drill bits and equipment.”

Eavor, meanwhile, has created new technology to drill far deeper wells of up to 23,000 feet or more, Ethier said. That requires extreme temperature-resistant equipment with reinforced drill bits to break through hard granite rock.

To do that, it’s created proprietary insulated drill pipes and partnered with industry vendors to design new drill bits. It’s also developed advanced down-well control technology to precisely place liquid-filled pipes through two well bores that pump water down for heating at the geothermal resource and then bring it back up again.

And the entire process is contained in a novel, closed-loop system where the water being heated never leaves the underground or surface pipes. Rather, it absorbs heat from the hot-rock bed like a radiator, using horizontal drilling to place piping offshoots directly next to the geothermal resource, which then heats up the water inside the tubes before it’s brought back to the surface.

“We have over 30 patents covering a lot of technology components, including proprietary software, hardware and system design,” Ethier said.

Eavor directly tested most of its technology in the New Mexico Bootheel at a drill site located next to the Lightning Dock geothermal power plant near Lordsburg. That’s the only conventional geothermal facility currently operating in the state.

“We met all our technology milestones,” Ethier said.

Future employment opportunities

That test operation also demonstrated lucrative future employment potential for oil and gas industry workers. Two conventional drilling rigs were used on the project, which lasted from August to December last year.

“We had more than 50 people employed at the rig site throughout construction,” Ethier said. “And that doesn’t include local services we used for fuel and water delivery, or for sewage and garbage disposal. It was also a boon for local hotels and restaurants in the area.”

As industry development gains momentum and companies begin drilling deeper wells for power plants, and for heating and cooling applications, a lot more employment opportunities could emerge for skilled oil and gas drilling crews, engineers and seasoned industry professionals.

In fact, most companies now pursuing modern geothermal development are largely run by former oil and gas executives and staffed by industry workers. Helmerich & Payne Inc., for example — an oil and gas drilling rig operator — is an investor in Eavor.

Global drilling company Baker Hughes also formed a partnership with two industry giants, Continental Resources and Chesapeake Energy, to test whether they can profitably turn spent natural gas wells into geothermal facilities, according to Politico. And Chevron New Energies, a subsidiary of Chevron Corp., is partnering with Sweden’s Baseload Capital to develop new geothermal technologies, starting with a new project in Weepah Hills mountains in Nevada.

“We’re not taking away from the oil and gas industry, but adding stability to it,” Ethier said. “This can provide a just transition for energy diversification that offers other options for employment.”

Forging ahead

Full-scale deployment of emerging geothermal technology — now called enhanced geothermal systems, or ESG — is still a few years off, but it’s a lot closer that many think, Singer said.

“We’re ready to deploy,” she said. “This is not technology that needs to be reinvented, because the technology and skills are there. It’s a matter of just starting to drill wells, and we’re ready to go.”

As momentum accelerates, it will allow drilling and development costs to decline through economies of scale and continuous technology and system efficiency improvement, making ESG more economical compared with fossil fuels like natural gas, Singer added.

“One reason for the shale gas revolution success was continuous drilling and constantly evolving technology and techniques to bring down costs,” Singer said. “Geothermal has not yet experienced that, and it’s what’s needed.”

Challenges remain. More temperature-resistant drilling technology, for example, is critical as wells go deeper, and a lot more subsurface research is needed to identify the best places for geothermal development.

Permitting issues could also cause problems, slowing development down the same way transmission projects are routinely held up through local, state and federal regulatory requirements that delay planning and construction for years.

But federal- and state-level investment and incentives can help with all those challenges. The U.S. Department of Energy announced in September a new “Energy Earthshot” to lower the costs for ESG by 90% to $45 per megawatt hour by 2035, which would make it significantly more affordable than today’s prices for natural gas.

That includes $44 million in new investment’s in ESG through the DOE’s Frontier Observatory for Geothermal Energy Research laboratory in Utah, plus $84 million in funding under the federal Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment law to support four ESG demonstration projects in different locations.

State-level initiatives like Ortiz y Pino’s bills can also help. And apart from potential bipartisan legislative support, environmental organizations are getting on board, given geothermal’s potential to provide clean backup power for intermittent solar and wind facilities as the state transitions from fossil fuels to renewables.

