James.galbraith

Public health crises require a dynamic government that makes quick decisions. GOP judges want to prevent that.

Imagine if, in the spring of 2020, Wisconsin’s public health agencies had needed to get permission from the state’s heavily gerrymandered, GOP-controlled legislature before they could implement policies intended to prevent the spread of Covid-19.

That’s the sort of future that a raft of recent court decisions, including two handed down last Friday, could be setting the country up for — one where the government has limited ability to fight this pandemic and any others that arise.

The first court decision, written by a Donald Trump appointee to the United States Courts of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, imposes strict limits on California’s ability to close down in-person instruction at private schools. Judge Daniel Collins’s opinion in Branch v. Newsom claims that such restrictions run afoul of parents’ rights “to direct the upbringing and education of children under their control.”

(All of the relevant schools in Branch are currently allowed to hold in-person classes, but the Ninth Circuit’s order prevents California from imposing many new restrictions even if the pandemic worsens and public health officials believe that they need to limit in-person gatherings to prevent outbreaks.)

Then, in Florida v. Becerra, the 11th Circuit reinstated a lower court order blocking various rules handed down by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which are supposed to help prevent cruise ships from becoming incubators for Covid-19. (Although most of the judges on the panel that heard Florida were appointed by Democratic presidents, the outcome in that case was likely controlled by a recent decision handed down by the conservative Supreme Court.)

The decisions in Branch and Florida, moreover, are part of a wave of decisions — mostly handed down by Republican appointees or by judges who ran for election as conservatives — that could permanently hobble the government’s ability to address future public health crises.

In May 2020, for example, four Republicans on the Wisconsin Supreme Court stripped that state’s Department of Health Services of much of its authority to close businesses and limit public gatherings. Notably, the deciding vote in this case, Wisconsin Legislature v. Palm, was cast by lame duck Justice Daniel Kelly, who’d recently lost his seat in a nearly 11-point landslide.

Almost immediately after the court’s decision in Palm, bars throughout the state reopened — many of them packed with unmasked patrons celebrating in close quarters months before Covid-19 vaccines became available. By October, Wisconsin had one of the worst Covid-19 outbreaks in the country.

The US Supreme Court also imposed tight restrictions on many state and federal public health agencies. Shortly after Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation gave conservatives a 6-3 supermajority, the Court started handing down decisions preventing state governments from limiting in-person gatherings at churches and other houses of worship.

Late last month, the Supreme Court decided to let a federal eviction moratorium — which was enacted to prevent people kicked out of them homes from spreading Covid-19 — to remain in effect until it expires at the end of July. But Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a brief opinion suggesting that the CDC may never impose such a moratorium again under existing federal laws.

These court decisions are not happening in a political vacuum. According to the Washington Post, “at least 15 state legislatures have passed or are considering measures to limit the legal authority of public health agencies.” If these state legislatures pass these bills into law, that is their right. Elected lawmakers have the power to enact unwise laws.

But it is not the job of the courts to rewrite laws that their favored political party disagrees with. Nor is it their job to invent novel and often outlandish constitutional limits on public health agencies. Many of the court decisions restricting public health agencies aren’t just harmful because they could enable the spread of a deadly disease, they are also an end-run around democracy.

And many of these limits on public health officials are likely to permanently hobble the nation’s public health agencies.

Congress and state legislatures gave public health agencies very broad powers for a reason

Let’s make one thing clear before we dive too deep into the recent court decisions: Public health officials, like nearly all executive branch officials at the state and federal level, can rarely act without legislative approval. But Congress and a number of states have already passed an array of laws giving certain powers to the CDC and other public health agencies — including broad authority to respond to a public health emergency.

So, when courts limit public health officials’ power under these existing statutes, they are altering the legal regime set up by democratically elected lawmakers.

Many of these existing laws are broadly worded to give public health agencies expansive power to arrest the spread of a deadly disease. Federal law, for example, gives the CDC power to “make and enforce such regulations as in [its] judgment are necessary to prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries into the States or possessions, or from one State or possession into any other State or possession.”

Similarly, the Wisconsin law at issue in Palm gives the state’s health department the power to “close schools and forbid public gatherings in schools, churches, and other places to control outbreaks and epidemics” and to “authorize and implement all emergency measures necessary to control communicable diseases.”

It is a little unusual for a legislature to give such open-ended authority to an agency, but there are very good reasons to do so in the public health context. It’s impossible to know in advance how to respond to a public health crisis, so officials need to have broad authority to adapt to unpredictable events.

