November 1-16, 2020

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

  • Andy Long:
    • Any course in US history is inauthentic — worse, is a lie — if it doesn't teach the life of Fannie Lou Hamer.
  • 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….

November 1-16, 2020

11/16/2020

  • Hurricane Iota explosively intensifies to Category 5 as it bears down on Nicaragua: The latest Category 5 ever observed in the Atlantic will be the second major hurricane to hit Central America in two weeks
    • Iota is the 30th named storm of the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season, marking a record. It’s the first time on record that the Atlantic has had two major hurricanes in November. It’s also the 10th named storm of the season to rapidly intensify, a feat that atmospheric scientists link to warmer sea surface temperatures from human-caused climate change.
    • Iota beats Laura, which struck southwest Louisiana in late August, and Eta, which made landfall in Nicaragua 12 days ago, as the strongest hurricane of the 2020 season. Activity this strong so late in the season is virtually unheard of.
    • Iota is the strongest hurricane ever observed this late in the season and ranks as the second-strongest November storm on record. Iota’s peak winds leaped 40 mph in six hours Sunday night, quadrupling the criteria for hurricane rapid intensification, which is a 35 mph increase in 24 hours. Its sudden strengthening was also reflected by a sudden drop in pressure, toppling 61 millibars in 24 hours, the fourth-fastest decline on record, trailing only hurricanes Gilbert (1988), Rita (2005) and Wilma (2005). This kind of rapid intensification is becoming more likely because of warming ocean waters. The water temperatures east of Nicaragua, where Iota has explosively strengthened, have warmed markedly in recent decades during November and December.
    • Iota’s intensity and rapid strengthening have helped make the 2020 season even more exceptional, compared with past seasons:
      • 2020 is the first Atlantic season featuring two major (Category 3 or higher) hurricanes on record during November, following Eta earlier this month.
      • Iota is the sixth major hurricane of the 2020 season, tying six other seasons for the second most in a year.
    • The latter half of the hurricane season has been particularly remarkable, as four of the past six named storms to form, all named after a Greek letter, have become major hurricanes. Storms named using the Greek alphabet have produced the equivalent energy of an average entire hurricane season.
  • Moderna Covid vaccine candidate almost 95% effective, trials show: US-based biotech firm is latest to reveal impressive results from phase 3 trials of jab
    • An interim analysis released on Monday, and based on 95 patients with confirmed Covid infections, found the candidate vaccine has an efficacy of 94.5%. The company said it planned to apply to the US regulator, the Food and Drug Administration, for emergency-use authorisation in the coming weeks. In the analysis, 90 of the patients received the placebo with the remaining five the vaccine.
    • The Moderna vaccine, which is being trialled in more than 30,000 volunteers, is not expected to be available outside the US until next year. The biotech company said it would have 20m doses ready to ship in the US before the end of 2020 and hoped to manufacture 500m to 1bn doses globally next year.
    • If the results remain as impressive as the trial goes on, the Moderna vaccine could potentially provide a major advantage over the Pfizer vaccine. While Pfizer’s vaccine requires ultracold freezing between -70C and -80C from production facility to patient, Moderna said it had improved the shelf life and stability of its own vaccine, meaning that it can be stored at standard refrigeration temperatures of 2C to 8C for 30 days. It can be stored for six months at -20C for shipping and long-term storage, the company said.
    • Given the relatively small number of cases analysed there is some statistical uncertainty over the 94.5% figure. But Stephen Evans, professor of pharmacoepidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said that based on the numbers released, the efficacy was still likely to be better than 85%.
    • A question mark that remains over the Pfizer vaccine is whether it prevents serious illness. The Moderna results, released by an independent data safety monitoring board, are encouraging on this point. Of 11 participants who developed severe Covid while on the trial, all were in the placebo group. The results also suggest the vaccine is effective in older people and those from diverse ethnic backgrounds.
  • Death row woman's clemency plea in jeopardy as lawyers contract Covid-19: Lisa Montgomery scheduled for execution on December; Her attorneys developed symptoms after visiting prison
    • In addition, mental health experts familiar with Montgomery’s case are unable to assess her mental state “and therefore cannot participate in the clemency process”. The lawyers have asked for an injunction postponing the execution until a thorough clemency appeal can be prepared.
    • Any clemency petition is likely to focus on the horrifying childhood to which Montgomery was subjected. According to court documents, she was born with brain damage related to her mother’s alcohol intake during pregnancy and went on to suffer incest, gang rape and child sex trafficking, as well as physical abuse and neglect. [ael: ironically, I was taking NKU's harrassment and abuse on-line training today, and they talked about how this sort of abuse can lead to all sorts of serious mental issues, including PTSD. How can you execute someone like that, even when their crime is so serious?]
  • ‘It’s like politicizing toilet paper.’ A member of Biden’s COVID-19 panel surveys the task ahead: Céline Gounder serves on President-elect Joe Biden’s new coronavirus task force
    • Céline Gounder has straddled the worlds of medicine, government, and the media: Now, the New York University epidemiologist and infectious disease expert is one of 13 people President-elect Joe Biden has named to a high-profile task force to help steer his response to the coronavirus pandemic. In addition to her medical work, Gounder co-hosts a podcast about the pandemic with Ron Klain, Biden’s newly named chief of staff. Until recently she was also a CNN medical analyst.
  • Presidential Transition: As More Republicans Break With Trump, He Refuses to Budge: Trump’s coronavirus team is blocked from working with Biden’s — [and that’s a problem, Fauci says.
    • The nation’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, made it clear on Sunday that President Trump’s coronavirus task force has not been allowed to communicate with President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s transition team, a step that he said was critically important to curbing the pandemic…. “It’s almost like passing a baton in a race, you don’t want to stop,” Dr. Fauci said, adding later, “Of course it would be better if we could start working with them.”
  • Britain to ban new petrol cars by 2030 on road to net zero emissions:
    • Britain will ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars and vans from 2030, five years earlier than previously planned, as part of what Prime Minister Boris Johnson is casting as a “green revolution” to cut emissions to net zero by 2050.
    • Johnson, who is grappling with Europe’s most deadly COVID-19 crisis, Brexit trade negotiations and the departure of his most senior adviser, wants to underscore his green credentials as part of what he hopes will be a reset for his government. “Now is the time to plan for a green recovery with high-skilled jobs that give people the satisfaction of knowing they are helping to make the country cleaner, greener and more beautiful,” Johnson said in a column published in the Financial Times on Tuesday.
  • Amid the worst of the pandemic, our mad king rages only about himself:
    • This is becoming like Greek tragedy. The nation is on fire with covid-19, cases and hospitalizations are soaring to unthinkable new highs, and our leader does nothing but rage and moan about his own punishment at the hands of cruel fate.
    • If it is true that “those whom the gods would destroy they first make mad,” then President Trump is finishing his shambolic term in office as Mad King Donald. Cumulative U.S. covid infections leaped from 10 million to 11 million in just six days, signifying uncontrolled spread. Hospitals are crowded with nearly 70,000 covid-19 patients — more than ever before — and medical systems, especially in the Great Plains and the Mountain West, are wavering under unbearable strain. The morgue in El Paso is so overwhelmed with bodies that inmates at the county jail there are being pressed into service as helpers, pending arrival of the National Guard. Yet Trump spent Monday morning on Twitter, pitifully howling “I won the Election!” about a contest he clearly and decisively lost.
    • We have reached the point in the pandemic that epidemiologists warned about months ago. They begged Trump to do everything he could to push infection rates as low as possible before autumn arrived and cooler temperatures forced people indoors, where the virus is transmitted much more easily.
    • A responsible president would have used his megaphone to urge all Americans to wear masks and practice social distancing; would have understood and explained how full cooperation with burdensome shutdowns earlier in the year could allow some institutions, including schools, to return to more normal functioning in the fall; and would have valued patience and resolve over instant gratification.
    • At the moment, however, there is nothing Biden can do. The Mad King, clinging to the fiction that he has not been deposed, will not even allow federal officials to begin sharing data with Biden’s incoming coronavirus team. The theme of his failed reelection campaign should have been “Make America Sick Again.”

11/15/2020

  • Laugh? We nearly all died – why my US failed state Twitter thread went viral: The final throes of the Trump presidency exposed America as the bad joke – and danger to the world – it has certainly become
    • The election and four years of Trump have shown that far from being a paragon of democracy, the US has not only neglected its decaying democratic institutions at home, but has also incubated a dangerous authoritarianism. As the US fixes itself, the rest of us too need to reform the international system which for too long has operated on the mistaken belief that the US is what it claimed to be. The Trump presidency should be the wake-up call we all need to build a better world.
  • Trump lost at the ballot box. His legal challenges aren’t going any better.
    • Rather than revealing widespread — or even isolated — fraud, the effort by Trump’s legal team has so far done the opposite: It’s affirmed the integrity of the election that Trump lost. Nearly every GOP challenge has been tossed out. Not a single vote has been overturned. “The Trump legal team does not seem to have identified any kind of global litigation strategy that has any prospect of changing the outcome of the election, and all of the court filings to date underscore that — as do all of the court rulings that have been issued to date,” said Robert Kelner, a Republican lawyer who chairs the election and political law practice group at Covington & Burling, an international law firm based in Washington.
  • Biden won places that are thriving. Trump won ones that are hurting. In a trend that’s been unfolding since 2000, Democrats continue to gain votes in prosperous, highly educated urban areas. Republicans are gaining in small cities and rural communities.
    • The parts of America that have seen strong job, population and economic growth in the past four years voted for Joe Biden, economic researchers found. In contrast, President Trump garnered his highest vote shares in counties that had some of the most sluggish job, population and economic growth during his term.
    • Trump fared well among voters who said the economy was their top concern, and he even won votes in places that didn’t fare particularly well under his presidency. This is perhaps a continuation of the 2016 election, when Trump won a huge share of places that had struggled under President Barack Obama. Democrats tended to view the 2020 election more as a referendum on Trump, especially his response to the pandemic.
    • “Counties where voters feel better off today than four years ago swung toward Biden,” said James Chung, co-founder of StratoDem Analytics, which studies local economic trends. “Counties that declined over the past four years were more likely to shift even more to Trump.” To be sure, Chung found that — as exit polls have shown — education and race most strongly explained voting patterns, but they were followed closely by a county’s economic performance. The economy often decides elections, but the surprise in this case was that good economic performance didn’t appear to favor the incumbent.
    • “Democrats need to figure out what their positive and inclusive vision is that speaks to rural America,” said Kenan Fikri, research director at EIG. “Democrats really didn’t make inroads into rural America this time around.”
  • Trump tunes out pandemic surge as he focuses on denying election loss
    • President Trump finally received some good news this past week: Amid spiking coronavirus cases nationwide — more than 100,000 new cases a day since Nov. 4, with deaths rising, too — pharmaceutical giant Pfizer announced that its experimental coronavirus vaccine was more than 90 percent effective. But the president was furious.
    • The news came six days after Election Day — too late to help Trump in his contest against President-elect Joe Biden — and he said both Pfizer and his own Food and Drug Administration had withheld the announcement to prevent delivering him the sort of pre-election public-relations victory that could have helped him in the polls. Instead of touting the vaccine success as a crowning achievement of his administration, as advisers encouraged, Trump barely mentioned it except to gripe on Twitter that “the Democrats didn’t want to have me get a Vaccine WIN, prior to the election.”
    • Since Election Day and for weeks prior, Trump has all but ceased to actively manage the deadly pandemic, which so far has killed at least 244,000 Americans, infected at least 10.9 million and choked the country’s economy. The president has not attended a coronavirus task force meeting in “at least five months,” said one senior administration official with knowledge of the meetings who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share candid details.
    • On Friday, Trump appeared in the Rose Garden to offer an update on Operation Warp Speed, his administration’s effort to fast-track a vaccine. The president and his team shared some encouraging news: that at least 20 million vaccine doses could be ready as early as December, with 25 million to 30 million doses coming each subsequent month. But Trump seemed deflated, with the dour disposition of a man who understood that the coronavirus progress was too late to help him in the polls. Biden is projected to win with 306 electoral votes, compared with Trump’s 232.
    • Although many federal health officials firmly believe more needs to be done to strengthen the country’s virus response, most are too afraid to call publicly for firmer action, two people familiar with task force meetings said. For several weeks, Birx and Fauci pushed to dramatically expand testing, raised concerns about hospital overcrowding and sounded alarms in public and in private about the deadly winter the country is hurtling toward — to no avail.
    • The White House — which probably hosted a superspreader event in late September celebrating the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett — no longer consults health experts before planning events, including the East Room celebration on election night that appears to have led to several infections, two officials said. One person present at the party, who came in contact with at least two individuals who later tested positive for the virus, said she had not heard from any White House contact tracers.
    • Experts worry that Trump’s mishandling of the virus so far is only going to get worse as the nation heads into winter. Scott Gottlieb, the former FDA commissioner under Trump, said it was clear the federal government was unlikely to change its approach, so states need to step up their own efforts. “The numbers are going to get very big in terms of hospitalizations and deaths,” Gottlieb said. “We are just going to have a lot of death and disease.”
  • A World War II veteran’s timeless words for his son — and his country
    • On Sunday, March 11, 1945, as his infantry unit paused in Acht, Germany, to prepare for the dangerous crossings of two rivers, the Moselle and the Main, a slender, bespectacled captain and former violinist in the Kansas City Philharmonic found a typewriter and wrote a letter to his son. The captain, my father, had landed on Utah Beach on June 8, fought in Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge and been awarded two Purple Hearts, two Silver Stars and a Bronze Star with a “V” for valor. As he sat at the typewriter, I was in Kansas, only four months old. Although the end of the war seemed to be in sight, he was undoubtedly aware that he might not live to see me.
    • He did not mail his letter but put it with his personal effects, knowing it would be safely shipped to my mother should he be killed. The letter remained in his personal papers until my younger sister found it in the spring of 2019. I wept when I read it.
    • He urged me to embrace “desirable character traits that are as fundamental as life itself, obedience, truthfulness, kindness, sincerity, tolerance, fruitfulness, and respect for other people’s rights.” And to “acquire a true sense of values so that you can recognize the things in life that are really important. . . . Learn to love beauty, wherever you find it, music, scenery, books, anything. Develop an inquisitive mind and always remember education is a never ending process. Culture is not a feminine word or a sissy trait. . . . Respect money for what it can do for you, but realize its limitations. Beyond a certain point it adds nothing to life. Never confuse ambition with greed.”
    • The nation has just refused to reelect a president who governed with contempt for core democratic values and who now refuses to accept the will of the voters. President Trump caused grave damage to the fabric of our democracy and our stature in the world. If we do not act promptly to repair that damage, it will forever alter who we are. Let us begin.

