July 1-20, 2020

Much of my 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.

  • 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
  • "… 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
  • "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
  • Here's the 10-day weather forecast for Mattawa, Ontario, where we have a farm, away from the noise of that blowhard, the liar-in-chief. I try to spend as much time as I can on the farm.
  • "[Y]ou cannot postpone a rendezvous with reality forever." Nick Cohen, Observer columnist

July 1-20, 2020

What went on, July (21-31), 2020?

7/20/2020

  • Trump threatens to deploy federal agents to Chicago and other U.S. cities led by Democrats:
    • Homeland Security officials said Monday they are making preparations to deploy federal agents to Chicago, while President Trump threatened to send U.S. law enforcement personnel to other Democratic-led cities experiencing spates of crime.
    • [ael: oh my god. It's come to this. Hitler, here we come!]
  • The crisis that shocked the world: America’s response to the coronavirus: Dysfunctional politics, a lack of funding for public health and a rush to reopen the economy ignited the resurgence of the virus
    • Many countries have rigorously driven infection rates nearly to zero. In the United States, coronavirus transmission is out of control. The national response is fragmented, shot through with political rancor and culture-war divisiveness. Testing shortcomings that revealed themselves in March have become acute in July, with week-long waits for results leaving the country blind to real-time virus spread and rendering contact tracing nearly irrelevant.
    • The fumbling of the virus was not a fluke: The American coronavirus fiasco has exposed the country’s incoherent leadership, self-defeating political polarization, a lack of investment in public health, and persistent socioeconomic and racial inequities that have left millions of people vulnerable to disease and death.
    • The single biggest miscalculation was rushing to reopen the economy while the virus was still spreading at high rates through much of the country, experts say. The only way to reopen safely, epidemiologists said as far back as early April, was to “crush the curve” — to drive down the rate of viral transmission to the point that new infections were few and far between.
    • America’s mishandling of the pandemic has defied most experts’ predictions. In October, not long before the novel coronavirus began sickening people in China, a comprehensive review ranked the pandemic preparedness of 195 countries. The project — called the Global Health Security Index and spearheaded by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and the Nuclear Threat Initiative — assigned scores to countries as a way to warn them of the rising threat of infectious-disease outbreaks. With a score of 83.5 out of 100, the United States ranked No. 1.
    • The federal government punted the coronavirus response to the states, counties and cities, said Cameron, who was senior director for global health security and biodefense on the White House National Security Council and helped write a pandemic response plan under President Barack Obama. The team Cameron led was disbanded after Donald Trump took office. The White House says positions on the disbanded team were absorbed into another office.
    • “I just never expected that we would have such a lack of federal leadership, and it’s been deliberate,” she said. “In a national emergency that is a pandemic, spreading between states, federal leadership is essential. And if there was any doubt about that, we ran that experiment from March and April until now. It failed. So we have to run a different experiment.”
    • “We just let our guard down,” Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) said in an interview Friday. “Some people when they heard, ‘Hey, Ohio’s open,’ what they mentally processed is, ‘It’s safe. We can go out and do whatever we want to. It’s back to normal.’ ” In the past two months, the virus has been smoldering in his state, the governor said, and “now we start to see some flames.” He fears Ohio could soon have the kind of runaway transmission afflicting Florida. “Florida a month ago is where Ohio is today. If we don’t want to be Florida, we’ve got to change what we’re doing. Everybody’s got to mask up,” the governor said.
    • Even before the pandemic hit, local public health agencies had been decimated by years of staffing and budget cuts. They had lost almost a quarter of their overall workforce since 2008 — a cut of almost 60,000 workers, according to national associations of health officials. The agencies’ main source of federal funding — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s emergency preparedness budget — had been cut 30 percent since 2003.
    • America, experts say, is approaching a tipping point at which its public health systems could become so overwhelmed they begin to collapse. Already, coronavirus test results take so long to come back they are almost useless for anything except as a historical record. The delays have a cascading effect. Contact tracing is rendered ineffectual. Containing the virus by isolation becomes impossible. And as hospitals fill, the virus’s fatality rate could inch upward because of overtaxed ICU nurses and doctors struggling to care for so many.
    • New York beat back the virus by closely following the scientific data and being cautious about reopening the economy, Cuomo said. Many places suffering high rates of infections didn’t do that, he said. “It was science denial meets government incompetence,” he said.
    • Future historians will not treat kindly Trump’s efforts to divide and confuse, said James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association. “You look at the Great Depression and how Roosevelt made a concerted effort to unite the country — the fireside chats, the New Deal. That is the instinctive reaction of almost every president in crisis. Even if you don’t succeed, you try to convince people that they’re all in this together,” Grossman said. “This presidency is the exception and anomaly.”

7/19/2020

  • Older Children Spread the Coronavirus Just as Much as Adults, Large Study Finds: The study of nearly 65,000 people in South Korea suggests that school reopenings will trigger more outbreaks.
    • A large new study from South Korea offers an answer: Children younger than 10 transmit to others much less often than adults do, but the risk is not zero. And those between the ages of 10 and 19 can spread the virus at least as well as adults do.
    • Several studies from Europe and Asia have suggested that young children are less likely to get infected and to spread the virus. But most of those studies were small and flawed, said Dr. Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute. The new study “is very carefully done, it’s systematic and looks at a very large population,” Dr. Jha said. “It’s one of the best studies we’ve had to date on this issue.”
    • Other experts also praised the scale and rigor of the analysis. South Korean researchers identified 5,706 people who were the first to report Covid-19 symptoms in their households between Jan. 20 and March 27, when schools were closed, and then traced the 59,073 contacts of these “index cases.” They tested all of the household contacts of each patient, regardless of symptoms, but only tested symptomatic contacts outside the household.
  • Anthony Fauci built a truce. Trump is destroying it: One man, six presidents and the fragile balance between politics and science.
    • Across the street from the pharmacy was the Shrine Church of St. Bernadette, host to masses and sacraments but also to something far more tempting to a 10-year-old kid: sports. Fauci won a trophy in his first year on the parish bantamweight basketball team and went on to play at Regis, a storied Jesuit high school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. “All you really need to know about Tony Fauci,” says Jack Rowe, a former president and chief executive of Mount Sinai NYU Health, “is that, at five-foot, seven-inches, he was the captain of his high school basketball team.”
  • We are all plastic people now, in ways we can’t see – and can no longer ignore: Our global plastics problem has been steadily growing for decades, polluting the planet in obvious ways. Less obvious are the microplastics that we eat and breathe, and the impacts they have on our health. I experimented on myself to find out more
  • As a sizzling July continues, here’s what to know about climate change and weather
    • “It’s your choice whom you’d rather trust on whether global warming makes tropical storms stronger, wildfires more severe or heat and rainfall extremes more common. The scientists studying these issues? Or some contrarians trying to tell you stories you might like to hear?” said Stefan Rahmstorf, head of Earth System Analysis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, in a recent Twitter thread. He was addressing the robust number of published and peer-reviewed climate scientists tracked in the database Web of Science.
    • Since the 1980s, there have been three daily record temperature highs for every two record lows set in the U.S. Using combined NOAA and NASA data, 2020 has been the planet’s second-hottest year on record through June.
    • What about those deadly California wildfires? The annual average wildfire season in the Western U.S. is 105 days longer, burns six times as many acres, and has three times as many large fires (more than 1,000 acres) than it did in the 1970s. Does the maintenance of electrical wires and forest underbrush play a role, too? Yes, say the experts, but worrisome to them is the dismissal of culpable climate-change factors whenever the presence of other contributors exists. [ael: just astounding: you can't ever get a season that's 365 days longer…. but 105 days longer, since the 70s?]
  • Fauci takes aim at Trump, state lawmakers and young Americans: ‘You’re propagating the pandemic’: Anthony Fauci made his case to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as to why it’s time to change the approach to the coronavirus
    • “The citizenry of the state or the city had the impression you went either from lock down to caution to the wind,” he said. The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for three decades also took aim and lawmakers and young people: “You’re propagating the pandemic.”
    • The Trump administration is trying to block $25 billion for states to conduct testing and contact tracing in the next coronavirus relief bill, people involved in the talks told the Washington Post on Saturday. Wait times vary from a matter of hours to up to 26 days in some extreme cases. Quest Diagnostics Inc. DGX, +1.15% one of the largest labs in the U.S. performing coronavirus tests, said that the average turnaround time for non-priority patients is “seven or more days” and “slightly more than one day” for priority patients.
    • Fauci said he did recommend restricting travel, and said pitching economic recovery at the expense of public health and the likely surge to levels seen at the beginning of the pandemic was “an unfortunate mindset.” He told Zuckerberg, “You can’t jump over steps.”

7/17/2020

  • Civil rights activist and politician John Lewis – a life in pictures
    • The civil rights leader John Lewis, known at the ‘conscience of America’, has died. Born the son of sharecroppers in Alabama on 21 February 1940, he attended segregated public schools and, inspired by the words of Martin Luther King Jr, became active in the civil rights movement. From university onwards he organised sit-ins at segregated lunch counters, took part in the Freedom Rides, was chair of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and was a key speaker at the historic March on Washington in 1963. He led one of the pivotal moments in the civil rights movement, a march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama that was brutally attacked by state troopers.
  • John Lewis, front-line civil rights leader and eminence of Capitol Hill, dies at 80: Mr. Lewis, a Georgia Democrat, announced his diagnosis of pancreatic cancer on Dec. 29 and said he planned to continue working amid treatment. “I have been in some kind of fight — for freedom, equality, basic human rights — for nearly my entire life,” he said in a statement. “I have never faced a fight quite like the one I have now.”
    • Mr. Lewis’s final years in the House were marked by personal conflict with President Trump. Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, Mr. Lewis said, rendered Trump’s victory “illegitimate.” He boycotted Trump’s inauguration. Later, during the House’s formal debate on whether to proceed with the impeachment process, Mr. Lewis had evinced no doubts: “For some, this vote might be hard,” he said on the House floor in December 2019. “But we have a mandate and a mission to be on the right side of history.”
    • As the last survivor of the “Big Six,” Mr. Lewis was the one who kept striving for black-white amity. Time magazine included him in a 1975 list of “living saints” headed by Mother Teresa. With only mild hyperbole, the New Republic in 1996 called him “the last integrationist.”
    • John — called Preacher because he sermonized chickens — was the odd child out. He loved books and hated guns. He never hunted small game with other kids. His petition for access to the Pike County library went unanswered. “White kids went to high school, Negroes to training school,” Mr. Lewis told the New York Times in 1967. “You weren’t supposed to aspire. We couldn’t take books from the public library. And I remember when the county paved rural roads, they went 15 miles out of their way to avoid blacktopping our Negro farm roads.”
    • When Mr. Lewis arrived on Capitol Hill, the New York Times observed wryly that he was one of the few members “who must deal with the sainthood issue.”
    • Unlike some other black notables, Mr. Lewis refused to participate in Louis Farrakhan’s 1995 Million Man March in Washington. He also denounced Farrakhan’s anti-Semitic rants. When needled about racial loyalty, Mr. Lewis liked to say, “I follow my conscience, not my complexion.”
    • In 2010, Obama awarded Mr. Lewis the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor. He continued to say that his conscience demanded that he teach young people the legacy of the civil rights movement. In 2013, he began a trilogy in comic book form called “March.” When a former supporter of the Ku Klux Klan named Elwin Wilson popped out of history in 2009, asking forgiveness for having severely beaten then-Freedom Rider Lewis in 1961 at a Greyhound bus station in Rock Hill, S.C., Mr. Lewis took him on three TV shows to show that “love is stronger than hate.”
    • He revisited the Edmund Pettus Bridge on anniversaries of Bloody Sunday, often accompanied by political leaders of both parties. “Barack Obama,” he mused, “is what comes at the end of that bridge in Selma.”
  • C.T. Vivian, Martin Luther King’s Field General, Dies at 95: A disciplined advocate of nonviolence, he was on the front lines in the 1960s movement for racial justice.
    • [ael: Unbelievably, the two civil rights icons died the same day….]
    • 17vivian01-jumbo.jpg?quality=90&auto=webp
    • The Rev. C.T. Vivian, an early civil rights organizer and field general for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the historic struggle for racial justice a half-century ago, died on Friday at his home in Atlanta.
    • In a nation trying to come to grips with racial inequality in the 1960s, Mr. Vivian was a paladin of nonviolence on the front lines of bloody confrontations. He led passive protesters through shrieking white mobs and, with discipline and endurance, absorbed the blows of segregationists and complicit law enforcement officials across the South. [ael: ironically, and terribly sadly, we've seen such shrieking white mobs in Bethal, Ohio, and other towns around this country, in 2020….]
    • “Nonviolence is the only honorable way of dealing with social change, because if we are wrong, nobody gets hurt but us,” Mr. Vivian said in an address to civil rights workers, as recounted in “At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68” (2006), by Taylor Branch. “And if we are right, more people will participate in determining their own destinies than ever before.”
    • Like his followers, Mr. Vivian was arrested often, jailed and beaten. In 1961, at the end of a violence-plagued interracial Freedom Ride to Jackson, he was dispatched to the Hinds County Prison Farm, where he was beaten by guards.
    • In 1964, Mr. Vivian was nearly killed in St. Augustine, America’s oldest continuously inhabited city and, at the time, one of its most rigidly segregated, where he had joined Dr. King in an extended campaign of peaceful protest. On an Atlantic beach, “roving gangs of whites whipped Black bathers with chains and almost drowned C.T. Vivian,” Stephen B. Oates wrote in “Let the Trumpet Sound,” his 1982 biography of Dr. King.
    • Accompanying Dr. King on a voter-registration drive in 1965, Mr. Vivian confronted Sheriff Jim Clark outside a courthouse in Selma, where 1,400 Black voters had been barred from registering. As television cameras rolled, The New York Times reported, Mr. Vivian asked Sheriff Clark to admit 100 Black people lined up behind him — just to get in out of a lightly falling rain.
      • Sheriff Clark refused. Mr. Vivian, a tall, lanky, angular man, called Sheriff Clark a “brute,” “fascist” and “Hitler.”
      • The 220-pound sheriff struck Mr. Vivian in the mouth with his right fist, sending him reeling down the courthouse steps. Sheriff Clark then ordered deputies to arrest him for “criminal provocation.” Mr. Vivan was dragged away, blood streaming down his face.
      • Sheriff Clark later told reporters that he had no recollection of the incident. “Of course the camera might make me out a liar,” he said. “I do have a sore finger.”
    • In 1959, Mr. Vivian met the Rev. James Lawson, who was teaching nonviolent strategies to members of the Nashville Student Movement. His students included Diane Nash, Bernard Lafayette, James Bevel and John Lewis, all of whom became prominent civil rights organizers. (Mr. Lewis went on to become a powerful voice for social justice in Congress and also died on Friday, the same day as Mr. Vivian.)
    • He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, from President Barack Obama in 2013.17vivian04-jumbo.jpg?quality=90&auto=webp
  • Florida’s ‘mini-Trump’ Ron DeSantis under growing pressure as Covid-19 cases surge: The governor has seen rising cases and bleak new records, but the prospect of mask orders and reopening reversals are slim
  • Camouflaged federal agents have descended on Portland. Trump's DHS is out of control: If Venezuela or Iran were perpetrating this nightmare, the US would stand against it. Instead, officials are promising more
    • A remarkable and nightmarish scene playing out in Portland should terrify anyone who cares about the US constitution: unmarked vans full of camouflaged and unidentified federal agents are pulling up next to protesters on street corners, then snatching and arresting them with no explanation.
    • The acting secretary of DHS, Chad Wolf, released a video statement Friday lamenting that Portland had declined the department’s “offer” of “support”. So DHS went ahead and sent in its thugs anyway. DHS’s list of reasons for invading Portland and implementing its terror operation, amid what it calls “rampant long-lasting violence”, consists mostly of graffiti incidents and minor property damage.
    • Portland is almost 400 miles from the Canadian border and 80 miles from the Pacific ocean, by the way. It’s unclear what legal authority, if any, allows CBP to be terrorizing the streets to hunt down graffiti artists—even if they think they can operate anywhere that’s 100 miles from a border. In other words, it’s illegal, or it should be.
    • With their actions in Portland, their authoritarianism is no longer creeping – the DHS and CBP are acting as full-on secret police. If there are not steep consequences for these disturbing actions, there will be no limits on where this will lead.
  • Who would kick millions off health insurance in the middle of a pandemic? Yes, Trump.
  • White anti-mask protesters jeered a black pastor demanding Tulsa race massacre reparations: A group of white people protesting Tulsa’s new mask ordinance swarmed him, poured water on him and grabbed at his bullhorn.
    • A video shows the group shouting, “USA! USA! USA!” as Turner began his sermon explaining the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, which left as many as 300 black people dead and leveled a 40-square block area of the all-black community of Greenwood.
    • [ael: these people demonstrate their stupidity in a myriad of ways…. Magatts….]
    • Related: He’s 100, a renowned jazz musician and a survivor of Tulsa’s 1921 race massacre: This is what Hal Singer and his family lost a century ago
      • Singer has never forgotten Tulsa and what happened there, his wife said. But with his health failing, he wonders if there will ever be reparations for the lives lost and the properties destroyed. “I have no more trust in justice in my country,” he told her. “It is too tiring. It is too ugly.”

