the "Headline That Caught My Attention or the WTF" thread
- Thread starter wader
- Start date
I'm with Nebraska on this one, and "the redder, the better"...
Nebraska and Colorado have issued competing proclamations, alternately encouraging and discouraging meat consumption on March 20.Credit...Sarah Kloepping/The Green Bay Press-Gazette, via Associated Press
Full article here: A Meat War Is Waged Across State Lines
A Meat War Is Waged Across State Lines
In a ceremonial effort to discourage meat consumption, the Colorado governor declared March 20 “MeatOut Day.” Then Nebraska’s governor announced “Meat on the Menu Day,” seeking to do just the opposite.
Nebraska and Colorado have issued competing proclamations, alternately encouraging and discouraging meat consumption on March 20.Credit...Sarah Kloepping/The Green Bay Press-Gazette, via Associated Press
Full article here: A Meat War Is Waged Across State Lines
OK, so while wishing my old boss in Ireland a Happy St. Patrick's Day this AM, I asked him if the Walrus seen down in Kerry, Ireland was going to replace the dearly departed "Fungie the Dolphin". In classic Irish understatement he responded, "Oh no, that's really Trump trying to get into Ireland through the back door to visit his Doonbeg Hotel and Golf Course, since we're on COVID lockdown.
Arctic walrus takes a nap on an iceberg, wakes up in Ireland
Arctic walrus takes a nap on an iceberg, wakes up in Ireland
Old Mud
Well-Known Angler
Old Mud
Well-Known Angler
Someone should tell that clown that could affect his political career. I know i wouldn't vote for him for that reason alone.I'm with Nebraska on this one, and "the redder, the better"...
A Meat War Is Waged Across State Lines
In a ceremonial effort to discourage meat consumption, the Colorado governor declared March 20 “MeatOut Day.” Then Nebraska’s governor announced “Meat on the Menu Day,” seeking to do just the opposite.
Nebraska and Colorado have issued competing proclamations, alternately encouraging and discouraging meat consumption on March 20.Credit...Sarah Kloepping/The Green Bay Press-Gazette, via Associated Press
Full article here: A Meat War Is Waged Across State Lines
" Wher's the Meat"
If I knew him, I'd demand an invite to the party. If he didn't tell me, then I'd turn him in...
NASA’s Last Rocket
The United States is unlikely to build anything like the Space Launch System ever again. But it’s still good that NASA did.By David W. Brown
- March 17, 2021, 11:58 a.m. ET
On Thursday, NASA will try for a second time to prove that the Space Launch System is ready to take flight, aiming for a continuous “hot fire” of its engines for as long as eight minutes. If the test goes well, the rocket’s next stop would be Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and as early as November, the launchpad. It is expected to lift a capsule called Orion on a path around the moon and back. Its first crewed mission is planned for 2023. That flight will be the first to lift astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit since 1972. Indeed, it will send astronauts farther into space than any human has gone before.
And yet far from being a bold statement about the future of human spaceflight, the Space Launch System rocket represents something else: the past, and the end. This is the last class of rocket that NASA is ever likely to build.
Seeing it launch, though, will actually mean something. While NASA has long desired to return astronauts to deep space, it could not. The agency lacked a vehicle designed, tested and validated as safe to lift humans more than a couple of hundred miles from the ground. If this week’s test succeeds and the rocket later flies, the United States will be able to say that it does.
Read the entire article here: NASA’s Last Rocket
I've always considered that living on a barrier island is an inherently temporary event. Looks like reality is starting to set in for some...
AVON, N.C. — Bobby Outten, a county manager in the Outer Banks, delivered two pieces of bad news at a recent public meeting. Avon, a town with a few hundred full-time residents, desperately needed at least $11 million to stop its main road from washing away. And to help pay for it, Dare County wanted to increase Avon’s property taxes, in some cases by almost 50 percent.
Homeowners mostly agreed on the urgency of the first part. They were considerably less keen on the second.
People gave Mr. Outten their own ideas about who should pay to protect their town: the federal government. The state government. The rest of the county. Tourists. People who rent to tourists. The view for many seemed to be, anyone but them.
Mr. Outten kept responding with the same message: There’s nobody coming to the rescue. We have only ourselves.
“We’ve got to act now,” he said.
The risk to tiny Avon from climate change is particularly dire — it is, after all, located on a mere sandbar of an island chain, in a relentlessly rising Atlantic. But people in the town are facing a question that is starting to echo along the American coastline as seas rise and storms intensify. What price can be put on saving a town, a neighborhood, a home where generations have built their lives?
Communities large and small are reaching for different answers. Officials in Miami, Tampa, Houston, San Francisco and elsewhere have borrowed money, raised taxes or increased water bills to help pay for efforts to shield their homes, schools and roads.
Along the Outer Banks — where tourist-friendly beaches are shrinking by more than 14 feet a year in some places, according to the North Carolina Division of Coastal Management — other towns have imposed tax increases similar to the one Avon is considering. On Monday, county officials will vote on whether or not Avon will join them.
“Based on the science that I’ve seen for sea-level rise, at some point, the Outer Banks — the way they are today — are not forever,” said David Hallac, superintendent of the national parks in eastern North Carolina, including the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, which encompasses the land around Avon. “Exactly when that happens is not clear.”
The Outer Banks have a rich past. Hatteras Island, originally home to members of the Algonquin tribe, is near the site of the so-called lost colony of Roanoke. A few miles north and several centuries later, the Wright brothers flew their first airplane.
And it is the vulnerability to the sea — the very threat Avon is wrestling with today — that, in a twist of fate, helped transform the Outer Banks into a tourist spot, according to Larry Tise, a former director of North Carolina’s Division of Archives and History.
In 1899 a terrible hurricane all but destroyed the islands, and the state decided not to spend money developing them. Land speculators later swooped in, snapping up property and marketing the curious local history to attract tourists.
Today, tourism dominates Avon, a hamlet of T-shirt shops and cedar-shake mansions on stilts lining the oceanfront. A few blocks inland sits a cluster of modest older houses, called the Village, shaded by live oaks, Eastern red cedars and wax myrtles. This is where most of the remaining lifelong Avon residents live.
Audrey Farrow’s grandmother grew up in Avon and met Ms. Farrow’s grandfather when he moved to town as a fisherman in the late 1800s. Ms. Farrow, who is 74, lives on the same piece of land she, and her mother before her, grew up on.
Standing on her porch last week, Ms. Farrow talked about how Avon had changed in her lifetime. Vacationers and buyers of second homes have brought new money but have pushed out locals.
And the ocean itself has changed. The water is now closer, she said, and the flooding more constant. The wind alone now pushes water up the small road where she lives and into her lawn.
“If we’ve had rain with it, then you feel like you’ve got waterfront property,” she said.
From any angle, the reckoning for Avon seems to be drawing nearer.
Over the past decade, hurricanes have caused $65 million in damage to Highway 12, the two-lane road that runs along the Outer Banks and connects Avon and other towns to the mainland. The federal and state governments are spending an additional $155 million to replace a section of Highway 12 with a 2.4-mile bridge, as the road can no longer be protected from the ocean. Hatteras Island has been evacuated five times since 2010.
County officials turned to what is called beach nourishment, which involves dredging sand from the ocean floor a few miles off the coast and then pushing it to shore through a pipeline and layering it on the beach. But those projects can cost tens of millions of dollars. And the county’s requests for federal or state money to pay for them went nowhere.
So the county began using local money instead, splitting the cost between two sources: revenue from a tax on tourists, and a property tax surcharge on local homes. In 2011, Nags Head became the first town in the Outer Banks to get a new beach under that formula. Others followed, including Kitty Hawk in 2017.