Some environmental activists took leading roles in Ortiz y Pino’s working group, and environmental organizations are expected to firmly back the senator’s bills in this year’s session.

“It’s such a great opportunity for us to supplement wind and solar in a sustainable fashion,” Ortiz y Pino said. “Geothermal runs 24/7, 365 days a year. It doesn’t go away, and it makes freeing ourselves from fossil fuels much more realistic.”

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New Study Finds the Best Brain Exercises to Boost Memory

Prevention

New Study Finds the Best Brain Exercises to Boost Memory

Korin Miller – January 28, 2023

New Study Finds the Best Brain Exercises to Boost Memory
  • Research has found exercise can have a positive impact on your memory and brain health.
  • A new study linked vigorous exercise to improved memory, planning, and organization.
  • Data suggests just 10 minutes a day can have a big impact.

Experts have known for years about the physical benefits of exercise, but research has been ongoing into how working out can impact your mind. Now, a new study reveals the best exercise for brain health—and it can help sharpen everything from your memory to your ability to get organized.

The study, which was published in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, tracked data from nearly 4,500 people in the UK who had activity monitors strapped to their thighs for 24 hours a day over the course of a week. Researchers analyzed how their activity levels impacted their short-term memory, problem-solving skills, and ability to process things.

The study found that doing moderate and vigorous exercise and activities—even those that were done in under 10 minutes—were linked to much higher cognition scores than people who spent most of their time sitting, sleeping, or doing gentle activities. (Vigorous exercise generally includes things like running, swimming, biking up an incline, and dancing; moderate exercise includes brisk walking and anything that gets your heart beating faster.)

The researchers specifically found that people who did these workouts had better working memory (the small amount of information that can be held in your mind and used in the execution of cognitive tasks) and that the biggest impact was on executive processes like planning and organization.

On the flip side: People who spent more time sleeping, sitting, or only moved a little in place of doing moderate to vigorous exercise had a 1% to 2% drop in cognition.

“Efforts should be made to preserve moderate and vigorous physical activity time, or reinforce it in place of other behaviors,” the researchers wrote in the conclusion.

But the study wasn’t perfect—it used previously collected cohort data, so the researchers didn’t know extensive details of the participants’ health or their long-term cognitive health. The findings “may simply be that those individuals who move more tend to have higher cognition on average,” says lead study author John Mitchell, a doctoral training student in the Institute of Sport, Exercise & Health at University College London. But, he adds, the findings could also “imply that even minimal changes to our daily lives can have downstream consequences for our cognition.”

So, why might there be a link between exercise and a good memory? Here’s what you need to know.

Why might exercise sharpen your memory and thinking?

This isn’t the first study to find a link between exercise and enhanced cognition. In fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) specifically states online that physical activity can help improve your cognitive health, improving memory, emotional balance, and problem-solving.

Working out regularly can also lower your risk of cognitive decline and dementia. One scientific analysis of 128,925 people published in the journal Preventive Medicine in 2020 found that cognitive decline is almost twice as likely in adults who are inactive vs. their more active counterparts.

But, the “why” behind it all is “not entirely clear,” says Ryan Glatt, C.P.T., senior brain health coach and director of the FitBrain Program at Pacific Neuroscience Institute in Santa Monica, CA. However, Glatt says, previous research suggests that “it is possible that different levels of activity may affect brain blood flow and cognition.” Meaning, exercising at a harder clip can stimulate blood flow to your brain and enhance your ability to think well in the process.

“It could relate to a variety of factors related to brain growth and skeletal muscle,” says Steven K. Malin, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Kinesiology and Health at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. “Often, studies show the more aerobically fit individuals are, the more dense brain tissue is, suggesting better connectivity of tissue and health.”

Exercise also activates skeletal muscles (the muscles that connect to your bones) that are thought to release hormones that communicate with your brain to influence the health and function of your neurons, i.e. cells that act as information messengers, Malin says. “This could, in turn, promote growth and regeneration of brain cells that assist with memory and cognition,” he says.

Currently, the CDC recommends that most adults get at least 150 minutes a week of moderate-intensity exercise.

