#maybe the first is delayed because its coming from Washington state

[plushie-lovey]

One of my soup cousin's delivery got delayed til next Wednesday ;-;

[aion-rsa]

Summer Movie Preview: From Black Widow to The Suicide Squad and Beyond

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The summer movie season has returned. Finally. Once something we all just took for granted, like handshakes and indoor dining, a summertime season stuffed with pricy Hollywood blockbusters and cinematic escapism suddenly feels like a long lost friend. But, rest assured, the summer movie season is genuinely and truly here. It’s maybe a little later than normal, yet it’s still in time for Memorial Day in the States.

This is of course happy news since many of the big screen events of this year have been 12 months or more in the offing. A Quiet Place Part II was supposed to open two Marches ago, and In the Heights is opening almost an exact year to the day from its original release. They’re here now, as is an impressive assortment of new films. There are genre fans’ long lost superhero spectacles, with Black Widow and The Suicide Squad leading the pack (and Shang-Chi closing out the season unusually late in time for Labor Day weekend), and there are also horror movies like The Conjuring 3 and M. Night Shyamalan’s Old, aforementioned musicals, family adventures in Jungle Cruise, psychedelic Arthurian legends via The Green Knight, and a few legitimately original projects like Stillwater and Reminiscence. Imagine that!

So sit back, put your feet in the pool, or up by the grill pit, and toast with us the summer movie’s resurrection.

A Quiet Place Part II

May 28 (June 3 in the UK)

Fourteen months after its original release date, the first movie delayed by the pandemic is finally coming to theaters for Memorial Day weekend. And despite what some critics say (even our own), most of us would argue it’s worth the wait. As a movie about a family enduring after a global crisis that has left their lives in tatters, and marred by personal tragedy, A Quiet Place Part II hits differently in 2021 than it would have a year ago. And it’s undeniably optimistic view of humanity feels like a warm balm now.

But beyond the meta context, writer-director John Krasinski (flying solo as screenwriter this time) has engineered a series of intelligent and highly suspenseful set pieces which puts Millicent Simmonds’ Regan front and center. Also buoyed by subtle and affecting work by Emily Blunt and Cillian Murphy, here as a neighbor they knew a few years and a lifetime ago, this is one worth dipping your toe back into cinema for, especially if you liked the first movie.

Cruella

May 28

We’ll admit it, we had the same initial skepticism you’re probably feeling about a Cruella de Vil origin story set in punk rock’s 1970s London. But put your cynicism aside, Disney’s Cruella is a decadent blast and the rarest of things: a live-action Disney remake that both honors its source material and does something creative with it. Neither a soulless scene-by-scene remake of a better animated film, or a lazy Maleficent like re-imagining, Cruella more often than not rocks, thanks in large part to its lead performance by Emma Stone.

Also a producer on the picture, Stone takes on the role of Cruella de Vil like it’ll be on an awards reel and absolutely flaunts the character’s madness and devilish charm. She also finds an excellent sparring partner via Emma Thompson, young Cruella’s very own Miranda Priestly. Once these two start their verbal battle at the end of the first act, the movie is elevated into an electric period comedy (with plenty of heavy handed period music). It’s a pseudo-thriller for all ages, enjoying some very sharp elbows for a kids movie.

The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It

June 4 (May 26 in the UK)

The latest big-screen adventure for real-life ghostbusters Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) sees the two drawn into the unusual case of the first ever U.S. murder trial where the defendant claimed he was innocent because he was possessed by a demon. This is the eighth movie in The Conjuring expanded universe—director Michael Chaves has already made a foray into this supernatural world with The Curse of La Llorona—and as with all the main Conjuring films, the hook is that it’s (very loosely) based on a true case that the Warrens were involved with.

Peter Safran and James Wan are back on board as producers, although with this being the first time Wan isn’t directing one of the main Ed and Lorraine investigations, we’re a little cautious about this return to the haunted museum.

In the Heights

June 11 (June 18 in the UK)

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s first Tony award winning musical is getting the proper big screen treatment in In the Heights. A full-fledged movie musical—as opposed to a taped series of performances, a la Disney+’s Hamilton—In the Heights is like a sweet summer drink (or Piragua) and love letter to the Latino community of New York City’s Washington Heights neighborhood.

Read more

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Best Movie Musicals of the 21st Century

By David Crow

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The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It and the Perils of Taking on a Real Life Murder

By Rosie Fletcher

Closer in spirit to the feel-good summertime joy of Grease than the narratively complex Hamilton, this is perfect multiplex escapism (which will also be on HBO Max if you’re so inclined). Directed by Crazy Rich Asians’ Jon M. Chu, In the Heights has a euphoric sense of movement and dance as it transfers Miranda’s hybrid blend of freestyle rap, salsa rhythm, and Caribbean musical cues to the actual city blocks the show was written about. On one of those corners lives Usnavi (Anthony Ramos), a bodega owner with big dreams. He’s about to have the summer of his life. You might too.

Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard

June 16 (June 21 in the UK)

You know Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard is a throwback when even its trailer brings back the “trailer voice.” But then the appeal of the 2017 B-action comedy, The Hitman’s Bodyguard, was its very throwback nature: a violent, raunchy R-rated buddy comedy that starred Samuel L. Jackson and Ryan Reynolds, who exchanged quips as much as bullets between some genuinely entertaining stunts.

Hopefully the sequel can also be as much lowbrow fun as it doubles down on the premise, with Reynolds’ Michael Bryce now guarding Samla Hayek’s Sonia, the wife of Jackson’s Darius. All three are on a road trip through Italy as they’re chased by Antonio Banderas in what is sure to be a series of bloody, explosive set pieces. Probably a few “motherf***ers” will be dropped too.

Luca

June 18

Pixar Studios’ hit rate is frankly incredible. With each new film seemingly comes a catchy song, an Oscar nomination, and a flood of tears from anyone with a heart—and there’s no reason to believe that its next offering will be any different. Luca is a coming-of-age tale set on the Italian Riviera about a pair of young lads who become best friends and have a terrific summer getting into adventures in the sun. The slight catch is that they’re both sea monsters.

Read more

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How Luca Became the First Pixar Movie Made at Home

By Don Kaye

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Pixar, Italian Style: Why Luca is Set in 1950s Italy

By Don Kaye

This is the feature directorial debut of Enrico Casarosa, who says the movie is a celebration of friendship with nods to the work of Federico Fellini and Hayao Miyazaki. The writers are Jesse Andrews and Mike Jones—Andrews is new to Pixar but has experience with coming-of-agers, having penned Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, while Jones co-wrote Soul. Jacob Tremblay and Jack Dylan Grazer voice the young boys (sea monsters)—13-year-old Luca and his older teenager friend Alberto—with Maya Rudolph as Luca’s sea monster mom. After a year of lockdown, this could be the summer movie we all need.

F9

June 25

You better start firing up the grill, because the Fast and Furious crew is finally ready to have another summer barbecue. And this time, it’s not only the folks whom Dom Toretto calls “mi familia” in attendance. The big new addition to F9 is 

John Cena as Jakob Toretto. As the long-lost little brother we didn’t know Vin Diesel’s Dom had, Jakob is revealed to be a superspy, assassin, and performance driver working for Dom’s arch-nemesis, Cypher (Charlize Theron). Everything the Family does together, Jakob does alone, as a one-man wrecking crew, and he’s coming in hot.

Fans will probably be happier, though, to see Sung Kang back as Han Seoul-Oh, the wheelman who was murdered in Fast & Furious 6, and then pretty much forgotten in The Fate of the Furious when his killer got invited to the cookout. It’s an injustice that brought veteran series director Justin Lin back to  the franchise to resurrect the dead. So it’s safe to assume he won’t be asking Cypher to bring the potato salad.

The Forever Purge

July 2 (July 16 in the UK)

We know what you’re thinking: Didn’t The Purge: Election Year end the Purge forever? That or “are they really still making these?” The answer to both questions is yes. Nevertheless, here we are with The Forever Purge, a movie which asks what happens if Purgers just, you know, committed extravagant holiday crime on the other 364 days of the year? You get what is hopefully the grand finale of this increasingly tired concept.

The Tomorrow War

July 2

Hear me out: What if it’s like The Terminator but in reverse? That had to be the pitch for this one, right? In The Tomorrow War, instead of evil cyborgs time traveling to the past to kill our future savior, soldiers from the future time travel to the past to enlist our current best warrior and take him to a world on the brink 30 years from now.

It’s a crazy premise, and the kind of high-concept popcorn that one imagines Chris Pratt excels at. Hence Pratt’s casting as Dan, one of the best soldiers of the early 21st century who’ll go into the future to stop an alien invasion. The supporting cast, which includes Oscar winner J.K. Simmons and Yvonne Strahovski, Betty Gilpin, and Sam Richardson, is also nothing to sneeze at.

Black Widow

July 9

The idea of making a Black Widow movie has been around since long before the Marvel Cinematic Universe first lifted into the sky on Tony Stark’s repulsors. The character has been onscreen for more than a decade now, and Marvel Studios has for too long danced around making a solo Widow, at least in part due to the machinations of Marvel Entertainment chairman Ike Perlmutter.

Read more

Movies

How Black Widow Could Build The MCU’s Future

By Kayti Burt

Movies

Upcoming Marvel Movies Release Dates: MCU Phase 4 Schedule, Cast, and Story Details

By Mike Cecchini and 1 other

But the standalone Black Widow adventure is here at last, and it now serves as a sort-of coda to the story of Natasha Romanoff, since we already know her tragic fate in Avengers: Endgame. Directed by Cate Shortland (Berlin Syndrome, Lore), the movie will spell out how Natasha (Scarlett Johansson) kept herself busy between the events of Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War, primarily with a trip home to Russia to clear some of that red from her ledger.

There, she will reunite with figures from her dark past, including fellow Red Room alumnus Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), Russian would-be superhero Alexei Shostakov, aka the Red Guardian (David Harbour), and Melina Vostokoff (Rachel Weisz), another survivor of the Black Widow program and a maternal figure to Natasha and Yelena.

It’s a chance to say goodbye to Nat and see Johansson as the beloved Avengers one more time. But this being Marvel, we suspect that the studio has a few tricks up its sleeve and in this movie about the future of Phase 4.

Space Jam: A New Legacy

July 16

In the annals of synergistic branding, Space Jam: A New Legacy might be one for the record books. A sequel to an older millennials’ 1990s touchstones—the thoroughly mediocre Michael Jordan meets Bugs Bunny movie, Space Jam—this sequel sees LeBron James now trapped in Looney Tunes world… but wait, there’s more! Instead of only charmingly interacting with WB’s classic stable of cartoon characters, King James will also be in the larger “WB universe” where the studio will resurrect from the dead every property they own the copyright to, from MGM’s classic 1939 The Wizard of Oz to, uh, the murderous rapists in A Clockwork Orange.

… yay for easter eggs?

Old

July 23

Though he might be accused of being a little bit hit-and-miss in the past, the release of a new M. Night Shyamalan movie should always be cause for celebration. Especially one with such a deeply creepy premise. Based on the graphic novel Sandcastle by Pierre Oscar Levy and Frederik Peeters, Old sees a family on vacation discover that the beach they are on causes them to age extremely rapidly and live out their entire lives in a day.

This is surely perfect fodder for Shyamalan, who does high-concept horror like no one else. The cast is absolute quality, featuring Gael García Bernal, Hereditary’s Alex Wolff, Jo Jo Rabbit’s Thomasin McKenzie, Phantom Thread’s Vicky Krieps, Little Women’s Eliza Scanlen, and many more. The trailer is pleasingly disturbing too as children become teenagers, a young woman is suddenly full-term pregnant, and adults seem to be decaying in front of their own eyes. Harrowing in the best possible way.

Snake Eyes

July 23 (August 20 in the UK)

Snake Eyes will finally bring us the origin story of the G.I. Joe franchise’s most iconic and beloved member. Henry Golding (Crazy Rich Asians) stars in the title role, with Warrior’s Andrew Koji as his nemesis—conflicted baddie (and similar fan fave) Storm Shadow. Expect a tale heavy on martial arts badassery, especially with The Raid’s Iko Uwais on board as the pair’s ninja master. Samara Weaving will play G.I. Joe staple Scarlett after her breakout a few years ago in Ready or Not, while Úrsula Corberó has been cast as Cobra’s Baroness. Robert Schwentke (The Time Traveler’s Wife, Red) directs.

Jungle Cruise

July 30

Jungle Cruise director Jaume Collet-Serra is best known for making slightly dodgy actioners starring Liam Neeson (Unknown, Non-Stop, Run All Night) and half-decent horror movies (Orphan, The Shallows), so exactly which direction this family adventure based on a theme park ride will take remains to be seen.

Borrowing a page and premise from Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen (1951), Jungle Cruise stars the ever-charismatic Dwayne Johnson as a riverboat captain taking Emily Blunt’s scientist and her brother (Jack Whitehall) to visit the fabled Tree of Life in the early 20th century. Like the ride, the gang will have to watch out for wild animals along the way.

Unlike the ride, they’re competing with a German expedition team who are heading for the same goal. A solid supporting cast (Jesse Plemons, Édgar Ramírez, Paul Giamatti, Andy Nyman) and a script with rewrites by Michael Green (Logan, Blade Runner 2049) might mean Disney has another hit on its hands. Either way, a lovely boat trip with The Rock should be diverting at worst.

The Green Knight

July 30 (August 6 in the UK)

There have been several major Hollywood reimaginings of Arthurian legends in the 21st century. And every one of them has been thoroughly rotten for one reason or another. Luckily, David Lowery’s The Green Knight looks poised to break the trend with a trippy, but twistedly faithful, interpretation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Dev Patel stars as Sir Gawain, a chivalrous knight in King Arthur’s court who takes up the challenge of the mysterious Green Knight (The Witch’s Ralph Ineson under mountains of makeup): He’ll swing a blow and risk receiving a returning strike in a year’s time. Gawain attempts to cheat the devil by cutting his head clean off, yet when the Green Knight lifts his severed head from Camelot’s floors, things start to get weird. As clearly one of A24’s biggest visual fever dreams to date, this is one we’re highly anticipating.

Stillwater

July 30 (August 6 in the UK)

The Oscar winning-writer director behind Spotlight, Tom McCarthy, returns to the big screen with a fictional story that feels awfully similar to real world events. In this film, Matt Damon plays Bill, a proud father who saw his daughter Allison (Abigail Breslin) go abroad to study in France. After she’s accused of murdering her roommate by local authorities, the deeply Southern and deeply Oklahoman father must travel to a foreign land to try and prove his daughter’s innocence.

It obviously has some parallels with the Amanda Knox story but it also looks like a potentially hard hitting original drama with a talented cast. Fingers crossed.

The Suicide Squad

August 6 (July 30 in the UK)

You might have seen a Suicide Squad movie in the past, but you’ve never seen James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad. With a liberating R-rating and an old school vision from the Guardians of the Galaxy director—who likens this to 1960s war capers, such as The Dirty Dozen or Where Eagles Dare—this Suicide Squad is absolutely stacked with talented actors wallowing in DC weirdness. One of the key players in this is Polka-Dot Man, another is a walking, talking Great White Shark, voiced by Sylvester Stallone. The villain is a Godzilla-sized starfish from space!

Read more

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Margot Robbie Wants Poison Ivy to Join Harley Quinn in the DCEU

By Kayti Burt

Movies

What to Expect from the Candyman Reimagining

By David Crow

So like it’s namesake, there’s probably a lot of characters who aren’t going to pull through this one. Even so, we can rest easy knowing that Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn will be as winsome than ever, and the likes of Idris Elba and John Cena will add some dynamic gravitas to the eccentric DC Extended Universe.

Free Guy

August 13

Perhaps pitched as The Truman Show for the video game age, Free Guy stars Ryan Reynolds as an easygoing, happy-go-lucky “Guy” who discovers… he’s a video game NPC living inside the equivalent of a Grand Theft Auto video game. This might explain why the bank he works at keeps getting robbed all the time. But as a virtual sprite who’s developed sentiency, he just might be able to win over enough gamers to not shoot him, and make love not war.

It’s an amusing premise, and hopefully director Shawn Levy can bring to it the same level of charm he achieved with the very first Night at the Museum movie.

Respect

August 13 (September 10 in the UK)

Before her passing in 2018, Aretha Franklin gave her blessing to Jennifer Hudson to play the Queen of Soul. Now that musical biopic is here with Hudson hitting the same high notes of the legend who sang such standards as “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,” “Think,” “I Say a Little Prayer,” and of course “Respect.”

The film comes with a lot of expectation and a lot of pedigree, with Forest Whitaker and Audra McDonald in the cast. Most of all though, it comes with that rich musical library, which will surely take center stage. And if movies like Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman have taught us anything, it’s that moviegoers love when you play the hits.

Reminiscence

August 20 (August 18 in the UK)

Lisa Joy is one of the most exciting voices on television today. One-half of the creative team behind Westworld, Joy steps into her own with her directorial debut (and as the solo writer) in Reminiscence, a science fiction film with a reliably knotty premise.

Hugh Jackman plays Nick Bannister, a man who lives in a dystopian future where the oceans have risen and the cities are crumbling. In a declining Miami, he sells a risky new technology that allows you to relive your past (and possibly change it, at least fancifully?). But when he discovers the lost love of his life (Rebecca Ferguson) is cropping up in other peoples’ memories, which seem to implicate her in a murder, well… things are bound to start getting weird. We don’t know a whole lot more, but we cannot wait to find out more.

Candyman

August 27

Announced back in 2018, this spiritual sequel to Bernard Rose’s 1992 original is one of the most exciting and anticipated movies on the calendar. Produced by Jordan Peele and directed by Nia DaCosta, the film takes place in the present day and about a decade after Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing projects have been torn down. Watchmen’s Yahya Abdul-Mateen II plays an up-and-coming visual artist who moves to the now-gentrified area with his partner and is inspired by the legend of Candyman, an apparition with a hook for a hand, to create new work about the subject. But in doing so, he risks unleashing a dark history and a new wave of violence.

Tony Todd, the star of the original movie, will also reprise his role in a reboot that aims to inspire fear for only the right reasons.

The Beatles: Get Back

August 27

Director Peter Jackson thinks folks have a poisoned idea about the Beatles in their final days. Often portrayed as divided and antagonistic toward one another during the recordings of their last albums, particularly Let It Be (which was their penultimate studio recording and final release), Jackson insists this misconception is influenced by Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s 1970 documentary named after the album.

