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[ides1056]

The full text:

Arundhati Roy: ‘The pandemic is a portal’ | Free to read | Financial Times

[mzilliox]

The full text:

Arundhati Roy: ‘The pandemic is a portal’ | Free to read | Financial Times

very well written, thanks

[defspace]

The Black American Amputation Epidemic

[Todd Amunrud]

https://www.pbs.org/wnet/amanpour-an...perts-anymore/


Not a read but a good listen. I lament these concerns with my medical colleagues frequently.

[mzilliox]

The Malignant Cruelty of Donald Trump - The Atlantic

[guido]

The Giant 'Murder Hornet' Resurfaces in British Columbia - The New York Times

"SEATTLE — The Asian giant hornet has resurfaced in the Canadian province of British Columbia, miles away from traps placed to contain it, suggesting that the invasive insect has already established itself in a broader territory than previously known.

Paul van Westendorp, a provincial apiculturist for British Columbia, said he had confirmed that one of the large hornets was discovered in the city of Langley this month. The specimen, collected after a woman killed an unusual-looking insect at her home, was found about eight miles north of where two other hornets were discovered last year near Blaine, Wash.

Since those initial troubling discoveries — the aggressive hornet’s first apparent foray into North America — American biologists have been placing traps throughout northwestern Washington State, while field workers in British Columbia focused traps along the border with the United States and in the community of White Rock. But the new discovery indicates that the hornet is not confined to that previously known territory, and that researchers may need to expand the scope of their work.

“This particular insect has acquired a larger distribution area at this time than we had thought,” Mr. van Westendorp said."

[guido]

Donald Trump: The Most Mendacious President in U.S. History | The New Yorker

"Seeing Trump’s falsehoods as foibles is folly. Trump’s lies are a feature, not a bug, of his Presidency and, indeed, of his entire public persona. His promotion of a sinister alternate reality divorced from facts is not an aberration that can be corrected. His misstatements are not mere mistakes. As the Post’s book points out, when called on a lie, Trump not only does not back away from it; he has a tendency to repeat it. In more than four hundred instances, the Post’s fact checkers found, he has repeated the same falsehood at least three times. Joe Scarborough is not even the first person whom Trump has falsely accused of murder since he has been President. Yet, when the White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, was asked on Thursday whether Trump would correct the Twitter errors that led to Twitter’s fact check, she adamantly refused. “His intent is always to give truthful information to the American people,” she said."

[72gmc]

Unfortunately topical today: establishment vs. other, property over people. But the audio is well done, and the people are strong.

Beneath the Ballpark - 99% Invisible

[guido]

The Trump Presidency Is the Worst Ever for Public Lands | Outside Online

"According to a new analysis by the Center for American Progress, his administration has removed or is attempting to remove protections from areas of public land equivalent to the size of Florida"

“President Trump is the only president in U.S. history to have removed more public lands than he protected,” reads the analysis.

[guido]

The Intolerable Tensions Between American Cities and their Police Forces | The New Yorker

"The political gap between the liberal mayors who run most big cities and the officers who help police them seems especially pronounced right now, as a cycle of police violence and counter-violence unfolds, in Minneapolis and perhaps beyond, after the killing of George Floyd. As the Black Lives Matter movement matured, from a sequence of protests into a more permanent political orientation, most liberal mayors usually tried hard to keep up, though this pattern seemed to make some police unions more reactionary and outspoken. Meanwhile, visual evidence of police killings, from body cameras or mobile phones, has made the circumstances of those deaths more difficult for anyone to complicate or excuse. A set of written witness statements and investigative reports, reviewed in City Hall, can leave some ambiguity about who is right and who is wrong; a video of a police officer in Minneapolis kneeling for nine minutes on the neck of a man who is not resisting and saying that he can’t breathe, as life drains from him, leaves no room at all. There’s only one honest reaction. The mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, expressed it out loud this week: “Why is the man who killed George Floyd not in jail?”"

[guido]

Opinion | George Floyd's Death, Protests, Coronavirus: America Is a Tinderbox - The New York Times

"The last two and a half months in America have felt like the opening montage in a dystopian film about a nation come undone. First the pandemic hit and hospitals in New York City were overwhelmed. The national economy froze and unemployment soared; one in four American workers has applied for unemployment benefits since March. Lines of cars stretched for miles at food banks. Heavily armed lockdown protesters demonstrated across the country; in Michigan, they forced the Capitol to close and legislators to cancel their session. Nationwide, at least 100,000 people died of a disease almost no one had heard of last year.

