February 1-16, 2021

Thanks

Much of my climate news comes from The Daily Climate, whose wonderful subscription service clues me in to what's going on each day. Another great source of stories (and commentaries) comes from my friend Jim Poyser, at Apocadocs. They stopped collecting news at the election of U.S. Unindicted Co-conspirator Forty-Five, which was a frickin' party pooper of a day, I'll tell ya. Their recovery scenario is perhaps more progressive than the Green New Deal.

Quotes

  • James Baldwin:
    • "People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction…." — Notes of a Native Son
    • "It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have." — No Name in the Street
    • "Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced." — As Much Truth As One Can Bear
  • "If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out that's not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven't even pulled the knife out much less heal the wound. They won't even admit the knife is there." — Malcolm X, TV interview, Mar. 1964
  • "… all you can talk about is money, and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!" — Greta Thunberg (address to the UN, 2019)
  • "The fear and dread of you will fall on all the beasts of the earth, and on all the birds in the sky, on every creature that moves along the ground, and on all the fish in the sea; they are given into your hands." — Genesis 9:2
  • "[Y]ou cannot postpone a rendezvous with reality forever." Nick Cohen, Observer columnist
  • “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.” — Voltaire
  • "Any course in US history is inauthentic — worse, is a lie — if it doesn't teach the experiences of people like Fannie Lou Hamer." [ael: me, late to the game…:(]
  • "I want to be a great ancestor…." Overheard on an ACLU zoom call….

And Now for the News

February 1-16, 2021

2/16/2021

  • Revealed: Monsanto owner and US officials pressured Mexico to drop glyphosate ban: Internal government emails show actions similar to those by Bayer and lobbyists to kill a proposed ban in Thailand in 2019
    • The moves to protect glyphosate shipments to Mexico have played out over the last 18 months, a period in which Bayer was negotiating an $11bn settlement of legal claims brought by people in the US who say they developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma due to exposure to the company’s glyphosate-based products.
    • So far the collaborative campaign to get the Mexican government to reverse its policy does not appear to be working. The Mexican president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has given farmers until 2024 to stop using glyphosate. On 31 December, the country published a “final decree” calling not only for the end of the use of glyphosate but also a phase-out of the planting and consumption of genetically engineered corn, which farmers often spray with glyphosate, a practice that often leaves residues of the pesticide in finished food products.
    • The records show alarm starting to grow in the latter part of 2019 after Mexico said it was refusing imports of glyphosate from China. In denying a permit for an import shipment, Mexican officials cited the “precautionary principle,” which generally refers to a policy of erring on the side of caution in dealing with substances for which there is scientific concern or dispute over safety.
    • A meeting between US and Mexican officials was held in January 2020 and a USTR “briefing paper”, prepared as guidance for the meeting, included the glyphosate issue as a key concern to be discussed with Luz Maria de la Mora, Mexico’s undersecretary for foreign trade. The paper specified as one talking point the United States’ concern that the rejection of glyphosate imports was done “without a clear scientific justification”. [ael: oh my…. could it be that the tRump administration was lying, was completely bullshitting? Impossible… for a plain yellow pumpkin to become a golden carriage! Impossible!]
    • By March, Mexico’s actions on glyphosate and genetically engineered crops needed “urgent attention”, according to a letter sent from Chris Novak, CropLife president, to Robert Lighthizer, USTR’s ambassador, copying the heads of the USDA and the EPA. Mexico’s actions were “incompatible with Mexico’s obligations under USMCA”, according to the CropLife letter. CropLife is funded by Bayer and other agrochemical companies.
    • “If Mexico extends the precautionary principle” to pesticide residue levels in food, “$20bn in US annual agricultural exports to Mexico will be jeopardized”, Novak wrote to US officials. [ael: let us throw precaution to the wind! Wild abandon, of all regulation and self-control!]
    • CropLife’s Novak told the Guardian that Mexico’s actions to ban glyphosate set “a dangerous precedent” that ignores farmer needs and “undermines the integrity of scientific standards as the foundation for global trade”. [ael: barf]
  • More Ohioans Want Some Say in Siting Drilling Waste Injection Wells: Each well drilled using hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for oil and gas production creates tens of millions of gallons of wastewater, called produced water or brine. In Ohio, much of that wastewater is disposed of in underground injection wells, including waste from Pennsylvania and West Virginia. As the number of injection wells grows in Ohio, local communities want some control over where these wells are located.
    • But nearly half of the more than 38 million barrels (1.6 billion gallons) of waste injected in Ohio disposal wells in 2017 came from West Virginia and Pennsylvania, according to the ODNR. “So somewhere there was a decoupling of what’s generated in Ohio and what Ohio is disposing of, which means that we are more and more taking in a higher percentage of other people’s stuff,” said Ted Auch of the nonprofit Fractracker Alliance.
    • In recent years, as more injection wells are permitted, there have been problems. In 2019, brine injected into one well in Washington County migrated into producing oil and gas wells five miles a way. And just this month, an old gas well started spewing brine for days into the environment, killing fish. Brine is suspected to have come from nearby injection wells. According the state, there have been 65 spills of oil and gas related brine in the past three years. Eleven of those happened in Belmont County, where OMNI Energy is building its injection wells. [ael: who could have foreseen that? It's impossible to foresee these sorts of things. So to hell with precaution! Throw precaution to the wind!]
  • Isadore Singer, Who Bridged a Gulf From Math to Physics, Dies at 96: His unifying disparate theoretical realms helped revolutionize our understanding of the most basic structure of the universe.
    • Dr. Singer was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1983 and the Abel Prize in 2004, often considered the Nobel of mathematics.
    • Isadore Manuel Singer — known to his friends as Is — was born on May 3, 1924, in Detroit to Simon and Freda Singer, immigrants from Poland. His father, who spoke only Yiddish, was a printer; his mother was a seamstress. Isadore quickly learned English and taught his family the language. His brother, Sidney, went on to become a particle physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. (He died in 2016.)
    • Isadore studied physics at the University of Michigan, graduating in two and a half years in order to join the Army as a radar officer during World War II. Stationed in the Philippines, he ran a communications school for the Filipino Army during the day. At night, he filled in the gaps of his abbreviated education, studying mathematics in correspondence courses to learn the prerequisites for relativity and quantum mechanics.
    • But all those were dwarfed by his singular contribution, the Atiyah-Singer Index theorem. Together with Dr. Atiyah, he created an unimagined link between the mathematical subfields of analysis and topology — and then united those fields with theoretical physics.
    • Dr. Atiyah, meanwhile, specialized in topology, which studies the shapes of abstract mathematical objects, often in many more dimensions than our ordinary three. Topology considers shapes to be elastic, so that objects can be pulled or squished without changing their fundamental nature. The two fields seemed to be nearly irremediably divided, because topology twists objects around, and analysis needs them to be rigid. Nevertheless, in the early 1960s, Dr. Singer and Dr. Atiyah sought to figure out if Dr. Atiyah’s topological tools could find solutions to analytical problems Dr. Singer was having with differential equations. Finding the exact solutions was too hard. But they found a way to figure out the number of solutions to the equations, even without their exact values. This was the Atiyah-Singer Index theorem.
    • That was just the beginning. In 1975, James H. Simons, a mathematician and a close collaborator with Dr. Singer (and later a prominent hedge fund manager and philanthropist), and Chen Ning Yang, a Nobel-winning physicist, were discussing their work. They realized that in their own scientific languages they were each talking about a common underlying structure. What the physicists called a “gauge theory” was what the mathematicians called a “fiber bundle.”
    • “This was the Big Bang of late 20th century unification between mathematics and physics,” said the mathematician and economist Eric Weinstein. “It was Is Singer who lit the spark that caused the fire.”

