Ken Scott Baron Podcast

What’s happening in the Middle East can seem very far away — at least until you stop for gas. Prices at the pump have jumped since Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz at the start of the conflict, creating a gap in the energy supply chain that spans the world.

It’s a reminder that war has profound effects on all those who are connected to it. And we are all connected to it, somehow.

The longer the conflict in the Middle East continues the greater the likelihood that people around the globe will pay more for food. And those in the most vulnerable countries could face hunger.

The Persian Gulf is a dominant source of the world’s fertilizers, especially those that deliver nitrogen to soils — a source of nourishment for crops that amount to half the world’s food.

Fertilizer is produced in the region and shipped … everywhere. If the Strait of Hormuz remains strangled, prices for fertilizer will rise. And as a result, farmers may use less on their crops, if they can get any at all. The world will get less food, and it will cost more.

We saw this happen at the start of the Russia-Ukraine war, when the world received a lesson in the geography of agriculture. Both countries provided the world with substantial quantities of wheat and other grains. Without them, bread shortages soon developed in West Africa and South Asia, among other places.

The Middle East won’t affect the harvesting of grain. But the effects of a fertilizer shortage, or more expensive fertilizer, may be even more intense. ​​The volumes are greater this time around, potentially, than in the Russia-Ukraine conflict

Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain — supply more than a third of the world’s urea, an important nitrogen fertilizer, and nearly a quarter of another one, ammonia.

And they all use the Strait of Hormuz to export their products.

Farmers in the Northern Hemisphere, who will soon need fertilizer to boost their spring crops. Where might they get it? China’s the most obvious alternative. But last year the Chinese government imposed restrictions on the export of fertilizer, in part to shield its farmers from just the sort of geopolitical chaos this war brought on.

Prices are already climbing. Over the past week, the price of urea sold in Egypt, a market that economists track closely, climbed more than 35 percent. If the trend continues, governments across the Global South could need to subsidize the cost of growing crops. And that could add to their debt burdens.

The long-term solution is not to be dependent on fertilizer that has to be trafficked through Strait of Hormuz. We have become hooked on these imports.

Those hooks are everywhere, once you start looking for them. War is hell on us all.

So much of being a gay man in this country has entailed resistance to neglect, to exploitation, to death. As gay men we have settled for stories about men wanting men that use tragedy in stories. If we didn’t suffer, we didn’t exist.

But, have we turned a corner?

The show “Heated Rivalry” is a beautiful, life-giving, hot take. Who wouldn’t wont to watch this? It’s a six-episode show that’s great as romance television.

We have suffered during, say, “Cruising,” in 1980, that remains an index of gay sex clubs in the Meatpacking District. The men in that movie like it hot. A homicidal maniac is on the loose, and he’s killing “homosexuals.” He might, alas, be gay himself, and the heterosexual detective trying to catch him worries he might not be as straight as he thought. Pathos again.

Or how about “The Talented Mr. Ripley” which also produces a body count.

There is a lot of gay media of torment and death, but let’s also never fail to remember that for a long time “Brokeback Mountain” was our “gay love story.” But Jack Twist gets beaten to death and, in the final shot, Ennis Del Mar stands in a trailer all by his lonesome.

Maybe we are accustomed to art that would enrage us as we are fed morsels like “Moonlight.”

During the AIDS crisis, a regime of dehumanization spawned a knowing counterculture of subversion. Being allowed to marry some man always seemed beside the point. Are we going to be allowed to live? We watched movies and still wondered if it did a number on the gay psyche.

During all of these years of gay comedies and weepy ghost stories, of high school comings-of-age and great-man biographies, the gay romance shelf has been barren.

One of the marvels of “Heated Rivalry” is its de-emphasis of tragedy. It hails from the world of the romance novel, where gay plots aren’t novel at all. (Rachel Reid, its author, has written a slew of these books.)

“Heated Rivalry” has no subtext in play, the stars meet during their rookie years and spend years trying not to fall in love. The last shot of the final episode puts the camera in the back seat of a car as these two drive out of the closet.