The best exercises for your memory

Overall, the CDC suggests doing the following to squeeze more exercise into your life to enhance your brain health:

  • Dance
  • Do squats or march in place while watching TV
  • Start a walking routine
  • Use the stairs
  • Walk your dog, if you have one (one study found that dog owners walk, on average, 22 minutes more every day than people who don’t own dogs)

However, the latest study suggests that more vigorous activities are really what’s best for your brain. The study didn’t pinpoint which exercises, in particular, are best—“when wearing an accelerometer, we do not know what sorts of activities individuals are doing,” Glatt points out. However, getting your heart rate up is key.

That can include doing exercises like:

Malin’s advice: “Take breaks in sitting throughout the day by doing activity ‘snacks.’” That could mean doing a minute or two of jumping jacks, climbing stairs at a brisk pace, or doing air squats or push-ups to try to replace about six to 10 minutes of sedentary behavior a day. “Alternatively, trying to get walks in for about 10 minutes could go a long way,” he says.

Marjorie Taylor Greene keeps rising in Republican ranks despite ‘loony lies’

The Guardian

Marjorie Taylor Greene keeps rising in Republican ranks despite ‘loony lies’

Adam Gabbatt – January 28, 2023

<span>Photograph: Gaelen Morse/Reuters</span>
Photograph: Gaelen Morse/Reuters

When Marjorie Taylor Greene was elected to America’s House of Representatives in 2020, she became one of the most visible of a wave of extremists to enter the Republican party whose often bizarre utterings stretched the bounds of what had previously been the norm of US politics.

The Georgian congresswoman, who has suggested Jewish space lasers are responsible for wildfires, speculated whether 9/11 was a hoax and supported the QAnon conspiracy theory, was part of a new wave of Trumpian Republicans and was mocked, ridiculed and reviled in equal measure – including by some in her own party.

Related: ‘We don’t know his real name’: George Santos’s unravelling web of lies

But in 2023, Greene is now firmly on her way to becoming one of the senior figures in the Republican party. She has become a favorite, and key ally, of Kevin McCarthy, the new House speaker, and preparing to take up assignments on some of Congress’s most prominent committees.

It’s been a remarkable rise that few could have seen coming during a checkered first half of 2021, when Greene was making her name known through her penchant for unhinged conspiracy theories and strange remarks, but her ascension to the upper echelons of the GOP was confirmed this week by McCarthy, in an interview with the New York Times.

“If you’re going to be in a fight, you want Marjorie in your foxhole,” McCarthy said.

“When she picks a fight, she’s going to fight until the fight’s over. She reminds me of my friends from high school, that we’re going to stick together all the way through.”

Green takes a selfie with Kevin McCarthy in the House chamber on 7 January.
Greene takes a selfie with Kevin McCarthy in the House chamber on 7 January. Photograph: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

This apparent fondness for a tussle has seen Greene rewarded with positions on the homeland security committee, despite her previously musing that no plane crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11, and on the oversight committee, where she is expected to be part of a subcommittee investigating the government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

If the latter seems problematic, given Greene’s loudly stated suspicions and conspiracy theories about the pandemic – in January she was permanently banned from Twitter for repeatedly violating rules about Covid-19 misinformation – then that’s only because lots of things Greene has said and done are problematic.

In 2021 Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, condemned Greene’s “loony lies and conspiracy theories” in relation to Greene having claimed support for executing Democratic politicians and harassing the survivor of a mass school shooting.

Later that year McCarthy himself, who had earlier attempted to avoid conflict, felt compelled to step in after Greene compared Covid masking rules to the treatment of Jewish people in Nazi Germany.

“Marjorie is wrong, and her intentional decision to compare the horrors of the Holocaust with wearing masks is appalling,” McCarthy said.

“The Holocaust is the greatest atrocity committed in history. The fact that this needs to be stated today is deeply troubling,” he said.

The multiple rebukes, and the egregiousness of Greene’s beliefs – whether disavowed or not – make her rise to prominence, as she takes up her seat on some of Congress’s most powerful committees, all the more remarkable.

Greene’s rapid recent rise began when she backed McCarthy for the House leadership, two months ahead of the ultimately farcical vote that saw him elected after 15 ballots. Greene had got in early, declaring her support in November on Steve Bannon’s podcast.

For McCarthy, who has been an unpopular figure among far-right voters and politicians – it was a selection of the latter that meant the manner of his ascension to speaker was embarrassing at best, it was a boost he needed.

