July 21-31, 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
  • "I want to be a great ancestor…." Overheard on an ACLU zoom call….

July 21-31, 2020

7/31/2020

  • Climate change strikes back: Svalbard coal mine flooded by melting glacier: After days with record heat at Svalbard, the penetration of water from the above melting glacier is now flooding Norway’s only operating coal mine that supplies the country’s only coal-power plant.
    • Large water penetration in Gruve 7 (Mine 7) was discovered on Sunday July 26 during a routine inspection, the Store Norske mining company informs. The day before, a record heat of 21.7°C was measured in Longyearbyen, the highest temperature ever measured so far north in the European Arctic.
    • Since the 70s, the annual average temperatures have risen by 4°C at Svalbard, with winter temperatures rising more than 7°C, as previously reported by the Barents Observer. A climate report released last year warns that annual average temperatures could increase with up to 10 degrees Celsius by 2100.
  • The Lakers Hold On to Beat the Clippers in Thriller: LeBron James defended both Paul George and Kawhi Leonard on the Clippers’ final possession. Zion Williamson played in the first game of the night’s doubleheader, but the Pelicans missed a game-winner at the buzzer against Utah.
    • Beautiful and stupid, simultaneously: 31ambriefing-nbc-articleLarge-v2.jpg
    • Lack of social distancing (including the impossibility of social distancing — but this was an unforced — but lovely — error; that's why their season won't last, but it was a wonderful gesture.
  • Trump, Please Quit Before You’re Fired: By walking away, he can save the lives of supporters who have listened to his lethal quackery.
    • Of late, Trump has been itching for a riot. With buildings aflame, windows smashed and mobs in the streets, he could fulfill his prophecy of being the only man able to fix the American carnage he warned us about. Majorities support changes needed to root out systemic racism. The only way that Trump can hold back the tide is to change the story.
    • Except, some of the players are not who we think they are. The police have identified the man who turned largely peaceful Black Lives Matter protests into mayhem in Minneapolis — the window-smashing Umbrella Man — as a white supremacist.
  • Postal Service backlog sparks worries that ballot delivery could be delayed in November: The U.S. Postal Service is experiencing days-long backlogs of mail across the country after a top Trump donor running the agency put in place new procedures described as cost-cutting efforts, alarming postal workers who warn that the policies could undermine their ability to deliver ballots on time for the November election.
    • As President Trump ramps up his unfounded attacks on mail balloting as being susceptible to widespread fraud, postal employees and union officials say the changes implemented by Trump fundraiser-turned-postmaster general Louis DeJoy are contributing to a growing perception that mail delays are the result of a political effort to undermine absentee voting.
    • DeJoy, a North Carolina logistics executive who donated more than $2 million to GOP political committees in the past four years, approved changes that took effect July 13 that the agency said were aimed at cutting costs for the debt-laden mail service. They included prohibiting overtime pay, shutting down sorting machines early and requiring letter carriers to leave mail behind when necessary to avoid extra trips or late delivery on routes.
    • The new policies have resulted in at least a two-day delay in scattered parts of the country, even for express mail, according to multiple postal workers and union leaders. Letter carriers are manually sorting more mail, adding to the delivery time. Bins of mail ready for delivery are sitting in post offices because of scheduling and route changes. And without the ability to work overtime, workers say the logjam is worsening without an end in sight.
    • David Partenheimer, spokesman for the U.S. Postal Service, said the recent changes aim to stabilize the agency after decades of financial woes. The procedures are not meant to slow the delivery of ballots or any other mail, he said, also asserting that any problems will be short-lived.
    • The upheaval inside the Postal Service has sparked condemnation from top Democrats. Speaking on Thursday at a service memorializing the late representative John Lewis, former president Barack Obama decried “those in power who are doing their darndest to discourage people from voting . . . even undermining the Postal Service in the run-up to an election that’s going to be dependent on mail-in ballots so people don’t get sick.”
    • The delays are especially alarming given the impending flood of campaign and election mail and a potential resurgence of coronavirus cases in the fall that could lead to staff shortages, Postal Service employees said. Their frustrations have led some to dub the new postmaster “Louie DeLay” in private, several workers said.
  • The Risk That Students Could Arrive at School With the Coronavirus: As schools grapple with how to reopen, new estimates show that large parts of the country would likely see infected students if classrooms opened now.
  • As Covid-19 Surges, California Farmworkers Are Paying a High Price: A survey of workers in 21 counties found the coronavirus is devastating them directly and indirectly, with farm hubs having the highest infection rates in the state.
    • The collapse of food service demands when most businesses and institutions shut down has cut farm jobs statewide by 20 percent, or 100,000. Many farmworkers who are still working have had their hours or days reduced, sometimes without warning. Lockdowns have also cost workers second jobs they needed to make ends meet. They are juggling bills and going hungry.
    • These are some of the findings in a new survey of 900 farmworkers in 21 farm counties, released on Tuesday. The survey was coordinated by the California Institute for Rural Studies (CIRS), with a wide group of researchers, farmworker organizations and policy advocates. The Covid-19 Farmworker Study (COFS) reinforces the dire warnings that farmworker advocacy organizations made when the coronavirus lockdowns began: The least protected essential workers in the country, toiling under environmental conditions like excessive heat, pollution and dust, are being devastated by the coronavirus, directly and indirectly.
    • Recommended protections for farmworkers, like masks, hand sanitizer and social distancing, need to be made mandatory, advocates said, and longstanding conditions that farmworkers have endured, such as crowded buses to and from work, or overcrowded housing, need to be addressed.
    • On the job, however, workers lack control of their own safety. Fewer than half of those surveyed said they had received masks from their employers. Even among those who had, they had received them once or a couple of times. (Farmworkers generally wear face coverings to protect themselves from pesticide dust, dirt and the sun. More than 95 percent of those surveyed said they are masked in the fields.)
  • Students can safely return to college if tested for coronavirus every two days, study says: The study, by researchers from the Yale School of Public Health, Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Open Network, used computer simulations to show how the virus might spread among a hypothetical cohort of 5,000 students.
    • In the simulations, 4,990 students were assumed to be coronavirus-free, while 10 were assumed to be infected. Researchers found screening every two days using a rapid, inexpensive test — even one that was not always accurate — would “maintain a controllable number of covid-19 infections” if coupled with “strict behavioral interventions” like quarantining positive students in isolation dormitories.
    • The study estimated screening costs would be $470 per student per semester, and did not consider the effects of reopening schools on staff and communities where colleges are located. It also said monitoring students for symptoms was not sufficient, and logistical challenges like the availability of tests or isolation dormitories “may be beyond the reach of many university administrators and the students in their care.” But the pace and extent of viral testing the study envisions could be difficult to carry out.
    • The study comes as many universities, including some in the Washington region, announced plans to move online for the fall semester. Georgetown University and George Washington University, for example, will remain remote for the rest of the year. Other schools, including Yale and Harvard, plan to welcome some students back to campus. Yale will require undergraduates living in dorms to be tested twice weekly, while Harvard plans to test students on campus every three days.