As Covid-19 taught us, infectious diseases can spread exponentially — so a small outbreak in, say, a single neighborhood in Milwaukee can rapidly grow to infect thousands or even millions unless state officials act swiftly to contain it. If no public health agency has the power to act quickly, the outbreak is likely to spread beyond the point of containment before the state legislature can act.

Public health agencies also need to make these calls in an ever-shifting environment. Even if there were no Covid in Milwaukee today, it might arrive tomorrow. And, if an agency successfully suppresses an outbreak in one community, it may make sense to lift some of the localized restrictions that quashed that outbreak — then reimpose them if a new threat emerges.

At oral arguments in Palm, attorney Colin Roth, who represented the state health department, offered a helpful analogy: Imagine that a massive wildfire was tearing through the state of Wisconsin.

In order to combat such a fire, the government could have to take several actions that would impose severe burdens on many Wisconsin residents. It may need to close highways and businesses to keep people out of the way of the fire. Firefighters may even need to create a firebreak by cutting down large swaths of forests, or even demolishing buildings in order to deny fuel to the growing inferno.

“The Covid-19 virus is a wildfire that is spreading across the state,” Roth told a hostile bench dominated by Republicans, and the state health department “is the fire department.”

It would be inane to require firefighters to get legislative approval for each highway they closed, or for each tree or building that they destroyed, in order to prevent the entire state from going up in flames. And, for the same reason, it would be equally inane to require the state legislature to micromanage the state’s response to a pandemic. Sometimes, a state encounters a crisis that cannot be addressed if it waits for hundreds of elected lawmakers to debate the problem and come up with a solution.

And yet, conservative judges are increasingly hostile to the view that public officials may exercise meaningful authority without constantly seeking approval from the legislature.

Why these court decisions could permanently disable our response to the next pandemic

The court orders limiting public health agencies’ powers typically fit into two different boxes. The first box consists of orders imposing novel constitutional limits on these agencies. Think of the Supreme Court’s decisions requiring public health officials to exempt churches and other places or worship from many pandemic restrictions — decisions that revolutionized the Court’s approach to “religious liberty.” Or the Ninth Circuit’s opinion in Branch, claiming that the Constitution protects the right of parents to send their kids to in-person classes at private schools.

The second box of cases arise out of a growing belief among conservatives that executive branch agencies should never be given broad authority to exercise policy discretion. In Palm, for example, Republicans on the Wisconsin Supreme Court required the state health department to jump through a series of procedural hoops that take weeks to complete in order to exercise many of its public health powers, and it gave a committee within the state’s highly gerrymandered legislature the power to suspend many of the department’s actions.

In a concurring opinion, Justice Rebecca Bradley compared the state health department’s order temporarily closing many businesses at the height of the pandemic to “the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.” She also described a system where a state agency can make swift public health decisions — even if it does so pursuant to an act of the state legislature — as a “tyrannical concentration of power.”

In other cases, courts have read statutes very narrowly in order to confine public health agencies’ power. Consider, for example, Alabama Association of Realtors v. HHS, the US Supreme Court case involving the CDC’s eviction moratorium.

To understand this case, it’s helpful to quote the relevant federal statute at some length. That statute gives the CDC authority to make regulations “to prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries into the States or possessions, or from one State or possession into any other State or possession.” It also includes a non-exhaustive list of ways that the CDC may exercise this power, including by providing “for such inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, pest extermination, destruction of animals or articles found to be so infected or contaminated as to be sources of dangerous infection to human beings.”

Republican officials, however, have urged the courts to read this non-exhaustive list as if it were a limitation on the CDC’s power to fight communicable diseases. Under this approach, the CDC’s authority would be limited to activities such as “inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, pest extermination, [and] destruction of animals or articles.”

And, while the Court’s order in Alabama Association of Realtors is brief and does not fully explain its reasoning, Kavanaugh’s concurring opinion suggests that at least he agrees with this narrow reading. He wrote that he shares the plaintiffs’ belief that “the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention exceeded its existing statutory authority by issuing a nationwide eviction moratorium.”

The courts, in other words, are imposing new constitutional limits on public health agencies. They are limiting legislatures’ power to give discretionary authority to public health officials. And they are reading public health statutes in unnatural ways to limit the government’s power to fight deadly diseases.

These are not the sort of court decisions that can be easily overcome by legislatures. Even if Congress or a state legislature attempted to override these court decisions, the sort of judges who would hand down decisions like Palm or Alabama Association of Realtors — decisions that curtail powers that lawmakers already granted — are unlikely to allow lawmakers to re-expand public health agencies’ power very far.