11/14/2020

  • US sees record 184,000 new daily Covid cases as Trump politicises vaccine effort: Deaths increase as states implement new social restrictions and president threatens not to deliver vaccines to New York
    • The US set yet another daily record for new coronavirus cases on Friday, topping 184,000, while Donald Trump promised imminent distribution of a vaccine – except to New York, which he threatened to leave out for political reasons [ael: my emphasis of insanity] – and the president-elect, Joe Biden, pleaded with Americans to follow basic mitigation measures.
    • At the White House, in his first remarks since losing the election to Biden, Trump said he expected a vaccine developed by Pfizer to receive emergency use authorisation “extremely soon”, and to be available to the general population by April. He also said the federal government would not deliver the vaccine to New York, because its governor, Andrew Cuomo, “doesn’t trust where the vaccine is coming from”. Trump and Cuomo have clashed frequently during the pandemic. Cuomo told MSNBC: “None of what he said is true, surprise surprise. We’re all excited about the possibilities about a vaccine.”
    • Preparing for government from Wilmington, Delaware, Biden has named his own Covid taskforce. On Friday one member, Dr Celine Grounder, alluded to delays in providing national security briefings to Biden caused by Trump’s refusal to concede when she told CNN the virus was now “essentially a national security threat [because] Americans are getting infected and sickened by coronavirus, dying from coronavirus, and how the economy is being impacted by the coronavirus”.
    • Shortly before Trump spoke, Biden issued a statement with a conspicuously presidential tone. “The crisis does not respect dates on the calendar,” he said. “It is accelerating right now. I renew my call for every American, regardless of where they live or who they voted for, to step up and do their part on social distancing, hand washing, and mask wearing.”
    • With winter closing in, socialising moving indoors and case numbers reaching levels regularly warned of by Dr Anthony Fauci, a widely trusted expert with whom Trump has regularly clashed, states across the Republican midwest are struggling. Hospital resources are stretched and governors have appealed for help.
    • “It’s on fire,” Mike DeWine, the governor of Ohio, told the Wall Street Journal. “We’ve never seen anything like this. Our spring surge and summer surge were nowhere like this.” Another Republican, Doug Bergum of North Dakota, ordered a mask mandate and imposed business restrictions. In Nevada, Democratic governor Steve Sisolak tested positive. The governors of New Mexico and Oregon have ordered strict social limitations. Imposing a two-week stay-at-home order, Michelle Lujan Grisham, the Democratic governor of New Mexico, said: “We are in a life-or-death situation, and if we don’t act right now, we cannot preserve the lives, we can’t keep saving lives, and we will absolutely crush our current healthcare system and infrastructure.”
    • One scientific model predicts more than 400,000 deaths by March. Two weeks ago, in an interview with the Washington Post, Fauci warned of a winter of more than 100,000 new cases a day and said the country was in for “a whole lot of hurt”. The US has now recorded more than 100,000 cases a day for 10 days running.
  • To shut down or not shut down? Officials implement new coronavirus restrictions as cases skyrocket, but face angry backlash. Governors and mayors are forced again to weigh coronavirus deaths against anger and economic devastation
    • With the coronavirus raging out of control and hospitals nearing capacity, state and local leaders are facing once more the gut-wrenching decision of whether to order shutdowns. But many are finding the call much harder to make this time — eight months after cities and states last implemented weeks-long shutdowns — amid angry backlashes, deeply polarized constituents and dire economic consequences.
    • Chicago was the first major city to announce, on Thursday, a reinstatement of stay-at-home advisory. On Friday, New Mexico followed suit with the country’s most restrictive statewide measures since the fall surge began. Oregon also announced a partial shutdown Friday, closing gyms and dine-in restaurants and mandating a six-person limit on all social gatherings.
    • Late Friday, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum (R) issued a statewide mask mandate after months of resistance. It will last until Dec. 14. Burgum also limited bar and restaurant capacity to 50 percent and suspended high school winter sports for a month. Cases in North Dakota have increased 60 percent in the past month and Burgum said this week that hospitals are so strained the state will allow health care workers to continue working after they test positive. Burgum’s spokesman said it is a potential short-term tool.
    • Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves (R) ruled out any shutdown, calling closing businesses “totally and completely unreasonable.” His statement came just days after the governor’s 8-year-old daughter was infected and his entire family forced to isolate. The state recorded 1,305 cases Friday, among its most since July, and five deaths. Public health experts, however, are divided on the question of lockdowns. Many agree that lockdowns may be the most effective — and perhaps only — way to get control of the virus. Because of how badly U.S. leaders and some individual Americans have handled the pandemic response, the virus has now entered a stage of exponential growth that will be hard to halt with minor actions, experts said.
    • “It’s becoming clear that we need to close parts of society to control covid,” Tom Frieden, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, wrote in a tweet. “Unfortunately, the spring’s initial widespread closure poisoned the well — many places shut down too soon and for too long.” He and others have called for the latest round of closures to be more targeted, using real-time data to pinpoint communities that have surging cases, and prioritized — choosing to close bars, for instance, so schools can stay open.
    • “We as a country desperately need to somehow reset our pandemic response,” said Columbia University virologist Angela Rasmussen. “There’s a lot of hope Biden will do just that, but there’s also no way we as country can wait until inauguration to get control of this virus.” By that time, the number of daily infections could double, some disease models show. America’s current death toll of 243,000 could reach 360,000 or higher. That means state leaders will now be left again — in the absence of federal leadership — to make the biggest decisions during this lame-duck period. “I try not to be too depressing. But my outlook right now is pretty pessimistic,” Rasmussen said. Missing to make tighter restrictions possible, she said, is economic support for businesses. A coordinated plan on what such lockdowns would accomplish. And the federal and political leadership needed to get people’s buy-in. “We should be doing lockdowns, but the reality is I don’t know if we as a country can.”
  • Young Voters, Motivated by Climate Change and Environmental Justice, Helped Propel Biden’s Campaign: They turned out in big numbers and overwhelmingly supported the former vice president. Young voters of color played a critical role in battleground states.
    • If Joe Biden wins the presidency, young voters between 18 and 29 will have played a critical role in his election, turning out in force and favoring the former vice president over President Trump by 61 percent to 36 percent, according to an analysis by the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning at Tufts University.
    • The center's analysis also found substantial pro-Biden youth voter turnout in key battleground states, including in closely-watched Georgia, where youth comprised 21 percent of the vote and gave Biden a 19-point edge over Trump. Specifically, young Black voters, who favored Biden over Trump by an 82-point margin, "put Georgia in play," the center said in its analysis.
    • Rather than talk strictly about science or decarbonization, Biden spoke about climate in terms of green job creation and investment in marginalized communities—language that helped energize young people who had coalesced around Sanders in the early Democratic primaries.
  • Senate 2020: The Loeffler-Warnock Senate Runoff in Georgia Offers Extreme Contrasts on Climate: Loeffler, the GOP incumbent, supports Trump’s fossil fuel agenda, while Warnock, a pastor, views climate change as a critical environmental justice concern.
  • Bayard Rustin: The Man Homophobia Almost Erased From History: Rustin played a key role in advancing civil rights and economic justice. His partner, Walter Naegle, talks with BuzzFeed about that legacy on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the march Rustin made a reality.
  • Trump is going out the way he came in: A loser, a liar and a cheat: As the virus heads into a winter surge, our defeated president tweets, plays golf and runs a money-raising scam
    • That is where we are: beyond counting, beyond being able to measure the tragedy and loss of COVID. Statistics can't do it for us anymore. We're reduced to comparisons, a doctor quoted in the New York Times on Thursday comparing 1,000 deaths a day to "two jumbo jets dropping from the sky. If every day, two jumbo jets would drop from the sky and kill everybody, don't you think that everybody would be in a panic?" asked Dr. Carlos del Rio, an infectious disease specialist at Emory University.
    • Well, no, doctor. Everybody is not in a panic, especially not our president, who with just over two months left in office played golf at his Virginia course last Saturday, a day that two jumbo jets dropped out of the sky with 1,007 dead of COVID, and Sunday, a day when only one jumbo jet dropped out of the sky with 464 dead. Nearly 126,000 new cases were diagnosed on Saturday, and 103,416 more Americans came down with the disease as Trump piloted his presidential golf cart around the links the next day.
    • That's what Trump was doing this week while Americans got sick and died. On Monday, 130,340 were diagnosed with COVID, and 745 died. On Tuesday, 139,746 contracted COVID and 1,465 died. On Wednesday, there were 142,860 new cases of COVID, and 1,431 died. On Thursday, a new national record was set with 163,402 new cases, and the country suffered its seventh day since the election with more than 1,000 deaths from COVID, a total of 1,172 succumbing to the disease.
    • Oh, yeah, I almost forgot: He wouldn't be Trump if he wasn't figuring some way to pocket some bucks for himself off his loss, and on Monday, he set up a website entitled "OFFICIAL ELECTION DEFENSE FUND," with a button screaming "CONTRIBUTE NOW!" A careful scroll through the fine print reveals that not a single dollar goes to Trump's so-called official recount defense fund until the Trump "Save America" PAC is paid $5,000, and the Republican National Committee gets $3,300. That means you would have to contribute more than $8,300 for Trump's "election defense fund" to receive any money at all. The RNC is free to use its share to aid the Republican candidates in the Georgia Senate runoff elections, for example.
    • Meanwhile, there is still no national plan from the Trump White House to deal with the fall and winter surge in the pandemic, no national call for wearing masks, no national requirement to limit public gatherings to less than 10 (or even lower), and no national plan to distribute medical gear and personal protective equipment. This has the governors of states like Utah and Wisconsin, facing record numbers of infections and hospitalizations, struggling to supply hospitals that are overrun with COVID patients.
    • Forty-six of the 50 states have COVID numbers that are increasing, often exponentially. Deaths among residents of nursing homes have doubled in more than 20 states. In North Dakota, which opened up businesses like bars and theaters early in the pandemic and has resisted restrictions on social gatherings and imposing mask requirements, hospital capacity is maxed out. This week the state's Republican governor issued a rule allowing medical workers who test positive for the virus to continue working so long as they are not showing symptoms. The Strategic National Stockpile, the nation's emergency reserve for personal protective equipment and medical devices like ventilators, which Trump falsely claimed early in the pandemic had been left with "bare shelves" by the Obama administration, has only 115 million N95 masks, less than half the 300 million the administration had promised to have in time to deal with a winter resurgence of COVID. And Rear Adm. John Polowczyk, the nation's national supply commander, retired on Monday, leaving the country's medical resupply effort leaderless.
    • We've got more deaths from this virus than the number of soldiers killed in World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam and the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. The president of the United States we just voted out of office is sitting around watching Fox News, filing phony lawsuits, firing people he thinks are "disloyal," and running a new scam on his way out the door to line his pockets with dollars from his adoring base. Donald Trump is living up to every expectation we ever had about him. He's going out exactly the way he came in: lying, cheating and stealing.

