02 January 22
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David Roth | Mark Zuckerberg Is the 2021 Scoundrel of the Year
David Roth, The New Republic
Roth writes: "It does not augur well when a culture's richest and most powerful men begin musing in public about whether a better life might await them on some otherworld colony."
The nitwit founder of Facebook has created the worst, most damaging website in the world. And we’re just supposed to accept it.
It does not augur well when a culture’s richest and most powerful men begin musing in public about whether a better life might await them on some otherworld colony. If you’ve spent all or even some of this last year living here on earth, it’s easy enough to understand the temptation, but when the lords of this particular realm are indulging these fantasies—think of Elon Musk’s aspiration to build a city on Mars over which he might preside like a more epic and meme-forward version of Total Recall’s Cohaagen—it gives the impression that they are more or less done with this used-up planet and everyone on it. Imagine Watchmen’s Dr. Manhattan in high isolation on the moon, a god grown tired of his rude and ravening and hungry lessers, except now he’s also really into NFTs and tax avoidance. It’s all ominous, almost poignantly oafish, and sociopathic in the deeply corny ways that we have come to expect from our superclass of tech billionaires. But there is an even worse escape than all of this.
In October, Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that his company would not just be changing its name to Meta—I will continue to call it Facebook here, as I assume will everyone else—but broadening its ambitions to encompass becoming a virtual reality community in which people might work, play, spend, and live. “I believe the metaverse is the next chapter for the internet,” Zuckerberg said in announcing this news. “And it’s the next chapter for our company, too.”
To a certain extent this is just how Silicon Valley’s apex-predator types talk about things now. Because the Web3 fripperies that intrigue them—think of the speculative-unto-grifty froth at the confluence of cryptocurrencies and NFTs and virtual reality and other such ostensibly decentralized, ostensibly liberative online aspirations—are intriguing to them, they believe that those fripperies must therefore be the future of something or other. And, to a certain extent, the outsize power and wealth afforded them by their success in this version of the internet guarantees that they’re at least a little bit right, if only because anything with that much influence and raw money behind it is unlikely to go away simply because normal people do not find it very appealing. In matters like this a little bit of brute force, when exerted by a class of sufficiently forceful brutes, can go a very long way.
But it is worth mentioning that the metaverse as Mark Zuckerberg envisions it is just not a very appealing idea, and only partially because it is Zuckerberg himself explaining it. The concept that Zuckerberg laid out in a protracted and pyrotechnically cringy presentation seems so thoroughly innocent of any idea of what people actually want to do in their nonvirtual lives, let alone in their virtual ones. “This is the Facebook ‘metaverse,’” Max Read wrote in his newsletter. “Using goggles made by Facebook subsidiary Oculus, you enter the Facebook-hosted V.R. metaverse, where you can meet your friends at a V.R. bar, play V.R. board games, go to V.R. meetings for your V.R. job, get summoned into a V.R. conference room to get V.R. furloughed by your V.R. boss and a V.R. human-resources representative.” To be fair, Zuckerberg makes clear in his presentation that metaverse users will also be able to look like a cartoon bear while doing all of these things, if they so choose.
As John Herrman noted in The New York Times, the reason to be skeptical about this endeavor is not that people don’t want to do some or all of the stuff that Zuckerberg talks about in strained tones of wonder and whimsy. Whether in terms of speculating on cryptocurrencies or gaming with a V.R. headset or just clocking into a virtual workplace, people are absolutely already doing all those things, albeit sometimes more happily than others. It is not even the question of why anyone would entrust the design and implementation of the future to Facebook, which has made the world infinitely dumber, uglier, and worse in a number of obvious and inescapable ways, and is a miserable website to use to boot. That is a really good question, though, if only because it is just extremely difficult to imagine someone choosing to work and live inside the website that convinced their grandparents that the germ theory of disease was a hoax. But what really rankles is that it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that this vision of the future is extractive, joyless, and dull; that the smug cretins who got rich off the platforms that this new decentralized movement is supposedly leaving behind are also leading the supposed successor movement doesn’t matter either. This push to transcend the world that Facebook has befouled and create a new, virtual one can be read in a sense as a response to the 10,000-page Facebook Papers leak, which demonstrated both the extent to which Zuckerberg’s own criminal indifference and Facebook’s inability to police its own sprawl have made the site a malignant metastatic force in countries around the world. Again, it doesn’t matter.
This is the taunt implicit in everything Zuckerberg does at this point in his reign. Here is a man who got unconscionably rich off the worst website that has ever existed, a website that has broken brains on a scale previously unimaginable in human history, and here is his stupendously wack vision for the future—and everyone is just going to have to deal with it. There are many things to abhor about Mark Zuckerberg and his works, but the fundamental mediocrity of it all—the lack of vision, the absence of any moral sense or shame, the inability and unwillingness not just to fix but even reckon with the dangerous and ungovernable thing he’s made—is what feels both most egregious and most of this moment. It is embarrassing and not a little enraging to realize that you are subject to the whims of an amoral and incurious capitalist posing as a visionary optimist. It is especially humiliating when the all-bestriding and inevitable figure in question is such a dim, dull nullity.
It seems important to mention that Facebook is not just a bad website, but a company that has shown itself willing to do the wrong thing whenever and wherever given a choice. Facebook was not the first and is not the only company to tell wild lies to advance its own ends, but few companies have done it bigger or suffered less for it. Facebook also did not invent a politics grounded in unreasoning spite and toddler-grade oppositional defiance and relentless resentful signaling; Americans did that all on their own, with some crucial late help from one family of reactionary Australian media types. But Facebook did create an algorithm that valued that style of grievance above all others, which pulled users along behind in turn. In the United States, the culture wanders, hunted and lost, through the virtual and nonvirtual wreckage those decisions made, without even the armor afforded by a V.R. bear costume. Abroad, where Facebook has been criminally indifferent at best and actively complicit at worst in abetting the spread of dangerous medical misinformation and genocidal rhetoric, the damage has been infinitely worse.
Americans represent only about 10 percent of Facebook’s users, but nearly 85 percent of the efforts that the company has put toward stemming the spread of misinformation has been focused on the U.S. In early December, NBC News’ Brandy Zadrozny reported that the specious pseudo-documentary Plandemic, which Facebook more or less succeeded in banning in the U.S. after it spread widely on the platform in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, was not only still easy to find on Facebook in Romania, but had been viewed on the platform more than 800,000 times in a country that, with a 40 percent vaccination rate, significantly lags behind the rest of Europe. Massive class action lawsuits filed against Facebook in California and the United Kingdom in December on behalf of Rohingya refugees living in the U.S. and the rest of the world, respectively, claimed that Facebook’s presence in Myanmar after 2011 was a “substantial cause, and perpetuation of, the eventual Rohingya genocide” that began in that country in 2013, and which Facebook effectively ignored despite multiple warnings from inside and outside of the company.