Source: New York Times

Of the 1.2 million people living with H.I.V. in the United States, more than 60 percent are Black or Latino. Transgender women, gay and bisexual men and teenagers and young adults of color face the greatest overall risk of contracting the virus in any given year.

There is disconnect between science and politics in the long war against H.I.V. Forty years ago, the infection was a mystery and a death sentence. Today, thanks to a combination of biomedical breakthroughs and diligent, public health (testing, education, robust social safety nets), it is a chronic but manageable condition that really only flourishes among society’s most marginalized groups.

The first Trump administration vowed to finally end the American H.I.V. epidemic, by 2030, doubling down on prevention efforts in the hardest hit communities. The resulting initiative paid off:

Transmission rates are down in the targeted ZIP codes, according to the National Minority AIDS Council, a nonprofit devoted to stopping the virus’s spread.

Racial health gaps are narrowing as a result, and because prevention is cheaper than treatment, money is being saved.

The second Trump administration seems determined to reverse course anyway.

The future of H.I.V. research became uncertain when it was caught in the cross hairs of the Trump administration.

The Adolescent Trials Network, a massive research apparatus focused on treating and preventing H.I.V. infection in teenagers and young adults, had been abruptly closed.

A 10-year study on H.I.V. and substance use in L.G.B.T.Q. teenagers and young adults was suspended. So was another project on reducing H.I.V. risk in relationships.

Another project, on how to improve the measurement of sexual orientation and gender identity in federal surveys, was also done for. So were at least two fellowship programs for early-career scientists who wanted to specialize in L.G.B.T.Q. health.

Salaries were reliant on N.I.H. funding and a lot of jobs are now gravely imperiled.

Federal grants are the lifeblood of academic research. They support scientists and students, institutes and administrators. They covered overhead costs. It is not uncommon for one person to be funded by several grants.

Likewise, medication that prevents H.I.V. transmission (known as pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP) has became widely available. Within the gay community, middle-aged white professionals had embraced the treatment as an ordinary component of overall health and wellness. But younger adults, immigrants and racial and ethnic minorities still had not.

“It’s not unlike birth control when it was first introduced. It’s pretty straightforward as a treatment, but it’s attached to all of this cultural baggage that makes it challenging to get across.

Nobody outside the scientific community seems to realize what is happening. We have lost years of research in a matter of weeks. Whole labs had been closed and successful, decades-long careers ended — and none of it appeared to have anything to do with the quality or import of the research itself. The decisions were political and ideological. They were also arbitrary and needlessly cruel.

Trust had been broken as a result. Whatever came next, it seems extremely unlikely projects would be able to just pick up where they had left off.

Do you remember scientist having to cull words like “gay” and “sex” back in the early 1990s. But this was different. In the past, even if they had to change a word or two, they still got to do their research.

Seasoned scientists are fleeing the profession, and younger ones are deciding not to pursue it at all. It’s impossible to say what new medicine those minds might have developed or what wicked problems their efforts might have solved.

Source: NYT

A year ago, even the most optimistic Democrats could not imagine winning back the Senate in 2026. President Trump had just stormed back to power. The Democratic brand was damaged. And Republicans were up to 53 Senate seats — with Democrats facing an unusually daunting midterm map.

But now, after a series of candidate recruitment in red states, Leader Schumer said that Democrats were poised to capitalize on rising anger from voters toward Mr. Trump over a cost-of-living crisis.

Mr. Trump’s approval ratings have slumped, and Democrats have won a series of elections over the last year. The political environment has so brightened for the party that there is an path to victory.

Flipping Alaska, Maine, North Carolina and Ohio, defending defending all of the states Democrats now hold is possible.

Schumer faces attacks frpm many on the left and those who are desperate for younger leadership to take the fight to Mr. Trump. Some progressives are dreaming of a challenge from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

A series of blue-chip Senate recruits include Mary Peltola, a Democratic former congresswoman, who entered Alaska’s race .