7/30/2020 — John Lewis Memorial, Ebenezer Baptist Church

  • Together, You Can Redeem the Soul of Our Nation: Though I am gone, I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe.
    • Mr. Lewis, the civil rights leader who died on July 17, wrote this essay shortly before his death, to be published upon the day of his funeral. Editorial Page Editor Kathleen Kingsbury wrote about this piece and Mr. Lewis’s legacy in Thursday’s edition of our Opinion Today newsletter.
    • Emmett Till was my George Floyd. He was my Rayshard Brooks, Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor. He was 14 when he was killed, and I was only 15 years old at the time. I will never ever forget the moment when it became so clear that he could easily have been me. In those days, fear constrained us like an imaginary prison, and troubling thoughts of potential brutality committed for no understandable reason were the bars.
    • Though I was surrounded by two loving parents, plenty of brothers, sisters and cousins, their love could not protect me from the unholy oppression waiting just outside that family circle. Unchecked, unrestrained violence and government-sanctioned terror had the power to turn a simple stroll to the store for some Skittles or an innocent morning jog down a lonesome country road into a nightmare. If we are to survive as one unified nation, we must discover what so readily takes root in our hearts that could rob Mother Emanuel Church in South Carolina of her brightest and best, shoot unwitting concertgoers in Las Vegas and choke to death the hopes and dreams of a gifted violinist like Elijah McClain.
    • John Lewis Risked His Life for Justice: His willingness to do so was essential to the quest for civil rights.
      • This young cohort conspicuously ignored members of the civil rights establishment who urged them to patiently pursue remedies through the courts. Among the out-of-touch elder statesmen was the distinguished civil rights lawyer Thurgood Marshall, who was several years away from becoming the nation’s first Black Supreme Court justice when he argued that young activists were wrong to continue the dangerous Freedom Rides of early 1961, in which interracial groups rode buses into the Deep South to test a Supreme Court ruling that had outlawed segregation in interstate transport.
      • By his early 20s, Mr. Lewis had embraced a form of nonviolent protest grounded in the principle of “redemptive suffering”— a term he learned from the Rev. James Lawson, who had studied the style of nonviolent resistance that the Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi had put into play during British colonial rule. The principle reminded Mr. Lewis of his religious upbringing and of a prayer his mother had often recited.
      • In his memoir “Walking With the Wind,” written with Michael D’Orso, Mr. Lewis explained that there was “something in the very essence of anguish that is liberating, cleansing, redemptive,” adding that suffering “touches and changes those around us as well. It opens us and those around us to a force beyond ourselves, a force that is right and moral, the force of righteous truth that is at the basis of human conscience.”
      • The essence of the nonviolent life, he wrote, is the capacity to forgive — “even as a person is cursing you to your face, even as he is spitting on you, or pushing a lit cigarette into your neck” — and to understand that your attacker is as much a victim as you are. At bottom, this philosophy rested upon the belief that people of good will — “the Beloved Community,” as Mr. Lewis called them — would rouse themselves to combat evil and injustice.
      • Mr. Lewis carried his faith in the power of nonviolence into the fateful Selma, Ala., voting rights demonstration — in March of 1965 — that was soon named Bloody Sunday to commemorate the vicious attack that state troopers waged on peaceful marchers. Mr. Lewis suffered a fractured skull and was one of 58 people treated for injuries at a hospital. The worldwide demonstrations that followed the brutal police killing of George Floyd underscored the extent to which many people need visual evidence to grow outraged over injustice that is perpetrated all the time outside the camera’s eye.
      • Soon after the Supreme Court crippled the act in 2013, states began unveiling measures limiting ballot access. At the time of the decision, Mr. Lewis wrote that the court had “stuck a dagger into the heart” of a hard-won and still necessary law. With his customary eloquence, he urged Congress to restore the Voting Rights Act, describing the right to vote as “almost sacred” and “the most powerful nonviolent tool we have in a democracy.”
  • Federal Agencies Agree to Withdraw from Portland, with Conditions: Federal agents are set to begin withdrawing from Portland, Ore., today after Gov. Kate Brown and the Trump administration agreed on a plan to protect federal property.
    • On Wednesday, Ms. Brown announced that the federal law enforcement agents guarding the federal courthouse in downtown Portland would begin withdrawing as early as Thursday. “We know where we are headed,” she said. “Complete withdrawal of federal troops from the city and the state.” Federal officials confirmed an agreement but hedged on the timing, cautioning that a departure would depend on the success of the state’s promise to secure the area.
    • While Mr. Trump has used images of tactical agents cracking down on protesters in his campaign videos, there was an increasing sense in the administration that the violent scenes of unrest linked to federal agents in Portland could risk becoming a liability, an administration official said. Among the thousands of protesters who had joined demonstrators in recent weeks were a Wall of Moms, nurses in scrubs and military veterans.
    • The move toward a resolution began last week, when Ms. Brown reached out to Mr. Pence, her closest contact in the White House. Ms. Brown had spent months working with Mr. Pence on the coronavirus pandemic, at times pleading for more federal support, but this time she came with a request for less federal involvement, telling him that the deployment of U.S. tactical teams on the streets of Portland needed to end.
  • Seniors and staff caught in the middle of nursing homes' quest for profit: The cycle of buying and selling care homes has led to shortcuts, closures, even fraud – and imperiled vulnerable residents’ health
    • On average, nursing home workers make $19,000 a year, and many rely on second jobs or food stamps to get by. “The thing that is still sad is these people are low-paid to begin with,” Sloat, an administrative organizer with SEIU Healthcare of Pennsylvania, the largest healthcare union in the state.
    • Still, states all across the country, like New York, are moving to provide immunity from Covid-19 litigation to nursing homes. Last month, 250 patient advocacy organizations wrote a letter asking legislators to not provide immunity to the nation’s facilities. The letter states: “Essentially, the only mechanism available for a nursing home resident to hold facilities responsible for substandard care is judicial recourse. By removing this safety net, nursing homes will have little to no oversight.”
    • When I ask Robinson, a veteran of the industry – she’s worked in nursing facilities for more than 30 years and joined SEIU in 1993 – what needs to be done to correct course, she tells me: “Stop making money the bottom line and care for our elders. They are people and they have lives and families and you can’t just put a dollar sign on their head.”
  • He held a BLM sign in what he called ‘America’s most racist town.’ The result? A viral video of abuse.
    • Over the three days Rob Bliss held the sign in the sweltering July heat in Harrison [AK], a town known as a haven for white supremacists and home to the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, similar interactions happened again and again.
  • One in three children have dangerous levels of lead in their blood: About 800 million children, mostly in developing countries, ‘will have had risky exposure’
    • About 800 million children and young people under the age of 19 are likely to have blood levels of lead at or above 5 micrograms per decilitre (5μg/dl), according to the report. There is no safe level for lead exposure, according to the World Health Organization, because even at very low concentrations it operates as a dangerous toxin, but levels above 5μg/dl are regarded by the US Centers for Disease Control as a cause for action.
    • “This is an absolutely shocking figure,” said Nicholas Rees, policy specialist at Unicef and author of the report. “We have known for so long about the toxic [nature of lead], but we have not known how widespread it is, and how many children are affected.”
    • Exposure at the levels studied is likely to cause reductions in cognitive ability, higher levels of violence and longterm health impacts such as cardiovascular disease, according to the researchers. Children are particularly vulnerable to lead exposure because it damages the developing brain and nervous system, building up over time, and the impacts do not show immediately. Lead mimics calcium in the bones, building up in people’s bodies and causing damage to other vital organs, including the kidneys, heart and lungs.
    • Lead at 5μg/dl of blood is likely to wipe about 3-5 points from a child’s IQ score, and at the levels found in the Unicef report could double the level of violence in society, said Fuller. It is also likely to increase the risk of cardiovascular disease, as about 900,000 deaths a year are already linked to lead poisoning.
    • One of the leading causes of lead poisoning is the disposal of car batteries, which use lead and acid to generate an electrical charge, and make up 85% of the lead used globally. When disposed of safely, they pose little risk, but in many countries about half of car batteries are recycled without safety precautions.
    • A further cause of lead poisoning is the use of lead compounds, such as lead oxide and lead chromate, as a food additive to make spices appear more vivid in colour. The compounds are used to make turmeric appear bright yellow, and sometimes used with paprika. The report found examples of its use in India, Bangladesh, Georgia, the Balkans, north Africa and sub-Saharan Africa.
  • A viral epidemic splintering into deadly pieces: There's not just one coronavirus outbreak in the United States. Now there are many, each requiring its own mix of solutions.
    • Once again, the coronavirus is ascendant. As infections mount across the country, it is dawning on Americans that the epidemic is now unstoppable, and that no corner of the nation will be left untouched.
    • In most states, contact tracing is now moot — there are simply too many cases to track. And while progress has been made on vaccines, none is expected to arrive this winter in time to stave off what many fear will be a new wave of deaths.
    • Overall, the scientists conveyed a pervasive sense of sadness and exhaustion. Where once there was defiance, and then a growing sense of dread, now there seems to be sorrow and frustration, a feeling that so many funerals never had to happen and that nothing is going well. The United States is a wounded giant, while much of Europe, which was hit first, is recovering and reopening — although not to us. “We’re all incredibly depressed and in shock at how out of control the virus is in the U.S.,” said Dr. Michele Barry, the director of the Center for Innovation in Global Health at Stanford University.
    • “National hubris and belief in American exceptionalism have served us badly,” said Martha L. Lincoln, a medical anthropologist and historian at San Francisco State University. “We were not prepared to see the risk of failure.”