“In the face of this knowledge, and possessing the tools to stop it, it simply kept marching forward,” the California complaint reads. “The undeniable reality is that Facebook’s growth, fueled by hate, division, and misinformation, has left hundreds of thousands of devastated Rohingya lives in its wake.” It is all bad, but the common denominator is that Facebook, which is obsessed with its own internal data and metrics, always knew what was happening and why and always blithely didn’t care. Despite the ongoing human rights crisis in Myanmar and the attendant international outcry, Facebook didn’t even hire content moderators fluent in local languages until 2018.
Facebook, as a company that is hyperfixated on growth and its own bespoke engagement standards, makes the decisions it makes because those decisions make important numbers go up. When it allows Vietnam’s government to censor dissidents on the site, it is because doing business in Vietnam makes revenues go up. When it permits incitation-oriented hate speech to exist on the site, whether in relatively minor markets like Myanmar or enormous ones like India, it is because it has noticed that keeping readers enraged also keeps them engaged, and because that engagement (Facebook’s current internal term of art for this, coined by Zuckerberg himself, is the suitably dystopian “meaningful social interaction”) is what the company values. When Facebook gooses its algorithm such that it favors and promotes that kind of speech, it is for the same reason. These are all profoundly vile, but none could remotely be described as a mistake. Every one of them is a choice, and the person who makes the choices at Facebook is Mark Zuckerberg.
So when Zuckerberg tells weird lies about all this in front of the U.S. Senate—when he claims that 94 percent of hate speech was scrubbed from the site before anyone ever saw it, for instance, despite internal metrics that show only 5 percent was removed at all—it is because he believes he can get away with it. There is no one who could meaningfully tell him no, both because he owns 58 percent of the company’s voting shares and is also the chairman of its board, but also because Facebook is organized such that he effectively has the final say on every decision the company makes; no other company this size invests so much formal or informal power in one person. It’s a terrible thing to say about someone, but Mark Zuckerberg really is Facebook. It shows.
The most fundamental problem with Facebook is that it does not have, and never really has had, any idea how to do any of this. It certainly has no real sense of how to be the kind of unimaginably vast global institution—the site claims 3.51 billion monthly users—that it very quickly became, and is in fact absolutely terrible at every aspect of being that site beyond the crucial Making Money Doing It element. All those monthly users interacting with all the ads that choke Facebook’s timeline and clutter its margins and blunder unbidden into every available space generate a lot of money for the company. This presumably helps soothe the realization that the core product itself is both absolutely loathsome and widely loathed—confusing and unpleasant to use, governed by an algorithm that seems to have been designed to make the experience of being on the site as unpleasant as possible, and increasingly the province of the shut-ins, kooks, quacks, grifters, and the dreaded Gun Uncle. Facebook has been pretty much exactly that bad for many years, in fact. It is, in every sense, the website that exists at the exact midpoint of Everyone Can Share Anything With Anyone and “doing the logistical and marketing scutwork for genocidaires and authoritarians and local sociopaths.” It’s awful.
More than that, it could only be awful. Facebook, which talks about itself as The Sharing Place but is driven by the incentives of the cheesy surveillance and value-neutral click-chasing and overwhelming economic leverage and relentlessly cynical avarice that make it profitable, could never and would never become anything but this, and could never and would never care about any of the damage it does. It will respond to a certain level of opprobrium or shame, albeit in qualified ways and at the last possible moment; if there were any sense that the regulatory or governmental arms of the U.S. government might be able or just willing to hold it to account, Facebook might theoretically respond to that. What that has looked like, for years, is Zuckerberg putting on a neat suit and sitting in front of various plump Senate grandees who take turns asking him to help them unlock their phones and accusing him of being very unfair to Diamond and Silk. The senators change, but Zuckerberg and his answers stay the same.
It is fraudulent and irresponsible and quite probably criminal in ways that reflect its co-founder and ruling lord, but what Facebook most has in common with Zuckerberg is that it sucks—not just in the sense that it is lame and bad. Even if you leave aside its authentic crimes against humanity, Facebook is still a machine built to turn lonely elderly relatives into blood and soil fascists; a haunted satellite that intermittently farts out the dispiriting opinions of random former high school classmates; a relentlessly tweaked, irredeemably borked newsfeed that shoves variously viral idiocies and advertisements at users with the horny and unlovable insistence of a frotteur moving through a crowded subway car.
The funny part is that Facebook isn’t even good at being that. Sure, the numbers go up, but the people that Facebook and Zuckerberg are trying to court with their metaverse initiative—younger people in general, but primarily the elusive creator who has little use for Facebook’s towering and overbearing uncoolness—know what Facebook is. They know that Zuckerberg’s metaverse is just a mall-shaped prison through which all of humanity would wander while being pelted with advertisements, slurs, and dumb, garish lies. In a nation functioning as poorly and unaccountably as ours, even petty and fraudulent titans like Zuckerberg can come to seem permanent; it is part of the citizenry’s broader terms of service that every now and then the accumulated consequences of their failures simply come rushing downhill at us like an unpleasantly fragrant mudslide. From that vantage point, after all this, it is impossible to perceive Mark Zuckerberg’s invitation to join him in a second universe as anything but a taunt. Look what he’s done to this one.
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Supporters of President Donald Trump take over the grounds of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. (photo: Matt McClain/WP)
1 in 3 Americans Say Violence Against Government Can Be Justified
Meryl Kornfield and Mariana Alfaro, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "The findings represent the largest share to feel that way since the question has been asked in various polls in more than two decades."
The Post-UMD poll, coming a year after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, marks the largest share of Americans to hold that view since the question was first asked more than two decades ago.
Phil Spampinato had never contemplated the question of whether violence against the government might be justified — at least not in the United States. But as he watched Republicans across the country move to reshape election laws in response to former president Donald Trump’s false fraud claims, the part-time engineering consultant from Dover, Del., said he began thinking differently about “defending your way of life.”
“Not too many years ago, I would have said that those conditions are not possible, and that no such violence is really ever appropriate,” said Spampinato, 73, an independent.
The notion of legitimate violence against the government had also not occurred to Anthea Ward, a mother of two in Michigan, until the past year — prompted by her fear that President Biden would go too far to force her and her family to get vaccinated against the coronavirus.
“The world we live in now is scary,” said Ward, 32, a Republican. “I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist but sometimes it feels like a movie. It’s no longer a war against Democrats and Republicans. It’s a war between good and evil.”
A year after a pro-Trump mob ransacked the Capitol in the worst attack on the home of Congress since it was burned by British forces in 1814, a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll finds that about 1 in 3 Americans say they believe violence against the government can at times be justified.
The findings represent the largest share to feel that way since the question has been asked in various polls in more than two decades. They offer a window into the country’s psyche at a tumultuous period in American history, marked by last year’s insurrection, the rise of Trump’s election claims as an energizing force on the right, deepening fissures over the government’s role in combating the pandemic, and mounting racial justice protests sparked by police killings of Black Americans.