11/13/2020 — Lucille Bridges Day

  • Lucille Commadore Bridges, who in 1960 broke through the segregated education system of the Deep South by enrolling her 6-year-old daughter, Ruby, in an all-white elementary school in New Orleans and escorting her there during her first year of classes, died on Tuesday at her home in the Uptown section of New Orleans. She was 86.
    • merlin_179872497_a14d7a99-cf43-43f8-8445-7a104eb04da8-superJumbo.jpg?quality=90&auto=webp&w=600Lucille Bridges next to the Norman Rockwell painting “The Problem We All Live With,” which depicts her daughter Ruby being escorted into a New Orleans school. Credit…Steve Ueckert/Houston Chronicle, via Associated Press
    • Lucille Bridges and her daughter braved a fusillade of abuse from white protesters as they walked up to the doors of the William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans on Nov. 14, 1960, under the escort of federal marshals, making good on the U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which ruled that school segregation was unconstitutional. Ms. Bridges escorted her daughter to school every day for a year because of continuing protests, according to the National Women’s History Museum. “She was very determined, and she took education very seriously,” Ruby Bridges, an author and activist, said in an interview on Wednesday. “I think it was because it was something that neither her nor my father was allowed to have. And ultimately that’s what she wanted for her kids — having a better life for them.”
    • In 1956, the family relocated from Mississippi to New Orleans to give their children a chance at a better education than they had had, Ruby Bridges said. “We decided to leave so that we could make it better,” Lucille Bridges said in an interview in 2016 for the “Power of Children” exhibit at the Altharetta Yeargin Art Museum in Houston. “I wanted it better for my kids than it was for us.”
    • In 1960, 165 Black children took a test for admission to the all-white William Frantz Elementary School, Lucille Bridges said, and Ruby was among only five who passed it. Ms. Bridges and her husband met with the school district superintendent before Ruby began classes. The superintendent explained that, as religious people, they should pray, because things were about to get much worse, she recalled.
    • Lucille Bridges said in the 2016 interview that two city police officers had blocked their path as she tried to escort her daughter through the school doors, insisting that they could not go in. She remembered two of the marshals replying, “The United States president said we can.” The marshals who took Ruby to and from school were heavily armed and kept a machine gun in their car. “And that’s the way we lived it for a whole year,” Lucille Bridges said.
    • The N.A.A.C.P. supported Lucille and Abon Bridges for several years because they had lost their jobs when the integration of the school made headlines. Friends in their all-Black neighborhood took turns guarding their home.
  • Middle School Students Solve The Issue Of Gerrymandering And Win $10,000 Prize
    • To help shed some light on this process we will use Alabama as an example. Kai explained that, “Alabama is a good example of a state that has experienced partisan gerrymandering over the last decade. In the 2010 redistricting cycle, Republicans drew district lines to pack together several major Democratic communities into a single district, ensuring that Democrats were only elected to one seat. Alabama's District 7, shown here in yellow, reaches into several other districts' regions to pick out Democratic voters.”
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  • Georgia Senator Dismisses Climate Change While Enjoying Protected Beachfront Mansion: Facing runoff, Sen. David Perdue says climate change is a hoax, but his beach community is sure worried about rising sea levels.
    • If Sen. David Perdue wins reelection in Georgia’s runoff in January, the Republican Party will almost certainly maintain its Senate majority. Perdue, an outspoken climate denier, urged President Donald Trump to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accords; voted against a Senate resolution that affirmed that climate change is real and that human activities contribute to it; and dismissed the Green New Deal as a “socialist wish list.” The one-term senator, who is a first cousin of Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue and golfing buddy of Trump, also vowed to protect the coal industry and was endorsed by the Koch-affiliated Super PAC, Americans for Prosperity. If Perdue wins, the potential for the Biden administration to respond to the global climate crisis will be greatly diminished.
    • Perdue’s Democratic challenger, former journalist Jon Ossoff, has not shied from the issue of climate change, pledging to make environmental policy “on the basis of scientific evidence — not the lobbying of polluters”; to work to reverse the Trump administration’s rollbacks of fuel economy standards; to reenter the Paris Climate Accords and negotiate for an “even more ambitious climate treaty”; and to move toward a rapid transition to clean energy sources.
    • Given that 66 percent of Georgians “believe in climate change,” and most feel that their government should do more to address the problem — as a majority of people in the U.S. do — the Republicans’ failure to recognize the crisis that is wreaking particular havoc in Georgia and other Southern states could be a force in swinging the runoff races toward the Democrats. Perdue, who has called for the resignation of the Georgia secretary of state and alleged without evidence that voting improprieties led to the outcome of the election, is of course hoping it will swing the other way.
  • Donald Trump attacks Fox News: 'They forgot the golden goose': President turns to right-wing network Newsmax for support after Fox warned viewers Trump’s election victory claims were false
    • Donald Trump has unleashed a torrent of tweets denouncing Fox News, accusing the network of having forgotten “what made them successful, what got them there”. “They forgot the Golden Goose,” Trump wrote in a tweet posted at midday on Thursday: "@FoxNews daytime ratings have completely collapsed. Weekend daytime even WORSE. Very sad to watch this happen, but they forgot what made them successful, what got them there. They forgot the Golden Goose. The biggest difference between the 2016 Election, and 2020, was @FoxNews!"
    • On Monday night, Fox host Neil Cavuto cut away from a campaign event hosted by the White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany at the Republican National Committee headquarters when McEnany said that Trump’s campaign team “wanted every legal vote to be counted”. “Whoa, whoa, whoa – I just think we have to be very clear. She’s charging the other side as welcoming fraud and welcoming illegal voting. Unless she has more details to back that up, I can’t in good countenance continue to show you this,” Cavuto said from the studio.
    • Later on Thursday, however, Trump tweeted his praise for two Fox hosts, both long-time Trump loyalists, touting a “must see” segment by commentator Sean Hannity and a “confirming and powerful piece” by Fox Business Network anchor Lou Dobbs.
  • More than 130 Secret Service officers are said to be infected with coronavirus or quarantining in wake of Trump’s campaign travel
    • The spread of the coronavirus — which has sidelined roughly 10 percent of the agency’s core security team — is believed to be partly linked to a series of campaign rallies that President Trump held in the weeks before the Nov. 3 election, according to the people, who, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the situation. The outbreak comes as coronavirus cases have been rapidly rising across the nation, with more than 152,000 new cases reported Thursday.
    • In addition, at least eight staffers at the Republican National Committee, including Chief of Staff Richard Walters, have the virus, according to officials at the organization. Some of those infected are in field offices across the country, including Pennsylvania, where some believe they were exposed in large staff gatherings, an official said.
    • The agency is also examining whether some portion of the current infections are not travel-related, one government official said, but instead trace back to the site where many Secret Service officers report for duty each day: the White House. White House staff largely eschew wearing masks, despite public health guidelines that they help contain the spread of the virus, and some Secret Service officers on duty at the complex have also been seen without them.
    • It’s not the first time the Secret Service has been hit hard by the decisions of Trump and Vice President Pence to travel during the pandemic. This summer, dozens of Secret Service agents fell ill or were sidelined and forced to quarantine in the wake of the president’s massive indoor stadium rally in Tulsa in June and the vice president’s subsequent trip to Arizona.
    • But many of Trump’s own choices put his protection team at heightened risk, specifically his choice to travel out of state and hold large public events. Secret Service agents and medical professionals were shocked early last month when Trump — then being treated at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for the coronavirus — insisted on taking a ride outside the hospital to wave to supporters from inside a government sport-utility vehicle. He wore a cloth mask, but many feared he was unnecessarily endangering the Secret Service agents inside the vehicle.
  • Biden Wins Georgia and Trump Wins North Carolina as Final States Are Called: With his victory in Georgia, President-elect Joe Biden has won a total of 306 electoral votes, flipping five states in the process. The Trump campaign lost a legal challenge to the election results in Michigan and withdrew one in Arizona.
  • Federal prosecutors assigned to monitor election malfeasance tell Barr they see no evidence of substantial irregularities: In a letter — an image of which was shown to The Washington Post — the assistant U.S. attorneys told Barr that the release of his Monday memorandum — which changed long-standing Justice Department policy on the steps prosecutors can take before the results of an election are certified — “thrusts career prosecutors into partisan politics.”
    • The signers wrote that in the places where they served as district election officers, taking in reports of possible election-related crimes, there was no evidence of the kind of fraud that Barr’s memo had highlighted. Barr’s memo authorized prosecutors “to pursue substantial allegations of voting and vote tabulation irregularities prior to the certification of elections in your jurisdictions in certain cases,” particularly where the outcome of an election could be affected.
    • Some weeks ago, when Barr had first proposed the move, officials in the criminal division — including political leadership — had pushed back vigorously and thought they had dissuaded the attorney general from taking such a step, only to be blindsided when the memo hit their inboxes Monday. The head of the department’s election-crimes branch, Richard Pilger, told colleagues within hours that he was stepping down from that job and taking a lesser position at the department, citing the new guidance.

