Dear Fellow Supporters of the Environment & of USPS Going Green & Saving Money,
Hello!
I would like to ask for thirty seconds of your time to take an impactful action.
Below you will find a letter to USPS' Environmental Counsel.
The letter points out that:
- USPS violated the National Environmental Policy Act by awarding the contract for new mail trucks before completing an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS),
- asks that the contract be placed on hold until the EIS is completed, and
- asks that the EIS include an evaluation of purchasing 100% electric vehicles.
This letter was produced by an organization called Elders Climate Action. If you have time to read it, please do. It's very thorough and well written.
My request is that you copy the letter (below) into a new email and send it to USPS' Environmental Counsel.
Your email must be received by USPS before April 5th. Please send it today. :)
Thank you for doing this.
Best wishes,
Meldan
________________
Copy and paste the text below in a new email and add your name as the signature
Email to: NEPA@USPS.gov
Subject line: Comments on United States Postal Service’s March 4, 2021 Notice of Intent to Prepare Environmental Impact Statement for Purchase of up to 165,000 Next Generation Delivery Vehicles
Mr. Davon Collins Environmental Counsel United States Postal Service 475 L’Enfant Plaza SW Washington, DC 20260–6201
Dear Mr. Collins,
I am a citizen climate activist and a breather of the air in a place served by USPS delivery vehicles. And I am one of millions committed to ending the Climate Crisis and the air pollution pandemic that contributes to premature death and disease in America. We call on the USPS to join us in building a just and sustainable future for our children, our grandchildren, and all children. I write to comment on the Notice of Intent referred to above, as well as on the contract recently awarded to Oshkosh Defense.
The award of the purchase contract to Oshkosh Defense before completion of an Environmental Impact Statement violates the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).
In its March 4, 2021 Notice of Intent (NOI) to Prepare Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), the USPS states that it has not yet decided on the mix of powertrain for the new delivery vehicles and will evaluate the environmental impacts of 3 alternative powertrains for the vehicles: (1) a mix of internal combustion and battery electric powertrains; (2) existing “commercial off the shelf” vehicles; and (3) no action. Yet USPS News announced on February 23, 2021 that the USPS has already awarded the contract for the delivery vehicles to Oshkosh Defense, which builds only internal combustion engines.
NEPA prohibits any agency from taking action that will have a significant impact on the human environment before it completes the NEPA process, including an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). It prohibits any agency from making irreversible commitments of resources before it provides information to the decisionmaker and citizens in a Record of Decision (ROD) after an environmental impact statement. No EIS has been completed and no ROD has been issued. Therefore, the award of the purchase contract to Oshkosh Defense must be reversed pending completion of an EIS according to NEPA rules.
The EIS as described in the NOI will violate NEPA rules requiring evaluation of the “environmentally preferable alternative” which is, of course, vehicles that do not contribute to unhealthy air pollution.
NEPA Section 101(a) says that each ROD must identify all alternatives considered and specify which alternative is “environmentally preferable” (that is, the one that will promote national environmental policy as expressed in NEPA Section 101). NEPA Section 101(a) requires the use of “all practicable means and measures…” to “create and maintain conditions under which man and nature can exist in productive harmony…” Clearly NEPA requires consideration of the health impacts of air pollution which deny many Americans any hope of “productive harmony,” and consideration of the impact that greenhouse gases will have on the stability of the climate and the consequential impacts on the environment, human health and the sustainability of natural systems on which human civilization depends.
The Energy Information Administration reported that the transportation sector of our economy contributes 37% of total U.S. CO2 emissions in 2019. Transportation CO2 emissions have been rising by nearly 3% annually for the last 5 years. Before the COVID pandemic, scientists estimated that air pollution from burning carbon would take an estimated 242,000 lives in 2020, the third-leading cause of death in the U.S. The science is clear: air pollution harms health across the entire lifespan, damaging lungs, hearts, brains, skin and other organs … affecting virtually all systems in the human body.
In light of NEPA’s clear intent to protect present and future generations of Americans, the USPS must consider the option of an electric delivery fleet that will cut emissions immediately and become pollution free when the grid has been decarbonized. We cannot have a postal service that delivers our mail while polluting our air, damaging our health, and threatening our future. The NOI must be revised to include the environmentally preferable alternative of 100% electric delivery vehicles.
Purchase of 100% Electric Vehicles is Practicable and Will be Effective.
NEPA Section 101(a) requires the use of “all practicable means and measures” to “create and maintain conditions under which man and nature can exist in productive harmony, and fulfill the social, economic, and other requirements of present and future generations of Americans.” What does “practicable” mean with respect to USPS Next Generation Delivery Vehicles? “Practicable” is defined by Meriam Webster as “capable of being put into practice or of being done or accomplished: synonymous with FEASIBLE; and capable of being used: synonymous with USABLE.”
For-profit U.S. companies with operations similar to those of the USPS, like FedEx, Amazon and UPS, are demonstrating that a 100% electric delivery fleet is both feasible (capable of being put into practice) and usable (capable of being used), by converting their delivery fleets to electric vehicles: (a) FedEx has issued detailed plans for its entire pickup and delivery fleet to be zero-emission electric vehicles by 2040.; (b) Amazon already uses electric delivery vehicles and plans to have 100,000 on the road by 2030; and (c) United Parcel Service has already begun using small zero-emissions vans similar to the type that the US Postal Service needs, with plans to have 10,000 by the middle of the decade.
The US Postal Service can do the same. And this very practicable alternative of a 100% electric vehicle delivery fleet will also be effective in reducing the health impacts of air pollution, accomplishing NEPA’s goal to “create and maintain conditions under which man and nature can exist in productive harmony, and fulfill the social, economic, and other requirements of present and future generations of Americans.”
Therefore, I ask that the USPS take no action on the award of the contract for purchase of delivery vehicles until completion of the NEPA process, including a proper Environmental Impact Statement. I also ask that the NOI for the Environmental Impact Statement be revised to include, as the environmentally preferable alternative, evaluation of the option to purchase 100% electric powertrain delivery vehicles.
Thank you for your consideration of my comment on this important matter.
Meldan Heaslip started this petition on MoveOn. If there's an issue close to your heart that you'd like to campaign on, you can start your campaign here.
FOCUS: Graeme Wood | A Black Army Rises to Fight the Racist Right Graeme Wood, The Atlantic Wood writes: "It has a militarylike structure, fields an army of hundreds of heavily armed men and women, subscribes to esoteric racist doctrines, opposes Black Lives Matter, and follows a leader who thinks we live in a period of apocalyptic tribulation signaled by the movements of celestial bodies."