7/29/2020

  • N.Y.P.D.’s Use of Unmarked Van in Arrest Draws Parallels to Portland: Videos of the arrest, shared widely on social media, were met with intense criticism and calls for an explanation from the police.
    • New York City police officers, several in plain clothes, swooped into a demonstration against aggressive police tactics on Tuesday and arrested a protester they appeared to have singled out, pulling her into an unmarked minivan before driving off. [ael: well, the police were thoughtful to put an exclamation point on the protest.]
    • While the police indicated that they were following standard procedure, the incident comes at a time when law enforcement practices are under intense scrutiny. Several city officials said on Tuesday that they were troubled by the videos of the woman’s arrest and publicly demanded a fuller explanation from the Police Department.
    • Councilman Brad Lander of Brooklyn said that with the “anxiety about what’s happening in Portland, the N.Y.P.D. deploying unmarked vans with plainclothes cops to make street arrests of protesters feels more like provocation than public safety.”
  • 'The hotspot of a hotspot of a hotspot': coronavirus takes heavy toll in south Texas: Hundreds have died in Hidalgo county, on the Mexican border – but the governor has thwarted efforts to go back into lockdown
    • Melendez recalled recently encountering a critically ill patient with an alarmingly low pulse. He tried to warn someone, but nurses informed him that a different doctor had already decided not to intervene because they “didn’t expect for [the patient] to survive”.
    • In Hidalgo county – “a poor, fat, diabetic population”, Melendez said bluntly – nearly one in three people under age 65 lack health insurance. Thirty percent live in poverty, and a 2020 WalletHub report found that three local cities hold the distinction as the “fattest” metropolitan area in the nation.
    • Type 2 diabetes and obesity are among the pre-existing conditions listed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as risk factors for “severe illness” related to Covid-19. Meanwhile, concern over exorbitant hospital bills deters some who don’t have insurance from seeking medical care. These and other socioeconomic factors have caused the virus’ greatest tragedies to disproportionately impact minorities in the US, with Latinos hospitalized at more than four times the rate of their white counterparts.
    • Last week, Hidalgo county judge Richard F Cortez ordered residents to stay home and encouraged non-essential businesses to limit their services. But a spokesperson for Texas governor Greg Abbott quickly undermined Cortez’s authority, saying it was “simply a recommendation”. The dizzying policy ping-pong is an extension of a larger politicization of the pandemic nationwide during an election year, where just suggesting wearing a face mask has become a partisan dog whistle.
    • In a matter of weeks, Melendez has put his sixth-grade teacher on life support, opened up a body bag to play a son’s farewell video for a patient who had already died, and stumbled upon a gravely ill nurse he’d known for 30 years, whom he didn’t even recognize at first glance. Harrowing personal moments abound, as do thorny gray areas.
    • The explosion of cases gets bigger by the day as new infections number in the hundreds, if not the thousands. Although Texas’s reopening plan banked on a symbiotic relationship between testing and contact tracing to curtail the virus’s spread, Hidalgo county’s contact investigations have been rendered ineffective, Melendez explained. There are too few contact tracers, and too many positive test results.
  • 'Spectacular': Trump praises doctor who dismissed face masks after viral video: Clip claiming benefits of hydroxychloroquine for coronavirus was removed by social media companies over false information
    • Donald Trump has praised as “spectacular” a doctor who wrongly dismissed the use of face masks to combat the coronavirus as well as reportedly claiming that alien DNA is used in medical treatments and some gynecological problems are caused by people dreaming about having sex with demons.
    • [ael: this must be the "tremendously strong and powerful plan" he's promised! Thank God, it's arrived!]
    • A group of lab coat-wearing doctors posted an online video on Monday to make a string of inaccurate assertions about the coronavirus that contradicted official government guidelines. Among them was a woman who identified herself as Dr Stella Immanuel and said: “You don’t need masks. There is a cure.”
    • The US president tweeted a version of the video, which rapidly gained tens of thousands of views on Facebook and YouTube before both companies took it down for containing false public health information. The president’s son Donald Trump Jr had his Twitter account restricted by the company for 12 hours after calling the video a “must watch”.
    • At a White House press conference on Tuesday, Trump expressed puzzlement over why the so-called “America’s Frontline Doctors” video had been removed, noting that Immanuel claimed to be treating hundreds of Covid-19 patients with the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, which he has long championed despite federal public health advice that it is ineffective against coronavirus.
    • “I don’t know why,” he told reporters. “I think they’re very respected doctors. There was a woman who was spectacular in her statements about it and she’s had tremendous success with it.” But Kaitlan Collins, White House correspondent for CNN, challenged the president. “The woman that you said was a ‘great doctor’ in that video that you retweeted last night said that masks don’t work and there is a cure for Covid-19, both of which health experts say is not true,” she said. “She’s also made videos saying that doctors make medicine using DNA from aliens and that they’re trying to create a vaccine to make you immune from becoming religious.”
    • Looking increasingly agitated, Trump replied: “Maybe it’s the same [person], maybe it’s not, but I can tell you this. She was on air along with many other doctors. They were big fans of hydroxychloroquine and I thought she was very impressive in the sense that, from where she came – I don’t know which country she comes from – but she said that she’s had tremendous success with hundreds of different patients. And I thought her voice was an important voice, but I know nothing about her.”
    • [ael: "I know nothing about her" and "they're very respected doctors". I'm going to have to use that in my logic courses….]
    • Last month a New York Times/Siena College poll found that 67% of Americans trust Fauci, who is also the country’s top infectious diseases expert, for accurate information about the coronavirus, whereas only 26% trust Trump. The president mused [ael: and this musing tells you all you need to know about Donald Dunning-Kruger Trump]: “He’s got this high approval rating. So why don’t I have a high approval rating with respect – and the administration – with respect to the virus? We should have it very high. So it sort of is curious, a man works for us, with us, very closely, Dr Fauci and Dr [Deborah] Birx also, very highly thought of – and yet, they’re highly thought of, but nobody likes me? It can only be my personality, that’s all!”
    • The Democratic National Committee condemned Trump for rejecting federal health experts and promoting Immanuel. Lily Adams, its war room senior spokesperson and adviser, said: “Trump spent today’s coronavirus briefing promoting snake oil doctors and unsafe, unproven treatments because he is incapable of acting decisively to get the coronavirus under control as we near 150,000 deaths, cases spike nationwide, and millions of Americans remain unemployed. “There’s no new tone – this is who Trump is and always will be: a conspiracy theorist content to gamble with the lives of others. We need a president who listens to real medical experts and can be trusted to make decisions that will keep Americans safe.”
  • A Northeast US climate initiative has had a major side benefit—healthier children: Researchers estimate a climate effort in the Northeast U.S. helped the region reduce toxic air pollution and avoid hundreds of asthma and autism cases, preterm births, and low birth weights.
    • Led by researchers from the Columbia Center for Children's Environmental Health at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, the study found the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative has reduced fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and, due to this reduction, the region avoided an estimated 537 cases of child asthma, 112 preterm births, 98 cases of autism spectrum disorder, and 56 cases of low birthweight from 2009 to 2014. By avoiding such impacts to children's health, the researchers estimate an economic savings of between $191 million to $350 million.
    • "Toxic air pollutants are released right along with [carbon dioxide]," lead author Frederica Perera, professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia Mailman School and director of translational research at Columbia Center for Children's Environmental Health, told EHN. "Because of biological vulnerability, developing fetuses and young child are disproportionately affected by air pollution and climate change."
    • [ael: so — prevention, or dealing with all the problems and costs?]
    • In the new study, the researchers used a tool from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that estimates air pollution-related illnesses and deaths and assigns an economic value. They looked at the states participating in the climate initiative as well as adjacent states (Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia.) The tool doesn't track actual cases of illness, rather, models what the improvement in air quality would be given the emissions reductions, and then estimated reduced rates of illness and disorders.
    • The new study did have limitations—the link between PM2.5 and autism, while likely given past research, hasn't been proven. There is strong evidence that PM2.5 negatively affects children's IQ, but the new review did not consider the "potentially large benefit" of the climate initiative in improvement of children's IQ.
  • Alberta’s renewed bet on coal: what Kenney’s policy shift means for mining, parks and at-risk species: The UCP government has rescinded a decades-old policy that restricted coal mining in parts of the Rocky Mountains and Foothills, setting the stage for a coal mining expansion in Alberta
    • [ael: Really? Really? A bet on coal, now? There's a forward thinker, looking back into time….]
    • The decision, which was announced in mid-May and came into force June 1, was framed as part of Alberta’s economic recovery. “Rescinding the outdated coal policy in favour of modern oversight will help attract new investment for an important industry and protect jobs for Albertans,” Energy Minister Sonya Savage said in a statement at the time. [ael: by "modern oversight" they mean the taxpayers will pick up the costs of clean-up.]
  • Iter: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly: The world's biggest nuclear fusion project has entered its five-year assembly phase.
  • Coronavirus: How fast is it spreading in Africa?
  • Scientists successfully revive 100m-year-old microbes from the sea: Microbes had lain dormant at the bottom of the sea since the age of the dinosaurs
    • Morono said the new research, published in the journal Nature Communications, proved the remarkable staying power of some of Earth’s simplest living structures. “Unlike us, microbes grow their population by divisions, so they do not actually have the concept of lifespan,” he added.
  • Loss of bees causes shortage of key food crops, study finds
    • Apple and cherry production hampered by lack of wild bees; Bees affected by loss of habitat, pesticides and climate crisis
  • Young people are infecting older family members in shared homes: As the death toll escalates in coronavirus hot spots, evidence is growing that young people who work outside the home, or who surged into bars and restaurants when states relaxed shutdowns, are infecting their more vulnerable elders, especially family members.
    • Front-line caregivers, elected officials and experts in Houston, South Florida and elsewhere say they are seeing patterns of hospitalization and death that confirm fears this would happen, which were first raised in May and June. That was when Florida, Texas, Arizona, California and other states reopened in efforts to revive their flagging economies.
  • Live updates: Trump questions why Fauci has better ratings as U.S. nears 150,000 coronavirus deaths
    • Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), who has frequently been seen around the Capitol without a face mask and not socially distancing, has tested positive for the coronavirus. Gohmert was set to travel aboard Air Force One with Trump on Wednesday until the positive test. [ael: C'mon Jesus!]
    • Twitter deleted a video filled with false information about the coronavirus — featuring a doctor who blames an illness on demon sperm — that had been retweeted by Trump and his son. Donald Trump Jr.’s account was limited, and he accused the company of “censoring” conservatives.
    • Teachers may go on strike “as a last resort” if forced to return to unsafe classrooms in the fall, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said Tuesday.
    • Coronavirus deaths in the United States could be in “the multiple hundreds of thousands” if the country does not reverse the continued rise of new cases, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. The nonprofit organization representing medical schools and teaching hospitals outlined an 11-step plan that the country could adopt to address the virus that has infected more than 4 million people and killed more than 152,000.
      • Its suggestions include making sure there is an adequate stock of lab supplies, personal protective equipment and medications, detailing how to increase testing and ensure its accessibility, and creating national standards for face coverings.
      • The United States should establish and enforce criteria for local stay-at-home orders and reopening measures and create a school reopening standard for K-12 schools, the AAMC said.
  • Three big takeaways from Trump’s awful new admission about Putin:
    • President Trump just admitted in a new interview that during his recent conversation with Vladimir Putin, he didn’t ask the Russian leader about the news that Russia might have paid bounties to Taliban-linked militias for the killing of U.S. troops…. Asked by Axios’s Jonathan Swan if he brought up this issue in his July 23 call with Putin, Trump blithely said he had not. “No, that was a phone call to discuss other things,” Trump replied. “And frankly, that’s an issue that many people said was fake news.” Trump further confirmed: “I have never discussed it with him." [ael: whoa!]
      • TRUMP: It never reached my desk. You know why? Because they didn’t think — intelligence — they didn’t think it was real.
      • SWAN: It was in your written brief.
      • TRUMP: They didn’t think it was worthy. If it reached my desk, I would have done something about it. It never reached my desk, because —
      • SWAN: Do you read your written brief?
      • TRUMP: I do.
    • Trump, perhaps sensing his audience might crave some comic relief at this point, then claimed to have more penetrating reading comprehension than anyone Swan has interviewed. But that aside, this is an important concession, because intelligence on the bounties actually did reach Trump’s desk. [ael: my emphasis] Intelligence officials provided Trump a written briefing on this in February. As the New York Times explained, it detailed the conclusion that a “Russian military intelligence unit offered and paid bounties to Taliban-linked militants to kill U.S. and coalition troops in Afghanistan.”
  • The Trump administration must stop sidelining the CDC: The US government needs to strengthen the agency charged with preventing the spread of disease — not undermine it. [ael: this is an editorial in Nature! Good lord…. And speaking of undermining, see the next article. It's easy to find examples, unfortunately.]
  • E.P.A. Inspector General to Investigate Trump’s Biggest Climate Rollback: The agency’s watchdog office said Monday it would investigate whether the reversal of Obama-era fuel efficiency standards violated government rules.
    • Auditors said they intended to investigate whether the Trump administration acted “consistent with requirements, including those pertaining to transparency, record-keeping, and docketing, and followed the E.P.A.’s process for developing final regulatory actions.” The yearlong effort to write the Trump administration rule was plagued with controversy. Just weeks before the final rule was published, the administration’s own internal analyses showed that it would create a higher cost for consumers than leaving the Obama-era standard in place and would contribute to more deaths associated with lung disease by releasing more pollution into the air. [ael: in other words, "Sounds good!" to Trump….]
    • The audit cites documents obtained and provided to investigators by Senator Tom Carper of Delaware, the ranking Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee. Senator Carper said the documents showed that the Department of Transportation wrote the bulk of the draft rule submitted to the White House for review, and that E.P.A. career staff members had complained in writing that they were shut out of the process. They also pointed to numerous errors in the rule.
    • The E.P.A. then “purposefully and potentially illegally withheld these documents from being placed into the rule-making docket,” Senator Carper said in a May letter, and later made changes to the final rule after it was signed and before it was published in the federal register.
  • Press: Trump declares war – on America! By Bill Press, Opinion Contributor (The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the view of The Hill) [ael: I, for one, am amazed and pleased that the Hill would publish this — it's unexpected to me, but if they've a Libertarian streak this must be it coming out. Praise the Lord.)
    • Give credit where credit is due. At least, Donald Trump’s kept one campaign promise. Running for president in 2016, he vowed he’d never launch a new foreign war. And he hasn’t. Not against Iran, North Korea or Venezuela. He’s launched a war against America’s cities, instead.
    • Yes, America is under attack, coast to coast. Not by foreign enemies. Not by terrorists. America’s under siege by goon squads of unauthorized and unneeded federal forces unleashed by President Donald Trump on America’s cities.
    • But here’s the greatest outrage. As Republican Tom Ridge, the first secretary of DHS, reminded us this week, the department was created in the wake of Sept. 11 to protect America from global terrorism. Yet Donald Trump has converted its officers into his “personal militia” and unleashed it against American citizens. And Republican leaders of Congress say nothing. Shame!
  • Donald Trump using federal agents as political stage props is anything but 'law and order': Our View: Deploying Department of Homeland Security police personnel to Portland and Chicago also violates conservative principles.
    • The Editorial Board, USA TODAY

7/28/2020 — Fannie Lou Hamer Day

  • Fannie Lou Hamer - "We're On Our Way"
    • Fannie says some very difficult things in this speech: ...anytime you see a negro policeman now, you can rest assured that he's a Tom....
    • Testimony Before the Credentials Committee, Democratic National Convention: Atlantic City, New Jersey - August 22, 1964
      • SNCC had formed the MFDP to expand black voter registration and challenge the legitimacy of the state's all-white Democratic Party. MFDP members arrived at the 1964 Democratic National Convention intent on unseating the official Mississippi delegation or, failing that, getting seated with them. On August 22, 1964, Hamer appeared before the convention's credentials committee and told her story about trying to register to vote in Mississippi. Threatened by the MFDP's presence at the convention, President Lyndon Johnson quickly preempted Hamer's televised testimony with an impromptu press conference. But later that night, Hamer's story was broadcast on all the major networks.
      • Support came pouring in for the MFDP from across the nation.4 But the MFDP's bid to win a seat at the Atlantic City convention still failed. At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago four years later the MFDP succeeded. On that occasion, Dubovoy recounts, "Hamer received a thunderous standing ovation when she became the first African American to take her rightful seat as an official delegate at a national-party convention since the Reconstruction period after the Civil War, and the first woman ever from Mississippi."
      • Related:
        • [ael: my friend Norma Jones knew of this Broadside, the sunflower queen, written by a friend of hers in honor of Fannie Lou Hamer (thanks to the University of Michigan libraries for the scan).]
        • This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer: Civil Rights and the Struggle for Black Equality in the Twentieth Century]
        • Review
          • She also shows what happened when black leaders acted out of fear. Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the NAACP, told Hamer, “You don’t know anything, you’re ignorant, you don’t know anything about politics. I been in the business over 20 years. You people have put your point across, now why don’t you pack up and go home?”
    • [ael:] My brother Steve introduced me to Fannie Lou Hamer, civil rights crusader, hero. Gil Scott-Heron wrote a tribute to Fannie, called 95 South (All of the Places We've Been)