11/12/2020

  • Trump’s unsavory post-election practices
    • When President Aleksandr Lukashenko of Belarus declared an implausible landslide victory in an election in August, the United States and other Western nations denounced what they said was brazen defiance of the voters’ will.
    • But just months later, President Trump and various of his supporters are borrowing from Mr. Lukashenko’s playbook in declaring Mr. Trump the winner of an election — despite all evidence to the contrary. The Times called officials in every state, representing both political parties. None reported any major voting issues, in a forceful rejection of Mr. Trump’s narrative.
    • Mr. Trump’s actions place him among other such anti-democratic leaders as Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia. Experts warn he risks “creating a new model” for like-minded populists in Europe and elsewhere.
    • Related: Trump’s Post-Election Tactics Put Him in Unsavory Company: Denying defeat, claiming fraud and using government machinery to reverse election results are the time-honored tools of dictators.
      • Still, the United States has never before had to force an incumbent to concede a fair defeat at the polls. And merely by raising the possibility that he would have to be forced out of office, Mr. Trump has shattered the bedrock democratic tradition of a seamless transition.
  • What Places Are Hardest Hit by the Coronavirus? It Depends on the Measure: By different metrics, all sorts of locations in the United States are deeply troubling, from Minot, N.D., to New York City.
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    • The Minot, N.D., area has seen more cases per capita in this upsurge than anywhere in the country. Wisconsin’s outbreak has escalated more rapidly than those in other states. The county that includes Los Angeles has reported more Covid-19 cases since the pandemic’s start than anywhere else. Texas has the most cases of any state, and the most cases reported on college campuses.
    • “The entire country is out of control,” said Dr. Dara Kass, an associate professor of emergency medicine at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York who treated numerous Covid-19 patients this spring and had the virus herself. “When you see the Dakotas and Montana and Oklahoma and Utah and Iowa and Texas — all these states — overrun with cases, it’s jarring to know that no matter what we do here, it’s going to depend on the action or inaction of leadership and people everywhere else.”
    • Cases are rising again on the sprawling Navajo Nation, which already had far more known cases and deaths than any other Native American reservation, and more than most places in the country. More than 12,000 people have been infected and at least 595 people have died.
    • South Dakota has the highest hospitalization rate in the country, with about 42 of every 100,000 South Dakotans hospitalized with Covid-19, according to the Covid Tracking Project. Still, the state has no mask mandate, and on Tuesday night, Mayor Paul TenHaken of Sioux Falls cast the tiebreaking vote to strike down a citywide mask mandate, which he has called “simply unenforceable.”
    • More than 2,200 cases have been reported at Texas Tech, more than 2,000 at Texas A&M and more than 1,500 on the Austin campus of the University of Texas. Hunter Heck, the student body president at Texas Tech, says there has been a disconnect between life on campus, where students for the most part are socially distanced and wear masks, and raucous off-campus parties.
    • [ael: and what is the president doing about all of this? Ignoring it. He's turned the corner, headed for home, crossed the plate, and swears he hit a home run.]
      • [ael: well actually, tRump was holding another covid party super-spreader event:] Three more White House staffers test positive, at least one of them after attending an election night event.: Three more White House staff members have tested positive for the coronavirus, including at least one, the political director, Brian Jack, who attended an election night event at the White House, people familiar with the diagnoses said on Wednesday.
      • Three other people had previously tested positive after attending the election night event: Mark Meadows, President Trump’s chief of staff; Ben Carson, the housing secretary; and David Bossie, an adviser to Mr. Trump who is leading the charge on lawsuits and other efforts related to contesting the election outcome in several states. Several hundred people gathered at the event in the East Room for several hours, many of them not wearing masks as they mingled and watched election returns.
  • As coronavirus soars, hospitals hope to avoid an agonizing choice: Who gets care and who goes home: New cases and hospitalizations break records
    • The number of new daily coronavirus cases in the United States jumped from 104,000 a week earlier to more than 145,000 on Wednesday, an all-time high. Nearly every metric is trending in the wrong direction, prompting states to add new restrictions and hospitals to prepare for a potentially dark future. “We’re at a fairly critical juncture," said Dave Dillon, a spokesman for the Missouri Hospital Association. The day will soon come when hospital staffing will fall below standards that are normally required, he said.
    • This fall surge comes at a moment when President Trump is fighting to remain in office while paying little attention to the deadly spread of the coronavirus. The president on Wednesday repeatedly tweeted combative messages that contested his election loss to Joe Biden, but did not address the coronavirus pandemic. “The worst of this crisis is playing out in the next six to eight weeks,” said David Rubin, director of PolicyLab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “The irony is, this is the time we most need our public leadership. Right now.”
    • A group of Illinois health-care workers wrote an open letter to Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot (D) on Monday predicting that “Illinois will surpass its ICU bed capacity by Thanksgiving.” Two leaders of the group, the Illinois Medical Professionals Action Collaborative Team (IMPACT), said Illinois is “on a bad trajectory.” “Cases have been rising really sharply, especially in Illinois, where for the past four days we had more than 10,000 cases, which was the highest number of cases that a state had experienced,” said Vineet Arora, chief executive of the team. Arora, who is also a hospitalist at the University of Chicago, is afraid the rate of infection will reach a point similar to New York at the height of its spring surge, “where physicians were having to decide, does this patient have a higher chance of surviving, or this patient?”
    • “Obviously, there’s a lot of attention on hospitals, but I think the big pressure points are going to be our nursing homes,” Ko said. “If there’s a place that’s going to buckle under because of the covid epidemic, it’s going to be a nursing home. You only have a limited number of skilled nursing staff that know how to do proper infection prevention.”
    • Related: At dinner parties and game nights, casual American life is fueling the coronavirus surge: A record-breaking surge in U.S. coronavirus cases is being driven to a significant degree by casual occasions that may feel deceptively safe, officials and scientists warn — dinner parties, game nights, sleepovers and carpools.
      • As new daily cases in the United States surpassed 145,000 on Wednesday, New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) announced a 10-person limit on gatherings in private homes, calling them a “great spreader.” Similar restrictions have been imposed in states including Ohio; Utah; Connecticut; Colorado, where one recent cluster involved seven people infected while playing the dice game bunco; and Rhode Island, whose governor has pledged to fine violators. Oregon last week announced a “pause” in hard-hit counties on most groups larger than six people.
      • But each additional contact increases a person’s risk, said David Rubin, the director of PolicyLab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, which warned in a blog post last week that small indoor gatherings create “perfect conditions for a virus that can spread among people who are crowded into a poorly ventilated space.” Rubin said a person’s “bank” of risk should be even lower in winter because respiratory viruses like the coronavirus are more stable in dry, colder air.
      • McDonald said he hopes that might help with an alarming widening of social groups and casual encounters, particularly among youths. In-school transmission is not the problem, he said. Instead, spread is happening after school — at play dates, sleepovers, and, especially, socializing and carpooling connected to youth sports, he said.
  • ‘Catastrophic’ lack of hospital beds in Upper Midwest as coronavirus cases surge
    • As coronavirus cases grow across the United States — up 70 percent on average in the past two weeks, with an average of 130,000 cases per day nationally — the situation is particularly acute now in the Upper Midwest and Plains states, with North and South Dakota leading the nation in new cases and deaths per capita over the past week, according to Washington Post data. Experts say that cases are surging in the region as the weather has turned colder and more people are forced inside — into more poorly ventilated indoor spaces where transmission thrives — with the virus arriving even in remote areas in largely conservative states where Republican leaders have resisted mask mandates or business closures, asking their residents to rely instead on personal responsibility.
    • The situation has become so acute that even some leaders who previously resisted restrictions have moved toward new strictures. Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds in Iowa, long an opponent of closures and mask-wearing as “feel-good” options, this week moved to prohibit maskless indoor gatherings of 25 or more and require those attending larger outdoor events to wear a mask.
    • In North Dakota, where cases have increased 60 percent in the past month, Republican Gov. Doug Burgum said this week that the state’s hospitals are at capacity and are so strained that the state will allow its doctors and nurses to continue working after they test positive for the coronavirus. His spokesman later qualified this is a potential short-term tool. Even though he has continued to resist a statewide mask mandate, Burgum urged his fellow residents to take precautions as hospitals brimmed with patients. “You don’t have to believe in covid, you don’t have to believe in a certain political party or not, you don’t have to believe whether masks work or not. You can just do it because you know that one thing is very real. And that’s that 100 percent of our capacity is now being used,” Burgum said. [ael: Burgum = idiot….]
    • Andrew T. Pavia, chief of pediatric infectious diseases at the University of Utah School of Medicine, said on a press call organized by the Infectious Diseases Society of America on Wednesday that the “enormous surge” in the Upper Midwest and mountain states is concerning because health-care access in some rural areas is already limited and staff and facilities taxed. “The situation really has to be described as dire,” Pavia said, saying that the “political climate” and “general distrust of the government” in these areas resulted in a reluctance of public officials to take more stringent measures to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease covid-19. Mass gatherings such as the motorcycle rally in Sturgis, S.D., also contributed, Pavia said, as well as university students attending classes that were largely in person.
    • Doctors at one of the region’s largest health-care systems, Avera Health in Sioux Falls, S.D., with facilities in South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska and North Dakota, said that its modeling showed the virus surge was only going to get worse in the coming weeks. Already, some of its facilities are nearing capacity and between 200 and 400 of its staffers are either out sick or in quarantine, officials said.
    • In Itasca County, a rural area of 45,000 residents northwest of Duluth, county health officials said there were 200 coronavirus cases and 13 deaths through September. Numbers have skyrocketed in the past few weeks — averaging about 200 to 300 new cases a week — with a positivity rate so high that the beleaguered county health department announced it would no longer do contact tracing and focus its efforts on protecting “high-risk settings” including schools and long-term-care facilities.
    • Chris Bjorkman, of De Smet, S.D., lost her husband, John, 66, a retired schools superintendent, after both were sickened by the coronavirus in September. Bjorkman had to be flown to a hospital in Marshall, Minn., when his condition worsened and there was no room for him in South Dakota, she said. He eventually ended up back in a hospital and died Oct. 20. The last time she was able to speak to him, she said, he told her the hospital food was awful, so she had a meat-lovers pizza delivered to his room. Bjorkman said that since her husband’s death she has been disheartened that so few of her neighbors have been wearing masks. Even the clerks in her local supermarket didn’t wear them until one of her family members called them out on it last week. “People are not taking it serious,” she said. “Some just don’t care.”
  • The surprising connection between West Coast fires and the volatile chemicals tainting America’s drinking water: Manufactured substances known as volatile organic compounds contaminate drinking water around the U.S. — and recent wildfires are making the situation worse.
    • Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) including benzene, residents were warned, could be seeping into the water system — just as the toxic chemicals did in Santa Rosa and Paradise, California, in the wake of wildfires in 2017 and 2018.
    • Wildfires as a source of VOCs in drinking water had not really been on the radar until the Tubbs Fire burned through large swaths of Santa Rosa, California, in 2017. After the blaze, drinking water samples from municipal supplies had levels of several VOCs, including benzene, above state and federal exposure limits.
    • Methylene chloride, a VOC that appeared at levels above EPA limits in both Santa Rosa and Paradise, illustrates one potential reason. Federal and global health agencies consider it a probable human carcinogen. But standard drinking water testing might very well miss it. That’s because EPA requires that water systems test at the tap for lead and copper, but other tests for contaminants are done at the water treatment plant, explains Solomon. She notes a hypothesis that methylene chloride can form from a reaction among water pipes, disinfection byproducts and chlorine — contaminating water after it leaves the plant.
    • Other chemicals might be contaminating water systems after a fire, too. “We look for benzene, styrene, naphthalene. But we don’t actually know what chemicals we should be looking for,” says Whelton. He suggests that water testing using current EPA methods is not capable of detecting all of the chemicals found after the recent California wildfires.
  • How do you feel about Trump supporters? The answer impacts your small business: As business owners, we risk alienating our customers and communities if we assume that our political beliefs should be imposed on others
  • Cheating-detection companies made millions during the pandemic. Now students are fighting back. With remote proctors watching them take tests, some worry that even leaving for the bathroom will brand them as cheats.
  • California Is Trying to Jump-Start the Hydrogen Economy: The fuel could play an important role in fighting climate change, but it has been slow to gain traction because of high costs."
    • Dozens of hydrogen buses are lumbering down city streets, while more and larger fueling stations are appearing from San Diego to San Francisco, financed by the state and federal governments. With the costs of producing and shipping hydrogen coming down, California is setting ambitious goals to phase out vehicles that run on fossil fuels in favor of batteries and hydrogen. Large auto and energy companies like Toyota Motor and Royal Dutch Shell have committed to supplying more cars and fueling stations.
    • A recent McKinsey & Company study estimated that the hydrogen economy could generate $140 billion in annual revenue by 2030 and support 700,000 jobs. The study projected that hydrogen could meet 14 percent of total American energy demand by 2050.
    • With about 7,500 hydrogen vehicles on the road, an aggressive state program of incentives and subsidies from cap-and-trade dollars envisions 50,000 hydrogen light-duty vehicles by middecade and a network of 1,000 hydrogen stations by 2030. The infrastructure required for producing, transporting and dispensing the gas alone will cost about $10 billion, according to California hydrogen researchers, who expect both private and government investment.
    • Some proponents of hydrogen think its biggest use will be in larger vehicles. Among them is SunLine Transit, which serves Palm Springs and other cities in Riverside County. The transit system has 17 hydrogen buses and is planning to add 10 in the next year. SunLine used more than $27 million in grants over the last 10 years to buy the vehicles and equipment to produce hydrogen, which it makes with the help of electricity from the grid and solar panels. The transit agency already sells compressed natural gas, which fuels most of its buses, to commercial and government agencies, and it plans to sell hydrogen, too.
    • The best use for hydrogen, some experts argue, is to power trucks, buses and airplanes. That’s because the fuel packs energy in a smaller and lighter package than the current generation of batteries, leaving more room for cargo and passengers. Hyundai is prepared to introduce the first mass-produced heavy-duty fuel-cell truck in a few months. Toyota, which has been testing fuel-cell trucks at the Port of Los Angeles since 2017, recently said it would develop heavy-duty fuel-cell trucks for North America.
    • Air Liquide, a French company, is building a $150 million plant outside Las Vegas that will turn biogas from decomposed organic waste into hydrogen, which it plans to sell in California. The plant will begin operations late next year. Air Liquide is building another plant on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls to supply the Northeast.
  • Leonard Pitts: Who’s going to tell the president that he has no clothes? Sycophants are more worried about bruising the presidential ego than they are about getting him to face facts.
    • We turn, one last time, to Hans Christian Andersen. Over the past four years, many observers, this one included, have found one of the Danish writer’s most famous tales irresistible for explaining both Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s slavish sycophancy toward him. In “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” a monarch parades through town naked, having been convinced by swindlers that he’s actually draped in an exquisite outfit made of a fabric visible only to those who are not “unusually stupid.”
    • Not wanting to be thought dense, everyone pretends they can see the magnificent outfit. Then a child blurts out the obvious. “But he hasn’t got anything on!” And the crowd begins to whisper to itself, until the truth finally breaks like a shaft of sunlight through the clouds, and the whole town cries out that the emperor is unclothed.
    • Its insistence on denying reality has reduced the GOP to a state beyond parody. Think a Washington Post report of party loyalists marching seven times around the U.S. Capitol like Israelites in the Bible around Jericho. Think the once-respected Rudy Giuliani holding a press conference in a Philadelphia landscaping supply company parking lot near a sex shop to decry fictitious election irregularities. “Do you think we’re stupid?” he cried. “Do you think we’re fools?” It’s enough to make comedy writers obsolete.
    • Acknowledging a bitter defeat is never easy. But so many others have risen to the task with grace. Hillary Clinton did it. Mitt Romney did it. John McCain, John Kerry and Al Gore did it. The weakling Trump is uniquely unable to do it, a failure that makes you long for Jan. 20. On that day, he’ll be escorted into disgrace, still insisting that he won what he didn’t. One imagines the emperor would empathize. Even after the child cried out, he still couldn’t admit his nakedness. “So he walked more proudly than ever, as his noblemen held high the train that wasn’t there at all.”
  • Reaching UK net zero target cheaper than we thought, says climate adviser: Exclusive: Chris Stark says cost is surprisingly low but criticises government for absence of a plan
    • “I don’t particularly see problems [in decarbonising the economy] – what I see is an absence of a plan,” he told the Guardian. “We have to get to the point by about the start of the next decade where all new investments, every new car, every new van, every new boiler, every new bit of plant and machinery for a business – that needs to be zero carbon by then, or at least have a plan in place to become zero carbon. The biggest challenge that I see at the moment is that we haven’t got a plan that looks anything like that for the UK at the moment.”
  • Trump can’t cope with losing. No wonder he hasn’t conceded yet. The president is a prisoner of the fictional world he’s built for himself. But we don’t have to live in it anymore.
    • Imagine that you are forever gasping for air because you can’t get enough oxygen. For Donald Trump, oxygen comes from winning, whatever it takes, including declaring victory in defeat. There are only two outcomes in life for Trump: You win or you lose, you dominate or you submit. That’s what makes Trump’s refusal to accept the results of this year’s election, no matter how preposterous his case may be, so predictable. I spent hundreds of hours with him to write “The Art of the Deal” back in 1987, and I’ve observed him in public life since, especially as president. Other than winning the 2016 election, Trump has never done anything that surprised me. He is who he is and has always been. He will never admit defeat, because he can’t.
    • Instead, Trump will continue to insist that he won, by a lot, until bad people took it away from him. Once Joe Biden is sworn in as president in January, Trump will race around making speeches to earn big fees and feel relevant, and above all, to keep up his doomed effort to prove his worthiness to himself. He will fight off his depression and grief with rage and blame.
    • It’s possible that Trump will run for president again in 2024, still falsely insisting that he was cheated. His singular skill is convincing people that what they are observing with their own eyes isn’t true. We’ve seen that vividly around his decades-long claims of success as a business executive despite his myriad failures and then, as president, in his insistence that we’re “rounding the corner” as coronavirus cases soar and his false proclamations of innocence as he was impeached.
    • The truth will never set Trump free; it’s too indicting. But it does have the potential to set the rest of us free. One of the primary lessons of the past four years, underscored most vividly during the pandemic, is the severe limits of self-interest in a deeply interdependent world. To advance what Trump perceived as his self-interest, he has been willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of lives, including those who most avidly support him. It is telling that Trump won a majority of votes in 93 percent of the 376 counties with the highest number of new coronavirus cases per capita. Wearing a mask and socially distancing undeniably save lives, but since March, Trump has been more concerned with saving face. He wasn’t going to let the virus, or scientists — or anyone else, for that matter — tell him what to do. Trying to prove that he could dominate even a disease, he became the willing superspreader in chief.
    • Trump has used the presidency as a literal bully pulpit, stirring fear and anger in his base by appealing to their most primitive instincts, and encouraging them to do whatever they feel like doing, no matter the cost to others, or themselves. This is possible only because Trump lacks a conscience, and any capacity for care and empathy.
  • Growing number of Republicans say Biden should have access to classified briefings
  • Biden flips Arizona, further cementing his presidential victory.
    • President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. has narrowly won Arizona, capturing the state’s 11 electoral votes and strengthening his Electoral College margin as President Trump continues to make baseless attacks on the vote counts favoring Mr. Biden…. The Arizona victory brings Mr. Biden to 290 electoral votes, 20 more than the 270 required to take the White House.