So, after going through the reams of footage Lindsay-Hogg shot but didn’t use, Jackson has crafted this new documentary about the album’s recording which is intended to paint a fuller (and more feel-good) portrait of the band which changed the world. Plus, the music’s going to be great… 

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

September 3

The greatest fighter in Marvel history finally hits the big screen with Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Simu Liu (Kim’s Convenience) takes on the title role of a character destined for a bright future in the MCU. Marvel fans might note that the “Ten Rings” of the title is the same organization that first appeared all the way back in Iron Man, and Tony Leung will finally bring their villainous leader, The Mandarin, to life. Awkwafina of The Farewell and Crazy Rich Asians fame also stars. Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton (Short Term 12), this should deliver martial arts action unlike anything we’ve seen so far in the MCU.

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[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

July 25, 2021

Heather Cox Richardson

Both Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia and Republican Senator Rob Portman of Ohio told television hosts today that they expect an infrastructure deal on the $579 billion bill this week. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has said that he will delay the Senate’s upcoming recess until this bipartisan bill and another, larger bill that focuses on human infrastructure are passed. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) says she will not hold a vote on the smaller infrastructure bill until the larger bill, which is a priority for Democrats, passes the Senate.

There are a lot of moving pieces in this infrastructure bill that have more to do with politics than with infrastructure.

First, what is holding up the bill in the Senate is a disagreement about the proper ratio of funding for roads and public transportation. When Congress passed the Federal-Aid Highway Act in 1956, starting the creation of 41,000 miles of interstate highways, lawmakers thought that gasoline taxes would pay for the construction and upkeep of the highways. Congress raised the gas tax four times, in 1959, 1983, 1990, and 1993. But, beginning in 2008, as fuel efficiency went up, the gas tax no longer covered expenses. Congress made up shortfalls with money from general funds.

In 1983, in order to gain support for an increase of $.05 in the gas tax from lawmakers from the Northeast who wanted money for mass transit, Congress agreed to establish a separate fund for public transportation that would get one out of every five cents collected from the gas tax. This 80% to 20% ratio has lasted ever since.

Now, Republican negotiators are demanding less money for public transportation and more for roads, sparking outrage from Democrats who note that a bipartisan agreement has stood for almost 40 years and that changing the ratio between public transportation and roads will move us backward. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, in 2019, fossil fuels used in transportation produced 29% of U.S. greenhouse gases.

Portman, the lead Republican negotiator, says that Republicans have made a “generous offer” and that it will provide a “significant increase” in transit money. "Democrats, frankly, are not being reasonable in their requests right now,” he said.

Republicans want to deliver money to rural areas where people depend on driving, even though there are far more people who live in areas that benefit from public transportation. Rural areas, of course, are far more likely than urban areas to be full of Republican voters.

Democrats in the House are eager to address climate change. On July 21, Chair of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure Peter DeFazio (D-OR) and 30 Democratic members of the committee wrote to Pelosi and Schumer to urge them to include instead the terms of the INVEST in America Act the House passed on a bipartisan basis earlier this month. That bill offered a forward-looking transportation package that expanded public transportation even as it called for road and bridge repair. “We can’t afford to lock in failed highway-centric policies for another five years,” they wrote.

But there is a larger story behind this transportation bill than the attempt of Republicans to change a longstanding formula to keep themselves in power. Republicans who are not openly tying themselves to the former president want to pass this measure because they know it is popular and they do not want Democrats to pass another popular law alone, as they did with the American Rescue Plan when Republicans refused to participate.

Democratic leadership wants to work with those Republicans to pass a bipartisan bill because it will help to drive a wedge though the Republican Party, offering an exit ramp for those who would like to leave behind the increasing extremism of the Trump Republicans.

Trump Republicans are, indeed, becoming more extreme as the House’s select committee on January 6 takes shape. After the Senate rejected a bipartisan commission to investigate the insurrection, House Speaker Pelosi and the House voted to establish a select committee. Its structure was based on one of the many committees established by the Republican-controlled House to investigate the attack on U.S. government facilities in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012. It permitted the minority to name 5 members, to be approved by the Speaker.

Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) tried to undercut the committee by appointing three members who had challenged the counting of the certified votes on January 6, including Jim Jordan (R-OH), who was at a December meeting with Trump and other lawmakers when they discussed protesting the vote count on January 6, and Jim Banks (R-IN), who attacked the committee, saying: “Make no mistake, Nancy Pelosi created this committee solely to malign conservatives and to justify the Left’s authoritarian agenda.” When Pelosi rejected Jordan and Banks, McCarthy pulled all five of his appointees.

But Pelosi had already established the committee’s bipartisanship when she appointed Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), a staunch Republican who voted with Trump more than 90% of the time but who openly blamed him for the January 6 insurrection. Today, Pelosi added Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) to the committee as well.

Kinzinger is an Iraq War veteran who was one of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump in January. "Let me be clear, I'm a Republican dedicated to conservative values, but I swore an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution—and while this is not the position I expected to be in or sought out, when duty calls, I will always answer," Kinzinger said in a statement.

McCarthy promptly tweeted that the committee had no credibility because Pelosi had “structured the select committee to satisfy her political objectives.”

McCarthy is scrambling, not least because he will almost certainly become a witness for the committee.

But there is more. With Trump out of office, pressure is ramping up on those who advanced his agenda. News broke on Thursday that the FBI had received more than 4500 tips about Brett Kavanaugh during his nomination proceeding for confirmation to the Supreme Court, and had forwarded the most “relevant” of those to the White House lawyers, who buried them, enabling the extremist Kavanaugh to squeak into a lifetime appointment to the court.

In Georgia, law enforcement officers indicted 87 people in what they are calling the largest gang bust ever in the state. Seventy-seven are part of the “Ghostface Gangsters” gang of white supremacists whose network stretched from Georgia to South Carolina to Tennessee. “The gang’s culture, structure, leadership, chain of command, and all involved in the furtherance of this ongoing criminal enterprise have been charged,” law enforcement officers said.

Meanwhile, vaccinated Americans are becoming increasingly angry at the unvaccinated Trump supporters who are keeping the nation from achieving herd immunity from the coronavirus. Some Republicans are starting to call for their supporters to get vaccinated.

As pressure mounts, McCarthy is not the only one who has signed onto the post–January 6 Trump party who is ramping up his rhetoric. This weekend, when presented with a gun, Trump’s disgraced former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn told the crowd, “Maybe I’ll find somebody in Washington, D.C.”

Representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ), who has been linked to the planning for the January 6 insurrection, suggested at an Arizona rally for the former president last night that the rioters were peaceful and that the real criminals were “insiders from the FBI and DOJ.” It seems likely he is hoping to discredit those organizations before more information comes out.

At the same rally, the former president spoke for almost two hours, reiterating his lie that he won the 2020 election and suggesting he would be reinstated into the White House before the next election. (He was weirdly fixated on routers.) He blamed Arizona Governor Doug Ducey, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, former Vice President Mike Pence, and Kavanaugh for his loss of the White House, and praised his former lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

“The radical left Democrat communist party rigged and stole the election,” he said.

A final note tonight: We lost a great American, Bob Moses, today. I don’t want to tack him on to tonight’s letter; he deserves his own. So hold this space. Until then, Rest in Power, Dr. Moses.

—-

Notes:

https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R45350.pdf

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions

https://transportation.house.gov/news/press-releases/chair-defazio-leads-30-transportation-and-infrastructure-committee-members-in-urging-congressional-leadership-to-include-transformational-policies-from-the-invest-in-america-act-in-infrastructure-legislation

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/transit-money-emerges-last-major-obstacle-bipartisan-senate-infrastructure-deal-n1274788

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/senators-hopeful-bipartisan-infrastructure-spending-bill-could-land-monday-n1274960

https://www.npr.org/2021/07/25/1020464213/nancy-pelosi-adam-kinzinger-january-6-committee

Ron Filipkowski @RonFilipkowskiMichael Flynn is presented with a rifle as a gift in Yuba, CA, and says that now “maybe I’ll find somebody in Washington, DC.”  609 Retweets1,212 Likes

July 25th 2021

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/01/13/ali-alexander-capitol-biggs-gosar/

Aaron Rupar @atruparRep. Paul Gosar turns reality on its head by portraying January 6 as a mostly peaceful affair, then pushes an absurd conspiracy theory that the real criminals on that day were "insiders from the FBI and DOJ" 1,182 Retweets4,650 Likes

July 24th 2021

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/22/us/politics/kavanaugh-fbi-investigation.html

https://www.wrdw.com/2021/07/22/georgia-gov-kemp-will-visit-augusta-discuss-large-scale-gang-bust/

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/24/trump-election-claims-rally-500719

https://www.wrdw.com/2021/07/23/87-locals-charged-biggest-gang-bust-state-history/

Aaron Rupar @atruparTrump has been speaking for more than 90 minutes now. He's currently goading his audience into booing the US women's soccer team. 735 Retweets3,061 Likes

July 25th 2021

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[sciencespies]

Europe proposes launcher alliance

https://sciencespies.com/space/europe-proposes-launcher-alliance/

Europe proposes launcher alliance

WASHINGTON — The European Union is proposing a “launcher alliance” involving companies and governments to develop the next generation of European launch vehicles, although some European startups are skeptical of those plans.

In a June 22 speech highlighting the EU’s space programs, including the signing of a Financial Framework Partnership Agreement with the European Space Agency, the EU commissioner responsible for space highlighted the launcher alliance as part of a “ambitious and disruptive space agenda.”

“There is no space policy without autonomous access to space,” said Thierry Breton, commissioner for the internal market. “However, it is a segment under massive business and technological changes.”

He said the EU had a “fantastic” launch vehicle industry, but that given growing global completion, Europe needed a “more offensive and aggressive strategy.” He called for cooperation among EU member states to support that strategy.

“This is why I proposed an alliance for launchers to have a shared road map for the next generation of EU launchers, a road map building on both traditional and NewSpace actors,” he said. “The initiative will involve all member states, national space agencies, ESA and industry.”

Exactly what the launcher alliance’s activities will be was not clear, although Breton said that EU funding will be available for the first time to support the industry, from research and development to block buys of vehicles for EU’s flagship satellite programs.

At a brief press conference after his remarks, Breton said the EU was working to have “all of the players involved around the table” for the alliance. “We are now working on the terms of the alliance, and hopefully we’ll launch it very quickly because we don’t have time to lose.”

Breton first mentioned the concept of the launcher alliance at the beginning of the year, but he and other EU officials have provided few details since. At the NewSpace Atlantic Summit June 8, Matthias Petschke, director of space in the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Defence Industry and Space, compared it to other industry alliances established in Europe for industries ranging from batteries to plastics.

“They bring together the public sector and the industry, the big established companies and the small new companies,” he said of such alliances. “With this initiative, we are going to look into a number of challenges for the European launcher industry.”

Those challenges, he said, include government demand for launchers in Europe that is significantly less than in the United States. The EU’s new secure connectivity initiative, which will eventually feature a satellite constellation providing communications services, could help stimulate demand.

Petschke said the alliance will also examine ways to make launchers more competitive, such as lowering prices, as well as ways to promote more investment into launch vehicles.

Petschke appeared on a panel with representatives of some European startups pursuing small launch vehicles. Those companies seemed skeptical about the benefits of the proposed alliance.

“I would like to know more details about that alliance,” said Raúl Torres, chief executive of Spanish launch startup PLD Space. “To me, it sounds a bit complex to put everyone into the same context and try to develop something like a new launcher.”

Jörn Spurmann, chief commercial officer of RFA, a German small launch vehicle startup, said the launcher alliance needed to focus on attracting business for European launch companies. “I think we should very actively go away from fully funding launch system and satellite projects but rather a commercial scenario,” he said.

“Cooperation is good, but competition is also good,” Torres said. “Maybe we have to allow competition in Europe, and cooperation if it’s needed. In my opinion, competition is more important than cooperation at this stage.”

ESA’s near-term focus

Josef Aschbacher, ESA director general, agreed that Europe needed to do more to make its launch industry competitive. “We used to dominate the launcher market, at least from a commercial perspective. Today, not anymore, and that’s something where Europe needs to seriously work on,” he said during a panel session of the Paris Air Forum June 21.

However, he said his immediate priority is to bring into service the Ariane 6 launch vehicle. “Ariane 6 is our most important launcher to come. We have to put all the energy and all the emphasis into making the maiden flight as soon as possible and making sure that everything works well,” he said.

He revealed that, working in cooperation with prime contractor ArianeGroup and the French space agency CNES, ESA has established an independent assessment of the schedule for the Ariane 6. ESA announced in October 2020 that the vehicle’s first flight, once planned for 2020, had slipped to the second quarter of 2022.

Aschbacher suggested that schedule could see more delays. The independent assessment, he said, will “make sure that we can do everything we need to do to launch on time.” He later defined “on time” as being before the next ESA ministerial meeting, which is tentatively scheduled for late 2022.

“This is a must, because we need good news and good success for our politicians to see that Europe performs, that Europe delivers and, therefore, it is worth investing in space in the ministerial conference,” he said. “This, for me, is a top, top priority.”

#Space

[introvertguide]

The French Connection (1971); AFI #93

The current movie under review  is one of the biggest award winning police action dramas ever created, The French Connection (1971). The film was nominated for 8 Academy Awards and won 5 Oscars in 1972 for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Gene Hackman), Best Screenplay, and Best Editing. The story also includes Roy Scheider prior to his Jaws fame as a buddy sidekick. In fact, this movie was part of a string of great “buddy” movies that included In the Heat of the Night (1967), Midnight Cowboy (1969), Butch Cassidy NS the Sundance Kid (1969), The Sting (1973), and All the President’s Men (1976). The French Connection has a lot of interesting Americana connections that I want to discuss, but first let’s go over the plot. Of course that means the usual:

SPOILER ALERT!!! LEGITAMATELY!!! A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THE GENERAL STORY AND PROBABLY THE PLOT OUTLINE WITHOUT EVER SEEING THE FILM!!! CHECK OUT THE FILM FIRST AND THEN COME BACK TO AVOID SPOILER DETAILS!!!

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The movie starts in France where an undercover detective is following a heroine smuggler named Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey). This detective is then followed home by Charnier's hitman, Pierre Nicoli (Marcel Bozzuffi), and is assassinated. Charnier plans to smuggle $32 million worth of heroin into the United States by hiding it in the car of his unsuspecting friend, television personality Henri Devereaux, who is traveling to New York City by ship.

Flash to New York City, where we see detectives Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle (Gene Hackman) and Buddy "Cloudy" Russo are staking out a club trying to nab a perp. They get a tip that some low level mobsters are part of a deal to sell a bunch of French heroin to gangs in America. Out at the Copacabana, Popeye notices Salvatore "Sal" Boca and his young wife, Angie, entertaining mobsters involved in narcotics. They tail the couple and establish a link between the Bocas and lawyer Joel Weinstock, who is part of the narcotics underworld.

Popeye goes to a bar that seems to serve only black patrons and shakes down everybody there. He secretly has an informant in the group and learns that a massive shipment of heroin will arrive in the next two weeks. The detectives convince their supervisor to wiretap the Bocas' phones. Popeye and Cloudy are joined by federal agents Mulderig and Klein, both of whom Popeye is not a fan of.

The drug car arrives in New York City. Boca is impatient to make the purchase—reflecting Charnier's desire to return to France as soon as possible—while Weinstock, with more experience in smuggling, urges patience, knowing Boca's phone is tapped and that they are being investigated.

Charnier realizes he is being observed. He "makes" Popeye and escapes on a departing subway shuttle. To avoid being tailed, he has Boca meet him in Washington D.C., where Boca asks for a delay to avoid the police. Charnier, however, wants to conclude the deal quickly. On the flight back to New York City, Nicoli offers to kill Popeye, but Charnier objects, knowing that Popeye would be replaced by another policeman. Nicoli insists, however, saying they will be back in France before a replacement is assigned.

Soon after, Nicoli attempts to shoot Popeye but misses and hits an innocent bystander instead. Popeye chases Nicoli up on a roof and eventually onto an elevated train that Nicoli makes and Popeye does not. Popeye commandeers a car and races to the next stop while barely avoiding traffic. Realizing he is being pursued, Nicoli works his way forward through the carriages, shoots a policeman who tries to intervene, and hijacks the motorman at gunpoint, forcing him to drive straight through the next station, also shooting the train conductor. The motorman passes out and they are just about to slam into a stationary train when an emergency trackside brake engages, hurling the assassin against a glass window. Popeye arrives to see the killer descending from the platform in an attempt to escape. When the killer sees Popeye, he turns to run but is shot dead by Popeye.

Popeye and Cloudy have a lengthy stakeout of the car that connects all the mobsters and has the opportunity to impound it when some gangsters see it and attempt to strip it. He and his team take it apart searching for the drugs, but come up empty-handed. Cloudy notes that the vehicle's shipping weight is 120 pounds over its listed manufacturer's weight. They remove the rocker panels and discover the heroin concealed therein. The police restore the car to its original condition and return it to Devereaux, who delivers the Lincoln Continental to Charnier.

Charnier drives to an old factory on Wards Island to meet Weinstock and deliver the drugs. After Charnier has the rocker panels removed, Weinstock's chemist tests one of the bags and confirms its quality. Charnier removes the drugs and hides the money, concealing it beneath the rocker panels of another car purchased at an auction of junk cars, which he will take back to France. Charnier and Sal drive off in the Lincoln, but hit a roadblock with a large contingent of police led by Popeye. The police chase the Lincoln back to the factory, where Boca is killed during a shootout while most of the other criminals surrender.

Charnier escapes into the warehouse with Popeye and Cloudy in pursuit. Popeye sees a shadowy figure in the distance and opens fire a split-second after shouting a warning, killing one of the feds, Mulderig, that he had been partnered with. Undaunted, Popeye tells Cloudy that he will get Charnier. After reloading his gun, Popeye runs into another room and a single gunshot is heard.

Title cards note that Weinstock was indicted but his case dismissed for "lack of proper evidence"; Angie Boca received a suspended sentence for an unspecified misdemeanor; Lou Boca received a reduced sentence; Devereaux served four years in a federal penitentiary for conspiracy; and Charnier was never caught. Popeye and Cloudy were transferred out of the narcotics division and reassigned.

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So this film has some of the most well known scenes in cinema history and I say this because they are copied a lot. The first scene when Popeye and Cloudy are on a stakeout, Popeye is disguised as Santa and receives a knife wound in his hand. This came back years later in Hot Fuzz! when Simon Pegg, as a police officer, was stabbed through the hand by a man dressed as Santa. In the Jackie Chan film Rush Hour, Chris Tucker goes into a bar pretending to shake down the group when he actually knows the group and jokingly asks his informant questions. 

Maybe one of the biggest aspects of the realism of the movie that director Friedkin insisted upon, was that the two cops that Popeye and Cloudy were based upon were in the movie. Jimmy Doyle was based on a cop named Eddie Egan and Buddy Rosso was based upon his partner Sonny Grosso. Egan and Grosso broke up the actual French Connection back in 1951. A book by Robin Moore that shares the name of the movie details the bust and this is what the movie was based on. For extra realism, the two real cops played the chief and one of the feds. Well, I say promote realism although Friedkin did not like the book and didn’t follow it as closely as he claims. There was no chase or shootout in the book. That was all there for drama.