McCarthy and Greene had spent months forging a working relationship they believed could be beneficial for both, with Greene placating the zaniest wing of both Republicans in the House and voters at home, and McCarthy providing relevance to someone who had been stripped of her committee assignments in 2021, leaving her, essentially, having nothing to do in Washington.

The New York Times reported that McCarthy, as he prepared to take up the speakership, had been mindful of the problems his centrist predecessors, John Boehner and Paul Ryan, faced in dealing with their furthest-right colleagues.

Both Ryan and Boehner – who would later describe some of his rightwing colleagues as “assholes” – endured battles with the Freedom Caucus, a conservative and often obstructionist group of GOP congressmen, when trying to pass legislation.

Greene remains one of the most popular figures among Trump supporters and believers, evidenced by her 758,000 followers on Trump’s Truth Social website – McCarthy has 113,000, Steve Scalise, the House majority leader, has 109,000 – and enjoys a close relationship with the former president, even calling Trump from the House floor during the debacle of January’s leadership vote.

Greene is also a successful fundraiser, bringing in $12.5m in the 2021-22 election cycle, the fifth most of any Republican representative, her popularity among the base and alignment with Trump making her the model of the new Republican politician.

Greene with Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump at the ex-president’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, in July 2022.
Greene with Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump at the ex-president’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, in July 2022. Photograph: Seth Wenig/AP

On Greene’s part, she has sought to sanitize, somewhat, the ill-informed, conspiracy-minded viewpoints that have characterized her political career. In early 2022 Greene began a deliberate, “methodical” reinvention, a confidante told the Washington Post.

From her position on the sidelines, with a congressional office but no meaningful role in the House, she began to think of the future. Greene, like most observers, believed McCarthy would be the next House speaker, and saw a role for herself as a bridge between the far right and the less kooky Republicans, the Post reported.

As she tried to make herself palatable to a wider audience, Greene set about trying not to speak at any more white nationalist rallies, or discuss the “gazpacho police” who are apparently patrolling the US Capitol. (Her remark was widely understood to mean Gestapo.) She is also yet to repeat her 2018 claim that the Clinton family orchestrated the plane crash that killed John F Kennedy Jr more than two decades ago.

In addition to this new reserve, Greene hired a new aide with a track record in conventional conservative politics, and eventually began meeting with McCarthy once a week, as the pair forged a close bond, each aware of the potential benefits.

McCarthy would go on to win the speakership. But his concessions to the right, personified by his promotion of Greene, have come at a cost. Already McCarthy has pursued Greene-backed, far-right strategies on vaccines and treatment of January 6 perpetrators, something that has left Greene delighted.

“People need to understand that it isn’t just me that deserves credit,” Greene told the New York Times.

“It is the will and the voice of our base that was heard, and Kevin listened to them. I was just a vehicle much of the time.”

If Greene was displaying an amount of faux humility, her conviction that she is channeling the will of the people and willingness to make it heard are a warning as to the level of influence she now wields.

In her new roles Greene said she will be investigating: “How many of our enemies got pallets of cash!?” from Covid-19 unemployment benefits, a question she posed without any context or explanation, and has pledged to impeach the homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, for his perceived failures in handling immigration.

From Greene’s political position in February 2021, when she was removed from her committee assignments by Democrats – and some Republicans – in a rebuke over incendiary and racist statements, which included her posting a mocked-up image of her holding a gun next to three Democratic lawmakers, all women of color, on Facebook, it has been a remarkable turnaround.

Less than two years on, Greene has taken up positions on two of the most prominent committees in the House. She has a metaphorical seat at the House speaker’s right hand, and will enjoy the visibility that all this brings.

It’s a testament to how quickly things can change in politics, but also a very visible reminder of what the Republican party increasingly stands for.

Greene may have sought to sanitize her image, but it is clear that her brand of populism, outrage and misinformation is not the embarrassment it once was to the party leadership: this is the modern version of the Republican party.