11/11/2020 — Roy Benavidez (Veteran's) Day

  • Fort Hood is named for a Confederate traitor. Is it time for ‘Fort Benavidez’? An unbelievable battlefield story and the effort to strip rebel names from Army posts
    • N2WMYXBCWEI6XHCKBXDCILCICQ.jpg&w=916
  • Limiting Indoor Capacity Can Reduce Covid Infections Significantly, New Study Shows: Research using cellphone data in 10 U.S. cities last spring could help influence officials’ decisions on new restrictions as cases resurge around the country.
    • Restaurants, gyms, cafes and other crowded indoor venues accounted for some 8 in 10 new infections in the early months of the U.S. coronavirus epidemic, according to a new analysis that could help officials around the world now considering curfews, partial lockdowns and other measures in response to renewed outbreaks.
    • The study, which used cellphone mobility data from 10 U.S. cities from March to May, also provides an explanation for why many low-income neighborhoods were hardest hit. The public venues in those communities were more crowded than in more affluent ones, and residents were more mobile on average, likely because of work demands, the authors said in the research published in the journal Nature on Tuesday.
    • “Restaurants were by far the riskiest places, about four times riskier than gyms and coffee shops, followed by hotels” in terms of new infections, said Jure Leskovec, a computer scientist at Stanford University and senior author of the new report, in a conference call with reporters. The study was a collaboration between scientists at Stanford, Northwestern University, Microsoft Research and the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub. [ael: Anna's friend was just trying to get her to go out to an Applebees, thinking perhaps that the plexiglass shields between booths — all occupied — would provide adequate protection.]
    • These measures are especially important in lower income areas, the new study suggests. Infections exploded in many such communities last spring, and the new model provides one likely explanation: Local venues tend to be more crowded than elsewhere. The researchers looked closely at grocery stores, to understand differences between high and low income communities. In eight of the ten cities, transmission rates were twice as high in low as in higher income areas. The mobility data pointed at one reason: Grocers in low-income neighborhoods had almost 60 percent more people per square foot; shoppers tended to stay there longer as well. [ael: Anna and I visited an African grocery a month or so ago; it's a tiny space anyway, but there were 10 people packed up at the register/entryway/first aisle, with in various states of unmasked….]
  • Robin Kemp lost her news job in Clayton County, Ga. — but she kept reporting the news. It paid off on election week.
    • Robin Kemp was 12 hours into the longest day of her journalism career when she got a call from a funny number. A British radio station wanted her on air to talk about the presidential election in Clayton County, Ga., where she lives and works. Could she be ready in, oh, 30 seconds?
    • Kemp, an indefatigable 56-year-old reporter who started her news site after the local paper laid her off in April, was the only journalist to watch all 21 hours of Clayton County’s marathon tabulation of absentee votes, from about 9 a.m. Thursday to 5 a.m. Friday. During that span, a record number of absentee ballots helped Biden close the statewide gap with Trump. And it was votes from Clayton County — the heart of the late civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis’s old district — that pushed Biden into the lead.
    • Kemp’s all-night coverage was public service journalism in its purest form. Physically and mentally exhausted, fueled by nothing but leftover Thai drunken noodles and the belief that if she didn’t watch it nobody would, Kemp spent nearly a day inside the stout government building where officials were counting votes. At that moment, it wasn’t just her county that needed a local reporter — her country did, too.
  • Masks also protect the wearer, CDC announces:
    • Wearing a mask protects you, not only those around you, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday in a significant update to its guidance on face coverings. The agency also noted that numerous studies have demonstrated the benefits of “universal masking policies.”