7/16/2020

  • North Carolina City Approves Reparations for Black Residents: The measure passed by the City Council of Asheville, N.C., would provide funding to promote homeownership and business opportunities, but stopped short of stipulating direct payments.
  • Fauci warns young of Covid-19 risks and says crisis could match 1918 flu: Infectious disease expert says young people socializing are ‘inadvertently part of the problem’
  • Fighting alone: I’m a GOP governor. Why didn’t Trump help my state with coronavirus testing?
    • Larry Hogan (R) says that President Trump played down the severity of the coronavirus outbreak, leaving states to come up with their own testing strategies and supplies. [ael: Hogan is chairman of the National Governors Association.]
    • “Anybody that wants a test can get a test,” President Trump had declared the previous month. In reality, only 2,252 Americans had been tested at that point in March. Across the country, my fellow governors were desperately pleading for help on testing. But in early April, Trump said it was the states’ job.
    • Now the kits had arrived. The crew members came down together, walked over and stopped six feet away. Yumi bowed, and the crew bowed in return. Following their lead, so did I. Then a caravan of Maryland National Guard trucks escorted by the Maryland State Police drove the tests from the airport to a refrigerated, secure warehouse at an undisclosed location. The federal government had recently seized 3 million N95 masks purchased by Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker. [ael: my emphasis] We weren’t going to let Washington stop us from helping Marylanders.
    • This should not have been necessary. I’d watched as the president downplayed the outbreak’s severity and as the White House failed to issue public warnings, draw up a 50-state strategy, or dispatch medical gear or lifesaving ventilators from the national stockpile to American hospitals. Eventually, it was clear that waiting around for the president to run the nation’s response was hopeless; if we delayed any longer, we’d be condemning more of our citizens to suffering and death. So every governor went their own way, which is how the United States ended up with such a patchwork response. I did the best I could for Maryland. Here’s what we saw and heard from Washington along the way.
    • The resulting disorganization would delay mass testing for almost two months and leave the nation largely in the dark as the epidemic spread. Meanwhile, instead of listening to his own public health experts, the president was talking and tweeting like a man more concerned about boosting the stock market or his reelection plans.
    • In early February, we descended on Washington for the annual winter meeting of the National Governors Association…. We brought in Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who was already widely admired but whose awesome knowledge and straight-talking style hadn’t yet made him a national rock star; CDC head Robert Redfield; Ken Cuccinelli, the acting deputy secretary of homeland security; Jay Butler, the CDC’s deputy director for infectious diseases; and Robert Kadlec, assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the Department of Health and Human Services. They hit us with detailed presentations and the unfiltered truth, as well as it was known then. I remember hearing many dire claims: “This could be catastrophic. . . . The death toll could be significant. . . . Much more contagious than SARS. . . . Testing will be crucial. . . . You have to follow the science — that’s where the answers lie.” It was jarring, the huge contrast between the experts’ warnings and the president’s public dismissals. Weren’t these the people the White House was consulting about the virus?
    • In the days and weeks that followed, as the coronavirus hit Maryland, we worked frantically, issuing executive orders, holding news conferences, calling other governors and federal infectious-disease experts, talking to local officeholders, strategizing with my senior staff — and constantly sanitizing our hands.
    • But the president was all over the place. He avowed, falsely, that “anybody” could get a test, even as my fellow governors were desperately pleading for help on testing. Then he shifted from boasting to blame. “We inherited a very obsolete system” from the Obama administration, he claimed, conveniently ignoring the fact that his own CDC had designed the troubled U.S. testing system and that his own Food and Drug Administration had waited a full month before allowing U.S. hospital labs to develop their own tests. On March 25, the president was back to bragging again. “We now are doing more testing than anybody by far,” including South Korea, whose widespread testing program was being praised around the world. This was true in absolute numbers, since we are a much bigger country, but we’d tested far fewer per capita than the Koreans had — 1,048 tests per million people vs. South Korea’s 6,764 per million — and of course that was the only figure that mattered. During one White House briefing in late March, Trump said the issue had been dealt with. “I haven’t heard about testing for weeks,” the president insisted.
  • Trump and His Allies Want You to "Adapt" to the Coronavirus Crisis: A Closer Look: [ael: Seth Meyers says the same thing as Hogan, only funnier….]
  • The deadly plague that could devastate the US rabbit population: Scientists aren’t sure they can mitigate the spread of the virus, which causes fevers, internal bleeding and liver failure
    • The disease, which has a mortality rate as high as 70%, had previously devastated rabbit and hare populations in China, Europe and Australia, first reaching domestic rabbits in the United States in 2018. But in the last few months it has leapt into wild rabbit populations for the first time, hitting seven states. If left unchecked, it could be dire not only for rabbits but for the numerous animals who depend on them for food.
    • Rabbit hemorrhagic disease virus (RHDV) has been around since the 1980s, when it hit domesticated rabbit populations in China and Europe, eventually killing 140 million domestic rabbits in China alone. It was also used in Australia as an attempt to control rabbit populations. In 2010 a new form of the virus, RHDV2, emerged in Europe. The USGS has warned that all rabbits, hares and distant endangered relatives called pikas could be susceptible in North America.
    • The virus is incredibly persistent in the wild, studies show. It can survive for months, and carcasses have enough virus to transmit for more than 20 days, meaning anything visiting the carcass (predators, flies) can spread it easily. And it can withstand high heat – it’s still transmissible for several days even in 120F (49C), and can last for three months in dried feces.
  • Indigenous-owned company to lead cleanup effort of oil, gas well sites on Enoch Cree Nation lands:
    • Premier Jason Kenney made the announcement Wednesday as part of the Alberta government’s $1-billion site rehabilitation program (SRP). Backwoods, as well as Western Petroleum Management, which will be working on 257 sites across Alberta, are the first Indigenous companies to be approved under the initial phase of the SRP.
  • BlackRock took "voting action" against 53 companies on climate issues so far this year:
  • Babies born near natural gas flaring are 50 percent more likely to be premature: Study: Researchers link air pollution from burning off excess natural gas to preterm births for babies; with the most pronounced impacts among Hispanic families.
    • The study, published today in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, looked at satellite data showing the location and duration of flares, and at hospital records from 23,487 births for parents living in the rural region of Eagle Ford, Texas between 2012 and 2015. In a previous study, the same researchers estimated that the Eagle Ford shale region, which is home to more than 7,000 fracking wells, had more than 43,000 flaring events between 2012 and 2016.
    • "We found that among mothers living within five kilometers (or about three miles) of a high amount of flaring activity during pregnancy, we saw 50 percent higher odds of preterm birth compared to mothers that had no exposure to flaring," Jill Johnston, one of the study's lead authors and an environmental health scientist at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California, told EHN.
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  • Trump Weakens Major Conservation Law to Speed Construction Permits: President Trump on Wednesday unilaterally weakened one of the nation’s bedrock conservation laws, the National Environmental Policy Act, limiting public review of federal infrastructure projects to speed up the permitting of freeways, power plants and pipelines.
    • Revising the 50-year-old law through regulatory reinterpretation is one of the biggest — and most audacious — deregulatory actions of the Trump administration, which to date has moved to roll back 100 rules protecting clean air and water, and others that aim to reduce the threat of human-caused climate change.
    • Because the action is coming so late in Mr. Trump’s term, it also elevates the stakes in the November elections. Under federal regulatory law, a Democratic president and Congress could eradicate the NEPA rollback with simple majority votes on Capitol Hill and the president’s signature. [ael: my emphasis…]
  • Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp forbids cities, counties from requiring masks as coronavirus surges in the state: Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) signed an executive order Wednesday night explicitly banning cities from enacting their own mask mandates, even as the state experiences a sharp rise in coronavirus cases and other Republican governors are turning to mask orders to try to quell the surge.
    • [ael: now that makes all the sense in the world. I hope that they're putting masks on Confederate statues to keep them safe, however….]
    • Local officials who had issued mask mandates as hospitals filled up were outraged Wednesday night as Kemp overrode their judgment. The order came on the same day Georgia recorded its second-highest number of coronavirus cases since the start of the pandemic, logging 3,871 cases and 37 deaths.
    • “It is officially official. Governor Kemp does not give a damn about us,” Savannah Mayor Van Johnson (D), who was the first local official to issue a mask mandate, wrote on Twitter. “Every man and woman for himself/herself. Ignore the science and survive the best you can. In #Savannah, we will continue to keep the faith and follow the science. Masks will continue to be available!”
    • “What he continues to do is downplay not only the challenge to Georgians, but the deaths of Georgians,” Stacey Abrams, Kemp’s Democratic challenger in the 2018 gubernatorial race, said on MSNBC. “More than 3,000 Georgians have perished, disproportionately black and brown Georgians. And he continues to fiddle while Rome burns.”
  • How a middle school principal used the Ocasio-Cortez playbook against a 16-term incumbent: Jamaal Bowman, a 44-year-old middle school principal who had never run for office, is the prohibitive favorite in the race against Rep. Eliot L. Engel, a 31-year congressman who is chairman of the powerful House Foreign Affairs Committee.
    • Three weeks before the election, days into the protests that erupted after the killing of George Floyd, Engel did show up at a Bronx event calling for peace amid looting. When informed there wasn’t time for him to speak, Engel said, twice, into a hot mic: “If I didn’t have a primary, I wouldn’t care.”
    • A day later, Ocasio-Cortez endorsed Bowman, followed by Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Eleventh-hour endorsements from establishment Democrats, including Sen. Charles E. Schumer and Hillary Clinton, and from members of the Congressional Black Caucus came in for Engel. “The Clinton endorsement led to our second-biggest fundraising day of the campaign,” said Bowman — second only to the hot-mic moment day. “So, thanks! It gave us another hundred grand to put toward more advertising.”
    • [ael: one more reason to take that Clinton bumper sticker off the car….]
  • As Universities Prepare To Bring Students Back, Some Turn To Mass Coronavirus Testing: At Tufts University, “We decided to test the students both on campus and off campus twice a week,” he says. “But faculty, staff and others only once a week.”
    • How often universities will need to test students also depends on the students themselves, Walensky says. If they do well at following COVID-19 precautions, they might be able to keep down the number of new cases that each infected student causes — a number epidemiologists call the reproductive number.
    • “If they’re able to control this down to about one and a half, then outbreaks could be controlled if you have something like weekly testing,” Walensky says. “That means probably a lot of mask wearing. That means probably not a lot of superspreading events and parties. Dining halls will look different.”
    • “I have two college kids who are just desperate to go back to school,” she says. “So, I think that the kids are so motivated to want to go back, to be with one another, that many of them are likely to behave in a way that will keep the reproductive number somewhere in the 1.5 to 2.5 range.”
    • Even if that number rises to three or four, Walensky’s study suggests that colleges can still manage the coronavirus by testing students every two or three days. Walensky and her colleagues published their work on MedRxiv.com, an online archive of medical research that has not yet been peer-reviewed.

7/15/2020

  • Donald Trump’s niece says president is dangerous and calls on him to resign: Mary Trump, whose bombshell book was published Tuesday, tells ABC that the country is ‘on a precipice’
    • Donald Trump’s extraordinary character and outrageous behavior “threaten the world’s health, economic security and social fabric” and were shaped by his “high-functioning sociopath” father during childhood, the book says.
    • “He [Fred] had no empathy, he was incredibly driven in a way that turned other people, including his children and his wife, into pawns to be used for his own ends. “If someone could be of use to him he would use them, if they were not of use he exiled them, in my father’s case [Fred Jr], tragically, he was not of use.” [ael: well, like father, like son. The apple hasn't fallen far from the tree….]
  • The most powerful renewable energy: Can we harness the extraordinary power of rivers in a way that replenishes ecosystems, rather than harming wildlife?
    • As well as profoundly altering the watercourse, large hydro dams can be a death-zone for fish. As well as obstructing their migratory routes, the fast-spinning turbine blades can cut them. If they make it past the blades, sudden changes in pressure can kill the fish, as can shear forces during passage through the turbine.
    • Is it possible to make clean, renewable energy from rivers while actually restoring wildlife and the wider habitat? Engineers have been looking to change the future of hydropower through fish-safe turbines. The California-based company Natel Energy has partnered with Microsoft founder Bill Gates’ investment firm Breakthrough Energy Ventures to create a new, blunt-edged turbine that improves fish survival. As well as saving fish, Natel’s turbine aims to create climate-resilient hydropower that can withstand the vagaries of unpredictable rainfall.
    • Natel’s vision, called Restoration Hydro, moves away from conventional large dams to a more distributed approach based on biomimicry. Before human intervention and the creation of aqueducts and canals, most North American rivers were clogged with woody debris and beaver dams. Cascades that mimic beaver structures cause water to slow down, creating small ponds and wetlands; this gives sufficient time for water to seep into the ground, which in turn raises the water table. A higher water table means more groundwater storage, which helps watersheds ride out long stretches of drought.
  • The ocean’s largest mystery – why has no one seen a whale shark give birth?: A world-first ultrasound and chance sightings of potential mating rituals could help in the urgent work to save these gentle giants from extinction
  • Canada’s coronavirus performance hasn’t been perfect. But it’s done far better than the U.S.: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was defending his government’s historic budget deficit, caused largely by shutting down parts of the economy and ramping up spending on emergency relief programs to fight the coronavirus.
    • Considering the alternative, he told reporters in Ottawa, it’s been worth it. “We were able to control the virus better than many of our allies,” he told reporters this month. “Including, particularly, our neighbor.”
    • Still, the country has fared far better than the United States. The close allies share similar connections to initial hot spots in China and Europe, and confirmed their first cases within a week of each other in January. But the United States has since reported more than three times as many total infections per capita, and nearly twice as many deaths. Canadians have taken note. The two countries agreed to close their shared border to nonessential travel in March. Surveys here show that the closure, while economically painful, continues to enjoy wide public support.
    • But the country has also performed better at critical moments. In the early stages of the pandemic, Canada was able to ramp up testing more quickly than the United States, enabling it to better isolate the sick, trace contacts and limit spread.
    • The Canadian people have been less divided and more disciplined. Some provinces and territories could have locked down sooner, analysts say, but once measures were announced, they were strict, broadly uniform and widely followed. “It was completely unexpected,” said Gary Kobinger, director of the Research Center on Infectious Diseases at Quebec’s Laval University. “I thought that people would not accept to stay home. … This also helped.”
    • Gerald Evans, a professor of medicine at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, said Canada’s single-payer national health-care system also confers “distinct” advantages, allowing people to seek care for covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, without fear of out-of-pocket costs.
    • Analysts also point to differences in political leadership. Canadian officials have largely set aside partisan grievances for a “Team Canada” effort. Alberta Premier Jason Kenney sent excess personal protective gear to provinces in need, including Quebec, led by frequent sparring partner Premier François Legault.
    • That contrasts with the response in the United States, where President Trump has at times seemed to condition federal aid on support for him, and governors have fought with each other and the federal government over critical supplies.
    • Though Canada’s response has not been entirely devoid of politics, Canadian officials have consistently deferred to public health experts and scientists to drive policy decisions, and have offered a generally consistent message. “There’s been a consensus … that covid-19 is a very serious health problem and many members of Parliament from all parties have been elevating the messages of health experts over the course of the crisis,” said Eric Merkley, a political scientist at the University of Toronto. “That distinguishes us from the United States, where the Republican Party has elevated covid skeptics quite substantially.”
    • Canada’s performance has included missteps. Before the country recorded its first case, officials assured the public that the health-care system was ready and the risk posed by the virus was “low.” They would repeat that message into early March. But as cases began to tick up in February, some infectious-disease experts worried that inertia had slowed the government’s response. Some said Canada was too slow to close its borders, screen travelers and enforce quarantines. Some provinces dispatched their own public health workers to airports to screen travelers, encroaching on an area of federal jurisdiction.
    • There were worries about shortages of personal protective equipment. Government efforts to procure supplies ran into barriers. The problem has not been entirely rectified. Chagla said his hospital still faces shortages of N95 respirator masks.
    • Long-term care homes quickly emerged as hot spots. Roughly one-fifth of Canada’s cases and more than 80 percent of its deaths have occurred in those facilities, according to government figures, despite repeated warnings about their vulnerabilities. Spiraling outbreaks in Ontario and Quebec were so severe that Ottawa agreed to send the Canadian military to help. Soldiers documented abuses including cockroach infestations, force feeding and “significant gross fecal contamination” in patients’ rooms.
  • To Settle Infinity Dispute, a New Law of Logic: To determine the nature of infinity, mathematicians face a choice between two new logical axioms. What they decide could help shape the future of mathematical truth.
    • Chief among the holes is the continuum hypothesis, a 140-year-old statement about the possible sizes of infinity. As incomprehensible as it may seem, endlessness comes in many measures: For example, there are more points on the number line, collectively called the “continuum,” than there are counting numbers. Beyond the continuum lie larger infinities still — an interminable progression of evermore enormous, yet all endless, entities. The continuum hypothesis asserts that there is no infinity between the smallest kind — the set of counting numbers — and what it asserts is the second-smallest — the continuum. It “must be either true or false,” the mathematical logician Kurt Gödel wrote in 1947, “and its undecidability from the axioms as known today can only mean that these axioms do not contain a complete description of reality.”
  • How Gödel’s Proof Works: His incompleteness theorems destroyed the search for a mathematical theory of everything. Nearly a century later, we’re still coming to grips with the consequences.
    • But Gödel’s shocking incompleteness theorems, published when he was just 25, crushed that dream. He proved that any set of axioms you could posit as a possible foundation for math will inevitably be incomplete; there will always be true facts about numbers that cannot be proved by those axioms. He also showed that no candidate set of axioms can ever prove its own consistency.
  • Death Valley sets record for planet's hottest temperature in years — and the heat wave is forecast to spread: The official weather observing station in Death Valley, California — called Furnace Creek for obvious reasons — reached a scorching 128 degrees Fahrenheit on Sunday. That is the hottest temperature anywhere on the planet since 2017 and only one degree behind what experts say is likely the hottest temperature ever recorded on Earth.
  • As the coronavirus crisis spins out of control, Trump issues directives — but still no clear plan: President Trump has vowed that the nation’s schools must reopen for the fall semester, but neither he nor his administration has detailed a plan for how to do so safely.
    • [ael: The National Academies of Science just detailed a plan, but said "local control", and the feds and states need to pay up (buildings prepared, PPE provided, etc. etc.) to eliminate the flagrant inequalities.]
    • There is no cohesive national strategy, apart from unenforced federal health guidelines. Instead, the administration is offering a patchwork of solutions, often in reaction to outbreaks after they occur. Although Trump and his team declare sweeping objectives, such as reopening schools, they have largely shirked responsibility for developing and executing plans to achieve them, putting the onus instead on state and local authorities.
    • “It’s a complete disaster,” Messaoudi said. “This is how this administration has handled this entire pandemic — conflicting messages, knee-jerk reactions, lack of cohesive plans and undermining the CDC and attacking science on a regular basis.”
    • Trump’s approach was on display Tuesday in the White House Rose Garden, where the president delivered a rambling, stream-of-consciousness set of remarks for 54 minutes on a medley of topics, only briefly addressed the current coronavirus surge and offered no agenda to arrest it other than a vague promise of a vaccine. Meanwhile, Trump’s advisers inside and outside the White House advanced a character assault on Anthony S. Fauci, the government’s top infectious-disease expert.
    • The challenges the administration is facing, however, were underscored Sunday when Education Secretary Betsy DeVos struggled in an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash to articulate a plan for schools to reopen safely for the 2020-2021 academic year starting soon. Just as Trump has been, DeVos was adamant about schools reopening and warned against school leaders becoming “paralyzed” by fear of spreading the virus.
    • But when Bash peppered her with questions about how schools could do so safely, especially in hot spots, DeVos repeatedly stammered, making clear the administration was deferring the more difficult decisions to state and local leaders. “We’re a country of action,” DeVos said. “We have education leaders who can work hard and figure this out.”
    • In many ways, the president is simply reactive — pushing his own priorities and leaving public health officials scrambling to catch up in devising policy. After some economists advised Trump that the economy could not fully recover until schools reopen, because most parents need child care to return to their jobs, the president suddenly made schools a focus.
    • White House aides said the administration is advocating for tens of billions of dollars to be added to the next phase of federal stimulus for schools to help fund safety precautions. Still, Trump slammed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention over its health guidelines for schools, which he considered overly stringent and therefore obstacles to reopening. Vice President Pence said the CDC would be issuing new guidelines because Trump did not want the recommendations “to be too tough.”
    • “If you look at every country that has been successful in managing this, it’s been strong federal leadership,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. “While all public health is local, federal direction is huge.” Testing and contact tracing — two of the key components of any high-functioning national virus response — is another area where the administration is still struggling.
    • In general, experts say the country needs to be conducting about 5 million tests a day right now, as opposed to its current daily rate of roughly 600,000. Moreover, across the nation, many people find themselves waiting seven days or more for test results, rendering them essentially useless in fighting the outbreak and containing the spread of the virus, experts added.
    • Amesh Adalja, an infectious-disease expert at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said more important than the sheer number of tests is how quickly individuals receive their results — and each day of waiting further decreases their value. “It’s not a question of, ‘How many do you do?’ It’s a question of, ‘How actionable are those results?’ And if those results are delayed, then their value diminishes,” Adalja said. “It sort of defeats the purpose if you have to wait.”
    • The president, for his part, has expressed little interest in the specifics of the response outside of updates on a coronavirus vaccine — or the “cure,” as he frequently calls it. He has pushed health officials to move even faster than the already historically ambitious timeline of delivering hundreds of million of doses by January, several current and former administration officials said.
  • Missouri governor says Trump is ‘getting involved’ in case of St. Louis couple who pointed guns at protesters: [ael: the coronavirus pandemic rages; meanwhile, Trump and his GOP are on their watch, busily protecting those who most need help — like people brandishing weapons at peaceful protesters]