Then, this week, a Minneapolis police officer was filmed kneeling on the neck of a black man named George Floyd. As the life went out of him, Floyd pleaded that he couldn’t breathe, echoing the last words of Eric Garner, whose 2014 death at the hands of New York policemen helped catalyze the Black Lives Matter movement. Floyd’s death came only days after three Georgia men were arrested on charges of pursuing and killing a young black man, Ahmaud Arbery, whom they saw out running. A prosecutor had initially declined to charge the men on the grounds that their actions were legal under the state’s self-defense laws.

In Minneapolis protesters poured into the streets, where they met a far harsher police response than anything faced by the country’s gun-toting anti-lockdown activists. On Wednesday night, peaceful demonstrations turned into riots, and on Thursday Minnesota’s governor called in the National Guard.

For a moment, it seemed as if the blithe brutality of Floyd’s death might check the worst impulses of the president and his Blue Lives Matter supporters. The authorities were forced to act: All four of the policemen involved were fired, police chiefs across the country condemned them and William Barr’s Justice Department promised a federal investigation that would be a “top priority.” Even Donald Trump, who has encouraged police brutality in the past, described what happened to Floyd as a “very, very bad thing.”

But on Thursday night, after a county prosecutor said his office was still determining if the four policemen had committed a crime, the uprising in Minneapolis was reignited, and furious people burned a police precinct. (One of the officers was arrested and charged with third-degree murder on Friday.) On Twitter, an addled Trump threatened military violence against those he called “THUGS,” writing, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”"

[guido]

Minneapolis, the Coronavirus, and Trump’s Failure to See a Crisis Coming | The New Yorker

"There, yet again, were the flames. Before the furious conflagrations erupted in Minneapolis, the final weeks of May had already seemed like the answer to a grim math problem: What is the product of a crisis multiplied by a crisis? The official mortality count of the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States swept toward a hundred thousand, while the economic toll had left forty million people out of work. It was difficult to countenance how so much misery could come about so quickly. But on Memorial Day we became video witnesses to the horrific death of George Floyd, at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department. By Friday, the looted shops, the charred buildings and cars, the smoldering Third Precinct—these were evidence of what the world looks like when a crisis is cubed.

These seemingly disparate American trials are not unrelated; they’re bound by their predictability and by the ways in which the Trump Administration has exacerbated them since they began. In March, the President claimed that “nobody knew there would be a pandemic or epidemic of this proportion,” and he has echoed that sentiment throughout the course of the emergency. But virtually everyone paying attention to public health saw something like the novel coronavirus coming. In less than two decades, we have seen epidemics of the SARS, MERS, Ebola, and H1N1 viruses. The Obama Administration created a National Security Council Directorate to mitigate the impact of such events; the Trump Administration largely disbanded it.

On Friday, Trump tweeted that the protesters in Minneapolis were “thugs”—a term with deep-rooted racist connotations—and later noted that the military was present in the city. “When the looting starts,” he warned, “the shooting starts.” This situation, too, is part of a long-building problem whose warning signs have gone unheeded by the current Administration. Progressives have widely criticized the 1994 Crime Bill, which was spearheaded by Joe Biden, but an element of that legislation has been underappreciated. The 1992 Los Angeles riots broke out after the acquittal of four police officers who had violently assaulted Rodney King (an incident that was also captured on video). As has often been the case with riots, the chaotic fury in Los Angeles was not simply a response to one incident but an accretion of anger at innumerable issues with a police department which had gone unaddressed for years. The Crime Bill authorized the civil-rights division of the Department of Justice to intervene in the instance of chronically troubled departments, by negotiating consent decrees that laid out specific reforms to be followed, and provided for monitors to oversee their implementation. Like the precursors to the coronavirus, Los Angeles—and later Ferguson and Baltimore—was an indicator of how such problems could play out without intervention. But, in this area as well, the Trump Administration has functioned like a building contractor who can’t recognize a load-bearing wall."

[ides1056]

"But, in this area as well, the Trump Administration has functioned like a building contractor who can’t recognize a load-bearing wall."

Great writing.

[guido]

An American Uprising | The New Yorker

"“A riot is the language of the unheard.” This is how Martin Luther King, Jr., explained matters to Mike Wallace, of CBS News, in 1966.

That language is now being heard across the United States with an uprising that began in Minneapolis and has spread to dozens of American cities, where there have been hundreds of arrests, curfews declared, National Guard troops summoned. The proximate cause is the video images of yet another black man killed by an officer of the law, the death of George Perry Floyd outside Cup Foods, on Thirty-eighth Street and Chicago Avenue South. Floyd joins Breonna Taylor, Freddie Gray, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Sandra Bland, Laquan McDonald, Tamir Rice—a lineage that goes back decades in the American story.