In Texas Oil Country, an Unfamiliar Threat: Earthquakes

The New York Times

In Texas Oil Country, an Unfamiliar Threat: Earthquakes

J. David Goodman – January 28, 2023

A truck disposes of wastewater from fracking near Pecos, Texas on Jan. 13, 2023. (Paul Ratje/The New York Times)
A truck disposes of wastewater from fracking near Pecos, Texas on Jan. 13, 2023. (Paul Ratje/The New York Times)

PECOS, Texas — The West Texas earth shook one day in November, shuddering through the two-story City Hall in downtown Pecos, swaying the ceiling fans at an old railroad station, rattling the walls at a popular taqueria.

The tremor registered as a 5.4 magnitude earthquake, among the largest recorded in the state. Then, a month later, another of similar magnitude struck not far away, near Odessa and Midland, twin oil country cities with relatively tall office buildings, some of them visible for miles around.

The earthquakes, arriving in close succession, were the latest in what has been several years of surging seismic activity in Texas, a state known for many types of natural disasters but not typically, until now, for major earth movements. In 2022, the state recorded more than 220 earthquakes of 3.0 magnitude or higher, up from 26 recorded in 2017, when the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas began close monitoring.

So unheard-of were strong earthquakes in the flat, oil-rich expanse about a six-hour drive west of Austin that some residents at first mistook the November quake for a powerful gust of wind. Lloyd Chappell, a retired propane deliveryperson who was in his recliner at the time, thought one of his grown sons was making a joke of shaking his chair. But no one was there. His water sloshed around in his glass for 30 long seconds.

“We’ve heard noises before — out there in the oil field, they drop big tanks, or things like that,” said Chappell, 66. “But I’d never felt that before.”

The vast majority of the temblors have been concentrated in the highly productive oil fields of the Permian Basin, particularly those in Reeves County, north and west of the city of Pecos. The county’s official population of 14,000 does not account for thousands of mostly male transient workers staying in austere “man camps” and RV parks, brought there by the promise of good pay in exchange for long hours, stark terrain and dangerous work.

Now earthquakes have become part of the same calculation.

“In West Texas, you love the smell of the oil and gas patch because it’s the smell of money,” said Rod Ponton, a former Pecos city attorney who once unintentionally attained international fame by appearing as a worried cat during a court hearing on Zoom. “If you have to have the ground shaking every two or three months to make sure you have a good paycheck coming in every month, you’re not going to think twice about it.”

The economy of Pecos and a handful of surrounding towns — some little more than sand-blown highway intersections and crowded gas station convenience stores — revolves around the oil fields.

John Briers moved several months ago to a man camp in Orla, in Reeves County, to take a job at one of two convenience stores because the pay was twice as much as he was getting in Houston. “It’s nice to have so much space,” he said of the area. “But it’s two hours from the nearest cardiologist.”

When the November earthquake struck, Briers, 55, was working at the store, whose central seating area acts as an informal workers cafeteria. The force was enough to shake the building, he said, and to push a large mobile crane, parked nearby, into a trailer. Briers likened it to the artillery he felt while serving in the military in Afghanistan.

On a recent weekday, a lunchtime crowd of mostly men in dusty work boots and shirts emblazoned with company logos streamed into the store from white pickup trucks, mostly uninterested in discussing earthquakes. Had they felt any of the quakes that seismic monitors showed striking across the oil fields?

“No.”

“No, sir.”

“Nobody really cares while the money is there,” said Nick Granado, 31, stopping briefly before grabbing lunch. He said he had been at home in Pecos with his wife and 2-year-old child at the time of the November earthquake. “It was different,” he said of the shaking. “But I wasn’t scared.”

In Reeves County, oil and gas production has increasingly meant hydraulic fracturing, a process of extraction that produces, as a byproduct, a huge amount of wastewater. Some of that wastewater is reused in fracking operations, but most of it is injected back under the ground. It is that process of forcing tens of billions of gallons of water into the earth that, regulators and geoscientists agree, is to blame for many of the earthquakes.

The connection between wastewater disposal and earthquakes has been long understood. Other states with substantial fracking operations have also seen the ground shake as a result, including Oklahoma, where a similarly rapid increase in earthquakes more than a decade ago included a 5.6 magnitude quake in 2016 that forced the shutdown of several wastewater wells.

Getting rid of the “produced” water is an important business in West Texas, and locations labeled “SWD” — for saltwater disposal — dot the landscape of drilling rigs and truck-worn roads. Each of the past few years, about 168 billion gallons of wastewater have been disposed of in this way, according to data from the Railroad Commission of Texas, which regulates the oil industry.