A man calling himself Grandmaster Jay has raised a disciplined, heavily armed militia. It has yet to fire a shot at its enemies, but it’s prepared for war.
hen Grandmaster Jay walked into Million’s Crab, a seafood joint in suburban Cincinnati, the waitstaff looked alarmed. Million’s Crab is a family restaurant, and on that placid November evening, Jay—the supreme commander of the Not Fucking Around Coalition—was wearing body armor rated to take a pistol round directly to the chest. Dressed from mask to shoes in black, he was four hours late to our meeting, and remorseless. “My time is scarce,” he said, making aggressive eye contact. Indeed, of the two of us, I was the one who felt sheepish, not because I was wasting his time but because it occurred to me that while I waited, I could have warned the servers that my dining companion was often armed and that he might look as if he had just stepped out of The Matrix. He sat across from me, in front of a platter of scallops and shrimp that had been hot when I’d ordered it for him an hour before, when the kitchen was closing. I offered him a plastic bib, which he declined. He wouldn’t eat any food, but he requested a San Pellegrino or, in its absence, filtered tap water.
Grandmaster Jay’s group, the NFAC, is a Black militia whose goals, other than to abjure Fucking Around, are obscure. It has a militarylike structure, fields an army of hundreds of heavily armed men and women, subscribes to esoteric racist doctrines, opposes Black Lives Matter, and follows a leader who thinks we live in a period of apocalyptic tribulation signaled by the movements of celestial bodies. Its modus operandi is to deploy a more fearsome Black militia wherever white militias dare to appear. Eventually, it intends to establish a racially pure country called the United Black Kemetic Nation. (“Kemet,” Jay explained, “is the original name of Egypt, which means ‘land of the Blacks.’”) A patch on Grandmaster Jay’s body armor bore the new nation’s initials, UBKN.
The NFAC leader’s real name is John Fitzgerald Johnson. He is a former soldier, a failed political candidate, a hip-hop DJ, a rambling egotist, and a prolific self-promoter. His life sometimes seems like a long disinformation campaign about itself. The alternate versions of Jay do not seem to cohere into a single person. “I’ve lived five different lives,” he told me, enigmatically. “Like a Rubik’s Cube.”
“We’re not going to dig into who I am,” he said. “You won’t get that from me.” He said he wasn’t from the Midwest. But I knew he lived near Cincinnati: I had staked out his apartment that afternoon. Even facts as straightforward as his age are not simple to determine. Some sources say he is as young as 50, others as old as 59. He is lithe enough to pass for being in his mid-40s. The best evidence—including court records—suggests that he turned 57 in December. (That might explain his given name: He would have been born just nine days after the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.) One hint that he is no longer a young man is a light smattering of age spots across his nose.
Jay claims that the NFAC first appeared publicly when nine white supremacists came to Dayton, Ohio, in May 2019. No one seems to have noticed the coalition then, amid some 600 other counterprotesters. In 2020, however, it showed up in larger numbers (Jay claims thousands, but hundreds seems more realistic) at protests over Confederate monuments and over the killing of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia; at protests over the police shooting of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky; and at protests over the police shooting of Trayford Pellerin in Lafayette, Louisiana.
In Louisville, just two hours from where Jay and I sat, the NFAC first revealed the extent of its capabilities. On his YouTube channel, Jay posted a video of his troops in formation, and local news stations ran aerial shots. The men and women are ragtag and amateur, and their uniforms are not, well, uniform. One man has a Texas-flag patch Velcroed to his body armor; a woman taps the trigger guard of her AR-15 with a three-inch yellow fingernail. But my goodness, the weaponry—AR-15s galore, sniper rifles with scopes and bipods, high-capacity magazines, and enough “tactical” clothing to resupply an Army-surplus store. They look like World War II partisans meeting their clandestine commander for the first time. They stand in neat, spaced columns. I counted 28 rows of seven before I stopped counting. (By contrast, aerial photos suggest that the white militiamen present that day could have fit in a small school bus.) When Jay orders his people into motion, they go.
So far, that is all they do. They do not bicker with other protesters, carry signs, or explain themselves. “We don’t come to sing,” Jay told a reporter from Newsweek. “We don’t come to chant.” Instead they stand, like a praetorian guard for some unseen emperor. In this laconic way, they distinguish themselves from two groups they loathe or deride: white militias (the camo-bedecked guys who show up at the same demonstrations and, sometimes, at the behest of the president, try to topple American democracy) and Black Lives Matter, whose activists tend toward nonviolence. “That movement accomplished nothing,” Jay told me, just “a lot of singing, a lot of hand-holding, a lot of sentiments and praise.”
Compare the NFAC’s military-style discipline, Jay said, with white militias. On January 6, at the U.S. Capitol, the insurrectionists included militia members from the groups the NFAC has arrayed itself against. Unlike the NFAC, they were flagrantly breaking the law and, for a time at least, getting away with it. “If the NFAC had done what these folks did,” Jay said, “they’d still be bringing the body bags” out of the Capitol. (If he is wrong, it’s only because a Black militia that attempted to storm Congress would have been fired upon by law enforcement long before it penetrated the Capitol.) “White people decided to act up and show us their true colors,” Jay said. In his view, January 6 demonstrated that the NFAC is an appropriate response to a country shameless in its hypocrisy: If a disorderly white militia can sack the Capitol and get away with it, on what basis could one object to an orderly Black militia that obeys the law?
One objection to such a militia is that it is avowedly racist. Jay described its recruiting strategy: “You must be Black,” he said. “If you’re biracial, your father must be Black.” The other criteria relate to recruits’ ability to arm themselves without attracting the attention of law enforcement. “Military experience is preferred,” Jay said, and would-be coalition members must have their own AR-style rifle. “We’re not a shotgun organization.” Anyone without a concealed-carry permit must have the clean record necessary to get one. In one of Jay’s videos, he tells his followers that he intends to meet “each and every last one of you face-to-face,” to conduct an interrogation to “screen out fakes, wannabes, snakes, and spiders.” Jay says he will swear people in after they have “put your life on the line” by standing armed in an NFAC formation, in a situation where other armed groups might start trouble.
This is the worry of those who monitor domestic extremist threats: If you recruit an army, equip it to fight, and range it as infantry across from other armed groups, one shot could ignite a skirmish and perhaps turn downtown Louisville into Baghdad for an afternoon. Public order is the hostage of the most radical gunman present. Jay posted a video from Louisville showing white militia members expressing concern that the NFAC would annihilate them. “There’s no cover there,” one laments to a police officer. “NFAC shows up and decide they want to wipe us all out—we’re gone in seconds.”
“These are volatile situations,” Amy Iandiorio, an investigative researcher for the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, told me when I asked her about the NFAC. The coalition is “larger than the older [white] militias. They are a lightning rod that attracts opposing groups, and that’s a recipe for conflict.”
“We have a zero-incident record,” Jay boasted, mostly accurately. “We’ve never destroyed a piece of property, or had our people arrested for anything.” So far, the NFAC’s only known casualties have been its own members, after a woman in formation sent herself and two others to the hospital when she fired her weapon seemingly by accident. (Right-wingers, gun enthusiasts, and ex-military types on social media ridicule Jay for his and his followers’ poor weapons discipline.)
