Read me >>> sharing illuminating journalism

[ericpmoss]

For anyone who said, "Hey, maybe I should read Thomas Piketty's book, but not even shelter-in-place lasts long enough to get through it" --

Capital in the 21st Century, the movie

COVID is making normal screenings impossible, so this page is trying to set up virtual screenings through theaters in your (?) area.

[ides1056]

Both illuminating and inspiring:

Opinion | ‘You Will Not Live to See Your Next Birthday’ - The New York Times

[htwoopup]

Saddens me that the comments on this devolve into “its the politicians giving themselves pensions” or “NY will be ok when the virus goes away”.

It is not about that.

Please read every word.

An opinion piece yes, but facts and data that are hard to argue.

“Perhaps the most enduring legacy of Brown v. Board of Education is not its condemnation of racial segregation, but the bitter lesson that much of America has successfully resisted the legal imperative to end segregation.”

Please read every word. Facts and data that in this country, (and others as well but the data is US), we will have to think hard about how to fix it if we are to have a future.

Opinion | The Coronavirus and The Cities We Need - The New York Times

[guido]

One Crisis Doesn’t Stop Because Another Starts | The New Yorker

"Around the world, weary people in many countries have begun to chart the promising slide of daily coronavirus cases and deaths—less so in the United States, of course, where our leader has decided that we should be “warriors” bravely exposing ourselves to the microbe. But even here in New York City, the worst hotspot so far, we appear to have reached the top of the roller coaster.

But the other crisis curves on our planet—the endless rises of temperature and carbon-dioxide concentration—show no such mercy. Just the opposite. Researchers reported last week that April of 2020 has tied for the hottest April on record, and that there is a seventy-five-per-cent chance that this year will become the hottest one ever measured for the globe as a whole. That would be remarkable, because it usually takes an El Niño warming the Pacific to vault the globe to a new record, which isn’t happening this year. In fact, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has said that February and March of 2020 were the two hottest non-El Niño months ever recorded in its temperature database. For perspective, April was the four hundred and twenty-fourth consecutive month with temperatures above the twentieth-century average, meaning that, if you’re under thirty-five, you’ve never lived through a cooler-than-usual month."

[mzilliox]

but people want to go "back to normal" as though this is not mother nature reminding us of nature's checks and balances

[guido]

E.P.A. Opts Against Limits on Water Contaminant Tied to Fetal Damage - The New York Times

"The Trump administration will not impose any limits on perchlorate, a toxic chemical compound that contaminates water and has been linked to fetal and infant brain damage, according to two Environmental Protection Agency staff members familiar with the decision."

[guido]

Appeals Court Allows Emoluments Suit Against Trump to Proceed - The New York Times

"A federal appeals court in Virginia on Thursday revived a lawsuit accusing President Trump of violating the Constitution by profiting from his Washington hotel, a decision that will most likely lead the Justice Department to appeal to the Supreme Court to keep the plaintiffs from gathering evidence in the case.

“We recognize that the president is no ordinary petitioner, and we accord him great deference as the head of the executive branch,” the majority opinion from the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals said. “But Congress and the Supreme Court have severely limited our ability to grant the extraordinary relief the president seeks.”

The 15-member appeals court in Richmond met in December to consider whether a three-judge appellate panel had wrongly dismissed the lawsuit over the Trump International Hotel brought by the District of Columbia and the State of Maryland. The local jurisdictions were about to begin evidence-gathering when the panel threw out the case."

[ides1056]

E.P.A. Opts Against Limits on Water Contaminant Tied to Fetal Damage - The New York Times

"The Trump administration will not impose any limits on perchlorate, a toxic chemical compound that contaminates water and has been linked to fetal and infant brain damage, according to two Environmental Protection Agency staff members familiar with the decision."

F bomb F bomb F FFFGFGGGGGGG

Damn how stupid can you get.

[guido]

President Trump’s job is to manage risk. Coronavirus shows he’s failing. - Vox

"A few months ago, I had dinner with a friend who argued that it was time to rethink Donald Trump’s presidency. After all, the economy was fine, we hadn’t ended up in a nuclear war, and the tough posture toward China was paying some trade dividends. Maybe the madman routine was working. Maybe it really was just a routine, and Trump was managing the presidency well enough. Wasn’t it time for critics like me to rethink their most dire warnings? Wasn’t it time to admit we’d gotten him wrong?

There were, even then, obvious rebuttals, and I made some of them. The lethal mismanagement of the Hurricane Maria response, for instance. But there was a power to the argument. The worst hadn’t happened. Didn’t that require a reckoning?

