Before the Liberation Day tariffs were imposed on April 2, grocery giant Albertsons sent a letter to its suppliers, noting the potential economic challenges ahead. “We understand this situation may raise concerns for your business operations and the ongoing relationship we share,” stated Albertsons executive vice president and chief merchandising and digital officer Omer Gajial, who wrote that he wanted to “clarify” Albertsons’ policy regarding the tariffs.

“We are committed to maintaining the value proposition our customers expect,” Gajial continued. “Therefore, with few exceptions, we are not accepting cost increases due to tariffs” (emphasis in original).

In other words, regardless of higher supplier costs from components of their goods sourced from China or other countries, they would have to absorb those increases if they want to sell to Albertsons. Tariff costs could not be included in invoices without prior authorization, Gajial said.

Albertsons offered suppliers a way to request cost increases due to tariffs, but they would have to give 90 days’ advance notice, submit a formal request with a detailed explanation with import duties and other relevant documentation, and allow 30 more days for review and approval. That means that even under the best-case scenario, suppliers would have to eat four months of cost increases before Albertsons would decide on any allowances. And “approval is not guaranteed,” the letter states.

Grocery suppliers whose sourcing or manufacturing is overseas have clearly incurred costs on its products, but hardball like this would mean they would have to compensate for losses with other retailers, perhaps ones where the power relationship is reversed.

. . .

Pundits and politicians say it incessantly: Our political system is broken because we are so “polarized.” They tell us that “polarization” prevents us from passing legislation or reaching a compromise or getting along.

This is bunk, not to mention a dangerous false equivalence, which minimizes the threat of authoritarianism.

. . .

Other countries’ experiences help distinguish polarization from authoritarianism. Hungary’s problem is not polarization; it’s the authoritarian rule of Viktor Orban who suppresses dissent, silences the media, and strips the judiciary of independence. Many Hungarians want the return of the rule of law, free speech, and robust civil society while Orban does not. But who would call that a “polarization” problem? It’s a dictator problem.

Whether it is Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s police state in Turkey or neo-fascist parties in Europe or MAGA’s takeover of the Republican Party, the defining feature that should concern us is not mutual intransigence or a widening ideological gap. Rather, in the United States and around the globe we see ordinary democratic parties (warts and all) up against authoritarian movements (some successful, others not) that reject democracy, truth, decency, pluralism, and the rule of law.

The central feature in the U.S.—a cult of personality in which the erratic, chaotic, and unhinged leader runs roughshod over its people—has nothing to do with Democrats. We cannot blame the small “d” democrats (or the large “D” ones either) for extremism or intransigence simply for insisting their fellow countrymen recognize objective reality and respect democratic norms.

. . .

A new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that Americans aged 50 to 85 were more likely to die over a 10-year period than Europeans in the same age group, regardless of their wealth.

The research, led by a team from the Brown University School of Public Health, analyzed data from over 73,000 adults in the U.S. and various regions of Europe. It examined the relationship between wealth and mortality, revealing that while greater wealth is generally linked to longer life, this association is especially pronounced in the United States. The study also highlighted that income inequality plays a larger role in the U.S., where the survival gap between rich and poor is significantly wider than in Europe.

Comparison data also showed that at every wealth level in the U.S., mortality rates were higher than those in the parts of Europe the researchers studied. The nation’s wealthiest Americans have shorter lifespans on average than the wealthiest Europeans; in some cases, the wealthiest Americans have survival rates on par with the poorest Europeans in western parts of Europe such as Germany, France, and the Netherlands.

. . .

Chris Hayes mentioned this on Bluesky today. I was unaware…

In October 1938, about 17,000 Polish Jews living in Nazi Germany were arrested and expelled. These deportations, termed by the Nazis Polenaktion (“Polish Action”), were ordered by SS officer and head of the Gestapo Reinhard Heydrich. The deported Jews were initially rejected by Poland and therefore had to live in makeshift encampments along the Germany–Poland border.