Ben Cahoon, the mayor of Nags Head, said that paying $20 million to rebuild the beach every few years was cheaper than buying out all the beachfront homes that would otherwise fall into the sea.
He said he could imagine another two or three cycles of beach nourishment, buying his city 20 or 25 more years. After that, he said, it’s hard to guess what the future holds.
“Beach nourishment is a great solution, as long as you can afford it,” Mr. Cahoon said. “The alternative choices are pretty stark.”
Now the county says it’s Avon’s turn. Its beach is disappearing at a rate of more than six feet per year in some places.
During the meeting last month, Mr. Outten described Avon’s needs. As the beach disappears, even a minor storm sends ocean water across Highway 12. Eventually, a hurricane will push enough water over that road to tear it up, leaving the town inaccessible for weeks or more.
In response, the county wants to put about one million cubic yards of sand on the beach. The project would cost between $11 million and $14 million and, according to Mr. Outten, would need to be repeated about every five years.
That impermanence, combined with the high cost, has led some in Avon question whether beach nourishment is worth the money. They point to Buxton, the next town south of Avon, whose beach got new sand in 2018, paid for through higher taxes. Now, most of that sand has washed away, leaving a beachfront motel and vacation rentals teetering over the water.
“Every bit of it’s gone,” Michael David, who grew up in Avon and owns a garage in Buxton, said during last month’s meeting. “We’re just masking a problem that never gets fixed.”
Speaking after the meeting, Mr. Outten defended beach nourishment, despite its being temporary. “I don’t think we can stop erosion. I think we can only slow it down,” he said.
In interviews with more than a dozen homeowners in Avon, a frequent concern was how the county wants to divide the cost. People who own property along the beach will benefit the most, Mr. Outten said, because the extra sand will protect their homes from falling into the ocean. But he said everyone in town would benefit from saving the road.
Homeowners on the ocean side of the road would pay an extra 25 cents for every $100 of assessed value — an increase of 45 percent over their current tax rate. On the inlet side, the extra tax would be just one-fifth that much.
Sam Eggleston, a retired optometrist who moved to Avon three years ago from outside Raleigh and bought a house on the western side of town, said even that smaller amount was too much. He said that because Highway 12 is owned by the state, the state should pay to protect it.
If the government wants to help, Mr. Eggleston argued, it should pay people to move their houses somewhere else — a solution he said would at least be permanent. “To keep spending millions and millions of dollars on the beach, to me doesn’t make sense,” he said.
That view was not shared by people who live on the beach.
When Carole and Bob Peterson bought a house on the ocean in 1997, it was protected from the water by two rows of huge dunes, Ms. Peterson said. Years of storms have washed away those dunes, leaving their 2,800-square-foot home exposed to the water.
Ms. Peterson acknowledged that she and her neighbors would benefit the most from rebuilding the beach. But the rest of the town should be willing to pay for it too, she said, because it protects the jobs and services they depend on.
“People that live over there, on that side, don’t understand that the beach is what keeps them alive,” she said, pointing across the road. “If you don’t have this beach, people aren’t going to come here.”
Audrey Farrow’s son, Matthew, a commercial fisherman, said he worried about the future of the place he grew up in. Between the flooding and the demand for vacation homes, which continues to drive up real estate prices, he said, it was getting harder to make a good life in Avon.
“I’m telling my kids already,” Mr. Farrow said, “go somewheres else.”
Tiny Town, Big Decision: What Are We Willing to Pay to Fight the Rising Sea?
On the Outer Banks, homeowners in Avon are confronting a tax increase of almost 50 percent to protect their homes, the only road into town, and perhaps the community’s very existence.AVON, N.C. — Bobby Outten, a county manager in the Outer Banks, delivered two pieces of bad news at a recent public meeting. Avon, a town with a few hundred full-time residents, desperately needed at least $11 million to stop its main road from washing away. And to help pay for it, Dare County wanted to increase Avon’s property taxes, in some cases by almost 50 percent.
Homeowners mostly agreed on the urgency of the first part. They were considerably less keen on the second.
People gave Mr. Outten their own ideas about who should pay to protect their town: the federal government. The state government. The rest of the county. Tourists. People who rent to tourists. The view for many seemed to be, anyone but them.
Mr. Outten kept responding with the same message: There’s nobody coming to the rescue. We have only ourselves.
“We’ve got to act now,” he said.
The risk to tiny Avon from climate change is particularly dire — it is, after all, located on a mere sandbar of an island chain, in a relentlessly rising Atlantic. But people in the town are facing a question that is starting to echo along the American coastline as seas rise and storms intensify. What price can be put on saving a town, a neighborhood, a home where generations have built their lives?
Communities large and small are reaching for different answers. Officials in Miami, Tampa, Houston, San Francisco and elsewhere have borrowed money, raised taxes or increased water bills to help pay for efforts to shield their homes, schools and roads.
Along the Outer Banks — where tourist-friendly beaches are shrinking by more than 14 feet a year in some places, according to the North Carolina Division of Coastal Management — other towns have imposed tax increases similar to the one Avon is considering. On Monday, county officials will vote on whether or not Avon will join them.
“Based on the science that I’ve seen for sea-level rise, at some point, the Outer Banks — the way they are today — are not forever,” said David Hallac, superintendent of the national parks in eastern North Carolina, including the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, which encompasses the land around Avon. “Exactly when that happens is not clear.”
The Outer Banks have a rich past. Hatteras Island, originally home to members of the Algonquin tribe, is near the site of the so-called lost colony of Roanoke. A few miles north and several centuries later, the Wright brothers flew their first airplane.
And it is the vulnerability to the sea — the very threat Avon is wrestling with today — that, in a twist of fate, helped transform the Outer Banks into a tourist spot, according to Larry Tise, a former director of North Carolina’s Division of Archives and History.
In 1899 a terrible hurricane all but destroyed the islands, and the state decided not to spend money developing them. Land speculators later swooped in, snapping up property and marketing the curious local history to attract tourists.
Today, tourism dominates Avon, a hamlet of T-shirt shops and cedar-shake mansions on stilts lining the oceanfront. A few blocks inland sits a cluster of modest older houses, called the Village, shaded by live oaks, Eastern red cedars and wax myrtles. This is where most of the remaining lifelong Avon residents live.
Audrey Farrow’s grandmother grew up in Avon and met Ms. Farrow’s grandfather when he moved to town as a fisherman in the late 1800s. Ms. Farrow, who is 74, lives on the same piece of land she, and her mother before her, grew up on.
Standing on her porch last week, Ms. Farrow talked about how Avon had changed in her lifetime. Vacationers and buyers of second homes have brought new money but have pushed out locals.
And the ocean itself has changed. The water is now closer, she said, and the flooding more constant. The wind alone now pushes water up the small road where she lives and into her lawn.
“If we’ve had rain with it, then you feel like you’ve got waterfront property,” she said.
From any angle, the reckoning for Avon seems to be drawing nearer.
Over the past decade, hurricanes have caused $65 million in damage to Highway 12, the two-lane road that runs along the Outer Banks and connects Avon and other towns to the mainland. The federal and state governments are spending an additional $155 million to replace a section of Highway 12 with a 2.4-mile bridge, as the road can no longer be protected from the ocean. Hatteras Island has been evacuated five times since 2010.
County officials turned to what is called beach nourishment, which involves dredging sand from the ocean floor a few miles off the coast and then pushing it to shore through a pipeline and layering it on the beach. But those projects can cost tens of millions of dollars. And the county’s requests for federal or state money to pay for them went nowhere.