The percentage of adults who say violence is justified is up, from 23 percent in 2015 and 16 percent in 2010 in polls by CBS News and the New York Times.
A majority continue to say that violence against the government is never justified — but the 62 percent who hold that view is a new low point, and a stark difference from the 1990s, when as many as 90 percent said violence was never justified.
While a 2015 survey found no significant partisan divide when it comes to the question of justified violence against the government, the new poll identified a sharper rise on the right — with 40 percent of Republicans and 41 percent of independents saying it can be acceptable. The view was held by 23 percent of Democrats, the survey finds.
Acceptance of violence against the government was higher among men, younger adults and those with college degrees. There was also a racial gap, with 40 percent of White Americans saying such violence can be justified, compared with 18 percent of Black Americans.
People’s reasoning for what they considered acceptable violence against the government varied, from what they considered to be overreaching coronavirus restrictions, to the disenfranchisement of minority voters, to the oppression of Americans. Responses to an open-ended question on the survey about hypothetical justifications included repeated mentions of “autocracy,” “tyranny,” “corruption” and a loss of freedoms.
The growth in the share of Americans willing to accept violence against the government identified by The Post-UMD poll may be partly due to methodology. Previous surveys were conducted by phone, while the new poll was largely conducted online, and studies have found respondents are more willing to voice socially undesirable opinions in self-administered surveys than when asked by an interviewer.
Recent surveys, though, have identified a similar trend, and subsequent interviews of some of the 1,101 respondents who participated in the Dec. 17-19 Post-UMD poll found that the events of the past two years have prompted people to reconsider their views. (The new poll has a margin of error of plus or minus four percentage points.)
It wasn’t until Jan. 6 that 75-year-old Beverly Lucas considered the fact that people could attempt to violently attack the government. Lucas, who voted for Trump and identifies as a Republican, said she was horrified watching the images of people clad in “Make America Great Again” apparel storming the Capitol, assaulting police officers who were guarding the building.
“That never should have happened in this country,” she said. “It’s a sobering idea that elected representatives should fear for their lives because of a mob.”
Still, Lucas said she had not ruled out the possibility that she would agree with violence if there was no available nonviolent alternative, referencing the Revolutionary War.
“When in the course of human events the government no longer represents the people, and there is no recourse, then it might be time,” she said.
“I don’t think that will ever happen,” she added.
The Capitol attack also set off alarms for Rob Redding, 45, a New York political independent who has been a talk-show host and runs a website focused on Black-oriented news. He said he has since considered arming himself to protect his loved ones.
The insurrectionists, he said, were attempting to “subvert American democracy because now it’s becoming equal for all people.”
“We are in a state where we’re going to have to arm ourselves, absolutely,” Redding said. “I’m a Black man in America. … I believe in protecting myself.”
Redding added that he doesn’t believe in breaking laws “unless laws are unjust.” “To sit up here and say that I support violence against our government, I don’t. I support government being level and equal for all people.”
Taylor Atkins, 29, who lives in Atlanta and works in health-care administration, said she “absolutely” believes it is justifiable to take arms against the government in situations where those in power use their positions to oppress Americans, particularly those of ostracized identities.
Atkins, a Democrat, described the Jan. 6 riot as “insane,” saying “there wasn’t a need for violent outrage just because the president that you wanted to didn’t win.”
But, she added: “For people of color — I’m Black — we’re actually losing our lives. We’re actually fighting over if my life is valuable.”
A new mom, Atkins said she didn’t join Black Lives Matter protests during the summer of 2020 because she had a baby back home. She also said she doesn’t support looting — but often, she noted, that’s the only way demonstrators can get attention.
Atkins said she has considered arming herself for her own “protection,” especially as the pandemic continues heightening tensions between civilians and the government. She pointed to clashes in Europe last year, where thousands of civilians protesting coronavirus measures fought police across the continent.
“I feel like that’s justified because, obviously, we do all care about each other … but everybody has the right to be a person and be free and make their own decisions,” she said. “As long as they’re not truly impacting somebody else, as far as they have covid and are not going to the store and actually coughing on somebody, they should be allowed to leave their house.”
Ward, the Michigan mother of two and self-employed housekeeper, said she would not participate in violence that she anticipates could come in her lifetime if the government imposes stricter rules such as an expansive vaccine mandate. She said she believes other people could be justified to “express their Second Amendment right” if the government infringes their freedom of choice and nonviolent action such as protests were unsuccessful.
Despite voting for Trump, Ward and other Republicans expressed disappointment with the insurrection on Jan. 6, saying they did not believe rioters had justification to commit violence.
Many respondents, particularly Republicans, cited the hardening battle lines over public health measures — and how far the government might go to combat the coronavirus — as a factor in their shifting views.
Don Whittington, 62, who lives in Prattville, Ala., and works in construction, said the pandemic has shown how easily it can be for some Americans to lose control over their freedoms, sparking angst among some groups, though he said he believes America is still far from a scenario that would push civilians to rebel against their government.
“What I can see across the country — there is going to come a point where people, both Democrat and Republican, are going to quit putting up with the things that are taking place,” said Whittington, a Republican.
Still, Whittington, a devout Christian and a firearm owner, said he wouldn’t be one to fight in a revolution.
“Because of my worldview, and because of my belief in God, I don’t know that I would ever use a weapon against a government or anybody else,” he said.
Matthew Wood, 37, a call center operator in Nampa, Idaho, said he has gotten more involved in local politics since the start of the pandemic, demanding fewer restrictions. If officials won’t listen to people like him, he said, violence would be acceptable as a last resort. “If governments aren’t willing to work and make changes, then so be it,” said Wood, a Republican.
Tomasz Antoszczak, a 39-year-old Democrat from New Jersey, said he did not believe justified violence could happen any time soon, stressing that such action would be “a very last resort.” But he said that the last administration’s attempts to overturn the results of the election could have gone differently, potentially tipping the scales.
“With last year’s insurrection, if things had gone in a different direction for some reason, and if the folks who stormed the Capitol were successful, and if the election was overturned and the results were overturned, and if Trump would have stayed in power,” Antoszczak said. “That’s just a lot of ifs.”
Antoszczak expressed concern about the lawmakers he said “caved in” to the demands of the last administration.
“The last couple of years definitely opened my eyes a little bit more as to how fragile our government can be,” he said.
James Lee, a Democrat in Florida, argued that American democracy was built on negotiation based on conflict, meaning that it took the Revolutionary War to achieve the political system the country has now.
“Whenever you lose that negotiation factor or the democracy itself, then, yeah, violence is going to have to be used in order to reestablish the democracy that we have,” he said.
Still, Lee said he wouldn’t be one to fight a despotic government.
“If I have to resort to firearms, in my opinion, I’ve already lost the battle,” he said.