The ending title cards were very interesting because it reminds the audience that 1) Friedkin cut his teeth with documentaries 2) the movie wasn’t going to show the whole seven month drug bust and 3) all the bad guys got away or got slaps on the wrist and the two cops were transferred out. This was a huge bust that didn’t really work out (although it stopped the trafficking) allowing the mobsters to escape and putting a stop to two careers. It is what I like most, however, because I don’t want to see a realistic movie in which the only interesting scenes are the ones that are not based on any facts. 

So should this movie be on the AFI list? Yes. It was the basis for gritty TV cop shows like The Streets of San Francisco and Starsky & Hutch. It has one of the greatest car chase scenes in cinema history. It won many awards and is known by those who haven’t seen the film. It is definitely AFI material. Would I recommend it? Well...not to kids. It has a ton of overt racism that is pretty uncomfortable to watch as well as some pretty terrible police work. The two cops were on set and they were OK with this? The film claims to be based on a real bust and the only cinematic parts of interest were made up. These white cops keep going into black bars and knocking everyone around but just chase after the French guys. White men are all detectives and assassins and mob bosses while anyone of color are just props to be knocked around to move the plot along. I would watch it again as a piece of cinema history and it is a progenitor of the 70s cop dramas, but I wouldn’t show it to my students because I don’t want them to think that it is OK for the police to rough up any number of black people as long as it might bring information about a mob boss. It is a good story with a bad message that needs some maturity to recognize the faults.

[newstfionline]

Headlines

Climate change makes freak Siberian heat 600 times likelier (AP) This year’s freak Siberian heat wave is producing climate change’s most flagrant footprint of extreme weather, a new flash study says. International scientists released a study Wednesday that found the greenhouse effect multiplied the chance of the region’s prolonged heat by at least 600 times, and maybe tens of thousands of times. In the study, which has not yet gone through peer review, the team looked at Siberia from January to June, including a day that hit 100 degrees (38 degrees Celsius) for a new Arctic record.

Mail delays likely as new postal boss pushes cost-cutting (AP) Mail deliveries could be delayed by a day or more under cost-cutting efforts being imposed by the new postmaster general. The plan eliminates overtime for hundreds of thousands of postal workers and says employees must adopt a “different mindset” to ensure the Postal Service’s survival during the coronavirus pandemic. Late trips will no longer be authorized. If postal distribution centers are running late, “they will keep the mail for the next day,″ Postal Service leaders say in a document obtained by The Associated Press. “One aspect of these changes that may be difficult for employees is that—temporarily—we may see mail left behind or mail on the workroom floor or docks,″ another document says. The changes come a month after Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a major donor to President Donald Trump, took over the sprawling mail service. In a memo titled “PMG Expectations and Plan,″ the agency said the changes are aimed at “making the USPS fundamentally solvent which we are not at this time.″ Postal Service officials, bracing for steep losses from the nationwide shutdown caused by the virus, have warned they will run out of money by the end of September without help from Congress. The service reported a $4.5 billion loss for the quarter ending in March, before the full effects of the shutdown sank in.

Twitter Hack Exposes Frailty of the Digital Public Square (Foreign Policy) Twitter accounts belonging to high-profile business leaders and politicians were hacked yesterday in the biggest security breach in the website’s 14-year history. Fortunately, the goal of the hackers was more con artist than saboteur. Accounts belonging to business leaders such as Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates as well as Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and former U.S. President Barack Obama all posted a version of the same message: A call to donate money to a cryptocurrency account in return for your money back twice over. Despite the millions of followers these accounts have, the scam seems to have convinced very few of them. Only about $120,000 in bitcoin has been deposited to the hacker’s accounts, according to Reuters. Although the refrain “Twitter is not real life” is often used as a putdown toward the social media-addled masses, the website can have an outsized grip on reality. In 2013, a hacker took control of the Associated Press Twitter account and wrote a hoax tweet describing explosions at the White House. The tweet was quickly deleted, but not before tricking high-frequency trading algorithms—sending the U.S. stock market into a flash crash.

Barbados wants you to work from its beaches during the pandemic (NYT) In the first half of 2020, governments around the world imposed entry restrictions or strict quarantine procedures; flight traffic fell to its lowest level in decades. Many are confined not just to their countries, but also to their homes, as offices were shut down along with travel. But even as the pandemic continues to rage, the government of Barbados, a country in the eastern Caribbean, is sending a very different message: Come here, not just for a holiday, but for up to a year. Bring your laptop. Soak up the sun, the sea, the sand—and forget about the coronavirus. Dubbed the “Barbados Welcome Stamp” and launching this week, the program will allow visitors to stay on the Caribbean island visa-free for up to one year. The aim is to attract remote workers, with a bill to be introduced in Parliament by the government that will remove the local income taxes that normally kick in after six months. The program has unsurprisingly sparked global interest. Considered from a cramped apartment in London or New York, working remotely on a beach has an appeal even to those who know little about Barbados. Barbados is not the only country trying to open up to laptop-toting foreigners. Estonia is to launch its own long-awaited “Digital Nomad” visa program in the coming months, and countries including Georgia, Germany and Costa Rica already have visa programs geared toward freelancers.

A fight over nude swimming marks return of pre-coronavirus banalities in Europe (Washington Post) LYCHEN, Germany—There is perhaps no better sign that people are eager to move on from the coronavirus than the fact that this German lake district town is embroiled in a heated debate about nude swimming, and it has drawn national attention. The local council’s ban on naked swimming—and other activities such as naked yoga—has returned the town to the banalities of pre-coronavirus summers and earned it a spot on the national public broadcaster’s nightly newscast, where it received more airtime than the United States’ spiraling coronavirus outbreak that day. Nude swimming has long been socially acceptable in other parts of eastern Germany and in Lychen, a town of about 3,000 people nestled between glassy lakes. “Whoever wants to swim naked swims naked. And those who don’t, do not,” said vacation home landlord Martin Hansen, 60, who opposes the ban. But in May, after it became apparent that the first wave of the coronavirus had largely bypassed the region, the Lychen town council turned its attention from social distancing restrictions to bathing rules. To some council members, naked fellow residents swimming, doing yoga and playing volleyball had been a growing annoyance. The mayor and council moved to ban all nude activity at popular public bathing spots. The outrage that followed included an anonymous letter to the mayor, threatening to poison the town’s lakes if nudist swimming rights were infringed upon. The police announced an investigation. TV crews and newspaper journalists descended on Lychen. Mayor Karola Gundlach declined an interview request from The Washington Post, citing the excessive media coverage and adding, “It does not help if people from around the world send me emails and tell me or the town what to do, what is right and wrong.”

Minorities under attack as PM pushes ‘tolerant’ Pakistan (AP) It’s been a tough month for religious minorities in Pakistan, and observers warn of even tougher times ahead as Prime Minister Imran Khan vacillates between trying to forge a pluralistic nation and his conservative Islamic beliefs. A Christian was gunned down because he rented in a Muslim neighborhood in northwest Peshawar, not far from the border with Afghanistan. Another Christian, pastor Haroon Sadiq Cheeda, his wife and 12-year-old son were beaten by their Muslim neighbors in eastern Punjab and told to leave their village. The attackers screamed “you are infidels.” An opposition politician was charged this week with blasphemy after declaring all religions were equal. A senior political figure, allied with the government and backed by Islamic extremists, stopped construction of a Hindu temple in the capital Islamabad. Analysts and activists blame an increase in attacks on an indecisive Khan. They say he preaches a vision of a tolerant Pakistan where its religious minorities thrive as equals among an overwhelming Muslim majority. They say that at the same time he cedes power to extreme Islamic clerics, bowing to their demands and turning to them for the final say, even on matters of state.

India virus cases surge nearly 32,700, beach state shut anew (AP) India’s virus cases surged another 32,695 as of Thursday, taking the nation closer to 1 million and forcing a new lockdown in the popular western beach state of Goa two weeks after it was reopened to tourists. The new confirmed cases took the national total to 968,876. The Health Ministry also reported a record number of 606 deaths in the past 24 hours, taking total fatalities up to 24,915. About a dozen states, including Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and Assam, have put high-risk areas under lockdowns, only allowing essential food supplies and health services. Goa state’s top elected official, Pramod Sawant, announced a three-day lockdown and a night curfew in the popular backpacking tourist destination, beginning Thursday night. He said people were flouting social distancing norms. Nearly 40,000 people were fined 100 rupees ($1.3) each in the past two weeks for not wearing masks.

Flooding in Bangladesh (Foreign Policy) As much as one-third of Bangladesh is now underwater after the country’s heaviest rainfall in a decade, according to Al Jazeera. As we reported last week, the floods began in part because of the overflowing of the Brahmaputra River. In the neighboring Indian state of Assam, at least 50 people have been killed as a result of the flooding.

Mysterious Fires Scorch Iran (Foreign Policy) Iran, already ravaged by U.S. sanctions and the coronavirus pandemic, now faces another scourge: A wave of mysterious fires torching the country, including a blaze that burned seven ships in Bushehr, a major port city, on Wednesday. The fires include a July 2 explosion at an underground fuel enrichment plant in Natanz that the New York Times reported was part of a covert effort to undermine the Iranian nuclear program. The incidents have sparked fears in Iran that the United States and Israel are increasing sabotage operations directed at Tehran. No deaths were reported from Wednesday’s fire. Officials in Iran have blamed some of the fires on sabotage, but others appear to have been caused by accidents, equipment failures, and inclement weather, the Times reported. The fires may raise fears of military miscalculation between the United States and Iran. The blazes come as the United States failed to convince allies on the U.N. Security Council to extend an arms embargo against Iran set to expire in October, as Foreign Policy reported. The Trump administration faces opposition from allies in its efforts to continue its so-called “maximum pressure” campaign—a definitive effort to scupper the 2015 nuclear deal. A website close to Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Nournews, said this month that an attack on Natanz could cross a “red line” and lead to “fundamental changes” in the Middle East.

China becomes first economy to grow since virus pandemic (AP) China became the first major economy to grow since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, recording an unexpectedly strong 3.2% expansion in the latest quarter after anti-virus lockdowns were lifted and factories and stores reopened. Growth reported Thursday for the three months ending in June was a dramatic improvement over the previous quarter’s 6.8% contraction —China’s worst performance since at least the mid-1960s. But it still was the weakest positive figure since China started reporting quarterly growth in the early 1990s. China, where the coronavirus pandemic began in December, was the first economy to shut down and the first to start the drawn-out process of recovery in March after the ruling Communist Party declared the disease under control.

Taiwan holds military drills against potential China threat (AP) Taiwan’s military fired missiles from the air and the island’s shore facing China on Thursday in a live-fire exercise to demonstrate its ability to defend against any Chinese invasion. Assault helicopters launched missiles and fighter jets dropped bombs on targets at sea, while tanks and missile trucks fired from a beach to deter a simulated invading force. The drill was part of a five-day annual exercise that ends Friday. China regards Taiwan as a breakaway province that is part of its territory. The self-governing island of 24 million people lies 160 kilometers (100 miles) off China’s southeast coast across the Taiwan Strait.

Japan “extremely concerned” as 136 COVID cases reported on U.S. bases (CBS News) The biggest coronavirus outbreak within the U.S. military anywhere in the world continues to grow. U.S. Forces Japan confirmed Wednesday another 36 infections among troops on the Japanese island of Okinawa, bringing the total to at least 136 since the U.S. military reported its first cases there last week. Until then, all of Okinawa had seen only 148 confirmed cases of COVID-19 since February, with Japanese authorities managing to contain the spread of the virus that causes the disease. In a sign of the growing tension between Japanese officials and the U.S. military in Okinawa, Defense Minister Taro Kono has pointed to “several problems” with the U.S. response to the pandemic. He notably avoided giving specifics when pressed by reporters earlier this week. “Okinawa residents are extremely anxious” about the spread of infection at U.S. military bases, said Okinawa governor Denny Tamaki, who flew to Tokyo Wednesday for a meeting with Defense Minister Kono to air his island’s grievances.

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

In trying to build a forecast model of the Democratic primaries, we literally had to think about the entire process from start (Iowa) to finish (the Virgin Islands on June 6). Actually, we had to do more than that. Since the nomination process is sequential — states vote one at a time rather than all at once — we had to determine, empirically, how much the results of one state can affect the rest.

The answer in the case of Iowa is that it matters a lot. Despite its demographic non-representativeness, and the quirks of the caucuses process, the amount of media coverage the state gets makes it far more valuable a prize than you’d assume from the fact that it only accounts for 41 of the Democrats’ 3,990 pledged delegates.

More specifically, we estimate — based on testing how much the results in various states have historically changed the candidates’ position in national polls — that Iowa was the second most-important date on the calendar this year, trailing only Super Tuesday. It was worth the equivalent of almost 800 delegates, about 20 times its actual number.

Which states will produce the biggest bounces?

Expected bounce magnitude according to FiveThirtyEight’s primary model

Relative bounce magnitude Date States Based on delegates Early state bonus Combined Feb. 3 Iowa +3 +20 +23 Feb. 11 New Hampshire +2 +10 +12 Feb. 22 Nevada +3 +5 +8 Feb. 29 South Carolina +3 +5 +8 Mar. 3 Colorado, Alabama, Utah, Oklahoma, Vermont, Texas, Tennessee, Maine, Virginia, North Carolina, California, American Samoa, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Arkansas +30 +30 Mar. 10 Mississippi, Michigan, North Dakota, Washington, Missouri, Idaho, Democrats Abroad +12 +12 Mar. 14 Northern Marianas +1 +1 Mar. 17 Ohio, Arizona, Florida, Illinois +16 +16 Mar. 24 Georgia +5 +5 Mar. 29 Puerto Rico +3 +3 Apr. 4 Alaska, Hawaii, Wyoming, Louisiana +5 +5 Apr. 7 Wisconsin +4 +4 Apr. 28 Rhode Island, New York, Delaware, Maryland, Connecticut, Pennsylvania +18 +18 May 2 Guam, Kansas +3 +3 May 5 Indiana +4 +4 May 12 Nebraska, West Virginia +3 +3 May 19 Kentucky, Oregon +5 +5 June 2 New Mexico, New Jersey, South Dakota, Montana, District of Columbia +8 +8 June 6 Virgin Islands +1 +1

Everything was a little weird in Iowa this year, however. And there were already some signs that the Iowa bounce — which essentially results from all the favorable media coverage that winning candidates get — might be smaller than normal. Iowa was bracketed by an extremely busy news calendar: President Trump’s impeachment trial both before and after the caucuses, the Super Bowl on Sunday, the State of the Union address on Tuesday. There was not the usual climactic uptick in media coverage around Iowa. From initial indications — to the extent any information at all is reliable at this point — Democratic turnout there wound up being fairly low.

But we weren’t prepared for what actually happened, which is that — as I’m writing this at 3:15 a.m. on Tuesday morning — the Iowa Democratic Party literally hasn’t released any results from its caucuses. I’m not going to predict what those numbers will eventually be, although early indications are that Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg and perhaps Elizabeth Warren had good results. The point is that the lead story around the 2020 Iowa Democratic caucuses is now — and will forever be — the colossal shitshow around the failure to release results in a timely fashion.

Maybe there will eventually be a decent-sized Iowa bounce despite all of this. But there’s a good chance that the candidates who did well in Iowa get screwed, and the candidates who did poorly there get a mulligan. To repeat: There’s very little importance in a mathematical sense to who wins 41 delegates. Iowa is all about the media narrative it produces and all about momentum, and that momentum, whoever wins, is likely to have been blunted.

Who might this help? Let’s pretend for a moment we don’t have any hints about how the results might have turned out. In fact, let’s pretend that Iowa didn’t happen at all. I re-ran our forecast model as though the Iowa caucuses were canceled.1 Here’s how that changed each candidate’s chances of getting a delegate majority:

How Iowa’s presence affected Democrats’ odds

Chances of winning a majority of pledged delegates per FiveThirtyEight forecast model on Feb. 3 (pre-Iowa), compared with a version of the model that skips the Iowa caucuses

Candidate As of our final PRE-IOWA SIMULATIONS ON Monday night In A HYPOTHETICAL SIMULATION WHERE Iowa didn’t exist Biden 43% 50% Sanders 31 24 Warren 5 5 Buttigieg 4 <1 Other <1 <1 No one 17 20

The presence of Iowa was helpful to Bernie Sanders, whose chances of winning a national delegate majority would have been 24 percent without Iowa — as compared to the 31 percent chance that he had with Iowa, as of Monday afternoon. Iowa was hurtful to Joe Biden, however, whose chances of a delegate majority would have been 50 percent without it, rather than 43 percent with it.

And Iowa was extremely helpful to Buttigieg, whose chances of winning the delegate majority were fairly low even with Iowa — keep in mind that he had slipped to third in polls of Iowa and fifth in national polls — but would have been virtually nonexistent (less than one percent) without it.

By giving the winning candidates a boost, the presence of Iowa also reduced the chance of an unstructured race and a potential brokered convention. The chance of there being no delegate majority was 17 percent without Iowa, but would have been 20 percent with it.

Granted, none of those changes — say, 24 percent versus 31 percent — are necessarily that large. But that’s partly because, as of Monday afternoon, four or five candidates appeared to have a shot at winning Iowa. For the candidate who actually won Iowa, it would have been a much bigger deal. We estimate that Sanders’s chances of a majority would have shot up to from 31 percent to 58 percent with an Iowa win, Warren’s from 5 percent to 32 percent, and Buttigieg’s from 4 percent to 22 percent.

And in some ways that still discounts Iowa’s impact, because several of the campaigns — for better or worse — built their entire strategy around the state. Would Buttigieg have been a major player in the race without Iowa? Considering his lack of support among black voters, probably not. Would candidates such as Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Julian Castro have dropped out so soon? That’s a harder call, since Harris, Booker and Castro weren’t polling particularly well anywhere. But the Democratic field might have remained a little more diverse.

So we’ve arrived at a point of some ambivalence. On the one hand, candidates such as Buttigieg, who seemingly did well there, are liable to be injured by the muddled storylines in Iowa following the results-reporting disaster on Monday night. On the other hand, it’s not clear why Iowa was afforded so much importance in the first place, and Buttigieg possibly owed his entire presence in the campaign to this quirk in the nomination process. Nonetheless, these were the rules of the game, as every candidate understood them. So if Iowa turns out not to matter very much because of the results-reporting snafu, they have every right to be upset.