11/10/2020

  • Dave Grohl, 10-Year-Old Nandi Bushell and One Very Epic Drum Battle: The Foo Fighters leader and the English prodigy struck up a competitive friendship on social media that has brought them, and thousands of music fans, immense joy.
    • You didn’t need to know every note of Nirvana’s angst-rock classic “In Bloom” to marvel at the spectacle of a little girl drumming along to the song in perfect synchronization last November, her face scrawled over with joy and passion.
    • The sight of Bushell wailing away immediately impressed Dave Grohl, the Foo Fighters frontman and former Nirvana drummer who played “In Bloom” on the band’s 1991 breakthrough album, “Nevermind.” Grohl is not a social media user, and he only learned about the viral clip when the album’s producer, Butch Vig, sent it to him. “I watched it in amazement, not only because she was nailing all of the parts, but the way that she would scream when she did her drum rolls,” Grohl said in a recent video interview. “There’s something about seeing the joy and energy of a kid in love with an instrument. She just seemed like a force of nature.”
    • That said, he experienced it like any piece of content — you watch it, you enjoy it, you pass it on and then move on. But toward the end of the summer, another one of Bushell’s videos made its way to Grohl via a flood of texts from friends around the world. This time, Bushell had prefaced her cover of the 1997 Foo Fighters song “Everlong” with a direct challenge to a drum-off. The rules of a drum-off aren’t formally sanctioned by any governing body, but Bushell’s exhilarated facial expressions and mastery of the song’s breakneck pace meant Grohl was in for a battle, should he choose to accept.
    • Despite his full docket, and after enough peer pressure, Grohl rose to the challenge with a performance of “Dead End Friends” by Them Crooked Vultures, one of those many bands he’s played in over the years. “At first I thought, ‘I’m not going to hit her with something too complicated, because I want this to be fun,’” he said. “I’m not a technical drummer; I am a backyard keg-party, garage jam-band drummer, and that’s the way it is.” Nonetheless, Bushell volleyed back another astute and overjoyed performance in two days. Grohl conceded defeat, and since then the two have continued playing music for each other. He recorded an original song about Bushell (sample lyric: “She got the power/She got the soul/Gonna save the world with her rock ’n’ roll”); Bushell returned the favor with her own song, “Rock and Grohl.” Cumulatively, the videos have attracted millions of views across YouTube and Twitter, making it a truly rare uncomplicated feel-good story from the last few months.
  • Viola Smith, ‘Fastest Girl Drummer in the World,’ Dies at 107: She became a star as a percussionist and bandleader in the swing era. But her call for the big bands to hire women instrumentalists during World War II had little impact.
    • Viola Smith, who played a giant 12-piece drum kit and was billed as the “fastest girl drummer in the world” — and who wrote a widely read essay during World War II advocating for big bands to hire female musicians in place of the male ones who had been drafted — died on Oct. 21 at her home in Costa Mesa, Calif. She was 107.
    • When Ms. Smith was 13, her father assigned her the drums in the family band, partly because all the other instruments were spoken for. The Schmitz Sisters Orchestra toured heavily and once participated in a radio battle with an all-male big band, performing Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.”
    • Opportunity abounded for her in New York. She studied timpani at the Juilliard School and played with the snare drum virtuoso Billy Gladstone at Radio City Music Hall. A young Frank Sinatra chatted her up one night at a chop house. She found a studio apartment in Midtown, where she ended up living for 70 years.
    • merlin_179580402_e04bc7ab-bf38-4cbe-a31f-6df33b5e3f21-superJumbo.jpg?quality=90&auto=webp
      Ms. Smith at 100. In her last years she lived on a Christian commune in Costa Mesa, Calif. Credit…Briana Serr/Piecemakers
    • Frances Carroll & Her Coquettes Featuring Drummer Viola Smith
  • Our colleague Tara Parker-Pope shared a beautiful video of a former ballerina who has Alzheimer’s, transported by a recording of “Swan Lake.” “Music holds (and unlocks) so many of our memories,” Tara wrote.
  • Trump Administration Removes Scientist in Charge of Assessing Climate Change: Michael Kuperberg was told he would no longer oversee the National Climate Assessment. The job is expected to go to a climate-change skeptic, according to people familiar with the changes.
  • Brain Scientists Explore the How of When: A new study offers the strongest evidence yet of “time cells” in the brain.
    • Related: [ael: I'd just read a story about Richard Feynman exploring how time is measured in the brain]
      • When I was in graduate school at Princeton a kind of dumb psychology paper came out that stirred up a lot of discussion. The author had decided that the thing controlling the "time sense" in the brain is a chemical reaction involving iron. I thought to myself, "Now, how the hell could he figure that?"
      • Well, the way he did it was, his wife had a chronic fever which went up and down a lot. Somehow he got the idea to test her sense of time. He had her count seconds to herself (without looking at a clock), and checked how long it took her to count up to 60. He had her counting-the poor woman-all during the day; when her fever went up, he found she counted quicker; when her fever went down, she counted slower. Therefore, he thought, the thing that governed the "time sense" in the brain must be running faster when she's got fever than when she hasn't got fever.
      • Being a very "scientific" guy, the psychologist knew that the rate of a chemical reaction varies with the surrounding temperature by a certain formula that depends on the energy of the reaction. He measured the differences in speed of his wife's counting, and determined how much the temperature changed the speed. Then he tried to find a chemical reaction whose rates varied with temperature in the same amounts as his wife's counting did. He found that iron reactions fit the pattern best. So he deduced that his wife's sense of time was governed by a chemical reaction in her body involving iron.
      • Well, it all seemed like a lot of baloney to me-there were so many things that could go wrong in his long chain of reasoning. But it was an interesting question: what does determine the "time sense"? When you're trying to count at an even rate, what does that rate depend on? And what could you do to yourself to change it? [ael: and Feynman goes on from there! Really interesting study….]
    • [ael: I've been counting while doing physical therapy, and I've noticed one thing that Feynman did, too: he couldn't talk while counting. He could do other things, e.g. reading — but he couldn't talk while counting! Only thing he couldn't do…..]
      • The next morning over breakfast, I reported the results of all these experiments to the other guys at the table. I told them all the things I could do while counting to myself, and said the only thing I absolutely could not do while counting to myself was talk.
      • One of the guys, a fella named John Tukey, said, "I don't believe you can read, and I don't see why you can't talk. I'll bet you I can talk while counting to myself, and I'll bet you you can't read.
      • So I gave a demonstration: they gave me a book and I read it for a while, counting to myself. When I reached 60 I said, "Now!" - 48 seconds, my regular time.. Then I told them what I had read.
      • Tukey was amazed. After we checked him a few times to see what his regular time was, he started talking: "Mary had a little lamb; I can say anything I want to, it doesn't make any difference; I don't know what's bothering you"- blah, blah, blah, and finally, "Okay!" He hit his time right on the nose! I couldn't believe it!
      • We talked about it a while, and we discovered something. It turned out that Tukey was counting in a different way: he was visualizing a tape with numbers on it going by. He would say, "Mary had a little lamb," and he would watch it! Well, now it was clear: he's "looking" at his tape going by so he can't read, and I'm "talking" to myself when I'm counting, so I can't speak.
  • In first for Fed, U.S. central bank says climate poses stability risks
    • “Acute hazards, such as storms, floods, or wildfires, may cause investors to update their perceptions of the value of real or financial assets suddenly,” Fed Governor Lael Brainard said in comments attached to the report, released Monday.
    • “Increased transparency through improved measurement and more standardized disclosures will be crucial,” Brainard said. “It is vitally important to move from the recognition that climate change poses significant financial stability risks to the stage where the quantitative implications of those risks are appropriately assessed and addressed.” Monday’s report comes just days after Joe Biden won the U.S. presidential election against President Donald Trump, who has downplayed the risks of climate change. Biden has promised to put fighting climate change back on the U.S. policy agenda.
  • ‘Hypocrites and greenwash’: Greta Thunberg blasts leaders over climate crisis:
    • Greta Thunberg has blasted politicians as hypocrites and international climate summits as empty words and greenwash. Until humanity admits it has failed to tackle the climate crisis and begins treating it as an emergency like the coronavirus pandemic, society will be unable to stop global heating, she said. In an interview with the Guardian, Thunberg said leaders were happy to set targets for decades into the future, but flinched when immediate action to cut emissions was needed. She said there was not a politician on the planet promising the climate action required: “If only,” said the teenager, who will turn 18 in January.
    • Thunberg is particularly scathing about the EU’s MEPs who in October approved almost €400bn (£360bn) in subsidies for farmers, the majority of which has weak or non-existent green conditions attached. Agriculture is responsible for about a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions, and Thunberg said: “It is a disaster for the climate and for biodiversity.” She said MEPs had asked for her support in September when the EU was deciding its target for emissions cuts by 2030. “When it’s about something that is in 10 years’ time, they are more than happy to vote for it because that doesn’t really impact them. But when it’s something that actually has an effect, right here right now, they don’t want to touch it. It really shows the hypocrisy.”
    • Justice is at the heart of her campaigning, Thunberg said. “That is the root of all this,” she said. “That’s why we are fighting for climate justice, social justice. They are so interlinked, you can’t have one without the other.” “The climate crisis is just one symptom of a much larger crisis, [including] the loss of biodiversity, the loss of fertile soil but also including inequality and threats to democracy,” she said. “These are symptoms that we are not living sustainably: we have reached the end of the road.”
  • Someone’s got to tell Trump he lost, but Republicans are loath to raise their hands.
    • By Monday evening, only a few Republican senators known for their distaste for Mr. Trump — Mitt Romney of Utah, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — had acknowledged Mr. Biden’s victory.
    • Thirty-one former Republican members of Congress — many of them outspoken critics of the president — on Monday denounced Mr. Trump’s allegations in an open letter that called on him to accept the election results.

11/9/2020

  • Tree of the week: a centuries-old kapok amid the hubbub of an Indian megacity: This silk-cotton tree at Lalbagh botanical gardens in Bengaluru, which may pre-date British rule, is a ‘living museum’
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  • Want to Fight the Zombie Fire Apocalypse? Weaponize Math: Peat fires smolder in the ground for months, suddenly emerging as surface wildfires. New simulations reveal their strange life, death, and reanimation.
    • The largest fires on Earth aren’t the monsters that have been burning across California and Australia, but the zombies smoldering in the soils of the Arctic and tropics. Undead fires live on in peat: wet, carbon-rich soil made from dead vegetation that accumulates over hundreds or even thousands of years. When it dries out—as it is increasingly doing on a warming planet—peat fires can fester, slowly spreading both laterally and vertically for months and releasing astonishing amounts of greenhouse gases. In the Arctic, which is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, peat fires even smolder under the snow throughout winter and reanimate in the spring, alighting as new surface wildfires. Hence, zombie fires.
    • “The magic of cellular automata is that by aggregating very simple rules in a space, it actually is able to capture what is called an ‘emergent behavior,’ which is a behavior that is extremely complex,” says Imperial College London engineer Guillermo Rein, coauthor of a new paper describing the work in the journal Proceedings of the Combustion Institute. “You can do what is called ‘super real-time’—in the sense that you get results of the future location of the fire before the fire is already there. If you want to help firefighters predict the movement of a fire, you have to have super real-time.”
  • Trump-picked head of energy panel says he was ‘demoted for my independence’ on climate change
    • On Thursday evening, Neil Chatterjee announced on Twitter he was no longer chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, saying Trump had replaced him with fellow Republican James Danly. Chatterjee will still stay on as a commissioner of the five-member panel. The move comes just weeks after Chatterjee and the agency began clearing the way for regional power administrators to put a price on carbon dioxide emissions, the main contributor to global warming.
    • Chatterjee, a Republican, was appointed by Trump in 2017 to a five-year term on the FERC, an independent commission. Although often a supporter of fossil fuels, he took steps toward allowing electric-grid operators to implement carbon pricing set up by states. And during his tenure, the FERC opened up electricity markets to rooftop solar panels and storage systems for solar, wind and other green energy. In an interview, Chatterjee said he thinks his removal from the post could be because his recent actions “aggravated somebody at the White House, and they make the switch.” “If that’s the case, that’s being demoted for my independence,” he said. “I’m quite proud of that, and will wear it as a badge of honor.”
  • Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine is more than 90 percent effective in first analysis, company reports:
    • “I would say it’s a historical moment. Something like this has never happened before. First of all, the world was faced with such a terrible situation, the pandemic, and being able in such a short time to go through what usually takes many years,” Kathrin Jansen, head of vaccine research and development at Pfizer, said in an interview. “Hearing that at the interim analysis we are over 90 percent effective — it was almost stunning to hear.”
    • In Pfizer’s 44,000-person trial, there have so far been 94 cases of covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, in people who were not previously infected. Fewer than nine of those cases were among people who received two shots of the vaccine, a strong signal of efficacy. The company’s shares soared more than 13 percent in premarket trading. The data is not yet published or peer-reviewed.
    • “The results are really quite good, I mean extraordinary,” said Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, adding that the results might bode well for a vaccine being developed by biotech firm Moderna and his institute that uses a similar technology, “which gives you hope we might even have two vaccines.”
    • Vaccine development typically takes many years, even decades. But the coronavirus vaccines have been a rare success story in the response to the virus, able to move forward because of a flourishing of new vaccine technologies, a backbone of prior work on emerging pathogens and a mentality that rarely exists in the world of vaccine development — of governments and companies willing to devote nearly unlimited resources to make sure that a vaccine succeeds.
    • “It looks to be an incredibly promising result,” Benkeser wrote, noting that the two biggest questions are how long the effect lasts and how well the vaccine works to prevent severe cases of covid-19. “Both will still require more data to get a definitive answer, but for now, I think this is really good news.”
    • The vaccine uses a new technology never before deployed in an approved medical product. Each injection contains lipid nanoparticles — fat bubbles — that surround a strip of genetic material called messenger RNA. The genetic material carries the blueprint for the distinctive spiky protein that studs the coronavirus surface. After being injected into a person’s arm, the fat capsule delivers its payload to the body’s cells, and the messenger RNA instructs those cells to build the spike protein, effectively teaching the immune system how to recognize and block the coronavirus. Pfizer’s early signal is encouraging not just for messenger RNA, Fauci said, but as a proof of concept that vaccine candidates that present the spike protein — the approach being pursued by essentially all the major candidates — can succeed.
  • Record-breaking wave of coronavirus cases continues to sweep the nation
    • A surge of cases revealed a snowball effect: It took only 10 days for the country to move from 9 million cases to what is expected to be its 10 millionth case Monday. By comparison, it took more than three months for the country to go from no cases to 1 million in late April.
    • The virus has been spreading fastest in the Great Lakes and Mountain West states, with North Dakota, South Dakota and Wisconsin leading the way. For nearly a month, Ohio has each day set a new high in its seven-day new case average. The nation’s obsession with vote counting in the presidential election has obscured the rising cases. But President-elect Joe Biden is set to name his coronavirus task force Monday, and his running mate Kamala D. Harris posted an understated message Sunday on Twitter. “COVID-19 is still here. Please continue to wear a mask and practice social distancing.”
    • The political differences over how to proceed were apparent Sunday in a contentious exchange between New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, the Democrat whose state was one of the first to be leveled by the virus, and South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem, the Republican whose state is in the crosshairs now. On ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” Cuomo said “we’re coming up to the worst two months, I think, that we may have seen vis-a-vis covid. You see the numbers going crazy all across this country, all across the globe. The scientists said this was going to happen.” Cuomo said, “Republican governors who were cowered by Trump’s philosophy to deny covid” will need to acknowledge the risks. “It’s going to be the states that denied covid that are now going to be paying the highest price,” he said.
  • Utah governor declares emergency, issues mask mandate: ‘We cannot afford to debate this issue’: For months, even as coronavirus cases have dramatically risen in his state, Utah Gov. Gary R. Herbert (R) has refused to order residents to wear a mask. But on Sunday, after the state’s worst week yet and amid fears that hospitals could soon be overwhelmed, he reversed course.
    • “Our hospitals are full,” Herbert said in the clip. “This threatens patients who rely on hospital care from everything from covid-19 to emergencies like heart attacks, strokes, surgeries and trauma. We must work together to keep infections low until a vaccine is available.” The announcement comes as Utah’s rolling seven-day average for new daily coronavirus cases reached a new high for the fifth consecutive day on Sunday and grew by nearly 40 percent in the past week, according to data tracked by The Washington Post. The state reported a record number of 437 virus-related hospitalizations on Sunday. In all, Utah has reported 132,621 cases and 659 deaths since the start of the pandemic.
    • Coronavirus cases are surging in the United States, with several other states like Minnesota, Wisconsin, Arkansas, the Dakotas and Alaska experiencing record surges in hospitalizations and newly reported infections. Health officials, including the country’s leading infectious-disease expert, Anthony S. Fauci, have warned that hospitals could soon be overwhelmed.
  • Barr clears Justice Dept. to investigate alleged voting irregularities as Trump makes unfounded fraud claims
    • Attorney General William P. Barr on Monday gave federal prosecutors approval to pursue allegations of “vote tabulation irregularities” in certain cases before results are certified and indicated he had already done so “in specific instances” — a reversal of long-standing Justice Department policy that quickly drew criticism for fueling unfounded claims of massive election fraud pushed by President Trump and other conservatives.
    • “This is totally predictable. It’s DOJ scare tactics again. It’s the same show we’ve seen before,” Gupta said. “Barr is probably doing this because Trump is demanding that he do something, but the voters decided this election, and overwhelmingly voted for Biden.”
    • Matthew Miller, a former Justice Department spokesman during the Obama administration, said, “There’s no justification for doing this now.” “The best case scenario is that Barr did this to appease Trump and add credibility to his allegations of voter fraud,” Miller said. “The worst case scenario is that DOJ is planning to intervene in some way and try to throw the election to the president. Neither one is good, but one is much, much worse than the other.”
    • Barr’s move came a day after the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee wrote to him urging an investigation into possible impropriety in Pennsylvania. On Sunday, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) sent a letter to Barr and FBI Director Christopher A. Wray asking them to investigate claims made by a postal worker in Erie, Pa., that there was mishandling of mail-in ballots by postal supervisors there. “I urge you to investigate these claims as soon as possible,” wrote Graham. “It is imperative that the American people have confidence in the 2020 election and all other elections. The expansion of voting by mail has placed the post office at the center of the election and we must ensure that the entire postal system operates with integrity.”