2/15/2021

  • After the Speech: What Trump Did as the Capitol Was Attacked: New evidence emerged in the impeachment trial about what President Donald J. Trump did from roughly 1 to 6 p.m. the day of the Capitol attack. But many questions remain unanswered.
    • Mr. Trump concluded his incendiary speech on the Ellipse at 1:11 p.m. He had repeatedly told the crowd that the election was stolen from him and urged his supporters to march to the Capitol in a last-ditch effort to stop President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory from being certified. Mr. Trump said twice that he would go with them. And days before the march, he had told advisers that he wanted to join his supporters, but aides told him that people in the crowd were armed and that the Secret Service would not be able to protect him.
    • Six minutes later, Mr. Trump’s motorcade began heading back to the White House. He arrived there at 1:19 p.m. as the crowd was making its way up Pennsylvania Avenue and beginning to swarm around the Capitol. Television news footage showed the mob as it moved closer to the doors.
    • At 1:34 p.m., Mayor Muriel Bowser of Washington made a formal request for assistance in a phone call with the Army secretary, Ryan D. McCarthy. At 1:49 p.m., as the Capitol Police asked Pentagon officials for help from the National Guard, Mr. Trump tweeted a video of his incendiary rally speech.
    • At 2:12 p.m., the same moment that the mob breached the building itself, Mr. Pence — who had defied the president by saying he planned to certify Mr. Biden’s victory — was rushed off the Senate floor. A minute later, the Senate session was recessed. Two minutes after that, at 2:15 p.m., groups of rioters began to chant, “Hang Mike Pence!”
    • Nine minutes later, at 2:24 p.m., Mr. Trump tweeted a broadside at Mr. Pence for moving ahead to certify Mr. Biden’s win: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!”
    • At 2:26 p.m., after Mr. Pence had been whisked away, a call was placed from the White House to Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, according to call logs that the senator provided during the impeachment proceedings.
    • The president had made the call, but he was actually looking for Senator Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama. Mr. Lee gave the phone to Mr. Tuberville, who has told reporters that he informed Mr. Trump that Mr. Pence had just been escorted out as the mob got closer to the Senate chamber. “I said, ‘Mr. President, they just took the vice president out, I’ve got to go,’” Mr. Tuberville recounted to Politico. This was a significant new piece of information. House prosecutors used it to argue that Mr. Trump was clearly aware that the vice president was in danger and that he had a callous disregard for Mr. Pence’s safety. On Friday, Mr. Trump’s defense team had insisted that Mr. Trump was not aware of any peril facing Mr. Pence.
    • Back at the White House, advisers were trying to get Mr. Trump to do something, but he rebuffed calls to intercede, including those from people wanting to see the National Guard deployed. The president, several advisers said, was expressing pleasure that the vote to certify Mr. Biden’s win had been delayed and that people were fighting for him.
    • “According to public reports, he watched television happily — happily — as the chaos unfolded,” Mr. McConnell said on Saturday. “He kept pressing his scheme to overturn the election. Even after it was clear to any reasonable observer that Vice President Pence was in serious danger, even as the mob carrying Trump banners was beating cops and breaching perimeters, the president sent a further tweet attacking his own vice president.
    • Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a close Republican ally of the president’s, told The Washington Post that he called Ivanka Trump, Mr. Trump’s eldest daughter, to try to get her to reason with her father. Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, also called Ms. Trump to see if she could talk to her father. A short time later, she arrived in the Oval Office, urging Mr. Trump to issue a statement. The White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, hammered at Mr. Trump to understand that he had potential legal exposure for what was taking place. Finally, at 2:38 p.m., Mr. Trump tweeted, “Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!”
    • A short time later, at 3:13 p.m., Mr. Trump added a note, “I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order – respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!” Ms. Trump quoted her father’s tweet when she sent out her own, telling “American Patriots” to follow the law. She quickly deleted it and replaced it when she faced blowback on Twitter for appearing to praise the rioters as “patriots.”
    • Around 3:30 p.m., Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House Republican leader and another ally of Mr. Trump’s, told CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell that he had spoken that afternoon with Mr. Trump as the Capitol was under siege…. In a statement on Friday night that was admitted into evidence in the trial on Saturday, Ms. Herrera Beutler recounted that Mr. McCarthy had a shouting match with Mr. Trump during the call. Mr. McCarthy had told Mr. Trump that his own office windows were being broken into. “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are,” Mr. Trump said, according to a report by CNN that the congresswoman confirmed.
    • The violence continued. Well before the Capitol Police announced at 8 p.m. that the building had been secured, Mr. Trump put out a final tweet at 6:01 p.m.: “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!”
  • Four reasons experts say coronavirus cases are dropping in the United States
    • Some point to the quickening pace of coronavirus vaccine administration, some say it’s because of the natural seasonal ebb of respiratory viruses and others chalk it up to social distancing measures. And every explanation is appended with two significant caveats: The country is still in a bad place, continuing to notch more than 90,000 new cases every day, and recent progress could still be imperiled, either by new fast-spreading virus variants or by relaxed social distancing measures.
    • “I don’t think the vaccine is having much of an impact at all on case rates," Tom Frieden said in an interview Sunday on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS.” “It’s what we’re doing right: staying apart, wearing masks, not traveling, not mixing with others indoors.” However, Frieden noted, the country’s numbers are still higher than they were during the spring and summer virus waves and “we’re nowhere near out of the woods.”
    • Researchers at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, publisher of a popular coronavirus model, are among those who attribute declining cases to vaccines and the virus’s seasonality, which scientists have said may allow it to spread faster in colder weather.
    • A fourth, less optimistic explanation has also emerged: More new cases are simply going undetected. On Twitter, Eleanor Murray, a professor of epidemiology at Boston University School of Public Health, said an increased focus on vaccine distribution and administration could be making it harder to get tested.
    • Where most experts agree: The mutated variants of the virus pose perhaps the biggest threat to the country’s recovery. One is spreading rapidly and another, known as B.1.351, contains a mutation that may help the virus partly evade natural and vaccine-induced antibodies. Fewer than 20 cases have been reported in the United States, but a critically ill man in France underscores the variant’s potentially dangerous consequences. The 58-year-old had a mild coronavirus infection in September and the B.1.351 strain reinfected him four months later.

2/14/2021 — Who killed Kizito Mihigo?; Virettia Whiteside Day

  • Historic Arctic outbreak brings dangerous cold, snow and ice to central and southern U.S.: Winter storm warnings and advisories cover all of Texas, Oklahoma and Missouri as snow and ice move in
    • A historic Arctic outbreak continues to bring a bone-chilling deep freeze to the central United States, as the coldest air in generations plunges south and is accompanied by snow and ice all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Some cities will see their lowest temperatures in more than a century as high-impact winter storms roll across the country.
    • Temperatures about 50 degrees below average occupy an enormous swath of the central United States, stretching from the Rockies to the Mississippi Valley and the Midwest. At least 15 states could see temperatures of minus-10 or colder, while lows near the U.S.-Canada border flirt with minus-40. More than 50 million people could see temperatures dip below zero during the next several days as the record-setting deep freeze envelops the country.
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  • Breaking the Rule of One: After upending a racial norm in the rural South, a Black councilwoman contends with defiance from a community she wants to serve
    • Local elections were coming up. Virettia had always thought of her town as “a nice place to live but a hard place to be anybody unless your granddaddy’s uncle’s cousin’s a somebody.” For a while, her father had been somebody — the city’s first Black councilman — but that was long ago, and she had always wondered what to make of his silence about the experience. But now it was the summer of protests after the killing of George Floyd. She was raising two sons. She saw Black women changing politics across the South including next door in Georgia, and soon she was posting a statement on Facebook titled “My Why”: “I am running because I’m a mother, a daughter, a sister, a friend and I am committed to our city, its residents and making local government work better for everyone.”
    • She started organizing tenants in the two apartment buildings she managed, Mayfair Manor and Valley Cove — a multiracial coalition of fast-food workers, former addicts, veterans, the elderly, the disabled and a few who kept declining to fill out voter registration forms until it became clear they could not read. She took a deep breath and ventured into a subdivision called Haughton Acres, walking up to houses flying Trump flags, and as the campaign went on, the rest of the town realized this was no ordinary election.
    • But at a moment when old political orthodoxies were being challenged all the way down to small towns in the rural South, there were now two Black women on the Fayette City Council: one representing the Black ward, and Virettia Whiteside, 35, manager of two apartment complexes across from a vestigial cotton field on the east side of town. She listened as the mayor opened the first regular meeting of the new council.
    • [ael: more strong women! Go, Virettia, go!]
  • Mitch McConnell savages Trump – minutes after voting to acquit: Senate minority leader says Trump ‘practically and morally responsible’ for Capitol riot, but votes not guilty regardless
    • McConnell, like the Senators who voted in favor of impeachment, was deeply critical of Trump’s conduct leading up to the attack. “They [the mob] did this because they’d been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on Earth because he was angry he lost an election,” McConnell said.
    • McConnell would have happily considered finding Trump guilty, were it not for Mitch McConnell
      • Even casual observers of American politics will recognize that this is not the first time that McConnell has been willing to throw his past self under the bus. You may recall his principled stand in early 2016 that no Supreme Court vacancy should be filled with a presidential election looming — a stand which he merrily torched when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died shortly before last year’s election. (For what it’s worth, he also managed to make an often-lengthy confirmation process fit within a much more constrained window of time.)
  • Rwanda: The Dove's music united a nation torn by genocide. Why did he die in a cell? A year ago, singer Kizito Mihigo died after being arrested for his song mourning the Tutsi and Hutu killings. Now western donors want a full inquiry into his death
    • Masses will be held across at least four continents this week to mark the anniversary of the death of Rwanda’s most famous gospel singer. But there will be a key difference in the ceremonies staged in Kizito Mihigo’s country of birth and those abroad. In Rwanda, no one will dare publicly to question how – or why – the baby-faced singer met his end. In the rest of the world, fans will be clamouring for justice.
    • In the US, campaigners’ attention is focused on the forthcoming trial in Kigali of Paul Rusesabagina, the former hotel manager whose efforts to save his Tutsi guests from being slaughtered by Hutu extremists won him Hollywood fame. Rusesabagina, who became a vocal critic of the RPF, was renditioned to Rwanda last August and is facing charges of financing terrorism.
    • For a few years, Kizito could do no wrong. His songs played incessantly on Rwandan radio and he was the performer of choice whenever the national anthem was sung at genocide commemorations. He was on friendly terms with first lady Jeannette Kagame, and rumours circulated he was dating the Kagames’ daughter. A weekly television show made him a household name.
    • But he began to suspect the regime, which controversially called the 1994 massacres “the genocide of the Tutsi” – thereby consigning to oblivion Hutus also killed in 1994 for supporting democratic reform – was exploiting his community’s victim status to keep Rwanda’s Hutu majority cowed and subservient. He was repelled by the notion of collective Hutu guilt, shocked when the government urged Hutus too young to have taken part in the genocide to publicly apologise for their supposed crimes. In March 2014, he brought out a song that broke every official taboo. While the UN and human rights investigators agree the RPF slaughtered tens of thousands of Hutus in Rwanda and neighbouring DRC before and after the genocide, Kagame has always insisted these killings were limited in number and carried out in the heat of emotion. Kizito’s song The Meaning of Death challenged that narrative, calling on Rwandans to show empathy to both victims of the genocide and “revenge killings”, as these deaths are termed. Eyes shut, clutching a rosary, the famous rescapé sings that death is equally terrible for all.
    • A final straw seems to have been a conversation in which Munyuza told the singer he’d deposited money in his bank account in return for services yet-to-be rendered. On 14 February 2020, Kizito and two collaborators headed south, intent on fleeing the country. Kizito’s famous face appears to have been his undoing. He was recognised in villages he passed through, and police caught the three near the frontier with Burundi. A few days later Rwandan police announced Kizito had been found dead in his cell, having allegedly used bedsheets to hang himself. Within hours, a gruesome photo, impossible to authenticate, began circulating on social media. It shows someone who looks very much like Kizito lying in a pool of blood, bruises to his head and neck. The man’s arms are tied firmly behind his back.
    • The Commonwealth Human Right Initiative and HRW, along with British and US government officials, called for an independent inquiry, but their requests have gone ignored by Rwanda’s justice ministry. No inquest was ever staged. Yet those who spoke to Kizito after his rearrest insist he was full of plans for the future, and gave no hint of feeling suicidal. Every Rwandan in the diaspora I interviewed for this article rejects the notion he died by his own hand.
    • Why kill Kizito, a devout entertainer popular with Hutus and Tutsis? Friends and family – too petrified to be named – believe he died because his songs highlighted the hypocrisy of the post-genocide narrative the RPF promotes abroad. “He was trying to unite Hutu and Tutsi, while the government depends on divide and rule,” says a friend based in the US. “He was preaching that we should forgive, make one nation, and they don’t want that.” Rather than protecting him, his celebrity may well have been a contributory cause. By targeting someone so high profile, the RPF signalled that no one is off limits.
  • Denmark’s Clean Energy Moonshot
    • [ael: video describing Denmark's plans for power-to-X islands in the North Sea, or near the Faroe Islands and Greenland — to take advantage of the Northwest passages, opened because of the thing we're fighting….]