Jay’s own record is blemished with accusations of violence (he denies them), and amid his long sermons about “racial maturity” and spiritual self-awareness, he sometimes makes alarming threats. In one video, as alleged in a criminal complaint against him, he tells his followers to burn government officials’ homes and murder their children. He also advises them to destroy police body cameras if they assault cops, to remove evidence.
Jay is contesting these allegations in court. Even if true, such threats hardly compare with the actual storming of the Capitol. Yet it is rarely good news when you learn that a sectarian racist is raising an army, stockpiling weapons, demanding total loyalty, and suggesting that he is a “messiah.” Jay speaks prophetically, and sometimes apocalyptically. Followers of his teachings, he said, “would be the first to tell you … nothing that I have predicted has not come true.” In October, on YouTube, he told his soldiers, “At this point, I don’t think I’ll be joining you all too much longer. Just remember that when I’m gone, these will be your instructional videos.”
In early December, the FBI raided his apartment and arrested him on charges that, during a September demonstration in Louisville, he pointed a rifle at federal agents, blinding them with its mounted light. Jay told me that all the allegations against him are “bullshit.” By bringing them up, federal prosecutors are trying to “character assassinate” him. “I’m a student of history,” he said. “Anytime someone starts to galvanize people, it’s the same process”: character assassination, then financial assassination through mounting legal bills, then imprisonment, exile, or outright murder. Jay is now out on bail. His social-media accounts are frozen, and he faces a possible 20-year sentence—which may or may not be a deterrent, if he thinks his end is near anyway.
The filtered water must have lowered his inhibitions, because over the next two hours Jay became more garrulous. His story, and the purpose of Not Fucking Around, became a little more clear, and a little less.
He grew up in Richmond, Virginia, and New York City. According to Pentagon records, he joined the military in 1989. At some point he got married, though he refused to say more about his domestic life. He told me that he spent four years in the Army in Germany, where he revised his racial self-understanding. “I saw that I had been socialized to believe that I was second-class, that there was something criminal inherent about me,” he said. In Germany, Jay was “treated with the utmost respect,” and he said he enjoyed a reprieve from the American racial hierarchy. When he met Americans overseas, they tended to interact with one another more as compatriots in exile than as the race enemies they might have been at home.
He visited Auschwitz, he said, and was indelibly influenced by what he saw. In our conversation, though, he made no direct reference to the mass murder of Jews and others, or to the lessons of totalitarian fascism. Instead, he mentioned that he was impressed by postwar Germany’s decision to outlaw Holocaust denial and the glorification of Nazism. The United States, he thinks, has failed to show the same backbone in reckoning with its crimes against Black people. He considers Germany’s “a genuine effort by society to restore and repair those people who were the victims of this Holocaust.”
Like so much else about Jay, this passion for European Jewry presents a contradiction: Elsewhere, he has quoted Hitler approvingly and suggested that the Jews of Europe—“those people running around calling themselves the Jews”—are imposters. He has also seemed to flirt with Holocaust denial. (A sample lyric from one of his hip-hop songs: “They call you racist if you proud of your folks / But they be muting you now if you forget about the Holocaust!”)
Jay’s videos repeat several themes popular among anti-Semitic segments of the Black Hebrew Israelites, a religious movement known for noisy proselytizing and elaborate conspiracy theories. One way to understand the NFAC is to imagine what a paramilitary wing of the Black Hebrew Israelites would be like. (Jay denied all charges of anti-Semitism but refused to answer when I asked directly whether he thought Jews died in large numbers in the Holocaust. “I’ve visited the death camps. I’ve studied the documents. I’ve seen for myself,” he said. “I don’t have to justify my experiences in my position to anyone.”)
Jay’s military career, like most things about him, is strange. After basic training, the Army assigns every soldier a military occupational specialty, or MOS: 11B is an infantryman, 94S is a Patriot system repairer, 12K is a plumber. Most soldiers have just one MOS over the course of their career; once the Army trains a soldier, why go through the expense of training him again? “I had five MOSs,” Jay said. This is like majoring in five different subjects in college—not technically against the rules, but rare and implausible. He named four but refused to identify the fifth. Later, Jay said he had only two MOSs.
Meanwhile, Jay acquired a record of violence. According to the affidavit in support of his indictment in Louisville, he was arrested in 1995 for punching a woman in the face, and for menacing a man with a 20-gauge shotgun. He left the Army in 1997 but despised civilian life. (He told his YouTube audience that he hated it: “You all were the most uncivilized, undisciplined people I had ever seen.”) He reenlisted in July 1998, but a year later he faced a court martial for another offense. He was busted down to the lowest rank—private—and drummed out of the Army with an “other than honorable” discharge.
In August 2003, according to the affidavit, Jay entered Fort Bragg and “threatened to kill his wife” (who was also a soldier) and her platoon sergeant at a recognition ceremony. Somehow, after all of this, Jay reenlisted that December, this time as an Army reservist. He attained the rank of sergeant, went absent without leave just over a year later, then escaped court martial by getting out of the Army a third time, again under other-than-honorable conditions, and again reduced to private. Despite these travails—or because of them—Jay modeled the NFAC on the military in which he had served. It’s an extremely top-down, chain-of-command organization, perfect for people who like to take orders, or give them. The NFAC is this private’s chance to be a general.
After his final discharge, Jay disappeared for several years. He later claimed to have worked as the “director of a global cloud-integration practice and solutions architect.” He tried a career as a hip-hop DJ, which took an embarrassing turn when stars including Grandmaster Flash and DJ Jazzy Jeff accused him of plagiarism and résumé exaggeration. Jay said the accusations were a misunderstanding, but he also suggested to me, in a peculiar and indirect way, that he had made certain mistakes. “When they finally admit that we have the capability to time travel,” he said, “I would love to see one of us go back and meet ourselves five years ago, or 10 years ago. You would sit that person down and have a word with him.”
Jay reappeared in 2015 as an ally of the movement he now denigrates, Black Lives Matter. “I was caught up in all that—I, too, was waving signs and chanting,” he said. He showed up during uprisings following various outrages, such as the murder of nine parishioners at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, by a white supremacist. He led a crowd of tens of thousands across the Arthur Ravenel Bridge to protest the mass shooting. After the murder of Walter Scott by a North Charleston police officer, he appeared at the side of Scott’s family. “I was there to escort Walter Scott’s mother into the funeral.” He said he was an ordained minister at the time. Photos from the funeral show Jay wearing an Anglican-style clerical collar and holding Judy Scott’s left arm. (At some point, he repudiated the “Black Lives Matter” slogan. “It’s not Black lives that matter anymore,” he tells a crowd in an undated video. “All lives!”)