To be even more blunt: the Iowa Democratic Party’s colossal screw-up in reporting results will potentially have direct effects on the outcome of the nomination process. The failure to report results will almost certainly help Biden, assuming that indications that he performed poorly in Iowa are correct, as they won’t get nearly as much media coverage. And they’ll hurt whichever candidate wins the state — mostly likely Sanders or Buttigieg. (Although if Sanders winds up finishing in second place or lower, he also might not mind a reduction in the importance of Iowa, especially with one of his best states, New Hampshire, coming up next.)

Furthermore, Iowa is typically a state that winnows the field. But with every candidate either having performed well there, potentially having an excuse for a disappointing finish there, or somewhere in between, it might not do that. Delaying the winnowing process would tangibly increase the chance of a contested convention.

It’s not a good situation for the Democratic Party. And it’s already too late for the damage to be entirely undone, even if Iowa eventually gets its act together.

[crimethinc]

Life in “Mueller Time”: The Politics of Waiting and the Spectacle of Investigation

For almost two years now, faithful Democrats have waited for special counsel Robert Mueller to file his report about collusion between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russian attempts to interfere in the US election, not to mention Trump’s involvement in obstruction of justice. Whenever Trump’s activity provokes them or a subterranean rumbling within the Justice Department emboldens them, the faithful take to the streets and social media with hand-held cardboard signs and internet memes to proclaim that Mueller Time is close at hand. Yet even if the Mueller investigation concludes with Trump’s impeachment, the spectacle of the investigation has served to immobilize millions who have a stake in systemic social change, ensuring that what comes next in the United States will be politics as usual—not liberation.

When you’ve fallen on the highway And you’re lying in the rain, And they ask you how you’re doing Of course you’ll say you can’t complain If you’re squeezed for information, That’s when you’ve got to play it dumb You just say you’re out there waiting For the miracle, for the miracle to come

-The 20th century’s greatest messianic thinker, Leonard Cohen

Within weeks of the beginning of the investigation, there were already think pieces and t-shirts proclaiming “It’s Mueller Time.” Let’s take the t-shirts at their word: maybe it’s been Mueller Time all along. Maybe Mueller Time is not a specific date that is about to arrive, but the era we’ve been experiencing these past two years.

In that case, Mueller Time is not an hour on the clock, but a way of experiencing time, a kind of time—like crunch time or quality time or go time, but the opposite of all of them. It is not a scale of time, like geologic time, or a time zone, like Eastern Standard Time—Mueller Time is more like the End Times, perpetually anticipated.

To be precise, Mueller Time is the political suspended animation in which the Democrats have waited for a repeatedly deferred deus ex machina to deliver them from this unbearable pres(id)ent. This condition of waiting, itself, rather than any of the grievous injustices that have taken place during it, is the very essence of hell.

Dante, the Marco Polo of the Abyss, located Limbo, the residence of those who wait, in Inferno, not in Purgatory. Waiting is not transformative or redemptive—it is the sort of sin for which the punishment is the crime. “Limbo” shares a Latin root with liminal—it is homeland of those who tarry on the threshold, those who are on the fence.

If you can get people used to waiting, you can get them used to anything.

To understand Mueller Time better, we can begin with its namesake. “Miller time” is a time to take a load off, to ease our pain by drugging ourselves into oblivion. It’s a profound expression of despair—“I can only relax in this world by deadening my senses”—disguised not just as relief but as celebration. What is the glee with which Democrats invoke Mueller Time if not an admission of their own abject powerlessness and dependence? “Rejoice,” says the Democrat, “Justice will be done! And thank goodness, as usual, the FBI will take care of everything.”

Miller Time and Mueller Time are both chronotopes, to use the term popularized by literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin: they are specific relationships to time. You cannot understand a group of people without understanding how they experience the passing of time. Peering between chronotopes produces strange refractions, like looking through a glass of water. How different the world appears to a person whose activism consists chiefly of waiting, in contrast to how it appears to those for whom waiting and acting are opposites! It is the difference between spectator and athlete, between the consumer and the inventor, between those who suffer history as if it were weather and those who make history as a side effect of understanding themselves as the protagonists of their time.

And Miller Time and Mueller Time are both marketed chronotopes. Miller Time is the “5 o’clock somewhere” that unites wage labor and intoxication in a mutually reinforcing false opposition—but even more importantly, it is the branded colonization of that time. Likewise, Mueller Time is not just the “he’ll get his” which all people of conscience wish for Trump, but a particular deferral of responsibility. Both are successful advertising campaigns that concentrate capital in certain hands precisely by inducing people not to take their problems into their own hands.

“The politicians’ stubborn faith in progress, their confidence in their ‘mass basis,’ and, finally, their servile integration in an uncontrollable apparatus have been three aspects of the same thing.”

-Walter Benjamin on how Social Democrats permitted the Third Reich to come to power in Germany

All this is familiar to those who were raised as Adventists, believing that the outrageous sinfulness of the prevailing world order indicates the imminence of the Resurrection and the necessity of repentance before authority. Mueller Time is the redemption, the arrival of the Millennium, when the legitimate authorities will reassert their dominion and the obedient will be rewarded for their patience. Good Christians have awaited this for two thousand years; they have made a religion out of waiting. You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.

To keep people waiting for salvation indefinitely, it helps to shift every once in a while from one source of dramatic tension to another. Some hoped Trump would run the country “like a business.” Now that the signature forms of evil associated with capitalism—nepotism, profiteering, corruption, race baiting, sexual harassment, misinformation—characterize the presidency, Democrats are proposing to return to the good-old-fashioned signature forms of evil previously associated with government: bureaucracy, clientelism, experts deciding the fates of millions behind closed doors. All the things that helped Trump come to office.

For the purposes of relegitimizing government, it is ideal that Robert Mueller is not just a “good” authority figure, but specifically, a white male Republican—an FBI director who first made a name for himself overseeing the killing of Vietnamese people. He is everything the average Democrat would oppose if Trump had not moved the goal posts by pursuing the same Republican agenda by potentially extra-legal means. Mueller represents the same FBI that attempted to make Martin Luther King, Jr. commit suicide, that set out to destroy the Occupy movement. Under Mueller’s leadership, the FBI determined that the number one domestic terror threat in the United States was environmental activism.

Mueller Time is a way of inhabiting the eternally renewed amnesia that is America. This is the real “deep state”—the part of each Democrat’s heart that will accept any amount of senseless violence and murder and oppression, as long as it adheres to the letter of the law.

“Definitions of basic historical concepts: Catastrophe—to have missed the opportunity. Critical moment—the status quo threatens to preserve itself. Progress—the first revolutionary measure taken.”

-Walter Benjamin

What will be the fruits of Mueller’s labors?

Rank-and-file Democrats still don’t understand how power works. Crime is not the violation of the rules, but the stigma attached to those who break rules without the power to make them. (As they say, steal $25, go to jail; steal $25 million, go to Congress.) At the height of Genghis Khan’s reign, it would have been pointless to accuse the famous tyrant of breaking the laws of the Mongol Empire; as long as Trump has enough of Washington behind him, the same goes for him. Laws don’t exist in some transcendent realm. They are simply the product of power struggles among the elite—not to mention the passivity of the governed—and they are enforced according to the prevailing balance of power. To fetishize the law is to accept that might makes right. It means abdicating the responsibility to do what is ethical regardless of what the laws happen to be.

In the struggle to control the law-making and law-enforcing apparatus of the US government, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have secured a solid majority. They remain at an impasse. The most likely explanation for Mueller’s delays is that he has been biding his time, waiting to see if the balance of power in the US government would shift enough that there could be some consequences to his report.

The wait The wait The wait The wait

The wait The wait The wait The wait

-Killing Joke, “The Wait”

Ironically, the only thing that could guarantee that Mueller’s report will have an effect would be if this impasse were disturbed by forces outside the halls of power—for example, by a real social movement utilizing direct action. If millions of people were in the streets preventing the Trump administration from accomplishing its agenda, then the power brokers in Washington would consider sacrificing Donald Trump to preserve business as usual.

In standing back and waiting, affirming the authority of the FBI and Congress to take care of matters, Mueller’s fans make it less likely that his investigation will pose a serious threat to the administration. The rank and file Democrats are left gazing at their screens, watching the bureaucratic equivalent of the spinning wheel of death.

In this case, the more you clap your hands, the less Tinkerbell exists.

I’m in the waiting room I don’t want the news—I cannot use it I don’t want the news—I won’t live by it

But I don’t sit idly by I’m planning a big surprise I’m gonna fight for what I wanna be And I won’t make the same mistakes Because I know how much time that wastes

-Fugazi “Waiting Room”

The arc of history is long, but it curves towards—death. There is no excuse to delay. Tomorrow will use you the way we use today.

What would it mean to stop waiting?

It would mean to stop looking to others to solve our problems, no longer permitting a series of presidents, Speakers of the House, FBI directors, presidential candidates, and other bullies and hucksters to play good cop/bad cop with us.

It would mean figuring out how to deal with the catastrophes that Trump’s presidency is causing directly, rather than through the mediation of other authority figures. It would mean building up social movements powerful enough to block the construction of a border wall, to liberate children from migrant detention facilities and reunite them with their families, to feed the hungry and care for the sick without waiting for legislators to give us permission to make use of the resources that we and others like us maintain on a daily basis.

Remember when we shut down the airports immediately after Trump took office? It would mean doing more of that, and less sitting around waiting on politicians and bureaucrats. That was our proudest moment. Since then, we have only grown weaker, distracted by the array of champions competing to represent us—the various media outlets and Democratic presidential candidates—all surrogates for our own agency.

Let’s stop killing time. Or rather—let’s stop permitting it to kill us.

“We live the whole of our lives provisionally,” he said. “We think that for the time being things are bad, that for the time being we must make the best of them and adapt or humiliate ourselves, but that it’s all only provisional and that one day real life will begin. We prepare for death complaining that we have never lived. Of all the people I know, not one lives in the present. No one gets any pleasure from what he does every day. No one is in a condition to say On that day, at that moment, my life began. Believe me, even those who have power and take advantage of it are plagued with anxieties and disgusted at the dominant stupidity. They too live provisionally and spend their whole lives waiting.”

“Those who flee the country also spend their lives waiting,” Pietro said. “That’s the trouble. But one mustn’t wait, one must act. One must say Enough, from this very day.”

“But if you do not have the freedom to act?” Nunzio said.

“Freedom is not a thing you can receive as a gift,” Pietro said. “You can be free even under a dictatorship on the simple condition that you struggle against it. A person who thinks with his own mind and remains uncorrupted is free. A person who struggles for what she believes to be right is free. You might live in the most democratic country in the world, but if you are lazy, callous, and servile, you are not free—in spite of the absence of violence and coercion, you are a slave. Freedom is not a thing that can be begged from others. You must take it for yourself, in whatever share you can.”

-Ignazio Silone, Bread and Wine

Further Reading

Take Your Pick: Law or Freedom

The Centrists

[dailyaudiobible]

11/24/2018 DAB Transcript

Ezekiel 47:1-48:35, 1 Peter 2:11-3:7, Psalms 119:49-64, Proverbs 28:12-13

Today is the 24th day of November. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I’m Brian. It is an honor and a pleasure to be here with you today as we close down another one of our weeks. And this week went fast…this week went fast, and it seems like the weeks only get faster as we get toward the end of the year. And man, we’re getting there. One month from today's Christmas Eve. So, that's how close we’re getting. But no matter how fast the days get we have rhythm and we step out of all the things that are pulling us in so many directions and just allow the word of God to wash over us and today is no different. We’re reading from the Good News Translation this week. Ezekiel chapter 47 verse 1 through 48 verse 35 today.

Prayer:

We thank You Father for another week in Your word. And, once again, we kind of reach this line in time and we look back and can declare Your faithfulness. You have been faithful, and we worship You. And Father, as I we put another week into our past and allow it to become a part of our history, we also look forward with anticipation to all that the new week will bring and all that the season holds for us. Holy Spirit come, allow us to immerse ourselves and deeply meditate upon what this season represents because You're coming, Jesus, changed humanity and we are changed because of it, but all too often we find ourselves dabbling and meshing ourselves and trapping ourselves in things that You have freed us from. We have walked back into slavery when we have been set free. And, so, we spend this time contemplating what it means to be set free because You came for us. So, come Holy Spirit. We release another week into our past and we walk with You into a bright future. Come, Holy Spirit we pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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And the Daily Audio Bible Family Christmas Box is what's going on around here right now and it is available. It’s chock-full of things that you're gonna want to keep and full of things that you’ll also want to give away as gifts. So, be sure to check it out at dailyaudiobible.com in the Shop, in the Christmas section, and you can do that at dailyaudiobible.com or you can also do it from the Daily Audio Bible app and see all the goodies that we have the Christmas Box for this year. They will sell out. I say this every year and they do. So, don't delay, especially if you are international. If you are outside the United States, yeah, especially don't delay. The 28th of this month, which is middle of next week will be the cutoff date for international. I mean, you can order all the way until they're gone, but we feel like if we don't get these orders in by the 28th, those that are going outside of the United States, they may not arrive in time for Christmas. So, just be aware of that. If you are within the domestic United States then, yeah, we have some time…a little bit more time on that. So, do indeed check them out.

And one of the things in the Daily Audio Bible Christmas box this year is a pack of 20 of our 2018 Christmas cards. If you are Christmas card sender, then check them out. You get those separate, There the only thing from the Christmas Box that you can get separate. You can order as many of those as you want separately. And it’s a good deal. I mean, five bucks for 20 cards and envelopes and there beautiful. They have the word for the year this year, “Hope” on the front of them. And you can see them at dailyaudiobible.com. But check those out. Invite your friends and your family. Invite those who could use a journey like this next year, to take the journey with you as we gear up and go through the whole thing again. This is the best time of year to invite those that are in your life who you see are kind of floundering and could use the stability of a rhythm and a community and the Scriptures in their life every day. This is a great time. So, the Christmas cards are available, and all this can be checked out at dailyaudiobiblebible.com.

If you are partner with the Daily Audio Bible, you can do that it dailyaudiobible.com as well. There is a link on the homepage…couldn't thank you enough. We’re in this together. So, thank you for your partnership. If you’re using the Daily Audio Bible app, you can press the Give button in the upper right-hand corner or, if you prefer, the mailing address is PO Box 1996 Spring Hill Tennessee 37174.

And, as always, if you have a prayer request or comment, 877-942-4253 is the number to dial.

And that's it for today. I'm Brian I love you and I'll be waiting for you here tomorrow.

Community Prayer and Praise:

Beautiful family, this is pastor Gene from Bradenton Florida. I always say, “my beautiful family” and I always say that “I love you” and I just want to tell you guys I really mean it. I don’t know where I would be without you guys. This has been the best…one of the best adventures of my life, going on five years and I’m so grateful. Actually, this is my fifth anniversary and I’m grateful. I’m grateful to Brian, I’m grateful to Jill, their family, I’m grateful to each one of you. Thank you so much for having me. Please join me in prayer. Lord Jesus, thank you for your love and your kindness. Father, we lift up our brother Rafael from Delaware and we ask for your blessing upon him, strengthen him, fill him with you joy and the reassurance that you are with him. We pray for our sisters, __ from California. Father, we glorify you and we rejoice on the progress, but we pray for a permanent change of every member of her beautiful family, of change that it’s rooted on a __ with Christ by every member of my sister’s family. That is my prayer father. Father, I pray for our sister Janet __. Her husband survived cancer but due to his cancer he cannot find a job. I pray in the name of Jesus that my brother will not release that information because it’s illegal if anybody’s taking that into consideration. Defending a position to get it is against the law. So, in the name of Jesus I pray that you will change that and that you will open doors for my brother. Father, I pray for our sister Christina. Her daughter Grace has a lot of emotional issues. I pray that you will deliver __. I pray that you will show her your love and your kindness. I pray that you will give my sister Christina strategies to strengthen her relationship with her. And father I pray, we pray, for our sister Alex and her husband who are going to infertility treatment. They feel like there on the end of the road and this is where you can show up and do a mighty work. We believe you and we believe in pray in Jesus’ name. I love you family. Pastor Gene from Bradenton Florida. Bye.

Hi, this is Kate the nurse from Seattle. I just got a message from my granddaughter. I’m gonna call her Ash, she’s 22. We live in Washington state and I think she’s in Arizona, but I don’t know. She’s been gone for half a year, three quarters of the year. She is addicted to heroin and wrote this poem that was frank, and frankly, for an old lady, shocking and horrific about how she feels about heroin and the need for it above all else. And I know that she has given her heart to Jesus at one point and I know she was in rehab and left early in Spokane for a while and was doing very well. And I’m just…please pray for her…please pray for her to choose the Lord first and for her safety, for her health because I’m not sure how much she’s healthy and for a good place to live. Thank you so much family. Again, Ashland, please pray for her heroin addiction. Thank you.

Hi, this is Diane from Pennsylvania and I’d like to make a prayer request for my girlfriend Anita who is starting chemotherapy today. And she had a big surgery about three weeks ago that was 8 ½ hours

and she does have stage IV cancer. And I’m just praying for successful chemotherapy and very minimal side effects. Also, I wanted to update you that my granddaughter Elizabeth is making steady progress and she has been able to be taken out of a very abusive situation…family situation. And, so, I’m so thankful for your prayers. And I also wanted to ask…request that people would consider given a Thanksgiving gift to the Daily Audio Bible because we feast on the word every day and I know it takes a lot of money to keep those servers going and to just have this happening every day for all of us all around the world. So, maybe you could consider a Thanksgiving gift for our Thanksgiving feast that we eat every day. Thank you so much. This is Diane from Pennsylvania.

Dear family, I am so nervous on this call and I’m so thankful, like Brian said that we don’t have to carry things alone. We have an emergency court this morning for custody of a grandchild. It’s not a good situation and I just pray that we get him today and I also ask prayer for his mother. She needs some help. You know, we all need help but the environment that he would be going in with her is just not good and I’m scared, and I just ask for prayers. I pray for you too. Thank you. Bye.

