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As lawmakers locked in $12 billion in spending late in the recently-concluded legislative session, they discovered education retirees.

These are the teachers and support staff who spent 20 or 30 years or more educating you and your children. They ensured the kids in their charge were fed, sheltered and taught as best as local resources allowed.

They havent seen a cost-of-living increase in their benefits since 2007.

Theres a reason for that: its expensive. A 1% increase for retirees would cost the Education Trust Fund (ETF) about $200 million. For comparison, the University of South Alabama, with about 14,000 students, will get $161.4 million from the budget next year.

To get around this, the Legislature in 2021 created a trust fund for retirees. It wont provide a COLA. Instead, it will pay retirees bonuses.

But legislators will decide each year whether bonuses are paid. Nothing will come out of the trust fund until it contains $100 million. And lawmakers cant fill it with ETF money.

So in the dusk of the 2024 session, the Senate used a supplemental spending bill to put $5 million into the fund. The House stripped it out.

Senators werent happy.

Next year, the education budget is going to start out in this chamber, and you bet your bottom dollar were going to have a deposit into that retiree trust fund for our retired state educators, said Sen. Arthur Orr, R-Decatur, the chair of the Senates education budget committee.

Orrs House counterpart, Rep. Danny Garrett, R-Trussville, later noted that $5 million wouldnt come close to addressing the retirees needs. The House, he said, put the money where it could have a more immediate impact.

Im sympathetic, he said. Im trying to be practical to tell you that the solution that was put in the supplemental did not address or come anywhere near addressing the problem.

Its hard not to be sympathetic to retirees. And its not easy to shift money around in our heavily-earmarked tax system.

But if lawmakers cared about this issue, couldnt they have worked on it at the start of the session?

Instead of all the terrible legislation they rushed through those first few weeks?

Like SB 1, sponsored by Sen. Garlan Gudger, R-Cullman, which criminalized certain forms of assistance with absentee ballots. The law itself is bad enough, but supporters justified it by pointing to mostly poor, mostly rural and mostly Black counties having higher-than-average use of absentee ballots. Which is not a crime, and could reflect a larger number of sick or elderly people, two groups that can cross the states high bar for voting absentee.

Or SB 129, sponsored by Sen. Will Barfoot, R-Pike Road, which banned public funding of diversity, equity and inclusion programs. It also gave the most brittle among us the power to subject educators to professional harassment for teaching accurate history.

Or HB 129, sponsored by Garrett. When fully implemented, that will siphon at least $100 million out of the ETF to dole out tax credits for nonpublic education purposes (including private school tuition).

Notice that $100 million is what you need to start paying bonuses to retirees? I do. $100 million also gets you halfway to a small retiree COLA, or a 2% pay raise for current education employees (on top of what lawmakers approved this year).

Instead, those taxpayer dollars will flow out of the ETF and into private entities. After 2027, theres no means-testing for the tax credits. In the eyes of the law, a family that can spend almost $30,000 a year at Indian Springs School or $25,000 a year at Randolph School in Huntsville is just as needy as a kid in a Black Belt district struggling to attract teachers. Were taking money from public schools that need the help and giving it to private schools that dont.

I could go on. The Legislature approved a bill forcing employers to prolong labor strife. They passed a tinfoil hat resolution denouncing the World Health Organization. They almost enacted a law that could have led to the arrests of librarians. (Lawmakers didnt pass other anti-LGBTQ+ laws bills this this year. But dont congratulate them for shifting the Overton Window on human decency to a partially-torn, sun-bleached photograph of Jesse Helms.)

Lawmakers did nothing about the mounting horrors in our state prisons. Or Alabamas rampant gun violence (still higher than New Yorks). They couldnt even ban organ harvesting without a familys permission.

Sure, they did some helpful things. Legislators voted to allow victims of abuse in the Boy Scouts to pursue justice. They authorized $10 million to feed children in the summer of 2025. They made our terrible open records law more workable.

The Republican-dominated Legislature erected (shaky) protections for in vitro fertilization after the Alabama Supreme Court tossed IVF providers into legal jeopardy. They shut down Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allens ham-handed effort to throw President Joe Biden off the state ballot.

So a few ounces of productivity in the scale. But they dont elevate the nine tons of ugliness on the other side of the fulcrum bills that made voting harder; education less equal and history instruction fraught with peril.

Nor does a half-baked, last-minute effort to address the problems of retirees, whose issues predate the Great Recession.