Many of these public health decisions are very poorly reasoned

Several of these decisions limiting public health officials’ power are haphazardly written. They give contradictory instructions to state officials. Or they fail to consider the implications of their own reasoning.

In some cases these errors are relatively minor. In Palm, for example, Chief Justice Patience Roggensack wrote the Court’s majority opinion holding that the court’s decision takes effect immediately, but she also wrote a separate concurring opinion stating that “although our declaration of rights is effective immediately, I would stay future actions to enforce our decision until May 20, 2020” — about a week after the Court’s decision. That sparked immediate confusion about whether the court’s decision took effect right away or not.

In other cases, however, judges appear to be so eager to impose limits on public health officials that they invent legal rules that are utterly nonsensical.

Consider the Ninth Circuit’s decision in Branch, the case holding that parents have a constitutional right to send their children to in-person classes at private schools. As mentioned above, Judge Collins rooted his opinion in a constitutional right of parents “to direct the upbringing and education of children under their control,” and there is some basis for courts to enforce such a parental right — but not to read it as expansively as Collins did in Branch.

In Meyer v. Nebraska (1923) the Supreme Court struck down a state law forbidding teachers from teaching “any subject to any person in any language other than the English language.” And, in Pierce v. Society of the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary (1925), the Court struck down a law requiring parents to send their children to public (not private) school. Both decisions were rooted in the idea that the 14th Amendment gives parents a limited right to decide how their children will be raised and educated.

But this right cannot be unlimited. Suppose that a parent wishes to send their child to a private school run by white supremacists, or one that would train their heir to become a child solider in an insurrection against the United States government, or one that refuses to teach math to girls. Or suppose that a parent chooses not to educate their child at all, preferring to keep the kid at home to perform menial labor. Or that a parent rents their child to a cotton mill that produces cheap textiles.

Collins attempts to square this circle by arguing that “historical practice and tradition confirms” that parents must be allowed to send their children to in-person classes. “As historically understood,” Collins writes, “the Meyer-Pierce right necessarily embraced a right to choose in-person private-school instruction, because ... such instruction was until recently the only feasible means of providing education to children.”

But, if parents are allowed to raise their children however they want, so long as their decisions comport with the “historical” understanding of Meyer and Pierce, then parents would have a constitutional right to engage in all sorts of abhorrent practices. The Supreme Court, for example, did not permit Congress to ban child labor until 1941 — 16 years after Pierce — so the historical understanding of that decision could permit parents to rent their children to cotton mills. Similarly, it was hardly unusual for schools, especially in the segregated South, to teach white supremacy when Meyer and Pierce were handed down.

In his apparent zeal to limit the power of public health officials, in other words, Collins handed down a legal rule that simply makes no sense. He would give parents a constitutional right to engage in destructive or genuinely cruel parenting, so long has that sort of cruelty was common at some ambiguous point in American history.

Moreover, to the extent that Meyer and Pierce could ever have been read to give parents an absolute right to send children to in-person classes during a public health emergency, more recent Supreme Court decisions read those cases far more narrowly. As the Court held in Runyon v. McCrary (1976), “the Court in Pierce expressly acknowledged ‘the power of the State reasonably to regulate all schools, to inspect, supervise and examine them, their teachers and pupils.’”

Conservative judges appear to be inventing new, unworkable legal rules on the fly. And, even if Covid-19 is someday eradicated, these new rules are likely to linger for decades or even centuries — sabotaging the nation’s response to the next pandemic in the process.

The United States is in the middle of another COVID-19 surge, and there's no mystery as to why. Now that a majority of eligible American adults are vaccinated against the virus, social distancing, mask requirements, and other pandemic safety measures in each state have been steadily reduced. But America has not achieved the level of public vaccination that would provide "herd immunity" to the virus—that is, a level of vaccination high enough that transmission of the virus through communities largely ceases due to a lack of infection targets—and so that return to unmasked "normal" has had dire consequences for Americans who are still unvaccinated. Among the vaccinated, pandemic infections remain low. Among the unvaccinated, including children too young for the vaccine, the new "delta" variant is spreading through unmasked communities like wildfire.

There are only two possible solutions to the new surge: Either the vast majority of Americans need to get vaccinated—and quickly—or widespread shutdowns need to again occur to prevent regional hospitals from becoming overwhelmed with new patients. (A third solution preferred by conservative Republicans—in which we allow the pandemic to take its course, with each citizen deciding for themselves whether they will or will not infect those around them and accepting widespread deaths as the necessary price—is too malevolent to take seriously.)