2/13/2021 — sHame the tRump Day

  • Highwayman's 1750 confessions reveal ‘unusual’ ambivalence about gay sex: Rare pamphlet includes roistering criminal’s surprisingly enlightened attitude to the advances made to him by an innkeeper’s son
  • Dramatic discovery links Stonehenge to its original site – in Wales: Find backs theory that bluestones first stood at Waun Mawn before being dragged 140 miles to Wiltshire
  • 'Hopefully it makes history': Fight for $15 closes in on mighty win for US workers: Fast-food workers will walk out on Tuesday, hoping to push through a minimum-wage raise to benefit tens of millions
    • For Major, now 55, it all began in a hall in Brooklyn, where union and community activists had convened a meeting of fast-food workers to see what pressure they could bring on an industry notorious for its low wages and poor conditions, and a state that had shown those workers little interest.
    • Industry lobbying allied to Republican and – until relatively recently – Democratic opposition has locked the US’s minimum wage at $7.25 since the last raise in 2009. Now a raise to $15 looks set to be included in Joe Biden’s $1.9tn Covid relief package – although it will still face fierce opposition. Even Biden, who campaigned on the raise, has expressed doubt about whether it can pass. But more progressive Democrats including longtime champion Senator Bernie Sanders are determined to push it through, and it remains in the House Covid relief bill.
    • The stakes are huge. The Congressional Budget Office said this week that 27 million Americans would be affected by the increase, and that 900,000 would be lifted out of poverty at a time when low-wage workers – and especially people of color – have suffered most during the pandemic. The CBO also said the increase would lead to 1.4m job losses and increase the federal budget deficit by $54bn over the next 10 years.
    • Other economists have disputed the CBO’s job-loss predictions – the Economic Policy Institute called them “wrong, and inappropriately inflated”. The long-running debate about the real cost of raising the minimum age will no doubt continue. What is certain is that Biden will face enormous political blowback if his campaign promise to raise the minimum wage falls so early in his presidency – a promise that during his campaign he argued was central to his plans to address racial inequality.
    • That backlash will also cross party lines – at least outside Washington. The US may be as politically divided as it has been since the civil war, but polling shows the majority of Americans support increasing the minimum wage no matter their chosen party. In November 60% of voters approved a ballot initiative to increase the minimum wage to $15 by 2026 even as they voted to re-elect Donald Trump.
    • Big companies including Amazon, Target and Disney have all moved to $15, or pledged to do so. One of Biden’s first executive orders called for federal contractors to pay employees a $15 minimum wage. The federal holdout would be the movement’s biggest win to date, but there is little arguing that they have made significant progress without it – not least for Alvin Major, who now has a union job earning over $17 an hour working at JFK airport and who says he is no longer worried about his bills.
    • Does she feel like part of history? “Hopefully it makes history,” said Alvarez. “But I don’t think I’m part of history. I’m tired, I’m tired of being mistreated, of being underpaid and overworked. We want that $15 and a union. I guess you don’t think about the whole history part until after it’s been done.” [ael: sick and tired of being sick and tired….]
  • Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust and Corpses to Compost: Where will you go when you die? In Washington state, you could choose your garden.
    • Recompose, an ecological death care company in Seattle, started offering human composting at the end of 2020. The option became legal in 2019 thanks to efforts by Recompose founder Katrina Spade, who worked with her state senator to pass a bill legalizing “natural organic reduction”—the process that turns human bodies into soil.
    • Inside the Recompose “Greenhouse,” 10 futuristic, white hexagonal vessels are surrounded by ferns, trees and other greenery—a lively contrast to a typical funeral home. Inside each vessel, a body rests in an 8-by-4-foot cylinder with wood chips, alfalfa, straw and plant material. For a month, microbes work to break down the body, which creates one cubic yard of nutrient-rich soil. Families can choose to bring home the soil formed from the remains of their loved ones or donate it to Bells Mountain, a land trust in southern Washington, where it will restore degraded forest land.
    • The $5,500 process uses just one-eighth of the energy that conventional burial or cremation uses, according to the Recompose website. While conventional burial uses massive amounts of land and materials, and cremation is powered by fossil fuels, human compost sequesters carbon and provides nutrients for plants. The process prevents one metric ton of carbon dioxide emissions per body, the website says.
    • [ael: I'm going to start a company and do it for $300 — but I've only got so much room in my 10x10 garden….]