In 2016, he emerged again, wearing a dark business suit with a black tie, pocket square, and large wristwatch. His website, onlywecanfixus.com, advertised a bid for the White House on an independent ticket. His platform consisted of mostly liberal platitudes, with an emphasis on diversity, police reform, support for veterans, and action on climate change—“almost indistinguishable,” he said, from Bernie Sanders’s. He lost to Donald Trump and concluded, like most independent candidates, that America had rigged politics against him.
The only way to win was to play a different game. On August 21, 2017, he witnessed the total eclipse of the sun while standing outside the city hall of Carbondale, Illinois. He swooned during the eclipse, felt a wave of energy, and began preaching the ideas of the NFAC soon after. He said that the NFAC “was born out of the atmosphere created by Donald Trump,” not out of a spiritual revelation. But the transformation does not appear coincidental. From that point on, he was “spitting knowledge” on social media, much of it about alien spacecraft (“visitors”) and odd phenomena he noticed in the sky. He also said he had a health scare. “I was supposed to be dead two years ago,” he told his followers. “But I’m not. I’m still here because I was cured in a way that defies medicine and changed my entire brain structure.” He began eating differently, and drinking “alkaline water” to “reactivate” his pineal gland and scrub his system of impurities that were impeding “higher abilities.” His drink order—San Pellegrino or filtered tap water—had spiritual implications.
Few paid attention until Jay showed up with dozens of armed followers in Georgia last year, and phrased his new beliefs in a militant idiom. Laws, he told me, are “just paper,” and it is only reasonable that Black people arm and train themselves to act as “an immediate bulwark against the continued human-rights abuses” perpetrated against them. “Too much talking. Time for the action,” he said.
Tommie Shelby, a professor of African American studies and philosophy at Harvard, noted that these ideas have precursors in Black political thought. Armed self-defense has been around at least since Cyril Briggs, who founded the African Blood Brotherhood in 1919. During the period after the First World War, when white mobs were shooting Black people and burning their businesses, many Black people considered peaceful protests (such as those organized by the NAACP) inadequate. Four decades later, the activist Robert F. Williams wrote the classic text of Black armed resistance, Negroes With Guns, which argues that violence against Black people calls for violence by Black people. The tradition of armed resistance persisted even as the civil-rights movement succeeded by rejecting this fearful symmetry: Martin Luther King Jr., Bayard Rustin, and John Lewis showed that Black people without guns were much more formidable.
Jay said he does not admire or imitate any Black activists from previous generations—he protested when I suggested a comparison to the Black Panthers, whose aesthetic the NFAC has obviously ripped off—but was quick to defend the Jamaican political thinker and activist Marcus Garvey, who called for Black self-sufficiency and attempted to found a homeland for Black people. When I mentioned W. E. B. Du Bois, Jay cut me off to condemn Du Bois as a “bourgeois” and “an enemy to the movement Marcus Garvey started … If [Du Bois] was alive today, he would eat his words.”
Like Garvey’s, Jay’s rhetoric calls for Black self-reliance and segregation from white people. His goal, he said, is “for the Black race to come into its own—which it has not”—and to “mature as a race,” first by building “racial esteem.” He said Black people have been like “the guy who sleeps on your couch that doesn’t go home until you have to throw the couch out with him.” If they get armed, and get serious, they will no longer “have to blame the non-melanated” for their failure. Ultimately, Jay calls for “descendants of the Portuguese and Atlantic slave trade” to separate themselves from others and create a Black ethnostate.
The United Black Kemetic Nation, he said, would have the full recognition of international law. “What we’re talking [about] here is a legal action that takes us from being freed slaves and descendants of slaves in a country that classifies us by color and denigrates us by race to a place where we are citizens of our own country,” he said. The location of this new country is negotiable, and as a model he considered Wyoming, because of its cheap land. But Jay told me that when he floated Wyoming to his followers, their response was: “Hell no—nobody wants to go to Wyoming.” (Shelby notes that the desire to establish a Black homeland on American territory likewise has a long history, showing up in Harry Haywood’s book Negro Liberation in the 1940s and the Republic of New Afrika movement in the ’60s and ’70s.)
As Jay browsed real estate, he also made overseas allies, he said, in Black-liberation movements in Africa and Europe. “These people are screaming our name while they’re resisting," he said, although no such screams have been independently documented. He claimed to have enlisted the Niger Delta Avengers, a militant group that has been blowing up pipelines and other infrastructure in Nigeria, as part of his coalition, which will eventually be the “military backbone” of the UBKN.
To demonstrate its power, Jay said, the NFAC aims to assemble, in one place, “a million legal [Black] gun owners,” to show that the United Black Kemetic Nation can defend itself. Part of the process of creating a new country (under a treaty known as the Montevideo Convention) is demonstrating that enough people are eager to live there permanently and can administer the new state. That includes defending it. Jay said, “If I assemble 1 million legal guns, I have the fifth-largest ground army on the planet. I think that’s a pretty significant indication … There are 57 million of us here. All I want is 1 [million].” (According to the Census Bureau, 47 million Americans identify as Black or Black and another race. Because of Jay’s patrilineal theory of race, he would presumably recognize a smaller number still.)
How can you get even 1 million armed followers if just a few years ago you were a failed DJ and now you believe that San Pellegrino will give you preternatural mental powers? These do not sound like promising beginnings for a modern Simón Bolívar or Toussaint L’Ouverture.
But Jay has loyal followers, maybe in spite of these eccentricities, and maybe because of them. Most people do not think it sensible to channel their justified rage by buying an AR-15 and joining a cultlike paramilitary organization. Nor do most Americans—let alone most Black Americans—want to establish a racially pure state, even somewhere other than Wyoming. But the desire for action of some kind, acknowledging that Black people are uniquely menaced, is to be expected. Watching a mob storm the Capitol with a Confederate battle flag should freak out any American who hates racism, and inspire such a person to seek a radical cure for a deep political sickness. Jay offers a remedy prepackaged and ready to deliver. Unfortunately, Jay’s answer—create a parallel, quasi-fascist race army with its own flag and homeland—strikes me as a particularly bad case of becoming that which you hate.
The NFAC also appears to have tapped into a kind of modish authoritarian magical thinking. Plenty of Trump supporters believed that their man had a mystical ability to outwit his opponents and bend previously unbendable laws of politics. He could say anything, do anything, and somehow survive. (Many still believe this.) In Jay, NFAC followers have a leader who conjured an army ex nihilo, announced a Black uprising in multiple American cities, and somehow got away with it for months. (I wonder how many of them regard Jay’s fraudulent past the way Trump supporters regard the former president’s—i.e., if such a clown could get this far, he must have divine favor.) Jay has terrible ideas, and in ordinary circumstances most people would identify them as crazy and reject them. In 2020 and its aftermath, however, there is a greater-than-usual demand for someone who seems to have at least a little skill at propitiating the angry gods.