In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom today announced the state's new attempt to address the crisis: Every one of the state's quarter million-plus state employees will have to choose. State employees will be required to either show proof of vaccination or be tested weekly for COVID-19 infection.

You don't have to be vaccinated. But if you want to keep your job, you're going to have to continuously prove you're not a danger to your coworkers.

This tradeoff between requiring vaccinations or requiring proof of your negative COVID-19 status is likely going to spread, because the status quo isn't going to be tenable. If the pandemic is spreading almost entirely among the unvaccinated, then the unvaccinated are either going to have to go into lockdown (again) or abide by other safety measures that can prevent infection. Also in California, a group of several hundred San Francisco bar owners are announcing that customers wanting to enter their businesses will either have to show proof of vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test. That mandate may spread to more city businesses, and the city itself is contemplating similar moves.

Within the federal government, the Department of Veterans Affairs will be requiring 115,000 front-line health workers to be vaccinated in an effort to protect patients.

These new vaccination mandates aren't happening in a vacuum. Vaccination rates among public workers continue to be deplorable in some regions, contributing to pandemic spread. Both governments and private businesses are getting fed up with a surge that didn't have to happen, resulting in more blunt warnings to workers than have been given in the past. The NFL has warned that if unvaccinated players result in an outbreak that requires the cancellation of a game, the team with the outbreak will be pinned as forfeiting the game. That puts the safety onus on the willfully unvaccinated: You don't have to get a free vaccine that may save your life or the life of someone around you, but if you take the risk and your decision screws your entire team out of a playoff berth, then that's going to be between you, the rest of your team, and every one of your irritated fans.

It is not likely that the United States will return to widespread public shutdowns, at least not unless the winter surge threatens to become even more catastrophic than the current one. There is no stomach for it; the places where COVID-19 is spreading rapidly now are the places where public or official contempt for safety measures resulted in lax measures to begin with. That means the next stage of the pandemic may require limiting where the unvaccinated can visit—or work—even as vaccinated Americans face far fewer restrictions.

Yep. Vaccine "passports" may be the government- and business-preferred way out of this new mess. It didn't have to happen, but it was either widespread vaccination or ... this.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: On May 31 last year, 25-year-old Safarain Herring was shot in the head and dropped off at St. Bernard Hospital in Chicago by a man named Michael Williams. He died two days later. Chicago police eventually arrested the 64-year-old Williams and charged him with murder (Williams maintains that Herring was hit in a drive-by shooting). A key piece of evidence in the case is video surveillance footage showing Williams' car stopped on the 6300 block of South Stony Island Avenue at 11:46 p.m. - the time and location where police say they know Herring was shot. How did they know that's where the shooting happened? Police said ShotSpotter, a surveillance system that uses hidden microphone sensors to detect the sound and location of gunshots, generated an alert for that time and place. Except that's not entirely true, according to recent court filings. That night, 19 ShotSpotter sensors detected a percussive sound at 11:46 p.m. and determined the location to be 5700 South Lake Shore Drive - a mile away from the site where prosecutors say Williams committed the murder, according to a motion filed by Williams' public defender. The company's algorithms initially classified the sound as a firework. That weekend had seen widespread protests in Chicago in response to George Floyd's murder, and some of those protesting lit fireworks. But after the 11:46 p.m. alert came in, a ShotSpotter analyst manually overrode the algorithms and "reclassified" the sound as a gunshot. Then, months later and after "post-processing," another ShotSpotter analyst changed the alert's coordinates to a location on South Stony Island Drive near where Williams' car was seen on camera. "Through this human-involved method, the ShotSpotter output in this case was dramatically transformed from data that did not support criminal charges of any kind to data that now forms the centerpiece of the prosecution's murder case against Mr. Williams," the public defender wrote in the motion. The document is what's known as a Frye motion - a request for a judge to examine and rule on whether a particular forensic method is scientifically valid enough to be entered as evidence. Rather than defend ShotSpotter's technology and its employees' actions in a Frye hearing, the prosecutors withdrew all ShotSpotter evidence against Williams. The case isn't an anomaly, and the pattern it represents could have huge ramifications for ShotSpotter in Chicago, where the technology generates an average of 21,000 alerts each year. The technology is also currently in use in more than 100 cities. Motherboard's review of court documents from the Williams case and other trials in Chicago and New York State, including testimony from ShotSpotter's favored expert witness, suggests that the company's analysts frequently modify alerts at the request of police departments - some of which appear to be grasping for evidence that supports their narrative of events.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Their entire political enterprise is built on the very forces that led to the insurrection.