2/12/2021

  • Trump Was Sicker Than Acknowledged With Covid-19: When he was hospitalized with the coronavirus in October, his blood oxygen levels had plunged and officials feared he was on the verge of being placed on a ventilator.
    • [ael: one more lie, just for the record…. We'd been saying "C'mon Jesus!", and Jesus was so close. Why didn't he seal the deal?]
  • Shell, in a Turning Point, Says Its Oil Production Has Peaked: Europe’s largest oil and gas producer said oil production would gradually decline 1 or 2 percent annually, underscoring the company’s desire to shift to greener energy.
    • Royal Dutch Shell on Thursday made the boldest statement among its peers about the waning of the oil age, saying its production reached a high in 2019 and is now likely to gradually decline. Shell’s “total oil production peaked in 2019” and will now drop 1 or 2 percent annually, the company said in a statement.
    • The company also emphasized that its emission reduction targets would include those of the products it sold to customers. That means, in trying to reduce its net carbon emissions to zero, Shell will be counting not just the emissions generated in its business but the gases coming out of the tailpipes of cars using fuels that Shell markets. The burning and other uses of fuels that Shell sells account for 90 percent of the company’s emissions.
  • Chick Corea, Jazz Keyboardist and Innovator, Dies at 79: When jazz and rock fused in the 1970s, he was at the forefront of the movement. But he never abandoned his love of the acoustic piano.
    • But it was playing in Miles Davis’s ensembles that set Mr. Corea on the path that would most define his role in jazz. He played the electric piano on Davis’s “In a Silent Way” (1969) and “Bitches Brew” (1970), the albums that sounded the opening bell for the fusion era.
    • Though he had become symbolic of the fusion movement, Mr. Corea never put much stock in musical categories. “It’s the media that are so interested in categorizing music,” he told The Times in 1983, “the media and the businessmen, who, after all, have a vested interest in keeping marketing clear cut and separate. If critics would ask musicians their views about what is happening, you would find that there is always a fusion of sorts taking place. All this means is a continual development — a continual merging of different streams.”
    • Armando Anthony Corea was born on June 12, 1941, in Chelsea, Mass., near Boston. His father, also named Armando Corea, was a trumpeter and bandleader in Boston, and his mother, Anna (Zaccone) Corea, was a homemaker. He began studying piano when he was 4. He picked up his nickname from an aunt, who often pinched his big cheeks and called him “cheeky.” The name eventually morphed into the pithier “Chick.”
    • In 1997, delivering a commencement address at Berklee College of Music, Mr. Corea told the members of the graduating class to insist on blazing their own path. “It’s all right to be yourself,” he said. “In fact, the more yourself you are, the more money you make.”
  • Build Nothing New That Ultimately Leads to a Flame: Today, I offer a second ground rule, corollary to the first: definitely don’t build anything new that connects to a flame.
    • It’s obvious, of course, that we’re not going to stop burning fossil fuel tomorrow: there are, for instance, 1.42 billion cars on the planet’s roads, and, at the end of 2019, less than one half of one per cent of them were fully electric. You can’t simply force conventional vehicles off the road, any more than you can instantly turn off every gas-fired power plant. That’s why global warming is such a wickedly difficult problem: two hundred years of constant development with fossil fuels at the center of our economy has left all of us deeply entangled. On the other hand, we do have to stop burning fossil fuel. Climate scientists have told us that, if we don’t cut emissions in half by 2030, we’re not going to meet the targets set in the Paris climate accord. Renewable energy has gotten so cheap so fast that the economics of such an endeavor are no longer insane. It would require an all-hands effort, grander in scale but similar in kind to the green-infrastructure program that President Biden has promised to propose, and one conducted around the world. But we have no chance if we simultaneously keep building new infrastructure for fossil fuels. If you’re already in a hole that would take a decade to climb out of, why would you dig yourself another decade’s worth of pit?
    • This principle—don’t build anything new that eventually leads to a flame—means that the Biden Administration should look askance at new pipelines. It has already taken care of Keystone XL, but the same logic says to shut off the Dakota Access pipeline (which is facing new legal trouble) and stop construction on Line 3 in Minnesota (especially during the pandemic). This logic means not building new L.N.G. facilities, such as Jordan Cove, in Oregon, or the Weymouth compressor station, in Massachusetts. It means not letting new homes and buildings hook up to natural gas. (Mayor Bill de Blasio just announced this plan for New York City, though full implementation won’t come until 2030.) It means stopping the construction of new gas stations, in favor of building out a network of E.V. chargers (and electric trains). If flame is a necessary part of our life for the moment but we need to douse it as soon as possible, then not building new bonfires is a sensible first step.
  • Young Climate Litigants Push High Court Fight Some Call Reckless
    • The young plaintiffs behind an ambitious climate lawsuit are taking their case to the U.S. Supreme Court, despite warnings from environmental lawyers that the attempt could backfire. Lawyers for the 21 children and young adults in Juliana v. United States quickly announced plans Wednesday to file a Supreme Court petition after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit refused to revive their claims that the federal government has violated their constitutional right to a stable climate system.
    • The plaintiffs have also sent letters to the Justice Department asking the Biden administration to come to the table to negotiate a potential settlement focused on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Biden hasn’t commented on the kids’ climate case, but on the campaign trail pledged to “strategically support” plaintiffs in other types of climate litigation.

2/11/2021 — Catherine Flowers Day

  • Activist Catherine Flowers: the poor living amid sewage is 'the final monument of the Confederacy': In rural Alabama where Martin Luther King marched for civil rights, Flowers has waged a long fight for environmental justice
    • When Flowers started on her journey all those years ago, she saw the crisis as one rooted in racism. She still thinks that – she uses a striking metaphor that the stream of effluent running down the road in Lowndes county is “the final monument to the Confederacy”. But the disaster is wider than that, she now believes. “What I’m finding is that it boils down to a lack of respect, and that lack of respect is expanding in this country. White people can’t afford to ignore this because they can become victims of it as well – it’s just more likely to happen to people of color first.”
    • [ael: certainly lack of awareness; and, for those who are aware, fatigue; and of course racism….]
    • Related: 'If white people were still here, this wouldn’t happen': the majority-Black town flooded with sewage: Black residents in Centreville, Illinois, say officials ignored their pleas for help for years. Now they’re quarantined in toxic conditions
      • For decades, residents of Centreville, a nearly all-Black town of 5,000 in southern Illinois, just a 12-minute drive from downtown East St Louis, have been dealing with persistent flooding and sewage overflows. The smell of it is in the air all over town after a rain, and bits of soggy toilet paper and slicks of human waste cling to the grass in neighborhoods where children used to play on warm days, locals said. Kids don’t play outside any more. Gardens don’t grow.Residents and environmental justice advocates also believe that these issues persist because the town is one of the poorest in America, with a median household income of less than $15,000 a year and almost half of residents living below the poverty line. They contend that authorities at the local and state level might have addressed wastewater problems long ago if the area was wealthier and more influential.
  • NASA's Climate Communications Might Not Recover From the Damage of Trump's Systemic Suppression: Laura Faye Tenenbaum is a writer and public speaker currently working on a memoir about her love of the natural world and her fight for empowerment within the science community.
    • I was the senior science editor for NASA’s Global Climate Change website and witnessed the impact of science suppression firsthand. I’d been at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), one of 10 NASA centers, for a decade when, three weeks into the Trump Administration, on Feb. 16, 2017, the Washington Post published an article noting that while the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Park Service were shutting down climate communication, NASA was still writing about climate change. The Post piece shared links to my most recent NASA blog post about the rapid increase of ice-mass loss in Greenland, plus my @NASAClimate tweets and NASA Climate Change Facebook page.
    • It caused NASA management to panic. Scott Pruitt had been appointed to head the EPA and promptly removed the EPA’s climate-change website. NASA management seemed to fear a similar fate. My manager sent a text late on the evening the Post published the story—it was a Thursday before a three-day weekend (NASA has what’s called a “9/80 work schedule,” meaning every other Friday is a day off)—which was so unusual that I saved a screen capture. It read, “We’ve been asked to stand down on social until we regroup next week.” He followed up with a frantic phone call, warning me not to post anything anywhere. When I checked my email the next morning, there was a message from Facebook: “You’re getting this email to confirm that you’re no longer an admin on NASA Climate Change. You were removed on February 17, 2017 at 9:45am.”
    • Under the Biden Administration, scientific institutions might eventually recover. The new President has appointed Gavin Schmidt, a top NASA scientist, to the position of acting senior climate adviser, a new role formed to help put greater focus on the agency’s research on climate change. But rebuilding the government and restoring the federal climate-science apparatus won’t be easy. These scientific institutions will also need to regain public trust—far too many Americans believed Trump’s lies about climate science, just as they believed his lies about COVID-19 and election fraud. And just as with this pandemic, the sooner we start doing the right thing—making decisions based on sound, evidence-based research—the more we can avoid the most dangerous outcomes.
  • Trump’s Environmental Policies Killed Thousands of People, Scientists Say
    • The Trump administration deliberately harnessed racism and class animosity to push policies that caused hundreds of thousands of deaths in the United States, including pandemic-related deaths that could have been avoided, says a new report in the medical journal The Lancet. Trump’s rollbacks of environmental and workplace protections led to 22,000 excess deaths in 2019 alone, it says.