7/14/2020

  • Pathologist found blood clots in 'almost every organ' during autopsies on Covid-19 patients
    • In the early stages of the pandemic, bedside clinicians noticed a lot of blood clotting "in lines and various large vessels," she said. "What we saw at autopsy was sort of an extension of that," she said. "The clotting was not only in the large vessels but also in the smaller vessels. And this was dramatic, because though we might have expected it in the lungs, we found it in almost every organ that we looked at in our autopsy study," she said. Rapkiewicz's study outlining her findings was published at the end of June in The Lancet journal EClinicalMedicine.
    • "We found them in the heart and the kidneys and the liver and other organs," she said. "Notably in the heart, megakaryocytes produce something called platelets that are intimately involved in blood clotting."
  • America shuts down again -- choosing reality over Trump's false claims
    • As new cases of the disease reach 60,000 a day nationwide, many leaders, including those who supported Trump's aggressive approach, now have little choice but to prioritize science over politics, leaving the President looking out of touch with reality.
  • Coronavirus US: 61,492 new cases recorded, second highest day on record [ael: we're number 1! Make America Sick Again!]
    • Florida sets new record in single-day coronavirus death toll
    • Covid-19 is closing down California all over again: Governor Gavin Newsom has ordered bars and restaurants to close as coronavirus restrictions return.
      • It is a pattern being repeated around the world, with Hong Kong and the Philippines also returning to lockdown. As WHO chief Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned on Monday, “There are no short cuts out of this pandemic.”
      • California’s two largest school districts, Los Angeles and San Diego, have meanwhile announced that their classes will remain online-only throughout the fall, despite the Trump administration’s continuing push to reopen schools across the US in September.
  • We ran the CDC. No president ever politicized its science the way Trump has. The administration is undermining public health
    • On Sunday, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos characterized the CDC guidelines as an impediment to reopening schools quickly rather than what they are: the path to doing so safely. The only valid reason to change released guidelines is new information and new science — not politics.
    • One of the many contributions the CDC provides our country is sound public health guidance that states and communities can adapt to their local context — expertise even more essential during a pandemic, when uncertainty is the norm. The four of us led the CDC over a period of more than 15 years, spanning Republican and Democratic administrations alike. We cannot recall over our collective tenure a single time when political pressure led to a change in the interpretation of scientific evidence.
    • Trying to fight this pandemic while subverting scientific expertise is like fighting blindfolded. How well and how quickly we adhere to the advice of public health experts at the CDC will determine whether, how soon and how safely our schools can reopen.
  • Millions Have Lost Health Insurance in Pandemic-Driven Recession: A new study estimates that more than five million American workers lost their insurance this spring, a number higher than those in any full year of insurance losses.
    • “We knew these numbers would be big,” said Stan Dorn, who directs the group’s National Center for Coverage Innovation and wrote the study. “This is the worst economic downturn since World War II. It dwarfs the Great Recession. So it’s not surprising that we would also see the worst increase in the uninsured.”
    • The nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation has estimated that 27 million Americans have lost coverage in the pandemic; that study took into account family members of the insured. Another analysis, published Monday by the Urban Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, projected that by the end of 2020, 10.1 million people will no longer have employer-sponsored health insurance or coverage that was tied to a job they lost because of the pandemic.
  • How to Reopen Schools: What Science and Other Countries Teach Us: The pressure to bring American students back to classrooms is intense, but the calculus is tricky with infections still out of control in many communities.
    • As school districts across the United States consider whether and how to restart in-person classes, their challenge is complicated by a pair of fundamental uncertainties: No nation has tried to send children back to school with the virus raging at levels like America’s, and the scientific research about transmission in classrooms is limited.
    • The World Health Organization has now concluded that the virus is airborne in crowded, indoor spaces with poor ventilation, a description that fits many American schools. But there is enormous pressure to bring students back — from parents, from pediatricians and child development specialists, and from President Trump.
    • “I’m just going to say it: It feels like we’re playing Russian roulette with our kids and our staff,” said Robin Cogan, a nurse at the Yorkship School in Camden, N.J., who serves on the state’s committee on reopening schools.
    • In one community in northern France, Crépy-en-Valois, two high school teachers became ill with Covid-19 in early February, before schools closed. Scientists from the Institut Pasteur later tested the school’s students and staff for coronavirus antibodies. They found antibodies in 38 percent of the students, 43 percent of the teachers, and 59 percent of other school staff, said Dr. Arnaud Fontanet, an epidemiologist at the institute who led the study and is a member of a committee advising the French government. “Clearly you know that the virus circulated in the high school,” Dr. Fontanet said.
  • How the World Missed Covid-19’s Silent Spread: Symptomless transmission makes the coronavirus far harder to fight. But health officials dismissed the risk for months, pushing misleading and contradictory claims in the face of mounting evidence.
    • But if the experts were wrong, if the virus could spread from seemingly healthy carriers or people who had not yet developed symptoms, the ramifications were potentially catastrophic. Public-awareness campaigns, airport screening and stay-home-if-you’re sick policies might not stop it. More aggressive measures might be required — ordering healthy people to wear masks, for instance, or restricting international travel.
    • In the days and weeks to come, politicians, public health officials and rival academics disparaged or ignored the Munich team. Some actively worked to undermine the warnings at a crucial moment, as the disease was spreading unnoticed in French churches, Italian soccer stadiums and Austrian ski bars. A cruise ship, the Diamond Princess, would become a deadly harbinger of symptomless spreading.
    • The two-month delay was a product of faulty scientific assumptions, academic rivalries and, perhaps most important, a reluctance to accept that containing the virus would take drastic measures. The resistance to emerging evidence was one part of the world’s sluggish response to the virus.
    • [ael: our science is better than ever; but our response is worse than ever. Is there some kind of stupidity conservation law at work?]
    • It is now widely accepted that seemingly healthy people can spread the virus, though uncertainty remains over how much they have contributed to the pandemic. Though estimates vary, models using data from Hong Kong, Singapore and China suggest that 30 to 60 percent of spreading occurs when people have no symptoms.
    • Dr. Rothe decided she had to sound the alarm. Her boss, Dr. Michael Hoelscher, dashed off an email to The New England Journal of Medicine. “We believe that this observation is of utmost importance,” he wrote. Editors responded immediately. How soon could they see the paper?
    • The next morning, Jan. 30, public health officials interviewed the Chinese businesswoman by phone. Hospitalized in Shanghai, she explained that she’d started feeling sick on the flight home. Looking back, maybe she’d had some mild aches or fatigue, but she had chalked them up to a long day of travel.
    • When the health officials described the call, Dr. Rothe and Dr. Hoelscher quickly finished and submitted their article. Dr. Rothe did not talk to the patient herself but said she relied on the health authority summary. Within hours, it was online.
    • On Monday, Feb. 3, the journal Science published an article calling Dr. Rothe’s report “flawed.” Science reported that the Robert Koch Institute had written to the New England Journal to dispute her findings and correct an error.
    • The next morning, Dr. Clemens-Martin Wendtner made a startling announcement. Dr. Wendtner was overseeing treatment of Munich’s Covid-19 patients — there were eight now — and had taken swabs from each. He discovered the virus in the nose and throat at much higher levels, and far earlier, than had been observed in SARS patients. That meant it probably could spread before people knew they were sick.
    • Virologists had discovered a subtle genetic mutation in the infections of two patients from the Munich cluster. They had crossed paths for the briefest of moments, one passing a saltshaker to the other in the company cafeteria, when neither had symptoms. Their shared mutation made it clear that one had infected the other. Dr. Böhmer had been skeptical of symptomless spreading. But now, there was no doubt: “It can only be explained with pre-symptomatic transmission,” Dr. Böhmer said.
    • Now it was Dr. Böhmer who sounded the alarm. She said she promptly shared the finding, and its significance, with the W.H.O. and the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control. Neither organization included the discovery in its regular reports.
    • “At this point, for us it was clear,” said Dr. Wendtner, the senior doctor overseeing treatment of the Covid-19 patients. “This was a misleading statement by the W.H.O.”
    • But public health officials saw danger in promoting the risk of silent spreaders. If quarantining sick people and tracing their contacts could not reliably contain the disease, governments might abandon those efforts altogether.
    • Plus, preventing silent spreading required aggressive, widespread testing that was then impossible for most countries.
    • While public health officials hesitated, some doctors acted. At a conference in Seattle in mid-February, Jeffrey Shaman, a Columbia University professor, said his research suggested that Covid-19’s rapid spread could only be explained if there were infectious patients with unremarkable symptoms or no symptoms at all. In the audience that day was Steven Chu, the Nobel-winning physicist and former U.S. energy secretary. “If left to its own devices, this disease will spread through the whole population,” he remembers Professor Shaman warning.
    • Afterward, Dr. Chu began insisting that healthy colleagues at his Stanford University laboratory wear masks. Doctors in Cambridge, England, concluded that asymptomatic transmission was a big source of infection and advised local health workers and patients to wear masks, well before the British government acknowledged the risk of silent spreaders. [ael: that's one of Obama's scientists — acting like a scientist. Good lord — if only….]
    • Researchers in Hong Kong estimated that 44 percent of Covid-19 transmission occurred before symptoms began, an estimate that was in line with a British study that put that number as high as 50 percent. The Hong Kong study concluded that people became infectious about two days before their illness emerged, with a peak on their first day of symptoms. By the time patients felt the first headache or scratch in the throat, they might have been spreading the disease for days.
    • Back in Munich, there is little doubt left. Dr. Böhmer, the Bavarian government doctor, published a study in The Lancet last month that relied on extensive interviews and genetic information to methodically track every case in the cluster…. Dr. Rothe and her colleagues got a footnote. [ael: an apology might have been nice, too — maybe that's in the footnote. NYTimes bad: it's a citation, perfectly reasonable. They made it sound like an insult.]
  • Partially blinded by police: Eight people suffered severe eye injuries at protests across the country on May 30. In three instances, video evidence undermines official accounts of what happened.
    • [ael: so — official accounts 0, truth and evidence 3? What might we conclude about official accounts, statistically?]
  • BlackRock Punishes 53 Companies Over Climate Inaction: BlackRock has punished more than 50 companies from U.S. oil major ExxonMobil to Swedish carmaker Volvo over their lack of progress on tackling global warming, six months after it warned of huge investment risks from climate change. The global investment giant has faced repeated accusations of not taking meaningful action on global warming.
  • Trump administration rescinds foreign students rule: Judge Allison Burroughs, a federal district judge in Boston who was expected to preside over oral arguments in the Harvard-MIT case, made the surprise announcement at the beginning of the court proceedings Tuesday.