So the county began using local money instead, splitting the cost between two sources: revenue from a tax on tourists, and a property tax surcharge on local homes. In 2011, Nags Head became the first town in the Outer Banks to get a new beach under that formula. Others followed, including Kitty Hawk in 2017.
Ben Cahoon, the mayor of Nags Head, said that paying $20 million to rebuild the beach every few years was cheaper than buying out all the beachfront homes that would otherwise fall into the sea.
He said he could imagine another two or three cycles of beach nourishment, buying his city 20 or 25 more years. After that, he said, it’s hard to guess what the future holds.
“Beach nourishment is a great solution, as long as you can afford it,” Mr. Cahoon said. “The alternative choices are pretty stark.”
Now the county says it’s Avon’s turn. Its beach is disappearing at a rate of more than six feet per year in some places.
During the meeting last month, Mr. Outten described Avon’s needs. As the beach disappears, even a minor storm sends ocean water across Highway 12. Eventually, a hurricane will push enough water over that road to tear it up, leaving the town inaccessible for weeks or more.
In response, the county wants to put about one million cubic yards of sand on the beach. The project would cost between $11 million and $14 million and, according to Mr. Outten, would need to be repeated about every five years.
That impermanence, combined with the high cost, has led some in Avon question whether beach nourishment is worth the money. They point to Buxton, the next town south of Avon, whose beach got new sand in 2018, paid for through higher taxes. Now, most of that sand has washed away, leaving a beachfront motel and vacation rentals teetering over the water.
“Every bit of it’s gone,” Michael David, who grew up in Avon and owns a garage in Buxton, said during last month’s meeting. “We’re just masking a problem that never gets fixed.”
Speaking after the meeting, Mr. Outten defended beach nourishment, despite its being temporary. “I don’t think we can stop erosion. I think we can only slow it down,” he said.
In interviews with more than a dozen homeowners in Avon, a frequent concern was how the county wants to divide the cost. People who own property along the beach will benefit the most, Mr. Outten said, because the extra sand will protect their homes from falling into the ocean. But he said everyone in town would benefit from saving the road.
Homeowners on the ocean side of the road would pay an extra 25 cents for every $100 of assessed value — an increase of 45 percent over their current tax rate. On the inlet side, the extra tax would be just one-fifth that much.
Sam Eggleston, a retired optometrist who moved to Avon three years ago from outside Raleigh and bought a house on the western side of town, said even that smaller amount was too much. He said that because Highway 12 is owned by the state, the state should pay to protect it.
If the government wants to help, Mr. Eggleston argued, it should pay people to move their houses somewhere else — a solution he said would at least be permanent. “To keep spending millions and millions of dollars on the beach, to me doesn’t make sense,” he said.
That view was not shared by people who live on the beach.
When Carole and Bob Peterson bought a house on the ocean in 1997, it was protected from the water by two rows of huge dunes, Ms. Peterson said. Years of storms have washed away those dunes, leaving their 2,800-square-foot home exposed to the water.
Ms. Peterson acknowledged that she and her neighbors would benefit the most from rebuilding the beach. But the rest of the town should be willing to pay for it too, she said, because it protects the jobs and services they depend on.
“People that live over there, on that side, don’t understand that the beach is what keeps them alive,” she said, pointing across the road. “If you don’t have this beach, people aren’t going to come here.”
Audrey Farrow’s son, Matthew, a commercial fisherman, said he worried about the future of the place he grew up in. Between the flooding and the demand for vacation homes, which continues to drive up real estate prices, he said, it was getting harder to make a good life in Avon.
“I’m telling my kids already,” Mr. Farrow said, “go somewheres else.”
movetheboat
Well-Known Angler
The last surviving man of the Juma tribe in the Brazilian Amazon has died of COVID-19, a case likely contracted from loggers, advocates said.
NYDAILYNEWS.COM
Last surviving man of Juma tribe in Brazilian Amazon has died of COVID-19
BRINGING JOY TO NATIVES SINCE 1492https://trib.al/Hk5XrDT?fbclid=IwAR0mAPeTk_WaZ46AeIaHIqt6cVNuJ0aYQWL8sjw-WKeZoHxXUoAvYmPrHg8
NYDAILYNEWS.COM
Last surviving man of Juma tribe in Brazilian Amazon has died of COVID-19
BRINGING JOY TO NATIVES SINCE 1492https://trib.al/Hk5XrDT?fbclid=IwAR0mAPeTk_WaZ46AeIaHIqt6cVNuJ0aYQWL8sjw-WKeZoHxXUoAvYmPrHg8
wader
Well-Known Angler
Holy Shit!!!
www.yahoo.com
When trucker Rod Drury pulled up to the wrecked camper on the Malad Gorge Bridge on I-84 near the Snake River in southern Idaho on Monday afternoon, he was sure it was the scene of a fatality. And it almost was. As he approached the wreck, he realized that over the edge of the bridge, still attached to the camper only by the trailer safety chain, was a Ford F-350 pickup, dangling nose down over the gorge.
Inside was the 67-year-old driver and his 64-year-old wife, from Garden City, Idaho, along with their two small dogs.
"I was like, I don’t even want to look over,” Drury said. An Idaho state trooper arrived as Drury did, and other first responders arrived quickly after. Together, they anchored more chains from the pickup to Drury's big rig.
A rappel team from Magic Valley Paramedics Special Operations Rescue Team made its way down to the truck, attached harnesses to the occupants, and got them back to the bridge deck. The couple suffered non-life-threatening injuries and were treated at a nearby hospital. The dogs were unhurt.
"This was a tremendous team effort that took a quick response and really showed the dedication and training of our community of first responders," said Capt. David Neth of the Idaho State Police District 4 in Jerome. "This is something we train and prepare for, but when it happens and people's lives literally hang in the balance, it takes everyone working together, and then some."
“You know, this is a God thing," said Drury, the trucker. "I’m looking at life a little bit differently today, that’s for sure.”
Trailer safety chain stops couple's pickup from plunging into Idaho gorge
When trucker Rod Drury pulled up to the wrecked camper on the Malad Gorge Bridge on I-84 near the Snake River in southern Idaho on Monday afternoon, he was sure it was the scene of a fatality. Inside was the 67-year-old driver and his 64-year-old wife, from Garden City, Idaho, along with their...
When trucker Rod Drury pulled up to the wrecked camper on the Malad Gorge Bridge on I-84 near the Snake River in southern Idaho on Monday afternoon, he was sure it was the scene of a fatality. And it almost was. As he approached the wreck, he realized that over the edge of the bridge, still attached to the camper only by the trailer safety chain, was a Ford F-350 pickup, dangling nose down over the gorge.
Inside was the 67-year-old driver and his 64-year-old wife, from Garden City, Idaho, along with their two small dogs.
"I was like, I don’t even want to look over,” Drury said. An Idaho state trooper arrived as Drury did, and other first responders arrived quickly after. Together, they anchored more chains from the pickup to Drury's big rig.
A rappel team from Magic Valley Paramedics Special Operations Rescue Team made its way down to the truck, attached harnesses to the occupants, and got them back to the bridge deck. The couple suffered non-life-threatening injuries and were treated at a nearby hospital. The dogs were unhurt.
"This was a tremendous team effort that took a quick response and really showed the dedication and training of our community of first responders," said Capt. David Neth of the Idaho State Police District 4 in Jerome. "This is something we train and prepare for, but when it happens and people's lives literally hang in the balance, it takes everyone working together, and then some."
“You know, this is a God thing," said Drury, the trucker. "I’m looking at life a little bit differently today, that’s for sure.”