Im genuinely sorry for all those people who worked to improve our childrens lives. They deserve better.

But theyre never going to be on the top of the agenda. In the Alabama Legislature, cruelty and nonsense trump all.

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In the Alabama Legislature, it's culture wars first, retirees second Alabama Reflector - Alabama Reflector

Credit: Michael Brooks / Alamy Stock Photo

4 min read23 May

Move more in 2024 thats my plan so far. Coupled with a dramatic decrease in ultra-processed foods, its working well. The combination of considered inputs and more regular, energetic outputs has certainly contributed to a newly invigorated, two stone lighter, physically and mentally stronger, generally happier me!

My job, like most in todays Western world, is pretty sedentary. We must find other opportunities to keep moving. Combining exercise with your commute is perfect for fitting it into a busy life. The rewards for putting some effort in walking or cycling the commute, the school run or just for fun last for so much longer than the journey. Immediately afterwards our bodies experience mood-boosting effects thanks to the release of endorphins, giving us motivation to keep going.

The trick is to create an environment where active travel becomes an easier habit for more people. To do that requires many mini-habits or actions that eventually culminate in a healthier lifestyle. We cant let this vital action be ignored as too difficult because of the short-term backlash we might get. The UK has the third-highest European population living with obesity, with an estimated associated cost of 58bn annually. Creating healthier places isnt easy; itll take compromise and political risk. But its the right thing to do.

I encourage every candidate standing at the next election to include walking or cycling on their leaflets

And this shouldnt be seen as a war between left and right. Weve come far under Conservative governments, mayors and councils. Some of our cities are unrecognisable from ten years ago. Roads on which only those without other options would have cycled now serve thousands a day.

When I was active travel minister in the Department for Transport, I was delighted to sign off on the inspiring new agency Active Travel England, and to appoint its chief executive Danny Williams and the national commissioner for walking and cycling Chris Boardman MBE. They work with councils to spread this progress across the whole country, finding solutions which work for the area. Their role is important, because making walking easier can often be lost within a department as big as DfT.

We also mustnt make it an argument between rural and urban areas. My Copeland constituency is blessed with lakes, rivers, fells and mountains, being situated within the English Lake District. But just as importantly, people and communities are connected by miles of public paths and bridleways, quiet lanes, coastal routes, and the start of the Coast to Coast, soon to become the 17th National Trail, which I completed with my husband last summer.

We proudly boast the UKs most popular challenge cycle route, Sustrans Sea to Sea (or C2C) from the Irish Sea at Whitehaven to the North Sea at Sunderland, some 138 miles. These networks provide huge financial and social boosts, bringing visitors and business to the area, and are also relied upon by locals for everyday journeys and escaping into nature.

It is often assumed that cycling is divisive. But the recently published, independently researched Sustrans walking and cycling index shows that people want to live in healthier places.

Most people use all modes of transport depending on the journey. Sustrans found that 58 per cent of people support more cycle paths protected from traffic and 62 per cent would like more low-traffic neighbourhoods, while 24 per cent say they want to drive less, with 50 per cent wanting to walk more, and 43 per cent to cycle more. This should reassure us to use the systems set up across government to help more people to change gear and get active.

Lets be brave and take cycling out of the culture wars. I encourage every candidate standing at the next election to include walking or cycling on their leaflets; it might just attract people who dont currently feel spoken to. People want to cycle more. We just need to help them do it.

Trudy Harrison, Conservative MP for Copeland

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Let's take cycling out of the culture wars - PoliticsHome

In the year of our Lord 2024, is there any topic at all that cant become fodder for the culture wars? Apparently not. Case in point: The dumb-as-hell fracas thats broken out on X about the cryptographic integrity of two messaging apps, Telegram and Signal. The debate boils down to which apps technical standards are more likely to protect user privacya topic you would think is an empirical one to be decided by math nerds. Alas, this simple but important issue has, like a bystander caught by a stray bullet, been dragged into a larger culture war fight between Elon Musk, the public broadcaster NPR, and each sides respective groupies.

The messaging app turned culture war debate has been raging for a while now in niche circles (I tweeted about it a week ago in the context of crypto), but got pushed into the mainstream when the Guardian published a closer look at the forces driving it. In an essay published this weekend, a Stanford researcher describes how, after a longtime editor decided to rage quit over NPRs left-wing politics, conservatives began gunning for the broadcasters CEO. In the ensuing fight, some loudmouth discovered that the CEO sat on the board of the Signal Foundation, and began making insinuations that Signal was somehow compromised because of this. And Musk, being who he is, piled on and began hinting without any evidence that a conspiracy was afoot.