Surely, though, there must be limits to what Jay’s followers can accept. At one point in our conversation, I thought I might have detected such a limit. We’d spent an hour talking some sense, and a lot of nonsense; now the restaurant staff presented me with the bill and a doggie bag, and exiled us to the parking lot. We sat in Jay’s SUV, which soon filled with pleasant Cajun aromas from the scallops. At that point, for the first time, the conversation flowed more naturally. Jay had run out of boilerplate.
“You mentioned time travel and you mentioned alien spacecraft,” I said. “Do you know anything about these things?”
Jay paused. “I’m not at liberty to discuss those.” I asked if he felt obliged to oaths of secrecy sworn to the U.S. military that had twice expelled him from its ranks. He said yes, but I pressed him to continue.
“Very interesting,” Jay said, speaking slowly and deliberately for the first time since his performance that night had begun. “Someone asked me the other day, they said, ‘How is it that you’ve managed to do in six months what other people have not been able to do for 60 years?’ … I would simply say that knowing the future doesn’t help. Unless you have a deep, personal, hands-on experience with the past.”
“A lot of times when people talk about time travel, they always run into the paradigm ‘If you change something in the past, then you’ll screw up your present.’” Jay shook his head. “Think of it in terms of alternate paths.” He said that by “stepping off this timeline into another timeline,” you create a new reality. “Yes, you can screw up things in that timeline. But when you return to your timeline, nothing has changed!” He continued. “There is no set future. There are multiple futures depending on the timeline that you set in motion.” He said one cannot really change the past—just mint a new timeline.
“Twenty-twenty is a great example. You all are living in an alternate timeline. Everything’s upside down; the world a year ago is completely 180 degrees from where you are now … and people are just blundering through it without realizing that you’re living in an alternate timeline. How did we get here? That’s the kicker. You figure that part out, you’ll figure out everything that I’m talking about.”
I thanked Jay for his time, and he thanked me for mine. A month later, the police raided his apartment. Among the small armory of assault rifles, they also found a prodigious amount of marijuana.
After Jay’s arrest in December, he ordered his followers into a “stand-down position.” The militias that the NFAC opposes, such as the Oath Keepers, were active during December and January—and because of their presence at the storming of the Capitol, they now feel the heat of law enforcement. On January 6, the NFAC had no presence in Washington: The District of Columbia does not allow open carry of weapons. When I talked with him in February, Jay gloated about his enemies’ legal jeopardy, with some justification. “The U.S. government is going around cleaning up all of those other organizations,” he said. “We’re watching.” This strategic stand-down was not entirely voluntary, of course. By arresting Jay, the government took him out of circulation as a militia leader. He won't be able to post instructional videos for some time, because of the social-media ban that was a condition of his bail. The cops took his rifles too.
Jay would not accept a foot soldier who showed up for inspection unarmed. Ironically, though, the government’s confiscation of his weapons has proved at least one of Jay’s prophecies. Jay previously argued that Black people, exercising their constitutional rights to speak and pack heat, would be treated differently from white people doing the same. The crime he is now charged with is a real one—pointing guns at cops is illegal and wrong—but poor muzzle discipline and poor judgment are universal at armed protests, and I suspect that other armed protesters have performed equally negligent acts and gotten little more than a dirty look and a chewing out from the cops. Right-wing militias stormed Michigan’s capitol and were not arrested.
Jay’s disarming has occasioned a shift in his emphasis, if not tone. When I spoke with him after January 6, he still slipped into periodic fits of rage at the impertinence of my questions, but he stressed that the NFAC is “peaceful” and wants to “open up a dialogue and stabilize the situation.”
But Jay did not raise a militia by cultivating a tranquil persona, and the NFAC members who heeded his call at his craziest moments will not wait forever for him to revoke his stand-down order and recover his insanity. They joined a group that promised to take a bite out of the Earth and reserve it for Black people. They expected to be led by a commander who preaches radical separatism, and who will swagger with an AR-15 in public and boast that his snipers can bisect a white militiaman’s head from 1,000 yards away. Jay told me that he already had to vet his recruits carefully. “Some people come to change the world,” he said, “and some come to end it all.” The latter, he implied, are unwelcome in the NFAC and have to be screened out. The NFAC has room for only one messiah. But even those who originally joined with peaceful intent can become jaded, given enough time, injustice, and absentee leadership.
“Brass is already calling this Fort Hood 2.0,” a military official said of the investigation now underway at Fort Sill. “It was a dark day at work today.”
he Army is investigating a possible series of sexual assaults of a female soldier at the Army training base in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, a commander at the base told press yesterday. The investigation, according to a military official with direct knowledge, is scrutinizing allegations of multiple assaults against the soldier by 22 service members. Video of one incident under investigation involving several drill sergeants was circulating at the base and was obtained by Army investigators, the official said.
The soldier, who was a trainee at the time of the alleged assaults, formally reported them on March 27. The alleged incidents at times involved groups of assailants, the military official said, and the woman’s report identified seven of the 22 members she said assaulted her. He spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel matters.
“I heard the term ‘sex ring’ thrown around, which is not one you love to hear,” the official said, reflecting concerns that the assaults may have been coordinated.
Colonel Cathy Wilkinson, a spokesperson for the U.S. Army, denied investigators have obtained a video, but declined to answer follow-up questions. “Investigators do not have any such video,” Wilkinson said in a statement to The Intercept.
The unit implicated in the assault is the 1-78 Field Artillery Battalion. The Defense Department is removing multiple unit drill sergeants as a result of the investigation, which is being conducted by the Army Criminal Investigation Command. Stars and Stripes reported that “multiple” personnel at Fort Sill were suspended this week following a sexual assault report filed by a soldier in training, but did not specify the exact number. According to Maj. Gen. Ken Kamper, at Fort Sill, the service members under scrutiny were part of a cadre that trains incoming troops.
Reports of sexual assault in the military have gone up dramatically in recent years, rising 38 percent from 2016 to 2018 and by 10 percent between 2018 and 2019. More than 20,000 service members reported being sexually assaulted in 2018, according to Defense Department figures.
Last year, 20-year-old Army Specialist Vanessa Guillén was murdered at Fort Hood, Texas, by another service member after Guillén told family and friends that she had been sexually harassed by superiors. An Army investigation, released in December, found a culture “permissive of sexual harassment and sexual assault” at the base — and that female troops were “vulnerable and preyed upon, but fearful to report and be ostracized and re-victimized.” In December, The Intercept reported that Fort Hood soldiers were unsurprised by the report and skeptical that there would be any significant changes. These soldiers described a “toxic leadership” culture at Fort Hood.
“It’s been bad historically but brass is already calling this Fort Hood 2.0,” the official said on Thursday evening. “It was a dark day at work today.”
etails from more than 500 million Facebook users have been found available on a website for hackers.
The information appears to be several years old but it is another example of the vast amount of information collected by Facebook and other social media sites and the limits to how secure that information is.
The availability of the data set was first reported by Business Insider. According to that publication, it contains information from 106 countries including phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdates and email addresses.