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Liz Cheney. (photo: J Scott Applewhite/AP)
Capitol Attack: Cheney Says Republicans Must Choose Between Trump and Truth
Martin Pengelly, Guardian UK
Pengelly writes: "'Our party has to choose,' Liz Cheney told CBS's Face the Nation. 'We can either be loyal to Donald Trump or we can be loyal to the constitution, but we cannot be both.'"
Republican member of the House committee investigating the events of 6 January issues stark warning to her party
On a day of alarming polling about attitudes to political violence and fears for US democracy, and as the first anniversary of the Capitol attack approached, a Republican member of the House committee investigating the events of 6 January 2021 had a stark warning for her party.
“Our party has to choose,” Liz Cheney told CBS’s Face the Nation. “We can either be loyal to Donald Trump or we can be loyal to the constitution, but we cannot be both.”
Trump supporters attacked Congress in an attempt to stop certification of his defeat by Joe Biden, which Trump maintains without evidence was the result of electoral fraud. Five people died around a riot in which a mob roamed the Capitol, searching for lawmakers to capture and possibly kill.
On Sunday, Cheney and Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the committee chairman, again discussed the possibility of a criminal referral for Trump over his failure to attempt to stop the riot or for his obstruction of the investigation.
Speaking to ABC’s This Week, Cheney said there were “potential criminal statutes at issue here, but I think that there’s absolutely no question that it was a dereliction of duty. And I think one of the things the committee needs to look at is … a legislative purpose, is whether we need enhanced penalties for that kind of dereliction of duty.”
Thompson said subpoenas could be served on Republicans in Congress who refuse to comply with information requests of the kind which have led to a charge of criminal contempt of Congress for Steve Bannon, Trump’s former strategist, and a recommendation of such a charge for Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff.
The Democrat told NBC’s Meet the Press the committee was examining whether it could issue subpoenas to members of Congress, immediately Jim Jordan of Ohio and Scott Perry of Pennsylvania.
“I think there are some questions of whether we have the authority to do it,” Thompson said. “If the authorities are there, there’ll be no reluctance on our part.”
Last month, the committee asked Jordan for testimony about conversations with Trump on 6 January. Jordan told Fox News he had “real concerns” about the credibility of the panel.
Perry was asked for testimony about attempts to replace Jeffrey Rosen, acting head of the justice department, with Jeffrey Clark, an official who tried to help overturn Trump’s defeat.
Perry called the committee “illegitimate, and not duly constituted”. A court has ruled that the panel is legitimate and entitled to see White House records Trump is trying to shield, an argument that has reached the supreme court.
Sunday saw a rash of polls marking the anniversary of 6 January.
CBS found that 68% of Americans saw the Capitol attack as a sign of increasing political violence, and that 66% thought democracy itself was threatened.
When respondents were asked if violence would be justifiable to achieve various political ends, the poll returned an average of around 30%. A survey by the Washington Post and the University of Maryland said more than a third of Americans said violence against the government could be justified.
ABC News and Ipsos found that 52% of Republicans said the Capitol rioters were trying to protect democracy.
Other polling has shown clear majorities among Republicans in believing Trump’s lie about electoral fraud and distrust of federal elections.
On CNN’s State of the Union, Larry Hogan, Maryland governor and a moderate Republican with an eye on the presidential nomination, said: “Frankly, it’s crazy that that many people believe things that simply aren’t true.
“There’s been an amazing amount of disinformation that’s been spread over the past year. And many people are consuming that disinformation and believing it as if it’s fact. To think the violent protesters who attacked the Capitol, our seat of democracy, on 6 January was just tourists looking at statues? It’s insane that anyone could watch that on television and believe that’s what happened.”
Cheney told CBS the blame lay squarely with her own party.
“Far too many Republicans are trying to enable the former president, embrace the former president or look the other way and hope that the former president goes away, or trying to obstruct the activities of this committee, but we won’t be deterred. At the end of the day, the facts matter, the truth matters.”
Her host, Margaret Brennan, pointed out that Republicans across the US, some in states where Trump’s attempt to steal the election was repulsed, are changing election laws to their advantage.
“We’ve got to be grounded on the rule of law,” Cheney said. “We’ve got to be grounded on fidelity of the constitution … So I think for people all across the country, they need to recognise how important their vote is for their voices. They’ve got to elect serious people who are going to defend the constitution, not simply do the bidding of Donald Trump.”
Cheney faces a primary challenger doing Trump’s bidding and enjoying his backing. The other Republican on the 6 January committee, Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, will retire in November rather than fight such a battle of his own.
Cheney said she was “confident people of Wyoming will not choose loyalty to one man as dangerous as Donald Trump”, and that she will secure re-election.
She also notably did not say no when she was asked if she would run against Trump if he sought the nomination next time.
On ABC, Cheney was asked if she agreed with Hillary Clinton, who has said a second Trump presidency could end US democracy.
“I do,” Cheney said. “I think it is critically important, given everything we know about the lines that he was willing to cross.
“… We entrust the survival of our republic into the hands of the chief executive, and when a president refuses to tell the mob to stop, when he refuses to defend any of the co-ordinate branches of government, he cannot be trusted.”
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From top left, clockwise: Rupert Murdoch, Sen. Joe Manchin, President Joe Biden, Elon Musk, former President Donald Trump, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema. (image: Shaun Lucas/The Intercept/Getty Images)
The 10 Worst Americans of 2021
Jon Schwarz, The Intercept
Schwarz writes: "At Christmas we traditionally reflect upon our blessings and forgive those who have trespassed against us. Let's not this year."
At Christmas we traditionally reflect upon our blessings and forgive those who have trespassed against us. Let’s not this year.
At this time of year we traditionally reflect upon our blessings and forgive those who have trespassed against us. But we’ve been trying that for millennia, and the results have been unsatisfactory. So let’s discard the accumulated wisdom of all humanity’s spiritual traditions and focus our mental energy instead on how much we dislike various awful people around us. Merry Christmas.
1. Manchinema
Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema of West Virginia and Arizona can be combined into one entry, Manchinema, both to save time and because it sounds like an obscure disease. “I’m afraid you have Manchinema,” says the doctor, looking grave, “and it is eating away the lining of your small intestine.”
Manchinema were seemingly grown in a lab to cause the most mental anguish possible to America’s progressives. They both adore the filibuster, which makes the anti-democratic Senate even less democratic. Why do they feel this way? Because, they say, they love democracy. It’s like supporting Mohammed bin Salman because you love Jamal Khashoggi.
2. Joe Biden
Biden would be on this list no matter what, because he is president of the United States. All presidents are ex officio members of any group of terrible Americans.
But Biden has also worked hard to earn his place here. “With Donald Trump out of the White House,” Biden predicted back in 2019, “you will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends.” Biden appears to still believe this, even as his Republicans friends openly plot to kill and eat him.
Probably Biden’s worst action has been to help establish a kind of global vaccine apartheid, under which (according to a recent estimate) rich countries have vaccinated 65 percent of their population against Covid-19, while poor countries have only been able to vaccinate 3 percent.