She joined former Senator Sherrod Brown in Ohio and former Gov. Roy Cooper in North Carolina, two other top Schumer recruits who are running in states that Mr. Trump has carried all three times he has been on the ballot.

But taking the Senate remains a steep challenge for Democrats. The party would need to not only sweep the four states that Mr. Schumer identified as his top targets, but also hold seats in the battleground states of Michigan, New Hampshire and Georgia.

Democrats also face an unusual number of fractious primaries — most notably in Michigan and Maine — and a Republican president with a super PAC that is flush with cash.

Most Democrats still view the House as the main battleground in 2026, given Republicans’ paper-thin majority in the chamber and its historical tendency to swing against the party in power in midterm elections.

There are parallels to 2006, when Democrats took back power by winning seats even in red states like Montana and Missouri.

That year, voters recoiled from President George W. Bush’s proposals to privatize Social Security as well as the quagmire of the Iraq war. Today Trump is similarly distracted by “military adventurism” and weighed down by an affordability crisis.

The cost issue is much more trenchant than Social Security privatization because that was the future. People are having their health care costs, their electricity costs, their housing costs raised right now.”

Listen better to get more love.

On Valentine’s Day we all are talking about LOVE.

In order to feel more loved by others, you must begin by making them feel loved by you. And becoming a better listener is one of the most powerful ways to do that.

Many of us think we’re pretty good listeners, but really, we’re mostly just waiting for our turn to speak. So learned people recommend adopting a “listening to learn” mind set. Basically, shift your focus from responding to understanding.

We all know that feeling, when someone is so curious about you, like they just can’t wait for you to share your story. Their eyes are shining. They’re leaning in.”

That kind of genuine, focused listening is rare, and quite powerful.

When someone feels deeply seen, valued, and understood by you, they become more willing, motivated, and even eager to do the same for you.

But becoming a better listener takes practice. Some simple best practices: Don’t interrupt, and don’t offer advice unless the person you’re talking to asks for it.

And ask follow-up questions like “Tell me more”. Focus on one relationship at a time. It might be someone you’re already close with, like a partner or a parent or it could be a colleague you’d like to get to know better.

Romantic relationships aren’t the only place to get that feeling of being loved, nor is feeling loved confined to just a few close relationships.

Giving and receiving love function together like a seesaw: You lift a person up with the weight of your curiosity and attentiveness — and they do the same in turn so it can really become a two-way street.

But, know when to throw in the towel.

If the other person gives you zilch in return those are signs this isn’t the right relationship to invest a lot of effort and energy in

There are questions like: Does this person seem to “get” me on some level, or at least show an interest in doing so?

When I’ve shared struggles or imperfections, have they been curious and listened enthusiastically?

Feeling loved is not out of your control. Practice all of this on Valentine’s Day.

The 2026 Mid terms

SENATE

Republicans are entering the 2026 midterms with a 53-47 majority in the Senate (including the two independents who caucus with the Democrats). This cycle, 35 Senate seats are up for election, including special elections to permanently fill the Ohio seat JD Vance vacated to become vice president and the Florida seat Marco Rubio left to be secretary of state.

Nine senators are retiring — five Republicans and four Democrats — creating 11 open seats, as Democrats defend nine incumbent seats and Republicans defend 15. To retake the Senate, Democrats must hold all of their seats and flip four Republican-held ones — a difficult task even given the fact that the party out of power typically gains ground in midterms.

The fight for the Senate would center on four crucial states: Maine, North Carolina, Michigan and Georgia.

THE PRESIDENT

The results from the latest New York Times/Siena University poll show that, one year in, the second Trump coalition has unraveled. The major demographic shifts of the last election have snapped back, and Democrats have regained their usual advantage among young, nonwhite and low-turnout voters in the race for control of Congress. Only 40 percent of registered voters say they approve of Mr. Trump’s performance, the poll found.

THE HOUSE

The battle for control of the House of Representatives this fall will be decided by a small fraction of the chamber’s seats. Republicans are clinging to a five-seat edge, the narrowest margin in modern times.