Texas only recently began its statewide program of monitoring for earthquakes, after a series of small quakes in North Texas rattled residents of Dallas and Fort Worth. The monitoring started in 2017 — just as petroleum development accelerated in the Permian Basin, particularly in and around Reeves County — and began to detect the increasing seismic activity.

“It was really very fortuitous,” said Peter Hennings, the principal investigator for the Center for Integrated Seismicity Research at the University of Texas.

Hennings said that while natural earthquakes can occur in West Texas, they can also be induced through human activity: the injection of a large amount of water in a short period of time adds fluid pressure under the earth, which essentially decreases the “clamping” between rocks along natural faults and allows them to slip, creating an earthquake.

And seismologists have established a relationship between smaller earthquakes and larger ones, Hennings said: The more small earthquakes you have, the greater the likelihood of a bigger one.

The problem can be addressed by cutting back on the amount of saltwater being injected back into the ground. Oklahoma, for example, did so in recent years and has seen a reduction in the number of earthquakes.

In 2021, the Texas Railroad Commission noted “an unprecedented frequency of significant earthquakes” in and around Reeves County and asked companies to implement their own wastewater plans, hoping to decrease the number of 3.5 magnitude or greater earthquakes by the end of this year.

To address earthquakes outside Odessa and Midland, state regulators suspended permits for deep disposal wells. And just north of the border with Texas, New Mexico regulators have been taking their own steps to control saltwater disposal, including $2 million in fines to Exxon over compliance failures.

The fracking issue has been a big one for Texas environmental groups, which have raised concerns about pollution, climate change, social inequity — and now earthquakes. “It is past time for the Railroad Commission of Texas to update the rules on injection wells,” said Cyrus Reed, the conservation director for the Sierra Club’s Lone Star Chapter, adding that there should be limits on injecting “polluted fracking wastewater” in places impacted by seismic activity.

For local officials in West Texas, the earthquakes have presented new and unforeseen concerns about the structural integrity of buildings and buried pipes, as well as basic questions such as, what are you supposed to do in an earthquake?

“It brought to light that we need to do some safety training,” said the Pecos city manager, Charles Lino. He had been in a staff meeting on the second floor of City Hall — a building Lino described as “very old” — when the floor began to move for what felt like a minute during the November earthquake, whose epicenter was northwest of town.

“Most of the staff were a little shaken and were, like, what do we do?” he said. “I don’t know how to react either, because I’m from this area.” Lino said the city was just beginning to develop its earthquake training.

Months earlier, in March, the head of emergency management for the county, Jerry Bullard, began keeping track of earthquakes. “There were two yesterday and one today,” he said on a recent weekday, looking at his list. He presented his catalog to the county’s leaders at a meeting in December. “They were kind of surprised,” he said.

His concern has been focused on the area’s older infrastructure, including the three-story courthouse in Pecos. But the county has been traditionally hands-off when it comes to building codes in unincorporated areas. “This county does not even have a fire code out in the county,” Bullard said.

At the same time, storing additional wastewater — with its volatile mix of chemicals — above ground in order to avoid injecting too much into the earth has created a new hazard, Bullard said. There were two explosions this month at saltwater disposal facilities in the county, setting off fires and “a black stream of smoke” visible for miles around, he said.

So far, the earthquakes have not caused much notable damage. Some residents said they noticed new cracks in their walls or patios, or a roof that appeared to slant a little more than before. Earthquake insurance is not something people generally purchase in West Texas, although there has been talk of it now, particularly in the larger cities of Odessa and Midland.

“We have tall buildings — not a lot of tall buildings — but people are concerned about foundations,” said Javier Joven, the mayor of Odessa, who met with state regulators and Midland leaders about the issue in 2021. Most of the area’s taller buildings were constructed decades ago, without the requirements now common in earthquake-prone areas, officials said. (Several in Midland have long sat empty, with some recently demolished or slated to be.)

So far, he said, officials have not taken steps to change building codes to address earthquakes, which could add significant new costs to construction. In the meantime, each tremor has become a topic of conversation. The mayor said he had felt at least three.

“The big popular discussion out here is: Did you feel it? Did you feel it?” he said. “And everyone goes on Facebook: I felt it. I felt it.”