[tkmedia]

Celtics' best path to Bradley Beal, or any third star, might be through cap space rather than a trade

Getty Images Trading for superstars is typically an aspirational exercise. You draft well, hoard picks and make your franchise appealing enough to maybe, one day have the opportunity to add a franchise player. But in the not-too-distant past, the Boston Celtics under Danny Ainge had such an enormous asset advantage that they felt they could afford to be picky about which superstars they targeted. They seemingly passed on opportunities to swipe Jimmy Butler, Paul George and Kawhi Leonard at reasonable prices in part to preserve the trade chips they would one day need to acquire Anthony Davis, who, of course, would prove uninterested in wearing green. As they waited, their assets depreciated. The picks the Celtics made lost value because there were too many of them for the majority to actually receive playing time. The picks they held lost value because the teams they originally belonged to improved. The All-Stars they already had left en masse. Kemba Walker was signed to replace them, but two years later, his health had deteriorated so rapidly that a first-round pick had to be attached to him just to trade him for Al Horford back. Now, with Brad Stevens at the helm, the stockpile is gone. Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown have graduated from trade bait status into bona fide, in-their-prime stars, but Boston no longer has the draft picks or the surplus of young talent needed to supplement them. After years of turning away gettable stars, the Celtics are now just like everybody else: desperate for players that they might no longer have access to. That's an enormously frustrating position for a team to find itself in right as a superstar who could potentially have interest in hopping aboard nears availability. Bradley Beal has not yet requested a trade. Such a request could come in the near future, but even if it doesn't, Beal can become a free agent next offseason. Resolution on his future is approaching, and on paper, Boston appears to be a strong fit. Beal and Tatum are lifelong friends having both grown up in St. Louis, and when Tatum saw an Instagram post about Beal trade rumors, he didn't exactly hide his interest in a partnership. Boston probably could land Beal through a trade by making Brown available, but that would defeat the entire purpose of a deal. The current, two-star Celtics aren't championship contenders, and such a swap would be a fairly modest upgrade. Making a trade without Brown almost certainly won't be possible. Even if the Celtics were willing to give Washington the sort of all-in draft picks-based package the Brooklyn Nets gave the Houston Rockets for James Harden, the Wizards probably wouldn't take it. Brooklyn's future picks had value because Harden, Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving are all nearing the end of their primes. Durant is 32 right now. Tatum will be 30 in 2028, the last year Boston can legally trade a first-round pick this offseason. The Celtics are too young to entice the Wizards that way. Barring something unforeseen, Boston has no clear path to trading its way into a Tatum-Brown-Beal trio. The now-ubiquitous pre-agency period of the player empowerment era has, in many instances, made trading a necessity. Stars exert so much pressure before they reach free agency that their situations are usually solved by the time free agency actually arrives, yet Beal's unique circumstances suggest that his case might be a bit more traditional. Davis pushed for his trade a year-and-a-half prior to the expiration of his contract. Beal has a year to go and no request has been made. He plays for a franchise that is notoriously averse to tanking and is coming off a season that was severely negatively impacted by COVID-19. Beal's loyalty to Washington is well known. Even if he's leaving the Wizards eventually, there isn't yet reason to believe that such a move would be immediate. The Russell Westbrook-led supporting cast helped Washington win 18 of its last 25 regular-season games. If Beal wants to give that group one last chance, free agency suddenly becomes a viable path to his acquisition.That would significantly complicate matters for certain suitors. The Golden State Warriors, for instance, are not only too far above the cap to feasibly create max space in 2022, but would likely struggle to even fit Beal under the hard cap that a sign-and-trade would induce unless Klay Thompson or Draymond Green was involved in the deal. The one benefit to having lost as many players as Boston has is that it has, for now, left the Celtics with a fairly clean cap sheet.  Tatum's max contract extension is set to begin next season, but because he missed out on an All-NBA selection, he had to settle for 25 percent of the cap as his starting salary rather than the 30 percent he would have been eligible for as an All-NBA player under the Derrick Rose Rule. Brown, signed before he grew into a star, isn't making any version of the max. Even with possible incentives factored in, he and Tatum will combine to make roughly $59 million in the 2022-23 season -- slightly more than half of the projected $115.8 million cap for that offseason. Not all two-star teams are created equal. Washington, for example, is set to pay Beal and Westbrook almost $79 million this season. Boston has very little dead weight on its books beyond the two stars. That was, in part, the motivation for the Walker trade. He is owed over $37 million for the 2022-23 season. Horford has a $26.5 million cap figure for that offseason, but only $14.5 million of that is guaranteed. If Boston could clear the decks beyond that dead money and its two stars, it could still get reasonably close to the max. As a 10-year veteran, Beal will be eligible for a projected salary of roughly $40.5 million in the summer of 2022. Boston could get to almost $33 million with just Tatum, Brown and the waived portion of Horford's money accounted for. That's not the max, of course, but if the Celtics could get him in the door on a one-year deal with a player option afterward, they could use his Non-Bird rights to bump him up to above $39 million in 2023 on a long-term deal. The Celtics' ideal scenario would obviously not involve dead Horford money, though. That's where their picks become more valuable. Attaching one or two to trade Horford into another team's cap space (perhaps, ironically, Oklahoma City's) is fairly realistic. At that point, keeping some of the young players currently in place would be feasible. Boston has four former first-round picks that will still be on rookie deals by that point, and their team options for the 2022-23 season are so cheap that, without Horford, keeping all of them along with the non-guaranteed deal of young big man Moses Brown wouldn't prevent the Celtics from coming close to max cap space next offseason.  PlayerSalaryJayson Tatum$30,351,780Jaylen Brown$28,741,071*Romeo Langford$5,634,257Grant Williams$4,306,281Aaron Nesmith$3,804,360Payton Pritchard$2,239,200Moses Brown$1,846,738Demetrius Jackson (dead money)$92,857Incomplete roster charges (six) $4,765,060Total salary$81,781,604Projected cap space$34,005,022*Includes $2,071,428 in likely incentives, per Spotrac.Again, this is short of the max, but we're in stone's throw territory. Get off of Langford or some combination of the others and they're basically there. Boston could preemptively decline its team options, as decisions are due early next season, but there's no point at such low cap figures. Those deals are all moveable without much pain. The pain would come this offseason, and Boston's willingness to endure it will say quite a bit about its long-term ambitions. Planning for cap space is a multi-year endeavor that involves letting go of immediate contributors in the hopes that the space their absence creates can yield something better. If the Celtics want to create max cap space next offseason, they're going to have to let go of Evan Fournier this offseason. They won't be able to sign a mid-level replacement to a long-term deal either unless they're confident they can trade that player next summer. No rookie extension for Robert Williams would be possible in this scenario either. Marcus Smart is a 2022 free agent, so Boston could delay a long-term decision on his status for now, but any scenario in which it signs a max player would mean renouncing his cap hold and letting him walk as well.Those are the stakes of playing the cap space game. Boston would be weakening itself right now by letting Fournier go. It would be inviting locker room tension by forcing key contributors this season to play for contracts next summer -- an approach that didn't go particularly well during the 2018-19 campaign. It would be doing all of this on a prayer. It might yield Beal or another star. But there's a good chance that it doesn't. Beal could ask for his trade in the middle of the season, or the Wizards could proactively move him without a request at the deadline if they sense their long-term hope is lost. He could decide that Washington is where he wants to spend his entire career. He could reach free agency and choose a different team. There are alternatives available to Boston if that's the case. Zach LaVine is currently playing with Tatum on Team USA, for instance, and while Chicago could renegotiate and extend him up to the max this offseason, doing so would deprive the Bulls of the cap space they'd need to properly surround him with a winning roster (which I explained in more depth here). There's a good chance he will be a free agent as well next summer.It's just exceedingly rare that any team enters free agency feeling particularly strongly about its chances at landing a star. Like a star trade, signing one outright is aspirational. It's something that's unlikely even after a team has committed several years to the pursuit. Boston was, at one time, too risk-averse to trade for Kawhi Leonard. That's not the sort of team that typically punts away entire seasons on the hope that doing so could eventually bear fruit in free agency.Next season might be a lost cause regardless, though. Fournier is a good player, but the last team to commit starter money to him for multiple years has zero playoff series wins to show for it. Williams has enormous upside, but if Stevens expected him to reach it, he likely would have played him more than 19 minutes per game as Boston's coach last season. Smart is the heart of a team that has already lost several other vital organs. The practical cost here isn't enormous. The Celtics aren't breaking up a surefire contender to chase a dynasty, but contention is a fairly nebulous concept.The Phoenix Suns proved that by reaching the Finals this season. The Suns weren't a traditional super team. They had two All-Stars and the perfect supporting cast. They got the right breaks and came two wins away from a championship. There's an argument in favor of that blueprint through its sheer attainability. Boston already has two All-Stars. The Celtics made the Eastern Conference finals in three of the four seasons prior to 2021 and could credibly claim that COVID-19 derailed their season. An organic bounce-back season might be in the cards. They have role players who could become champions under the right circumstances.But waiting for those circumstances is part of what got Boston into this mess in the first place. Its chance at a dynasty might have been squandered by waiting too long to be this aggressive. Its margin for error is gone. The Celtics can no longer afford to be greedy. They can have something resembling their current roster and try to be opportunistic with minimal assets down the line, or they can start planning their big swing right now with the understanding that they could very well miss entirely. That's a risk Boston tried to avoid under Ainge. It's one it might need to take to get back into the championship picture under Stevens. Read the full article

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

November 9, 2020

Heather Cox Richardson

I had hoped that the days when the news came like a firehose were over, but so far, no luck.

This morning, the stock market jumped 1200 points in its first day of trading after the announcement of Biden’s election. Over the course of the day it was up as much as 1600 points, then ended for the day with the Dow Jones Industrial Average up 834.57 points, or 2.95%.

The strong market is at least in part because pharmaceutical company Pfizer and the German drug company BioNTech announced today they have a coronavirus vaccine which appears to be about 90% effective. The Trump administration immediately tried to take credit for the vaccine, only to have Pfizer note that it has not taken federal money under Trump’s Operation Warp Speed for rushing a coronavirus vaccine. Don Jr. promptly suggested that the delay in announcing the potential vaccine until this week was designed to hurt Trump’s reelection, but it seems Pfizer is likely distancing itself from Trump to avoid any suggestion that the vaccine is about politics, rather than science. In the past, the administration has touted a number of treatments for Covid-19 that have turned out to be ineffective, and the pressure for a vaccine before the election threatened to weaken public faith in one.

The pandemic continues to worsen across the country. Today we learned that Ben Carson, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, has tested positive for the virus; so has David Bossie, the Trump adviser in charge of the campaign’s legal challenges to the election loss. Both men were at the election night watch party at the White House, along with White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, who was infected at the time and did not wear a mask. Aides told PBS NewsHour reporter Yamiche Alcindor that they were worried the event would be a superspreader, but felt pressured to attend.

President-Elect Joe Biden started his presidential transition today, beginning by announcing the makeup of his coronavirus task force. It’s an impressive group of doctors and scientists, including Dr. Rick Bright, a whistleblower fired by Trump officials. “Please, I implore you, wear a mask," Biden told Americans. "A mask is not a political statement…. The goal is to get back to normal as fast as possible.”

New leadership and the rising infection rates are shifting the conversation. Last night, Utah’s Republican Governor Gary Herbert announced a state of emergency. He has imposed a statewide mask mandate indefinitely and a ban on social gatherings outside of households for the next two weeks. He has limited extracurricular activities at schools. Businesses that don’t follow the mask mandate can be fined; organizers who ignore the social gathering rule can be prosecuted and fined up to $10,000.

Not everyone likes the idea of new leadership, though. In an unprecedented move, Trump is refusing to acknowledge that he has lost the election. He has launched lawsuits challenging the ballot counting in a number of states, and his surrogates—including White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany—are accusing the Democrats of cheating. Tonight, Attorney General William Barr legitimized the idea of voter fraud by permitting federal prosecutors to investigate such allegations. Barr’s move prompted the head of the Election Crimes Branch of the Department of Justice, Richard Pilger, to resign.

But what’s so weird about this is that they are losing all these lawsuits. Indeed, some of them they’re not even trying to win: they’re not bothering to fill out the correct paperwork. It seems clear that they are simply stoking the narrative of an unfair election, but it is not at all clear to me to what end.

It is certainly possible that Trump and his people are launching a coup, as observers warn. And yet, this would not be an easy task. Biden’s win is not a few votes here or there; it is commanding, and Trump’s aides are telling reporters they think the game is played out. The military has already said it wants no part of getting involved in the election, and the courts so far are siding against the administration entirely. Even key Republican leaders, such as Georgia’s Republican lieutenant governor, are denying there has been any problem with the vote.

Maybe what’s at stake is that last Tuesday’s election left control of the Senate hanging on two runoff elections in Georgia. Today the Republican candidates in those races tagged on to the cries of voter fraud to call for Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to resign. Raffensberger is the top elections official in the state. He is a Republican. There is no evidence of any irregularity in the 2020 Georgia election, and the two senators did not offer any. But if they can get Democratic votes thrown out, Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler might avoid the runoffs that look like they might well result in Democratic victories.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is determined to keep control of the Senate, and ginning up a conviction that the election was rigged could do that. McConnell defended Trump’s challenging of the election today, although he did not explicitly say he believed the election had been fraudulent. Trump’s attacks are working: new polling shows that 7 out of 10 Republican voters now think that the 2020 election was illegitimate. Barr met with McConnell before he signed onto the idea of voter fraud by announcing that federal prosecutors could go after it.

Still, while control of the Senate is likely driving McConnell, it seems highly unlikely that Trump cares about it. Perhaps the president is simply deep in a narcissistic rage, unable to face the idea of losing.

But there is something else niggling at me.

Trump’s refusal to acknowledge Biden’s win means that the current administration is denying him the right to see the President’s Daily Briefing (the PDB) which explains the biggest security threats facing the country and the latest intelligence information. Trump can keep Biden from seeing other classified information, too.

Today, Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper (by announcing the firing on Twitter), and replaced him with a loyalist, Christopher C. Miller, who will be “acting” only. Trump also selected a loyalist and Republican political operative, Michael Ellis, to become the general counsel at the National Security Agency, our top spy agency, over the wishes of intelligence officials. Ellis was the chief counsel to Representative Devin Nunes (R-CA), a staunch Trump loyalist. Trump is also reportedly considering firing FBI director Christopher Wray and CIA director Gina Haspel. Last week, he quietly fired the leaders of the agencies that oversee our nuclear weapons, international aid, and electricity and natural gas regulation, although the last of those officials was moved to a different spot in the administration.

In other words, Trump is cleaning out the few national security leaders who were not complete lackeys and replacing them with people who are. It’s funny timing for such a shake-up, especially one that will destabilize the country, making us more vulnerable.

Today Washington Post diplomacy and national security reporter John Hudson noted that a source told him that the “Trump administration just gave Congress formal notification for a massive arms transfer to the United Arab Emirates: 50 F-35s, 18 MQ-9 Reapers with munitions; a $10 billion munitions package including thousands of Mk 82 dumb bombs, guided bombs, missiles & more….” This deal comes two months after the administration’s Abraham Accord normalizing relations between Israel and the UAE opened the way for arms sales.

The UAE has wanted the F-35 for years; it is the world’s most advanced fighter jet. They cost about $100 million apiece. The president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has secretly been pushing for the sale of the arms to the UAE in the face of fierce opposition by government agencies and lawmakers.

The administration had announced a much smaller version of this deal at the end of October, in a sale that would amount to about $10 billion, but Congress worried about the weaponry falling into the hands of China or Russia and seemed unlikely to let the sale happen. In 2019, it stopped such a deal. Trump declared a national emergency in order to go around Congress and sell more than $8 billion of weapons to the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. He later fired Steven Linick, the State Department’s inspector general looking into those sales, but when the IG’s report came out nonetheless, it was scathing, suggesting that they put the U.S. at risk of being prosecuted for war crimes.

When you remember that Trump’s strong suit has always been distraction, and that he has always used the presidency as a money-making venture, I wonder if we need to factor those characteristics in when we think about his unprecedented and dangerous refusal to admit he has lost this election.

—-

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

Heather Cox Richardson

[newstfionline]

Headlines

Canada’s other health crisis (Washington Post) The novel coronavirus was on the march across Canada, but it was a different public health crisis that turned Shannon Krell’s world upside down. Her brother hadn’t shown up for work, which was unusual. She called the police to have someone check on the 46-year-old, but a friend arrived first and made the sad discovery. Ryan Krell had died of an accidental drug overdose—another life lost to a crisis that has killed more than 15,400 people in Canada since 2016. Their number has increased in the shadow of the coronavirus pandemic. British Columbia, the epicenter of the crisis, recorded its deadliest month in May—and then surpassed it in June. Nearly four times as many people in the province have died of a suspected overdose this year as have died of the coronavirus. Overdose deaths in the Yukon territory this year are double last year’s tally. Paramedics in the city of Saskatoon last month responded to a record weekly number of overdose calls.

Taller cubicles, one-way aisles: Office workers must adjust (AP) Bergmeyer, a design firm in Boston, has erected higher cubicles, told employees to wear masks when not at their desks and set up one-way aisles in the office that force people to walk the long way around to get to the kitchen or the bathroom. “The one-way paths take me a little out of the way, but it was easy to get used to,” said Stephanie Jones, an interior designer with the company. “It actually gives me the opportunity to see more people and say a quick hello when I might have just walked directly to my desk before.” Around the U.S., office workers sent home when the coronavirus took hold in March are returning to the world of cubicles and conference rooms and facing certain adjustments: masks, staggered shifts, spaced-apart desks, daily questions about their health, closed break rooms and sanitizer everywhere. Employers in some cases are requiring workers to come back to the office, but most, like Bergmeyer, are letting the employees decide what to do, at least for now. Some firms say the risks and precautions are worth it to boost productivity and move closer to normal.

Postal Crisis Ripples Across Nation as Election Looms (NYT) Each day, when Nick Casselli, the president of a Philadelphia postal workers union, sits down at his desk, his phone is full of alarmed messages about increasing delays in mail delivery. Mr. Casselli and his 1,600 members have been in a state of high alert since Louis DeJoy, a Republican megadonor and an ally of President Trump’s, took over as postmaster general in May. Overtime was eliminated, prompting backups. Seven mail-sorting machines were removed from a nearby processing center in West Philadelphia, causing further delays. Now, post offices are being told to open later and close during lunch. Similar accounts of slowdowns and curtailed service are emerging across the country as Mr. DeJoy pushes cost-cutting measures that he says are intended to overhaul an agency suffering billion-dollar losses. But as Mr. Trump rails almost daily against the service and delays clog the mail, voters and postal workers warn a crisis is building that could disenfranchise record numbers of Americans who will be casting ballots by mail in November because of the coronavirus outbreak. At risk are not just the ballots—and medical prescriptions and paychecks—of residents around the country, but also the reputation of the Postal Service as the most popular and perhaps the least politicized part of the federal government.

California power problems (NYT) A heat wave is scorching the Southwest and has forced intermittent power shut-offs in California. Thermometers are cracking 110 degrees Fahrenheit in some cities. Californians used so much electricity trying to stay cool Friday night that, for the first time in 19 years, the agency that oversees much of the state’s power grid shut off power to hundreds of thousands of customers for several hours to avoid a damaging overload. The National Weather Service issued an excessive heat warning for much of the West Coast. The sweltering heat comes as coronavirus cases are on the rise in California, creating a dilemma for those who could not stay cool at home.