The nation’s political climate is volatile, and much can change between now and November. But at the start of the year, only a small number of seats are seen as genuinely competitive, magnifying the stakes of individual House races that routinely cost tens of millions of dollars.

The clearest Democratic pathway to a majority — and the power to serve as a check on President Trump and his legislative agenda — is defending the party’s most vulnerable incumbents and flipping a handful of Republican-held seats.

The Cook Political Report rates just 18 seats as tossup races — four held by Democrats and 14 by Republicans. But the map is evolving and Cook recently shifted 18 House races in Democrats’ direction, a sign of the party’s momentum and Mr. Trump’s struggles.

Of the House’s 435 seats, the vast majority, 375, are rated as “solid” for one party or the other — meaning they are essentially noncompetitive. Another two dozen races are seen as likely to favor one party, while 18 are in the more competitive “lean” category.

To get to the House majority, Democrats would need to hold all of their solid and likely seats, sweep the 13 seats that lean toward their party and win at least seven of the 18 tossups, according to The Cook Political Report.

Phones and Whistles

Recent events in Minneapolis led to protests and community responses. Much of what’s been reported involves how residents have used phones and whistles as tools during confrontations with federal immigration enforcement.

The right to assemble, protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, guarantees the right of the people to peaceably gather, protest, and associate for lawful, public, or private purposes without government interference.

It applies to public spaces and protects against actions that violate freedom of speech, though it is subject to reasonable, content-neutral restrictions on time, place, and manner.

In recent weeks, the streets of Minneapolis have echoed with the shrill blasts of whistles, the constant buzz of cellphones recording and communicating, and the honking of car horns — an auditory backdrop to simmering tensions around federal immigration enforcement actions in the city.

Phones as Witness and Network

Cellphones have become indispensable tools for Minneapolis residents mobilizing in response to heightened U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity. Teams of community members actively document enforcement actions with video, sending footage in real time to local and national audiences.

This real-time documentation serves a dual purpose. First, it acts as evidence and oversight, ensuring that interactions between federal agents and civilians are visible beyond the immediate scene. Second, the presence of phones and cameras tends to draw larger crowds of observers — a tactic some see as a deterrent to potential misconduct.

Whistles as Alert Systems

Whistles — simple, loud, and highly portable — have taken on outsized symbolic and practical importance in Minneapolis. Residents have adopted them as alert systems to signal approaching immigration enforcement, with different patterns of whistle blasts conveying different meanings:

Short, sharp blasts indicate that federal agents are approaching or present nearby. Longer, sustained whistles can signal that someone is being detained or that help is needed.

These audible signals spread quickly through neighborhoods, prompting residents to come outside to observe, record, assist, or bear witness. In some cases, the blasts have summoned neighbors within minutes, creating spontaneous gatherings of observers and improvised legal observers.

The Soundscape of Protest

The combination of whistles, phone alerts, and video documentation has reshaped the nature of protest and community defense. Rather than centralized demonstrations, the emphasis has been on decentralized rapid responses: a way of signaling across phone networks that something is happening somewhere in the city. This is a choreography of civic resistance, in which sound — from whistles, shouts, and horns — drives movement and response.

A New Auditory Politics

In Minneapolis today, phones and whistles represent evolving forms of civic engagement, ways for people to support one another, bear witness, and assert community presence in the face of federal enforcement actions that many view as intimidating or destabilizing.

Whether seen as grassroots solidarity tactics or sources of controversy, these sound-based methods have become defining features of the city’s current moment — a reminder that in urban conflict, even the simplest signals can carry profound social meaning.

Here at the NABWMT we have a proud history of peaceful protest and fighting injustice.

Ever since cameras became embedded in cellphones, people have been using their devices to bear witness to violence.

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees five essential freedoms: religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition. Adopted in 1791 as part of the Bill of Rights, it prevents the government from restricting expression, establishing a state religion, or interfering with peaceful protest and petitioning for redress of grievances.

Courts have long granted citizens a First Amendment right to film in public. But this right on paper is now being increasingly contested on the streets as federal agents try to stop citizens from recording their activities.