  • Large DNA Study Traces Violent History of American Slavery: Scientists from the consumer genetics company 23andMe have published the largest DNA study to date of people with African ancestry in the Americas.
    • More than one and a half centuries after the trans-Atlantic slave trade ended, a new study shows how the brutal treatment of enslaved people has shaped the DNA of their descendants.
    • In the new study, Dr. Micheletti’s team compared this genetic database with a historical one, Slave Voyages, which contains an enormous amount of information about slavery, such as ports of embarkation and disembarkation, and numbers of enslaved men, women and children.
    • EXPLORE THE DISPERSAL OF ENSLAVED AFRICANS ACROSS THE ATLANTIC WORLD: This digital memorial raises questions about the largest slave trades in history and offers access to the documentation available to answer them. European colonizers turned to Africa for enslaved laborers to build the cities and extract the resources of the Americas. They forced millions of mostly unnamed Africans across the Atlantic to the Americas, and from one part of the Americas to another. Analyze these slave trades and view interactive maps, timelines, and animations to see the dispersal in action.
  • Untouchables': the silent power of the caste system: We cannot fully understand the current upheavals, or almost any turning point in American history, without accounting for the human pyramid that is encrypted into us all: the caste system. By Isabel Wilkerson
    • In the winter of 1959, after leading the Montgomery bus boycott that arose from the arrest of Rosa Parks and before the trials and triumphs to come, Martin Luther King Jr and his wife, Coretta, landed in India, in the city then known as Bombay, to visit the land of Mahatma Gandhi, the father of nonviolent protest. They were covered in garlands upon arrival, and King told reporters: “To other countries, I may go as a tourist, but to India I come as a pilgrim.”
    • At one point in their trip, King and his wife journeyed to the southern tip of the country, to the city of Trivandrum in the state of Kerala, and visited with high-school students whose families had been untouchables. The principal made the introduction. “Young people,” he said, “I would like to present to you a fellow untouchable from the United States of America.”
    • King was floored. He had not expected that term to be applied to him. He was, in fact, put off by it at first. He had flown in from another continent, and had dined with the prime minister. He did not see the connection, did not see what the Indian caste system had to do directly with him, did not immediately see why the lowest-caste people in India would view him, an American Negro and a distinguished visitor, as low-caste like themselves, see him as one of them. “For a moment,” he wrote, “I was a bit shocked and peeved that I would be referred to as an untouchable.”
    • Then he began to think about the reality of the lives of the people he was fighting for – 20 million people, consigned to the lowest rank in the US for centuries, “still smothering in an airtight cage of poverty,” quarantined in isolated ghettoes, exiled in their own country.
    • And he said to himself: “Yes, I am an untouchable, and every negro in the United States of America is an untouchable.” In that moment, he realised that the land of the free had imposed a caste system not unlike the caste system of India, and that he had lived under that system all of his life. It was what lay beneath the forces he was fighting in the US.
    • Chapter 13: Pilgrimage to Nonviolence: It was a marvelous experience to meet and talk with the great leaders of India, to meet and talk with and speak to thousands and thousands of people all over that vast country. These experiences will remain dear to me as long as the cords of memory shall lengthen.
      • "I AM AN UNTOUCHABLE"
      • I remember when Mrs. King and I were in India, we journeyed down one afternoon to the southernmost part of India, the state of Kerala, the city of Trivandrum. That afternoon I was to speak in one of the schools, what we would call high schools in our country, and it was a school attended by and large by students who were the children of former untouchables ….
      • The principal introduced me and then as he came to the conclusion of his introduction, he says, "Young people, I would like to present to you a fellow untouchable from the United States of America." And for a moment I was a bit shocked and peeved that I would be referred to as an untouchable ….
      • I started thinking about the fact: twenty million of my brothers and sisters were still smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in an affluent society. I started thinking about the fact: these twenty million brothers and sisters were still by and large housed in rat-infested, unendurable slums in the big cities of our nation, still attending inadequate schools faced with improper recreational facilities. And I said to myself, "Yes, I am an untouchable, and every Negro in the United States of America is an untouchable."
      • From sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church, July 4, 1965
    • A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of others, on the basis of ancestry and often of immutable traits – traits that would be neutral in the abstract, but are ascribed life-and-death meaning in a hierarchy favouring the dominant caste whose forebears designed it. A caste system uses rigid, often arbitrary boundaries to keep the ranked groupings apart, distinct from one another and in their assigned places.
    • Throughout human history, three caste systems have stood out. The tragically accelerated, chilling and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany. The lingering, millennia-long caste system of India. And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the US. Each version relied on stigmatising those deemed inferior in order to justify the dehumanisation necessary to keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom, and to rationalise the protocols of enforcement. A caste system endures because it is often justified as divine will, originating from a sacred text or the presumed laws of nature, reinforced throughout the culture and passed down through the generations.
    • In 1913, Bhimrao Ambedkar, a man born to the bottom of India’s caste system, born an untouchable in the central provinces, arrived in New York City from Bombay. He came to the US to study economics as a graduate student at Columbia, focused on the differences between race, caste and class. Living just blocks from Harlem, he would see first-hand the condition of his counterparts in the US. He completed his thesis just as the film The Birth of a Nation – the incendiary homage to the Confederate south – premiered in New York in 1915. He would study further in London and return to India to become the foremost leader of the untouchables, and a pre-eminent intellectual who would help draft a new Indian constitution. He would work to dispense with the demeaning term “untouchable”. He rejected the term Harijans, which had been applied to them by Gandhi, to their minds patronisingly. He renamed his people Dalits, meaning “broken people” – which, due to the caste system, they were.
    • “There is so much similarity between the position of the Untouchables in India and of the position of the Negroes in America,” Ambedkar wrote to Du Bois, “that the study of the latter is not only natural but necessary.”
    • Du Bois wrote back to Ambedkar to say that he was, indeed, familiar with him, and that he had “every sympathy with the Untouchables of India”. It had been Du Bois who seemed to have spoken for the marginalised in both countries as he identified the doubleconsciousness of their existence. And it was Du Bois who, decades before, had invoked an Indian concept in channelling the “bitter cry” of his people in the US: “Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house?”
  • Scientists launch ambitious conservation project to save the Amazon: Modeled on the authoritative UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, the first Amazon report is planned for release in April 2021; that report will include an extensive section on Amazon conservation solutions and policy suggestions backed up by research findings.
    • Over the last five decades, the Amazon rainforest lost almost a fifth of its forest cover, putting the biome on the edge of a dangerous cliff. Studies show that if 3 to 8% more forest cover is lost, then deforestation combined with escalating climate change is likely to cause the Amazon ecosystem to collapse. After this point is reached, the lush, biodiverse rainforest will receive too little precipitation to maintain itself and quickly shift from forest into a degraded savanna, causing enormous economic damage across the South American continent, and releasing vast amounts of forest-stored carbon to the atmosphere, further destabilizing the global climate.
    • Amid escalating forest loss in the Amazon, propelled by the anti-environmentalist agenda of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, experts fear that this year’s burning season, already underway, may exceed the August 2019 wildfires that shocked the world. Most Amazon basin fires are not natural in cause, but intentionally set, often by land grabbers invading indigenous territories and other conserved lands, and causing massive deforestation.
    • The SPA, Nobre says, will make a critical break with the purely technical approach of the United Nation’s IPCC, which banned policy prescriptions entirely from its reports. In practice, this has meant that while contributing scientists can show the impacts of fossil fuels on the atmosphere, they cannot recommend ending oil subsidies, for example. “We inverted this logic, and the third part of the [SPA] report will be entirely dedicated to searching for policy suggestions,” Nobre says. “We need the forest on its feet, the empowerment of the traditional peoples and solutions on how to reach development goals.”
  • Deutsche Bank says it will no longer invest in fracking or Arctic oil as banks turn away from fossil fuels:
    • Deutsche Bank said on Monday it would no longer fund oil sand or new energy projects in the Arctic region, as banks become more conscious of their carbon footprint, and contributions to climate change. The German bank also said it would end all fracking projects in countries with short water supply, and halt global business activities in coal mining by 2025. By the end of 2020, Deutsche Bank said it would review all planned business activities that are highly dependent on coal in Europe and the US.
  • Ships moving in as Arctic sea ice level reaches record low: The Northern Sea Route is now completely open.
    • According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, ice levels on the 15th of July stood at 7.51 million square kilometers, which is 330,000 square kilometers below the record for the time of year set in 2011.