Facebook has been grappling with data security issues for years. In 2018, the social media giant disabled a feature that allowed users to search for one another via phone numbers, following revelations that the political firm Cambridge Analytica had accessed information on up to 87 million users without their knowledge or consent.
In December 2019, a Ukrainian security researcher reported finding a database with the names, phone numbers and unique user IDs of more than 267 million Facebook users – nearly all US-based – on the open internet. It is unclear if the current data dump is related to this database.
The Menlo Park, California-based company did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In a statement provided to other publications, Facebook said the leak was old and stemmed from a problem that had been fixed in 2019.
In addition to concerns about COVID safety, workers at Amazon have expressed frustration about impossibly high productivity expectations and are therefore starting to unionize. (photo: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)
Amazon Apology to Democrat Includes Admission Drivers Urinate in Bottles Guardian UK Excerpt: "Amazon has apologized to the congressman Mark Pocan, admitting to scoring an 'own goal' in its initial denial of his suggestion its drivers were sometimes forced to urinate in bottles during delivery rounds."
Firm hit back at Congressman Mark Pocan for saying workers had to urinate in bottles, before admitting Pocan was telling truth
mazon has apologized to the congressman Mark Pocan, admitting to scoring an “own goal” in its initial denial of his suggestion its drivers were sometimes forced to urinate in bottles during delivery rounds.
“We know that drivers can and do have trouble finding restrooms because of traffic or sometimes rural routes, and this has been especially the case during Covid when many public restrooms have been closed,” the company said in a blogpost.
Its admission came a week after the Wisconsin Democrat criticised working conditions for Amazon staff, saying in a tweet: “Paying workers $15 [an hour] doesn’t make you a ‘progressive workplace’ when you union-bust and make workers urinate in water bottles.”
Amazon responded: “You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would work for us.”
It subsequently walked back that comment.
“This was an own goal, we’re unhappy about it, and we owe an apology to Representative Pocan,” Amazon said in its blogpost, adding that its previous response only referred to staff at warehouses and fulfilment centers.
In response, Pocan tweeted: “Sigh. This is not about me, this is about your workers who you don’t treat with enough respect or dignity.”
Amazon said urinating in bottles was an industry-wide problem and shared links to news articles about drivers for other delivery companies who have had to do so.
“Regardless of the fact that this is industry-wide, we would like to solve it,” the company said. “We don’t yet know how, but will look for solutions.”
The apology comes as workers at an Alabama warehouse are waiting for a vote count that could result in the online retailer’s first unionized facility in the US, which would be a watershed moment for organized labor.
Amazon has long discouraged attempts among its more than 800,000 US employees to organize. Allegations by many workers of a grueling or unsafe workplace have turned unionizing the company into a key goal for the US labor movement.
Pocan tweeted that the company should acknowledge “the inadequate working conditions you’ve created for all your workers, then fix that for everyone and finally, let them unionize without interference.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of N.Y., speaks during a news conference after the Senate passed a COVID-19 relief bill in Washington, Saturday, March 6, 2021. (photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
The majority leader shared his plans for cannabis legislation with POLITICO in an exclusive interview.
Schumer has been making waves on cannabis policy since he first introduced a bill to legalize marijuana in April 2018. It was part of his pitch for voting Democrat in the 2020 election, and now — with the majority in hand — he is putting together new federal marijuana reform legislation with Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.).
This week, Schumer’s home state of New York legalized marijuana use for adults, after years of failed efforts. More than 40 percent of Americans now live in states that have embraced full legalization.
President Joe Biden has been a conspicuous outlier among Democrats when it comes to supporting marijuana legalization. But Schumer said Biden’s reticence won’t deter the Senate from taking aggressive action to loosen federal restrictions.
“I want to make my arguments to him, as many other advocates will,” Schumer said in an interview with POLITICO this week. “But at some point we're going to move forward, period.“
Schumer pointed to the decade-long experiment with state legalization as evidence that the worst fears of what would happen were overblown. “The legalization of states worked out remarkably well,“ he said. “They were a great success. The parade of horribles never came about, and people got more freedom.“
Schumer was so enthusiastic to get to the cannabis policy discussion that he started sharing his thoughts before a question was posed. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Schumer: In 2018, I was the first member of the Democratic leadership to come out in support of ending the federal prohibition. I'm sure you ask, “Well what changed?” Well, my thinking evolved. When a few of the early states — Oregon and Colorado — wanted to legalize, all the opponents talked about the parade of horribles: Crime would go up. Drug use would go up. Everything bad would happen.
The legalization of states worked out remarkably well. They were a great success. The parade of horribles never came about, and people got more freedom. And people in those states seem very happy.
I think the American people started speaking with a clear message — more than two to one — that they want the law changed. When a state like South Dakota votes by referendum to legalize, you know something is out there.
Was there a specific moment or a specific experience that you can point to and say, “This is when I started to see this issue differently?”
A while back — I can't remember the exact year — I was in Denver. I just started talking to people, not just elected officials, but just average folks.
[They said] it benefited the state, and [didn’t] hurt the state. There were tax revenues, but people had freedom to do what they wanted to do, as long as they weren't hurting other people. That's part of what America is about. And they were exultant in it.
What difference does the fact that the Senate is now controlled by Democrats make for legalization, and is 51 votes enough to pass the bill that you're about to propose?
Probably the most important power of the majority leader is the ability to put bills on the floor. And the fact that I am introducing a bill, and the fact that people will know that there will be a vote on this sooner or later — that's the big difference.
Even when states were for this, if [then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell wouldn't bring the bill up, their senators were never challenged: “How are you going to vote?” And they could say, “Well ... I don't know.” They don't have to say anything. And so the fact that every member will know once we introduce this legislation — not only that it has my support, but that it will come to the floor for a vote — is going to help move things forward in a very strong way.
What role does President Biden play in this? He does not support the full legalization of cannabis. Are you worried that he could veto this bill if it passes?
Well, he said he'd like to see more information on the issue. I respect that. I certainly will have an ongoing conversation with him, and tell him how my views evolved. And hope that his will to.
Will the Senate move forward even if the president's views do not evolve on this?
We will move forward. He said he's studying the issue, so [I] obviously want to give him a little time to study it. I want to make my arguments to him, as many other advocates will. But at some point we're going to move forward, period.
New York State will soon have a legal cannabis industry, and banking is going to be a big issue. The SAFE Banking Act has already been reintroduced in the Senate. Are you working with Banking Committee Chairman [Sherrod] Brown to move the SAFE Banking Act this Congress?
We've talked to the Banking Committee, and we certainly want to make sure that the communities that [have] most been affected by this — over the scheduling of marijuana — get some of the benefits here. But we have to figure out the right way to do that.
Chairman Brown has said that standalone cannabis legislation shouldn't move ahead of the comprehensive reform. Do you agree with that statement?