Attachments
That actually made the local news here ?Holy Shit!!!
Trailer safety chain stops couple's pickup from plunging into Idaho gorge
When trucker Rod Drury pulled up to the wrecked camper on the Malad Gorge Bridge on I-84 near the Snake River in southern Idaho on Monday afternoon, he was sure it was the scene of a fatality. Inside was the 67-year-old driver and his 64-year-old wife, from Garden City, Idaho, along with their...
View attachment 32056
When trucker Rod Drury pulled up to the wrecked camper on the Malad Gorge Bridge on I-84 near the Snake River in southern Idaho on Monday afternoon, he was sure it was the scene of a fatality. And it almost was. As he approached the wreck, he realized that over the edge of the bridge, still attached to the camper only by the trailer safety chain, was a Ford F-350 pickup, dangling nose down over the gorge.
Inside was the 67-year-old driver and his 64-year-old wife, from Garden City, Idaho, along with their two small dogs.
"I was like, I don’t even want to look over,” Drury said. An Idaho state trooper arrived as Drury did, and other first responders arrived quickly after. Together, they anchored more chains from the pickup to Drury's big rig.
View attachment 32058
View attachment 32060
A rappel team from Magic Valley Paramedics Special Operations Rescue Team made its way down to the truck, attached harnesses to the occupants, and got them back to the bridge deck. The couple suffered non-life-threatening injuries and were treated at a nearby hospital. The dogs were unhurt.
"This was a tremendous team effort that took a quick response and really showed the dedication and training of our community of first responders," said Capt. David Neth of the Idaho State Police District 4 in Jerome. "This is something we train and prepare for, but when it happens and people's lives literally hang in the balance, it takes everyone working together, and then some."
“You know, this is a God thing," said Drury, the trucker. "I’m looking at life a little bit differently today, that’s for sure.”
wader
Well-Known Angler
can you imagine seating in the front seat looking out the windshield waiting to be rescued? I'd probably have a heart attack.
Oh, the humanity!!!
pressherald.com/2021/03/18/north-lanes-of-maine-turnpike-closed-after-wine-laden-truck-crash/
By Staff Report March 18, 2021
A tractor-trailer truck carrying wine overturned Thursday morning on the Maine Turnpike in Litchfield. Photo courtesy of Maine State Police
The north lane of Interstate 95 in Litchfield was shut down Thursday morning after a tractor-trailer truck sideswiped an unoccupied Maine Turnpike truck and tipped over, officials said.
The tractor-trailer, which was half-loaded with wine, hit the vehicle around mile-marker 92, according to Maine State Police. The north lanes of the highway were closed around 10:25 a.m.
The driver of the tractor-trailer, who was not identified, received minor injuries in the crash, police said.
A photo provided by police showed the tractor-trailer tipped on its side along the highway, with wine bottles strewn across the median.
Wine-laden truck tips over on Maine Turnpike in Litchfield, forcing lane closures
By Staff Report March 18, 2021
A tractor-trailer truck carrying wine overturned Thursday morning on the Maine Turnpike in Litchfield. Photo courtesy of Maine State Police
The north lane of Interstate 95 in Litchfield was shut down Thursday morning after a tractor-trailer truck sideswiped an unoccupied Maine Turnpike truck and tipped over, officials said.
The tractor-trailer, which was half-loaded with wine, hit the vehicle around mile-marker 92, according to Maine State Police. The north lanes of the highway were closed around 10:25 a.m.
The driver of the tractor-trailer, who was not identified, received minor injuries in the crash, police said.
A photo provided by police showed the tractor-trailer tipped on its side along the highway, with wine bottles strewn across the median.
Battle Stations!!!
pressherald.com/2021/03/18/scientists-in-u-s-and-canada-open-new-fronts-to-battle-murder-hornets/
By NICHOLAS K. GERANIOS March 18, 2021
SPOKANE, Wash. — Scientists in the U.S. and Canada are opening new fronts in the war against so-called murder hornets as the giant insects begin establishing nests this spring.
The scientists said Wednesday that insects
“This is not a species we want to tolerate here in the United States,” said Sven-Erik Spichiger of the Washington state Department of Agriculture, which eradicated a nest of the Asian giant hornets last year.
“The Asian giant hornet is not supposed to be here.”
“We may not get them all, but we will get as many as we can,” he said of eradication efforts this year.
Paul van Westendorp of the British Columbia Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Fisheries said the hornets pose threats to human life, to valuable bee populations needed to pollinate crops and to other insects.
“It’s an absolutely serious danger to our health and well-being,” he said. “These are intimidating insects.”
One major front will be setting thousands of traps this spring to capture queens that are trying to establish nests, officials said. Both government agencies and private citizens will set traps, they said.
Another effort is underway to determine exactly where in Asia these hornets came from, to try and learn how they are getting across the Pacific Ocean, scientists said. The theory is they are crossing on cargo ships, Spichiger said.
While hundreds of the hornets were killed when the nest in Whatcom County was destroyed last October, only a handful of the hornets were spotted in British Columbia last year, van Westendorp said.
Scientists have been studying the genetics of captured hornets and comparing them with those that exist in South Korea, Japan and China, Spichiger said.
Initial findings indicate the hornets found in the U.S. were linked to hornets in South Korea, while those in British Columbia were linked to hornets found in Japan, Spichiger said.
But it is not clear that the hornets found in North America actually migrated directly from those countries, said Anne LeBrun, a scientist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The agency is working to pin down the origin of murder hornets found here.
Hornet queens tend to emerge from winter quarters in the spring and establish nests to birth worker hornets. The hornets start attacking and destroying beneficial honey bees later in the year, eating the bees for protein as they raise more hornets, Soichiger said.
Whatcom County is about 55 miles south of Vancouver, British Columbia.
The Washington state agency will continue using orange juice and rice cooking wine in traps this year, while citizens can use either orange juice or a brown sugar-based bait, officials said. Residents in Whatcom, Skagit, San Juan, Island, Jefferson, and Clallam counties in Washington have been encouraged to make their own traps starting in July.
Half of the confirmed reports of the species in the state last year and all of the reports about the hornets in British Columbia came from members of the public, officials said.
The first confirmed detection of an Asian giant hornet in Washington was made in December 2019 and the first hornet was trapped last July. Several more were subsequently caught, all in Whatcom County, which is in the northwestern corner of the state.
Asian giant hornets, an invasive pest not native to the U.S., are the world’s largest hornet and a predator of honey bees and other insects. A small group of Asian giant hornets can kill an entire honey bee hive in a matter of hours. The honey bees pollinate many of the crops in Washington’s multibillion-dollar agriculture industry.
Asian giant hornets can deliver painful stings to people and spit venom. Despite their nickname and the hype that has stirred fears, the world’s largest hornets kill at most a few dozen people a year in Asian countries, and experts say it is probably far less. Meanwhile, hornets, wasps and bees typically found in the United States kill an average of 62 people a year, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said.
The real threat from Asian giant hornets — which are 2 inches long — is their devastating attacks on honeybees, which are already under siege from problems like mites, diseases, pesticides and the loss of food.
Scientists in U.S. and Canada open new fronts to battle ‘murder hornets’
By NICHOLAS K. GERANIOS March 18, 2021
SPOKANE, Wash. — Scientists in the U.S. and Canada are opening new fronts in the war against so-called murder hornets as the giant insects begin establishing nests this spring.
The scientists said Wednesday that insects
“This is not a species we want to tolerate here in the United States,” said Sven-Erik Spichiger of the Washington state Department of Agriculture, which eradicated a nest of the Asian giant hornets last year.