7/13/2020

  • 30-year-old dies after attending 'Covid party' in Texas: Patient said: ‘I think I made a mistake, I thought this was a hoax, but it’s not’, according to health official
    • “Just before the patient died, they looked at their nurse and said ‘I think I made a mistake, I thought this was a hoax, but it’s not,’” said Dr Jane Appleby, the chief medical officer at Methodist hospital in San Antonio. Appleby said: “I don’t want to be an alarmist, and we’re just trying to share some real-world examples to help our community realise that this virus is very serious and can spread easily.”
    • A “Covid party” is a gathering held by somebody diagnosed with coronavirus to see if the virus is real and to see if anyone gets infected, she explained.
  • Immunity to Covid-19 could be lost in months, UK study suggests: Exclusive: King’s College London team found steep drops in patients’ antibody levels three months after infection
    • In the first longitudinal study of its kind, scientists analysed the immune response of more than 90 patients and healthcare workers at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS foundation trust and found levels of antibodies that can destroy the virus peaked about three weeks after the onset of symptoms then swiftly declined. Blood tests revealed that while 60% of people marshalled a “potent” antibody response at the height of their battle with the virus, only 17% retained the same potency three months later. Antibody levels fell as much as 23-fold over the period. In some cases, they became undetectable.
      WaningAntibodyResponse.png
    • Prof Jonathan Heeney, a virologist at the University of Cambridge, said the study confirmed a growing body of evidence that immunity to Covid-19 is short-lived. “Most importantly, it puts another nail in the coffin of the dangerous concept of herd immunity,” he said. “I cannot underscore how important it is that the public understands that getting infected by this virus is not a good thing. Some of the public, especially the youth, have become somewhat cavalier about getting infected, thinking that they would contribute to herd immunity. Not only will they place themselves at risk, and others, by getting infected, and losing immunity, they may even put themselves at greater risk of more severe lung disease if they get infected again in the years to come.”
  • America is not prepared for schools opening this fall. This will be bad: Siva Vaidhyanathan
    • …consider my brother-in-law, a public school teacher married to my sister, who is immuno-suppressed after intensive cancer treatment. He looks at classroom plans for the fall and sees almost nothing to protect him from the aerosol spread of the virus. Once winter comes, air will recirculate among closed classrooms. Schoolchildren are hard to manage in normal times, and they cough on whatever is close. Given that many more children will be facing crises at home as parents and grandparents lose their jobs or their health or both, behavior will be even harder to manage. And given that he might only see each child two days a week, building trusting relationships will be impossible. Teaching online in the spring was a miserable failure, so his students will be well behind grade level in most subjects, making the task of catching them up even more daunting. He has already said goodbye to dear colleagues who have decided to leave the profession rather than deal with this impending disaster.
    • Teachers in Fairfax county, Virginia, have already pledged not to teach in person this fall because their district has not planned adequately for safety and educational quality.
    • This is a crisis of conflicting needs. Parents need their children in school so they can do their jobs or care for sick or elderly relatives. Children need a decent education, access to nurses, nutritious meals, safety, friendship and mentorship. And teachers deserve to be able to do their jobs to the best of their ability, know that they are making a difference, and trust they are not endangering themselves or their loved ones.
    • Like Denmark, South Korea and dozens of other decently run countries around the world, the US could have schooling this fall five days a week – had we committed hundreds of billions of dollars to construction, desk separators, masks, internet and software upgrades (especially in rural communities), HVAC and ventilation fixes, food service delivery to classrooms, viral testing and tracing, and school nurses (most US schools did away with full-time nurses decades ago). We would have had to have started all these projects in March. Instead, we’re in July, just weeks from schools opening, and almost nothing has been done.
    • President Donald Trump, invoking his power of positive thinking, has declared that schools will be open full-time this fall, regardless of consequences. Vice-President Mike Pence, acknowledging that the US Centers for Disease Control guidelines make that impossible, has pledged that the guidelines will change because Trump wants them to – thus destroying the CDC’s credibility, yet doing nothing to help schools.
    • Instead of massive infusions of federal funds, every school district faces budget cuts from reduced state and local taxes. So you can write off the education and safety of almost all American children. Millions will be at home alone, where they are most likely to be hurt or killed. Millions will be with abusive relatives. Millions will be without lunch or nurse care.
    • There is nothing Americans can do to save public education right now. We had a window about three months ago. We saw this coming. Teachers all saw this coming. There was no federal help, no national leadership. We got to visit bars and amusement parks this summer, though. So there’s that.
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  • Dear Joe Biden: Don't Listen to Silicon Valley: Unlike 20 years ago, today’s Silicon Valley culture is elitist and authoritarian. Its leaders are part of the problem, not the solution.
    • I hope you will take to heart the words of Albert Einstein, who said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” This is particularly true in tech.
    • Unlike 20 years ago, today’s Silicon Valley culture is elitist and authoritarian. The cult of the founder has blinded Silicon Valley to society’s needs. The tech industry has been transformed into a poster child for income inequality, toxic masculinity, and white privilege. In the era of George Floyd, Silicon Valley’s leaders are the last people to provide you with guidance on technology policy. Their companies and their community should instead be targets for reform.
    • Silicon Valley reflects many of the worst aspects of American industry today. It consists of monopolies and oligopolies. Too many business models are predatory. The industry has outsourced too many jobs, and helped to eliminate jobs in other industries. The companies do not pay enough taxes. Some operate as if they have more power than any government. It does not have to be this way. With the proper regulations, technology can once again be a driver of economic growth, while also being a force for good. This is your opportunity.
  • Education interrupted. Years lost. Students face 'cruelty' of new visa policy: The new rule was designed “without regard to concerns for the health and safety of students, instructors, and others,” says Harvard University President Larry Bacow.
    • Then, in the wake of the pandemic, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office issued the “July 6 Directive,” which states that international students enrolled in online instruction face deportation unless they switch to in-person classes. Students currently outside the country won’t be allowed back in. As a result, more than one million international students (about 5.5 percent of the total U.S. higher education population) currently in the U.S. are facing the difficult choice of losing their visa status—and throwing away years of study—or risking their health.
    • While the directive allows for a narrow mix of online and in-person instruction, the details are unclear, and it doesn’t allow for a completely online course load, even in a COVID-19 spike. If any face-to-face class moves online, students would immediately lose their visas. To date, the government hasn’t provided details on how long students have to figure out their situation, nor has it explained the ramifications of deportation for future study in the U.S. (Related: 2020 graduates face an uncertain future and workforce.)
    • “The order came down without notice—its cruelty surpassed only by its recklessness,” argues Larry Bacow, president of Harvard University, whose 5,000 international students would be affected. “It appears that it was designed purposefully to place pressure on colleges and universities to open their on-campus classrooms for in-person instruction this fall, without regard to concerns for the health and safety of students, instructors, and others.”
  • The battle for the ‘breathing lands’: Ontario’s Ring of Fire and the fate of its carbon-rich peatlands: Northern Ontario's muskeg serves as home to dozens of First Nations, stores immense amounts of carbon and sits on top of vast mineral deposits. Whose vision for the bogs and fens will win out?
    • “People don’t wake up and go ‘oh yeah, woohoo, decomposing organic material is the best!’ says Anna Baggio, the director of conservation planning for Wildlands League, in an interview with The Narwhal. “It’s not sexy. But it’s hugely valuable and we can’t even begin to get our heads around it.” It’s true: Ontario’s peatlands — or muskeg, as the wetland ecosystem is often called — offer a mind-boggling range of ecological benefits.
    • Like tropical and temperate rainforests, the peatlands sequester a huge amount of carbon, storing an estimated 35 billion tonnes of carbon in Ontario’s Far North alone (that’s equivalent to annual emissions from seven billion cars). The peatlands also serve as critical habitat for wildlife including caribou, wolverines and many migratory birds.
    • Disturbance of peatlands releases carbon dioxide and methane directly into the atmosphere. And while peatlands are already a net contributor of methane, these changes also destroy the ecosystem’s future storage capabilities for carbon dioxide, turning them from a carbon sink into a carbon emitter.
    • Last year, findings published by Strack’s research team concluded that seismic exploration conducted for Alberta’s oil and gas industry has disturbed at least 1,900 square kilometres of peatland and increased methane emissions by 4,400 to 5,100 metric tonnes per year.
    • Northern Indigenous communities have known of the ecological significance of peatlands for countless generations. After all, it’s their land: the “breathing lands,” as elders of Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug First Nation call it. “It’s been our source of food and source of livelihood as far as I can remember, back when we used the land quite a lot as a source of our livelihood,” says David Paul Achneepineskum, CEO of the tribal council Matawa First Nations that represents nine Ojibway and Cree First Nations, in an interview with The Narwhal. “A lot of people still think of it that way: their ancestors’ and their grandmothers’ and grandfathers’ way of life.”
  • ‘Million-mile’ batteries are coming. Are they a revolution?
    • Recently, multiple EV battery makers have announced the imminent arrival of “million-mile” batteries, power packs that supposedly have enough juice to be driven to the moon and back twice. In May, a top executive at General Motors said the company was “almost there” on development of a million-mile battery; in June, Chinese battery maker Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd. (CATL) told Bloomberg it was ready to produce batteries that last 1.24 million miles. For months, rumors have swirled that Tesla will soon roll out a million-mile battery on its own. Its 2019 Impact Report, released in early June, certainly reinforced that impression when it emphasized the environmental advantages of a “future Tesla vehicle with a million mile battery.”
    • In practice, early data suggests today’s EV batteries often last considerably longer with less degradation, said James Frith, an energy storage analyst for BloombergNEF, an clean energy research firm. Tesla’s recent impact report, Frith notes, claims that Model S and X batteries lose less than 20 percent of their original charge capacity after being driven 200,000 miles. A Nissan executive, meanwhile, recently estimated that a Nissan Leaf battery will last about 22 years based on battery degradation data the company is collecting on EVs sold in Europe, according to Automotive News.

7/12/2020

  • 'Historic corruption': 2 Republican senators denounce Trump's commutation of Stone: GOP lawmakers have been mostly silent about the commutation.
    • “Unprecedented, historic corruption: an American president commutes the sentence of a person convicted by a jury of lying to shield that very president,” Romney (R-Utah) wrote on Twitter Saturday.
    • In a statement, Toomey (R-Pa.) noted that the president “clearly has the legal and constitutional authority to grant clemency for federal crimes,” but said commuting Stone’s sentence was a “mistake” due in part to the severity of the charges against him.
    • Related: Robert Mueller: Roger Stone remains a convicted felon, and rightly so
      • The work of the special counsel’s office — its report, indictments, guilty pleas and convictions — should speak for itself. But I feel compelled to respond both to broad claims that our investigation was illegitimate and our motives were improper, and to specific claims that Roger Stone was a victim of our office. The Russia investigation was of paramount importance. Stone was prosecuted and convicted because he committed federal crimes. He remains a convicted felon, and rightly so.
  • Tucker Carlson’s chief writer resigns over racist and sexist posts, the latest trouble for Fox’s most controversial star
    • Among his posts, Blake Neff had smeared black people as lazy and criminal, stated that he would not get medical care from an Asian doctor, used homophobic slurs and repeatedly mocked a female college acquaintance by reposting her Facebook messages and photos for several years.
    • Top newsroom officials called Neff’s posts “horrendous” and “deeply offensive” in a memo to staff Saturday, a day after they were exposed in a CNN story. “FOX News Media strongly condemns this horrific racist, misogynistic and homophobic behavior,” said the memo from Suzanne Scott and Jay Wallace, the chief executive and president of Fox News, respectively. “Make no mistake, actions such as his cannot and will not be tolerated at any time in any part of our work force.” [ael: "But they're okay from the President of the United States, of course."]
  • Visual timeline shows Bolsonaro flouted health recommendations before contracting coronavirus — and after: [ael: The man is almost as evil as Trump. It's a bromance made in heaven] The Washington Post analyzed hundreds of videos and photos of Bolsonaro to retrace his steps in the two weeks before he first reported symptoms on July 5. Experts believe symptoms may appear 2 to 14 days after exposure to the virus.
    • For months, even as the coronavirus pandemic grew into a debilitating national crisis, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro did everything he could to downplay it. He called on people to return to normal. He waded into crowds of supporters. He repeatedly described it as nothing more than a little flu.
    • The Washington Post analyzed hundreds of videos and photos of Bolsonaro to retrace his steps in the two weeks before he first reported symptoms on July 5. Experts believe symptoms may appear 2 to 14 days after exposure to the virus.
    • July 7: Bolsonaro held a small news conference to tell the gathered reporters, clustered nearby, that he’d tested positive for the coronavirus. And then he took off his mask.
    • The visual evidence shows that Bolsonaro not only met with far more people than his official schedule suggests, but that he routinely flouted public health guidelines. He at times wore a mask and maintained a distance of six feet from others. But just as frequently, he met with people without a mask, shook hands and even hugged supporters.
    • Bolsonaro is now isolated, taking the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine, an unproven and potentially harmful medication when used to treat covid-19. But how he got to this point is revealed in the weeks before.
  • Fauci is sidelined by the White House as he steps up blunt talk on pandemic: Trump hasn’t consulted with the scientist since early June, telling Hannity ‘he’s ‘a nice man but he’s made a lot of mistakes.’
    • In recent days, the 79-year-old scientist and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has found himself directly in the president’s crosshairs. During a Fox News interview Thursday with Sean Hannity, Trump said Fauci “is a nice man, but he’s made a lot of mistakes.” And when Greta Van Susteren asked him last week about Fauci’s assessment that the country was not in a good place, Trump said flatly: “I disagree with him.”
    • For some administration officials, such developments have been an early sign their job was on the line. But Trump cannot directly fire Fauci, a career civil servant with more than 50 years in government service who enjoys strong bipartisan support in Congress. In any case, the president has no plans to get rid of him, said the official.
    • Fauci has found other ways to get his message out, from online Facebook chats to podcasts and print media interviews. And in recent days, with coronavirus cases slamming hospitals in the South and West, he has been frankly critical of the U.S. response — and implicitly, of the president.
    • The tension between the White House and Fauci was on full display last Sunday, when CBS host Margaret Brennan told millions of viewers that “Face the Nation” had tried for three months to interview him. White House communications officials, who must approve television appearances related to the coronavirus, responded by allowing Fauci spots this week on PBS NewsHour, a CNN town hall with Sanjay Gupta and NBC’s “Meet the Press” during the prime Sunday morning slot, according to one person familiar with the situation.
    • Then Fauci joined a Facebook Live event on Tuesday with Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.), disputing Trump’s assertions that a lower death rate showed the country’s progress against the pandemic. Fauci called it “a false narrative” and warned, “Don’t get yourself into false complacency.” Fauci did not end up making any of the scheduled appearances. The White House canceled them after his Tuesday remarks, according to the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to relate behind-the-scenes conversations.
    • Four months ahead of Election Day, Trump wants to “reopen and move on,” said another senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal internal deliberations. Those who disagree with that approach are out of favor, the official said.
    • Fauci has also expressed concern about the administration’s plan to reopen schools, but White House officials see keeping children home as having even more deleterious effects. Fauci has also called on state and local officials to mandate that people wear masks in public.
    • Trump is also galled by Fauci’s approval ratings. A recent New York Times/Siena College poll showed that 67 percent of voters trusted Fauci for information on the coronavirus, compared with 26 percent who trusted Trump.
    • The internal turmoil and troubled national response have taken a toll on Fauci, those close to him say. He is exasperated that states and individuals are not following the recommendations of experts, such as social distancing and wearing face coverings, said David Barr, a longtime HIV/AIDS activist who has known Fauci for 30 years.
    • In the previous five presidential administrations, Fauci has almost always played a key role in public health emergencies and infectious-disease responses by advising the president and serving as a chief spokesman for both Republican and Democratic administrations. In many ways, he was shaped by the HIV/AIDS crisis that emerged during his first years as NIAID director when the Reagan administration remained largely silent about a disease afflicting mostly gay men.
  • Okinawa demands answers from US after 61 marines contract coronavirus: US military tells officials two affected bases have been put into lockdown and those who tested positive are in isolation
    • The governor of Okinawa island in Japan has demanded that a United States military commander take tougher prevention measures and have more transparency after officials were told more than 60 marines at two bases have been infected with the coronavirus over the past few days.
    • Late on Saturday governor Denny Tamaki spoke on the phone to Lt Gen H Stacy Clardy, commander of III Marine Expeditionary Force, and insisted the US increases its disease prevention measures to maximum levels, stops sending personnel to Okinawa and seals the bases.
    • “We now have strong doubts that the US military has taken adequate disease prevention measures.”
  • Trump decries ‘cancel culture’ — but no one embraces it more: Here are just a few of the ways that Trump has used or tried to use the powers of his office to punish critics and perceived enemies…. [ael: she gives 11!]
  • Don’t stop with the police: Check racism in the prosecutor’s office
    • Take a run-of-the-mill fistfight: Police make the arrest, but prosecutors charge the black 20-something with aggravated assault instead of sending him home with a swollen wrist and a bruised ego. It’s prosecutors who pursue pretrial detention without closely watching the surveillance footage. It’s prosecutors who call the man a danger to society, even though he’s a youth mentor and nonprofit employee and community volunteer. And it’s prosecutors who force him to either risk 18 to 60 months in jail if convicted at trial or plead guilty to a lesser felony that may yield probation but may also guarantee him a criminal record for life.
  • Three Arizona teachers who shared a classroom got coronavirus. One of them died: All three teachers wore masks and gloves, used hand sanitizer and socially distanced, but still got sick, according to school officials at the small community in the eastern part of the state.
    • Gregorich reiterated the three teachers were careful and still got Covid-19. "I think that's really the message or the concern that our staff has is we can't even keep our staff safe by themselves … how are we going to keep 20 kids in a classroom safe? I just don't see how that's possible to do that," he said.
    • A month after they caught the virus that killed their colleague, Martinez and Skillings are still struggling. Martinez says fatigue is lingering, she still has a cough, and she continues to take breathing treatments to relieve tightness in her chest. She recently tested negative and retested. Skillings says she thought she was getting better, but recently her cough returned full force. She tested a week ago and it came back positive again.
  • Florida reports largest, single-day increase in COVID cases: Florida shattered the national record Sunday for the largest single-day increase in positive coronavirus cases in any state since the beginning of the pandemic, adding more than 15,000 cases as its daily average death toll continued to also rise.
    • The numbers come at the end of a grim, record-breaking week as Florida reported 514 fatalities — an average of 73 per day. Three weeks ago, the state was averaging 30 deaths per day. Since the pandemic began in March, 4,346 people have died in Florida of COVID-19, the state says.
    • About 10.7% of Saturday’s 143,000 tests came up positive, with an average age of 38. “I still think we need to increase our testing a little bit more,” said University of Florida epidemiologist Dr. Cindy Prins, adding that the state and local health departments should ramp up their contact tracing.
    • About 10.7% of Saturday’s 143,000 tests came up positive, with an average age of 38. “I still think we need to increase our testing a little bit more,” said University of Florida epidemiologist Dr. Cindy Prins, adding that the state and local health departments should ramp up their contact tracing.
    • Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said that even with the rising rates, he still wants the schools to reopen as scheduled next month, saying children have not proven to be vectors for the disease in states and countries where campuses are open. He said while each county will have to come up with procedures, depending on their local infection rate, not opening the schools would exacerbate the achievement gap between high- and low-performing students.
    • ap_4a3ff14cdd61434aa5fccc8179e70b16-620x370.jpg
    • [ael: Look at this moron, who looks like a used-car salesman — and who has been so devastatingly wrong about everything coronavirus, has absolutely no credibility — if he says that "children have not proven to be vectors for the disease", we need to extend the double-dog-dare to him — sit in a classroom with 30 kids for 8 hours a day, five different classrooms for a week. That's how we'll try to prove that they're NOT vectors — with you, and maybe with your family, too. Let's bring in your wife, mother, kids, Uncle Vinny, etc.]
  • Fracking Firms Fail, Rewarding Executives and Raising Climate Fears: Oil and gas companies are hurtling toward bankruptcy, raising fears that wells will be left leaking planet-warming pollutants, with cleanup cost left to taxpayers.
    • The day the debt-ridden Texas oil producer MDC Energy filed for bankruptcy eight months ago, a tank at one of its wells was furiously leaking methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere. As of last week, dangerous, invisible gases were still spewing into the air.
    • In the months before its bankruptcy filing, though, the company managed to pay its chief executive $8.5 million in consulting fees, its top lender, the French investment bank Natixis, later alleged in bankruptcy court.
    • Whiting Petroleum, a major shale driller in North Dakota that sought bankruptcy protection in April, approved almost $15 million in cash bonuses for its top executives six days before its bankruptcy filing. Chesapeake Energy, a shale pioneer, declared bankruptcy last month, just weeks after it paid $25 million in bonuses to a group of executives. And Diamond Offshore Drilling secured a $9.7 million tax refund under the Covid-19 stimulus bill Congress passed in March, before filing to reorganize in bankruptcy court the next month. Then it won approval from a bankruptcy judge to pay its executives the same amount, as cash incentives.
    • “It seems outrageous that these executives pay themselves before filing for bankruptcy,” said Kathy Hipple, an analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis and a finance professor at Bard College. “These are the same managers who ran these companies into bankruptcy to begin with,” she said.
    • It is also likely that many companies haven’t set aside enough money, as required by law, to restore well sites to their original state. An analysis of recently bankrupt oil and gas companies’ financial statements, prepared for The New York Times, shows a funding shortfall.
    • The federal government estimates that there are already more than three million abandoned oil and gas wells across the United States, two million of which are unplugged, releasing the methane equivalent of the annual emissions from more than 1.5 million cars.