7/27/2020

  • A New Solution to Climate Science’s Biggest Mystery: For the first time in 41 years, researchers have provided a new answer to one of the thorniest—and most fundamental—questions in Earth science.
    • The project began, in one telling, five years ago, in a castle that overlooks the Bavarian Alps, where three dozen of the world’s most successful and rivalrous earth scientists came together for a week of cloistered meetings. They gathered, in part, out of embarrassment. For the past four decades, their field—the study of Earth’s natural phenomena, including its land, ocean, and climate—had boomed. Generations of young researchers who once would have become nuclear physicists or oil geologists instead pursued careers in glaciology and paleoclimatology. Governments, hoping to understand the dangers of global warming, had poured hundreds of millions of dollars into climate science. And the work was good. It gave humans a new way of seeing Earth: We learned to map the flow of the oceans, to chart the growth of continent-spanning glaciers, and to read the evidence left behind in lake mud and caves by ancient rainstorms, droughts, and hurricanes.
    • They wanted a better answer to the question, which is: If you greatly increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, how hot will the planet get?
    • This week, a team of 25 researchers—drawn from across the earth sciences and descended from the Bavaria effort—published the first new answer in 41 years. Their estimate of this value, called “climate sensitivity,” significantly reduces the amount of uncertainty involved in forecasting climate change. “It helps us answer this fundamental question, which is: How warm is it gonna get?” Kate Marvel, a climate scientist at NASA and an author of the paper, told me.
    • Since Arrhenius first tried to calculate climate sensitivity, scientists have talked about it by estimating how much temperatures would rise if CO₂ doubled. The new paper finds that doubling carbon dioxide will likely increase Earth’s average temperature by 2.6 to 3.9 degrees Celsius (about 5 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit). That’s much narrower than the old estimate, which said that a doubling of CO₂ would raise temperatures by 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius (about 3 to 8 degrees Fahrenheit).
    • original.png
    • One group that the refined result does not bode well for is “self-styled lukewarmers,” Majkut said, “who claim that global warming is real but not too much of a problem.” The paper undercuts their claims, he said, by showing that “when you carefully calibrate your estimate and confront it with other pieces of evidence in a rigorous way, very low climate sensitivity appears really unlikely.”
    • After Arrhenius first mused about climate sensitivity in 1896, the concept was revisited a few times. For most of the early 20th century, scientists did not put much stock into the warming effects of carbon dioxide, because water vapor was seen as a more potent greenhouse gas. It wasn’t until Guy Callendar, a British chemist, revisited the concept in the late 1940s that it was revived. In 1964, Charles Keeling, an American climatologist, showed that carbon dioxide was already warming the planet in a manner predicted by Callendar’s and Arrhenius’s work.
    • Fifteen more years passed before Jule Charney, an American meteorologist, produced the first modern estimate of climate sensitivity with a team of climate modelers and experts. Charney’s paper found that climate sensitivity was in a range of 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius. “The really frustrating thing about this number is that the first time they did this exercise, they got a range of 1.5 C to 4.5 C. The next time they did it, with more sophisticated models, they got a range 1.5 C to 4.5 C,” Marvel said.
    • The range proved stubborn. About a decade after Charney and his colleagues first reached their estimate, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—a global panel of scientists led by the United Nations—considered the planet’s climate sensitivity anew. In 1991, in its first synthesis report on the evidence for and dangers of climate change, the IPCC said that climate sensitivity was somewhere from 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius. In 1995, in its second report, it reached the same conclusion. It found the same range again in 2001, in its third report; in 2007, in its fourth; and in 2014, in its fifth and most recent assessment. “People say, ‘What the hell, climate scientists? You had one job,’” Marvel said.
  • [ael:] This is a John Lewis moment.
    • Trump would destabilize the cities, then declare martial law, preventing an election that he is destined to lose.
      • One hope is that people show him poll numbers which show him winning, stoking his own delusional belief that he can win fairly.
      • Another hope is the 25th Amendment, but the crowd of ass-sniffers he's encircled himself with won't have the guts (or even the thought) to defend the country and the Constitution.
    • Those protesting in the cities must hold their fire — must demonstrate peacefully — until Trump is removed. We must practice non-violence — take a John Lewis moment — and allow the thugs to beat us, to tear gas us, to abuse us — for all the world to see. It was the outrage over the systemic abuse and murder of peaceful citizens that riled the nation — let it happen again.
    • In the meantime, we must exercise the exercise the second part of the John Lewis moment, and vote. VOTE! We must vote out this tyrant, before he gains sufficient tyrannical means of staying in power.
  • Deutsche Bank tightens fossil fuel lending policies: Deutsche Bank (DBKGn.DE), said on Monday it would end business worldwide with the companies most exposed to coal mining by 2025 at the latest, as part of a revamp of its policies on financing the fossil fuel industry.
  • Senate Republicans urge McConnell to include clean energy in COVID-19 recovery package: [ael: yeah, the Republicans up for re-election, who are desperately seeking to stem the flood….]
  • At 88, he is a historical rarity — the living son of a slave: As unlikely as it might seem, that boy, Daniel Smith, is still alive at 88, a member of an almost vanished demographic: The child of someone once considered a piece of property instead of a human being.
    • Long after leaving Massies Mill, Va., and moving up North as a young man in his 20s, Smith’s father, Abram Smith, married a woman who was decades younger and fathered six children. Dan, the fifth, was born in 1932 when Abram was 70. Only one sibling besides Dan — Abe, 92 — is still alive.
    • All along, Smith created his own history — as a medic in the Korean War and a hometown hero who rescued a man from a flood. He’s been chased on a dark road by white supremacists in Alabama as a foot soldier in the fight for civil rights. Smith was there when a young firebrand named John Lewis roused the crowd at the March on Washington, and he linked arms with activists in Selma across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
    • In about 1957, he was working as a trip director for Camp Jewell, a YMCA camp in nearby Colebrook, Conn., when he brought his group of teenagers back from a week at a lake to show them a reservoir where he used to swim. Upon their arrival, he spotted a commotion — a young woman had fallen into the quarry. Smith rushed down to help. The woman had been hoisted onto dry land, and he bent over to check her pulse: still beating. He had leaned over to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation when a police officer yelled down: “Hey, you, you, YOU. She’s already dead. She’s already dead.”
    • At first, he didn’t know what the cop meant — Smith knew she was alive — but suddenly it dawned, and he backed away. “He didn’t want me to put my lips on her, and she died,” he said, still angry and “sick” about what happened. That year, he realized that his parents had been sold a bill of goods about America as the land of the free: “We were all brainwashed. … Everyone in America fell for it.”

7/26/2020 — Anna's birthday, and Olivia de Havalind dies, at 104

  • The Amazon, Giver of Life, Unleashes the Pandemic: The virus swept through the region like past plagues that have traveled the river with colonizers and corporations.
    • Cities and towns along the river have some of the highest deaths per capita in the country — often several times the national average. In Manaus, there were periods when every Covid ward was full and 100 people were dying a day, pushing the city to cut new burial grounds out of thick forest. Grave diggers lay rows of coffins in long trenches carved in the freshly turned earth.
    • Indigenous people have been roughly six times as likely to be infected with the coronavirus as white people, according to the Brazilian study, and are dying in far-flung river villages untouched by electricity.
    • The crisis in the Brazilian Amazon began in Manaus, a city of 2.2 million that has risen out of the forest in a jarring eruption of concrete and glass, tapering at its edges to clusters of wooden homes perched on stilts, high above the water.
  • Texas hospital forced to set up 'death panel' as Covid-19 cases surge: Starr County Memorial Hospital struggling to cope with virus; Officials blame social gatherings for rise in local cases
    • Doctors at Starr County Memorial Hospital, the only hospital in Starr County, have been issued with critical care guidelines to decide which Covid-19 patients it will treat and which ones will be sent home because they are likely to die. The committee is being formed to alleviate the hospital’s limited medical resources so doctors can focus on patients with higher survival rates.
    • “We are seeing the results of socialization during the 4th of July, vacations, and other social opportunities,” wrote Starr county Judge Elroy Vera on the county’s Facebook page. “Unfortunately, Starr County Memorial Hospital has limited resources and our doctors are going to have to decide who receives treatment, and who is sent home to die by their loved ones.”
    • “I have been a nurse for almost 30 years and I had never seen a time like this in our community,” said Corando Rios, a nurse at Starr County Memorial Hospital’s Covid-19 unit. He tested positive for coronavirus a few days ago and is recovering at home in quarantine. “We are not ICU [intensive care unit] capable, but we are doing ICU work. We now have a state emergency response team of nurses, medics, respiratory therapists, and nurse assistants, and last week two doctors, nurses, and respiratory therapists came from the US Navy,” added Rios. “We are doing the best we can with the resources available.”
    • Starr county is not the first place to be forced to draw up guidelines for which Covid 19 patients it will treat. Critical care standards were first enacted in the US in Arizona on 3 July in response to requests from health service providers around the state. In early July, Arizona became a global coronavirus hot spot, though rates of positive cases have decreased since then.
  • Breonna Taylor killing: call for justice intensifies after months of frustration: The 26-year-old black ER tech was shot dead by police in her own home but no one has yet been charged over her killing
    • The three officers that police say discharged their weapons in the incident that killed Taylor remain free and have not been charged with any crimes. Two still have their jobs. Louisville replaced its police chief and promised police reforms. One of the officers involved, Brett Hankison, was fired last month with the police chief writing that his conduct showed “an extreme indifference to the value of human life”. The city has adopted Breonna’s law, a ban on “no-knock” raids like the one that killed Taylor.
    • “Here’s the thing: for black people in America, it’s always wait for justice. It’s always wait. And how much longer must we wait?” said Hannah Drake, a Louisville poet and activist involved in the protests.
    • At times, the police response has been heavy-handed, with cops using teargas on what appeared to be peaceful crowds and arresting hundreds of protesters since late May, including Bryant, the hunger striker. A black barbecue stand owner, David McAtee, was shot and killed after police and national guard troops dispersing a crowd violating curfew far from the area of protests opened fire. Despite being required to wear body cameras, there is no body-camera footage from the officers who fired their weapons.
    • Asked what happens if no charges are filed, Arthur shared an African proverb: “The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth. You can take that in a number of ways, but it’s what’s going to happen if justice does not happen in this situation.”
  • Rep. Ted Yoho removed from board of Christian charity over his comments about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: A Christian nonprofit organization that fights world hunger asked Rep. Ted Yoho (R-Fla.) to resign from its board after he confronted a female colleague and then reportedly used a sexist expletive after Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) was out of earshot.
  • A global I-told-you-so: Forty years ago, Jimmy Carter's Global 2000 report sounded dire warnings about our environment.
    • The result was a report that was both exhaustive and alarming. Global 2000 was released to the public on July 24, 1980. Twenty years into the 21st Century, the dire assessments of Global 2000 look startlingly accurate, and our failures at acting on them look every bit as startlingly bad.
    • The closing line of the report's executive summary may sound distressingly familiar. "The time to prevent this (disastrous) outcome is running out. … Unless nations take bold and imaginative steps … (we) must accept a troubled entry into the Twenty-first Century." And one-fifth of the way through that century, here we are.
    • [ael: in the forward, Carter says:] "Another inefficiency: The US Agency for International Development program (USAID), which was supposed to be designed for sustainable development in the Third World, is almost totally incompetent. The Carnegie Foundation and The Carter Center, looking to the application of science and technology to improve the quality of life in the Third World, recently did a definitive analysis of US AID. Of the $11 billion spent annually, $10 million goes to Israel every day, about two thirds of that amount goes to Egypt, and a huge part of the remainder goes to finance purchases of weapons from American manufacturers. This leaves about $2.1 billion a year to actually improve the lives of people overseas. Of that $2.1 billion, 80 percent goes to administrative costs: It costs us eighty cents of every dollar to finance the expenditure of twenty cents of aid in the Third World.]
    • [ael: Carter then goes on to explain how to do it right, using Japan as an example.]
  • Sunscreen Chemicals Accumulate in Body at High Levels: FDA study looked at six common ingredients; proposed rule to test safety remains on hold]
  • The Unprecedented Bravery of Olivia de Havilland: The Gone With the Wind film legend, who died at age 104, went up against a broken Hollywood studio system—and helped change the industry forever.
    • original.jpg
    • Olivia de Havilland was the last great living female star of the movies’ golden age, in the 1930s and ’40s. She died today at 104 at her home in Paris, and her radiant visage and sinuous voice will haunt audiences for at least another century, whether as Errol Flynn’s blushing Maid Marian in The Adventures of Robin Hood, or as her old friend Bette Davis’s scheming foil in the Grand Guignol of Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte.
    • In later years, de Havilland recounted her adventures with the same kind of sly wit that had impelled her to tell Hal Kern, Gone With the Wind’s film editor, that she could do a better job of retching in the climactic first-act finale than Vivien Leigh, who played Scarlett O’Hara and didn’t think vomiting was ladylike. (Kern agreed, and it’s de Havilland’s desperate sounds that appear on the finished soundtrack). A post–World War II teatime encounter in her home with a smitten Kennedy, just back from naval service in the Pacific, came to an amusing end. “He was quite silent,” she would say in a British newspaper interview many years later. “His friend did most of the talking. He just sat there, those great big eyes staring. Then when it was time for them to leave, we walked into the hallway and he very decisively opened the door—and it was the closet, and all my old boxes of summer hats and tennis rackets fell on his head.” Later, she declined a dinner invitation from Kennedy, claiming she had to study her lines, and when Kennedy spotted her dining that night at Romanoff’s with the much older author Ludwig Bemelmans, he was dumbfounded. “Do you think it was me walking into the closet?” he asked a friend. “Do you think that’s what really did it?”