“The Asian giant hornet is not supposed to be here.”
“We may not get them all, but we will get as many as we can,” he said of eradication efforts this year.
Paul van Westendorp of the British Columbia Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Fisheries said the hornets pose threats to human life, to valuable bee populations needed to pollinate crops and to other insects.
“It’s an absolutely serious danger to our health and well-being,” he said. “These are intimidating insects.”
One major front will be setting thousands of traps this spring to capture queens that are trying to establish nests, officials said. Both government agencies and private citizens will set traps, they said.
Another effort is underway to determine exactly where in Asia these hornets came from, to try and learn how they are getting across the Pacific Ocean, scientists said. The theory is they are crossing on cargo ships, Spichiger said.
While hundreds of the hornets were killed when the nest in Whatcom County was destroyed last October, only a handful of the hornets were spotted in British Columbia last year, van Westendorp said.
Scientists have been studying the genetics of captured hornets and comparing them with those that exist in South Korea, Japan and China, Spichiger said.
Initial findings indicate the hornets found in the U.S. were linked to hornets in South Korea, while those in British Columbia were linked to hornets found in Japan, Spichiger said.
But it is not clear that the hornets found in North America actually migrated directly from those countries, said Anne LeBrun, a scientist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The agency is working to pin down the origin of murder hornets found here.
Hornet queens tend to emerge from winter quarters in the spring and establish nests to birth worker hornets. The hornets start attacking and destroying beneficial honey bees later in the year, eating the bees for protein as they raise more hornets, Soichiger said.
Whatcom County is about 55 miles south of Vancouver, British Columbia.
The Washington state agency will continue using orange juice and rice cooking wine in traps this year, while citizens can use either orange juice or a brown sugar-based bait, officials said. Residents in Whatcom, Skagit, San Juan, Island, Jefferson, and Clallam counties in Washington have been encouraged to make their own traps starting in July.
Half of the confirmed reports of the species in the state last year and all of the reports about the hornets in British Columbia came from members of the public, officials said.
The first confirmed detection of an Asian giant hornet in Washington was made in December 2019 and the first hornet was trapped last July. Several more were subsequently caught, all in Whatcom County, which is in the northwestern corner of the state.
Asian giant hornets, an invasive pest not native to the U.S., are the world’s largest hornet and a predator of honey bees and other insects. A small group of Asian giant hornets can kill an entire honey bee hive in a matter of hours. The honey bees pollinate many of the crops in Washington’s multibillion-dollar agriculture industry.
Asian giant hornets can deliver painful stings to people and spit venom. Despite their nickname and the hype that has stirred fears, the world’s largest hornets kill at most a few dozen people a year in Asian countries, and experts say it is probably far less. Meanwhile, hornets, wasps and bees typically found in the United States kill an average of 62 people a year, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said.
The real threat from Asian giant hornets — which are 2 inches long — is their devastating attacks on honeybees, which are already under siege from problems like mites, diseases, pesticides and the loss of food.
The Meat Wars extend to France!!
LYON — Grégory Doucet, the mild-mannered Green party mayor of Lyon, hardly seems a revolutionary. But he has upended France by announcing last month that elementary school lunch menus for 29,000 Lyonnais children would no longer include meat.
An outrage! An ecological diktat that could signal the end of French gastronomy, even French culture! Ministers in President Emmanuel Macron’s government clashed. If Lyon, the city of beef snouts and pigs’ ears, of saucisson and kidneys, could do such a thing, the apocalypse was surely imminent.
“The reaction has been quite astonishing,” Mr. Doucet, 47, said.
He is a slight man whose mischievous mien and goatee give him the air of one of Dumas’s three musketeers. A political neophyte elected last year, he clearly finds it a little ludicrous that he, an apostle of less, should end up with more, sitting beneath a 25-foot ceiling in a cavernous mayor’s office adorned with brocade and busts of his forbears. That tweaking a local school menu has split the nation leaves him incredulous.
“My decision was purely pragmatic,” he insisted, eyes twinkling — a means to speed up lunches in socially distanced times by offering a single menu rather than the traditional choice of two dishes.
Not so, thundered Gérald Darmanin, the interior minister. He tweeted that dropping meat was an “unacceptable insult to French farmers and butchers” that betrays “an elitist and moralist” attitude. Julien Denormandie, the agriculture minister, called the mayor’s embrace of the meatless lunch “shameful from a social point of view” and “aberrational from a nutritional point of view.”
All of which prompted Barbara Pompili, the minister of ecological transition, to speak of the “prehistoric” views, full of “hackneyed clichés,” of these men, in effect calling two of her cabinet colleagues Neanderthals.
This heated exchange over little illustrated several things. Mr. Macron’s government and party, La République en Marche, remain an uneasy marriage of right and left. The rising popularity of the Greens, who run not only Lyon but also Bordeaux and Grenoble, has sharpened a cultural clash between urban environmental crusaders and the defenders of French tradition in the countryside.
Not least, nothing gets the French quite as dyspeptic as disagreement over food.
The mayor, it must be said, made his move in a city with an intense gastronomic tradition. At the Boucherie François on the banks of the Rhône, a centennial establishment, Lyon’s culture of meat is on ample display. The veal liver and kidneys glistened; cuts of roast beef wrapped in pork fat abounded; the heads of yellow and white chickens lolled on a counter; the saucissons, some with pistachio, took every cylindrical form; the pastry-wrapped pâté showed off a core of foie gras; and pigs’ trotters and ears betrayed this city’s carnivorous inclinations.
“The mayor made a mistake,” said François Teixeira, a butcher who has worked at François for 19 years. “This is not good for Lyon’s image.”
Certainly, the mayor’s decision came at a sensitive moment. The right in France has expressed indignation that the country is being force-marched, through politically correct environmental dogmatism, toward a future of bicycles, electric cars, veganism, locavores, negative planet-saving growth and general joylessness — something at a very far cry from stuffing goose livers for personal delectation.
Last year, Pierre Hurmic, the Green party mayor of Bordeaux, touched a nerve when he rejected the city’s traditional Christmas tree because it’s “a dead tree.” Mr. Doucet’s culinary move was part of “an ideological agenda,” the right-wing weekly Valeurs Actuelles proclaimed in a cover story. “The canteens of Lyon were just a pretext.”
Mr. Doucet, who describes himself as a “flexitarian,” or someone who favors vegetables but also eats a little meat, argues that the Education Ministry forced his hand. By doubling social distancing at schools to two meters, or more than six feet, it obliged the mayor to accelerate lunch by offering just one dish.
“There’s a mathematical equation,” he said. “You have the same number of tables, but you have to put fewer children at them, and you can’t start the lunch break at 10 a.m.”
But why nix meat? The mayor, who has a 7-year-old in elementary school, rolled his eyes. “We have not gone to a vegetarian menu! Every day, the children can eat fish or eggs.” Because a significant number of students already did not eat meat, he said, “we just took the lowest common denominator.”
It was not, Mr. Doucet said, an ideological decision, even if he aims over his six-year term to adjust school menus toward “a greater share of vegetable proteins.”
The mayor continued: “Most of the time these days there’s not much choice. You don’t have the choice to go to a museum, or to the theater, or to the cinema. It’s indecent for the right-wing opposition to say that I am trampling on our liberties in the context of a state of emergency.”
Mr. Macron has adopted a balancing act between his embrace of a Green future and, as he put it last year, his rejection of “the Amish model” for France. The president tries to differentiate rational from punitive or extreme environmentalism.