7/11/2020

  • The best political ad ever made. By Republican Voters Against Trump
  • CDC Suggests Alternative Voting Methods As Trump Mounts Attacks On Mail-In Ballots:
    • The Centers for Disease Control quietly issued new guidance on voting safely amid the coronavirus pandemic, including a recommendation for “alternative voting methods,” as President Trump ramps up attacks on mail-in voting ahead of the November election.
    • “In the midst of this pandemic, voters should not need to choose between their health and casting their ballots,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) said in a statement. Klobuchar is the ranking member of the Senate’s Rules and Means Committee, which requested the CDC’s guidance. “Now we should pass my legislation to guarantee every voter can cast a mail-in ballot and everyone has access to at least 20 days of early voting so we can reduce lines on Election Day for those who need to vote in person.”
    • Trump’s attacks on mail-in voting are also partisan. On April 8, in what appears to be his first tweet on the subject, Trump wrote that “Republicans should fight hard” against it, because it “doesn’t work out well” for the GOP. This echoes a party belief that mail-in voting gives Democrats an advantage. Analysis by FiveThirtyEight found that neither party, however, gains an advantage by mailing in ballots.
  • After months of decline, America’s coronavirus death rate begins to rise: Texas, Arizona and South Carolina have all seen their death tolls rise by more than 100 percent in the past four weeks, according to an analysis of state and county health data by The Washington Post. Four more states — Mississippi, Tennessee, California and Louisiana — have seen at least a 10 percent jump in that time span.
    • Even President Trump’s favorite possible remedy — the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine, which he has taken as a prophylactic and called a “game changer” — is being resurrected, although the Food and Drug Administration revoked its approval last month after safety warnings about potential cardiac problems. White House trade adviser Peter Navarro has been leading a Trump administration effort to demand that the FDA renew its emergency authorization for the controversial drug. “It feels like Groundhog Day. They’re repeating same thing. And that’s because there’s only so many denial tactics you can employ,” said Jha, of the Harvard Global Health Institute. “The federal government is just AWOL.”
    • Federal health officials Friday made public the coronavirus testing plans prepared by each state, several major cities and U.S. territories. The Trump administration has chosen to rely on these individual plans, spurning a congressional requirement to adopt a uniform nationwide testing strategy.
    • Several state plans emphasize that they need federal help to secure enough testing supplies. “If the federal government reduces, or ceases to send, test kits to . . . Georgia, this could result in an [insurmountable] challenge and the state will not meet the 2% testing goal without additional private lab resources,” that state’s plan said. Louisiana’s said, “The greatest threat to our test plan success is the inability to obtain the needed supplies and reagents to successfully execute the state testing plan.”
  • Coronavirus is spreading in fraternity houses, raising concerns for campuses opening this fall: The explosion in cases at UC-Berkeley comes on the heels of major outbreaks at the University of Washington and University of Mississippi, both of which have been traced to fraternity housing or social functions this summer.

7/10/2020

  • Fred Rogers Took a Stand Against Racial Inequality When He Invited a Black Character to Join Him in a Pool: In 1969, when Black Americans were still prevented from swimming alongside white people, an episode of 'Mister Rogers' Neighborhood' broke the color barrier.
    • Though segregation was no longer the law of the land in America by the end of the 1960s, Black citizens were still not embraced as equal participants in public life. This status was reflected at many community pools across the country, with white people preventing Black people from sharing the water with them. It was in this atmosphere that Fred Rogers performed a simple but meaningful act in episode 195 of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, which aired on May 9, 1969. Rogers invited Officer Clemmons, a Black police officer on the show, to join him and cool his feet in a small plastic wading pool. When Clemmons sat down and placed his feet in the water, right next to Rogers', the two men broke a well-known color barrier.
    • Despite the Civil Rights Act of 1964, pools around the country were still segregated: In the 20th century, many communities in the United States created pools for children and adults to swim and splash in. However, few of these spaces welcomed Black people. Many white people balked at the thought of unsegregated pools because they harbored the racist belief that African Americans were more likely to transmit disease. Pool-goers were also separated by color due to bigoted fears about the need to protect the virtue of white women from predatory Black men.
    • Like buses and lunch counters, pools became a place of protest during the fight for civil rights. In 1964, a group of Black and white people jumped into a segregated pool at a motel in St. Augustine, Florida. This enraged the manager that he poured acid in the water (fortunately, the acid was diluted in the pool water and no one was injured).
    • Won't You Be My Neighbor? - Officer Clemmons Scene: Francois Clemmons discusses his role on the show as a black police officer and the show tackling racial segregation.
      • [ael: May 9th, 1969: we're about to land on the moon, and we're just now breaking the swimming pool color barrier on episode 195 of the Mr. Rogers Show….]
      • The pair recreated the pool scene 24 years later: Won't You Be My Neighbor? (2018) - I Love You Just The Way You Are Scene
        • Both Clemmons and Rogers understood the importance of their pool scene. In 2018, Clemmons told a Vermont news website, "It was a definite call to social action on Fred's part. That was his way of speaking about race relations in America." The interaction remains emblematic of the messages of love, kindness, and acceptance that Rogers was trying to share with his show's viewers.
        • In 1993, when Clemmons made a last appearance on the show, he and Rogers recreated the pool scene, during which Clemmons sang "Many Ways to Say I Love You." But this time Clemmons didn't just use Rogers' towel — Rogers took the towel and dried Clemmons' feet himself. Clemmons, who saw a connection to Jesus washing his disciples' feet, found the act very moving. As he later said, "I am a Black gay man and Fred washed my feet."
      • Years ago, Mr. Rogers showed us how to make an electric car, with a 50-mile range.
        • He says "Huh… I guess there's no such thing as an electric airplane — fun thing to think about, though."
        • The largest electric plane ever to fly — not just thinking anymore, Mr. Rogers: we're not in the Kingdom of Make Believe anymore….:)
  • Texas border county had 'model' Covid-19 response – then the governor stepped in: Officials in Latino Starr county say Greg Abbott’s reopening orders have rendered them toothless, and cases are surging
    • Five residents from Starr county on Texas’s southern border died on a single day last week after contracting Covid-19. New infections in the rural border community of around 65,000 people have soared in recent weeks, and two intubated patients had to be airlifted to Dallas and San Antonio when overwhelmed local hospitals couldn’t care for them.
    • But Starr county’s public officials knew months ago that is was especially vulnerable to the coronavirus pandemic: roughly one in three residents lives in poverty, a sizable slice of the population doesn’t have health insurance, and risk factors such as diabetes and obesity prevail. To protect their constituents, who are more than 99% Latino, they acted fast to curtail the contagion.
    • They developed what officials said was at the time the only drive-through testing site south of San Antonio. They closed schools. They implemented a stay-at-home order, curfew and mandatory face coverings. Only when necessary, they flexed their authority to fine and even jail anyone who flouted the law.
    • Their strategy worked. The first few coronavirus cases trickled into Starr county in late March, but for three weeks in April, there were no new infections. Before the end of May, weekly tallies of new confirmed positives never once reached double digits. Even seasonal influenza, coughs, colds and fevers that would normally travel through the community suddenly vanished.
    • “What we did here was a model for the rest of the nation to follow, but it was lost,” said Joel Villarreal, the mayor of Rio Grande City, one of four small cities in the county. “In fact, I think we had it right.” [my emphasis]
    • The inflection point came when the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, unilaterally decided to reopen the state, and stripped local governments of their power in the process. By early May, malls, restaurants, movie theaters, gyms and salons threw open their doors, albeit at limited capacity. Texans lost their fear of the virus as politicians told them it was safe to re-emerge from lockdown, and once masks became politicized, localities could no longer require their use.
  • COVID-19 Cases and Deaths in Federal and State Prisons: Novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) represents a challenge to prisons because of close confinement, limited access to personal protective equipment, and elevated burden of cardiac and respiratory conditions that exacerbate COVID-19 risk among prisoners.1 Although news reports document prison outbreaks of COVID-19, systematic data are lacking.2 Relying on officially reported data, we examined COVID-19 case rates and deaths among federal and state prisoners.
    • By June 6, 2020, there had been 42 107 cases of COVID-19 and 510 deaths among 1 295 285 prisoners with a case rate of 3251 per 100 000 prisoners. The COVID-19 case rate for prisoners was 5.5 times higher than the US population case rate of 587 per 100 000. The crude COVID-19 death rate in prisons was 39 deaths per 100 000 prisoners, which was higher than the US population rate of 29 deaths per 100 000 (Table). However, individuals aged 65 years or older comprised a smaller share of the prison population than of the US population (3% vs 16%, respectively) and accounted for 81% of COVID-19 deaths in the US population. The Table provides a standardized calculation showing that the adjusted death rate in the prison population was 3.0 times higher than would be expected if the age and sex distributions of the US and prison populations were equal.
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  • School openings across globe suggest ways to keep coronavirus at bay, despite outbreaks
    • Other outbreaks also suggest that elementary school pupils pose a smaller threat than older students. Among the worst schoolwide outbreaks was at Gymnasium Rehavia, a middle and high school in Jerusalem, where 153 students and 25 staff were infected in late May and early June. An outbreak at a New Zealand high school before that country’s shutdown infected 96 people, including students, teachers, staff, and parents. In contrast, a neighboring elementary school saw few cases.
    • But the picture is still blurry. Another Israeli outbreak was in an elementary school in Jaffa, with 33 students and five staff members affected. Across the globe, an elementary school classroom in Trois-Rivières, Canada, had nine of 11 students infected after one contracted the virus in the community.
    • Other data come from day care centers: In many countries, they stayed open for children of essential workers, and outbreaks appeared rare. Two flares in Canadian day cares—one in Toronto, and one outside of Montreal—led to temporary closures. In Texas, where overall cases have skyrocketed, at least 894 preschool staff and 441 children across 883 facilities have tested positive, according to news reports. That’s up from 210 total cases just a few weeks ago.
    • Not all countries have the luxury of instituting a mask policy driven by science and comfort. Benin requires masks in public spaces, but because the cost can be prohibitive for families, schools do not turn maskless students away. Students in Ghana returned to school in May wearing masks—if they had them. South Africa, which faces a rising COVID-19 caseload, is racing to provide free masks to all students who need them.
    • At the same time, open schools can change the overall balance of who becomes infected by adding cases among children. In Germany, the proportion of all new infections that were in children under age 19 ticked upward from about 10% in early May, when schools reopened, to nearly 20% in late June. But wider testing and a decline in cases among the elderly could also explain the increase. In Israel, infections among children increased steadily after schools opened. That paralleled a rise in cases nationwide, but it’s not clear whether the country’s rising caseload contributed to the increase within schools or vice versa.
    • In other places, ranging from Mexico to Afghanistan to the United States, planning for fall 2020 is underway. In the United States, school districts are releasing a patchwork of plans, which often include hybrid models that alternate distance learning with small in-person classes. Whether those plans sufficiently protect children, staff, and communities from COVID-19 will depend on how case numbers look as opening day approaches. This reality was thrown into stark relief late last month, when Arizona’s governor announced he would delay the state’s school reopening by at least 2 weeks, to 17 August, because of a surge in cases.
  • Trump Unmasked His Racist Campaign Strategy—and Christians Have Choices to Make
    • As Indigenous groups pointed out this past weekend, the Mount Rushmore memorial in South Dakota’s Black Hills where Trump was delivering his speech was taken from the Lakota people. In 95-degree heat, more than 100 protesters, many Lakota, lined the road leading from Keystone to the monument holding signs and playing Lakota music. “The president needs to open his eyes,” said Hehakaho Waste, a spiritual elder with the Oglala Sioux tribe. “We’re people, too, and it was our land first.”
    • But the president’s eyes were not opened. Later that weekend, in his July 4 speech delivered at the White House, Trump vowed to “defend, protect, and preserve American way of life, which began in 1492 when Columbus discovered America.”
    • Trump’s remarks sharply contrasted those of former Vice President Joe Biden who, in a campaign video posted on Twitter, called on Americans to “commit to finally fulfill” America's founding principle that “all men are created equal.” “We have a chance now to give the marginalized, the demonized, the isolated, the oppressed a full share of the American dream,” said Biden. “We have a chance to rip the roots of systemic racism out of this country.”
    • What does Trump want? If that wasn’t clear before, it is now: “We want a clear and faithful defense of American history and we want unity,” he said his July 4 remarks. Trouble is, you can’t have both. Unless we come to a more truthful understanding of U.S. history — nationally and practically repenting of systemic white racism — we will never find the unity to go forward together. And as his recent speeches demonstrate, Donald Trump’s reelection campaign is designed to fuel our divisions in the name of “law and order” — all for Trump’s own benefit (his only real goal in life).

7/9/2020

  • Trump Threatens to Cut Funding if Schools Do Not Fully Reopen: Disregarding the advice of his own health experts, President Trump also attacked the C.D.C.’s reopening guidelines as onerous and expensive.
    • [ael: Trump thinks that everything should be free to him. He's a parasite, a blood-sucking louse.]
    • Once again rejecting the advice of the specialists who work for him, Mr. Trump dismissed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s “very tough & expensive guidelines,” which he said asked schools “to do very impractical things.” [ael: such as, you know, pay attention to the pandemic.] Within hours, the White House announced that the agency would issue new recommendations in the days to come. [ael: such as, you know, ignore the pandemic.]
    • The president’s criticisms, in a barrage of Twitter threats, inflamed a difficult debate that has challenged educators and parents across the country as they seek ways to safely resume teaching American children by September. Even as the coronavirus is spreading faster than ever in the United States, Mr. Trump expressed no concern about the health implications of reopening in person and no support for compromise plans that many districts are considering. [ael: my emphasis, but that says it all about "Mr. Trump".]
    • His all-or-nothing stance left him at odds with the nation’s two largest school districts. Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City announced shortly after Mr. Trump’s tweets that schools would not fully reopen in September, with students attending classes in person only one to three days a week to accommodate social distancing. The chief public health officer in Los Angeles County told school officials on Tuesday to be prepared to continue learning entirely from home given the surge of infections in California.
    • During a coronavirus task force briefing later Wednesday afternoon, Vice President Mike Pence announced that the C.D.C. would issue new recommendations next week, saying the guidelines should not be a reason for schools to stay closed. “We just don’t want the guidance to be too tough,” he said, promising “five different documents that will be giving even more clarity on the guidance going forward.” [ael: I guess in translation we could say that Pence said, "Let's not let reality get in the way of our plans."]
    • [ael: and this one is just right over the top:] An administration official… denied that Mr. Trump or other White House officials had pressured the agency to ease the existing guidelines for schools, which were updated in April. [ael: wait — read his "Twits": he's right there, pressuring the agency - “While they want them open, they are asking schools to do very impractical things. I will be meeting with them!!!” - with his trademark multiple exclamation points!!!]
    • [ael: then there's this: "Dr. Robert R. Redfield, the agency’s director, Dr. Redfield said on Wednesday that Americans should not interpret C.D.C. guidelines as requirements." But let's be clear: withholding funding for schools could make anything a requirement, no matter how unbelievably foolish.]
    • [ael: and, in good news, we have this:] In reality, it may be a hollow threat. The president has no control over about 90 percent of school district budgets, which are generally financed by local property and sales taxes. And he has little control over federal funding already appropriated by Congress. “Trump has no legal authority to withhold funds,” Arne Duncan, the secretary of education under President Barack Obama, said during a briefing with reporters on Wednesday. “Threatening people, bullying them, lying doesn’t stop the virus from spreading.” He added: “It’s ludicrous. It’d be funny if it wasn’t so sad.”
    • Many parents, educators and doctors believe that the social, educational and psychological costs of a prolonged shutdown or online learning now outweigh the risk of the virus itself, a position expressed by the American Academy of Pediatrics. But how schools reopen safely is a matter of serious discussion.
  • 'Playing the hand of God': scientists' experiment aims to help trees survive climate change: Scientists use a strategy called assisted migration in an attempt to rescue tree species from inhospitable conditions
    • When trees do migrate north, most “species don’t have a smooth transition across the landscape; they will encounter houses, roads, development”, says Landau. Even if trees could find an unobstructed path forward, many studies echo Landau’s conclusion: the Earth’s climate is changing far too rapidly for them to keep pace.
    • Related: Adaptive Silviculture for Climate Change (ASCC) project
  • Best new thing in the world: A former high school football player dove and caught a child dropped from the balcony of a burning building: Phillip Blanks, a retired U.S. Marine and former football player, dove to catch a 3-year-old boy who was thrown from a burning building in Phoenix on July 3.GRUHCQI6DVAG3LVASOKXVYPYWI.png&w=500
    • [ael: Sadly the mother died, after going back in for another child, who was rescued by another man….]
    • But word started to spread below that a child was in the apartment, and that’s when a second heroic rescue took place. Another bystander ran inside the building and through the flames to save the 8-year-old.
    • D’Artagnan Alexander, 42, was on his way to a nearby plaza, where he works as a barber, when he heard screams and saw the flames. “I have a 3-year-old and a 9-year-old, so when I heard there were kids in there, that really hit my heart,” said Alexander, who immediately parked his car and ran toward the blaze. Without hesitating, he said, he entered the smoke-filled building and made his way to the third floor, which he described as scorching hot.
    • “I heard someone scream for help and I found the girl on the floor and carried her outside,” said Alexander, who managed to escape the building mostly unscathed, aside from a few minor burns. “Everything happened so fast,” he said. “I didn’t have time to think, my body just kicked into action and I went in.”
    • Phillip Blanks, 28, left, and D’Artagnan Alexander, 42, right, meet Corey Long, the father of the children they rescued from a fire on Friday. (Maranda Carruth)SJ2TUJQ6JBCCNMORJPV44IFRK4.jpg&w=500