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Hovertext:
The fact that tiny gas-masks would be really cute has actually sold me on bunker life.

Today's News:

Another infrastructure week begins just like all the other ones have, with Republicans saying they're "optimistic" but Democrats laying out issues yet to be resolved in this bipartisan "hard" infrastructure proposal: "highways/bridges, water funding, broadband, Davis-Bacon [prevailing wages for projects using federal funds], using unspent Covid [money] as [a] payfor, infrastructure bank and transit."

Which is, well, most of it really. That leaves negotiators in essentially the same place they were Friday and, shockingly, not where Republican Sen. Susan Collins insisted they would be Monday: ready to vote.

Majority Leader Chuck Schumer tried to push Republicans with a vote last Wednesday to kick off a legislative process on this bipartisan infrastructure bill, and Republicans unanimously filibustered it because they just weren't ready after something like six weeks of "working" on it. On Friday, Republicans were trying to change the standard 80/20 funding breakdown between highway/transit programs. And were calling Democrats unreasonable for assuming that this standard funding formula was a given. One could say Republicans are not necessarily acting in good faith on that. Nonetheless, the White House and Democrats offered what they're calling a global deal—on every outstanding issue—Sunday.

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The time crunch hasn't changed. If this isn't done this week, at least part of the August recess—now set to begin Aug. 9—will be rescinded, but this process has to play out to get the Democrats who insist on this bipartisan fiasco to be reassured that they've done everything possible with Republicans so they'll support the $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation bill that contains the rest of President Joe Biden's economic priorities, in which the human infrastructure parts include education, paid leave, child tax credits, and expansion of health care—all potentially transformational programs.

The bipartisan bill, for lack of a better description of what still seems to be cocktail napkin scribblings, is a number—$579 billion in "new" spending—that was agreed to weeks ago, and nearly a trillion in total spending. Where it's coming from and where it will be spent beyond the broad categories of infrastructure—water systems, highways, maybe transit, broadband—seems to continue to be in discussion. Details are scarce other than Republicans saying it’s too much public transportation.

Their argument, according to Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Pat Toomey, is that transit got plenty of COVID-19 relief money. "Nobody’s talking about cutting transit,” Toomey said Sunday. "The question is, how many tens of billions of dollars on top of the huge increase that they have already gotten is sufficient? And that's where there is a little disagreement."

That funding was to keep transit programs afloat during the pandemic, allowing them to essentially survive. New funding is necessary for public transit to meet future requirements. That's where House Transportation Committee Chair Peter DeFazio—an Oregon Democrat—and 30 of his committee members come in. They've warned the Senate in a letter that they won't accept less than the $715 billion in the infrastructure bill, which they have already passed.

Public transportation groups agree. "The historical share for public transit from the Highway Trust Fund is 20%," Paul Skoutelas, president of the American Public Transportation Association, said Sunday. "It is the absolute minimum acceptable level to help sustain our nation's public transportation systems. It is imperative that we make robust, forward looking investments to modernize and expand public transit that will assist in our economic recovery from the COVID pandemic and get Americans back to work."

As of Monday morning, Republicans are rejecting that global offer from Democrats, saying it "goes against" what had already been agreed to, but since anything they've already agreed to hasn't been released to the public (if it has even been written down anywhere), no one outside the negotiations has any way of verifying that. A Republican source told Punchbowl News: "The 'global offer' we received from the White House and Chuck Schumer was discouraging since it attempts to reopen numerous issues the bipartisan group had already agreed to."

In other words, when Collins said last Wednesday that they "are making tremendous progress, and I hope that the majority leader will reconsider and just delay the vote until Monday," she was lying. Republicans insisted they had to have a bill before they could vote, even though last week's vote was purely procedural, an agreement that eventually there would be a bill to consider on the floor. Collins insisted that they could have that much by Monday—today. They don't. Surprise, surprise.

By Cezary Jan Strusiewicz  Published: July 25th, 2021 

Shortly after the pandemic struck last year, the Federal Reserve began buying billions of dollars in government debt every month to drive down borrowing costs and keep the economy from collapsing.

Today, house prices are surging, stocks have continued their stratospheric rise, and banks have more cash than they know what to do with. Yet the Fed is still pumping billions into the economy. Why?