If youre wondering, my own politics are centrist. I find there is excellent reportingand plenty of bias and bad stuff, tooto be found in publications across the political spectrum. (And as someone who toils in media, Ill add I get frustrated with the lefts refusal to acknowledge its own bias. While someone at Fox News is likely to say Yeah, were right wingso what? the liberal high priests at the New York Times or Columbia Journalism School will tell you, We dont have an agenda. We perform JOURNALISM.) But thats getting beyond the topic at hand, which is whether the NPR presidents slight involvement with Signal should lead us to distrust the app. The short answer is: Thats ridiculous.

Whether or not an NPR person is on its board, Signal is open-source and encrypted, which is what you want if you care about security. Meanwhile, the consensus among cryptographers Ive metwho dont strike me as raging leftistsis that Signals tech is first-rate. It also doesnt hurt that the app was built by an American who is a hard-core privacy fanatic. Contrast that with Telegram, which lacks end-to-end encryption (even Mark Zuckerbergs WhatsApp has this!) and is broadly suspected of being back-doored by the Kremlin. For me, this is an easy decision that has nothing to do with culture war stuff and everything to do with technology. Signal is the one I trust for privacy but, as they say, you do you.

An earlier version of this newsletter incorrectly stated Telegram has servers in Russia.

Jeff John Roberts jeff.roberts@fortune.com @jeffjohnroberts

Sullivan & Cromwell and the founder of consulting firm Forensic Risk Alliance are the respective choices of the DOJ and Treasury to act as monitors in the Binance settlement. (WSJ)

Coinbase shares dropped nearly 8% on news the CME may soon start offering spot Bitcoin trading. (CoinDesk)

A bankruptcy court gave final approval for Genesis to return $3 billion in cash and crypto to customers, rejecting objections from DCG, which will get nothing from the deal. (Reuters)

Controversial crypto firm Prometheum launched custody for Ethereum, a key step in its jerry-rigged plan to offer popular tokens as securities under existing law. (Fortune)

The SEC's deadline to rule on VanEck's Ethereum ETF application is this week, though there is wide consensus the agency will deny the bid. (Bloomberg)

Golfer Scottie Scheffler's arrest already a crypto meme:

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Elon Musk and the Signal vs. Telegram debate - Fortune

When Pope Francis emerged on the balcony over St Peters Basilica for the first time in 2013, it was a symbolic victory for the liberal wing of a beleaguered church. The newly elected Holy Father would tidy up the scandal-ridden mess left in Benedict XVIs wake and drag the papacy into the 21st century. In the decade since, Franciss efforts have demarcated him from his far more staid predecessors: he has denounced laws that criminalise homosexuality; in 2015 he struck a revolutionary tone when he suggested forgiveness could be granted to women who had abortions; early in his tenure he declared that, yes, even atheists could go to heaven.

The great Catholic reformer was in lockstep with the trajectory of the decade. In spite of the retreats made by the election of Donald Trump and the Brexit referendum (2016 was the annus horribilis for the liberal disposition) it seemed the progressive march forward was inevitable: gay marriage and abortion were legalised in Ireland by popular vote; the Womens March and Me Too movement fought back against base misogyny; there was the great racial reckoning of Americas Black Lives Matter summer. This was the ambient temperature of the 2010s and early 2020s. An era when even the Pope was woke.

But change at the top looms in the Vatican (not even the Pope is immortal). And when white smoke next appears over the Holy See one question will hang in the air: what will it mean for the fate of the so-called liberal Catholics? The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat a longtime observer of the papacy recently suggested that the liberalising energy Francis brought with him has all but dissipated. A conservative takeover has been fomenting. With it, the fear among the trenchant traditionalists that someone even more radical would come along has abated. Perhaps Francis and his allies will find that instead of rock, their revolution was built on sand.

Not even the will of God can keep the culture wars out of the Vatican. On one side, the traditionalists with Cardinal Raymond Burke as their spiritual leader fear Francis is eroding the doctrine; disrespecting the strictures of the faith; and relentlessly pursuing a political agenda moonlighting as a divine one. Francis, meanwhile, in a 60 Minutes interview on 19 May, said his conservative detractors have a suicidal attitude; that they are locking themselves in a dogmatic box. Perhaps the liberal reformation will not die with him. But as the Holy See is tugged between these two poles, it begins to look like a microcosm, mimicking trends general to the Anglosphere: a decade of supremacy for woke ideology accompanied by the inevitable conservative backlash.