The president, casting his net wide as usual ahead of regional elections in June, wants to appeal to conservative farmers while attracting some of the Green vote. During a recent visit to a farm, he attacked attempts to forge a new agriculture based on “invective, bans and demagoguery.” In an apparent allusion to the Lyon fiasco, he has said “good sense” should prevail in balanced children’s diets and noted that, “We lose a lot of time in idiotic divisions.”
His government has proposed a Constitutional amendment, the first since 2008, that, if approved in a referendum, would add a sentence to the effect that France “guarantees the preservation of the environment and biological diversity and fights against climate change.”
The right has expressed opposition to the change. It still has to be reviewed by the right-leaning Senate. Another bill sets out possible reforms for a greener future that include banning advertisements for fossil fuels and eliminating some short-haul domestic flights.
Mr. Doucet is unimpressed. “Macron is not an ecologist. He is a modern conservative. He knows there’s a problem, so he is ready to make some changes, but he does not measure the size of the problem. Can you tell me one strong step he has taken?”
For now, the meatless Lyon school lunches are still being served. Children seem just fine. Last week, a Lyon administrative court rejected an attempt by some parents, agricultural unions and local conservative politicians to overturn the mayor’s decision, ruling that the “temporary simplification” of school menus did not pose a health risk to children.
Mr. Doucet says that when the health crisis eases, but not before, he will be able to offer a choice of school menus again, including meat. Meanwhile, Mr. Denormandie, the agriculture minister, has asked the prefect in the Lyon area to look into the legality of dropping meat.
“Mr. Denormandie’s accusation that we are antisocial is a lie,” Mr. Doucet told me. “He said we were denying meat to the poorest people with the most precarious existences, which is false. He should have been fired at once.”
Boris Charetiers, a member of a parents’ association, said the mayor was being closely watched. “We are vigilant,” he said. “We don’t want this to be a definitive decision. Our children cannot be hostages to ecological political conviction.”
A French City Dropped Meat From Kids’ Lunches. The Nation Erupted.
The Green party mayor of Lyon, a gastronomic capital, introduced no-meat menus in schools. Let the anguish begin.LYON — Grégory Doucet, the mild-mannered Green party mayor of Lyon, hardly seems a revolutionary. But he has upended France by announcing last month that elementary school lunch menus for 29,000 Lyonnais children would no longer include meat.
An outrage! An ecological diktat that could signal the end of French gastronomy, even French culture! Ministers in President Emmanuel Macron’s government clashed. If Lyon, the city of beef snouts and pigs’ ears, of saucisson and kidneys, could do such a thing, the apocalypse was surely imminent.
“The reaction has been quite astonishing,” Mr. Doucet, 47, said.
He is a slight man whose mischievous mien and goatee give him the air of one of Dumas’s three musketeers. A political neophyte elected last year, he clearly finds it a little ludicrous that he, an apostle of less, should end up with more, sitting beneath a 25-foot ceiling in a cavernous mayor’s office adorned with brocade and busts of his forbears. That tweaking a local school menu has split the nation leaves him incredulous.
“My decision was purely pragmatic,” he insisted, eyes twinkling — a means to speed up lunches in socially distanced times by offering a single menu rather than the traditional choice of two dishes.
Not so, thundered Gérald Darmanin, the interior minister. He tweeted that dropping meat was an “unacceptable insult to French farmers and butchers” that betrays “an elitist and moralist” attitude. Julien Denormandie, the agriculture minister, called the mayor’s embrace of the meatless lunch “shameful from a social point of view” and “aberrational from a nutritional point of view.”
All of which prompted Barbara Pompili, the minister of ecological transition, to speak of the “prehistoric” views, full of “hackneyed clichés,” of these men, in effect calling two of her cabinet colleagues Neanderthals.
This heated exchange over little illustrated several things. Mr. Macron’s government and party, La République en Marche, remain an uneasy marriage of right and left. The rising popularity of the Greens, who run not only Lyon but also Bordeaux and Grenoble, has sharpened a cultural clash between urban environmental crusaders and the defenders of French tradition in the countryside.
Not least, nothing gets the French quite as dyspeptic as disagreement over food.
The mayor, it must be said, made his move in a city with an intense gastronomic tradition. At the Boucherie François on the banks of the Rhône, a centennial establishment, Lyon’s culture of meat is on ample display. The veal liver and kidneys glistened; cuts of roast beef wrapped in pork fat abounded; the heads of yellow and white chickens lolled on a counter; the saucissons, some with pistachio, took every cylindrical form; the pastry-wrapped pâté showed off a core of foie gras; and pigs’ trotters and ears betrayed this city’s carnivorous inclinations.
“The mayor made a mistake,” said François Teixeira, a butcher who has worked at François for 19 years. “This is not good for Lyon’s image.”
Certainly, the mayor’s decision came at a sensitive moment. The right in France has expressed indignation that the country is being force-marched, through politically correct environmental dogmatism, toward a future of bicycles, electric cars, veganism, locavores, negative planet-saving growth and general joylessness — something at a very far cry from stuffing goose livers for personal delectation.
Last year, Pierre Hurmic, the Green party mayor of Bordeaux, touched a nerve when he rejected the city’s traditional Christmas tree because it’s “a dead tree.” Mr. Doucet’s culinary move was part of “an ideological agenda,” the right-wing weekly Valeurs Actuelles proclaimed in a cover story. “The canteens of Lyon were just a pretext.”
Mr. Doucet, who describes himself as a “flexitarian,” or someone who favors vegetables but also eats a little meat, argues that the Education Ministry forced his hand. By doubling social distancing at schools to two meters, or more than six feet, it obliged the mayor to accelerate lunch by offering just one dish.
“There’s a mathematical equation,” he said. “You have the same number of tables, but you have to put fewer children at them, and you can’t start the lunch break at 10 a.m.”
But why nix meat? The mayor, who has a 7-year-old in elementary school, rolled his eyes. “We have not gone to a vegetarian menu! Every day, the children can eat fish or eggs.” Because a significant number of students already did not eat meat, he said, “we just took the lowest common denominator.”
It was not, Mr. Doucet said, an ideological decision, even if he aims over his six-year term to adjust school menus toward “a greater share of vegetable proteins.”
The mayor continued: “Most of the time these days there’s not much choice. You don’t have the choice to go to a museum, or to the theater, or to the cinema. It’s indecent for the right-wing opposition to say that I am trampling on our liberties in the context of a state of emergency.”
Mr. Macron has adopted a balancing act between his embrace of a Green future and, as he put it last year, his rejection of “the Amish model” for France. The president tries to differentiate rational from punitive or extreme environmentalism.
The president, casting his net wide as usual ahead of regional elections in June, wants to appeal to conservative farmers while attracting some of the Green vote. During a recent visit to a farm, he attacked attempts to forge a new agriculture based on “invective, bans and demagoguery.” In an apparent allusion to the Lyon fiasco, he has said “good sense” should prevail in balanced children’s diets and noted that, “We lose a lot of time in idiotic divisions.”
His government has proposed a Constitutional amendment, the first since 2008, that, if approved in a referendum, would add a sentence to the effect that France “guarantees the preservation of the environment and biological diversity and fights against climate change.”
The right has expressed opposition to the change. It still has to be reviewed by the right-leaning Senate. Another bill sets out possible reforms for a greener future that include banning advertisements for fossil fuels and eliminating some short-haul domestic flights.
Mr. Doucet is unimpressed. “Macron is not an ecologist. He is a modern conservative. He knows there’s a problem, so he is ready to make some changes, but he does not measure the size of the problem. Can you tell me one strong step he has taken?”