7/8/2020

  • Intense Arctic Wildfires Set a Pollution Record: High temperatures and dry soil mean ideal conditions for fires. Blazes in June produced more carbon emissions than any other fires in almost two decades of monitoring.
    • Exceptionally high temperatures in Russia’s Far North are also a harbinger of an unusually hot year worldwide. Average global temperatures this June nearly matched the record for 2019, and this year as a whole stands to be among the five hottest years on record. Average temperatures in Europe in June were 1.3 degrees warmer than the average over the period between 1981 to 2010, according to European data.
  • Live updates: U.S. passes 3 million reported coronavirus cases as debate rages over plans to reopen schools: The coronavirus pandemic’s surge across the Sun Belt continued Wednesday as thousands of new cases in Florida and Arizona pushed the total number of confirmed infections in the United States past 3 million, according to data tracked by The Washington Post.
    • Against that background, a political fight over whether to send students back to classrooms in the fall pitted several large school systems and universities against President Trump, and the federal government against itself. In the space of a few hours Wednesday morning, Trump attacked his own administration’s guidelines for reopening schools as “expensive” and “impractical,” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that the nation’s largest public school system would not fully reopen in the fall despite White House pressure, and the federal government was sued by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology over an order that would require international students to attend classes in person.
    • Trump undercuts his own health officials, voices disagreement with CDC guidelines on reopening schools
      • President Trump on Wednesday undercut his administration’s own health experts, saying he disagreed with guidelines for reopening schools issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In morning tweets, Trump called the guidelines “very tough & expensive” as he continued to pressure local school districts to open in the fall, even as many states are experiencing a surge in coronavirus cases. “While they want them open, they are asking schools to do very impractical things,” Trump said of CDC officials. “ I will be meeting with them!!!”
      • Teachers union president ‘double dog’ dares Trump to visit a reopened class: National Education Association President Lily Eskelsen García said President Trump should go to a classroom full of young students if he plans to prematurely reopen schools without proper precautions against the spread of the coronavirus. “I double dog dare Donald Trump to sit in a class of 39 sixth-graders and breathe that air without any preparation for how we’re going to bring our kids back safely,” she said Wednesday during an interview with “CNN New Day’s” Alisyn Camerota.
    • Cases surpass 500,000 across Africa, where testing rates remain low: South Africa has adopted the most robust testing effort and, not surprisingly, emerged as an apparent hot spot in Africa. The nation has recorded 215,855 cases and 3,502 deaths, according to the latest Africa CDC data.
      • But that number probably leaves out many undocumented cases in countries that have struggled to implement robust testing for the virus. The World Health Organization has raised concerns that a “silent epidemic” may unfold in nations that either lack the resources or political will to adequately track and prevent the spread of the coronavirus, Reuters reported.
  • Stop saying Trump is ‘in denial.’ The truth is much worse.
    • We know why Trump did these things. He feared that publicly taking coronavirus too seriously would spook the markets, which he sees as crucial to his reelection. His allies frankly admitted reopenings would fuel the impression of rapid rebound, helping his reelection (or so they thought). In those cases, Trump made an active choice to prioritize his own perceived political needs over what experts — including his own — recommended as in the best interests of the country. He has now seen them proved right twice.
    • Not clueless and hapless. Malevolent.
  • California's San Quentin prison declined free coronavirus tests and urgent advice — now it has a massive outbreak: The storied prison is dealing with the third-largest coronavirus outbreak in the United States. Researchers fear that other institutions are at risk.
    • Since the first cases of COVID-19 were reported at San Quentin in the San Francisco Bay Area of California 5 weeks ago, more than one-third of the inmates and staff — 1,600 people — have tested positive. Six have died.
    • Researchers in the Bay Area say it didn’t have to be this way. For the past four months, they have been offering prison officials free tests for the coronavirus, guidelines for protecting prisons from the pandemic and increasingly frantic warnings that trouble was coming. Law firms filed motions in federal court, requesting that California governor Gavin Newsom compel California’s prisons to heed expert advice. Two core recommendations have been to test staff and inmates frequently, and to release prisoners so that there is sufficient room to isolate cases, quarantine those who might be infected and provide adequate space between inmates. The court denied the motions and correctional facilities have failed to fully implement the measures.
    • Nine out of the ten largest outbreaks in the United States have been associated with prisons, according to a list maintained by The New York Times. Although testing alone doesn’t curb COVID-19, it alerts officials to the situation so that they can separate people who test positive, as well as those potentially infected, before the virus has a chance to spread. With prison outbreaks flaring up in the United States in March, Fyodor Urnov, a scientific director at the Innovative Genomics Institute at Berkeley, offered free, philanthropy-supported COVID-19 testing services to San Quentin. “The reply was a polite, respectful ‘Thank you, but we’re all set for now,’” Urnov says. He wrote to San Quentin officials again when the outbreak emerged in June, and got a similar response.

7/7/2020

  • Amy Cooper Faces Charges After Calling Police on Black Bird Watcher: Ms. Cooper was captured on video calling the police after Christian Cooper asked her to keep her dog on a leash in Central Park.
    • People are rarely charged with filing a false police report, legal experts said, because the authorities do not want to discourage the reporting of crimes and because it can be difficult to prove that a person made a false report knowingly. But experts said that the evidence in the case against Ms. Cooper was strong and that it could have broader implications in other instances of white people making false police reports against Black people.
    • “To the extent that this woman was arguably deploying racial stereotypes and weaponizing them, it will make people think twice,” said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor and a retired federal judge. “It is a big deal.”
  • Sean Doolittle sees sports as a reward America hasn’t earned yet: "I might go crazy before anything else," Washington Nationals pitcher Sean Doolittle told reporters on July 5, describing uncertainty in the era of coronavirus.
    • Four Atlanta Braves players tested positive. First baseman Freddie Freeman was one of them, and he has been dealing with body aches, headaches, chills and a fever since Thursday, according to a message from his wife. The Miami Marlins announced Saturday that four players had tested positive. The New York Yankees announced four positive player cases, too. This weekend alone, veteran pitchers David Price of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Felix Hernandez of the Braves opted out of playing, joining three Nationals — Ryan Zimmerman, Joe Ross and Welington Castillo — as well as the Colorado Rockies’ Ian Desmond and the Arizona Diamondbacks’ Mike Leake.
    • “We’re trying to bring baseball back during a pandemic that’s killed 130,000 people,” Doolittle said. “We’re way worse off as a country then we were in March when we shut this thing down. And, like, look at where other developed countries are in their response to this. We haven’t done any of the things that other countries have done to bring sports back. Sports are like the reward of a functioning society. And we’re trying to just bring it back, even though we’ve taken none of the steps to flatten the curve. …
  • Gun violence kills 160 as holiday weekend exposes tale of 'two Americas': With more than 500 wounded across the US, local leaders see racism and under-investment at the root of the crisis
    • A six-year-old in Philadelphia, a seven-year-old in Chicago, an eight-year-old in Atlanta, a 15-year-old in New York, all shot. Community cries of “enough is enough”.
  • First Thing: the US is a Covid 'leader', but not in the way Trump thinks: White House press secretary says ‘the world is looking at us as a leader’ as the US approaches 3m infections.
    • The number of recorded coronavirus cases in the US is approaching 3 million, with 130,000 deaths, and daily case rates higher than anywhere else in the world. The White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, claimed on Monday that “the world is looking at us as a leader in Covid-19.” And it is – but not in the way she means.
    • As Europe begins to reopen its borders to international visitors, America’s flawed response to the pandemic means it is still on the continent’s travel banned list. This humiliation should force Americans to see global travel the way others do, argues Tamara J Walker.
  • Live updates: Coronavirus hospitalizations soar as Fauci warns U.S. is ‘still knee deep in the first wave’: The United States is “still knee deep in the first wave” of the novel coronavirus outbreak, Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Monday. Unlike Europe, “we never came down to baseline and now are surging back up.”
  • International students must take classes in person to stay in the country legally this fall, ICE announces: [ael: this is vicious. I suggest NKU introduce a series of in-person independent studies, or take other counter-aggressive steps…]
    • “What is just, to me, absolutely staggering is we have been asking for this guidance since April,” Boroughs said. Now universities have “nine days to respond. There’s just tremendous concern about trying to protect current students who are members of their communities, and their educational investment.”
    • The University of Southern California dramatically revised its fall semester plans last week amid an “alarming spike” in cases in the region and intensified restrictions from the governor, recommending undergraduates take all classes online and reconsider living on or near campus. A university spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday.
    • Ted Mitchell, the president of the American Council on Education, called the guidelines horrifying, saying it raised more questions than it answered and did more harm than good. “Iron-clad federal rules are not the answer at this time of great uncertainty,” he said in a statement. “The guidance is unworkable and deeply harmful,” said Craig Lindwarm, vice president of governmental affairs for the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities. He was concerned not just for the short-term impact of the announcement but for the message it would send long-term about the contributions international students make to the United States.
  • Brazil’s Bolsonaro tests positive for coronavirus: [ael: c'mon Jesus…. Q: What have you got when you've got Bolsonaro up to his neck in virus? A: not enough virus.]
  • Fox News apologizes for ‘error’ of removing Trump from photo of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell:
    • [ael: error? That's business-as-usual at Fox. What have they got to apologize for, which they shouldn't have apologized over 1000 times before?]
    • The point being, Fox News was accomplishing a nice bit of PR work from Trump by disappearing him from the photo. And it’s not as if the on-screen presentation was too cramped to accommodate the larger-than-life Trump: As the screenshot at the top of this post shows, there was plenty of space on both sides of the malignly cropped shot.
    • This is hardly a first for the network. Fox News was also busted last month for running misleading photographs of Seattle protests and the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone on its website. The photographs exaggerated lawlessness in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing by police in Minneapolis. In that instance, too, Fox News declared that it “regrets these errors," which required extensive forethought and exertion.
    • After Epstein’s 2019 arrest, Trump told reporters: “I had a falling out with him a long time ago. I don’t think I have spoken with him for 15 years. I was not a fan. A long time ago. I’d say maybe 15 years. I was not a fan of his, that I can tell you. I was not a fan of his.” Compare those sentiments with what he’d told New York magazine in 2002: “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific Guy. … He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” So even if there was some sort of falling out, Trump was buddies with Epstein while well aware of the latter’s preference for young women.
  • States mandate masks, begin to shut down again as coronavirus cases soar and hospitalizations rise: The pandemic map of the United States burned bright red Monday, with the number of new coronavirus infections during the first six days of July nearing 300,000 as more states and cities moved to reimpose shutdown orders.
    • The United States has reported 2.9 million coronavirus cases to date, and at least 127,000 people have died of the virus nationwide. The United States has had more than twice as many reported deaths as any other country and accounts for nearly a quarter of all deaths attributed to the virus worldwide. [ael: that's just because we keep testing for DEATH! If we'd just stop testing for DEATHs, we'd have fewer DEATHs!]
    • West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice (R) announced that face coverings will be mandatory inside buildings, and he asked residents to comply voluntarily. West Virginia hit an all-time peak of 130 new cases in one day on Sunday, putting its total at 3,442 cases on Monday. “If you go to work in a building, I expect you to wear a mask as you enter work, and if you’re working in an area that is completely socially distanced, take your mask off,” Justice said during a briefing. “If you go to a drinking fountain, put your mask on. If you go into a retail business, then I expect you to wear a mask.”
    • Trump and his campaign have increasingly argued that Americans need to continue to live their lives despite the pandemic. On Monday afternoon, Trump tweeted, in all caps, “SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL!!!” [ael: thank god for this federal leadership. I see that he's enlisted ICE in his plans to make sure that schools hold in-person classes…. C'mon Jesus!]
  • Supreme Court Won’t Block Ruling to Halt Work on Keystone XL Pipeline: But the justices stayed the rest of a federal trial judge’s ruling striking down a permit program, allowing construction of other pipelines around the nation.
    • The Supreme Court on Monday rejected a request from the Trump administration to allow construction of parts of the Keystone XL oil pipeline that had been blocked by a federal judge in Montana. But the court temporarily revived a permit program that would let other oil and gas pipelines cross waterways after only modest scrutiny from regulators.