If this is the death knell for liberal Catholicism, Franciss own character will loom large in the history books on the revolutions failure. He is often cast as a cosy liberaliser: he talks about praying for peace, has an informal manner, eschews the ornately gilded vestments traditionally associated with the papacy in favour of the modest and refined. But behind the doors of St Peters the view is rather different. Damian Thompson, the former editor-in-chief of the Catholic Herald,has described a curia presided over by an autocrat who wrenches power from his ideological opponents and permits any number of sins from his ideological allies; one who is motivated more by resentment than theology.

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But to the outside world he remains hard to criticise: Francis is a Pope for Guardian readers, those who take the mores established in the 2010s as their gospel. But despite trading the papal finery for a humble cassock, as conservative momentum builds it seems now the Pope has no clothes.

His liberal bent is defended as a survival mechanism for a church in decline, with a reputation so badly bruised by years of sex-abuse scandal that it will likely never recover. If this is the aim, the outcome is bleak: under Francis there has been no flurry of the lapsed re-embracing the church.

But there is a far greater existential question for the papacy. Cardinal Burke issued an early warning in the Francis pontificate: The pope does not have the power to change teaching [or] doctrine. Indeed, Francis has realised that he cannot launder Catholicism of its inherent conservatism without entirely disrupting its nature. His tenure has revealed that liberal Catholicism is a theologically inconsistent proposition. The popularity of Francis among the progressive establishment can do very little to change that.

Attempts have been made to adopt facets of Catholicism while divesting it of its baggage. Far from the Vatican, the ludicrous display of the 2018 Metropolitan Museum annual gala where Rihanna dressed in a Mitre and Hollywood starlets wore haloes and images of the Sistine Chapel was revelatory; there is no mode of Catholicism that can cohere with the liberal celebrity industrial complex that is anything more than a superficial aesthetic.

In downtown Manhattan, Catholicism has emerged in the last five years as a scene for the It Girls which is now slowly infiltrating Britain accompanied by a fetishistic and coquettish style (crucifixes over bare chests, knee high socks, rosary beads). Its a wry and cynical mode of mocking the liberal pieties of the 2010s, both politically reactionary and theologically insubstantial.

Yet both the Catholic reformers and the young unserious adopters of the religion make a similar mistake. The young think they can engage with the style while subverting the dogma. And the reformers believe that everything can be forced into a liberal shape, no matter its inherent nature, logic be damned. Meanwhile, the conservatives are at the gates.

[See more: Does the Archbishop of Canterbury matter politically?]

Read more:
The myth of progressive Catholicism - The New Statesman

Increasingly, vegans, vegetarians and others looking for meat alternatives are seeing a new option on the menu: patties that look, taste and even appear to bleed like beef hamburgers, but are actually made of soy, pea protein and other ingredients.

Now, a leading American plant-based meat company called Impossible Foods plans to rebrand, in order to reach a wider audience.

From now on, Impossible Foods says that all of its green cardboard packaging will be switched to red, in a bid to appeal to the carnivorous cravings of meat eaters, according to a March news release.

Big-name, plant-based meat alternative brands like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat are losing revenue at an alarming pace. Multiple brands, like the vegan chicken nugget brand Nowadays, are going out of business. And Impossible Foods private share value has dropped 89% since 2021.

Some of the plant-based meat substitute industrys woes can be attributed to politics. Many consumers associate plant-based meat substitutes with veganism, animal rights activism and left-wing politics.

Impossibles CEO, Peter McGuinness, said in 2023 that his company has an elitist reputation and that the companys rebranding is a rejection of wokeness. The so-called wokeness of Impossible and other plant-based meat substitutes shows the symbolic power that food can have in politics.

As communication scholars, we study and teach our students about the persuasive power of symbols. Even innocuous items like the food we eat are symbols that come with attached meanings and values.

Amid the highly polarized politics in the U.S., plant-based meat substitutes and their analog, real meat, have become weapons in a symbol-laden political battle between some conservatives and liberals, sometimes nicknamed the Meat Culture War. In other words, while an Impossible burger might literally be a soy patty, it is also a symbolic threat to the right-wing ideological order, a symbolic stand-in for the left-wing villain of the week.