This has the twin virtues of being both mind-numbingly cruel and unbelievably stupid. The omicron variant is the fruit of leaving huge swaths of humanity unvaccinated and available to host mutations. Omicron may turn out, knock on wood, to be less deadly than previous variants. But until most everyone on the planet has lasting immunity to Covid-19, we will continue to be rolling the dice, over and over and over again.
On the other hand, this policy does have some enormous upsides, such as [INAUDIBLE].
3. Elon Musk
It’s easy to criticize Elon Musk, America’s wealthiest man, so let’s do it. He’s engaged in union busting, built a gigantic fortune on government subsidies and government research, made preposterous predictions about the self-driving capacity of Tesla cars, and potentially undermined the safety of Tesla owners and those around them.
But let’s concentrate here on his more picayune claims. Musk has said that he was “selling almost all physical possessions” and living in a $50,000 home in Texas rented from his company SpaceX. But according to the Wall Street Journal, Musk has in fact also been living in a billionaire friend’s 8,000-foot Austin home. The Journal additionally found that Musk has been shopping for his own Austin-area mansion. The ultra-powerful often engage in this kind of peculiar self-mythologizing; Kim Jong Il was not satisfied with merely being dictator of North Korea — he also had to tell the world he shot a 38-under round of golf and was born under a double rainbow.
Finally, let’s not forget Musk’s gravest crime: violating a core commandment of the Church of the SubGenius, which is “Don’t Try to Be Funny If You’re Not.”
EMBED4. Jonathan F. Mitchell
Former Texas Solicitor General Jonathan Mitchell crafted the legal concept behind Texas’s S.B. 8 law, which bans abortion after as early as six weeks from conception. The Supreme Court has ruled that governments can’t interfere with a woman’s right to obtain an abortion before fetal viability, so under normal circumstances Texas officials would be sued and the law would be thrown out. But Mitchell came up with the idea of making S.B. 8 only enforceable by private citizens, granting them the right to sue into penury anyone who “aids or abets the performance or inducement of an abortion.”
Needless to say, this is completely bonkers. If it endures, it will literally be the end of constitutional rights in the United States. States can just hand individual citizens the ability to punish anyone engaging in constitutionally protected activities, and that’s that.
Societies can’t survive if lawyers are continually trying to find preposterous loopholes in everything. Yes, I signed a contract to pay you $300,000 for your house, but my lawyer figured out that it never specified they had to be American dollars. So here are 300,000 Jamaican dollars, worth about $2,000 in U.S. currency. Now get out.
Mitchell’s bad faith is the kind of thing that makes people give a standing ovation to the famous line from “Henry VI,” “Let’s kill all the lawyers.” We don’t need to go that far, but we definitely have to kill Mitchell’s pernicious sophistry.
5. Rupert Murdoch
Murdoch has been around so long — he’s about to turn 91 — that it’s easy to forget what an extraordinarily bad person he is. He’s generated a cult that now comprises perhaps 25 percent of Americans, who are lost in a fantasy world in which there are no such things as global warming, evolution, or any trustworthy figures outside the cult. Most shockingly, he’s sent out his minions like Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson to discourage the cult from getting vaccinations for Covid-19. It’s like the People’s Temple in Guyana, except Jim Jones doesn’t kill himself but — after everyone else has drunk the Flavor Aid — jumps on a helicopter, shouts, “So long, suckers!” and flies away.
6. Donald Trump
There’s no need to enumerate the downsides of Trump. Everyone is capable of doing that themselves.
7. You
You were Time Person of the Year in 2006, but don’t let that go to your head; Hitler and Stalin received that honor too. For 2021, in particular, we’re all condemning you for having a body that can turn into a virus factory at any moment. Even in normal times there are an estimated 380 trillion viruses living on and in you. This is obviously too many; please get your act together.
8. Covid-19 Profiteers
The pandemic has turned nine pharma executives and investors into billionaires. They now have a combined wealth of almost $20 billion. But there’s more: Eight other pharma investors who were already billionaires pre-Covid have increased their wealth by another $32 billion.
This has only been possible thanks to a massive government intervention in the market via monopoly patent protection — for vaccines that were largely developed via government funding. In other words, regular people have paid for this on both ends. We haven’t checked, but surely America’s free market champions are out in force condemning this.
9. Stephen Breyer
Remember when Ruth Bader Ginsberg was diagnosed with both colon cancer and pancreatic cancer but refused to retire during Barack Obama’s presidency? What a girlboss! Then she died while Trump was president, cementing control of the Supreme Court to the ultra-right for the next 30 years.
Stephen Breyer has seen this example right in front of him and apparently decided to emulate it. Breyer, now 83 years old, is one of the three remaining justices appointed by a Democratic president. At any moment, a Democratic senator could die, plausibly handing control of the chamber to the GOP and eliminating any opportunity for Biden to replace Breyer. But Breyer is going to take his time, planning to retire sometime between now and 2056. It’s all very exciting, as long as your primary concern is Breyer’s ego and not whether American democracy is obliterated.
10. My Secret Enemy
I would like to identify my secret enemy, but then they wouldn’t be secret. Also, everyone who wasn’t my secret enemy would feel they were off the hook and be tempted to misbehave. Please try to stay on the straight and narrow, so you are not unmasked and identified in the coming list of all the worst people of 2022. (Note that it is plausible that my secret enemy is me.)
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Planned Parenthood. (photo: Michael B. Thomas/Getty Images)
Terrible Year Ends With Planned Parenthood Clinic on Fire
Laura Bassett and Caitlin Cruz, Jezebel
Excerpt: "2021, largely a hellish year, has ended much in the same way it began: with damage to a Knoxville, Tennessee, Planned Parenthood clinic."
A Knoxville reproductive health clinic has burned down on the last day of 2021.
2021, largely a hellish year, has ended much in the same way it began: with damage to a Knoxville, Tennessee, Planned Parenthood clinic. In January, a man fired a shotgun at the front door of the Knoxville reproductive health center, reportedly “shattering the glass and lodging bullet holes in the reception area.” And early Friday morning—on New Year’s Eve—the same clinic was found engulfed in flames and burning to the ground. No one was inside the building or hurt in either incident. The clinic was temporarily closed since Dec. 7, 2021 for renovations with patients receiving care via telehealth, according to Planned Parenthood of Tennessee and North Mississippi.
“This is a huge loss for the community and we hope that there are no resulting injuries or damage to neighboring properties. We are grateful for the response of local firefighters and are fully cooperating with the authorities as they assess the cause of the fire. Planned Parenthood of Tennessee and North Mississippi is a leading provider of high-quality, affordable reproductive and sexual health care and education in Tennessee, and we remain committed to serving as many people as possible — no matter what,” Ashley Coffield, President and CEO, Planned Parenthood of Tennessee and North Mississippi, said in a statement to Jezebel.