From 1935 to 1938, Jews living within Germany had been stripped of most of their rights by the Nuremberg Laws, and faced intense persecution from the state. As a result, many Jewish refugees sought rapidly to emigrate out of the Reich. However, most countries, still feeling the effects of a global depression, enacted strict immigration laws and simply would not address the refugee problem. According to a census conducted in 1933, over 57 percent of the foreign Jews living in Germany were Polish.

Following the German annexation of Austria on 13 March 1938, the Polish government became worried that it would face a large-scale return of Jewish citizens of Poland that had been living in Austria. On 31 March 1938, the parliament approved legislation enabling the revocation of Polish citizenship if the person had been living abroad for more than five years since the establishment of Poland in 1919. The German government, which did not want to be stuck with tens of thousands of stateless Jewish Poles, passed legislation in August that allowed it to deport any foreigner who had lost their citizenship from their home country. Additionally, a confidential directive was issued to not allow any new residence permits to be issued to Jews.

History teaches if we want to learn.

. . .
The chemistry of kindness

In his book The Healing Power of Doing Good, nonprofit leader Allan Luks quoted survey respondents attempting to articulate the feelings they experienced when doing volunteer work. “It makes you explode with energy,” one said. Others described “a relaxation of muscles that I didn’t even realize had been tensed” and a “euphoric” feeling of being “zapped by an energy bolt.” Luks coined the term “helper’s high” to describe these feelings.

Dopamine is released when we give to others. Scientists have actually witnessed this in the lab.

This sensation has physiological origins. Gregory Fricchione, the Mind/Body Medical Institute Professor of Psychiatry at HMS and director of the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, describes it as a release of “chemical juice.” When we help others, he says, neurotransmitters flow up in a tight bundle of axons called the medial forebrain bundle through the subcortex with “exit ramps to many of the important structures of the brain” — the fear-conditioning amygdala, the memory-forming hippocampus, and the motivation-moderating medial prefrontal cortex.

Among these neurotransmitters is dopamine. This feel-good chemical is linked to the brain’s reward center. And it’s released when we give to others. Scientists have actually witnessed this in the lab. A few years ago, a small study from an international research collaboration that included scientists from the National Institutes of Health used magnetic resonance imaging to measure brain activity associated with making a charitable donation. The findings, reported in PNAS, suggested that this action engages the mesolimbic system of the brain, triggering a euphoric rush of dopamine in much the same way that anticipating a reward, like money, does.

Numerous other processes may be implicated in the helper’s high, says Fricchione: pain-reducing endogenous opioids, endorphins, and perhaps even the neuromodulating chemicals that make up the endocannabinoid system. Then there’s oxytocin, the so-called affiliation hormone, which has plentiful receptors in the amygdala, where it helps suppress fear and anxiety.

. . .

Jonathan Last asks at The Bulwark, “If you were Chris Krebs, would you flee the country?”

Last week Donald Trump issued a presidential memorandum. This one instructs the Department of Justice et al. to launch an investigation into Chris Krebs, the former head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). His alleged crime? Testifying to the Jan. 6 Select Committee that Republican officials “lied to the American people about the security of the 2020 election.” In Trump’s telling, Krebs “falsely and baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen.” That is, Krebs committed HERESY by thought, heresy by word, heresy by deed, and heresy by action!

I further direct the Attorney General, the Director of National Intelligence, and all other relevant agencies to immediately take all action as necessary and consistent with existing law to suspend any active security clearances held by individuals at entities associated with Krebs, including SentinelOne, pending a review of whether such clearances are consistent with the national interest.

I further direct the Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security, in consultation with any other agency head, to take all appropriate action to review Krebs’ activities as a Government employee, including his leadership of CISA.

Blah, blah, blah, hereby, blah.

. . .

But those cases were based on the very same Fourteenth Amendment that Trump wants reinterpreted by a MAGA-friendly Roberts court to deny birthright citizenship to “anchor babies.” This isn’t the 20th century anymore. The Roberts court is not the Warren court. Roberts oversees the court that overturned 50 years of precedent with its Dobbs decision.