For now, the meatless Lyon school lunches are still being served. Children seem just fine. Last week, a Lyon administrative court rejected an attempt by some parents, agricultural unions and local conservative politicians to overturn the mayor’s decision, ruling that the “temporary simplification” of school menus did not pose a health risk to children.
Mr. Doucet says that when the health crisis eases, but not before, he will be able to offer a choice of school menus again, including meat. Meanwhile, Mr. Denormandie, the agriculture minister, has asked the prefect in the Lyon area to look into the legality of dropping meat.
“Mr. Denormandie’s accusation that we are antisocial is a lie,” Mr. Doucet told me. “He said we were denying meat to the poorest people with the most precarious existences, which is false. He should have been fired at once.”
Boris Charetiers, a member of a parents’ association, said the mayor was being closely watched. “We are vigilant,” he said. “We don’t want this to be a definitive decision. Our children cannot be hostages to ecological political conviction.”
You and me both
Jonathon Swift is rolling in his grave...
SAN FRANCISCO — Since 2013, Matt Bors has made a living as a left-leaning cartoonist on the internet. His site, The Nib, runs cartoons from him and other contributors that regularly skewer right-wing movements and conservatives with political commentary steeped in irony.
One cartoon in December took aim at the Proud Boys, a far-right extremist group. With tongue planted firmly in cheek, Mr. Bors titled it “Boys Will Be Boys” and depicted a recruitment where new Proud Boys were trained to be “stabby guys” and to “yell slurs at teenagers” while playing video games.
Days later, Facebook sent Mr. Bors a message saying that it had removed “Boys Will Be Boys” from his Facebook page for “advocating violence” and that he was on probation for violating its content policies.
It wasn’t the first time that Facebook had dinged him. Last year, the company briefly took down another Nib cartoon — an ironic critique of former President Donald J. Trump’s pandemic response, the substance of which supported wearing masks in public — for “spreading misinformation” about the coronavirus. Instagram, which Facebook owns, removed one of his sardonic antiviolence cartoons in 2019 because, the photo-sharing app said, it promoted violence.
What Mr. Bors encountered was the result of two opposing forces unfolding at Facebook. In recent years, the company has become more proactive at restricting certain kinds of political speech, clamping down on posts about fringe extremist groups and on calls for violence. In January, Facebook barred Mr. Trump from posting on its site altogether after he incited a crowd that stormed the U.S. Capitol.
At the same time, misinformation researchers said, Facebook has had trouble identifying the slipperiest and subtlest of political content: satire. While satire and irony are common in everyday speech, the company’s artificial intelligence systems — and even its human moderators — can have difficulty distinguishing them. That’s because such discourse relies on nuance, implication, exaggeration and parody to make a point.
That means Facebook has sometimes misunderstood the intent of political cartoons, leading to takedowns. The company has acknowledged that some of the cartoons it expunged — including those from Mr. Bors — were removed by mistake and later reinstated them.
“If social media companies are going to take on the responsibility of finally regulating incitement, conspiracies and hate speech, then they are going to have to develop some literacy around satire,” Mr. Bors, 37, said in an interview.
Emerson T. Brooking, a resident fellow for the Atlantic Council who studies digital platforms, said Facebook “does not have a good answer for satire because a good answer doesn’t exist.” Satire shows the limits of a content moderation policy and may mean that a social media company needs to become more hands-on to identify that type of speech, he added.
One of the Nib cartoons that Facebook removed last year. Credit...The Nib
Many of the political cartoonists whose commentary was taken down by Facebook were left-leaning, in a sign of how the social network has sometimes clipped liberal voices. Conservatives have previously accused Facebook and other internet platforms of suppressing only right-wing views.
In a statement, Facebook did not address whether it has trouble spotting satire. Instead, the company said it made room for satirical content — but only up to a point. Posts about hate groups and extremist content, it said, are allowed only if the posts clearly condemn or neutrally discuss them, because the risk for real-world harm is otherwise too great.
Facebook’s struggles to moderate content across its core social network, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp have been well documented. After Russians manipulated the platform before the 2016 presidential election by spreading inflammatory posts, the company recruited thousands of third-party moderators to prevent a recurrence. It also developed sophisticated algorithms to sift through content.
Facebook also created a process so that only verified buyers could purchase political ads, and instituted policies against hate speech to limit posts that contained anti-Semitic or white supremacist content.
Last year, Facebook said it had stopped more than 2.2 million political ad submissions that had not yet been verified and that targeted U.S. users. It also cracked down on the conspiracy group QAnon and the Proud Boys, removed vaccine misinformation, and displayed warnings on more than 150 million pieces of content viewed in the United States that third-party fact checkers debunked.
But satire kept popping up as a blind spot. In 2019 and 2020, Facebook often dealt with far-right misinformation sites that used “satire” claims to protect their presence on the platform, Mr. Brooking said. For example, The Babylon Bee, a right-leaning site, frequently trafficked in misinformation under the guise of satire.
“At a point, I suspect Facebook got tired of this dance and adopted a more aggressive posture,” Mr. Brooking said.
Political cartoons that appeared in non-English-speaking countries and contained sociopolitical humor and irony specific to certain regions also were tricky for Facebook to handle, misinformation researchers said.
That has caused fallout among many political cartoonists. One is Ed Hall in northern Florida, whose independent work regularly appears in North American and European newspapers.
When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in 2019 that he would bar two congresswomen — critics of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians — from visiting the country, Mr. Hall drew a cartoon showing a sign affixed to barbed wire that read, in German, “Jews are not welcome here.” He added a line of text addressing Mr. Netanyahu: “Hey Bibi, did you forget something?”
Mr. Hall said his intent was to draw an analogy between how Mr. Netanyahu was treating the U.S. representatives and Nazi Germany. Facebook took the cartoon down shortly after it was posted, saying it violated its standards on hate speech.
“If algorithms are making these decisions based solely upon words that pop up on a feed, then that is not a catalyst for fair or measured decisions when it comes to free speech,” Mr. Hall said.
Adam Zyglis, a nationally syndicated political cartoonist for The Buffalo News, was also caught in Facebook’s cross hairs.
After the storming of the Capitol in January, Mr. Zyglis drew a cartoon of Mr. Trump’s face on a sow’s body, with a number of Mr. Trump’s “supporters” shown as piglets wearing MAGA hats and carrying Confederate flags. The cartoon was a condemnation of how Mr. Trump had fed his supporters violent speech and hateful messaging, Mr. Zyglis said.
Facebook removed the cartoon for promoting violence. Mr. Zyglis guessed that was because one of the flags in the comic included the phrase “Hang Mike Pence,” which Mr. Trump’s supporters had chanted about the vice president during the riot. Another supporter piglet carried a noose, an item that was also present at the event.
“Those of us speaking truth to power are being caught in the net intended to capture hate speech,” Mr. Zyglis said.
For Mr. Bors, who lives in Ontario, the issue with Facebook is existential. While his main source of income is paid memberships to The Nib and book sales on his personal site, he gets most of his traffic and new readership through Facebook and Instagram.
The takedowns, which have resulted in “strikes” against his Facebook page, could upend that. If he accumulates more strikes, his page could be erased, something that Mr. Bors said would cut 60 percent of his readership.
“Removing someone from social media can end their career these days, so you need a process that distinguishes incitement of violence from a satire of these very groups doing the incitement,” he said.
Mr. Bors said he had also heard from the Proud Boys. A group of them recently organized on the messaging chat app Telegram to mass-report his critical cartoons to Facebook for violating the site’s community standards, he said.