And then the novel coronavirus came, and President Trump did nothing for week after week, month after month. We sit, still, in the void where a plan should be, forced to choose between endless lockdown and reckless reopening because the federal government has not charted a middle path. Instead, we wake to presidential tweets demanding the “liberation” of states, and laugh to keep from crying when the most powerful man in the world suggests we study the injection of disinfectants. Trump has let disaster metastasize into calamity. The feared collision of global crisis and presidential recklessness has come, and it is not close to over. "

[ides1056]

I talked with a twenty-something Muslim on Saturday who thought the president had done a good job early in the pandemic because he had tamped down the panic with the fantasy he spun.

Needles to say I was borderline apoplectic in my response.

I can recommend reading Timothy Snyder, but you can listen to him first:

[guido]

Stop Driving 5 Miles per Hour Over the Speed Limit | Outside Online

"Speed kills.

In the United States, roughly 40,000 people die in traffic every year. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, motor-vehicle speeding killed over 9,000 people in 2018, which means around a quarter of all traffic deaths in this country are speed related. The NHTSA attributes our speeding epidemic to four factors: traffic, running late, anonymity (drivers become detached from their actions while in their automotive cocoons), and disregard for others and for the law. This is all a diplomatic way of saying that people who drive too fast are selfish assholes.

But while it’s easy to blame the douchebag in the BMW who flies by you in the right lane at 97 miles per hour for this national epidemic, the truth is, we’re all a bunch of assholes when we drive. It’s just that what each of us considers speeding is relative. While the legal speed limit on any given stretch of road is generally fixed and unambiguous, there’s also the speed at which most people actually drive on that stretch, which may be well in excess of whatever number is posted on that little white sign.

For practical purposes, here in the U.S., we’re pretty unconcerned with speeding just as long as we’re going the same speed as everyone else and we don’t think we’re going to get caught. No doubt there’s a fancy traffic-engineering term for this phenomenon, but comedian George Carlin articulated our approach to gauging our own speed better than any transportation-policy wonk possibly could: basically, anyone driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone driving faster than you is a maniac."

[guido]

With the World on Pause, Salamanders Own the Road - The New York Times

"Out they come on warm, wet spring nights, from beneath leaves and under logs and inside burrows where they have hibernated since fall: a veritable army of amphibians embarking on one of nature’s great migrations, albeit largely hidden from human sight and all too often ending beneath automobile tires.

It is an ignominious fate for creatures with life histories that read like fairy tales. And although nobody knows exactly how many frogs and salamanders are killed while crossing roads, scientists say that even moderate traffic at the wrong time can wipe out entire populations in a few years.

This year, however, amphibian migrations in the northeastern United States coincide with the Covid-19 pandemic. Social distancing and shelter-in-place orders have caused vehicular traffic to decline, turning this spring into an unintended, large-scale experiment."

[guido]

Opinion | The Coronavirus and a World Without Meat - The New York Times

"Is any panic more primitive than the one prompted by the thought of empty grocery store shelves? Is any relief more primitive than the one provided by comfort food?

Most everyone has been doing more cooking these days, more documenting of the cooking, and more thinking about food in general. The combination of meat shortages and President Trump’s decision to order slaughterhouses open despite the protestations of endangered workers has inspired many Americans to consider just how essential meat is.

Is it more essential than the lives of the working poor who labor to produce it? It seems so. An astonishing six out of 10 counties that the White House itself identified as coronavirus hot spots are home to the very slaughterhouses the president ordered open.

In Sioux Falls, S.D., the Smithfield pork plant, which produces some 5 percent of the country’s pork, is one of the largest hot spots in the nation. A Tyson plant in Perry, Iowa, had 730 cases of the coronavirus — nearly 60 percent of its employees. At another Tyson plant, in Waterloo, Iowa, there were 1,031 reported cases among about 2,800 workers.

Sick workers mean plant shutdowns, which has led to a backlog of animals. Some farmers are injecting pregnant sows to cause abortions. Others are forced to euthanize their animals, often by gassing or shooting them. It’s gotten bad enough that Senator Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, has asked the Trump administration to provide mental health resources to hog farmers.

Despite this grisly reality — and the widely reported effects of the factory-farm industry on America’s lands, communities, animals and human health long before this pandemic hit — only around half of Americans say they are trying to reduce their meat consumption. Meat is embedded in our culture and personal histories in ways that matter too much, from the Thanksgiving turkey to the ballpark hot dog. Meat comes with uniquely wonderful smells and tastes, with satisfactions that can almost feel like home itself. And what, if not the feeling of home, is essential?

And yet, an increasing number of people sense the inevitability of impending change."

[ides1056]

I was wrong about veganism. Let them eat meat (but farm it right) | George Monbiot | Opinion | The Guardian

Modern farming is a byproduct of the chemical industry that developed after the First World War. Synthetic fertilizer and myriad poisons used to increase short-term yields have led to overpopulation and the despoiling of the planet.

We are winning the war on Nature, but it's only the seventh inning.