2/10/2021

  • Why Germany Prosecutes the Aged for Nazi Roles It Long Ignored: Since German courts expanded the definition of who was guilty of Holocaust atrocities, several people over 90 have been charged.
    • A dissection table at the Sachsenhausen camp in Oranienburg, Germany. Credit…Jan Bauer/Associated Press
      merlin_183452577_7c551ed5-1628-466d-b150-a50689981d64-jumbo.jpg?quality=90&auto=webp
    • [ael: lest we forget….]
  • Large food companies are looking to lock carbon in soil as a way to meet ambitious emissions goals: Regenerative agriculture practices can sequester carbon in soil, but for companies with complex supply chains, the logistics of moving to such practices can be complicated.
    • Stonyfield isn’t the only food company betting big on meeting its carbon reduction pledge by shifting its farmers toward regenerative agriculture practices that sequester carbon in soil, among other benefits. General Mills, Cargill, Danone, Walmart and others have made similar ambitious pledges, and for good reason. Like other food companies, their agricultural supply chains are responsible for a huge portion of their carbon emissions. In fact, researchers recently concluded in Science that world climate goals cannot be achieved without fundamental changes to our food system. Regenerative farming, which centers on building soil health, is one promising pathway for decreasing agriculture’s carbon footprint. But how does a large food company motivate the multitude of farmers in its supply chain to adopt farming practices that bind carbon in the soil? And how do we know that these agricultural practices are truly sequestering carbon, and for how long?
    • Take General Mills, which set a goal of converting 1 million acres (405,000 hectares) in its supply chain to regenerative farming practices to help cut its carbon footprint 30% by 2030, and to net zero by 2050. That goal covers about 20% to 25% of its massive global supply chain, according to Jay Watson, sourcing sustainability engagement manager at General Mills.
  • University in Norway responds to Will Ferrell and GMs Super Bowl ad - Sorry (not sorry)
    • Free tuition
    • Free health care
    • One year paid maternity leave
    • Real Social Security
    • etc.
  • General Motors' Super Bowl commercial gets hilarious response from Audi Norway and Innovation Norway
  • A French nun survived the 1918 flu pandemic and both world wars. Now she’s beaten coronavirus days before she turns 117.
  • A majority of the people arrested for Capitol riot had a history of financial trouble: Trail of bankruptcies, tax problems and bad debts raises questions for researchers trying to understand motivations for attack
    • Nearly 60 percent of the people facing charges related to the Capitol riot showed signs of prior money troubles, including bankruptcies, notices of eviction or foreclosure, bad debts, or unpaid taxes over the past two decades, according to a Washington Post analysis of public records for 125 defendants with sufficient information to detail their financial histories. The group’s bankruptcy rate — 18 percent — was nearly twice as high as that of the American public, The Post found. A quarter of them had been sued for money owed to a creditor. And 1 in 5 of them faced losing their home at one point, according to court filings.
    • The participation of people with middle- and upper-middle-class positions fits with research suggesting that the rise of right-wing extremist groups in the 1950s was fueled by people in the middle of society who felt they were losing status and power, said Pippa Norris, a political science professor at Harvard University who has studied radical political movements. Miller-Idriss said she was struck by a 2011 study that found household income was not a factor in whether a young person supported the extreme far right in Germany. But a highly significant predictor was whether they had lived through a parent’s unemployment. “These are people who feel like they’ve lost something,” Miller-Idriss said.
    • Trump’s false claims about election fraud — refuted by elections officials and rejected by judges — seemed tailored to exploit feelings about this precarious status, said Don Haider-Markel, a political science professor at the University of Kansas who studies political extremism. “It’s hard to ignore with a Trump presidency that message that ‘the America you knew and loved is going away, and I’m going to protect it,’” Haider-Markel said. “They feel, at a minimum, that they’re under threat.”
    • The roots of extremism are complex, said Haider-Markel. “Somehow they’ve been wronged, they’ve developed a grievance, and they tend to connect that to some broader ideology,” he said.
    • Nine days later, she turned herself in to the FBI. She was charged with two federal misdemeanors related to entering the Capitol building and disorderly conduct. Last week, federal authorities filed similar charges against two others on her flight: Jason L. Hyland, 37, of Frisco, who federal authorities said organized the trip, and Katherine S. Schwab, 32, of Colleyville, Texas. Ryan remained defiant at first. She clashed with people who criticized her online. She told a Dallas TV station she deserved a presidential pardon.
    • Then Trump left for Florida. President Biden took office. And Ryan, at home in Texas, was left to wonder what to do with her two mini-goldendoodle dogs if she goes to prison. “Not one patriot is standing up for me,” Ryan said recently. “I’m a complete villain. I was down there based on what my president said. ‘Stop the steal.’ Now I see that it was all over nothing. He was just having us down there for an ego boost. I was there for him.” [ael: slow people….]
  • CBO analysis confirms that a $15 minimum wage raises earnings of low-wage workers, reduces inequality, and has significant and direct fiscal effects: Large progressive redistribution of income caused by higher minimum wage leads to significant and cross-cutting fiscal effects
    • On the issue of how minimum wage increases are financed, we should note that the CBO’s modeling assumptions indicate that a higher minimum wage is extraordinarily effective in redistributing income from those with very high incomes towards low-wage workers. This is because the CBO assumes that most of the increased labor earnings for low-wage workers are paid for by reduced profits and small price increases, the bulk of which are paid by high-income families whose average annual family income is well over $200,000.6 In short, the CBO’s modeling assumptions—which drive a large part of their finding that higher minimum wages will increase the federal budget deficit—show that a higher minimum wage is extraordinarily effective policy in reversing the generation-long rise in income inequality in the United States. As they note in their analysis: “Although total nominal income would be roughly unchanged in CBO’s estimate, labor income would increase while capital income would decrease. Labor income tends to be more heavily taxed. Income would also shift toward lower-income people and away from higher-income people under the bill.”
  • The antidepressant fluvoxamine could keep mild COVID-19 from worsening: A real-world study and data from animal and cell studies confirm earlier clinical trial results

2/9/2021 — Anna's second shot day

  • Rapid coronavirus tests: a guide for the perplexed: Scientists still debate whether millions of cheap, fast diagnostic kits will help control the pandemic. Here’s why.
    • These speedy tests, which typically mix nasal or throat swabs with liquid on a paper strip to return results within half an hour, are thought of as tests of infectiousness, not of infection. They can detect only high viral loads, so they will miss many people with lower levels of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. But the hope is that they will help to curb the pandemic by quickly identifying the most contagious people, who might otherwise unknowingly pass on the virus.
    • Yet, as the government announced its plan, a furious argument broke out. Some scientists were delighted by the United Kingdom’s testing strategy. Others said that the tests would miss so many infections that, if rolled out in their millions, they could cause more harm than good. Many people might be falsely reassured by a negative test result and change their behaviour, argued Jon Deeks, who specializes in test evaluation at the University of Birmingham, UK. And, he said, the tests would miss even more infections if people self-administered them, rather than relying on trained professionals. He and his Birmingham colleague Jac Dinnes are among scientists who want more data on rapid coronavirus tests before they’re used widely.
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  • Watch This Billion-Year Journey of Earth’s Tectonic Plates: A new simulation offers a different view of how the continents we live on drifted into their current configuration.
    • Older computerized simulations tended to recreate the movements of the continents alone, showing them drifting about on an undynamic blue ocean background like croutons bobbing about in soup. This time around, the scientists tried a new approach. They combined magnetic data, which reveals the positions of rocks relative to the magnetic poles millions of years ago, with geological data describing how the plates interact along their boundaries. The result is a high-fidelity simulation, one that models the migration of entire tectonic plates — continents, oceans and all — showing how they fraternize with one another with remarkable precision.
    • [ael: here's "the movie"]
  • Tardigrade circus and a tree of life — January’s best science images: The month’s sharpest science shots, selected by Nature’s photo team.
    • Tardigrade wheels. Tardigrades, also called water bears, are best known for being indestructible — they can survive extreme heat, radiation and even the vacuum of outer space. This video of a tardigrade under the microscope shows how it interacts with spherical colonies of Volvox aureus, a green alga. “Tardigrades really like something to hold on to when they are on a slippery glass slide, so naturally they grab on to just about anything they waddle into,” says Penny Fenton, a PhD student at the University of Suffolk in Ipswich, UK, who made the video. “They do eat algae, but the Volvox are safe as long as they keep moving.” Fenton studies aquatic toxicology, and does microphotography in her spare time. She cultures the algae and finds wild samples of tardigrades in leaf litter and water from her shed’s rain gutters. Videos of her microscopic performers on Instagram have attracted thousands of likes.
  • Representative Ron Wright, Republican of Texas, died on Sunday after battling Covid-19 in the hospital, his office said on Monday. He was 67.
  • The Mushrooms Will Survive Us: In our ruined global moment, watching something busily transform trash into fleshy, sculptural fruit is a comfort.
    • Six kits for two people quickly proved an outrageous excess. We had pounds and pounds of mushrooms to consume. I cooked oyster mushroom bourguignon, mushroom tacos, mushroom pastas. I sliced the bulbous lion’s mane into thick steaks and seared them in butter. When a few mushrooms sat out too long and shriveled, I boiled them into a mushroom stock for ramen. It was incredible. Still, we could barely keep up.
    • This was the most action my apartment had seen in months. I felt proud that spores might find various hospitable substrates around my home: the grout in the kitchen tile, a musty corner of my old wood floor, the unfinished pine boards stained with water rings from the places I’d set down potted plants too soon after a watering. Fungal threads, for all I knew, could be probing, tendrilic, just beneath the surface right now. They might emerge and sporulate, as the kits had done, sending microscopic sentinels zooming around the room.
    • [ael: I just ordered the Blue Oyster + Lion's Mane grow kit, at Smallhold! Very excited….]
  • How gut microbes could drive brain disorders: Scientists are starting to work out how the gut microbiome can affect brain health. That might lead to better and easier treatments for brain diseases.
    • It’s not yet clear how that signal in the gut reaches the brain, but one likely conduit is the vagus nerve. The vagus connects the brainstem to many organs, including the colon, making it the longest of the twelve cranial nerves that carry signals between the brain and the rest of the body. “It’s really a highway,” Cryan says. And research in humans and animals suggests that it has a crucial role in ferrying at least some messages between the gut and the brain.
  • Fossil Fuel Pollution Kills 8.7 Million a Year, Twice Previous Estimate: Fine-particle pollution is harmful even at lower levels, according to a global study
    • [ael: more than have been killed by this global pandemic — but I guess we're okay with this, because it's about driving in our cars….]
    • Fossil fuels are alone responsible for more than 8 million premature deaths annually, according to new research by a team of U.S. and U.K. scientists published in Environmental Research. That's double the previous high-end estimate of fine-particle pollution mortality, and three times the combined number killed by HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria in 2018.
    • Even though air quality has improved in many countries, particularly wealthier ones, the findings suggest that even at lower concentrations pollution caused by fossil fuels is deadlier than previously understood. In the U.S., for instance, the researchers found that 350,000 premature deaths per year are attributable to fine-particulate pollution generated by fossil-fuel combustion, up from previous estimates of roughly 100,000 to 150,000. This means even successful pollution-fighters have more work to do—particularly in poor and historically disadvantaged areas, where pollution is even more concentrated.
    • This work might have been prevented from informing public health policy but for a federal court in Montana, which last week vacated a rule written by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under former President Donald Trump that barred scientific research based on standard, anonymized health data from consideration in its work. The rule would have effectively negated nearly three decades of research demonstrating that air pollution kills people.
  • Biden's new conservation corps stirs hopes of nature-focused hiring spree: A 1930s initiative that tackled environmental woes and unemployment could inspire the new administration’s plans to confront the climate crisis
    • Now, as the ongoing pandemic has wrought the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression, Roosevelt’s public jobs programs are back in the spotlight. As part his recent climate policy spree, Biden announced the establishment of a “Civilian Climate Corps Initiative” that could harness the energy of the very generation that must face – and solve – the climate crisis by putting them to work in well-paying conservation jobs. After Biden’s omnibus executive order, the heads of the Department of the Interior, the Department of Agriculture and other departments have 90 days to present their plan to “mobilize the next generation of conservation and resilience workers”, a step toward fulfilling Biden’s promise to get the US on track to conserve 30% of lands and oceans by 2030.
  • Outcry as more than 20 babies and children deported by US to Haiti: Ice accused of sending ‘defenseless babies into the burning house’ as deportations of 72 carried out in apparent breach of Biden order
    • Immigration advisers are especially concerned about the safety of the Haitian children deported on Monday, given that they are being returned to a country that is embroiled in rapidly mounting political turmoil. The Haitian president, Jovenel Moïse, is refusing to heed opposition calls for him to step down in a dispute over the end of his term – his detractors say he should have left office on 7 February. Moïse has been ruling by decree for more than a year and has recently cracked down on public protests. On Sunday, the day that opponents urged him to stand down, he announced the arrests of 23 people including a supreme court justice and a senior police inspector whom he claimed were plotting a coup against him.
    • Two Haitian journalists were reportedly shot with live ammunition fired by the armed forces on Monday in volatile scenes in the Champ de Mars in downtown Port-au-Prince. The Biden administration has stoked further controversy by backing Moïse in the dispute. The US government has announced it takes the view that the Haitian president has another year to run before he must leave office.