“You just wake up and find you’re in danger of being shut down because white nationalists were triggered by your comic,” he said
Facebook has sometimes recognized its errors and corrected them after he has made appeals, Mr. Bors said. But the back-and-forth and the potential for expulsion from the site have been frustrating and made him question his work, he said.
“Sometimes I do think about if a joke is worth it, or if it’s going to get us banned,” he said. “The problem with that is, where is the line on that kind of thinking? How will it affect my work in the long run?”
For Political Cartoonists, the Irony Was That Facebook Didn’t Recognize Irony
As Facebook has become more active at moderating political speech, it has had trouble dealing with satire.SAN FRANCISCO — Since 2013, Matt Bors has made a living as a left-leaning cartoonist on the internet. His site, The Nib, runs cartoons from him and other contributors that regularly skewer right-wing movements and conservatives with political commentary steeped in irony.
One cartoon in December took aim at the Proud Boys, a far-right extremist group. With tongue planted firmly in cheek, Mr. Bors titled it “Boys Will Be Boys” and depicted a recruitment where new Proud Boys were trained to be “stabby guys” and to “yell slurs at teenagers” while playing video games.
Days later, Facebook sent Mr. Bors a message saying that it had removed “Boys Will Be Boys” from his Facebook page for “advocating violence” and that he was on probation for violating its content policies.
It wasn’t the first time that Facebook had dinged him. Last year, the company briefly took down another Nib cartoon — an ironic critique of former President Donald J. Trump’s pandemic response, the substance of which supported wearing masks in public — for “spreading misinformation” about the coronavirus. Instagram, which Facebook owns, removed one of his sardonic antiviolence cartoons in 2019 because, the photo-sharing app said, it promoted violence.
What Mr. Bors encountered was the result of two opposing forces unfolding at Facebook. In recent years, the company has become more proactive at restricting certain kinds of political speech, clamping down on posts about fringe extremist groups and on calls for violence. In January, Facebook barred Mr. Trump from posting on its site altogether after he incited a crowd that stormed the U.S. Capitol.
At the same time, misinformation researchers said, Facebook has had trouble identifying the slipperiest and subtlest of political content: satire. While satire and irony are common in everyday speech, the company’s artificial intelligence systems — and even its human moderators — can have difficulty distinguishing them. That’s because such discourse relies on nuance, implication, exaggeration and parody to make a point.
That means Facebook has sometimes misunderstood the intent of political cartoons, leading to takedowns. The company has acknowledged that some of the cartoons it expunged — including those from Mr. Bors — were removed by mistake and later reinstated them.
“If social media companies are going to take on the responsibility of finally regulating incitement, conspiracies and hate speech, then they are going to have to develop some literacy around satire,” Mr. Bors, 37, said in an interview.
Emerson T. Brooking, a resident fellow for the Atlantic Council who studies digital platforms, said Facebook “does not have a good answer for satire because a good answer doesn’t exist.” Satire shows the limits of a content moderation policy and may mean that a social media company needs to become more hands-on to identify that type of speech, he added.
One of the Nib cartoons that Facebook removed last year. Credit...The Nib
Many of the political cartoonists whose commentary was taken down by Facebook were left-leaning, in a sign of how the social network has sometimes clipped liberal voices. Conservatives have previously accused Facebook and other internet platforms of suppressing only right-wing views.
In a statement, Facebook did not address whether it has trouble spotting satire. Instead, the company said it made room for satirical content — but only up to a point. Posts about hate groups and extremist content, it said, are allowed only if the posts clearly condemn or neutrally discuss them, because the risk for real-world harm is otherwise too great.
Facebook’s struggles to moderate content across its core social network, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp have been well documented. After Russians manipulated the platform before the 2016 presidential election by spreading inflammatory posts, the company recruited thousands of third-party moderators to prevent a recurrence. It also developed sophisticated algorithms to sift through content.
Facebook also created a process so that only verified buyers could purchase political ads, and instituted policies against hate speech to limit posts that contained anti-Semitic or white supremacist content.
Last year, Facebook said it had stopped more than 2.2 million political ad submissions that had not yet been verified and that targeted U.S. users. It also cracked down on the conspiracy group QAnon and the Proud Boys, removed vaccine misinformation, and displayed warnings on more than 150 million pieces of content viewed in the United States that third-party fact checkers debunked.
But satire kept popping up as a blind spot. In 2019 and 2020, Facebook often dealt with far-right misinformation sites that used “satire” claims to protect their presence on the platform, Mr. Brooking said. For example, The Babylon Bee, a right-leaning site, frequently trafficked in misinformation under the guise of satire.
“At a point, I suspect Facebook got tired of this dance and adopted a more aggressive posture,” Mr. Brooking said.
Political cartoons that appeared in non-English-speaking countries and contained sociopolitical humor and irony specific to certain regions also were tricky for Facebook to handle, misinformation researchers said.
That has caused fallout among many political cartoonists. One is Ed Hall in northern Florida, whose independent work regularly appears in North American and European newspapers.
When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in 2019 that he would bar two congresswomen — critics of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians — from visiting the country, Mr. Hall drew a cartoon showing a sign affixed to barbed wire that read, in German, “Jews are not welcome here.” He added a line of text addressing Mr. Netanyahu: “Hey Bibi, did you forget something?”
Mr. Hall said his intent was to draw an analogy between how Mr. Netanyahu was treating the U.S. representatives and Nazi Germany. Facebook took the cartoon down shortly after it was posted, saying it violated its standards on hate speech.
“If algorithms are making these decisions based solely upon words that pop up on a feed, then that is not a catalyst for fair or measured decisions when it comes to free speech,” Mr. Hall said.
Adam Zyglis, a nationally syndicated political cartoonist for The Buffalo News, was also caught in Facebook’s cross hairs.
After the storming of the Capitol in January, Mr. Zyglis drew a cartoon of Mr. Trump’s face on a sow’s body, with a number of Mr. Trump’s “supporters” shown as piglets wearing MAGA hats and carrying Confederate flags. The cartoon was a condemnation of how Mr. Trump had fed his supporters violent speech and hateful messaging, Mr. Zyglis said.
Facebook removed the cartoon for promoting violence. Mr. Zyglis guessed that was because one of the flags in the comic included the phrase “Hang Mike Pence,” which Mr. Trump’s supporters had chanted about the vice president during the riot. Another supporter piglet carried a noose, an item that was also present at the event.
“Those of us speaking truth to power are being caught in the net intended to capture hate speech,” Mr. Zyglis said.
For Mr. Bors, who lives in Ontario, the issue with Facebook is existential. While his main source of income is paid memberships to The Nib and book sales on his personal site, he gets most of his traffic and new readership through Facebook and Instagram.
The takedowns, which have resulted in “strikes” against his Facebook page, could upend that. If he accumulates more strikes, his page could be erased, something that Mr. Bors said would cut 60 percent of his readership.
“Removing someone from social media can end their career these days, so you need a process that distinguishes incitement of violence from a satire of these very groups doing the incitement,” he said.
Mr. Bors said he had also heard from the Proud Boys. A group of them recently organized on the messaging chat app Telegram to mass-report his critical cartoons to Facebook for violating the site’s community standards, he said.
“You just wake up and find you’re in danger of being shut down because white nationalists were triggered by your comic,” he said
Facebook has sometimes recognized its errors and corrected them after he has made appeals, Mr. Bors said. But the back-and-forth and the potential for expulsion from the site have been frustrating and made him question his work, he said.
“Sometimes I do think about if a joke is worth it, or if it’s going to get us banned,” he said. “The problem with that is, where is the line on that kind of thinking? How will it affect my work in the long run?”
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