We are seeing a pattern of intimidation of people who are just trying to observe. A federal judge granted a preliminary injunction prohibiting the government from retaliating against peaceful observers and protesters. But that injunction was lifted on Wednesday by an appeals court.

Government officials have said that violence against agents includes “videotaping them where they are at, when they are out on operations.”

The nation’s founders worried that if the state had a monopoly on weapons, its citizens could be oppressed. Their answer was the Second Amendment. Now that our phones are the primary weapons of today’s information war, we should be as zealous about our right to bear phones as we are about our right to bear arms.

To adopt the language of Second Amendment enthusiasts, perhaps the only thing that can eventually stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a camera.

The difference between oppression and liberation, is, who will ultimately control the cameras.

The smartphone camera is a potent weapon because it offers the promise of future accountability. Even if the person filming is killed, the camera can preserve evidence of a crime that could be prosecuted in the future. A desire to evade such accountability is why governments engaged in violent repression often shut off internet access and thus prevent witnesses from sharing video and photos.

The best defense is to double down on documentation. Those who can afford the personal risk should keep filming. And those who can’t risk being on the front lines can support those doing the documenting in other ways.

We need to question whenever the government asks us to put away our phones — especially when it comes to filming people we pay with our tax dollars.

Source: New York Times

Genetic researchers were seeking children for an ambitious, federally funded project to track brain development — a study that they told families could yield invaluable discoveries about DNA’s impact on behavior and disease.

They also promised that the children’s sensitive data would be closely guarded in the decade-long study, which got underway in 2015.

The scientists did not keep it safe.

A group of fringe researchers thwarted safeguards at the National Institutes of Health and gained access to data from thousands of children. The researchers have used it to produce at least 16 papers purporting to find biological evidence for differences in intelligence between races, ranking ethnicities by I.Q. scores and suggesting Black people earn less because they are not very smart.

Mainstream geneticists have rejected their work as biased and unscientific. Yet by relying on genetic and other personal data from the prominent project, known as the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, the researchers gave their theories credence.

Members of the research group were ineligible to obtain data from the ABCD project. But one of them gained access through an American professor who was already being investigated by the N.I.H. over his handling of another child brain study.

Their papers have provided fodder for racist posts on social media and white nationalist message boards that have been viewed millions of times. Some of the papers are cited by A.I. bots like ChatGPT and Grok in response to queries about race and intelligence. On the social media platform X, Grok has referred users to the research more than two dozen times this month alone.

The science is faulty, but it’s being used to advance an unethical agenda.”

The misuse of the children’s data has validated longstanding concerns that hundreds of thousands of Americans’ genetic information held by the N.I.H. could fall into the wrong hands.

Critics say the N.I.H. has failed to address the risks that the data, even with personally identifiable details removed, could be misused in unethical research, for commercial purposes or by foreign adversaries.

In dozens of cases, the N.I.H. suspended researchers’ access and demanded that compromised data be destroyed, but the agency relies heavily on good-faith pledges of compliance.

The misuse of the data for so-called race science is not the only example of a security failure involving the ABCD Study.

There has been no official public accounting of how the N.I.H. lost control of the children’s genetic information.

When Elon Musk invited X users last June to post politically incorrect “divisive facts” on the social network, a so called researcher replied with a criticism of affirmative action and said white people had bigger brains than Black people.

The conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza said on X in 2023 that studies showed that Black people, “who are the rock-solid base of the Democratic Party, have the lowest IQ of any ethnic group.” As evidence, he reposted another chart based on ABCD data about American 10-year-olds.

Scientists said the unauthorized use of the data underscored the need for stronger controls. Several families in the ABCD Study said in interviews that they were not told about the misuse of the information and never would have agreed to participate had they known it could be used to promote racial division.

There needs to be an acknowledgment that there are bad-faith researchers.

But the Government Accountability Office, a federal watchdog, reported last April that the N.I.H. did not have the resources to properly monitor all the downloads of genetic data and “may be missing violations that go unreported by researchers.”