2/8/2021

  • Glacier Bursts in India, Leaving More Than 100 Missing in Floods: Rescue efforts were underway in the northern state of Uttarakhand, where officials said a hydroelectric dam project had been largely swept away.
    • But the latest disaster also raised fears of what is to come. Scientists, who said the breaking of a glacier in the middle of the winter appeared to be a result of climate change, have warned that rising temperatures are melting the Himalayan glaciers at an alarming pace. The glaciers, which supply water to tens of millions of people, could be mostly gone by the end of the century, a recent study found.
  • Disease experts warn of surge in deaths from Covid variants as US lags in tracking: Despite having a well-developed genomic sequencing infrastructure, a national surveillance program was never enacted
    • “It’s a grim projection, unfortunately,” said Ali Mokdad, professor at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington, one of the leading academic forecasters of Covid-19. “I’m concerned about a spike due to the new variant and the relaxation of social distancing,” he said. “People are tired. People are very tired.”
    • “This virus is here to stay,” said Mokdad. “We’re not going to reach herd immunity, simply, we’re not going to reach it. It’s going to be seasonal, and it’s going to be like the flu, and we’re going to need to be ready for it,” he said.
    • That leads to another potential need from vaccine-makers – vaccine updates to enhance immunity to new variants. Already, Moderna and Pfizer are working on “booster shots” for Covid-19 variants. Experts now recommend double-masking to protect against the virus, alongside more vigilant social distancing. Together, these developments have made Mokdad certain of one outcome: “I’m 100% sure in winter [2021-22] we will have a surge – but it will slow down our decline. But I’m convinced it will happen.”
  • A Super Bowl Ad That the Biden Presidency Made Possible: GM has cast its electric vehicles as normal American cars, in a normal Super Bowl ad. Here are seven ways to think about that.
    • The only twist is that both cars—Ferrell’s Cadillac Lyriq, and his friends’ Hummer EV—have electric motors. Gone are the humpty-dumpty lines of older GM electric vehicles, such as the Chevy Bolt. Gone is the playboy sensuality of the Tesla Model 3. These are normal American cars, being driven in a normal American Super Bowl ad. Since the modern era in American climate politics began in 1988, when the NASA climate scientist James Hansen informed a U.S. Senate committee that the long-hypothesized threat of global warming had begun to make itself felt, 33 years of effort—from environmentalists, scientists, activists, engineers, bureaucrats, politicians, the whole societal caboodle—have gone into this moment, of making electric cars seem normal.
    • Ferrell really should have carpooled with Thompson and Awkwafina. They would have prevented more emissions that way. (And to be clear: EVs alone won’t eliminate carbon pollution from the transportation sector—we also need electric buses, better trains, and more public transit—but they’re much better than gas-powered cars.)

2/7/2021

  • Opinion: The one crucial vaccine trial result that could end our covid nightmare
    • But let’s look at the crucial measure of hospitalization. The results released thus far show that the single dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was 85 percent successful in protecting against severe disease. Crucially, not a single person who received the vaccine was hospitalized or died. This is particularly striking because this vaccine trial had a site in South Africa, where nearly all the cases of covid-19 were due to infection with the dominant variant there, known as B.1.351. When it came to protecting against symptomatic disease, the vaccine appeared to be less effective in South Africa (57 percent) compared with the United States (72 percent), but it prevented all cases of hospitalizations with the B.1.351 variant, too.
  • Auto industry peers into an electric future and sees bumps ahead: GM’s Super Bowl ad turns to Kenan Thompson, Awkwafina and Will Ferrell to sell a new generation of EVs
    • But there are many bumps in the road ahead. The carmaker of the future will have to be as much a battery or software company as it is a conventional engineering company. It will need networks of rapid recharging stations and massive new supply chains to meet demand for new parts, like lithium for batteries. New business models could alter the nature of car ownership — and undermine politically powerful dealers. And throughout, the big car companies must work to maintain peace with their unions.
    • James D. Calaway, chairman of an Australian firm called Ioneer, is hoping to get the permits to start a lithium mine in Nevada that would quadruple U.S. production of the mineral. It would be located on the parched outcropping Rhyolite Ridge in the third most sparsely populated county in the United States, Calaway says, between Reno and Las Vegas. Phase one would produce about 22,000 tons a year of battery-grade lithium for the next 25 years — enough to produce about 400,000 EVs a year. The U.S. market usually exceeds 17 million cars a year, though with the ailing economy, sales fell about 15 percent short of that last year. But getting that lithium would mean destroying much of the habitat of Tiehm’s buckwheat, a plant, says the Center for Biological Diversity, which wants to stop the mine.
  • He became the nation’s ninth vice president. She was his enslaved wife. Her name was Julia Chinn
    • She was born enslaved and remained that way her entire life, even after she became Richard Mentor Johnson’s “bride.” Johnson, a Kentucky congressman who eventually became the nation’s ninth vice president in 1837, couldn’t legally marry Julia Chinn. Instead the couple exchanged vows at a local church with a wedding celebration organized by the enslaved people at his family’s plantation in Great Crossing, according to Miriam Biskin, who wrote about Chinn decades ago.

2/6/2021 — Carol Parks Day

  • The brave, but forgotten, Kansas lunch counter sit-in that helped change America:
    • BECEOQTHAEI6XOVYOB7YO2OXQU.jpg&w=767
    • “You have to right wrongs occasionally. And that’s what we did,” said Parks, now Carol Parks Hahn, 80. She organized the Dockum sit-in alongside her cousin, Ronald Walters, president of the NAACP Youth Council.
    • Segregation was technically illegal in Kansas — the state had passed a civil rights statute in 1874. This was a place that “bled” over whether slavery would be allowed, that was the origin point of Brown v. Board of Education, which in 1954 led to the integration of schools. Still, segregation ruled all.
    • Parks’s mother, Vivian, had been the first female president of Wichita’s NAACP branch. The family home was a gathering place for Black leaders visiting the city. During a trip, Franklin Williams — the NAACP’s Western Region Director — described to Parks and Walters a protest on a California college campus in the 1940s, where students sat down at an eatery and read newspapers, denying seats to paying customers. Walters, especially, latched onto the idea of using economic pressure. He and Parks brought the idea of organizing a “sit-down” to the Youth Council.
    • “Chester Lewis got up and answered questions,” Diggs said. “The parents were still reluctant but they felt a little bit more confident it would be okay.” They expanded the sit-in to more days a week. The next morning, Parks and others headed back to their stools. But something different happened. An unfamiliar man entered and looked at the Youth Council. “Serve them,” he said. “I’m losing too much money.” Just like that, with a statement revealing the wisdom of Walters’s focus on economic pressure, the sit-in was over.
    • For Parks, it was a quiet victory. She got to enjoy a Coca-Cola from a glass, at the counter. Diggs remembers a celebratory moment. She was at her summer job, lifeguarding at a pool. “Someone came out there and announced, ‘They’re serving them, they’re serving them.’ It was like, ‘Yay!’ It was a community roar.”
    • Chester Lewis spoke to the vice president of Dockum Drug Stores and confirmed the store, “agreed to abolish all discriminatory practices as of Monday morning, at 10 a.m., August 11,” Lewis wrote in a letter to Herb Wright. The news that followed was even better — Rexall, as ubiquitous then as McDonald’s or Starbucks is today, was desegregating all its stores in Kansas.
  • Mutated virus may reinfect people already stricken once with covid-19, sparking debate and concerns: More than 100 million people have been infected with the coronavirus, but they may not be completely protected against new variants
    • “I worry especially that some of these premature sweeping conclusions being made could rob people of hope,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Georgetown University’s Center for Global Health Science and Security. “I worry the message they may receive is that we’re never going to be rid of this. When in fact that’s not what the data suggests.” She and others emphasized the apparent lack of severe health repercussions from reinfection — and the lack of evidence that reinfection is common.
    • On Tuesday, details of the Novavax trial were presented at the New York Academy of Sciences. About 30 percent of the people in the South African trial had antibodies in their blood at the start of the trial showing they had recovered from an earlier infection. But that previous exposure didn’t necessarily appear to afford protection. Among those who got saltwater shots, the people with a prior infection got sick at the same rate as study participants who had not been previously infected — a surprise because they would have been expected to have some immunity. Nearly 4 percent of people who had a previous infection were reinfected, an almost identical rate to those with no history of infection.
    • “It is not surprising to see reinfection in individuals who are convalescent. And it would not be surprising to see infection in people who are vaccinated, especially a few months out from vaccine,” said Michel Nussenzweig, head of the Laboratory of Molecular Immunology at Rockefeller University. “The key is not whether people get reinfected, it’s whether they get sick enough to be hospitalized.”