I would like to see it all move together, yes.
You said during the 2020 election that McConnell's opposition to cannabis policy was the primary thing holding it up. But do you know of or believe there are other Republicans who do support removing cannabis from the Controlled Substances Act?
Yes. What we want to do is first introduce our comprehensive bill, and then start sitting down with people who are not for this in both parties, and A) try to educate them, B) see what their objections are, and if they have some modifications that don't interfere with the main thrust of the bill — we'd certainly listen to some suggestions if that'll bring more people on board. That is not to say we're going to throw overboard things like expungement of records — [things that are] very important to us — just because some people don't like it.
Speaking of expungement of records, most criminal records are at the state level, not at the federal level. Do you think that the federal government should be pushing states to expunge those records?
Yes.
How?
While we can't require it, we can get all kinds of different incentives — incentives and disincentives.
Along those lines, decriminalization versus legalization is something that a lot of people don't fully understand. You actually said yesterday to reporters that you call it “decriminalization” because that lets the states legalize. And just to clarify, when you say decriminalization…
I am personally for legalization. And the bill that we'll be introducing is headed in that direction.
Does it remove marijuana completely from the Controlled Substances Act?
Oh, you'll have to wait. I don't want to get into the details of our bill. You'll have to wait and see.
The vice president sponsored the [comprehensive legalization legislation] MORE Act in the previous Congress. Has she been involved at all in these legalization talks?
We would like to get her involved, but we have not yet.
You said that the timeline on this bill is soon. Does that mean that we're going to see it in the next two weeks?
Texas, Florida and Arizona are among the Republican-led states considering similar legislation, setting the stage for potential clashes with companies headquartered there.
Industry experts are closely watching how things unfold in Georgia to see whether there is a boycott and loss of business similar to what North Carolina experienced with regard to its “bathroom bill” from 2016. That picture became clearer on Friday when Major League Baseball announced it won’t hold this year’s All-Star Game in Georgia as initially planned.
Companies in Texas are already weighing in on a bill making its way through the state legislature that would limit early voting hours and broaden the authority of partisan poll watchers.
American Airlines came out against the legislation, passed by the state Senate on Thursday, while Dallas-based Southwest Airlines said in a statement that “the right to vote is foundational to our democracy” but did not oppose the measure outright.
“This is not good enough, @SouthwestAir. Do you oppose these extreme voter suppression bills SB7/HB6?” tweeted Julián Castro, the former Democratic mayor of San Antonio and secretary of Housing and Urban Development under former President Obama.
That kind of public criticism is putting more pressure on consumer-facing businesses to pick a side, experts say.
"Whether they want to or not, I think [companies are] going to increasingly get pulled into policy issues, and sometimes policy issues that are very political. In the old days, maybe it was a little easier to say, 'We don’t comment on it. We don’t talk about it.' I think increasingly that’s just not really realistic," said John Forrer, director of the Institute for Corporate Responsibility at George Washington University.
Voting rights advocates are focusing their attention on Arizona and Florida as well.
In Arizona, a bill that would impose restrictions on early and mail-in voting is likely to land on Gov. Doug Ducey’s (R) desk. The state legislature in Florida, where potential 2024 GOP presidential contender Ron DeSantis is governor, is considering a similar bill targeting absentee ballots.
Both states have major sporting events on the horizon, just like Georgia did. The Super Bowl is slated for Glendale, Ariz., in 2023, and Miami is in the running to host part of the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
The intensifying debate isn’t just ensnaring companies with headquarters in states considering new voting laws.
Brad Smith, president of Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft, said his company is concerned about Georgia’s election law after deciding "to invest substantially in Atlanta" by purchasing land for new office space.
“Two things are clear to us. First, the right to vote is the most cherished aspect of democracy. And second, this new law has important provisions that unfairly restrict the rights of people to vote legally, securely, and safely,” Smith wrote in a blog post, noting that the company raised concerns with the legislation before it became law.
The national-level corporate criticism comes five years after North Carolina faced significant backlash for enacting its so-called bathroom law that targeted transgender people. The state lost more than $3.76 billion in business, according to an Associated Press analysis from 2017, as major companies refused to build or expand in the state and concerts and major sporting events were canceled.
Few companies have taken similar action in Georgia, though Major League Baseball's announcement on Friday could prompt others to follow suit.
"The most proactive action as a company ... is to come out now and say, 'Look. We stand against a policy in any state that doesn’t meet these basic criteria, or we expect any voting policy to look like X,'" said Daniella Ballou-Aares, CEO of the Leadership Now Project, a consortium of more than 300 business leaders and academics working to enact democratic reforms.
Ballou-Aares, who worked in the State Department during the Obama administration, said employers face even more pressure to do something when the legislation is in their home state.
“Companies have always been concerned about their employees, and we have seen companies engage for a long time on issues relevant to their local employees,” said Ballou-Aares.
In Georgia, both Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey and Delta CEO Ed Bastian called the voting bill “unacceptable” but only after boycott threats.
Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams called the responses from corporate America “mealy-mouthed” and said she was “deeply disappointed” that many didn't speak up until after the bill was signed into law, not while it was making its way through the state legislature.
Forrer said such missteps can be prevented.
“It’s natural for activists to try to target those corporations that are most closely aligned with it to try to turn the heat on. So companies need to start anticipating taking stances on issues because they are increasingly being pressured to,” he said.
Some state leaders seemed to welcome the fight with their corporate critics.
Georgia Republicans this week took a swipe at Delta by passing a bill in the state House to repeal a tax break on jet fuel.
When asked this week about the corporate backlash, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) told CNBC he’s “glad to deal with it.”
I'm gonna tell you fascists You may be surprised The people in this world Are getting organized You're bound to lose You fascists bound to lose
Race hatred cannot stop us This one thing we know Your poll tax and Jim Crow And greed has got to go You're bound to lose You fascists bound to lose.
All of you fascists bound to lose: I said, all of you fascists bound to lose: Yes sir, all of you fascists bound to lose: You're bound to lose! You fascists: Bound to lose!
People of every color Marching side to side Marching âcross these fields Where a million fascists dies You're bound to lose You fascists bound to lose!
I'm going into this battle And take my union gun We'll end this world of slavery Before this battle's won You're bound to lose You fascists bound to lose!
Honeybees on the outside of a bee hive. U.S. agriculture has become almost 50 times more toxic to honeybees and other insects over the past 25 years, a new study finds. (photo: Redux)
Insect 'Apocalypse' in US Driven by 50x Increase in Toxic Pesticides Stephen Leahy, National Geographic Leahy writes: "America's agricultural landscape is now 48 times more toxic to honeybees, and likely other insects, than it was 25 years ago, almost entirely due to widespread use of so-called neonicotinoid pesticides, according to a new study published today in the journal PLOS One."