Data from the projects has generated hundreds of papers on, among other things, the effects of social media on mental health, genetic links to addiction and the causes of sleep disorders.

In a 2023 paper, a researcher tried to rank the intelligence of children across ethnic groups. But the sample size for the vast majority of groups was far too small to draw meaningful conclusions.

Mankind Quarterly, a journal known for pushing race science. A researcher studied penis sizes by race and once looked for correlations between intelligence and first names, concluding that people with “non-western Muslim names” had lower I.Q.s.

This runs counter to the scientific consensus that any correlation between a complex trait like intelligence and genes, let alone social constructs like race, is not the same as causation.

Research has found that the environment in which people are raised can affect their cognitive abilities. In the United States, for example, any serious analysis must consider how Black people endured centuries of slavery and racial discrimination and how they today face disproportionately high poverty rates and a lack of quality education and health care.

A Substack article last April asserted that Black people’s supposed lack of intelligence was the source of the racial income gap.

While some scientists have pushed the N.I.H. to limit how sensitive genetic data can be used in research, there is little indication the administration agrees — and there are signs it is moving in the opposite direction.

The acceptance of gay people in the United States has peaked around 2020 and has sharply reversed since then.

Americans’ bias against gay people did indeed decline faster than any other bias ever tracked in social surveys. Until 2020.

Research led by Professor Charlesworth published in 2022 detailed a decline. Drawing on 7.1 million responses from Americans collected from 2007 to 2020, the researchers tracked both explicit bias and implicit bias. Forecasting models suggested that, at that pace, anti-gay bias could hit zero as early as 2022.

But at that time, the Charlesworth research team was also analyzing new data showing that anti-gay bias had begun to rise. The analysis of an additional 2.5 million responses from Americans collected from the beginning of 2021 through 2024 revealed that progress had not only stalled; it had reversed. In just four years, anti-gay bias rose by around 10 percent.

Increases also appeared in bias toward Black, darker-skinned, older, disabled and overweight people, but not as starkly. Just as bias against gay people fell especially steeply before 2020, it has surged particularly sharply since.

These trends were distinctly robust among the youngest American adults — those under 25. This group increased its animus against marginalized groups in general and gay people in particular at a faster rate than older Americans did. And although anti-gay bias has risen faster among conservatives, it has also risen among liberals.

What explains this decline in tolerance? Evidence suggests that we can rule out two common hypotheses. The first is that the anti-gay backlash is a side effect, or spillover, of the backlash against the movement for transgender rights. If that were so, you would expect increases in anti-trans bias to be meaningfully correlated with subsequent increases in anti-gay bias — which the research does not show.

The second hypothesis is that the anti-gay backlash reflects the rise in panic about sexual grooming, the notion that gay adults are recruiting or influencing children to become gay. But the research shows no evidence of spikes in grooming discourse (measured through Google searches) that are meaningfully correlated with subsequent spikes in anti-gay bias.

The first idea is social instability. Starting around 2020, the United States experienced a sustained disruption consisting of the Covid pandemic, economic strain and intensifying political conflict — each of which has been linked to heightened intergroup hostility and scapegoating. This would explain the overall rise in bias against marginalized groups.

The second factor, which would explain the rise specifically in anti-gay bias, is anti-establishment sentiment. The sustained social disruption since 2020 has fueled resentment and a loss of confidence in institutions perceived to have failed — governments, corporations, the broader establishment.

By 2020, support for gay and lesbian equality had become an establishment position. Corporate America, for example, demonstrated a concrete commitment to gay rights, with companies donating hundreds of thousands of dollars for Pride celebrations and other efforts at gay and lesbian inclusion.

Gay and lesbian people, newly woven into the fabric of mainstream society, may have been collateral damage in a broader revolt against a system that felt broken, especially among younger generations grappling most intensely with uncertainty about their future.

The recent rise of anti-gay bias suggests that public attitudes and media representation are no longer moving in lock step. (An example is the exuberance surrounding “Heated Rivalry).

By all means, celebrate our media success but stay vigilant against homophobia.

Source: NY Times