Food, politics and culture

While costs vary, products made by the plant-based meat industry can cost two to three times more than animal-based meats.

People who are higher income, younger and live in the suburbs are most likely to have tried plant-based meat substitutes, Gallup polling shows. A rural Mississippi corner store probably wont sell Impossible sausages, but an urban California Whole Foods probably will.

In some cases, conservatives have attached even more meaning to plant-based meat substitutes. Conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, for example, produced a documentary in 2022 featuring the Raw Egg Nationalist, a prominent far-right influencer, who said that Impossible, Beyond and other plant-based companies are part of a soy globalist conspiracy to criminalize meat consumption and weaken citizens through poisoned food. The Raw Egg Nationalist also wrote in 2022 that plant-based meat substitutes and eggs are perverted products pushed by elites to bring civilization to the brink of madness.

Foods political symbolism is not new. Depicting East Asian men as effeminate rice eaters was used as a justification for European colonial rule in Asia in the 1800s and for later stoking anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.S. And during the Iraq War in the mid-2000s, some U.S. restaurants renamed french fries as freedom fries to protest Frances refusal to join the war.

More recently, some people have derisively called men who consume soy-based proteins soy boys. In response to calls for meat reduction, Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst has proposed banning the trend of Meatless Mondays to combat the Lefts War on Meat.

Impossibles appeal to the political right likely wont be solved with a quick repackage. Thats because their issue is related to a deep-seated conspiratorial ideology embraced by some people in far-right political circles.

Sure, some studies in consumer psychology suggest that brand color impacts consumer preferences. For plant-based meats in particular, consumers perceptions of the products eco-friendliness and tastiness is somewhat affected by packaging color in this case, typically green. A color shift may nudge a wayward carnivore to take a taste of an Impossible brat, but thats a bandage, not a solution.

You are what you eat

The symbolic connection between consuming the right foods and U.S. political identity is strong.

During the 2012 election, political analyst Dave Wasserman argued that who controls the Senate would come down to Cracker Barrel diners, who tend to favor options like chicken and dumplings, country fried steak and meatloaf, versus Whole Foods shoppers.

He correctly noted that electoral districts that are also home to a Whole Foods were more likely to vote blue, while districts with Cracker Barrels were more likely to vote red. Ten years later, in the summer of 2022, social media went wild when Cracker Barrel offered an Impossible sausage patty on its menu.

Some people then posted on Cracker Barrels Facebook page, lambasting the restaurant chain. As one person wrote, We dont eat in an old country store for woke burgers.

Plant-based meat substitutes are often used by conservative commentators as a symbolic stand-in for Big Government and are seen as a threat to individual liberty.

At the 2019 Conservative Political Action Conference, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz declared his wish to see PETA supporting the Republican Party now that the Democrats want to kill all the cows. At a 2020 rally in Des Moines, Iowa, then-President Donald Trump cast the anti-meat conspiracy in even more nefarious and illogical terms, saying that they want to kill our cows! You know why, right? That means youre next.

In 2021, a survey found that 44% of Republicans actively believe that there is a movement in the U.S. to ban red meat.

A larger conspiracy

These fears overlap with the populist right-wing conspiracy theory of The Great Reset, meaning the belief that wealthy elites are weakening citizens particularly white men to subject them to tyrannical control and subjugation.

A 2023 article in The American Conservative argued that Impossible was at the forefront of a collective vegan madness that has seized our media and political classes not to convince people but to compel them. In the online backlash to Cracker Barrels new Impossible sausage item, some commentators similarly suggested that Cracker Barrels 5G sausages were controlled by Bill Gates.

Psychology and gender scholarship has found that traditional forms of masculinity associated with right-wing ideologies correlate with high meat consumption. Right-wing males consume red meats at higher volumes and with greater frequency than other demographics.

As communication scholars, were confident that what Impossible cant do is repackage in a way that will attract right-wing carnivores. The Meat Culture Wars wont end because of red wrappers or meaty descriptors. Theyll only end when, collectively, other items become perceived as an identity threat and globalist conspiracy and people forget about fake meat.

S Marek Muller is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies atTexasStateUniversity. David Rooneya is a doctoral candidate in Communication Studies at the Moody School of Communication,Universityof Texas.

The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.

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Plant-based meat alternatives are trying to exit culture wars an impossible task? - Japan Today