Bald Eagle Sends Government Drone Into Lake Michigan (NYT) A squabble in the sky over Lake Michigan left one bald eagle victorious and one government drone mangled and sunken. Hunter King, a drone pilot at the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy, was surveying an area of the lake near the state’s Upper Peninsula last month when the $950 drone started “twirling furiously” after it indicated that a propeller had been torn off. “When he looked up, the drone was gone, and an eagle was flying away,” said the department, whose name is abbreviated E.G.L.E. The department speculated that the eagle could have attacked because of a territorial dispute, because it was hungry “or maybe it did not like its name being misspelled.” Julia Ponder, executive director of the Raptor Center at the University of Minnesota, said that it was likely because the drone had encroached on the eagle’s territory. “They’re the king of the skies,” she said.

National Debt To Surpass $78 Trillion By 2028 (Forbes) The coronavirus pandemic pushed the government into the proverbial corner, prompting it to borrow heavily from the future to ward off a serious threat today. Without this intervention, the U.S. economy would be in a much worse recession or possibly even a depression. Even though borrowing excessively may have been the lesser of two evils, the burgeoning debt will have ramifications in the future. With the debt approaching $27 trillion, and projected to rise to $78 trillion by 2028, it will present significant challenges.

French government pushes for wider mask use (AP) After France recorded its highest one-day rise in virus infections since May, the government is pushing for wider mask use and tighter protections for migrant workers and in slaughterhouses. But France still plans to reopen schools nationwide in two weeks, and the labor minister says the government is determined to avoid a new nationwide lockdown that would further hobble the economy and threaten jobs. France’s infection count has resurged in recent weeks, blamed in part on people crisscrossing the country for weddings, family gatherings or annual summer vacations with friends. Britain reimposed quarantine measures Saturday for vacationers returning from France as a result.

Lukashenko under pressure as rival protests planned in Belarus capital (Reuters) Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko was under growing pressure on Sunday with rival protests due to converge on the capital a week after a contested presidential election that has thrown his country into turmoil. Lukashenko, in power for 26 years, has faced down a week of street demonstrations and refused demands for a re-run of an election protesters say was massively rigged to disguise the fact that he has lost public support. Often emotional in state TV appearances, the 65-year-old leader has alleged a foreign-backed plot to topple him. Russia, which has had a troubled relationship with Lukashenko, is watching closely as Belarus hosts pipelines that carry Russian energy exports to the West and is also viewed by Moscow as a buffer zone against NATO. The EU is gearing up to impose new sanctions on Belarus in response to a violent crackdown in which at least two protesters have been killed and thousands detained. Protesters show no signs of backing down.

Campus-based Thai protest movement extends reach to streets (AP) Anti-government protesters gathered in large numbers in Thailand’s capital on Sunday for a rally that suggested their movement’s strength may have extended beyond the college campuses where it has blossomed. Thousands of people assembled at Bangkok’s Democracy Monument, a traditional venue for political activities. Hundreds of police were also present, as well as a small contingent of royalists opposed to the protesters. There was no reliable estimate of the crowd size, though it appeared to be one of the biggest demonstrations in several years. The student-led movement has three core demands: holding new elections, amending the constitution and ending the intimidation of critics of the government. Thailand has experienced a successful coup roughly every six years on average since the army toppled the absolute monarchy in 1932 and replaced it with a constitutional monarchy. But it has been under military rule for much of the time since then.

10 killed in Somalia in extremist attack on Mogadishu hotel (AP) A Somali police officer says at least 10 people have been killed and more than a dozen others injured in an ongoing siege at a beachside hotel in Somalia’s capital where security forces are battling Islamic extremist gunmen who have invaded the building, Capt. Mohamed Hussein told The Associated Press that the attack started with a powerful car bomb which blew off the security gates to the Elite Hotel.

[orbemnews]

Biden Outlines $1.9 Trillion Spending Bundle to Fight Virus and Downturn WASHINGTON — President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Thursday proposed a $1.9 trillion rescue package deal to fight the financial downturn and the Covid-19 disaster, outlining the kind of sweeping help that Democrats have demanded for months and signaling the shift within the federal authorities’s pandemic response as Mr. Biden prepares to take workplace. The package deal contains greater than $400 billion to fight the pandemic instantly, together with cash to speed up vaccine deployment and to securely reopen most faculties inside 100 days. One other $350 billion would assist state and native governments bridge finances shortfalls, whereas the plan would additionally embody $1,400 direct funds to people, extra beneficiant unemployment advantages, federally mandated paid depart for employees and huge subsidies for youngster care prices. “Throughout this pandemic, hundreds of thousands of Individuals, by means of no fault of their very own, have misplaced the dignity and respect that comes with a job and a paycheck,” Mr. Biden stated in a speech to the nation. “There may be actual ache overwhelming the true financial system.” He acknowledged the excessive price ticket however stated the nation couldn’t afford to do something much less. “The very well being of our nation is at stake,” Mr. Biden stated, including that it “doesn’t come cheaply, however failure to take action will price us dearly.” Mr. Biden took swift motion to form the agenda at a time of nationwide disaster and a day after President Trump’s impeachment within the Home. Whereas it displays the political shift in Washington as Democrats take management of Congress, help for Mr. Biden’s program will instantly run into challenges, beginning with the likelihood {that a} Senate trial of Mr. Trump may delay its passage. It is usually unclear how simply Mr. Biden can safe sufficient votes for a plan of such ambition and expense, particularly within the Senate. Democratic victories in two Georgia particular elections final week gave Mr. Biden’s social gathering management of the Senate — however solely with a 50-50 margin after Vice President-elect Kamala Harris’s tiebreaking vote. Mr. Biden should compensate for any defecting average Democrats with Republican votes at a time of scarce bipartisanship. Mr. Biden stated that lawmakers would wish to come back collectively for the great of the nation, and that “unity shouldn’t be some pie within the sky dream — it’s a sensible step to getting the issues we’ve got to get achieved as a rustic, get achieved collectively.” His speech on Thursday got here at an extremely difficult second, as virus circumstances proceed to climb, hundreds of thousands of employees stay sidelined and America’s partisan divisions are threatening to tear it aside. Per week after a mob stormed the Capitol to disrupt Congress’s certification of Mr. Biden’s win, Washington has come to resemble an armed camp, with metal barricades being erected throughout town and armed legislation enforcement policing the streets. Greater than 20,000 Nationwide Guardsmen are anticipated to flood Washington earlier than Mr. Biden’s swearing-in on Jan. 20. The financial rebound from the pandemic recession has additionally reeled into reverse amid a winter surge of the virus and new waves of restrictions on financial exercise in cities and states. The Labor Division reported on Thursday that 1.15 million Individuals filed new unemployment claims within the first full week of the brand new 12 months, a 25 p.c improve from the earlier week. One other 284,000 claims have been filed for Pandemic Unemployment Help, an emergency federal program for employees like freelancers who don’t usually qualify for jobless advantages. The nation shed 140,000 jobs in December, the division reported final week. Mr. Biden’s aides say the urgency of the second drove the president-elect to suggest a considerably bigger financial jolt than what the Obama administration pushed by means of upon taking workplace amid a recession in 2009. The Biden proposal is greater than 50 p.c bigger than the Obama-Biden stimulus, after adjusting for inflation, and it comes on high of a number of trillions of {dollars} of financial help that Congress accepted final 12 months below Mr. Trump. The package deal mirrored the scope of the problem going through the financial system and the nation’s well being system. In a briefing on Thursday, one Biden official famous that the present nationwide planning and infrastructure for mass vaccinations and testing was far much less developed than the incoming White Home crew had anticipated. Mr. Biden detailed his so-called American Rescue Plan in a night speech in Delaware, successfully kicking off his presidency and putting him within the brightest highlight since his nomination acceptance speech final summer time on the Democratic Nationwide Conference. The president-elect struck an pressing, however optimistic tone, saying the US may overcome its present challenges. “Out of all of the peril of this second, I need you to know I see the promise,” Mr. Biden stated. “I’m as optimistic as I’ve ever been.” Up to date  Jan. 14, 2021, 7:46 p.m. ET The plan was lauded by progressive teams in addition to by the nation’s main enterprise foyer, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which was usually at odds with the Obama administration over spending and rules. “We applaud the president-elect’s give attention to vaccinations and on financial sectors and households that proceed to endure because the pandemic rages on,” the chamber stated in a press release. Republicans have been largely silent on the plan, which incorporates the kind of state and native help that grew to become a sticking level in final 12 months’s stimulus negotiations. Congress was in a position to agree on a $900 billion package deal in December solely after such help was excluded. However Mr. Biden outlined his rationale for together with such funding, saying it was important to avoiding cutbacks and layoffs that may set again the battle in opposition to the virus and additional injury the financial system. “Tens of millions of individuals placing their lives in danger are the very folks now liable to dropping their jobs: cops, firefighters, all first responders, nurses, educators,” Mr. Biden stated. Mr. Biden’s “rescue” proposal, which might be financed solely by means of elevated federal borrowing, flows from the concept that the virus and the restoration are intertwined and that the financial system can not rebound with out mass vaccine deployment. “What the financial system wants is a profitable rollout of the vaccines, and discount within the dangers of social and financial exercise,” stated Aaron Sojourner, a labor economist on the College of Minnesota’s Carlson Faculty of Administration who served within the White Home Council of Financial Advisers below the Obama and Trump administrations. “That may go a great distance towards selling restoration. It received’t go all the way in which, however it would go a great distance.” Mr. Biden, who has promised to get “100 million Covid vaccine photographs into the arms of the American folks” by his a centesimal day in workplace, stated final week that he supposed to launch almost all obtainable coronavirus vaccine vials as soon as he takes workplace, relatively than holding some again because the Trump administration had been doing. The $20 billion “nationwide vaccine program” he introduced on Thursday envisions group vaccination facilities across the nation. In latest speeches, he has stated he want to see mass vaccination websites in highschool gymnasiums, sports activities stadiums and the like, maybe staffed by the Nationwide Guard or workers of the Federal Emergency Administration Company. Mr. Biden additionally referred to as for a “public well being jobs program” that may handle his objectives of bolstering the financial system and the Covid-19 response whereas additionally rebuilding the nation’s fragile public well being infrastructure. The proposal would fund 100,000 public well being employees to interact in vaccine outreach and phone tracing. On the identical time, Mr. Biden is eager on addressing the racial disparities which have been so painfully uncovered by the coronavirus pandemic, which has disproportionately claimed the lives and jobs of individuals of colour. He pledged to extend funding for group well being facilities and to fund efforts to mitigate the pandemic in prisons and jails, the place Black folks and Latinos are overrepresented. In his remarks, Mr. Biden lamented a “rising starvation disaster,” significantly amongst minority communities, saying: “Multiple in 5 Black and Latino households in America report that they don’t have sufficient meals to eat. It’s mistaken. It’s tragic. It’s unacceptable.” He proposed a variety of efforts to assist those that have suffered essentially the most within the financial pullback. His plan would supply emergency paid depart to 106 million Individuals, whatever the measurement of their employer, a proposal that many congressional Republicans labored to pare again in a stimulus invoice handed final spring. And it could prolong tax credit to many households to offset as much as $8,000 in annual youngster care prices. It offers billions of {dollars} in rental help and would give grants to hundreds of thousands of the hardest-hit small companies. It additionally briefly will increase the dimensions of two tax credit in a fashion that may successfully present extra cash from the federal government to low-income employees and households. And it could prolong expanded unemployment advantages by means of the tip of September, with an additional $400 weekly complement. Mr. Biden additionally referred to as on Congress to lift the federal minimal wage to $15 an hour, a precedence he outlined throughout his marketing campaign. . Mr. Biden plans to unveil one other, bigger set of spending proposals in February, and he started laying the groundwork to finance these efforts by elevating taxes on companies and the wealthy. He drew a pointy distinction between the struggling of low-wage employees and people struggling with no paycheck with the wealthiest Individuals, saying there’s a “rising divide between these few folks on the very high who’re doing fairly properly on this financial system — and the remainder of America.” “Simply since this pandemic started, the wealth of the highest 1 p.c has grown by roughly $1.5 trillion because the finish of final 12 months — 4 occasions the quantity for your complete backside 50 p.c,” he stated. The second package deal is predicted to be centered on job creation and infrastructure, together with a whole bunch of billions of {dollars} of spending on clean-energy tasks like electrical car charging stations, together with well being care and training spending. Mr. Biden has stated he’ll work to construct Republican help for his plans, and he’ll want 10 Republican votes within the Senate to beat a filibuster. However high Democrats within the Home and Senate are getting ready to pivot shortly to a parliamentary course of generally known as finances reconciliation within the occasion they will get solely a easy majority within the Senate. Republicans used the process to bypass a filibuster and approve Mr. Trump’s signature tax cuts in 2017. Republicans’ refusal to think about a stimulus package deal in extra of $1 trillion held down the dimensions of the final congressional reduction invoice, handed in December. Mr. Biden’s aides stated Thursday that they have been assured that the almost $2 trillion package deal he had proposed would discover large help amongst Democrats at a time when rates of interest stay low and lots of economists are urging lawmakers to deficit spend with a purpose to promote financial development. Sheryl Homosexual Stolberg contributed reporting. Supply hyperlink #Biden #combat #downturn #outlines #Package #Spending #TRILLION #Virus

[backstorywithdanalewis]

The New Variant - The race against Covid-19 on Back Story with Dana Lewis podcast. Link: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1016881/7078915