And Donald Trump is a convicted felon.

Conservative people in America appear to distrust science more broadly than previously thought. Not only do they distrust science that does not correspond to their worldview, but also, compared to liberal Americans, their trust is also lower in fields that contribute to economic growth and productivity. Short interventions aimed at strengthening trust have little effect. This is apparent from new research by social psychologists at the University of Amsterdam, which has now been published in Nature Human Behavior.

Science helps solve major societal problems, such as pandemics and climate change. But if people do not trust scientists, they will be less likely to accept scientific solutions. "In America, but also in other countries, conservatives generally have lower trust in science," says one of the researchers involved, Bastiaan Rutjens. "Since the 1980s, trust of science among conservatives in America has even been plummeting."

Part of the explanation is that scientific findings do not align with conservatives' political or economic beliefs. "But science is also increasingly dismissed in some circles as a "leftist hobby," and universities as strongholds of the leftist establishment," Rutjens adds. The researchers wanted to gain more insight into how trust varies across scientific fields and whether short interventions could strengthen trust.

. . .

Liberals were found to have more trust than conservatives in all 35 scientific professions that were examined—not just in fields that align with their priorities, such as climate change or inclusion, but also in areas focused on industry. However, the differences in levels of trust were not entirely uniform, with levels varying depending on the scientific field.

. . .

In three weeks, on my birthday May 7th, it’ll be exactly 80 years since Germany signed terms of surrender at the headquarters of US General Dwight D. Eisenhower in Reims, France.

That year, 1945, also signaled the official end of the Republican Great Depression. And May 7 of this year may well signal the beginning of the Second Republican Great Depression, the fourth major economic crash in our history. Troublingly, every one of the prior three financial crises also tripped off a major war.

. . .

Batten down your financial hatches and get ready; this is going to be rough for everybody except the morbidly rich, who are rubbing their hands with gleeful anticipation at the upcoming “buying opportunity of the century” to acquire everything from small companies to real estate to stocks, all on sale at massive, depression-era-level discounts.

Thomas Jefferson probably never said “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty”, but that doesn’t make it less true. Since President Trump’s second term started 12 weeks ago, I’ve been keeping track of the actions of his administration as best I can. I’ve previously mapped actions across five broad authoritarian categories and dug a little deeper into some aspects, particularly his attacks on science and universities . Today I want to show how his administration is directly undermining the key pillars of democracy.

The data tells the story. Of the 192 actions I’ve tracked over the first 12 weeks, here I’ve mapped 69 of them across five themes that are each corrosive to democracy:

Weakening democratic checks and balances

Weaponising state power against personal ‘enemies’

Undermining the rule of law

Suppressing dissent

Controlling information

The actions (and accompanying dates and links) are available in this googlesheet, and a high resolution PDF of the Venn Diagram is available here. Below I consider each of these themes in turn.
All the actions are available in this googlesheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16MqweAeUP5veuqJqXsg7j8MXv4VKi4mJJ9E6f3_Ail4/edit?usp=sharing

Mapping the Human Cell: A 400-Year Quest

Scientists have been trying to map the human cell ever since the invention of the microscope more than 400 years ago. Yet, many parts of the cell remain largely unexplored.

“ We know each of the proteins that exist in our cells, but how they fit together to then carry out the function of a cell still remains largely unknown across cell types,” said Leah Schaffer, Ph.D., a postdoctoral research scholar at UC San Diego School of Medicine.
A New Cellular Atlas Emerges

Now, Schaffer and her team at UC San Diego, along with collaborators from Stanford University, Harvard Medical School, and the University of British Columbia, have created a detailed, interactive map of U2OS cells — cells linked to pediatric bone tumors. By combining high-resolution microscopy with data on protein-protein interactions, the researchers mapped the internal structure and organization of proteins within these cells.

. . .



. . .