[mzilliox]

I was wrong about veganism. Let them eat meat (but farm it right) | George Monbiot | Opinion | The Guardian

Modern farming is a byproduct of the chemical industry that developed after the First World War. Synthetic fertilizer and myriad poisons used to increase short-term yields have led to overpopulation and the despoiling of the planet.

We are winning the war on Nature, but it's only the seventh inning.

one of my lifes' works is to prove fertilizer and pesticides are not necessary to have an abundance of produce growing on your land. so far, every year i dont add these things, and build the soil in natural ways, i see better and better health, for the produce and myself.

[caleb]

I was wrong about veganism. Let them eat meat (but farm it right) | George Monbiot | Opinion | The Guardian

Modern farming is a byproduct of the chemical industry that developed after the First World War. Synthetic fertilizer and myriad poisons used to increase short-term yields have led to overpopulation and the despoiling of the planet.

We are winning the war on Nature, but it's only the seventh inning.

I was surprised in the article that @guido links that a full quarter of 25-34 year olds are full veg or vegan. I was aware it was an increasing number, but not that high.

To the Guardian piece, yes: the dichotomizing meat/no meat framework obscures the degree to which the conditions of raising animals matters. Keeping a couple pigs out back to feed scraps (most of that stuff my city collects, using a internal combustion engine truck, as compost) who eventually become an Easter ham is nothing like keeping a herd of steers on concrete while pumping them full of corn.

I think there's a real possibility that humans eating meat will be an outlier in my lifetime, and that might be a better world. But between here and there, the pressing issue seems to be raising animals better, both for them and for the environment.

[ides1056]

My grandparents had a cattle ranch. I worked on a biodynamic farm before college. I have raised cows for more than a decade.

2-4-D and 2-4-5-T were sprayed in the alfalfa field that surrounded the main house at the ranch. Whether it was the cause of my grandfather's cancer or my aunt's is debatable. But they are wicked poisons. Ask the Vietnamese.

Small scale hand farming can produce incredible yields without chemicals. But it's work, hard work, and it doesn't pay well.

Cows are sentient beings. Individual as we are, and far more aware of their place in the cosmos than we are. I would happily be treated as they were in the end: one bad day. Let me have a happy life doing what I love and just make sure not to miss when the time comes.

[caleb]

Mark Lilla is once again worth the time. Opinion | We Want to Know the Future of the Coronavirus. Too Bad. - The New York Times

But the post-Covid future doesn’t exist. It will exist only after we have made it. Religious prophecy is rational, on the assumption that the future is in the gods’ hands, not ours. Believers can be confident that what the gods say through the oracles’ mouth or inscribe in offal will come to pass, independent of our actions. But if we don’t believe in such deities, we have no reason to ask what will happen to us. We should ask only what we want to happen, and how to make it happen, given the constraints of the moment.

Apart from the actual biology of the coronavirus — which we are only beginning to understand — nothing is predestined. How many people fall ill with it depends on how they behave, how we test them, how we treat them and how lucky we are in developing a vaccine. The result of those decisions will then limit the choices about reopening that employers, mayors, university presidents and sports club owners are facing. Their decisions will then feed back into our own decisions, including whom we choose for president this November. And the results of that election will have the largest impact on what the next four years will hold.

The pandemic has brought home just how great a responsibility we bear toward the future, and also how inadequate our knowledge is for making wise decisions and anticipating consequences. Perhaps that is why our prophets and augurs can’t keep up with the demand for foresight. At some level, people must be thinking that the more they learn about what is predetermined, the more control they will have. This is an illusion. Human beings want to feel that they are on a power walk into the future, when in fact we are always just tapping our canes on the pavement in the fog.

[guido]

The Coronavirus Is Exposing Wall Street’s Reckless Gamble on Bad Debt | The New Yorker

"In January of 2019, Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, appeared before a House of Commons committee to discuss global threats to financial stability. At that time, the U.S. unemployment rate was below four per cent, the gross domestic product was growing steadily, and Donald Trump was busy boasting about “the greatest economy ever.” But, despite these favorable statistics, staffers at the bank had identified a potentially serious problem on the horizon: a rapid buildup of corporate debt, which was associated with a potentially alarming decline in lending standards. Carney compared what was happening in the corporate-debt markets to the subprime-mortgage boom that culminated in the great financial crisis of 2008 and 2009. Citing the rise of “covenant lite” loans that placed very few restrictions on corporate borrowers, Carney said, “The subprime analogy isn’t perfect, but it’s on the road to ‘no doc’ underwriting, which happened eleven years ago.”"

[ides1056]

Mark Lilla is once again worth the time. Opinion | We Want to Know the Future of the Coronavirus. Too Bad. - The New York Times

Arundhati Roy: “The Pandemic Is a Portal” - Yes! Magazine