7/25/2020

  • America 'staring down the barrel of martial law', Oregon senator warns: In interviews with the Guardian, Democrat Ron Wyden said the federal government’s authoritarian tactics in Portland and other cities posed an “enormous” threat to democracy, while his fellow senator Jeff Merkley described it as “an all-out assault in military-style fashion”.
    • In the early hours of Saturday, thousands of protesters gathered again outside the federal courthouse in the city, shooting fireworks at the building as teargas, dispensed by US agents, lingered above. Protesters and agents used leaf blowers to try to redirect the gas. At around 2.30am, agents marched down the street, clearing protesters with gas at close range. They also extinguished a fire outside the courthouse.
    • Wyden said in a statement: “The violent tactics deployed by Donald Trump and his paramilitary forces against peaceful protesters are those of a fascist regime, not a democratic nation.” Speaking by phone, he said: “Unless America draws a line in the sand right now, I think we could be staring down the barrel of martial law in the middle of a presidential election.”
    • The senator recalled a conversation with a legal adviser for the head of national intelligence. “I asked him again and again what was the constitutional justification for what the Trump administration is doing in my home town and he completely ducked the questions and several times said, ‘Well, I just want to extend my best wishes to your constituents.’ “After I heard him say it several times, I said my constituents don’t want your best wishes. They want to know when you’re going to stop trashing their constitutional rights.”
    • Merkley offered words of advice. “I would say that you probably don’t believe that these federal forces will attack protesters if the protesters are peaceful and you will be wrong because that’s exactly what they’re doing in Portland,” he told the Guardian.
    • “This is an all-out assault in military-style fashion on a peaceful-style protest. The way to handle graffiti is put up a fence or come out and ask people to stop doing it, not to attack a peaceful protest but that’s exactly what happened. It’s very clear what the president is trying to do is incite violence and then display that violence in campaign ads. And I say this because that’s exactly what he’s doing right now. This is not some theory.” The senator added: “This is just an absolute assault on people’s civil rights to speak and to assemble.”
    • “I think it’s also important to note the president we’ve always known has this intense authoritarian streak,” he said. “He loved and had so much affection for the leader of North Korea, Putin in Russia. Just admiration for some of the tactics in the Philippines with Duterte and Erdoğan in Turkey, by the crown prince in Saudi Arabia.”
  • 'That’s an illegal order': veterans challenge Trump's officers in Portland: Two veterans asked federal agents if they understood their oath to defend the constitution as teargas was fired
    • The Black Lives Matter protest in Portland looked to be winding down last Saturday night when US marine corps veteran Duston Obermeyer noticed a phalanx of federal officers emerge from the federal courthouse. They shot teargas at the crowd and pushed a protester to the ground with such force that, Obermeyer said, she slid 6ft across the pavement. The 42-year-old had driven about 40 minutes from his home in the Molalla area for his first protest after hearing the many recent reports of federal personnel in tactical gear emerging from unmarked cars with automatic weapons to pick up protesters. His plan was to observe first-hand what was happening.
    • In a Pokémon hat and Superman T-shirt, and with a cotton mask protecting his face, the 6ft 4in, 275lb man walked up to the officers and asked whether they understood their oath to defend the constitution.
  • Trump Bragged About Gassing Portland’s Mayor: ‘They Knocked the Hell Out of Him’: He also threatened to send tens of thousands of federal troops to cities, whether mayors wanted them there or not.
    • Trump indicated he was preparing for an invasion of major American cities, with or without the support of local officials. “We’ll go into all of the cities, any of the cities, we’re ready,” Trump said. “We’ll put in 50,000, 60,000 people that really know what they’re doing, they’re strong and they’re tough,” Trump said. “As you know, we have to be invited in. At a certain point, we have to do something much stronger than being invited in.” [ael: you know that you have to be invited in — but you're going in anyway. This is tyranny. 25th Amendment!]
    • Also on Thursday night, a federal judge dealt a minor blow to the administration’s efforts to have federal troops roam major American cities and attack people with impunity: the court issued a temporary restraining order blocking the feds from attacking journalists and legal observers at protests. The order also says the feds can’t seize photographic and video equipment, or order legal observers or journalists to stop filming them.
    • “This order is a victory for the rule of law,” Oregon ACLU interim executive director Jann Carson said in a statement. “Federal agents from Trump’s Departments of Homeland Security and Justice are terrorizing the community, threatening lives, and relentlessly attacking journalists and legal observers documenting protests. These are the actions of a tyrant, and they have no place anywhere in America.”
  • Chicago Activists, Community Leaders Struggle With 'Very Polarizing' Deployment of Federal Agents: On Wednesday, President Trump announced that hundreds of members of agencies including the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) will be sent to Chicago. Though no concrete date for their deployment has been confirmed, it’s believed their arrival could be as soon as this week.
    • Mayor Lightfoot initially expressed concern over the presence of “secret, federal agents” but, after speaking with the President, has agreed to allow federal agents into the city — as long as the agents work in conjunction with local law enforcement. (Many in Chicago, though, have very little faith in the police department as it stands, let alone as relates to any expanded presence.)
    • Some activists say this kind of response is expected of Lightfoot, who was previously an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Illinois. They believe she is following her “law and order” background, and that this is an opportunity for her to lock up as many people as she can.

7/24/2020

  • When COVID-19 science comes home to roost: Derrick Z. Jackson: When you assassinate science, a massacre needs no bullets, bombs, or gas.
    • According to July 21 New York Times tracking, 41 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands are seeing an increase of coronavirus cases over the last 14 days. The death toll is now predicted to go well past 200,000 by November 1, according to at least three forecasts kept by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website.
    • A delusional president, a host of sycophant governors, and a handful of greedy business leaders have, in essence, declared that we should trust them more than we do doctors, more than epidemiologists, more than public health experts, more than even common sense. Their arrogance, incompetence, and racism has literally choked many in this country—of all colors—to death, and shown us how, when you assassinate science, a massacre needs no bullets, bombs, or gas.
    • The University of Washington's forecasting models estimate that universal mask use could save 41,000 U.S. lives by November, including 1,000 lives saved in Georgia.
    • President Trump, who defends monuments to the traitors who fought to maintain slavery, refused to be photographed wearing a mask until very recently. A July 13 Gallup poll found that just 46 percent of Republicans wear a face covering very often or always, compared to 94 percent of Democrats. An Associated Press poll back in May found that 83 percent of Black people wore masks outside the home compared to 64 percent of White people.
    • While one in three African Americans told a Washington Post poll last month that they personally knew someone who died of COVID-19, only 1 in 11 White respondents could say the same thing.
    • Just as Malcolm X said JFK's 1963 assassination represented the nation's chickens of hate coming home to roost (the Birmingham church bombing that killed four Black girls was earlier that year), the same could be said about COVID-19, with the current death toll as this nation's punishment for a half century of sidelining science and too often reducing scientists to political pawns in an effort to delay action against polluters, gun makers, tobacco and trash food companies or to deal with issues such as climate change, gun violence, cancer, obesity, or environmental justice.
    • In the 2000s, President George W. Bush drove a huge partisan wedge between the parties on the environment. He froze EPA staffing, undermined moderate EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman by censoring key parts of scientific analysis on climate change and pulled the United States out of the Kyoto Protocol climate agreement.
    • All that pales compared with the Trump Administration's efforts to roll back 100 air, water and chemical environmental regulations by the New York Times's latest count. Many of those regulations protect us from the pollution that causes asthma, heart disease, cancer, diabetes and other chronic illnesses that put people at more risk of worse outcomes from COVID-19.
    • The administration's chain of ignorant decisions have toppled into dominoes of death: The refusal to create a national strategy to deal with the virus; the sloth on testing and tracing; the sidelining of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; the constant undercutting of infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci; the time wasted on President Trump's poisonous home remedies; and the crass attempts by President Trump to use COVID-19's economic crisis to accelerate the gutting of environmental protections.
    • The New York Times even had to sue the CDC to get a more complete set of data on COVID's impact on Latinx and African Americans. And the CDC itself is in racial turmoil as more than 1,200 employees, have signed a letter saying that a toxic atmosphere has marginalized Black employees within the agency and hampered its response to the pandemic.
    • Compounding that have been governors who themselves ignored state scientists and public health officials and mayors pleading for help. Besides the obstinance of Kemp and Abbott, perhaps no other governor symbolizes the rejection of science—and therefore of reality—as does Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. While the Northeast was laid low by COVID-19, DeSantis that his state was a "success." Now it seems clear that what he was most successful at was disappearing his state's data; as a whistleblower says she was fire for refusing to cook the books on virus infection to justify an aggressive reopening.
    • On July 16 the Center for Public Integrity obtained a July 14 document prepared for the White House Coronavirus Task Force. It says that 18 states currently experiencing uncontrolled spread of COVID-19 should enact stricter social distancing protocols, including mandating masks outside of the home. True to the White House form, the document has not been made public. At the same time, the Trump Administration told hospitals in the middle of a pandemic to send COVID-19 data directly to Health and Human Services, run by former drug industry executive Alex Azar and not to the long-trusted CDC, run by medical scientists.
  • Trump is using federal agents as his 'goon squad', says Ice's ex-acting head: John Sandweg says the deployment of homeland security officials is a ‘manufactured crisis’ stemming from ‘a failure of leadership’
    • Sandweg also pointed to the department’s acting director, Chad Wolf, who has been seen as a driving force behind the deployment which has outraged Democrats, some Republicans and many civil rights groups. “You have an acting secretary, if you will, who is in a very precarious position in that a number of his predecessors did not have that long a tenure, who I think is eager to please,” Sandweg said.
    • Both of Oregon’s senators and other members of the state’s congressional delegation have called for an investigation into the administration’s handling of the protests. Meanwhile, Governor Kate Brown said at a press conference on Wednesday: “This is a democracy, not a dictatorship. We cannot have secret police abducting people and putting them into unmarked vehicles. I cannot believe I have to say that to the president of the United States.”
  • ‘I Am Someone’s Daughter:’ Ocasio-Cortez Condemn’s Yoho’s Remarks: In a speech on the House floor, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, addressed the remarks made by Representative Ted Yoho, Republican of Florida.
    • 'I Could Not Allow That To Stand': Ocasio-Cortez Rebukes Republican For Vulgar Insult: [ael: NPR gives the entire speech, which was eloquent, powerful, wonderful.]
      • On the allegation that he used a pejorative, Yoho said, "Having been married for 45 years with two daughters, I'm very cognizant of my language. The offensive name-calling, words attributed to me by the press, were never spoken to my colleagues, and if they were construed that way, I apologize for their misunderstanding."
      • Ocasio-Cortez said Yoho's comments on Wednesday prompted her to address the controversy. She described his remarks as making "excuses for his behavior."
      • "I could not allow my nieces, I could not allow the little girls that I go home to, I could not allow victims of verbal abuse, and worse, to see that. To see that excuse, and see our Congress accept it as legitimate and accept it as an apology and to accept silence as a form of acceptance. I could not allow that to stand," she said.
      • She reprimanded Yoho for using his family members as a "shield" for his foul language. "Having a daughter does not make a man decent. Having a wife does not make a decent man. Treating people with dignity and respect makes a decent man. And when a decent man messes up, as we all are bound to do, he tries his best and does apologize," she said.
  • Major new climate study rules out less severe global warming scenarios: An analysis finds the most likely range of warming from doubling carbon dioxide to be between 4.1 to 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit
    • The current pace of human-caused carbon emissions is increasingly likely to trigger irreversible damage to the planet, according to a comprehensive international study released Wednesday. Researchers studying one of the most important and vexing topics in climate science — how sensitive the Earth’s climate is to a doubling of the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — found that warming is extremely unlikely to be on the low end of estimates.
    • The new range is narrower than previous studies but shows at least a 95 percent chance that a doubling of carbon dioxide, which the world is on course to reach within the next five decades or so, would result in warming greater than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) relative to preindustrial temperatures. That is the threshold beyond which scientists say the Earth will suffer dangerous effects — disruptive sea level rise, intolerable heat waves and other extreme weather and permanent damage to ecosystems.
    • To produce the study, the group of researchers worked like detectives, breaking up into teams that sifted through multiple sources of evidence. Some of the data examined include instrument records since the industrial revolution, paleoclimate records from coral reefs and ice cores that provide evidence of prehistoric temperatures, and satellite observations and intricate models of how the climate system works.
    • “An important part of the process was to ensure that the lines of evidence were more or less independent,” lead author Steven Sherwood, a climate scientist at the University of New South Wales’s ARC Center of Excellence for Climate Extremes, said in a news release. “You can think of it as the mathematical version of trying to determine if a rumor you hear separately from two people could have sprung from the same source; or if one of two eyewitnesses to a crime has been influenced by hearing the story of the other one,” Sherwood said.
    • In fact, the study has a message that matters to us a great deal: There is basically little or no chance that we are going to get lucky and find that the warming caused by our activities turns out to be minor.
    • But Gavin Schmidt, the study’s co-author and Marvel’s colleague at NASA Goddard, offered some optimism, noting that collective action by nations could prevent the doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. “The primary determinant of future climate is human actions,” Marvel said.
    • Here's the same story in Science: Earth’s climate destiny finally seen more clearly: Landmark study narrows bounds for “climate sensitivity,” ruling out benign warming
  • Inside Clean Energy: Ohio’s Bribery Scandal is Bad. The State’s Lack of an Energy Plan May Be Worse: The $61 million scheme snagged a politician, lobbyists and a dark money group. Meanwhile, nobody’s thinking about how to get to a clean energy future.
    • Last October, I went to the public library in my Columbus, Ohio, neighborhood and saw a woman standing outside the front entrance, asking people to sign a petition. The signatures were for a proposed ballot measure to repeal an Ohio law, passed a few months earlier, that provided taxpayer-funded bailouts for nuclear and coal-fired power plants. The legislation also got rid of Ohio's requirements that utilities meet annual targets for renewable energy and energy efficiency.
    • Two people standing near the petition gatherer were "blockers," paid operatives there to discourage me and any other passers-by from signing it. They were handing out postcards from a dark money group saying that the campaign to repeal the law was part of a Chinese government plot to harm the United States. As of Tuesday, the world knows that the campaign to pass the Ohio law and the attacks on the effort to repeal it were part of what prosecutors call the largest bribery scheme in Ohio history.
    • The $61 million scheme was bankrolled by the utility FirstEnergy, the Akron-based company that was the main beneficiary of the bailout legislation, and the money went to accounts controlled by Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder for his political and personal use, prosecutors said.
  • C.D.C. Calls on Schools to Reopen, Downplaying Health Risks: The agency’s statement followed earlier criticism from President Trump that its guidelines for reopening were too “tough.”
    • The nation’s top public health agency issued a full-throated call to reopen schools in a statement that aligned with President Trump’s pressure on communities, listing numerous benefits of being in school and downplaying the potential health risks.
    • Experts on the subject at the C.D.C. were cut off from direct communication with the working group after their input on the statement was interpreted as being too cautious, the official said. Instead, the group communicated directly with the office of Dr. Robert R. Redfield, the C.D.C. director, which did seek input from experts at the agency. But the C.D.C. was by no means in charge, the official said.
    • [ael: from May:] C.D.C. Issues Reopening Checklists for Schools and Businesses: The tips encouraging handwashing, social distancing and other familiar practices were published after the White House rejected an earlier draft of recommendations.
      • The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday released six flow charts meant to help schools, restaurants, transit systems and other businesses decide when to reopen during the coronavirus pandemic, the agency’s first release of such guidance after a more comprehensive draft was rejected by the White House.
        • White House Rejects C.D.C.’s Coronavirus Reopening Plan: Detailed guidelines for reopening drafted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were blocked from publication after Trump administration officials labeled them “overly prescriptive.”
        • [ael: I have the full document.]
  • A 92-Year-Old Piano Teacher Won’t Let Students Miss Bach in the Pandemic: Cornelia Vertenstein, a Holocaust survivor, is still teaching piano lessons over FaceTime from her Denver home.
    • Programs were distributed by email. Plato was quoted at the top: “Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.” [ael: my emphasis]
    • “With great pride, I introduce my students who prepared themselves with discipline and determination in difficult circumstances,” she said. “When I was a little girl, I could not go to public schools because of my religion. And they created a little school in the basement of an old building, which sometimes had heat and sometimes didn’t. Great minds and achievements came out of that school, which taught me that in any situation you can strive, learn, look ahead and have dreams.”