7/6/2020

  • Swing states may be up for grabs as Covid-19 hits Republican strongholds: As the devastation of the pandemic spreads across the country, states long considered to be reliably Republican appear increasingly up for grabs
    • “It’s not fair to the Republicans because all the states that need help – they’re run by Democrats in every case,” the US president said at the time, as hard-hit states such as New York and California sought federal financial relief from the impact of the virus. [ael: that's pure evil, the evil of "Dunning-Kruger" Trump.]
    • Those hurdles could have profound implications for the US Senate, as Democrats fight to regain control of the chamber. Texas, Georgia and Arizona are all holding Senate races this fall, and Trump’s controversial comments about the coronavirus pandemic have put Republican senators in difficult positions as they prepare for their November elections.
    • Despite his complaints of “fake polls”, Trump appears to be somewhat aware of the precarious position he is in. The president has already started to claim the election will be “rigged” by voter fraud because of efforts to expand voting by mail, even though voter fraud is actually very rare. Trump’s baseless claims have been read as an attempt to delegitimize the election in case he loses.
  • As Trump gaslights America about coronavirus, Republicans face a critical choice:
    • Though US coronavirus fatalities are down, there are few signs that the virus is going to disappear. The spike in patients overwhelmed some Texas hospitals as concerns grow about shrinking capacity in intensive care units. Florida set an all-time record for the most cases in a single day Saturday, surpassing the previous record set in New York in mid-April. Former FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb warned Sunday on CBS's "Face the Nation" that there's "no clear line of sight on how we're going to get this under control." [ael: yes there is: where masks, social distance, and act responsibly — which Republicans can't seem to do, since they're so focused on Trump's anus.]
    • Weekend images emerged of partygoers dancing and shouting with no distancing at an event in Diamond Lake, Michigan, and closely packed crowds at a Wisconsin waterpark.
    • Cases are declining in three states — Kentucky, Vermont and the swing state of New Hampshire, where the Trump campaign announced that the President will hold a campaign rally Saturday at Portsmouth International Airport. The crowd will be in a hangar, with the overflow crowd outside. The campaign said that there will be ample access to hand sanitizer and all attendees will be provided a face mask "that they are strongly encouraged to wear."
    • But the concern is that the President's descriptions of an innocuous virus will lead his supporters to let their guard down. In direct contradiction to Trump's "totally harmless" assertion, the US case fatality rate from coronavirus stood at 4.6% this weekend, according to Johns Hopkins University data.
    • The World Health Organization has said that 20% of all people who are diagnosed with coronavirus are sick enough to need oxygen or hospital care. And while the CDC estimates that a third of coronavirus cases are asymptomatic, that does not make the disease any less dangerous since people with mild or no symptoms can pass the virus on to others. As of Sunday, the death toll in America had surpassed 129,000 American lives.
  • Ennio Morricone, Oscar-winning Italian film composer, dies aged 91: Morricone’s work helped define the western but he went on to work across all film genres
    • Morricone wrote his own obituary, which was read out by Assumma. “I, Ennio Morricone am dead. Thus I announce it, to all my friends who have always been close to me and also to those who are a little far away, whom I greet with great affection,” it begins. He says it is “impossible to name everyone” but mentions members of his family and close friends, closing with words for his wife: “I renew to you the extraordinary love that has held us together, and I am sorry to abandon you. To you the most painful farewell.”
    • His 1960s scores for Sergio Leone, backing a moody Clint Eastwood in the Dollars trilogy, were huge successes and came to define him: with their whistling melodies, and blend of symphonic elements with gunshots and guitars, they evoke the entire western genre. “The music is indispensable, because my films could practically be silent movies, the dialogue counts for relatively little, and so the music underlines actions and feelings more than the dialogue,” Leone has said. Morricone has said his own best work was for Leone’s 1984 film Once Upon a Time in America.
    • Those films, and Morricone’s scores, were a clear influence on Quentin Tarantino who hired him for his western The Hateful Eight. It earned Morricone his first Oscar outside of his lifetime achievement award. Tarantino also used his music in Kill Bill, Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained, with Morricone writing an original song for the latter.
    • Another great obit: Ennio Morricone: a composer with a thrilling ability to hit the emotional jugular
  • Dominion cancels Atlantic Coast Pipeline, sells natural gas transmission business: The Atlantic Coast Pipeline is dead, abandoned by Dominion Energy and its partner, Duke Energy, after the $8 billion project reached a regulatory dead end.
    • Thwarted by environmental groups repeatedly in the federal courts, the project was more than three years behind schedule and more than $3 billion over budget, with no clear path to completion after federal courts in Montana threw out a nationwide federal water quality permit that the Atlantic Coast Pipeline relied upon to cross hundreds of bodies of water in its path.
    • “It’s all about the people,” said Nancy Sorrells, who helped form the Augusta County Alliance against the project in 2014 and represents the county in the Alliance of the Shenandoah Valley. “They knew it was wrong from start to finish and just never gave up…. It’s been the best Fourth of July since 1776,” she added.
  • After Fighting Plastic in ‘Paradise Lost,’ Sisters Take On Climate Change: Melati and Isabel Wijsen began campaigning to reduce plastic waste in Bali seven years ago. Now 19 and 17, they say the pandemic shows that stark measures to protect the planet are possible.
    • In January, Melati appeared at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where she spoke passionately about the need to pressure companies and governments to ban single-use plastic. Former Vice President Al Gore, who was on the panel with her, drew applause when he said, “Melati, I’m so impressed with you.”
    • “This is a virus that impacts us directly right now, but climate change will do the exact same thing,” she said. “One of the biggest things we have seen from the coronavirus is that government can act quickly. My question is: Why is that not the case when it comes to climate change?”
    • During the campaign, they came to see Bali not as an island paradise but “a paradise lost,” Melati said. The sisters found that the island produced enough plastic waste to fill a 14-story building every day but had no island-wide system for collecting garbage.
    • In December 2017, so much debris washed ashore during trash season that the government declared a “garbage emergency” along some of the most popular tourist beaches. Yet the growth of the tourism industry and the construction of hotels have continued apace. Even President Trump has plans for a Trump-branded hotel and golf resort here.
  • Do Americans Understand How Badly They’re Doing?: In France, where I live, the virus is under control. I can hardly believe the news coming out of the United States.
    • America is my home, and I have not emigrated. I have always found the truest expression of my situation in James Baldwin’s label of “transatlantic commuter.” I have lived in France off and on since the early 2000s, and it has been instructive over the decades to glimpse America’s stature reflected back to me through the eyes of a quasi-foreigner. If the country sparked fear and intense resentment under George W. Bush and mild resentment mixed with vicarious pride under Barack Obama, what it provokes under Trump has been something entirely new: pity and indifference. We are the pariah state now, but do we even see it?
  • Trump Falsely Claims ‘99 Percent’ of Virus Cases Are ‘Totally Harmless’: The president dismissed the severity of the pandemic, downplaying the effect of the disease even as infections surge across the Sunbelt and rebound in California.
    • His remarks about a virus that has already claimed nearly 130,000 lives were perplexing. The coronavirus is surging across the Sunbelt states and has rebounded in California. At least 2.8 million Americans are known to be infected, and public health officials have said the real number of infections may be 10 times higher.
    • And the death rate does not capture all of the harm caused by the disease. As many as 15 to 20 percent of known Covid-19 patients may require hospitalization, and of the group admitted, 15 to 20 percent are transferred into intensive care, according to some estimates.
    • 06-MORNING-COUNTRY-CASES-articleLarge.png
  • Nick Cordero, Nominated for Tony as Tap-Dancing Tough Guy, Dies at 41: The Broadway actor’s battle with the coronavirus was followed closely by many as his wife chronicled his experience on social media.
    • As he remained unresponsive, she began daily playing a song that he had written, “Live Your Life,” and encouraging others to do so as well.
    • The actor Zach Braff, in whose guesthouse Ms. Kloots has been living with her family while Mr. Cordero was hospitalized, said on Twitter: “I have never met a kinder human being. Don’t believe that Covid only claims the elderly and infirm.” Mr. Braff, Mr. Cordero’s co-star in “Bullets Over Broadway,” added, “I am so grateful for the time we had.”
    • Ms. Kloots’s frequent updates on Instagram, interspersed with short video clips from well-wishers, periodically had encouraging news; on April 24, Ms. Kloots said that Mr. Cordero had two negative Covid-19 tests.
  • 239 Experts With One Big Claim: The Coronavirus Is Airborne: The W.H.O. has resisted mounting evidence that viral particles floating indoors are infectious, some scientists say. The agency maintains the research is still inconclusive.
    • The coronavirus is finding new victims worldwide, in bars and restaurants, offices, markets and casinos, giving rise to frightening clusters of infection that increasingly confirm what many scientists have been saying for months: The virus lingers in the air indoors, infecting those nearby.
    • If airborne transmission is a significant factor in the pandemic, especially in crowded spaces with poor ventilation, the consequences for containment will be significant. Masks may be needed indoors, even in socially-distant settings. Health care workers may need N95 masks that filter out even the smallest respiratory droplets as they care for coronavirus patients.
  • Live updates: As U.S. coronavirus cases soar, White House digs in despite criticism:
    • With the number of novel coronavirus cases soaring in the United States, many elected officials are beginning to acknowledge that rushing to reopen was a mistake. The mayor of Miami-Dade County on Monday said he will sign an executive order reclosing dining rooms, gyms and many other businesses, a day after the rolling seven-day average for daily new cases nationwide hit a record high for the 27th day in a row.
    • Dozens of former government scientists and public health officials of both parties on Monday criticized the Trump administration for marginalizing science and expertise in its response to the pandemic. But White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows defended Trump’s unsubstantiated assertion over the weekend that 99 percent of the country’s coronavirus cases are “totally harmless.” According to administration and campaign officials, the president’s reelection effort is focused on convincing Americans that they can live with the virus, a stark opposition to the strategy of his presumptive opponent, Joe Biden.
    • The United States is probably diagnosing just 1 out of 12 coronavirus cases, meaning that the true number of new daily infections could soon hit 700,000, according to former Food and Drug Administration commissioner Scott Gottlieb…. “What’s surprising is how quickly the supply chain got pressed in states like Georgia and Florida and our inability to move supplies into those states. Those states right now don’t have enough testing,” he said. “There’s delays of three to five days when you talk to doctors on the ground.”
    • West Virginia governor mandates masks inside buildings: Masks or other facial coverings are now mandatory inside buildings in West Virginia for residents aged 9 years and older, when social distancing isn’t feasible. Gov. Jim Justice (R) announced the executive order in a news briefing on Monday in response to an uptick in coronavirus cases over the weekend, local news outlets report. But the mandate, which takes effect at midnight, isn’t punitive – West Virginia residents are expected to comply voluntarily.
    • Arizona surpasses 100,000 cases as hospitalizations continue to rise: Gov. Doug Ducey (R) launched Arizona’s reopening May 1, which included salons and barbershops, restaurant dine-in services and retail stores. But last week, as cases ballooned, Ducey closed down bars, gyms, theaters and water parks again and extended the executive order through July 27, the Arizona Republic reported. Reported cases in Arizona peaked July 1 with 4,877 cases, two days after his decision. Vice President Pence visited Phoenix on July 1 and announced that the federal government would send 500 health workers for assistance and would prioritize Arizona in its distribution of remdesivir, the first covid-19 treatment drug found to work in clinical trials.
    • Harvard to reopen with fewer than half of undergrads on campus and all courses taught remotely
    • Medical assistants, cooks and cleaners also face risks on the front lines of the covid-19 crisis, but with low pay and little recognition
  • Judge orders Dakota Access pipeline shut down pending review:
    • FARGO, N.D. (AP) — A judge on Monday ordered the Dakota Access pipeline shut down for additional environmental review more than three years after it began pumping oil — handing a victory to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and delivering a blow to President Donald Trump’s efforts to weaken public health and environmental protections it views as obstacles to businesses.
    • The order comes after Boesberg said in April that a more extensive review was necessary than what the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers already conducted and that he would consider whether the pipeline should be shuttered during the new assessment.
    • “Yet, given the seriousness of the Corps’ NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) error, the impossibility of a simple fix, the fact that Dakota Access did assume much of its economic risk knowingly, and the potential harm each day the pipeline operates, the Court is forced to conclude that the flow of oil must cease,” he added.
  • Overwhelmed nursing homes kept taking new patients. Some got sick and died.: Lorraine Sheppard moved into Potomac Valley Rehabilitation and Healthcare Center for physical therapy in mid-April, just as the nursing home reported its first coronavirus case. Within three weeks, the largely healthy 92-year-old was dead.
    • What happened to her points toward a thorny question faced by all nursing homes: Whether to continue taking new patients during a pandemic that has devastated the elderly and infirm, leaving many facilities short-staffed and overwhelmed.

7/5/2020

  • The Fullest Look Yet at the Racial Inequity of Coronavirus:
    • Early numbers had shown that Black and Latino people were being harmed by the virus at higher rates. But the new federal data — made available after The New York Times sued the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — reveals a clearer and more complete picture: Black and Latino people have been disproportionately affected by the coronavirus in a widespread manner that spans the country, throughout hundreds of counties in urban, suburban and rural areas, and across all age groups.
    • Latino and African-American residents of the United States have been three times as likely to become infected as their white neighbors, according to the new data, which provides detailed characteristics of 640,000 infections detected in nearly 1,000 U.S. counties. And Black and Latino people have been nearly twice as likely to die from the virus as white people, the data shows.
    • “Systemic racism doesn’t just evidence itself in the criminal justice system,” said Quinton Lucas, who is the third Black mayor of Kansas City, Mo., which is in a state where 40 percent of those infected are Black or Latino even though those groups make up just 16 percent of the state’s population. “It’s something that we’re seeing taking lives in not just urban America, but rural America, and all types of parts where, frankly, people deserve an equal opportunity to live — to get health care, to get testing, to get tracing.”
    • The data also showed several pockets of disparity involving Native American people. In much of Arizona and in several other counties, they were far more likely to become infected than white people. For people who are Asian, the disparities were generally not as large, though they were 1.3 times as likely as their white neighbors to become infected.
    • Experts point to circumstances that have made Black and Latino people more likely than white people to be exposed to the virus: Many of them have front-line jobs that keep them from working at home; rely on public transportation; or live in cramped apartments or multigenerational homes.
    • The Times obtained the C.D.C. data after filing a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to force the agency to release the information. To date, the agency has released nearly 1.5 million case records. The Times asked for information about the race, ethnicity and county of residence of every person who tested positive, but that data was missing for hundreds of thousands of cases.
  • Social media backlash forces Trump to find new ways to spread his message: Twitter, Reddit and other platforms are taking action against the president’s rhetoric. The alternatives have far less reach
  • 'We've got to do something': Republican rebels come together to take on Trump: A slew of organized Republican groups have sprung up to do all they can to defeat Trump in November. Will their effort work?
  • Trump’s push to amplify racism unnerves Republicans who have long enabled him: President Trump’s unyielding push to preserve Confederate symbols and the legacy of white domination, crystallized by his harsh denunciation of the racial justice movement Friday night at Mount Rushmore, has unnerved Republicans who have long enabled him but now fear losing power and forever associating their party with his racial animus.
    • Former Ohio governor John Kasich, a Republican who ran against Trump in 2016, said the GOP’s muted and scattered response to the president on race this week underscores how the party is “in decline” and has become a vessel for Trumpism — even as polls show Trump losing ground among seniors and white evangelicals and trailing Biden in every key battleground state. “They coddled this guy the whole time and now it’s like some rats are jumping off of the sinking ship. It’s just a little late,” Kasich said. “It’s left this nation with a crescendo of hate not only between politicians but between citizens. . . . It started with Charlottesville and people remained silent then, and we find ourselves in this position now.”
    • Kasich added, “I’m glad to see some of these Republicans moving the other way but it reminds me of Vichy France where they said, ‘Well, I never had anything to do with that,’ ” a reference to the French government that continued during Nazi occupation in the 1940s.
    • [ael: how about this for barfodocious?] “Whether the media decides to acknowledge it or not, President Trump has repeatedly condemned hatred and bigotry and encouraged all of us to come together,” Matthews said in an email.
    • “Without white resentment, there is no rationale for Donald Trump,” Belcher said. “Without that, what reason do his supporters have to be with Donald Trump if he’s not going to be your tribal strong man? He started there and will end there.”
  • Historians question Trump’s choice of ‘heroes’ for national garden monument: “For starters, you might want to consult different communities about who their heroes are and not just choose your own,” Grossman said. “You might also want to consult professionals, like actual historians.”
    • “Trump, your Garden of Heroes is sleight of hand. You want to focus on monuments, but your policies have undermined voting rights, health care, immigrant justice & protections for the American people, esp poor & low wealth,” William Barber, a reverend and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, said in a tweet.
    • If Trump believes so strongly in history, “how about a national monument to opponents of southern secession? And to abolitionists?” Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Douglas Blackmon said on Twitter. “There are no Asian American heroes. Like Sadao Munemori who attacked two machine gun emplacements in Italy, then gave his life diving on a grenade to save his unit. He’s not a hero? Wrong color?”
    • “The tragedy is an undertaking like this could actually be a good idea if serious,” said Sean Wilentz, a history professor at Princeton University. “You could engage artists who are hurting for work right now. You could be innovative and really rethink the idea of what it means to memorialize things and how we do that. You could even break out of the whole classical/neoclassical forms we’ve been stuck in when it come statues. But I don’t think that’s what Trump has in mind.”
  • The White House repeatedly denied the CDC permission to brief the public on the coronavirus, report says
    • Earlier in the year the CDC had given frequent briefings on the pandemic. But then it fell abruptly silent, with no public briefings held between March 9 and June 12. A CDC spokesperson, speaking anonymously to Yahoo, confirmed that the agency "slowly but surely took a backseat" to the coronavirus task force. "We continued to ask for approval" from the White House to hold briefings, the CDC spokesperson told Yahoo News. "We were not given approval. Finally, we just stopped asking."
    • A task force member told Yahoo that the CDC was too concerned with its own stature, and an interagency response to the crisis was required. "The CDC feels like they should be in charge of this," remarked the official.
    • [ael: this is just too hard to believe…. Lord help us.]
  • Coronavirus updates: Early reopenings fueled explosion in cases that could overwhelm hospitals, local officials warn: Local officials in states with surging coronavirus cases issued dire warnings Sunday about the spread of infections, blaming outbreaks in their communities on early reopenings and saying the virus was rapidly outpacing containment efforts.
    • After Texas reported another single-day record for new coronavirus cases over the weekend, Austin Mayor Steve Adler (D) told CNN’s “State of the Union” that there won’t be enough medical personnel to keep up with the spike in cases if the rate of increase continues unchanged in his city. “If we don’t change this trajectory, then I am within two weeks of having our hospitals overrun,” he said, adding that intensive care units in the city could be overflowing within 10 days. He said he was not sure that Texas needed a statewide shelter-in-place order but that he wanted the authority to impose one locally.
    • Officials nationwide continued to plead with the public to wear masks, practice social distancing and avoid large gatherings to stop the virus from spreading deeper into communities. Several more major U.S. cities, including Cincinnati and Cleveland, passed ordinances requiring people to wear face coverings while in public.