Bees, butterflies, and other insects are under attack by the very plants they feed on as U.S. agriculture continues to use chemicals known to kill.
merica’s agricultural landscape is now 48 times more toxic to honeybees, and likely other insects, than it was 25 years ago, almost entirely due to widespread use of so-called neonicotinoid pesticides, according to a new study published today in the journal PLOS One.
This enormous rise in toxicity matches the sharp declines in bees, butterflies, and other pollinators as well as birds, says co-author Kendra Klein, senior staff scientist at Friends of the Earth US.
“This is the second Silent Spring. Neonics are like a new DDT, except they are a thousand times more toxic to bees than DDT was,” Klein says in an interview.
Using a new tool that measures toxicity to honey bees, the length of time a pesticide remains toxic, and the amount used in a year, Klein and researchers from three other institutions determined that the new generation of pesticides has made agriculture far more toxic to insects. Honey bees are used as a proxy for all insects. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency does the same thing when requiring toxicity data for pesticide registration purposes, she explained.
The study found that neonics accounted for 92 percent of this increased toxicity. Neonics are not only incredibly toxic to honeybees, they can remain toxic for more than 1,000 days in the environment, said Klein.
“The good news is that we don’t need neonics,” she says. “We have four decades of research and evidence that agroecological farming methods can grow our food without decimating pollinators.”
“It’s stunning. This study reveals the buildup of toxic neonics in the environment, which can explain why insect populations have declined,” says Steve Holmer of American Bird Conservancy.
As insects have declined, the numbers of insect-eating birds have plummeted in recent decades. There’s also been a widespread decline in nearly all bird species, Holmer said. “Every bird needs to eat insects at some point in their life cycle.”
What are neonics?
Neonic insecticides, also known as neonicotinoids, are used on over 140 different agricultural crops in more than 120 countries. They attack the central nervous system of insects, causing overstimulation of their nerve cells, paralysis and death.
They are systemic insecticides, which means plants absorb them and incorporate the toxin into all of their tissues: stems, leaves, pollen, nectar, sap. It also means neonics are in the plant 24/7, from seed to harvest, including dead leaves. Nearly all of neonic use in the U.S. is for coating seeds, including almost all corn and oilseed rape seed, the majority of soy and cotton seeds, and many yard plants from garden centers.
However only 5 percent of the toxin ends up the corn or soy plant; the rest ends up the soil and the environment. Neonics readily dissolve in water, meaning what’s used on the farm won’t stay on the farm. They’ve contaminated streams, ponds, and wetlands, studies have found.
This is the first study to quantify how toxic agricultural lands have become for insects and it shows toxicity levels rapidly increased when treating seeds with neonics really took off, said Klein. “This is also when beekeepers began to see declines in bee numbers,” she says.
These are correlations, since the study did not quantify or estimate what bees or other insects are actually exposed to. It may or may not overestimate actual insecticide doses received by bees, the study says.
However, the study did not look at the many documented nonlethal impacts of neonics on bees, including impaired reproduction, altered immune function, and inability to navigate effectively.
“For that reason we think our study is a very conservative estimate,” Klein says.
Insect apocalypse?
Some scientists have been warning that there is an “insect apocalypse” underway. A global analysis of 452 species in 2014 estimated that insect abundance had declined 45 percent over 40 years. In the U.S. the numbers of iconic Monarch butterflies has fallen 80 to 90 percent in the last 20 years. A study published last month reported that 81 species of butterflies in Ohio declined by an average of 33 percent in the last 20 years. Systematic measurements of butterfly populations are the best indicator of how the world’s 5.5 million insect species are doing, the authors of the Ohio study noted.
Not only do bees, butterflies, and other insects pollinate one-third of all food crops, declining insect numbers can also have catastrophic ecological repercussions. Renowned Harvard entomologist E.O. Wilson has said that without insects the rest of life, including humanity, “would mostly disappear from the land. And within a few months.”
In April 2019 a major study warned that 40 percent of all insect species face extinction due to pesticides—particularly neonics, since they’re the most widely used insecticide on the planet—but also because of with climate change and habitat destruction.
The study authors acknowledge that “their analysis is simplistic and not a suitable basis upon which to draw conclusions about risk,” says David Fischer, Chief Scientist and Director, Pollinator Safety, at Bayer Crop Science.
Regulatory agencies such as the EPA have concluded that seed treatment with neonics poses a low risk, Fischer wrote in an email.
Bayer-Monsanto makes imidacloprid and clothianidin, two of the three neonicotinoids that contributed most to overall toxicity, according to the PLOS One study. Syngenta-ChemChina makes the third one, thiamethoxam.
“Neonics are less toxic to non-target organisms than older insecticides, and, when used according to the label, are low risk to bees,” says Syngenta in a statement.
In 2018, the European Union banned neonicotinoids for field use based on their harm to pollinators. In 2019, Canada also passed restrictions on the use of the most widely used neonicotinoids.
Farms using neonics had 10 times the insect pressure and half the profits compared to those who use regenerative farming methods instead of insecticides according a 2018 study. Like agroecological farming, regenerative agricultural uses cover crops, no-till and other methods to increase on-farm biodiversity and soil health. The regenerative corn-soy operations in the study didn’t have to worry about insect problems, said co-author Jonathan Lundgren, an agroecologist and Director of the ECDYSIS Foundation.
Farmers who are dependent on chemicals are going out of business, said Lundgren, who is also a grain farmer in South Dakota. “It’s painful to see when we have tested, scientifically sound solutions. Working with nature is a good business decision,” he says.
hen Grandmaster Jay walked into Million’s Crab, a seafood joint in suburban Cincinnati, the waitstaff looked alarmed. Million’s Crab is a family restaurant, and on that placid November evening, Jay—the supreme commander of the Not Fucking Around Coalition—was wearing body armor rated to take a pistol round directly to the chest. Dressed from mask to shoes in black, he was four hours late to our meeting, and remorseless. “My time is scarce,” he said, making aggressive eye contact. Indeed, of the two of us, I was the one who felt sheepish, not because I was wasting his time but because it occurred to me that while I waited, I could have warned the servers that my dining companion was often armed and that he might look as if he had just stepped out of The Matrix. He sat across from me, in front of a platter of scallops and shrimp that had been hot when I’d ordered it for him an hour before, when the kitchen was closing. I offered him a plastic bib, which he declined. He wouldn’t eat any food, but he requested a San Pellegrino or, in its absence, filtered tap water.
he Army is investigating a possible series of sexual assaults of a female soldier at the Army training base in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, a commander at the base told press yesterday. The investigation, according to a military official with direct knowledge, is scrutinizing allegations of multiple assaults against the soldier by 22 service members. Video of one incident under investigation involving several drill sergeants was circulating at the base and was obtained by Army investigators, the official said.
etails from more than 500 million 
mazon has apologized to the congressman Mark Pocan, admitting to scoring an “own goal” in its initial denial of his suggestion its drivers were sometimes forced to urinate in bottles during delivery rounds.