11/8/2020 — Stacy Abrams day

  • How Georgia, built on legacy of a civil rights titan, finally tilted blue: A quiet satisfaction reigned as votes in the area previously held by Trump critic John Lewis took the Democrats over the line
    • If any one person can be credited with delivering the blow against Trump it is Stacey Abrams, the former candidate for state governor who took her revenge on the Republican establishment for, as many in Georgia see it, stealing that election. In response, she mobilised a cadre of voters to make sure it couldn’t happen again, and that has paid off for Biden.
    • On Tuesday, that organising helped elect Williams to the Congressional seat previously held by Lewis. It also paid off for Biden. Abrams tweeted her delight at the result, saying: “My heart is full.”
    • 3500.jpg?width=620&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=c1542b318dc7a2224cc94d93274f1952
  • ReichTweet
  • ‘Welcome back’: America’s allies celebrate Biden win, hope for a U.S. return to global cooperation: Messages of congratulations for President-elect Joe Biden rolled in from around the world on Sunday as allies and adversaries of the United States accepted that the country would have a new leader despite the lack of any sign from President Trump that he planned to concede the election.
    • International media covered the event widely. The Sunday Times in London carried the headline “Sleepy Joe wakes up America” with a picture of a Black woman with a U.S. flag wrapped around her shoulders. The French television station BFM TV said 313,000 viewers had stayed up past 2 a.m. local time to watch Biden’s speech.
    • There was also silence from Saudi Arabia, one of the most important U.S. allies in the Middle East. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the country’s de facto ruler, has developed close relations with the Trump administration and a personal friendship with Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner. On the anniversary last month of the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post columnist who was dismembered in a Saudi consulate in Turkey, Biden called for accountability and human rights reform in the kingdom. After Biden’s victory, Khashoggi’s fiancee, Hatice Cengiz, tweeted: “If you don’t find justice on your own, time will bring its own justice.”
    • Russia has been silent on the election result, but opposition figure Alexei Navalny congratulated Biden and Harris. He said a free and fair election “is a privilege which is not available to all countries” and expressed hope for a new level of cooperation between Russia and the United States.
  • The descent of Trump: Editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes tracks the downward trajectory of Trump, starting with his Trump Tower escalator ride.
  • An Open Letter to Joe Biden: You must rebuild public trust in the scientific impartiality of the EPA, the DOE and other agencies
    • [ael: Joe so knows this….]
    • Over the last four years, Americans have had ample opportunity to observe the consequences of willful scientific ignorance. Ignorance is toxic and fatal [ael: my emphasis]. It is a potent vector for the spread of the COVID-19 virus. It hampers effective action on climate change, burdening our children with present and future climate disruption they did nothing to incur. Ignorance isolates us from the rest of the world. The United States is the world’s pariah nation, unwilling to accept science, unwilling to participate in international efforts to control a global pandemic, and unwilling to take part in international efforts to reduce emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases. Our peers in the free world view us with pity and concern.
  • Alex Trebek, beloved 'Jeopardy!' host, dies after cancer battle at age 80: The popular game-show host was best known for his soothing voice and understated humor.
    • George Alexander Trebek was born on July 22, 1940, in Sudbury, Ontario, to chef George Edward Trebek and Lucille Lagacé.
  • It began on a gold escalator. It may have ended at Four Seasons Total Landscaping. The end came in all the places you’d expect, in all the ways you’d expect, with all the people you’d expect.
    • When news broke Saturday that Donald Trump’s reign was ending, the president was on a golf course that he owns in Virginia, playing his last round as a non-loser. In Washington, about 125 of his worshipful supporters gathered on the stoop of the Supreme Court to “stop the steal,” then circumnavigated the U.S. Capitol seven times, because that’s how the Israelites conquered Jericho, according to the Book of Joshua. And a pair of Trump’s most loyal surrogates made a defiant stand on the gravelly backside of a landscaping business in an industrial stretch of Northeast Philadelphia, near a crematorium and an adult-video store called Fantasy Island, along State Road, which leads — as being associated with Trump sometimes does — to a prison.
    • Rudolph Giuliani, America’s mayor turned Trump’s sloppy fixer, squinted into the autumnal sun at journalists who had assembled outside Four Seasons Total Landscaping — a choice of location that multiple Trump staffers could not account for, saying that it was the work of the campaign’s Pennsylvania advance team. Literally anywhere else would have conveyed more legitimacy on the enterprise, but legitimacy did not seem a high priority for one of the last battles of a lost war.
    • That evening, a federal judge heard arguments from attorneys who wanted to stop the counting in Nevada’s Clark County because Republicans could not conduct “meaningful observation.” The judge wondered how to interpret the phrase. How many people should observe, and from what distance? Should observers be entitled to hear a ballot-counter’s every utterance? What if one of the poll workers had a soft voice and could not be overheard? “At what point does this get to the ridiculous?” Judge Andrew P. Gordon asked. His question was answered the following day, at Four Seasons Total Landscaping.
    • Sean Middleton, the company’s director of sales, was at a Bible study when he got the call to come to the shop and help prepare for Giuliani’s news conference. “I was pretty happy because it got me out of Bible study,” he said Saturday, adding: “I have no idea why [the campaign] wanted to do it here. I don’t know how the government works. Maybe they saw on satellite images that we have a big back lot and proximity to [Interstate] 95?” Middleton said he was not aware of any connection between the landscaping company and the Trump campaign, which did not immediately provide an explanation for why the news conference was held at that location.

11/7/2020 — Biden/Harris Day

11/6/2020 — Greta Thunberg Day

  • Climate activist Thunberg hits back at Trump over anger management taunt: Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg hit back at Donald Trump on Twitter late on Thursday saying the U.S. president should “chill” about the election, a riposte to his tweet last year mocking the teenager over what he called her anger management issues.
    • Commenting on Trump tweeting "STOP THE COUNT!" on Thursday, as the election race in the United States went to the wire, 17-year-old Thunberg tweeted: "So ridiculous. Donald must work on his Anger Management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend! Chill Donald, Chill!"
  • Counties with worst virus surges overwhelmingly voted Trump: Counties with worst virus surges overwhelmingly voted Trump
    • An Associated Press analysis reveals that in 376 counties with the highest number of new cases per capita, the overwhelming majority — 93% of those counties — went for Trump, a rate above other less severely hit areas. Most were rural counties in Montana, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa and Wisconsin — the kinds of areas that often have lower rates of adherence to social distancing, mask-wearing and other public health measures, and have been a focal point for much of the latest surge in cases.
    • Taking note of the contrast, state health officials are pausing for a moment of introspection. Even as they worry about rising numbers of hospitalizations and deaths, they hope to reframe their messages and aim for a reset on public sentiment now that the election is over. “Public health officials need to step back, listen to and understand the people who aren’t taking the same stance” on mask-wearing and other control measures, said Dr. Marcus Plescia of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.
  • Ghana to black Americans: Come home. We’ll help you build a life here.
  • The warming climate is making baby sea turtles almost all girls:
    • On the tiny West African island nation of Cape Verde — home to a sixth of the planet’s nesting loggerheads — the disparity is stark. Eighty-four percent of youngsters are now female, researchers from Britain’s University of Exeter found in a July report.
  • Stephen Colbert’s tearful response to Trump election claims: ‘I didn’t expect this to break my heart’
    • Stephen Colbert became visibly emotional while condemning President Donald Trump’s response to the election on “The Late Show.” “We’re taping this just a little while after Donald Trump walked into the White House briefing room and tried to poison American democracy,” he said on Thursday’s show. Colbert changed his monologue in response to Trump’s remarks. The late-night host said Trump’s troubling comments were also why he was dressed in black, “because Donald Trump tried really hard to kill something tonight.”
    • Stephen Rips Up The Monologue And Starts Over After Trump's Heartbreaking Thursday Night Lie Fest
    • Colbert called on one particular group of officials to take an unpredictable stand in the face of Trump’s “predictable” behavior. “Republicans have to speak up,” he said. “All of them.” “For evil to succeed, all that is necessary is for good men to do nothing,” he said, paraphrasing John Stuart Mill (via John F. Kennedy). Calling Trump a fascist, he said Republicans should not wait to take the temperature of public opinion before speaking up.
  • Sears’s ‘radical’ past: How mail-order catalogues subverted the racial hierarchy of Jim Crow: A lesser-known aspect of Sears’s 125-year history, however, is how the company revolutionized rural black Southerners’ shopping patterns in the late 19th century, subverting racial hierarchies by allowing them to make purchases by mail or over the phone and avoid the blatant racism that they faced at small country stores.
  • ‘My sense is that we lost’: Trump campaign aides grapple with dwindling odds: Only a small number of those in the president's inner circle have adamantly encouraged Trump not to concede.
    • As senior campaign officials huddled with attorneys to discuss President Donald Trump’s legal options with his opponent closing in on 270 electoral votes, others in the Virginia office building polished off their resumes and wondered when, if ever, their candidate might concede. The president, who currently sits at 214 Electoral College votes, has refused to accept a potential election loss and unleashed a legal offensive not seen in a presidential cycle since 2000.
    • Trump's dwindling circle of believers comes at a critical moment for the president’s legacy, which his allies fear could be permanently tarnished if he presses too long with a court battle that plunges the nation into political crisis and fails to yield his desired result. Only a small number of those in the president's inner circle — namely former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and advisers Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie — have adamantly encouraged Trump not to concede.