7/4/2020

  • Rapid Arctic meltdown in Siberia alarms scientists:
    • Much of the world remains consumed with the deadly novel coronavirus. The United States, crippled by the pandemic, is in the throes of a divisive presidential campaign and protests over racial inequality. But at the top of the globe, the Arctic is enduring its own summer of discontent. Wildfires are raging amid ­record-breaking temperatures. Permafrost is thawing, infrastructure is crumbling and sea ice is dramatically vanishing.
    • In Siberia and across much of the Arctic, profound changes are unfolding more rapidly than scientists anticipated only a few years ago. Shifts that once seemed decades away are happening now, with potentially global implications. “We always expected the Arctic to change faster than the rest of the globe,” said Walt Meier, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “But I don’t think anyone expected the changes to happen as fast as we are seeing them happen.”
    • Much of Siberia experienced an exceptionally mild winter, followed by a warmer-than- average spring, and it has been among the most unusually warm regions of the world during 2020. During May, parts of Siberia saw an average monthly temperature that was a staggering 18 degrees Fahrenheit (10 Celsius) above average for the month, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.
    • Ted Schuur, a professor at Northern Arizona University who researches permafrost emissions, said the rapid warming is turning the Arctic into a net emitter of greenhouse gases — a disconcerting shift that threatens to dramatically hasten global warming. The unusually mild conditions in Siberia are particularly worrisome, as the region is home to the largest zone of continuous permafrost in the world.
    • There has long been concern throughout the scientific community that the approximately 1,460 billion to 1,600 billion metric tons of organic carbon stored in frozen Arctic soils, from Russia to Alaska to Canada, could be released as the permafrost melts. That is almost twice the amount of greenhouse gases trapped in the atmosphere. Recent research by Schuur and others shows that warmer temperatures allow microbes within the soil to convert permafrost carbon into carbon dioxide and methane.
    • “When we develop a fever, it’s a sign. It’s a warning sign that something is wrong and we stop and we take note,” Turetsky said. “Literally, the Arctic is on fire. It has a fever right now, and so it’s a good warning sign that we need to stop, take note and figure out what’s going on.”
  • We asked veterans to respond to The Post’s reporting on Clint Lorance and his platoon. Here’s what they said. Clint Lorance was convicted of second-degree murder in Afghanistan and pardoned by President Trump. His troops are still haunted by his crimes.
    • [ael: not an easy read, but an important one.]
  • BP and Shell Write-Off Billions in Assets, Citing Covid-19 and Climate Change: The moves were seen as a possible turning point as plummeting demand makes big oil companies admit they’re not worth what they used to be.
    • Two of the world's largest energy companies have sent their strongest signals yet that the coronavirus pandemic may accelerate a global transition away from oil, and that billions of dollars invested in fossil fuel assets could go to waste. This week, Royal Dutch Shell said it would slash the value of its oil and gas assets by up to $22 billion amid a crash in oil prices. The announcement came two weeks after a similar declaration by BP, saying it would reduce the value of its assets by up to $17.5 billion. Both companies said the accounting moves were a response not only to the coronavirus-driven recession, but also to global efforts to tackle climate change.
    • Shell had already lowered its long-term outlook at the end of last year. This week, it released a more pessimistic projection for oil demand over the next few years too. The company also said the cuts to its refining asset values would "support the decarbonization of its energy product mix." The biggest hit to Shell's books came in its investments in liquefied natural gas, which the company hopes can still play a growing role in global energy needs. Those assets are now worth up to $9 billion less than Shell had hoped, the company said.
    • The firm said the pandemic would "expedite peak oil demand," and that some stores of oil in North American shale, Canadian tar sands and Russian and Norwegian Arctic fields are now likely to go undeveloped, given how expensive they are to extract.
    • The research and consulting firm Wood Mackenzie said the price crash of recent months has wiped away $1.6 trillion in its valuation of oil and gas producers, and that the impairments are sending an important signal. "It's about fundamental change hitting the entire oil and gas sector. Within this write down, Shell is giving us a message about stranded assets, just like BP did a few weeks ago," said Luke Parker, vice president of corporate analysis, in a research note. "Just a few years ago, few within the oil and gas industry would even countenance ideas of climate risk, peak demand, stranded assets, liquidation business models and so on. Today, companies are building strategies around these ideas."
  • James Baldwin Was Right All Along: The writer and activist has the painful, powerful words for this political moment. America just needs to heed them.
    • original.jpg
    • Why can’t we understand, as Baldwin did and demonstrated throughout his life, that racism is not a sickness, nor a virus, but rather the ugly child of an economic system that produces inequalities and injustice? The history of racism is parallel to the history of capitalism. The law of the market, the battle for profit, the imbalance of power between those who have all and those who have nothing are part of the foundation of this macabre play. He spoke about this not-so-hidden infrastructure again and again: “What one does realize is that when you try to stand up and look the world in the face like you had a right to be here, you have attacked the entire power structure of the Western world.” And more pointedly: “I attest to this: The world is not white; it never was white, cannot be white. White is a metaphor for power, and that is simply a way of describing Chase Manhattan Bank.”

7/3/2020

  • Trump to hold Fourth of July gathering at Mount Rushmore as coronavirus surges: South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem (R) confirmed this week that social distancing won’t be enforced and that the approximately 7,500 expected attendees will not be required to wear masks. The United States on Thursday recorded the largest single-day total of new coronavirus cases since the start of the pandemic, and on Friday a number of states set new case records.
    • [ael: there's REAL, AMERICAN leadership for you. American exceptionalism: really, really, exceptionally stupid.]
    • Trump, reputedly (if he can stick to the script): "“If we tear down our history, we will not be able to understand ourselves or America’s destiny. The left wing mob and those practicing cancel culture are engaging in totalitarian behavior that is completely alien to American life — and we must not accept it,” Trump will say, according to a campaign official with knowledge of the speech.
    • Native Americans: “The whole Black Hills is sacred. For them to come and carve the presidents, slave owners who have no meaning to us, it was an insult,” Ricky Gray Grass, a member of the Oglala Sioux’s executive council, told The Washington Post earlier this week.
    • [ael: Trump, 0; Native Americans, 1]
  • Trump’s Mount Rushmore Trip Highlights Disconnect With Virus’s Surge: The president’s insistence on celebratory gatherings — and his focus on the culture wars — is jarring as health officials stress the dangers of a raging pandemic.
    • As the president departed Washington for South Dakota on Friday, new virus cases surged above 50,000, and at least five states — Alabama, Alaska, Kansas, North Carolina and South Carolina — reported their highest single day of cases yet. Newly reported cases of the virus were rising in all but a handful of states, and many large cities, including Houston, Dallas, Jacksonville and Los Angeles, were seeing alarming growth.
    • “People voted him out because they felt he did not understand the suffering,” Mr. Beschloss said, referring to Hoover. Mr. Beschloss said that while presidents had always celebrated the Fourth of July, it was also highly unusual to turn it into a partisan rally.
    • Mr. Trump has consistently played down the concerns over spikes in new cases, even as many cities and states have had to slow or reverse their reopenings, claiming that young people “get better much easier and faster,” that the death rate is declining and that the virus will “just disappear.”
    • In Washington, however, officials are adamantly opposed to the celebration that White House officials defended as a gathering people could enjoy safely. Administration officials noted that the celebration was scaled back from last year’s event, when Mr. Trump turned the holiday into a salute to the military, with tanks on the streets of the capital and flyovers from Air Force One as well as aircraft from each branch of the armed forces, as he delivered remarks from the Lincoln Memorial.
    • But the virus has already shown it can infiltrate the administration, and the White House has experienced the dangers of staging large gatherings as the pandemic rages. Vice President Mike Pence postponed a planned trip this week to Arizona after Secret Service agents set to accompany him tested positive for the coronavirus or showed symptoms. And at least eight campaign staff members who helped plan Mr. Trump’s indoor rally last month in Tulsa, Okla., have tested positive, either before the rally or after attending.
  • Trump’s Niece Presses Case Against Effort to Bar Publication of Her Book: Mary Trump and her lawyer filed documents questioning the validity of the nondisclosure agreement she signed, saying it was based on fraud and was too broad to be enforced.
    • [ael: the piece was written by Alan Feuer, who "covers courts and criminal justice for the Metro desk. He has written about mobsters, jails, police misconduct, wrongful convictions, government corruption and El Chapo, the jailed chief of the Sinaloa drug cartel." Definitely the man to write about Trump.]
  • Nonprofit leaders: Standing firm and united against racism and any acts that dehumanize people: As Northern Kentucky nonprofit leaders, we stand together against racism and denounce any acts that dehumanize people.
    • [ael: Thanks to local friends! Keep it up Brighton Center, Family Promise, et al.]
  • Commerce IG says department is preventing release of report about NOAA officials who issued Hurricane Dorian statement: regarding National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officials' issuance of statements that contradicted with a local National Weather Service statement about Hurricane Dorian in September 2019.
    • A scientific misconduct investigation earlier this month found that NOAA officials violated their ethical standards and scientific integrity policy when they issued these conflicting statements during Hurricane Dorian. In the memo to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, Inspector General Peggy Gustafson said the Department is relying on "amorphous claims of privilege" that are preventing the IG's office from releasing their report. She said her office "cannot be expected to blindly divine the position of the Department and interagency stakeholders without specific privilege claims to specific portions of the report."
    • Specifically, the panel determined that acting Administrator of NOAA Neil Jacobs and NOAA Deputy Chief of Staff and Director of Communications Julie Roberts violated NOAA's Code of Ethics for Science Supervision and Management and the agency's Scientific Integrity Policy in writing and releasing the September 6 statement.
    • The day after NOAA issued that statement, the inspector general's office issued a memo to the acting head of NOAA notifying him that their office was "examining the circumstances surrounding the unsigned Statement," the memo states.

7/2/2020

  • Trump has 'gone awol' as president amid coronavirus pandemic, says ex-CIA director: Leon Panetta becomes latest prominent public figure to accuse Trump of effectively surrendering to the virus and abandoning Americans to their fate
    • Leon Panetta, who served in various capacities under nine US presidents, became the latest prominent public figure to accuse Trump of effectively surrendering to the virus and abandoning Americans to their fate, using the military jargon awol, meaning absent without leave. “This is a major crisis,” Panetta told Anderson Cooper 360 on CNN, noting that top infectious diseases expert Anthony Fauci has warned that America may hit 100,000 new cases a day, twice the current rate. “But the president, rather than bringing together some kind of national strategy to confront this crisis, simply resorts to tweeting about vandalism and other things to kind of divert attention from the crisis that’s there.”
    • He added: “We have a president that is not willing to stand up and do what is necessary in order to lead this country during time of major crisis. I have never experienced a president who has avoided that responsibility.”
    • [ael: I don't know why people are struggling to understand this — it's really simple: Trump only cares about one person (and it's not you).]
    • The virus has infected more than 2.6m Americans and killed 128,000, according to Johns Hopkins University. Newly reported infections topped 50,000 on Wednesday for the first time, an all-time high in the US outbreak, and are rising significantly in 40 states, more than a dozen of which have been forced to pause reopening plans. Hospital beds and testing capacity are under strain.
    • Overall, the survey found, 60% of voters disapprove of how Trump has handled the coronavirus and 57% believe the president is to blame for the deaths associated with it. [ael: what the hell's wrong with the 40% who may actually approve of his handling of the coronavirus?]
  • 'It's very troubling': alarm grows over Covid-19 spike among young Americans: Doctors are seeing more and more young patients – and health experts are urging young people to take the virus seriously
    • In Florida, the Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, has acknowledged that cases “are shifting in a radical direction younger”, but this week vowed not to roll back reopening – despite a huge rise in cases. The state has, however, issued a moratorium on consumption of alcohol at bars. [ael: Well, that should do it! That'll stop this virus, for sure.]
    • Mary Jo Trepka, professor and chair of the department of epidemiology at Florida International University, said the median age of recent cases in the state has been in the 30s. On 23 June it was 33; currently it’s 37. “That means that half of the people are 37 or younger who are testing positive for Covid-19,” she said. “That’s really pretty remarkable, how large that number is, especially since you would still think that more frail people would be more likely to be identified because they’re going to have more severe illness.”
  • ‘The new gold’: demand for PPE soars again amid shortage as US cases rise: Fragile supply chains and wary hospitals continue to push some workers to wear N95 masks and and gowns for up to a week
    • [ael: hmmm. Seems like we had fair warning on this, right? What about that defense production act thing? In WWII, by this time, we were producing bombers at the rate of one every 10 minutes or so. Seems like we could have been prepared for a surge at this point. What could be wrong?]
    • In Texas, Lubbock Kids Dental CEO Kay Kennel said: “I haven’t been able to buy any [PPE] in nine weeks.” Texas, like most other states, created a supply chain task force to deal with PPE shortages. But Kennel said she watches daily in disbelief as the governor updates the state on new PPE shipments, and yet she cannot obtain the supplies she needs. As of Thursday, she had nine days worth of PPE left for her staff. “There’s no excuse for this – none, none,” she said.
    • The Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), which is in charge of distributing medical supplies such as masks, appeared to struggle to distribute supplies in the spring. In June, the agency said it distributed millions of surgical masks, gloves and gowns nationally, but some nursing homes which received them said the products were defective and unusable. As of June, one in five nursing homes in Florida told the federal government they still have almost no masks or gowns, according to the Miami Herald.
  • Coronavirus US: Texas governor orders all residents to wear masks: Texas governor Greg Abbott today issued an executive order requiring all Texans to wear face masks at public gatherings. Here’s the announcement from Abbott’s office.
    • As the Dallas Morning News notes, the move is a reversal from earlier this year when Abbott blocked local lawmakers from requiring people to wear masks.
  • Coronavirus cases are rising in 40 of 50 US states: The surge is blame in part on Americans not wearing masks or following social distancing guidelines.
    • President Donald Trump on Wednesday seemed confident the virus would soon subside, telling Fox Business: “I think that, at some point, that’s going to sort of just disappear, I hope.” [ael: well that's certainly encouraging. I'll go with that. That's a federal plan, of sorts.]
    • All but 10 states are showing an increase in newly confirmed cases over the past 14 days, according to data compiled by the COVID Tracking Project, a volunteer organization that collects testing information. The outbreaks are most severe in Arizona, Texas and Florida, which together with California have re-closed or otherwise clamped back down on bars, restaurants and movie theaters…. While some of the increases may be explained in part by expanded testing, other indicators are grim, too, including hospitalizations and positive test rates. Over the past two weeks, the percentage of positive tests in Georgia, Kansas and Tennessee has doubled. In Idaho and Nevada, it has tripled.
  • This is how you lose a culture war:
    • President Trump has waved the white flag by wearing a black mask to ward off the coronavirus — and it’s fitting that even in defeat, he makes himself out to be a hero: “Looked like the Lone Ranger,” he told Fox Business on Wednesday about his own experience donning a face covering.
    • “We must have no stigma, none,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) exhorted on the chamber’s floor earlier this week, pushing his caucus to fall in line.
    • “I went to my grocery store every week, guess what? They wore masks,” Sean Hannity said on Fox News. “Nobody at my grocery store, thank God, got coronavirus. I think they work.”
    • Trump wanted to make masks a symbol, a marker of political identity, much as the Lone Ranger’s signature non-disguise tells everyone who he is and what he stands for. But symbols have to exist at a distance for us to abstract them, as many do with the statues or with the flag. They have to stay untethered from actual everyday life. The decision of whether to wear a mask is as tethered as can be to how we live every one of these monotonous, epidemic-defined days. Masks are right here, right now, in front of our noses. Or not.

7/1/2020

  • Revealed: Covid-19 outbreaks at meat-processing plants in US being kept quiet: Testing has found positive cases at North Carolina facilities, but officials refuse to release the information
    • In late April, while outbreaks began emerging at meat processing plants across the country, Donald Trump signed an executive order forcing the facilities to remain open. That same month, the US exported a record amount of pork to China, despite industry claims of a domestic shortage.
    • Since the pandemic began, more than 36,000 meat processing and farm workers have tested positive for Covid-19 and at least 116 have died, according to a tally by the Food and Environment Reporting Network, though the true number is likely higher.
    • “Why, when a nursing home has an outbreak, it’s in the paper, but when a meatpacking facility does, it’s not?” said Mac Legerton, a longtime grassroots policy advocate and co-director of the Robeson County Cooperative for Sustainable Development, and is among those who have criticized local and state governments’ approach to case reporting.
  • Ten years of the sun in one hour – Nasa releases mesmerising space film: The space agency gathered 425 million high-resolution images of the sun, which have now been stitched together to form the video
  • First Thing: the US bought the world's entire supply of a Covid-19 drug: The Trump administration snapped up stocks of remdesivir, one of just two two drugs proven to work against the virus.
    • Donald Trump promised to put America first, and at least in the case of the coronavirus drug remdesivir, that’s precisely what he has done. To the alarm of experts, his administration has bought up virtually all stocks of the drug – one of just two proven to work against Covid-19 – for the next three months, leaving almost none for the rest of the world.
    • Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau warned there could be unintended negative consequences if the US continued to outbid its allies. “We know it is in both of our interests to work collaboratively and cooperatively to keep our citizens safe,” he said. The Trump administration has also invoked the Defense Production Act to block some medical goods made in the US from being sent abroad.
  • Los Angeles sheriff's department faces a reckoning after another police shooting: One of the most powerful local police agencies in the US has a history of abuse. Families of those killed by LASD want systematic change
    • Carl Reiner, Multifaceted Master of Comedy, Is Dead at 98: Mr. Reiner was a gifted comic actor, but he spent most of his career slightly out of the spotlight — writing, directing and letting others get the laughs.
    • A photo showing Mr. Reiner, Mr. Brooks and Annie Reiner wearing “Black Lives Matter” T-shirts, taken on Mr. Brooks’s birthday, was posted on Twitter this week.
  • Democrats unveil sweeping plan to tackle climate change: The new document offers policy recommendations in nearly every sector of the economy.
    • The 547-page report, the most ambitious Democratic climate plan to date, calls for setting a price on carbon dioxide pollution, eliminating pollution from cars by 2035 and from power plants by 2040 and achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. It also aims to make environmental justice a focus and says marginalized communities that often suffer the worst effects of climate change and pollution must get "the tangible benefits" of climate action.
    • “It will be a fight as long as it needs to be,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Tuesday. “We will turn this report into law, saving the planet. Democrats know that the climate crisis is the essential crisis of our time.”
    • The document produced by the House's Select Committee on the Climate Crisis contains no input from Republicans, who have consistently derided any climate change policies such as the Green New Deal, a reference to the plan led last year by progressives Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) that called for overhauling the U.S. economy to combat climate change.
  • The virus didn’t stop a Washington socialite from throwing a backyard soiree. Then the tests came back positive.

What went on: 2020

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What went on: 2017

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What went on: 2014

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