There’s no proof, at this point, that fire was set deliberately, but the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the FBI have made contact with local officials to determine whether it may be a case of domestic terrorism.
“Any fire in a structure like that, you’re right, everything gets investigated,” Assistant Chief Brent Seymour told Knox News. “This may be a little more attentive.”
Ken Peters, an anti-abortion activist who held religious protests at the clinic, said he prays no one was hurt and also “that abortion completely end[s] in America.”
If the incident does turn out to be arson, it’s just the latest in an alarming trend of escalating violence against abortion clinics. Between 2019 and 2020, providers across the country reported a 125% increase in “vandalism, assault and battery, death threats/threats of harm, stalking, and hoax devices/suspicious packages,” according to a recent report by the National Abortion Federation. The assaults and altercations included “shoving, pushing, tripping, and spitting on clinic escorts, staff, and others outside of clinics.”
“We expected an escalation in anti-abortion activities in 2020 and 2021 due to the political climate, the election, and the increase in hate incidents throughout the country,” Melissa Fowler, chief program officer of NAF said in a statement to Jezebel, adding that “some of the people at the January 6 insurrection are the same people who have been targeting abortion providers and protesting at clinics in their communities.”
We will be updating this story as more information comes out.
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An aerial view of drying earth in the Chibayesh marshland in Iraq's southern Ahwar area on 20 June, 2021. (AFP)
Poverty, Displacement and 300 Storms: How 'Climate Violence' Threatens Iraq
Safaa Khalaf, The Middle East Eye
Khalaf writes: "Iraq's sky now rains dust and pollutants. The land between the Tigris and the Euphrates no longer gets enough rain to save the country from droughts, which have devastated local communities and agricultural supply chains, spurring a tide of migration."
Excessive heat and drought are wreaking havoc across the country, forcing struggling families to leave their homes
Iraq’s sky now rains dust and pollutants. The land between the Tigris and the Euphrates no longer gets enough rain to save the country from droughts, which have devastated local communities and agricultural supply chains, spurring a tide of migration.
The situation has deteriorated rapidly over the past two decades, with Turkey and Iran restricting the flow of water via dams and other infrastructure. Water has effectively been transformed into a political tool, while sand and dust storms are becoming more frequent across Iraq; it has been estimated that the country could experience 300 such storms a year by 2023.
Today, as Iraq celebrates the centenary of its founding as a modern state, its ecosystem is on the verge of collapse. As water flows in rivers decline dramatically, Iraq is expected to become one of the world’s most water-stressed countries by 2040, with a forecasted rating of 4.6 out of 5, indicating extremely high stress. At the same time, Iraq is contributing to global warming, with the International Energy Agency reporting that the country accounts for around eight percent of world methane emissions.
Iraq’s environment ministry has acknowledged the ongoing climate crisis, which threatens to make Iraq unliveable over the next two decades due to excessive heat, drought, scarcity of water reserves, desertification and loss of biodiversity - all of which are wreaking havoc on food security chains.
Iraq uses more than 63 percent of its water resources on agriculture, even when it often relies on imported food. According to the head of Iraq’s parliamentary agriculture and water committee, Salam al-Shammari: “Farming techniques in Iraq are rudimentary; therefore, we have a significant waste of water with a weak agricultural output.”
Rising temperatures
Agriculture contributes about four percent of Iraq’s GDP, and about 20 percent of the labour market depends on it. But amid climate change, water scarcity and increased armed conflict, agricultural production fell by about 40 percent between 2014 and 2018, according to the World Bank.
In addition to agricultural usage, Iraq loses around 15 percent of its water reserves annually to evaporation. Over the next few decades, the United Nations projects that temperatures in Iraq will rise by two degrees, exceeding the 1.5C threshold outlined in a worrying report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Excessive temperatures, often exceeding 50C in summer, have been decimating Iraq’s crops and livestock, destroying the ecological diversity of marshes and exacerbating shortages of safe drinking water. There are also thousands of fires every year.
Iraq fought to have its historic marshes added to the World Heritage List in 2016, perhaps seeing this as a way to safeguard water flows. But today, marsh dwellers are on the edge of peril. According to government estimates, buffalo numbers have dwindled to less than 200,000 from 1.2 million, as the salinity rate in various marshes has reached a “dangerous level of deadly pollution as a result of drought”, according to Jassim al-Asadi, a consultant with the Nature Iraq NGO.
At the same time, the International Organization for Migration found in 2019 that 21,314 people from Iraq’s central and southern governorates had been displaced due to water scarcity, high salinity content in the water, or waterborne diseases. Several years earlier, in 2012, 20,000 people were displaced from agricultural communities due to drought. Families who have inhabited villages for decades are being forced to leave their ancestral lands.
“Livestock is entirely decimated, and there is not enough water, so why should farmers and fishermen remain in a dead land? Most of them have been displaced to the city, but there is no work in the city. Unemployment there is increasing day after day,” I was told by Karim Hattab, who heads the local farmers’ union in Maysan, southeastern Iraq, which has been severely affected by drought.
Weapon of war
The federal government has acknowledged that Iraq is part of a “double negative relationship between the environment and armed conflict … [which] has led to environmental pollution and serious damage that has impacts on the economy, society and the individual”.
Destruction of the local environment and water infrastructure has been wielded as a weapon of armed conflict in Iraq, particularly by Islamic State. Large quantities of water have been wasted in artificial floods; large agricultural areas have been destroyed; and valuable water reserves have been lost, forcing many to flee their homes.
This category of “climate violence” poses a significant risk when combined with increasing poverty and unemployment, population growth and a stalled economy. Yet, climate issues do not seem to be a priority for the Iraqi government. A draft law relating to national water resources management and conservation has been stalled since 2016. And Iraq was among the last countries to join the Paris climate agreement.
To remedy its environmental failures, Iraq recently launched a national strategy to combat climate change, in partnership with the UN Environment Programme. But the $2.5m in funding from the Green Climate Fund is nowhere near enough to address the scale of Iraq’s crisis.
Indeed, the Iraqi population is fighting an uphill battle to overcome severe climate change and drought, leaving millions of people facing an uncertain future in the months and years ahead.
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Hannah Crawford, left, and Jessica Cramp, interns with the New England Aquarium, photograph a sea turtle in their care as a way of recording the condition and recovery of the animals. (photo: Lauren Owen Lambert)
Rare Turtles Keep Washing Up on Cape Cod. "Turtle Movers" Fly Them to Texas.
Lauren Owens Lambert, Vox
Lambert writes: "The pilots are taking the turtles on a 2,900-kilometer (1,800-mile) trip from Massachusetts to Texas's Gulf Coast. Eight hours later, they're nearly there."
Inside the 1,800-mile rescue operation helping the world’s most endangered turtle.
Sea turtles appear to fly as they swim beneath ocean waves. With long, gray-green flippers that move like slow wingbeats, they glide through the water as birds do through the sky. Actually flying through the air, though, at 10,000 feet above the ground, the reptiles seem anything but graceful.