That’s what a growing number of lawmakers, investors and even some Fed officials themselves are demanding to know. They are warning that the central bank’s vast purchases of government bonds and mortgage-backed securities are feeding financial bubbles in the housing, stock and even cryptocurrency markets, and stoking higher consumer prices, with little apparent benefit to ordinary Americans.

“There’s no justification for the Fed to maintain [its purchases] at current levels, and doing so seriously risks contributing to heightened inflation,” Sen. Pat Toomey (Pa.), the top Republican on the Banking Committee, told POLITICO.

Fed policymakers, who will gather this week for a closely watched meeting on their next steps, are now grappling with how and when to start slowing their bond buys, which amount to a staggering $120 billion a month. The question has touched off a heated debate within the central bank itself over the future of a program that rescued the financial markets from a near meltdown last year.

Some Fed officials believe that tapering bond purchases too soon could weaken the economy once the trillions of dollars in aid approved separately by Congress runs out, particularly amid rising fears about the latest coronavirus surge. Winding down asset purchases is the first step toward a more significant event — raising short-term interest rates — and the Fed wants to ensure that its actions won’t slow the job market recovery as millions of Americans remain out of work.

But it’s also not clear how much those asset purchases are actually helping support jobs. Publicly traded companies, which have greatly benefited from the Fed cash machine, have engaged in a wave of stock buybacks, which boost their share prices and enrich investors but do little to directly expand employment.

“It’s counterproductive on every level,” said Lou Crandall, chief economist at Wrightson ICAP. “Encouraging more borrowing like this is just not necessary.”

A big priority for the Fed now is not to surprise investors, who are expecting bond purchases to slow, but not for several months. If the central bank moves more quickly, that could jolt interest rates higher and hit the brakes harder on the economy than it intended. A similar move by the Fed eight years ago sent the bond market tumbling, forcing the central bank to backtrack and threatening its credibility.

“Everyone’s questioning what we’re getting for $120 billion right now,” said Megan Greene, a senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School. “But tapering could have even more nefarious effects, so the risk of carrying on seems lower than the risk of backing out of it too abruptly.”

In the meantime, investors’ tolerance for risk is unusually high against a backdrop of surging “meme stocks” and trendy cryptocurrencies, as the Fed itself noted in a May report on financial stability.

Mohamed El-Erian, chief economic adviser at Allianz, the parent company of asset management giant PIMCO, says the central bank is making things worse by continuing its purchases.

“You can argue quite easily that the economic benefits are limited and are far exceeded by the costs and risks that are starting to undermine the prospects for high, durable, inclusive growth,” he said.

The bond-buying process, designed to lower long-term interest rates, was used in a big way during the 2008 financial crisis when Congress did little to help.

“Now, it is very hard to argue that we are living in a world of deficient aggregate demand,” he said. “Household demand is booming and will continue booming as long as nothing gets in the way.”

Fed Chair Jerome Powell was pressed earlier this month by both Democrats and Republicans on why the central bank continues to snap up $40 billion in mortgage-backed securities each month even as housing prices soar, suggesting that market is in no need of support.

Powell acknowledged that Fed policies were contributing to higher home prices but cited other factors as well, such as insufficient supply of houses and the savings that many families have been able to build up.

“Housing prices are moving up across the country at a high rate, and I suppose the good news is that this is not driven by the kind of reckless, irresponsible lending that led to the housing bubble that led to the last financial crisis,” he said.

“Nonetheless, housing prices are moving up and of course that makes it more difficult for entry-level buyers to get into the housing market,” he said.

Powell also emphasized that these purchases were aimed at bringing down all longer-term interest rates, not just mortgages.

The issue has triggered disagreements within the central bank. Dallas Fed President Rob Kaplan, St. Louis Fed President James Bullard and Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren are signaling they’d be open to slowing the purchases of bundled mortgages sooner than purchases of U.S. government debt.

“I’m leaning a little bit toward the idea that maybe we don’t need to be in mortgage-backed securities with a booming housing market and even a threatening housing bubble here, according to some people,” Bullard told CNBC last month.

But George Pearkes, macro strategist at Bespoke Investment Group, said it’s a misconception that the Fed’s mortgage-backed security purchases have a targeted effect on mortgages. Because those types of securities are already backed by the government, he said, the calculus for a lender on whether to sell a mortgage to housing giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac isn’t going to be much different.

“I absolutely detest this argument,” he said. “I think it’s nonsense.”