11/5/2020

  • Green Hydrogen: Could It Be Key to a Carbon-Free Economy?: From Saudi Arabia to Australia, green hydrogen projects — which use renewable energy to produce hydrogen from water — are taking off. The fuel’s boosters say it could play an important role in decarbonizing 15 to 20 percent of the economy that is difficult to electrify, such as long-haul trucks, aircraft, and heavy manufacturing.
    • Saudi Arabia is contructing a futuristic city in the desert on the Red Sea called Neom. The $500 billion city — complete with flying taxis and robotic domestic help — is being built from scratch and will be home to a million people. And what energy product will be used both to power this city and sell to the world? Not oil. The Saudis are going big on something called green hydrogen — a carbon-free fuel made from water by using renewably produced electricity to split hydrogen molecules from oxygen molecules.
    • Germany has allocated the largest share of its clean energy stimulus funds to green hydrogen.
    • “It is very promising,” said Rachel Fakhry, an energy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council. Experts like Fakhry say that while wind and solar energy can provide the electricity to power homes and electric cars, green hydrogen could be an ideal power source for energy-intensive industries like concrete and steel manufacturing, as well as parts of the transportation sector that are more difficult to electrify. “The last 15 percent of the economy is hard to clean up — aviation, shipping, manufacturing, long-distance trucking,” Fakhry said in an interview. “Green hydrogen can do that.”
    • Such advantages are fueling growing interest in global green hydrogen. Across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, more countries and companies are embracing this high-quality fuel. The U.S. lags behind because other forms of energy, such as natural gas, are much cheaper, but several new projects are getting underway, including a green hydrogen power plant in Utah that will replace two aging coal-fired plants and produce electricity for southern California.
    • In Japan, a new green hydrogen plant, one of the world’s largest, just opened near Fukishima — an intentionally symbolic location given the plant’s proximity to the site of the 2011 nuclear disaster. It will be used to power fuel cells, both in vehicles and at stationary sites. An energy consortium in Australia just announced plans to build a project called the Asian Renewable Energy Hub near Pilbara that would use 1,600 large wind turbines and 30 square miles of solar panels to run a 23-gigawatt electrolysis factory that would create green hydrogen to send to Singapore.
    • The Middle East, which has the world’s cheapest wind and solar power, is angling to be a major player in green hydrogen. “Saudi Arabia has ridiculously low-cost renewable power,” said Thomas Koch Blank, leader of the Rocky Mountain Institute’s Breakthrough Technology Program. “The sun is shining pretty reliably every day and the wind is blowing pretty reliably every night. It’s hard to beat.”
    • The energy density of green hydrogen is three times that of jet fuel, making it a promising zero-emissions technology for aircraft. But Airbus, the European airplane manufacturer, recently released a statement saying that significant problems need to be overcome, including safely storing hydrogen on aircraft, the lack of a hydrogen infrastructure at airports, and cost. Experts say that new technologies will be needed to solve these problems. Nevertheless, Airbus believes green hydrogen will play an important role in decarbonizing air transport.
    • In the U.S., where energy prices are low, green hydrogen costs about three times as much as natural gas, though that price doesn’t factor in the environmental damage caused by fossil fuels. [ael: my emphasis — shall we get smart and start factoring in the environmental damage caused by fossil fuels, or keep subsidizing fossil fuels at the cost of destroying our world? Sheesh….] The price of green hydrogen is falling, however. In 10 years, green hydrogen is expected to be comparable in cost to natural gas in the United States.
    • A major driver of green hydrogen development in the U.S. is California’s aggressive push toward a carbon-neutral future. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, for example, is helping fund the construction of the green hydrogen-fueled power plant in Utah. It’s scheduled to go online in 2025.
    • A company called SGH2 recently announced it would build a large facility to produce green hydrogen in southern California. Instead of using electrolysis, though, it will use waste gasification, which heats many types of waste to high temperatures that reduce them to their molecular compounds. Those molecules then bind with hydrogen, and SGH2 claims it can make green hydrogen more cheaply than using electrolysis.
    • California officials also see green hydrogen as an alternative to fossil fuels for diesel vehicles. The state passed a Low Carbon Fuel Standard in 2009 to promote electric vehicles and hydrogen vehicles. Last month, a group of heavy-duty vehicle and energy industry officials formed the Western States Hydrogen Alliance to press for rapid deployment of hydrogen fuel cell technology and infrastructure to replace diesel trucks, buses, locomotives, and aircraft. “Hydrogen fuel cells will power the future of zero-emission mobility in these heavy-duty, hard-to-electrify sectors,” said Roxana Bekemohammadi, executive director of the Western States Hydrogen Alliance. “That fact is indisputable. This new alliance exists to ensure government and industry can work efficiently together to accelerate the coming of this revolution.”
  • Trump should have lost in a landslide. The fact that he didn’t speaks volumes: Blaming the voters simply will not do. This is a failure of leadership. Those responsible for it need to be held accountable
    • In the lead-up to the 2020 election, Democrats were extremely confident in Joe Biden’s prospects. With his comfortable lead in national polls, there was talk of a Biden landslide, a giant “blue wave” that could turn Texas blue. Even though the polls had been off in the 2016 election, media commentators reassured audiences that Biden’s lead was different – far stronger and more stable – than Hillary Clinton’s had been.
    • But Biden didn’t offer a clear and compelling alternative. He was a weak candidate from the start, so much so that even some of his allies were worried what would happen if he won the primary. Biden, like Hillary Clinton before him, represented the corporate wing of the Democratic party; he loudly defended the private health insurance industry and the fracking industry from attacks by the left. He ran away from proposals favored by the Democratic base like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. He didn’t show much interest in courting core constituencies like Latino voters (reportedly, the Biden campaign did not consider them part of its “path to victory”, which helps explain the losses in Texas and Florida). Biden didn’t even put much energy into the campaign; at crucial moments when Trump’s team were knocking on a million doors a week, Biden’s was reportedly knocking on zero. His ground game in important swing states like Michigan was “invisible”.
    • To many on the left, then, Biden’s lackluster performance is no surprise. Yes, Trump could have been resoundingly defeated. But 2016 proved once and for all that the Democratic establishment simply doesn’t have a message that can effectively counter Trump. The party leadership ignored the lessons that should have been learned four years ago. Instead, Democratic strategy is the very definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
    • This is why many of us on the left were pushing so hard for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary. We believed that he had a winning formula for combating Trumpism, that the conventional wisdom that centrism is “pragmatic” was totally upside down. Bernie knew how to speak to Trump’s own voters, he could go to a Fox town hall and have the attendees cheering for single-payer healthcare, or win over a crowd at Liberty University. We believed that in a general election, he would be able to move the kinds of discontented anti-establishment voters who put Trump in office, and would have dominated in the rust belt states where Biden is just barely squeaking by.
    • That theory is untested; we never got a chance to compare what a left candidate could do against Trump with what Clinton and Biden managed. But the disappointing Democratic performances in both 2016 and 2020 should tell us that something is deeply, troublingly wrong with the party. A reality TV clown who supports policies most Americans hate (eg tax cuts for the rich) should not be coming anywhere near winning a presidential election. Yet he is. Why?
    • It is time for a whole new approach, not a double dose of the existing one. We need to take the right lessons from this election, the ones that didn’t take in 2016. First, don’t trust polls, and don’t get complacent or assume the tides of history will carry you to victory. Second, Trumpism will not “self-destruct”: you can’t simply run against Trump, you need a powerful alternative vision that actually gives people what they say they want and fights for something worth believing in.
  • Trumpism is a lifestyle disease, chronic in America
    • As a critic, I can say that he embodied, embraced or inflamed almost everything ugly in American culture, past, present and perhaps future. He made it palpable and tangible even to people inclined to see the bright side of everything. That this week’s election wasn’t a repudiation of Trumpism, that some 6 million more Americans believe in it now compared with four years ago, is horrifying. But it’s also reality, and it’s always best to face reality.
    • He also gave our unique brand of ugliness — rooted in racism, exceptionalism, recklessness, arrogance and a tendency to bully our way to power — a name. Trumpism is now rooted in the lexicon, and although white supremacy may be the better, more clinical term for what ails America, Trumpism is a useful, colloquial alternative. It encompasses an even wider category of people that includes not just avowed racists who have publicly supported the president but also those who downplay the problem, or align with it for personal gain, or are simply unwilling to acknowledge its history and persistence. Naming a thing is an essential first step to understanding it, and although some White people will reflexively resist acknowledging how their lives intersect with white supremacy, it may be easier to see how much Trumpism exists in all of us.

11/4/2020

  • [ael: the "blue wave" did not materialize, as usual. And Trump apparently rebounded by holding large outdoor contagion events, and people seem to like that. Also saying "Fire Fauci" and the like — sounds like a great idea, to his people.]
  • [ael: as I sat in bed, waiting for a phone call to ease my mind — and no call forthcoming — so many headlines crossed my mind; so many scenarios. I knew that if things were looking rosy, then I'd have gotten a phone call, so only the non-rosier scenarios were coming to mind. I didn't want to see the headlines.]
  • [ael: a week or so ago I had a dream, a really wonderful dream. It was of a turtle and an eagle flying together — perhaps meeting at sea level, their beaks conjoined. It felt so wonderful. Those two have become icons for this moment — whether the eagle and the turtle have a future or not — is about to be decided.]
  • [ael: after all the talk — the LeBron James voters, the young climate voters, etc. etc. — where did they go? Were they just too lazy? Or did they actually punch the card for authoritarian ignoramus? ]

11/3/2020

  • [ael: election day: Steve and I were planning to "tend" polling locations around Cincinnati, but had to press Anna and Paula into action to take on a "forgotten" polling location. They did so from about 10:30 to 4:30, and then Steve and I took over until the polls closed at 7:30. It was a long time to wait for a few votes, but everyone counted….]

11/2/2020

  • Donald Trump has threatened to fire Anthony Fauci, America’s top infectious disease expert, during a midnight rally in Florida 24 hours before the US presidential election.: As crowds at the Miami Opa-Locka airport chanted “Fire Fauci”, the president allowed the chants to continue for several seconds before responding: “Don’t tell anybody, but let me wait until a little bit after the election. I appreciate the advice. I appreciate it.” He continued: “Nah, he’s been wrong on a lot. He’s a nice man though. He’s been wrong on a lot.”
    • In a hard-hitting interview with the Washington Post published on Saturday night, Fauci said the US should prepare for “a whole lot of hurt” under the coronavirus pandemic and predicted a winter of 100,000 or more cases a day and a rising death toll. “It’s not a good situation,” Fauci said. “All the stars are aligned in the wrong place as you go into the fall and winter season, with people congregating at home indoors. You could not possibly be positioned more poorly.”
  • Scholars warn of collapse of democracy as Trump v Biden election looms: Dozens of experts on fascism warn of global danger, calling for action from ordinary people: ‘It is not too late’
    • Dozens of historians of fascism and authoritarianism have signed a letter warning that democracy “is either withering or in full-scale collapse globally”, and urging ordinary people to take action.

11/1/2020

  • Tom Toles’s final cartoon: As Tom Toles tells us today, he has decided to retire. After a half-century of brilliant cartooning, including 18 years at The Post, he is entitled, but we will miss him greatly, as we know will many of you.
    • 3ZHJ2IREP5HRJGZJVMDOT4TZ7U.jpg&w=916
  • ‘They’re Calling You on the Squid Phone’: Cephalopod researchers were surprised by the sighting of a ram’s horn squid, a peculiar animal never before filmed in its natural environment.
  • A Pinnacle of Coral Is Discovered in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef: The underwater skyscraper teems with sea life and had been overlooked in past surveys of the reef system.
  • Masks Work. Really. We’ll Show You How.
  • Investigation finds Ford and GM knew about climate change in the 1960s: According to an investigation published by E&E News, American car manufacturing giants GM and Ford knew that car emissions contributed to climate change as early as the 1960s but continued to produce vehicles that guzzled fossil fuels for decades after the fact and even lobbied against regulatory requirements that would have improved fuel efficiency standards.
    • The investigation found that GM greenlit research from Ruth Annette Gabriel Reck into how its vehicles contributed to climate change in the 1960s, in part because the company was under the impression that aerosols could have a cooling effect that would counteract the warming effect of carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels. Reck found exactly the opposite: aerosols contribute to the warming effect. Further studies, including climate modeling projects that showed the planet's temperature increasing as a result of carbon emissions in the earth's atmosphere, were run on computers at GM Research Labs.
    • Similar research was occurring at Ford around the same time. In 1955, the automaker hired a Canadian physicist named Gilbert Norman Plass who had published a number of papers on the climate, several that looked at the role carbon dioxide played in climate change. Plass continued to study this topic while at Ford, and ran climate models on the company's computers. While employed by Ford and managing the company's theoretical physics department, he wrote numerous articles in which he warned of climate change caused by CO2 emissions, particularly caused by burning fossil fuels. Despite the work occurring within Ford's own labs, it's unclear if the company's executives ever saw the research on climate change or took it seriously.
  • 'Sleeping giant' Arctic methane deposits starting to release, scientists find: Exclusive: expedition discovers new source of greenhouse gas off East Siberian coast has been triggered
    • [ael: yeah, I know I included this in October. Just thought that it bore repeating. We're fucked. See last Tom Toles cartoon above….]

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