But before he was a horrific video image, an entry in the history of injustice, George Floyd was born in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and came to Houston with his mother when he was very young. He was raised in the Cuney Homes, a housing project in the Third Ward, a historically black neighborhood. In 1981-82, a woman named Waynel Sexton was Floyd’s second-grade teacher, at Frederick Douglass Elementary School. After hearing of Floyd’s death, Sexton posted on Facebook a facsimile of her pupil’s composition for Black History Month: “When I grow up, I want to be a Supreme Court Judge,” Floyd wrote. “When people say, Your honor, he did rob the bank, I will say, Be seated. And if he doesn’t, I will tell the guard to take him out. Then I will beat my hammer on the desk. Then everybody will be quiet.”

Sexton told me that she was saddened and “appalled” when she saw the video of her former pupil’s death. “I went right upstairs and put my hands on that paper of his. I always keep some memento of my students. I remember I always told the children during Black History Month, ‘Well, we have studied all these famous people. What kind of famous person will you be in the future?’ I remember that he was so influenced by our lesson on Thurgood Marshall.” Under the image of Floyd’s composition, Sexton wrote, “How could his dream have turned into the nightmare of being murdered by a police officer? It just breaks my heart.”"

[guido]

Live From New York, It’s Jazz at a Distance - The New York Times

"The Greenwich Village club Smalls is booking bands inside the venue again, but audiences will still have to stay home.

In a different age, about three months ago, 20 bucks could buy you up to four sets of music at Smalls, the pulsing Greenwich Village basement club celebrated for crowd-pleasing, unfussy jazz. Squeeze into the front row and you’d be close enough to the musicians to sweat on one other. Buy a drink and you were welcome to stick around for a 1 a.m. jam session featuring brash up-and-comers — and maybe guest turns by established stars. That cover charge, and a willingness to pack yourself in, also bought access to the intimate Mezzrow, Smalls’s sister club, just across Seventh Avenue South.

Smalls and Mezzrow haven’t been packed in the last 12 weeks, of course. The clubs shuttered after performances on March 15, and their owner, Spike Wilner, said that even before the mandated shutdown, the crowds had diminished and musicians had been canceling gigs.

But there’s a funny thing about jazz: It keeps roaring back to life. Live music returns to Smalls on June 1, in a socially distant way, thanks to Mr. Wilner’s persistence, the club’s shift into full nonprofit mode and a windfall from a celebrity benefactor — a $25,000 donation to the SmallsLIVE Foundation from Billy Joel.

“That gift was such a positive vibe at a time when things were really dark,” Mr. Wilner said last week. “The impact of the virus has been devastating on the jazz community.”

In a phone interview, Mr. Joel said he felt compelled to support Smalls in its time of need: “Live music is the vitality of New York.” He added: “That great sound is the hum of the city. And during this pandemic, it’s the jazz and classical players who get hit first.”"

[Scott G.]

James Mattis, read it and weep.

James Mattis Denounces Trump as Threat to Constitution - The Atlantic

[mjbabcock]

I wish Esper would write something similar.

[theflashunc]

James Mattis, read it and weep.

James Mattis Denounces Trump as Threat to Constitution - The Atlantic

The Mad Dog is a couple years too late on this one. Sorry James, but you were Secretary of Defense for two years under this clown. The people trying to scramble for the exits and distance themselves from this administration is both incredible to watch and a clear sign we must not forget who served this tin pot regime.

[guido]

If Trump Goes Even Lower, We’d Better Be Prepared | The New Yorker

"What I’d like to talk about is civil disobedience, and its uses in authoritarian states. I’m not talking about what’s going on in this country this week—I have no more interest in telling people currently in the streets that they shouldn’t be destroying property than they have in listening to me. If you live a life, as black Americans clearly do, in which a police officer could kill you for allegedly passing a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill, or if you live a life in which the incompetence of the nation’s leaders has helped precipitate an economic crisis that has left you with no job and no prospect of one—well, I’ve been impressed with how peaceful the vast majority of the people in the streets have been. In fact, Tuesday night may turn out to have been significant. Unintimidated by Trump’s heavy-handedness and local curfews, lots of people once again took to the streets, and a frequent chant—“Why you got your riot gear? We don’t see no riot here”—was both a powerful taunt and accurate reporting."

[ZenNMotion]

The full text:

Arundhati Roy: ‘The pandemic is a portal’ | Free to read | Financial Times

I just ran into this from another source, and I think it's worth a bump to encourage more to read it. It's a more global view that's largely missing from the US-based media signal noise. This quote will stick with me:


"Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.

We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it."