Inside the airplane, 120 sea turtles, 118 of which are juvenile Kemp’s ridleys (Lepidochelys kempii), shift uncomfortably among beach towels inside stacked Chiquita banana boxes, their crusty eyes and curved pearlescent beaks peeking through slot handles. The windowless metal cabin vibrates with the sound of propellers as the pilots work to keep the plane aloft and the internal air temperature at a turtle-friendly 22 degrees Celsius (72 degrees Fahrenheit). It’s December 2020, and outside, the cold air above New England slowly gives way to balmier southern temperatures. The pilots are taking the turtles on a 2,900-kilometer (1,800-mile) trip from Massachusetts to Texas’s Gulf Coast.
Eight hours later, they’re nearly there. “We’re coming into Corpus Christi,” says Mike Looby, a pilot with a sea turtle rescue organization called Turtles Fly Too, as airport runways come into view among the sprawling buildings below. Looby and co-pilot Bill Gisler, both from Ohio, will visit four different locations in Texas to offload the animals. This is the largest number of turtles the organization has transported to date.
Once the plane is on the tarmac, staff and volunteers from several aquariums and marine rescue facilities crowd around. The pilots gently slide each box of turtles toward the cargo door, and the group lines up to carry them to vans parked nearby.
“What happened to these guys?” someone asks.
“They were found stranded on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts,” says Donna Shaver, chief of the division of Sea Turtle Science and Recovery at Padre Island National Seashore, as she grabs a box.
In the summer months, the waters in the Gulf of Maine where Cape Cod is located are warm, calm, and full of food, serving as a natural nursery for 2- to 4-year-old Kemp’s ridleys, the smallest and most endangered sea turtle in the world. Migrating loggerheads (Caretta caretta), green sea turtles (Chelonia mydas), and the occasional leatherback (Dermochelys coriacea) also visit Cape Cod Bay. But as water temperatures plummet in November, December, and January, the cold-blooded turtles must migrate out or perish. Many lose their way and wash up, cold-stunned, on the inside edge of the hook-shaped Cape, which curls into the ocean like a flexing arm, forming what some locals call “the deadly bucket.”
The phenomenon is the largest recurring sea turtle stranding event in the world. While it’s natural — local records of sea turtle bones date back centuries — the scale is new and may, paradoxically, be a product of successful efforts to recover Kemp’s ridley populations, in addition to the effects of climate change.
“This area is increasing in water temperature faster than 99 percent of water bodies in the world,” says Kate Sampson, sea turtle stranding and disentanglement coordinator at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), who helps coordinate turtle transport. “Because of that, it seems like it’s drawing more sea turtles.”
Fortunately for the turtles, hundreds of volunteers and several staff members organized by the nonprofit Mass Audubon Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary stand at the ready to patrol every inch of the 105-kilometer (65-mile) stretch of beach lining the inner Cape, twice a day, from November through December, no matter the weather. When they find a turtle, the animal begins a logistically complex journey from rescue to rehabilitation and, eventually, to release. Saving each flight’s worth of little lives involves approximately five vans, 1,000 miles, four organizations, and 50 people. Without this monumental collaboration across North America’s Eastern Seaboard, other efforts to save the Kemp’s ridley sea turtle from extinction might be futile.
Why turtle strandings are on the rise
Three weeks before Looby and Gisler’s departure with their precious herpetological cargo, Nancy Braun and her border collie Halo walked a stretch of Great Hollow Beach, near Cape Cod’s outermost tip. The unrelenting wind blew hard and Braun’s cheeks were rosy with cold, her hair frantically trying to escape from beneath a fuzzy winter hat. Every so often, she raised binoculars to her eyes to scan the sand and any promising-looking lump of seaweed. A resident of nearby Truro and a Mass Audubon volunteer, Braun was on the lookout for turtles.
Walking quickly, she passed small cottages in the dunes with window shutters closed tightly against the elements. Brightly colored beach chairs lined the shore like memorials to summers past. Along the way, Braun saw a group of people gathered around something in the distance, and she broke into a run in their direction, Halo bounding by her side. When she arrived, there they were: four sea turtles, clearly in need of care. As the group waited for the arrival of a Mass Audubon vehicle to take the turtles for initial processing, Braun and the others covered them with seaweed to protect against the wind chill.
“This is so cool,” said Richard Lammert, a visitor from New York. “We were just walking the beach and came across these turtles. I had no idea that sea turtles even came up this far. I’ve never seen one up close, let alone helped to rescue it.”
While the mood was light, there was also a sense of urgency among the group. “I called Mass Audubon to let them know what we found,” said Michael Weinstein, another Truro resident. That’s exactly the type of response turtle rescuers hope for and why rescuers prioritize educating the community in addition to recruiting and training volunteers, according to Carol “Krill” Carson, president and founder of the New England Coastal Wildlife Alliance and a volunteer with Mass Audubon. Without a clear understanding of why the turtles are stranded in the first place, some well-intentioned people might think they should throw the animals back into the ocean. “Anyone can walk the beach and find a sea turtle,” Carson says. “It’s what that person does when they find a turtle that is critical.”
Former director of Mass Audubon Bob Prescott started the sea turtle rescue program back in 1979. At the time, Prescott says he would find only a handful of turtles each year. The number has since skyrocketed. In 2014, volunteers found a record-breaking 1,242 turtles stranded on Cape Cod beaches. In 2020, there were 1,045, the second-highest number on record.
The most common species found is Kemp’s ridley, which nests in only two places in the world: a stretch of beach in Mexico and one in Texas. Between the late 1940s and the mid-’80s, Kemp’s ridley populations plummeted from more than 40,000 nesting females to fewer than 300, due to entanglement in fishing gear and the harvesting of adults and eggs for human consumption. Today, Kemp’s ridleys still face a wide variety of threats, including habitat loss, coastal development, ship strikes, plastic waste, and climate change. With so few ridleys left, “every life counts in the survival of this species,” says Prescott, which makes the turtle rescue effort that much more important. “It’s all hands on deck.”
Connie Merigo, executive director of the National Marine Life Center, in Bourne, Massachusetts, agrees. “You hear a lot in biology, ‘Why are you interfering? Shouldn’t you just let nature run its course?’ In this case, a lot of these threats are not under control. So, if we let thousands of these turtles die every year in a cold-stunning event, the population is that much smaller.”
Interestingly, though, the success of ongoing conservation efforts is likely one of the factors driving the increased need for rescues. That’s because there are simply more turtles around to strand. Conservation efforts on nesting beaches in Mexico, strict regulations on pollution, and new technological advancements in fishing equipment have all helped, as have new nest sites developed in Texas since the 1970s. Today, there are an estimated 5,500 Kemp’s ridley females nesting in Mexico and 55 in Texas.