Dr. Paul Hunter/ Virologist: (00:00) And as soon as he said that, you know, I felt, actually felt physically sick because that meant that this, you know, even with it a lockdown, like if we'd continued the November lockdown, we would almost certainly have continued to have, uh, increasing numbers of cases, increasing number of hospitalizations and increasing numbers of deaths. And Dana Lewis - Host : (00:22) By the way, we are seeing those now. Dr. Paul Hunter/ Virologist: (00:24) Yeah, absolutely. Yes, yes. Yeah. And so it was extraordinarily worrying. Dana Lewis - Host : (00:36) Hi everyone. And welcome to another edition of backstory. I'm Dana Lewis. I started this podcast in the spring under lockdown, and it's been a fantastic outlet to interview and hear some amazing people. This is our last podcast of 2020 we're under lockdown in London. So I guess it ends as it started tonight is new year's and hopefully 2021 is a better year for everyone as we speak. My kids will not be going back to school in London this week, because school openings are delayed. Hospitals are overwhelmed here and in America, and in other parts of Europe, the COVID 19 virus has been relentless. And now it is adapting and becoming more dangerous because then you variant makes it spread faster. We're talking about 70% faster. According to the experts this week, Oxford AstraZeneca announced they have been approved as a vaccine. The third big vaccine after Pfizer's and Medina. Dana Lewis - Host : (01:35) This one is easier to transport, cheaper to buy. But as this new variant of COVID-19 spreading in the UK, in Europe and Canada in the U S now resistant to vaccines, well, they say probably not, but we can tell you behind the scenes tests are being carried out at government labs. And we will know more in a couple of weeks, but we are in a race say experts to get the pandemic under control with vaccines before this virus mutates again. And it will on this backstory, we speak to a professor of medicine, Dr. Paul Hunter here in the UK. He's a virologist, but first we go to the U S and an epidemiologist who has been publicly critical of the Trump administration's handling of the pandemic. There's been a lot of people that have been critical, which by the way, and by any estimation was downplayed politically by Trump to win an election. He lost the election and the virus just keeps on coming. Dana Lewis - Host : (02:42) All right, joining me now from Washington is Dr. Eric Feigal-Ding, who is an epidemiologist, a health economist, uh, he's well known. He does a lot of television by the way. And, uh, Eric, you know, you appeared in this ad, um, really against, uh, president Trump with a lot of other healthcare, uh, people, doctors who were really concerned about the pace, uh, of the spread of COVID-19 in the United States as most people are. Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (03:12) Why did you do that,? Well, I felt like, um, public policy around public health has really failed in terms of leadership in leading the country. And so much of what we know about, um, masks. So much of what we know about lockdowns so much. What we know about testing content tracing being early to stop the pandemic. So many public health recommendations were ignored. And literally we've never been in a situation where, um, an election came down to life and death for thousands, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people as, as quickly, I'm unfolding, um, the last few months and into the coming months. So I felt really compelled as a public health scientist to really act and advocate. Dana Lewis - Host : (04:06) I'm glad you acted with good conscience. And, but why do you think that president Trump ignored kind of that side of the discussion to a large degree in downplayed the virus constantly saying we're rounding a corner. The vaccines are coming, you know, from the moment this started breaking out in the United States, he, he was trying to close the door and say, we have it under control and it's going away. Why? Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (04:32) Right. Well, it's the key thing for his reelection. He thought according to a lot of strategists is that the economy must be booming. As long as the economy is booming, that was his path to reelection. And obviously the coronavirus pandemic has thrown a huge monkey wrench that given all the economic damage that he has done. And, and he thought early on that, the longer, he just tried to downplay it, ignore it. Just trying to tell people it's a hoax that you would somehow dampen people's anxiety. And again, not cause people to get worried and therefore change your behaviors and hurt the economy. Can you tell him that he could win in that way for his reelection, but the virus, the virus is, will do its virus thing. It does not care about political beliefs whatsoever. It will transmit at every single opportunity that you get it to transmit, whether it's airborne, whether it's not wearing masks, whether it's not this isn't seen, whether they're not taking any public health precautions, not testing conduct, Tracy, this is why the virus really agnostics the politics and that kind of dimension a trunk, just his mindset just could not deal with this pandemic. Dana Lewis - Host : (05:51) All right. It's important timeframe in how long this virus is led to run loose in some regard, is it not? Because now that enters us into this new conversation about a new variant, which I want to ask you about, but the longer this virus is around the, the more it's going to change and adapt and, and become vaccine resilient. Is it not Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (06:18) Well rag vaccine resiliency, vaccine escape is a little bit more tricky. Uh, we don't think that this will escape the vaccine, but you are right that the longer this virus circulates in nature, that he has a host or reservoir of whether it's humans or animals to replicate pass on. And in these hosts on mutate, the longer that keeps happening, the more and more of these mutations, these chanced unlucky mutations that we will see. And so this is why we have to really eradicate zero COVID, shouldn't be the goal because with zero COVID, we can eradicate it for good and return to complete normal. But with this semi, you know, uh, lockdown semi, uh, keep the embers, as long as it's almost gone, you know, that's half Willy nilly approach or not end this virus and will allow it to become endemic for longterm and mutates more and more forms. And we just cannot afford that Dana Lewis - Host : (07:26) Here in the United Kingdom, but also where you are in the United States, that does appear to be the pro the approach though, as long as the hospitals can deal with the inflow of patients, then you kind of release some of the restrictions, let businesses open again and movie theaters and Cylons, and then the moment it looks like they're about to be overwhelmed. Again, they start locking down and that's what we're, we're experiencing here in London, uh, because of this new development with the virus, they are locking down and starting to get pretty panicked, but they're never going for what you talk about this kind of zero approach to the virus. Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (08:06) Yeah. My best analogy is, look, if you are owner with Jurassic park and you know, you've almost eliminated all the velociraptors, um, but welcome to the park. Kids come to the park. No one's gonna come to the park and same with, if it was a zoo, the full economic demand and marginal propensity to consume, and all of these things, economics, you will not return until you have completely eliminated that spiral. This virus is just that pernicious, uh, just that easy way to, um, basically transmit that it will really stall out our economic development in so many different ways and hurt our children in so many ways. So a little bit of the vaccine strategy, which I cannot, you know, emphasize is so important, but isn't coming fast enough for given the pace of inoculations zero COVID should be the goal and really, truly stamp it out. Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (09:07) So that's never a menace to us. Again, you really have to aim for that. And with the hospital criteria, it's so dumb. Look, if that was the criteria for everything, you know what? You don't need to wear helmets, a hospital beds they're not full, you don't need, uh, you know, seatbelt laws or hospital beds are not full. That's not how public health works. You reduce risk every single way you can. And this is the friends of the same reason. Um, I think secondhand smoke is it is a good analogy. Second hand smoke, extra hurts and causes cancer and heart disease and deaths and other people, right? That's why it's banded restaurants and bars and this, and this hurting other people. This, we have to take this prevention model and the community model truly we need to, in order to in guarantee economic development, we need to stop this virus for good. And we need to think of the collective good and not just think of, Oh, are the hospital beds full? We're not really. We really have to focus on zero COVID as the goal. Dana Lewis - Host : (10:11) How concerned are you about this new variant that they've traced back to at least starting here in the United Kingdom, especially in the South East and around London, where I am to September, they think, um, and it has quote unquote by the government taken off. How concerned are you? Is this just another variant in some 4,000 variants? Or would you say, no, this is a lot more significant. Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (10:38) Yeah, we've had a lot of variants, but this is significant given that the number of mutations is accumulated is huge. It's like a huge jump step up from the average rate of mutation. And it's in the spike protein and in the binding domains, which means it can likely modify how this virus functions and this increased transmissibility anywhere between 50 and 70% is worrisome. That said it doesn't change how we, our public guidelines are. We know how to stop this virus. It's basically wear masks, take distance precautions, but that's not enough to take airborne precautions because this is the airborne virus and hence ventilate and do all these, uh, contesting contracts racing. All of these things don't change. These strategies still work. The problem is this virus just move so much faster. If these public health containment measures are not in place and no one wants to lock down, I don't want to lock down. No one wants to lock down. That's a last resort, but unless we can do all these proper public health things, lockdown is the only way to go. And obviously that hurts all a lot of people. So it doesn't change in a percent, uh, what we should be doing, that it just changes the urgency. And I think the increased risk of transmission in children, that speculation also increases the urgency that if we want our kids to go back to school in the near future, we really have to get this under control. Dana Lewis - Host : (12:14) All right. That's what I want to ask you about, because up until now, it's been gauged here in another parts of the United States that it's more important to keep schools open than it is to keep kids away from COVID because they don't generally get a lot of big reactions to it or, or they're they're asymptomatic. Uh, but no doubt it is spreading amongst kids. And this new variant appears to be based on initial reports. And I understand studies are still going on and you're you're, you don't have firsthand studies, uh, in front of you right now, but what do you think, how do you interpret that data that you're starting to see about its ability to spread with kids? And what does that mean to, to school openings, which are just around the corner, Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (13:01) Right? And I think this is one of the factors that really worries me because this transmissibility people have downplayed it in children for the longest time. Now, granted children don't die at a high rate, but they do get sick and do get hospitalized. And some have, of course, unfortunately do die, but this is only more important for our kids, because if it is true, if it is preliminary, data is true that this elevates the transmission risk among kids to the level of Advil, which is what they're speculating. This means that children are efficient vectors as adults. And that means schools will become much more dangerous of a place. Now, obviously of all the things to open, the last things to close down should be schools. And so I would rather close down bars and restaurants before it closed schools, but this really changed the ball game around schools. Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (14:01) And this emphasizes that stopping the virus, ultimately stopping the virus through vaccinations or through these other public health container measures, Texas tech testing conduct, raising mass ventilation, airport precautions. It just takes on a level of urgency. I cannot emphasize enough and people are just also ignoring the fact that it's airborne this wash. Your hands is important in the early days, but I think wash your hands. It's still important, but not nearly as important as ventilate and not nearly as important as you know, um, using, um, advanced Merv 13 filters germicidal UV for, for, for office buildings and, um, newer schools, all these things take on a new level of urgency, unfortunately. And if so, if this variant holds out true, which is now detected in like dozens of countries worldwide, it is very worrisome for our kids going back to school Dana Lewis - Host : (15:05) More widespread than we realize because, Oh, Kay's very, very good at analyzing like a hundred times better at, at doing genome sequencing and, and studying the development of the, of the virus. Do you think that there's just a lot of other countries that just haven't recognized how widespread this is already in their populations? Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (15:27) Yeah, absolutely. And remember the old adage, no testing, no cases, no pandemic. Well in this, uh, situation, it's no genomic sequencing new, no mutations, no new variants. It's, it's this. And it's a very backwards, you know, see, you know, you will hear no evil, but is there a truly evil, um, we don't know. And the us is ranked number 43 in the world in terms of percentage of total cases sequenced the virus. Okay. The sequence. So we're really behind the ball game here and we think it could already be behind. Remember in the spring, we had discovered that we were two months behind identification of the early Washington state cases because we didn't, we lacking lacking testing and you know, January, February. So this is the worry that it's already here. It's already circulating. Now it's not more deadly or, um, you know, virulent than the previous drains. Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (16:28) But again, what's what makes this fire so unique is that it doesn't kill everyone really quickly. Because if you do like a Bola with 50% mortality, this fires wouldn't take over the world. It spreads pernicious Lilly, heart kills a lot of people, but also harmlessly passes through many. And this bad things are many because of is contagious. This is what gives it the pernicious property to take on the world as a pandemic. So we have to stop it and we have to take a whole, no prisoner, zero a zero COVID because those countries that have New Zealand, Taiwan, Australia, China, and Vietnam, they've enjoyed hundreds of days of no community transmissions or for the most part and all and no deaths. And they're having concerts sports games do it. Life is basically returned to normal and they have not paid any further price beyond the initial lockdown period, but we are constantly paying it again and again, with multi-trillion dollar relief bills that we can't afford on the longterm, we have to do it and we have to stop it. Now, Dana Lewis - Host : (17:46) Editorial in the garden by an Anthony. Who's a professor of global health and sustainable development at university college here in London, um, says don't blame the new development with the virus for where we are. He says the prime minister's repeated dithering delays and seeming inability to make unpopular decisions have led Britain to one of the worst death rates in the world. We can only hope that we're not in that position by Easter. He says, there's a lot of parallels between what's happened in Britain and what has happened under president Trump. Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (18:20) Yeah, absolutely. And I agree the most of the global cases, hospitalizations and deaths are not due to the new, very new, very is still a small minority of the total viruses that circulating. And you know, it really is a show of how big the difference good leadership makes. Um, in New Zealand, just Cinda art and Shirley leadership allowed to huge move fast and take the precautionary principle. Taiwan did the same thing as well. Um, Taiwan's vice-president is actually a Johns Hopkins trained epidemiologist. They move fast. They, you know, they do blink when it came to, uh, how bad this could be. They knew that they had to get under control and that takes leadership decisiveness. If you want to be sure, 100% sure before you act, you will be too late as a who immersions director. Mike Ryan said, this is why good leadership in these times of crisis makes all the difference. This is not like a hurricane that's already blown through. This is an active storm. That's still raging and the faster you can stop it, the faster you can enjoy life again. Dana Lewis - Host : (19:41) Last question to you, what is the risk? And I don't want to over dramatize it, but it seems to me in everything that I've read, that you've already talked about, the new variant changing, somewhat the development of the spike protein, which is what the vaccines are designed to cling on to an attack. If we did there to use somebody else's words again, if this goes on with us, just kind of letting the steam out of the lockdowns and then locking down a bit more and then letting it run again, run hot. Isn't there a danger that these vaccines that we need so badly at a certain point will get outpaced by COVID-19, which is constantly adapting to its environment. Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (20:33) Yeah, it's this, this coronavirus, it's not as fast mutating as say the flu, but it does mutate over time. And the longer we let it linger, especially for many, many years there be vaccine escape. To some degree, it won't be, you know, right now say maternal adviser, a 95% efficacy. It won't be that it drops to zero, but it could drop a significant percentages. The more mutations it has now, we're doing lab studies right now to show how much, um, the, our antibodies, the resistance that we develop from this vaccine will, uh, attack this new variant. And some people say probably won't affect much at most, a few percentage points dropped, but the longer we let it roam free, the more it will pick up these resistance. And I use the word resistance because it's slightly not exactly the slightly akin to antibiotic resistance, right? Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (21:34) The, you use more ways to attack it. Especially certain drugs like monoclonal antibodies, which people speculate it could be use of the monoclonal antibodies in the immunocompromised person, but the more you attack the virus, the more it will try and ways to beach and the more time and more bodies in which you can live for a while to mutate the more, the greater, the risk that this could happen. And that is what we ultimately don't want. Now, granted, we can modify the MRD vaccines pretty quickly. We had this vaccine, we are administering now back in February, we can synthesize pretty fast, but the trials would take so long and take so much effort and time, and we will lose a lot of cases. And we'll go through more of these openings. Lockdowns at the pandemic is not control. We have to stop it now. And the fact scene thing, you know, it's a more of a multi-year thing. If it becomes a significant vaccine escape, but that should not be a consideration right now consideration right now is we have to stop it for a whole collective of public health, children's educational and economic reasons. And long-term, if we do not stop it in 2021, 2022, we let it keep roaming. Then the vaccine escape will really catch up with us in a few years. And that's what we ultimately definitely want to avoid as well. Dana Lewis - Host : (23:02) All right, Dr. Eric, figgle ding. Very good to talk to you and, uh, an epidemiologist and health economist, and I will confess, I've been trying to get him for more than a week. He's he's a busy guy and in high demand. So we really appreciate your time. Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (23:17) Thank you. Best wishes. Thank you, sir. Dana Lewis - Host : (23:27) All right, let's go to Norwich Um, England in East Anglia, the North school of medicine, uh, is at the university of East Anglia and Dr. Paul Hunter, uh, is a professor in medicine. Hi, Paul. Hello. Good afternoon. You are a virologist. Yeah, my medical specialty. Dr. Paul Hunter/ Virologist: (23:46) I graduated in medicine, then I specialized in medical, microbiology and virology, but a lot of my, uh, career has been, um, are also involved in, uh, public health aspects of infectious disease. Dana Lewis - Host : (23:59) You probably never thought we would be in this situation. Dr. Paul Hunter/ Virologist: (24:04) Um, well actually one of our medical students, Amanda, my old medical students, uh, sent me an email a couple of months back saying he can remember a lecture that I gave about 10, 15 years ago now where I was predicting pretty much that we would have something like this at some time in there in, uh, um, uh, uh, working career. So, uh, it's one thing to predict the one was expecting. Dana Lewis - Host : (24:30) I think that predicted it's quite another one to face it. And I mean, actually, did you really believe that when you kind of looked statistically and said, yeah, well, I mean, we're probably do every century or something. Yeah, Dr. Paul Hunter/ Virologist: (24:40) No, absolutely. Because, um, you know, we, for most of my professional career, we've been experiencing one or two what's called emerging infectious disease threats a year. And it was only really a matter of time before we had a big one like this. I mean, we've had in the last few years, we've had, um, Ebola in West Africa, Zika virus in South America, uh, avian, influenza, swine flu, all sorts of other threats, SARS and MERS. And so they, they come about once one or two a year on average. And it was only a matter of time before we had one as big as this. And as the world health organization, um, said a couple of days ago, you know, this might not actually be the big one where they're full of good news. Yeah, absolutely. Dana Lewis - Host : (25:36) So it may not actually be the big one because they're expecting something that's much stronger than this virus. Dr. Paul Hunter/ Virologist: (25:43) Well, be the case. I mean, we're heading for about 2 million deaths totally so far. Um, with this pandemic and, um, Spanish flu, there was, I think I'm writing saying there was something like 50 million deaths worldwide and, um, it it's, uh, possibly only a matter of time before we gain, we have something that can do offs this, but hopefully Dana Lewis - Host : (26:08) Like we, we seem so utterly ill prepared for all of it. Look, as we speak, let's start off on a positive app. Oxford AstraZeneca has announced now that their vaccine has been approved. So we have yet another big vaccine out of the, I guess, out of three big ones now, um, would you take it, do you think this is great news or Dr. Paul Hunter/ Virologist: (26:33) I think it is, I think the, um, they're the three main vaccines at the moment and, uh, for the West at least, but there are others, there's the Russian Sputnik vaccine and China's got it. Seven vaccine, um, which is, um, again is slightly different to, uh, the, so the, uh, Emma RNA vaccines for Pfizer Medina and the add no virus vector vaccine, Dana Lewis - Host : (26:58) This one different than the Pfizer and the Madonna Dr. Paul Hunter/ Virologist: (27:01) It's it's, it's delivered within a preexisting virus, which is for the Oxford one, it's a chimpanzee virus and that gets into the cells and then the DNA is released. And then the, um, uh, then that cell manufacturers that spike protein, which is what you're trying to gender the, um, immunity to, um, the Pfizer and Medina vaccine. So it's called MRN a vaccine. So essentially what you're doing is injecting messenger RNA into, um, uh, uh, little packages that then get taken up and then get replicated into, into the protein. And so ultimately the end, the end result is, is, is the same, but they, uh, they, there are many different, um, issues in how you handle these different vaccines. Certainly. Dana Lewis - Host : (27:57) I don't know many mainstream people that don't have concerns about the safety of the vaccines, even traditional people that generally say, yeah, you know, vaccines are fine. They give them to their kids. These have been rolled out so quickly in such a compressed period of time. I mean, there, there are still a lot of concerns with some pretty sober people. I mean, these are not anti-vaxxers, but just generally people who are worried about, you know, do you take it or do you wait awhile? Dr. Paul Hunter/ Virologist: (28:22) Yeah. I mean, I, I, I've got no hesitation, you know, I'm just desperately looking to the opportunity to have my shots, which the last time I looked might not be till April may. Um, although with the Oxford vaccine coming out, I think that, I mean, this issue about the speed is, is that these have got to effectively got to market. Um, when you realize what the reasons for the delays are normally, then it becomes, um, less frightening. The, the issue with most vaccines is that when you're developing a new vaccine, so any disease, the first thing is you never sure it's going to work. So what happens is that you persuade somebody to fund your initial research, to show that you can develop a vaccine and that may be, and then go on to show that it works possibly an animal experiments. And, um, and then once you've got those, you write those up and you then go through another round of persuading, somebody to fund the phase one studies, uh, which if they're successful, you fund the second phase two studies. Dr. Paul Hunter/ Virologist: (29:34) And, and the other thing is that for most, uh, infectious diseases that you're trying to develop, uh, vaccines to you don't have actually that much disease around. So the, even when you do get to phase three trials, it takes a long time to accumulate enough cases in your study for you to be able to judge the efficacy of the vaccine what's happened here is that effectively all these manufacturers, all these vaccine producers were funded up front for the whole thing. They, um, so they didn't, once they'd completed the phase one studies, they could, they didn't then have to go begging for money to do the next bit. And also because of, uh, that they were able to, um, overlap the different studies. So that as soon as you've got preliminary data, showing that phase, once it's safe, you can then, uh, pretty much quickly go onto the phase two studies and so on. So, so all the steps have been gone through, Dana Lewis - Host : (30:45) Right, in saying that with the Oxford AstraZeneca and maybe with the others too, that because we're in the middle of a pandemic and especially in the United Kingdom where you have a national healthcare system. Yes, they were, they were very quick in getting it out to people, having the right people, take it for their studies and being able to get those results back. Dr. Paul Hunter/ Virologist: (31:06) Yeah. And, and importantly, having those right people actually get sick. Um, and you, because, you know, you only know that the vaccine has worked once people start getting sick in your study. And then what happens is the once you've got enough people who have actually developed the disease, you break the code and see whether or not the people who've developed the disease have been in, have had the vaccine or a placebo. And, um, and that's why that phase three studies, which typically can take several years to complete, have been, um, able to got big gut through quite quickly, Dana Lewis - Host : (31:49) As we speak, there are a lot of people sick and there are numbers of people sick in America, sick in Europe, United Kingdom, um, very close to leading the death toll in Europe, again, um, this new variant and pull it's really what I wanted to talk to you about. Are you alarmed by the new variant? Dr. Paul Hunter/ Virologist: (32:10) Oh, desperately. So, um, I can remember one of, one of the days that I will remember most about the epidemic was, uh, in part because it shocked me and I wasn't expecting it was when the prime minister gave his, uh, his, um, presentation about a week a Saturday. What was, it was about a week before Christmas about this, Dana Lewis - Host : (32:43) You know, it's not very long ago. It seems in this news cycle, it seems like it was a long time ago. It was just a week before Christmas. And that was 72 hours after he had come out and said it would be inhuman, just create a lockdown through Christmas. Dr. Paul Hunter/ Virologist: (32:58) Absolutely. And, um, and th what he said was that the second sentence was effectively that as far as they can tell, the new variant has an R value of more than 0.4 over the pre-existing variants. Now we've, um, we we're hoping to publish this soon, but we've, we've been looking at how effective the Nash, the November lockdown was. And generally it was pretty effective. It must be said, you know, in terms of suppressing the virus, um, and most regions were able to get down on average to about an R value of 0.7, um, in for that, for their epidemics. Dana Lewis - Host : (33:50) You know, Paul, there's a lot of people that don't understand the R value, especially in America, because it's talked about in news conferences here all the time, but the R value essentially as if it's an R value of one, that means you infect one other person. If it's one and a half, you're inspecting, you're bending silent half, you're passing it on. So it's gotta be below one. Dr. Paul Hunter/ Virologist: (34:08) It's got to be below one now. So the simple maths was, if our November lockdown was able to get the existing variants down to an R value of 0.7, and this new variant was 0.4, that takes above one. And so what, what essentially that said was that the, that the November lockdown was not sufficient to reverse the increase in this new variant, which is very scary. And that means that, you know, we, um, and as soon as he said that, you know, I felt, actually felt physically sick because that meant that this, you know, even with it, uh, locked down, like if we'd continued the November lockdown, we would almost certainly have continued to have, uh, increasing numbers of cases, increasing number of hospitalizations and increasing numbers of deaths. Dana Lewis - Host : (35:08) And by the way, we are seeing those now. Dr. Paul Hunter/ Virologist: (35:10) Yeah, absolutely. Yes, yes. Yeah. And so it was extraordinarily worrying. It means cause we tend to use the term non-pharmaceutical interventions and although for, for these, and they'll they lock downs is, um, it's a sort of a catch-all phrase. The reality is that lockdown is a very, you know, means very different things. You know, it can be just a Pope's restaurants are closed, shops are closed or it could be, everybody has to stay at home. It could mean, you know, and there's a difference between lockdowns with schools open and down, Dana Lewis - Host : (35:48) We're in London and we're in a, we're in a tier four lockdown, which means beauty salons, gyms, all of the main shopping centers, which were open just before Christmas had to be closed, but you can still go to work. You can still, uh, travel on public transit. They say, if you need to, but most people who want money will say that they need to indeed. Um, so it's it's, and you're not allowed to socialize with other households that shut all of that Christmas three household mixing idea that just shut it all down. Do you think that is working now? Dr. Paul Hunter/ Virologist: (36:27) Yeah. And that, that was depressing because actually, although a lot of my colleagues were arguing against having celebrations over Christmas. I was not one of them because I felt that we could, I felt the three, uh, family Christmas, uh, rule could have allowed us to manage Christmas safely, uh, and less of a risk than actually going about our normal daily life, uh, early on in the month. But this new variant of course, just, yeah, I mean, it just, uh, throw out, Dana Lewis - Host : (37:04) Do you alarm that beyond the R the replication number? Dr. Paul Hunter/ Virologist: (37:10) If we can't stop this disease, if whatever we do shorter vaccination increased. Well, there's a number of things. The first is that forgetting about vaccination at the moment, what this means is that case numbers will increase, um, rapidly, no matter, uh, possibly no matter how strict our lockdowns are. And of course you can't lock downs, can't be ever totally strict. I mean, if we were able to enforce a rule that said, okay, for the next month, nobody at all is allowed to leave their house. Then, uh, the virus would pretty much have disappeared and may well have actually totally disappeared. The problem is that there'd be a lot of people dead from starvation and the water supplies would have stopped working and, and our electricity wouldn't be on and all these other things, which we need to keep us alive. So it's, it's always has to be a balance between how restrictive you, you want to be. And actually, how do you keep people, keep society going, um, at the lockdown and seems to me Dana Lewis - Host : (38:26) What balance it seems to me watching this government in Britain, and then also watching the, the Trump. I don't even want to characterize it, but I mean, the Trump tragic tragic comedy, um, that there's, there was this idea of herd immunity in the beginning. And then they started to kind of get into this other system where, you know, they would, they would lift the lid, um, just until hospitals started to see those increase numbers. And they were worried about the hospitals getting overwhelmed, and then they would put it down. Whereas in Asia, the philosophy was very much shut it down, eliminate it, and then reopened. And, and in Western Europe and in America, um, Canada was a bit better where I'm from generally though it was, you know, let it, let it simmer. Dr. Paul Hunter/ Virologist: (39:18) Yeah. Yeah. And I think that was a mistake. And I think, I think the, um, we certainly didn't in this country do well enough to control this epidemic. And I think the, the fact that we, that the new variant arose in the UK, there is nothing special about where new variants can arise. But the only thing that drives whether or not you're going to get a new variant in one place or another is how much more disease you've got in one place or another, you know, the likelihood of getting a new variant appearing in a place is solely related to the number of infections. So if we'd managed to bring our infections lower during the summer and September, if we'd got an effective test track and trace that actually worked properly, if we, um, uh, being a little bit more cautious about opening up some of the hospitality venues and encouraging people to go on, um, uh, to go to restaurants during August on particular days, because that's when you've got the half price meal. And that's when it was really busy, um, that, um, you know, we might not have actually had enough cases around to have actually kick-started the English barrier, but then of course the, you know, there's the South African variants. So, you know, it wouldn't necessarily Dana Lewis - Host : (40:48) Very, very quickly. Just two more questions. One is, you said the English variant look, I was looking at the center for strategic risks in America. Um, and there, there are a lot of former defense officials and people who have died who have dealt with the risk of biological warfare. And I have a lot of respect for them, but they talked about the genome sequencing sequencing that takes place in the United Kingdom. Um, and that there really isn't anything comparable to in other places and that the us should have it, but that the number that they use in the United States 0.3% of cases have been sequenced in the United Kingdom. It's about five, 10% roughly, right? Yes. The us is ranked 43 in the world, by the way, which I think is shocking. So look that may tell us, yeah, the UK is better at sequencing. Doesn't it also tell us that this variant, while it's really been identified in the United Kingdom and people are sealing their borders to the UK, it is probably much more widespread than we realize. Dr. Paul Hunter/ Virologist: (41:55) Yeah, it is now. But I think, I think the balance of evidence is it probably started initially in the Southeast of England, maybe Kent, but, you know, we can't say that for certain, you know, one of the things, as I'm sure you know about Kent is that it's sort of quite close to the channel tunnel. And so, you know, a lot of them, Dana Lewis - Host : (42:18) All the truck drivers passing through and stuff, Dr. Paul Hunter/ Virologist: (42:21) Well, you can't exclude that, but it did, you know, um, but, uh, it, it certainly is spreading more widely. Um, it, it's now in the States, it's now in Canada, it's in Australia and it's, uh, it pretty in print, I think most European countries where they've actually looked for it. Dana Lewis - Host : (42:44) Do you, in your initial reaction, which you described as feeling physically ill when you saw the increasing our rates, um, and realize this new VR variant, uh, had taken off, do you believe that, um, we are battling the clock in that this variant, it is just a matter of time because we're seeing mutations in the spike protein, which it attaches the vaccines attach onto. If we don't roll out vaccines effectively, if this is not handled quickly and the lid put back on all of this, that the virus is simply going to outpace and I'm smart than you vaccines, Dr. Paul Hunter/ Virologist: (43:30) You're quite right. I mean, at the moment, there is no evidence that it's made a big change to the ability of the vaccine to protect against that strain. The big problem though, is that we do, we S um, uh, I I've been saying this for some time and probably one of the few people in the UK that is actually, uh, quoted as saying this for some time. But, um, I was gratified to know that the chief scientist of the world health organization two days ago said exactly the same thing. We do not know whether any of the current vaccines actually stop infection. So, um, it is certainly plausible that the vaccines and I think the, um, there is, uh, I think the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine have actually looked at this and the thought does it didn't actually make that much difference to whether somebody an infection or not. But what it does is stop people or reduce the chances of people developing things symptomatic Dana Lewis - Host : (44:40) Right now. No, I'm alarmed now I'm alone, because what you're telling me is if it doesn't stop infection yeah, lets you continue on. But that means all of the social distancing, all of the mask wearing all of that is going to have to continue because this vaccine will continue to circulate and continue to mutate and develop. And eventually Dr. Paul Hunter/ Virologist: (45:00) It's quite plausible. Yeah. And it may well be the case that although at the moment that the spike proteins is still, uh, uh, uh, close enough for the vaccine to work, um, at some point, presumably it's quite possible that we will get some nutation that is, uh, that's the called escape mutants that, that no longer is controlled by the vaccine, but it shouldn't be that we weren't have to go through the huge process that we've had to this year to, to modify the vaccines for any new mutation. But the issue is in people who don't have vaccine, if it does, if these vaccines don't stop transmission, although they'll almost certainly reduce the probability of transmission, even if they don't stop, stop it, but if they don't stop it, then any concept of herd immunity from vaccination, just evaporates, you know, and, um, so that people who elect not to be vaccinated for whatever reason or can't because of preexisting disease or whatever, um, they're still very much at risk of getting the infection of getting severe disease and, and, and dying depending on other risk factors and their age and so on. Dr. Paul Hunter/ Virologist: (46:22) So yeah, it is. And, and I think with this, um, more infectious, um, variant that becomes even more difficult for people who don't have the vaccine, they're even more at risk of continuing to be getting the infection. So I think to be honest, I can't, you know, I, well, I've been saying for months that, you know, I can see my grandchildren's grandchildren, well, I won't be around then, but you know, I, I strongly suspect that my grandchildren's grandchildren will still be getting infections with COVID-19, but they almost certainly will not be dying by then. And almost certainly the disease that we S that they would experience, won't be that much different from the common cold. And that is, and I'm saying that because we know that's happened at least twice in the past, where a very similar to virus virus to COVID-19 has got into human society probably was responsible for large of deaths for the few years. And then after that, it just sort of, we came to a, um, um, uh, a, a situation where it was just the common cold bond, Dana Lewis - Host : (47:41) But you're saying there's still some very difficult years potentially ahead of us, even though the UK health minister was on television this morning, saying this is all going to be over in the spring. I mean, he is that's, I think that is in the extreme. Dr. Paul Hunter/ Virologist: (47:56) I think that is overly optimistic personally. I, it, I think the things will be a lot better by the spring. Don't get me wrong, you know, by the time we're into the spring and people who, um, are wanting are accepting of the vaccine of the vaccine that is going to make a huge difference. And I can't see next summer being anywhere near as difficult as this last year. And I, you know, um, uh, the, um, I quite personally, I totally expecting to be able to travel and go to meetings, um, come next summer and September again. Dana Lewis - Host : (48:38) You're right. I hope you're right. And I, uh, I'm watching president elect Biden criticize the Trump rollout of the vaccine because this is a race against time saying the way it's going. It will take years not months. The UK government seems poised and they have promised a speedy, efficient rollout, but they have bungled everything, uh, up until now. So Dr. Paul Hunter/ Virologist: (49:01) White Dana Lewis - Host : (49:04) Dr. Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine at the Norwich school of medicine, university of East Anglia. Great to talk to you, Paul. Thank you so much. Bye pleasure. Dana Lewis - Host : (49:13) That's our backstory, the last edition of 2020. We wish you, well, please subscribe to backstory. I've now launched a new newsletter to help you digest and navigate the daily news, because I think a lot of people and people tell me they don't know how to read daily news and watch television and figure out what's true. And what's disinformation. Check it out. Dana Lewis's backstory newsletter on sub stock. I'll try to explain news and give you an idea how I source it. And I'll even put the links there in 2021. I'll continue to bring you weekly podcasts focusing on international news. Here's what the astrologers say about 2020. It was a cataclysmic aligning of planets that ends in the new year. Thank goodness. And 2021 ushers in the age of Aquarius, what changes are astrologists predicting in 2021? If this year saw our regular ways of life up ended, then next year is tipped to offer technological advancements and the mending of communities they say on December the 21st, 20, 20 Jupiter and Saturn met in Aquarius. And they'll remain in this sign for the majority of year. Aquarius is a sign associated with abrupt change, forming communities fighting for causes that you care about and making technological advances. Anyway, that's what a stroller you're saying. And I think I'll take any good news at this point. Thanks for listening to backstory on Dana Lewis and London. And I'll talk to you again soon. On the other side in 2021, 