7/23/2020

  • 20 states sue over Trump rule limiting states from blocking pipeline projects:
    • The Clean Water Act previously allowed states to halt projects that risk hurting their water quality, but that power was scaled back by the EPA, a move Administrator Andrew Wheeler said would “curb abuses of the Clean Water Act that have held our nation’s energy infrastructure projects hostage.”
    • “Let's be clear, this Trump administration rule is not about water quality. This is about pushing forward fossil fuel energy infrastructure,” said California Attorney General Xavier Becerra (D), calling the Clean Water Act “the only way to prove that these projects comply with state law.”
  • Trump administration recommends against universities requiring COVID-19 tests before students return
    • [ael: for the stupid reason that…] “….you're only negative for that one moment,” Adm. Brett Giroir, assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services who is in charge of COVID-19 testing strategy, told reporters.

7/22/2020

  • Climate Change Poses ‘Systemic Threat’ to the Economy, Big Investors Warn: Financial regulators should act to avoid economic disaster, according to a letter from pension funds and other investors representing almost $1 trillion in assets.
    • Climate change threatens to create turmoil in the financial markets, and the Federal Reserve and other regulators must act to avoid an economic disaster, according to a letter sent on Tuesday by a group of large investors. “The climate crisis poses a systemic threat to financial markets and the real economy, with significant disruptive consequences on asset valuations and our nation’s economic stability,” reads the letter, which was signed by more than three dozen pension plans, fund managers and other financial institutions that together manage almost $1 trillion in assets.
    • The letter calls on regulators to adopt the steps Ceres outlined last month in a report that makes 51 recommendations to eight federal agencies. At its core are two demands: that the agencies treat climate change as a systemic risk, and that the S.E.C. ensures mandatory and consistent disclosure of climate threats facing companies.
    • Nevertheless, Ceres’s recommendations offer a blueprint for how a Democratic administration might begin to tackle climate change, should former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. win the presidency in November. Last month, Democrats on the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis released a report that echoed some of the recommendations from Ceres, particularly ones regarding the disclosure of financial risks.
    • She said the S.E.C., which regulates the stock market and requires publicly traded companies to regularly disclose information about a range of perils they face, should also require those companies to better disclose the financial risks they confront from climate change.
    • Julie Gorte, senior vice president for sustainable investing at Impax Asset Management, which manages $23 billion, said the S.E.C. should force companies to disclose the location of their physical assets, such as factories and other facilities. That way, investors can gauge the risks facing those facilities from wildfires, hurricanes or flooding, and push companies to address them. Investors would then be able to choose whether to invest based on that information.
    • Sarah Bloom Raskin, a former Federal Reserve governor and deputy secretary of the Treasury who wrote the foreword to Ceres’s list of recommendations, said that regulators in the United States were falling behind their counterparts in other countries, which have already begun imposing stress tests for climate change as well as other steps.
  • First active leak of sea-bed methane discovered in Antarctica: Researchers say potent climate-heating gas almost certainly escaping into atmosphere
    • The researchers also found microbes that normally consume the potent greenhouse gas before it reaches the atmosphere had only arrived in small numbers after five years, allowing the gas to escape.
    • Vast quantities of methane are thought to be stored under the sea floor around Antarctica. The gas could start to leak as the climate crisis warms the oceans, a prospect the researchers said was “incredibly concerning”.
    • The reason for the emergence of the new seep remains a mystery, but it is probably not global heating, as the Ross Sea where it was found has yet to warm significantly. The research also has significance for climate models, which currently do not account for a delay in the microbial consumption of escaping methane.
    • The release of methane from frozen underwater stores or permafrost regions is one of the key tipping points that scientists are concerned about, which occur when a particular impact of global heating becomes unstoppable. “The methane cycle is absolutely something that we as a society need to be concerned about,” said Thurber. “I find it incredibly concerning.”
  • The revolutionary boat powered by the ocean: A new design of ship in the Philippines is hoping to pose a low-carbon alternative to the country’s usual bangka, by working with the power of waves rather than against them. The ship is a hybrid model, using multiple internal combustion engines for initial propulsion but switching to wave energy while cruising in open waters.
  • Why the next president should establish a Department of Climate: The executive branch is not yet equipped to respond to climate change.