2/5/2021

2/4/2021

  • Those big, misleading maps of presidential results by land area are getting worse:
    • 2C67BMQ2OJE35HGGM3DDL7VS24.gif&w=540RAOJG5DGRJEN7KHOWIJV47LJPA.gif&w=540
  • Sea level rise could be worse than feared, warn researchers: Danish team predict possible 1.35m rise by 2100 and highlight issues with previous modelling
    • In its most recent assessment, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said the sea level was unlikely to rise beyond 1.1 metre (3.6ft) by 2100. But climate researchers from the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute believe levels could rise as much as 1.35 metres by 2100, under a worst-case warming scenario. When they used historical data on sea level rise to validate various models relied on by the IPCC to make its assessment, they found a discrepancy of about 25cm, they said in a paper published in the journal Ocean Science.
    • “The models used to base predictions of sea level rise on presently are not sensitive enough,” he said. “To put it plainly, they don’t hit the mark when we compare them to the rate of sea level rise we see when comparing future scenarios with observations going back in time.”
  • AI maths whiz creates tough new problems for humans to solve: Algorithm named after mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan suggests interesting formulae, some of which are difficult to prove true.

2/3/2021

  • New push to rename Donald Trump state park amid complaints: Lawmakers and residents hope name change could spotlight social justice – and encourage donations
    • And since Trump’s supporters stormed the US Capitol earlier this year, lawmakers, advocates and residents are once again pushing to rename the underdeveloped 436-acre park in hopes of sparking a dialogue on social justice and spurring much-needed private contributions to improve the space. [ael: my emphasis — reminds me of Michael Waram's comment, that the best way to care for a forest is to leave it alone.]
    • The park came to be named after Trump when he donated it to the state in 2006. The agreement stipulated that “the name will be prominently displayed at least at each entrance to each property”, Lohud.com reported. Opponents have argued that there is no definition of the word “prominently”, and that the deed to the property was never signed by a representative of the state, potentially meaning the state would be within its rights to change the name.
      • [ael: no reason that it has to be called "Donald J. Trump State Park" — only that his name be prominently displayed. So those historical markers that no one ever looks at could prominently display his name, saying that he — the disgraced former president — once donated the land, with the stipulation that his name be prominently display — so typical of him!]
  • What a picture of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a bikini tells us about the disturbing future of AI: New research on image-generating algorithms has raised alarming evidence of bias. It’s time to tackle the problem of discrimination being baked into tech, before it is too late
    • Want to see a half-naked woman? Well, you’re in luck! The internet is full of pictures of scantily clad women. There are so many of these pictures online, in fact, that artificial intelligence (AI) now seems to assume that women just don’t like wearing clothes.
    • That is my stripped-down summary of the results of a new research study on image-generation algorithms anyway. Researchers fed these algorithms (which function like autocomplete, but for images) pictures of a man cropped below his neck: 43% of the time the image was autocompleted with the man wearing a suit. When you fed the same algorithm a similarly cropped photo of a woman, it auto-completed her wearing a low-cut top or bikini a massive 53% of the time. For some reason, the researchers gave the algorithm a picture of the Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and found that it also automatically generated an image of her in a bikini. (After ethical concerns were raised on Twitter, the researchers had the computer-generated image of AOC in a swimsuit removed from the research paper.)
  • What You Can Do to Avoid the New Coronavirus Variant Right Now: It’s more contagious than the original and spreading quickly. Upgrade your mask and double down on precautions to protect yourself.
    • The variant known as B.1.1.7., which was first identified in Britain has the potential to infect an estimated 50 percent more people, and researchers have begun to think that it may also be slightly more deadly. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has predicted that this variant could become the dominant source of infection in the United States by March. A variant first reported in South Africa has found it’s way to South Carolina. And scientists are studying whether a variant with a different mutation, and first found in Denmark, along with one identified in California, have caused a surge of cases in California.
    • NYTimesCovidHolidays
  • AstraZeneca vaccine shows strong effect against coronavirus with just one dose
  • GAO report slams Trump administration response to the coronavirus pandemic:
    • A government watchdog study from a generally staid audit agency amounts to a wide-reaching condemnation of President Donald Trump’s botched response to the covid-19 pandemic. The 346-page Government Accountability Office document, much longer than most, outlines broad Trump administration failures so alarming that the normally circumspect auditors pronounced themselves “deeply troubled.” That constitutes an anguished cry from an office that prides itself on just-the-facts, albeit dull, reports.
    • Almost 90 percent — 27 of 31 — of the GAO’s recommendations from June, September and November “remained unimplemented” as of Jan. 15, less than a week before Trump left office. The document was released last week. “GAO remains deeply troubled that agencies have not acted on recommendations to more fully address critical gaps in the medical supply chain,” it said.
    • “In September 2020, GAO stressed the importance of having a plan that focused on coordination and communication and recommended that HHS, with the support of the Department of Defense, establish a time frame for documenting and sharing a national plan for distributing and administering COVID-19 vaccine, and among other things, outline an approach for how efforts would be coordinated across federal agencies and nonfederal entities,” the GAO said. “To date, this recommendation has not been fully implemented. GAO reiterates the importance of doing so.”
    • The report details a bungled Trump administration response to a virus that has killed over 445,000 Americans, far more than in any other nation. Former HHS Secretary Alex Azar and a spokesperson for Trump did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did current HHS officials. Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.) did. The House Oversight and Reform Committee, where he chairs the government operations subcommittee, was one of the congressional panels that received the GAO report. “This independent report is a stunning indictment of the Trump administration’s total failure to respond to the coronavirus pandemic,” Connolly said. “Their inaction resulted in lives lost.”
  • Fifth Third Achieves Carbon Neutrality
    • Fifth Third's carbon neutrality achievement follows the Bank's five-year $8 billion sustainable finance goal announced in September 2020. Additionally, Fifth Third continues to make significant progress on its five bold sustainability goals, announced in 2017, including having already achieved its goal for 100% renewable power, a 20% reduction in water usage and a 25% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
  • Cheney holds on to House GOP leadership position amid furor over impeachment vote: Liz Cheney, the third-highest-ranking Republican in the House, refused to apologize for voting to impeach former President Donald Trump.
    • Liz Cheney, the third-highest-ranking Republican in the House, held on to her title as House GOP conference chair during a secret ballot Wednesday. Three sources said the vote among Republican House members was 145-61.
    • The lopsided vote to keep Cheney in leadership, despite her vote to impeach Trump, also signals a hidden disenchantment with the former president in the House GOP ranks. The impeachment vote was public, meaning lawmakers would be held accountable by their party's voters for their position. But the Cheney vote was a secret ballot, freeing lawmakers to vote their preferences without fear of repercussion.

2/2/2021 — Capt. Tom Moore Day

  • Capt. Tom Moore dies after covid diagnosis. The 100-year-old raised millions for Britain’s NHS.
    • Some have pointed out that Moore’s private campaign was so important because the health service had been starved for public funds over the past decade. At the outset of the pandemic, hospitals faced a crippling lack of supplies. Some health workers wore trash bags, as there wasn’t enough personal protective equipment to go around. “They’re all being so brave. Every day, they’re putting themselves in danger of this unseen enemy that we’ve got at the moment,” Moore said of doctors and nurses in an interview with Sky News Australia last year.
    • Moore served as a young officer in 146th Royal Armored Corps, first in India and then Burma, joining what the BBC called “the bruised and bloodied forgotten army, which was suffering from disease and low morale, fighting in the world’s least hospitable terrain, with impenetrable jungle, poisonous snakes and hot lashing rain for six months of every year.” The broadcaster reported, “Much of the fighting was done hand-to-hand, with no quarter given on either side.”
    • His garden odyssey — and unexpected rise to stardom — began in April, when he sought to raise 1,000 pounds (about $1,370) for the NHS by walking his 82-foot-long garden path back and forth 100 times, using his walker for support. He wanted to complete the journey, which he broke down into short ambles, ahead of his 100th birthday on April 30.
    • As public interest in his fundraiser grew, so did the pot of donations. Just 24 hours after Moore started walking, he had raised the equivalent of $8,750. As money poured in, Moore’s fundraising page crashed repeatedly. He completed his final lap two weeks ahead of schedule — an event that was live-streamed by the BBC as the figure reached $15 million. Afterward, donations continued to climb.
  • As House GOP faces decision on its future, McConnell defends Cheney, rebukes Greene in rare set of statements
    • “Loony lies and conspiracy theories are cancer for the Republican Party and our country,” McConnell said. “Somebody who’s suggested that perhaps no airplane hit the Pentagon on 9/11, that horrifying school shootings were pre-staged, and that the Clintons crashed JFK Jr.’s airplane is not living in reality. This has nothing to do with the challenges facing American families or the robust debates on substance that can strengthen our party.”
    • Greene responded Monday night on Twitter. “The real cancer for the Republican Party is weak Republicans who only know how to lose gracefully,” she said. “This is why we are losing our country.”
    • In a separate statement, McConnell did name Cheney, describing the No. 3 House Republican as “a leader with deep convictions and the courage to act on them.” “She is an important leader in our party and in our nation,” McConnell said in the statement, first reported by CNN. “I am grateful for her service and look forward to continuing to work with her on the crucial issues facing our nation.”
  • Judge throws out Trump rule limiting what science EPA can use: Biden officials had asked the Montana federal judge to send back the Environmental Protection Agency rule limiting studies behind public health safeguards.
    • A federal judge on Monday vacated the Trump administration rule limiting which scientific studies the Environmental Protection Agency can use in crafting public health protections, overturning one of the last major actions taken by the agency before President Biden took office. The ruling by Judge Brian Morris, chief judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Montana, Great Falls, marked a victory for environmental groups and public health advocates. Just two weeks before Biden’s inauguration, EPA finalized a rule requiring researchers to disclose the raw data involved in their public health studies before the agency could rely upon their conclusions.
    • Three groups - the Environmental Defense Fund, the Montana Environmental Information Center and Citizens for Clean Energy - sued and last week Morris ruled the agency acted improperly by issuing the rule under the Federal Housekeeping Statute, which allows for changes that are only procedural and not substantive. The Biden administration requested the judge vacate the rule and send it back to the agency.