[deniscollins]

Colleges Slash Budgets in the Pandemic, With ‘Nothing Off-Limits’

Costs have soared as colleges have spent millions on testing, tracing and quarantining students, only to face outbreaks. More than 214,000 cases this year at college campuses, with at least 75 deaths, mostly among adults last spring, but also including some students more recently. If you were a university president, which of the two strategies would you emphasize to balance budgets: (1) layoff faculty, or (2) eliminate the lowest enrollment programs? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision?

Ohio Wesleyan University is eliminating 18 majors. The University of Florida’s trustees this month took the first steps toward letting the school furlough faculty. The University of California, Berkeley, has paused admissions to its Ph.D. programs in anthropology, sociology and art history.

As it resurges across the country, the coronavirus is forcing universities large and small to make deep and possibly lasting cuts to close widening budget shortfalls. By one estimate, the pandemic has cost colleges at least $120 billion, with even Harvard University, despite its $41.9 billion endowment, reporting a $10 million deficit that has prompted belt tightening.

Though many colleges imposed stopgap measures such as hiring freezes and early retirements to save money in the spring, the persistence of the economic downturn is taking a devastating financial toll, pushing many to lay off or furlough employees, delay graduate admissions and even cut or consolidate core programs like liberal arts departments.

The University of South Florida announced this month that its college of education would become a graduate school only, phasing out undergraduate education degrees to help close a $6.8 million budget gap. In Ohio, the University of Akron, citing the coronavirus, successfully invoked a clause in its collective-bargaining agreement in September to supersede tenure rules and lay off 97 unionized faculty members.

“We haven’t seen a budget crisis like this in a generation,” said Robert Kelchen, a Seton Hall University associate professor of higher education who has been tracking the administrative response to the pandemic. “There’s nothing off-limits at this point.”

Even before the pandemic, colleges and universities were grappling with a growing financial crisis, brought on by years of shrinking state support, declining enrollment, and student concerns with skyrocketing tuition and burdensome debt. Now the coronavirus has amplified the financial trouble systemwide, though elite, well-endowed colleges seem sure to weather it with far less pain.

“We have been in aggressive recession management for 12 years — probably more than 12 years,” Daniel Greenstein, chancellor of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, told his board of governors this month as they voted to forge ahead with a proposal to merge a half-dozen small schools into two academic entities.

Once linchpins of social mobility in the state’s working-class coal towns, the 14 campuses in Pennsylvania’s system have lost roughly a fifth of their enrollment over the past decade. The proposal, long underway but made more urgent by pandemic losses, would merge Clarion, California, and Edinboro universities into one unit and Bloomsburg, Lock Haven and Mansfield universities into another to serve a region whose demographics have changed.

Such pressures have reached critical mass throughout the country in the months since the pandemic hit. State governments from Washington to Connecticut, tightening their own belts, have told public universities to expect steep cuts in appropriations. Students and families, facing skyrocketing unemployment, have balked at the prospect of paying full fare for largely online instruction, opting instead for gap years or less expensive schools closer to home.

Costs have also soared as colleges have spent millions on testing, tracing and quarantining students, only to face outbreaks. A New York Times database has confirmed more than 214,000 cases this year at college campuses, with at least 75 deaths, mostly among adults last spring, but also including some students more recently.

Freshman enrollment is down more than 16 percent from last year, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center has reported — part of a 4 percent overall drop in undergraduate enrollment that is taking tuition revenue down with it.

In a letter to Congress last week, the American Council on Education and other higher education organizations estimated that the virus would cost institutions more than $120 billion in increased student aid, lost housing fees, forgone sports revenue, public health measures, learning technology and other adjustments.

And because donations to all but the heftiest endowments limit those funds to specific uses, most colleges cannot freely dip into them as emergency reserves. Harvard has the largest endowment in the nation, but its pandemic losses turned a $300 million-plus surplus in 2019 into a $10 million operating loss in 2020, according to an annual report posted last week, forcing the university to freeze hiring, slash capital spending and cut senior managers’ pay.

That has meant months of cutbacks, including abolishing athletic programs, deferring campus construction and laying off administrative staff and cafeteria workers. Scores of graduate programs, including some at elite research universities such as Harvard, Princeton and U.C. Berkeley, have temporarily stopped taking new Ph.D. students — the result of financial aid budgets strained by current doctoral candidates whose research is taking more time because of the pandemic.

A Chronicle of Higher Education database tracking the budgetary triage has documented more than 100 such suspended programs, from the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Arts and Sciences, which will not take new school-funded doctoral students next fall, to Rice University, which paused admissions to all five of the Ph.D. programs in its school of humanities.

Most of the suspensions are in social sciences and humanities programs where the universities — rather than outside funders such as corporations, foundations and the federal government — typically underwrite the multiyear financial aid packages offered to doctoral students. University officials say the suspensions are necessary to ensure their strapped budgets can continue supporting students already in Ph.D. pipelines.

But Suzanne T. Ortega, president of the Council of Graduate Schools, noted that interrupting that pipeline could also have a lingering impact on the higher education work force, diverting promising students from low-income households, for example, or discouraging candidates who might bring much needed diversity to faculty rosters.

As it is, the pandemic has had an outsize impact on less affluent students: A survey of 292 private, nonprofit schools released this month by the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities reported a nearly 8 percent decrease in enrollment among students who receive federal Pell Grants.

“A couple years off is not necessarily the end of the world and may even be a wise thing,” Ms. Ortega said. “But if our universities don’t remain in touch with those students, and connect with them, and encourage them to keep thinking about grad school, we could have our own lost generation of students who get busy with other things and then don’t fulfill their dreams.”

As schools exhaust the possibilities of trims around the margins, what is left, administrators say, is payroll, typically the largest line item in higher education. Since February, when the coronavirus hit, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has reported that colleges and universities have shed more than 300,000 mostly nonfaculty jobs.

“Some of these institutions have redone their budgets three, four, five times,” said Jim Hundrieser, vice president for consulting and business development at the National Association of College and University Business Officers, a professional organization for finance officers in higher education.

“As this next chapter unfolds, what’s left is just staffing. For most, this will be the toughest round.”

In central New York, Ithaca College’s provost and senior vice president for academic affairs, La Jerne T. Cornish, said “there is no joy” as the school accelerated plans to cut 131 full-time faculty jobs, a result of declining enrollment exacerbated by the pandemic. Ms. Cornish said the school had already furloughed 167 nonfaculty staff members and offered early retirement to 30 faculty members to address an $8 million shortfall.

But, Ms. Cornish said, further action was needed to bring the payroll into line with enrollment declines.

Ohio Wesleyan’s president, Rock Jones, told students in a recent email that the university would eliminate or phase out majors in comparative literature, urban studies, journalism and 15 other subjects. The move, he wrote, would merge religion and philosophy into one department and lump Black studies and women’s studies into a single “critical identity studies” program, but also will save about $4 million and limit faculty layoffs to one tenured post.

The school’s plan followed a yearlong faculty-led review, but Mr. Kelchen, the higher education professor, said such consolidations often can allow institutions to downsize despite faculty job protections as well as encourage people in positions deemed redundant to take early retirement.

“Even if the faculty can stay on,” he said, “they’ll get reassigned, maybe to teach in another department or do administrative work.”

Other schools are laying the groundwork now for cuts they expect later. Trustees at the University of Florida took the first step in September to allow faculty furloughs to help close a projected $49 million shortfall from the coronavirus. Steve Orlando, a university spokesman, said the next step — a formal furlough policy — is expected to come to the board this year.

Daniel Meisenzahl, a spokesman for the University of Hawaii, said the 10-campus system had embarked on an exhaustive fiscal review in which “every single unit” was being examined, including an array of bachelors’ programs and university centers for public policy and conflict resolution. The system is facing a projected 13 percent decline in revenue and a net loss of nearly $67 million in operating income.

Mr. Kelchen said that the coronavirus had worked its way into the core of the nation’s academic machinery, and that the damage would likely be lasting.

“These cuts are going to continue long past the pandemic,” he said.