The effect of the Fed’s purchases is also misunderstood, argued Roberto Perli, founding partner of research firm Cornerstone Macro and a former Fed economist.

Perli said the benefit to the Fed's asset purchases — or "quantitative easing," as it is known — is entirely front-loaded: Markets react to the central bank’s initial announcement that it will conduct massive amounts of buys over an unspecified period of time, and rates adjust accordingly. The rest of the process is just the Fed following through on those purchases, which have already been factored in by investors.

“If there was no QE today, and the Fed was considering, ‘OK, do we need to do it?’ Probably the answer is no,” Perli said. “But QE was necessary a while ago, like a year ago, and nobody ever thought that QE was going to end after a month or two months or six months, so the market built expectations of how much QE there would be.”

“In fact, those expectations were all that mattered,” he added. “And at the time that was why QE was so effective, because people expected QE to be large.”

For his part, Senate Banking Chair Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) urged the Fed to ensure that all Americans benefit from the recovery, drawing a contrast with the economy in the years after the 2008 financial crisis.

“Wall Street destroyed our economy, costing families their jobs and their homes and their savings – and then came roaring back while everyone else limped along,” he told POLITICO. “It’s the Fed’s job to make sure that does not happen again – both by watching for risks to financial stability and by centering workers and their families, not Wall Street, in its decisions on monetary policy.”

In response to nationwide protests last summer over the murder of George Floyd by police, many cities and states have tried to change their approach to policing. One such strategy is to make fewer arrests for low-level offenses in an effort to reduce the number of potentially violent encounters between the police and the public. Virginia, for instance, banned police from pulling people over for exclusively minor traffic violations earlier this year. Meanwhile, Oregon decriminalized drug possession. Louisiana restricted police from making arrests for certain misdemeanors, asking police to instead issue summons. And cities like San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, began sending clinicians instead of police to help people suffering from a mental health crisis. 

These efforts are all part of a shift that has been underway in America’s largest cities for a number of years now. But despite the effect these changes have had in reducing violent encounters with the police, these efforts have still experienced significant backlash, particularly from some in law enforcement who have blamed rising murder rates on police “pulling back” and being “defunded.” This criticism has intensified as murder rates have risen, even though most cities’ police budgets weren’t cut by much in 2021 and murders still ticked up in cities that increased their police budgets. 

I’m a data scientist and founder of the Police Scorecard, a research group that analyzes policing data to better understand how to end police violence. We are still waiting for the federal government to publish arrests data for 2020 and 2021, but what we do know from previous years is that low-level arrests are in decline, and that appears to have helped reduce the number of shootings by police — not made violent crime worse. 

Data from the FBI Uniform Crime Report shows arrest rates have generally been declining since the 1990s, when crime rates were much higher than they are now. These declines have been accelerated, in more recent years, by changes in policing in America’s largest cities. For example, police departments serving 86 of America’s 100 most populous cities reported 30 percent fewer total arrests in 2019 than they did in 2013.²¹ This decline was particularly pronounced among low-level offenses, or offenses not involving crimes against people, sex offenses, weapons offenses or serious property and financial crimes. In America’s largest cities, arrests for low-level offenses declined during this period by 38 percent, with arrests for disorderly conduct, curfew and loitering violations, gambling, prostitution, drunkenness and liquor law violations all falling by more than 50 percent — the largest reductions of any offenses reported. It wasn’t just changes in policing that reduced low level arrests — policy changes enacted by city councils, local prosecutor’s offices and state legislatures likely contributed to these declines as well.

While national data hasn’t been published for 2020 yet, preliminary data suggests arrests in big cities declined even further beginning with the lockdowns in March and April 2020.

There has been, in other words, a shift away from “broken windows” policing, or the debunked idea that aggressive policing of minor crimes deters more serious crimes. But what has this shift meant for crime more generally and for reports of police violence?

Only 27 percent of the nation’s law enforcement agencies report data on police shootings to the FBI’s National Use-of-Force Data Collection program, and no agency-level data from this program has been made public. But the data that is available suggests that in cities where there were reductions in low-level arrests, there were also reductions in police shootings. 

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/US/video/police-misconduct-trials-rare-cities-pay-millions-settle-76793246

Searching open data portals, internal affairs publications and media databases, I obtained data on fatal and nonfatal police shootings from 2013 to 2019 in 86 of America’s 100 largest cities.²² These cities reported a decline from 749 police shootings in 2013 to 464 shootings in 2019, a 38 percent decrease over this period.