2/1/2021 — Audrey Nell Day

  • Norway’s trillion-dollar wealth fund sold the last of its investments in fossil fuel companies: Norway’s decision was an economic one, but it’s still a step in the right direction on climate change.
    • The decision to nix the fund’s portfolio of oil and gas companies, worth $6 billion, was an economic one. In 2020, the fund reported losses of $10 billion in oil and gas shares that were worth $40 billion at the start of the year. Back in 2017, the central bank of Norway said the government should drop oil and gas investments to protect the wealth fund — the world’s largest — from the price volatility.
    • With shares in more than 9,000 companies spanning 74 countries worth an estimated 1.5 percent of total global investments, the wealth fund may be, as US environmentalist Bill McKibben tweeted, “earth’s single biggest pool of investment capital.”
    • Norway wants to be an international leader on climate change, yet it continues to rely on heavily polluting fossil fuel extraction for continued economic prosperity, a contradiction often referred to as Norway’s climate change paradox. The fact that the fund has pulled out of oil and gas companies is a big step in the right direction. But there’s still a long way to go. That’s because Norway isn’t cutting all ties with its petroleum industry just yet. Not even close.
  • A New Day for the Climate: It remains to be seen whether Joe Biden’s sweeping climate directives can make a meaningful difference, but a critical threshold has been crossed. (By Elizabeth Kolbert)
    • [ael: any sign of positive feelings from Elizabeth Kolbert is a good sign…. And speaking of signs,]
    • Nine years ago, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse had a sign made up that showed a photograph of the Earth as seen from space. “TIME TO WAKE UP,” it urged, in large, unevenly spaced letters. Every week that the Senate was in session, Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, would tote the sign to the chamber, set it on an easel, and, before a hundred chairs—most of them empty—deliver a speech. Though the details changed, the subject of the speech remained the same…. Last week, Whitehouse hauled his beat-up sign to the chamber for the two-hundred-and-seventy-ninth time. He propped it up and announced that this speech would be the last in his long-running series. “A new dawn is breaking,” he said. “And, when it’s dawn, there’s no need for my little candle against the darkness.”
    • During the 2020 Presidential campaign, Joe Biden insisted that he took seriously the threat posed by global warming. Within hours of being sworn in, he had signed a slew of climate-change directives. One recommitted the United States to the Paris climate accord; another revoked the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline. A third charged the Secretary of the Interior to restore the borders of two national monuments in Utah—Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante—which the Trump Administration had shrunk. [ael: hadn't heard about that one — hooray!]
    • Last week, on the same day that Whitehouse literally dropped the mic, Biden signed a second, even more sweeping batch of executive orders. Among their many provisions, they directed the Interior Department to “pause” new oil and gas leases on federal land, and created the Civilian Climate Corps, a government jobs program intended to put people to work restoring public lands and waters. They also instructed federal agencies to purchase “zero-emissions” vehicles, called on the director of the Office of Management and Budget to identify and then eliminate federal fossil-fuel subsidies, and established a new White House Office of Domestic Climate Policy. “It’s hard to imagine the week could have gone better,” Mike Brune, the executive director of the Sierra Club, told Rolling Stone. “We’re going from having the worst president in the history of our country with regards to protecting the environment to someone who has the most ambitious set of environmental proposals in our country’s history.” [ael: holy smokes! I should have paid a little more attention! Wonderful news.]
  • The Black girl who defied segregation, inspiring MLK and Jackie Robinson
    • One of the most dramatic episodes in the St. Augustine story began on July 18, 1963, when a group of teens, members of the NAACP Youth Council advised by Hayling, conducted sit-ins at downtown lunch counters. One group of seven went into Woolworth’s opposite the city’s central plaza, home to the Slave Market and (until this past summer) a towering gray memorial to Confederate soldiers. They sat on red stools and looked up at the overhead signs. Sheriff Davis arrived and made sure that D.J. Johnson — his only Black deputy — did the honors of shoving the group into a police car. “That really was the hurting part of the whole day,” Audrey Nell said in a 2011 interview with the Civil Rights History Project, “when he came in and snatched us and told us that we were under arrest.”
    • Local judge Charles C. Mathis Jr. offered a stark choice. If the parents signed a form saying their kids would refrain from protests until they turned 21, the teenagers were free to go. Otherwise, they would remain in jail until they could be sent to reform school. Three of the seven agreed to those terms. Audrey Nell, along with friends JoeAnn Anderson, 15, Samuel White, 14, and Willie Carl Singleton, 16, urged their parents not to sign away their First Amendment rights. Thus the showdown began.
    • With no juvenile facility available, they remained in jail with adults for the languid last weeks of August. They missed the beginning of school, the news of four youngsters dynamited to death in a Birmingham church, the Klan rally where Hayling was beaten. One morning, Samuel and Willie Carl were whisked away to the notorious Florida School for Boys in Marianna. (Decades later, the world learned about the brutal punishments doled out at a building called “The White House.” In 2014, the bodies of some 55 youngsters were exhumed on the grounds there.)
    • The girls were taken in the wee hours one morning, packed into a car by a man Audrey Nell remembered as “Deputy Haney.” In an interview with Andrew Young for the movie “Crossing in St. Augustine,” she recalled Haney’s saying to a female companion, “You know what? If we kill these two n-s and say they tried to escape … nothing would be said.” They were deposited at the Florida School for Girls in Ocala. There, the days were filled with grinding boredom and hard physical labor. “We seen our mothers’ pain,” Audrey Nell recalled in 2011, “when they came up to that school [for a weekend visit] and seen our bloody knees. We had to scrub floors on our knees. We had to wax floors on our knees … until you see your face in them.”
    • Finally, on Jan. 14, just shy of six months after their arrest for a nonviolent sit-in, the St. Augustine Four were sent home. It was the day before Martin Luther King’s 35th birthday. Almost five months later, Audrey Nell was introduced to King by Hayling. He had come to oversee a program of nonviolent direct action designed to keep racial injustice on the front page as the Civil Rights Bill worked its way through a maddeningly stuck Senate. King almost got more than he bargained for. The cottage that was rented for him was shot up. He appealed to President Lyndon B. Johnson for federal troops, saying, “All semblance of law and order has broken down in St. Augustine.” But he was delighted to meet the courageous young activists. “When he seen us,” Audrey Nell told Andrew Young, “he grabbed and hugged us and told us that we went way, way beyond the call of duty,” she recalled.
    • Having not signed away her rights to protest, Audrey Nell joined King at the Monson Motor Lodge on June 11. Both were arrested and taken to the St. Johns County Jail. Her arrest card describes her as 5-foot-1, 105 pounds, charged with breach of peace, trespassing with malicious intent, and conspiracy. Four nights later, she stood on the sidewalk with the overflow crowd outside St. Paul AME Church on Central Avenue just a few doors down from her home. Suddenly a friend raced out and shouted, “Jackie Robinson … wants to meet you all!” So impressed was Robinson that he invited Audrey Nell and JoeAnn up north later in the summer. They flew for the first time in their lives, first class, no less. In a three-week stay with the Robinsons, they toured the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty and the World’s Fair.
    • For years, Audrey Nell Edwards Hamilton felt dogged by her police record in St. Augustine. “I always used to wonder why I used to go apply for a job and I never could get one,” she told Young. “I was hurt. I was in disbelief. I couldn’t believe that these people in St. Augustine had kept this record hanging over my head for 40 years … for just asking for a hamburger. For sitting in. For food we never did get — in America. You know, God bless America.”

What went on: 2021

What went on: 2020

What went on: 2019

What went on: 2018

What went on: 2017

What went on: 2016

What went on: 2015

What went on: 2014

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