7/21/2020

  • Trump's vow to send federal officers to US cities is election ploy, critics say: Opponents warn of grave threat to civil liberties as observers say president seeks to build ‘law and order’ credentials
    • The sinister events in Portland have renewed fears about creeping authoritarianism from Trump’s White House. Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University, has called for peaceful civil disobedience. “Stormtrooper tactics have no place in a free society,” he said. “The apparent deployment of the military for domestic law enforcement violates the Posse Comitatus Act in the absence of a genuine insurrection, and the claim that such deployment is genuinely necessary to preserve order does not meet the laugh test.
  • Trump consults Bush torture lawyer on how to skirt law and rule by decree: John Yoo wrote memo used to justify waterboarding
    • John Yoo told the Guardian he has been talking to White House officials about his view that a recent supreme court ruling on immigration would allow Trump to issue executive orders on whether to apply existing federal laws.
    • [ael: 25th Amendment, now!]
    • “The supreme court has said President Obama could [choose not to] enforce immigration laws for about 2 million cases. And why can’t the Trump administration do something similar with immigration – create its own … program, but it could do it in areas beyond that, like healthcare, tax policy, criminal justice, inner city policy. I talked to them a fair amount about cities, because of the disorder.”
    • In a Fox News Sunday interview, Trump declared he would try to use that interpretation to try to force through decrees on healthcare, immigration and “various other plans” over the coming month. The White House consultations with Yoo were first reported by the Axios news website.
    • “This is how it begins,” Laurence Tribe, a Harvard constitutional law professor, wrote on Twitter. “The dictatorial hunger for power is insatiable. If ever there was a time for peaceful civil disobedience, that time is upon us.”
    • “He could declare that he would not enforce federal firearms laws,” Yoo wrote, “and that a new ‘Trump permit’ would free any holder of state and local gun-control restrictions.
    • “Even if Trump knew that his scheme lacked legal authority, he could get away with it for the length of his presidency,” he said. In a telephone interview, he added: “According to the supreme court, the president can now choose to under-enforce the law in certain areas and it can’t be undone by his successor unless that successor goes through this onerous thing called the Administrative Procedure Act, which usually takes one to two years.”
    • Constitutional scholars have rejected Yoo’s arguments as ignoring limits on the executive powers of the president imposed by the founders, who were determined to prevent the rise of a tyrant.
    • Tribe called Yoo’s interpretation of the Daca ruling “indefensible”. He added: “I fear that this lawless administration will take full advantage of the fact that judicial wheels grind slowly and that it will be difficult to keep up with the many ways Trump, aided and abetted by Bill Barr as attorney general and Chad Wolf as acting head of homeland security, can usurp congressional powers and abridge fundamental rights in the immigration space in particular but also in matters of public health and safety.”
  • A Navy Veteran Had a Question for the Feds in Portland. They Beat Him in Response.: The veteran said he wanted to ask the officers whether they felt their actions violated the Constitution. Video shows them tear-gassing him and smashing his hand with baton blows.
    • Christopher J. David had largely ignored the protests in downtown Portland, Ore., but when he saw videos of unidentified federal agents grabbing protesters off the street and throwing them into rented minivans, he felt compelled to act. Mr. David, a Navy veteran, said that federal agents’ use of violent tactics against protesters, without the support of the mayor, the governor or local law enforcement, was a violation of the oaths that agents take to support, uphold and defend the Constitution.
    • And so, on Saturday, he took a bus downtown to ask the officers how they squared their actions with that oath. Instead of getting an answer, Mr. David was beaten with a baton by one federal officer as another doused him with pepper spray, according to video footage of the encounter. After he walked away from the confrontation, Mr. David was taken to a nearby hospital, where a specialist said his right hand was broken and would require surgery to install pins, screws and plates. He declined pain medication.
    • Kenneth T. Cuccinelli, the acting deputy secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, said on CNN that he was “familiar with the video” involving Mr. David and that “maintaining an appropriate response is an ongoing obligation.”
    • “It just didn’t seem worth it to me at that point, but it reached that threshold when I saw Pinochet-type behavior from our own government,” he said, referring to the Chilean dictator.
    • Internet users quickly called him “Captain Portland” for barely flinching at the blows. Noting how at 6 feet 2 inches tall he towered over the officers, some people compared him to the “Game of Thrones” character known as the Mountain. On Twitter, he went from having a handful of followers before the encounter to more than 60,000 on Monday.
  • Jackie Robinson’s Inner Struggle:
    • It was Tuesday, Sept. 30, 1947 — Game 1 of the World Series between the New York Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers — and Jack Roosevelt “Jackie” Robinson was making history. The Dodger first baseman was standing in a packed Yankee Stadium about to hear the national anthem. From a distance, the tableau can seem an inspiring inflection point: the first Black major leaguer in the 20th century playing in the first televised World Series. “There I was,” Robinson recalled in his 1972 memoir “I Never Had It Made: An Autobiography,” “the Black grandson of a slave, the son of a Black sharecropper, part of a historic occasion, a symbolic hero to my people.” So far, so good: The safe narrative of Robinson-as-stoic-hero is intact. “The band struck up the national anthem,” he wrote. “It should have been a glorious moment for me as the stirring words … poured from the stands.” Yet if we see the scene through Robinson’s eyes — and hear the anthem through his ears — we encounter an altogether different story. Writing a quarter of a century after the 1947 World Series, Robinson observed, “I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a Black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.” [ael: my emphasis: to all of those who will never understand why we take a knee….]
  • There Are Wasps in the Yard. You’d Better Get to Know Them.: They buzz. They hover. Sometimes they sting. But how much do you really know about these insects that can menace our summers?
    • The wasp will drag her prey into her gallery and lay an egg. She seems to know the sex of the egg ahead of time and apportions cicadas appropriately: one or two for males, and two or three for the much larger females. When the egg hatches, the larva will eat the still-living lunch. (Charles Darwin, lover of most life-forms, once wrote that the existence of similar wasp species that prey on caterpillars made it hard for him to believe in “a beneficent and omnipotent God.”)
    • [ael: I was part of a team that wrote a paper about cicada-killer wasps! It was fun, but they do make one wonder about a beneficent God, for sure, especially if you're a cicada….]
  • Why Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp stands alone on masks
    • “Every relevant scientific body is saying that masks are essential,” said K.M. Monirul Islam, an epidemiologist who runs the public health program at Augusta University. [ael: so heh, let's make it a choice! Certainly Georgians will be smart enough to make the right choice. Oh heh, look — a stupid Georgian! And who's the idiot he's greeting?]7I43P6GK2II6VPDKNBA3FDMQSM.jpg&w=500
    • Kemp, meanwhile, is unmoved, vowing to stand in the way of “disastrous policies” — as he labeled the orders in Atlanta — that “threaten the lives and livelihood of our citizens.” That position upends local control, long a principle claimed by conservatives. And the target placed on Atlanta intensifies the political overtones of the litigation, say mayors of other Georgia cities, from Augusta to Athens to Savannah, whose mask ordinances remain in effect.
    • Whatever ill will may have resulted, however, has not lasted. When Trump — with no mask, in violation of the city’s rules — visited Atlanta last week, a masked Kemp was at the airport to welcome him.
    • Bottoms — who has tested positive for the coronavirus, along with her husband and one of their sons — has said that the mask ordinance could bring down infection rates and save lives…. Her argument has been bolstered by the Trump administration’s scientific advisers, who have been calling on the public to wear masks since early April, and health experts at the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Last week, CDC Director Robert Redfield cited studies showing the beneficial impact of masks in saying that widespread use could “bring this epidemic under control” within one or two months.
    • The Harvard Global Health Institute rates Georgia as among the 11 states where the coronavirus is spreading so rapidly that governors should institute stay-at-home orders.
  • Greta Thunberg plans to donate one million-euro prize to green causes:
    • “All the prize money will be donated through my foundation to different organisations and projects who are working to help people on the frontlines affected by the climate crisis and ecological crisis, especially in the Global South,” she said. 
 One of Thunberg’s first two donations of 100,000 euros each will go to SOS Amazonia, a crowdfunding campaign launched in June to buy medical supplies and provide telemedicine services to residents of Brazil’s Amazon rainforest. The second will back the Stop Ecocide Foundation, which is lobbying for the Hague-based International Criminal Court to prosecute people responsible for large-scale destruction of the natural world.
  • Global Warming Is Driving Polar Bears Toward Extinction, Researchers Say: By century’s end, polar bears worldwide could become nearly extinct as a result of shrinking sea ice in the Arctic if climate change continues unabated, scientists said.
    • Nearly all of the 19 subpopulations of polar bears, from the Beaufort Sea off Alaska to the Siberian Arctic, would face being wiped out because the loss of sea ice would force the animals onto land and away from their food supplies for longer periods, the researchers said. Prolonged fasting, and reduced nursing of cubs by mothers, would lead to rapid declines in reproduction and survival.
    • “There is very little chance that polar bears would persist anywhere in the world, except perhaps in the very high Arctic in one small subpopulation” if greenhouse-gas emissions continue at so-called business-as-usual levels, said Peter K. Molnar, a researcher at the University of Toronto Scarborough and lead author of the study, which was published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change.
    • By rough estimates there are about 25,000 polar bears in the Arctic. Their main habitat is sea ice, where they hunt seals by waiting for them to surface at holes in the ice. In some areas the bears remain on the ice year round, but in others the melting in spring and summer forces them to come ashore.
  • New Emails Show How Energy Industry Moved Fast to Undo Curbs: The messages, made public in a lawsuit, suggest the E.P.A. rescinded a requirement on methane at the behest of an executive just weeks after President Trump took office.
  • Once again, Trump says the corrupt part out loud: In the course of announcing that “more” federal law enforcement will be descending on cities like Chicago, while hailing enforcement efforts to “grab” people in Portland, Trump quickly segued into a claim about the presidential race.
    • If Joe Biden gets elected, Trump said, “the whole country would go to hell. And we’re not going to let it go to hell.” [ael: my emphasis: you mean you're going to make sure that Biden doesn't get elected….]
    • Trump just said it straight from the Oval Office: This is all about Biden.
    • At around that time, Trump’s eldest son tweeted out a new Trump campaign ad that depicts a terrified elderly woman calling 911 about an intruder, while falsely claiming Biden would defund the police. The political messaging is seamlessly connected to President Trump’s claims about Biden in the White House while announcing the new law enforcement actions.
    • Trump’s deployment of federal law enforcement into Democratic-led cities is every bit as devoted to manufacturing and sustaining a campaign attack on Biden as his manipulation of national security policy in the Ukraine scandal was. The new ad on Biden — approved by Trump himself — says the corrupt part out loud, just as he did in the White House.
    • One way to underscore this point is to ask: What is the operational justification for what Trump is doing right now? Is there one? Juliette Kayyem, a former senior homeland security official, told me there’s a big tell here: In cases like this, federal officials would ordinarily be trying to coordinate with local officials, precisely because that would make it more likely such efforts would succeed at their stated objective. In this case, though, they are pursuing the policy in defiance of local officials. We’ve already seen this in Portland, Ore. Now it’s happening again: Homeland security officials are reportedly making plans to send federal law enforcement to Chicago, even though Chicago’s mayor stated unequivocally that she doesn’t want this.
    • The stated justification for going into Chicago is not protests. The plans are reportedly for federal law enforcement to assist against drug trafficking and gangs. But if anything, this further underscores the ad hoc justification here. Why now, particularly since this is in defiance of local officials?
    • “The administration can’t even get its story straight, showing there is no federal plan,” Kayyem told me. “In Portland, it’s courts and statues. In Chicago, it’s apparently drugs. In other cities, in the words of our president, it’s ‘who knows.’”
    • Beyond this, Trump himself is confirming the truly corrupt nature of what his administration is doing — he himself is demonstrating that there’s no genuine rationale for it other than his reelection needs. Here again Trump said the damning part out loud. The same president who sent troops to the border as a campaign prop in 2018 has now explicitly said the cities being targeted by law enforcement are “all run by Democrats.” That edges right up to saying this is one of his own stated criteria for making this decision.
  • First Thing: American scientists wade into politics with a Trump rebuke: More than 1,200 have signed a letter urging the president to ‘restore science-based policy in government’.
    • As Donald Trump continues to downplay or denigrate the advice of his own administration’s scientists, more than 1,200 members of the US National Academy of Sciences have now signed an open letter urging the president to “restore science-based policy in government”. The letter began in 2016 as a response to Trump’s refusal to act on their warnings over the climate crisis, but it has rapidly accumulated fresh signatures amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
    • The White House’s most recent affront to science is its bid to prevent billions of dollars being spent on crucial coronavirus track-and-trace efforts. On Sunday, with US deaths surpassing 140,000 and confirmed case numbers moving inexorably towards 4 million, Trump described the nation’s top infectious disease expert, Dr Anthony Fauci, as a “little bit of an alarmist”.

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