Although this is a good sign, the current population is still critically low. According to NOAA, the number of nests grew steadily until 2009 but has fluctuated since then, underscoring the importance of ongoing monitoring and conservation. “Endangered species recovery is the long game,” says Shaver, who leads the Kemp’s ridley nesting program in Texas. “It’s so heartwarming to work with people who have the same mission at heart to try and give back to preserve and sustain this population.”
The other likely factor contributing to turtle strandings is the warming of the Gulf of Maine. Climate change has caused the water here to warm earlier each year and to stay warm for longer, keeping young Kemp’s ridleys in the fertile shallows of Cape Cod Bay later each fall. But the temperatures of the outer Cape and the North Atlantic still plunge as summer comes to a close. When fall arrives and the turtles attempt to navigate northward around the cape’s hook, they hit a disorienting wall of cold and turn around in search of the warmer water of their southerly ocean habitats.
This leads them back to the shallow flats inside the bay, where they encounter land instead of the open ocean. When the waters inside the cape reach a consistent 50 degrees Fahrenheit, any turtles still there will become hypothermic and eventually die unless they get help. Given the compounding factors, there’s no obvious end in sight to the trend.
“We are going to continue to see an increase of cold-stuns on Cape Cod,” says NOAA’s Kate Sampson.
That increase has only heightened the need for collaboration. In 2010, the New England Aquarium built a sea turtle rehabilitation facility in Quincy, Massachusetts, to meet demand. And with the high stranding numbers in 2020, breaking the record for live admitted turtles at 754, and limited staff due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the National Marine Life Center in Bourne, Massachusetts, also opened its doors to help with triage of incoming turtles, on top of the rehab services it already provided.
In addition to being hypothermic, Kemp’s ridleys usually arrive at these facilities with pneumonia or develop the condition within the first week or two of their arrival. Turtles also sometimes show up with traumatic injuries like broken bones and cracked shells from ocean waves tossing their bodies repeatedly into rocks, jetties, and seawalls when the animals are too cold to swim out of the surf.
Initially, when the turtles arrive, the goal is simply to assess their injuries through physical examinations and X-rays and to stabilize them. Rehabilitation staff members give the turtles fluids to rehydrate them and antibiotics to treat infections. They also work to slowly bring the animals’ internal body temperatures back up.
Still, the two Massachusetts facilities can only care for so many turtles. At some point, the animals, including those that Braun and the others found on Great Hollow Beach, must be transported to other aquariums and facilities to complete their rehabilitation and ready them for release back into the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. In total, 29 additional rehab facilities are prepared to take in sea turtles for long-term rehabilitation. And flying, it turns out, is the fastest, least stressful, and safest way to transport the animals. That’s where Turtles Fly Too and its team of dedicated volunteer pilots come in.
The first — and only — US operation permitted to airlift sea turtles
On a frigid, clear December day, the early morning sun peeks over the horizon as four vans pull onto the tarmac at Hanscom Field in Bedford, Massachusetts. Yawning, their breath turning into clouds before them, Kate Sampson of NOAA, Connie Merigo of the Marine Life Center, and a handful of other turtle rescuers from the New England Aquarium, pour out of the vehicles to meet with pilots Looby and Gisler. They strategize about the loading process to get dozens of turtles into the air as quickly and safely as possible. And that’s just one phase of the process.
Among the myriad details that must be worked out are how many turtles the rehabilitation facilities need to move, what planes are available and their capacity, where the pilots are coming from, where they’re going, and who will be on hand for pickup — all right up to the moment when the turtles arrive at their destination.
The service that Turtles Fly Too provides is unique. Besides the US Fish and Wildlife Service, which has the authority to move any endangered animal, “we have the first and only permits in the nation to fly sea turtles,” says Leslie Weinstein, the organization’s president. Turtles Fly Too got its start in 2014, the record-breaking year of strandings. Weinstein was running an aviation parts manufacturing company full time and had just transported a green sea turtle successfully to a facility in Dubuque, Iowa, that summer. In November, when cold-stranded sea turtles began washing up, turtle rescuers put Weinstein in touch with Sampson and Merigo, who was then directing the New England Aquarium’s Rescue Rehab Program. And thus, Turtles Fly Too was born.
Weinstein found the organization’s first pilot through a volunteer group called Pilots N Paws that transports domestic animals. A full-time dentist in New York, Ed Filangeri’s assignment was to fly eight turtles from Massachusetts to Baltimore, Maryland. Filangeri was immediately hooked, and the two joined forces. These days, Filangeri doesn’t hesitate to cancel dental appointments, because, he says, “the turtles can’t wait” and the clients understand. The organization now counts more than 350 pilots among its ranks and provides emergency transport to other species too, including sea otters, pelicans, and seals.
The flights vary in cost from $1,500 to $100,000 depending on the plane used, the number of drop locations, and the number of turtles on board. According to Weinstein, the average ticket price comes in at about $1,000 per turtle. Public contributions to Turtles Fly Too help cover that, as do airfields that waive landing fees or provide discounts on fuel. One Christmas Eve, when Filangeri had a mission to Virginia, he showed up in a Santa hat, and he and the crew named each of the eight traveling turtles after a flying reindeer. “I thought it was funny that they were flying with a man with a white beard on Christmas Eve,” Filangeri laughs. But, joking aside, “We do what’s necessary. We are the turtle movers,” adds Weinstein. “You can’t put a value on one Kemp’s life.”
After months spent healing from injuries, being treated for their illnesses, and regaining their strength, the turtles that Looby and Gisler transported in December are ready for release. “These guys come in chronically ill, and it takes time to get them healed,” says Joe Flanagan, senior veterinarian at the Houston Zoo. On the appointed day in March 2021, the beaches of Galveston, Texas, are warm, and the spring sun reflects off the light-colored sand. Boxes filled with Kemp’s ridley sea turtles gathered from the New England coastline sit in the shade of a small tent. Several beach-goers line up behind strips of bright pink tape wafting in the wind, marking a safe corridor for the turtle parade. Aquariums and rehabilitation centers coordinate with each other to combine their releases and allow the public to attend. “We’ll probably not see these guys ever again, I hope. But if we do it would be nice to see them nesting,” says Flanagan.
Staff and volunteers carefully grasp the small Kemp’s ridleys just behind their front flippers and carry them one by one down the sandy strip toward the ocean. The people gathered to watch cheer, clap, take selfies, smile, and wave as the animals complete the final leg of their strange, human-assisted migration. “Goodbye, little one! Good luck!” someone yells. “Look at how cute they are,” says another bystander. The sea turtles seem equally enthusiastic, waving their flippers wildly as if in anticipation of the swim, longing for the embrace of warm water, at last, eager to once again fly beneath the waves.
“Oh my god, he is so ready to go!” says one of the turtle rehabilitators as she places a small pale-green Kemp’s, named Hagrid, slowly into the water. With several fast pumps of his flippers, the young turtle disappears into the Gulf of Mexico.
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