And cities that cut low-level arrests by 50 percent or more, such as Milwaukee, Philadelphia and Newark, New Jersey, also saw some of the larger reductions in police shootings. There were 57 percent fewer police shootings in these jurisdictions in 2019 than there were in 2013. Notably, police shootings actually increased in some cities that made more low-level arrests, like Jacksonville, Florida, and Louisville, Kentucky.

To be sure, reducing low-level arrests isn’t the only reform that might have contributed to fewer police shootings. In this time period, the U.S. Department of Justice also initiated reforms in 12 major cities through consent decrees, MOAs or the Collaborative Reform Initiative,²³ with cities that underwent these reforms, like Newark and Baltimore, making far larger reductions in low-level arrests and police shootings. These cities would have been more likely to implement policies intended to prevent unlawful, excessive or unconstitutional arrests, as well as new use-of-force policies restricting the amount of force used by police.

But it wasn’t just police shootings that decreased. Reported crime fell in jurisdictions that cut low-level arrests; in fact, it fell by just as much as those cities that made more low-level arrests. Consistent with recent research, cities that reduced low-level arrests did not experience an uptick in violent crime — or murder, specifically — compared to other cities during this period. Moreover, cities that made fewer arrests for low-level offenses did not see a substantial reduction in violent crime arrests, suggesting a more lenient approach to low-level offenses has not resulted in police being less responsive to serious public safety threats.

There is still substantial room for improvement, though. Despite the changes that have taken place, low-level arrests still made up 55 percent of all arrests reported in the nation’s largest cities, and 69 percent of all arrests nationwide, in 2019. In other words, there are still plenty of opportunities for cities to make fewer low-level arrests, which could help police shootings fall even further without compromising public safety. But unfortunately, the politics surrounding the increase in murder and violent crime in some of America’s cities could make it harder to pass these types of reforms, even though they’ve so far seemed effective.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/US/video/remembering-george-floyd-year-protest-77890592

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/policing-happen-77102704

Sunday the BBC reported YouTube influencers were offered money to spread vaccine misinformation. But according to the New York Times, that's just the tip of the iceberg. "The scheme appears to be part of a secretive industry that security analysts and American officials say is exploding in scale: disinformation for hire: Private firms, straddling traditional marketing and the shadow world of geopolitical influence operations, are selling services once conducted principally by intelligence agencies. They sow discord, meddle in elections, seed false narratives and push viral conspiracies, mostly on social media. And they offer clients something precious: deniability. "Disinfo-for-hire actors being employed by government or government-adjacent actors is growing and serious," said Graham Brookie, director of the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, calling it "a boom industry." Similar campaigns have been recently found promoting India's ruling party, Egyptian foreign policy aims and political figures in Bolivia and Venezuela. Mr. Brookie's organization tracked one operating amid a mayoral race in Serra, a small city in Brazil. An ideologically promiscuous Ukrainian firm boosted several competing political parties. In the Central African Republic, two separate operations flooded social media with dueling pro-French and pro-Russian disinformation. Both powers are vying for influence in the country. A wave of anti-American posts in Iraq, seemingly organic, were tracked to a public relations company that was separately accused of faking anti-government sentiment in Israel. Most trace to back-alley firms whose legitimate services resemble those of a bottom-rate marketer or email spammer... For-hire disinformation, though only sometimes effective, is growing more sophisticated as practitioners iterate and learn. Experts say it is becoming more common in every part of the world, outpacing operations conducted directly by governments. The result is an accelerating rise in polarizing conspiracies, phony citizen groups and fabricated public sentiment, deteriorating our shared reality beyond even the depths of recent years... Commercial firms conducted for-hire disinformation in at least 48 countries last year — nearly double from the year before, according to an Oxford University study. The researchers identified 65 companies offering such services... Platforms have stepped up efforts to root out coordinated disinformation. Analysts especially credit Facebook, which publishes detailed reports on campaigns it disrupts. Still, some argue that social media companies also play a role in worsening the threat. Engagement-boosting algorithms and design elements, research finds, often privilege divisive and conspiratorial content. The article also notes "a generation" of populist political leaders around the world who have risen "in part through social media manipulation. "Once in office, many institutionalize those methods as tools of governance and foreign relations."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When the 150,000-member "megachurch" Hillsong opened a branch in Atlanta, its pastor Sam Collier says Facebook suggested using it to explore how churches can "go further farther on Facebook..." reports the New York Times: He is partnering with Facebook, he said, "to directly impact and help churches navigate and reach the consumer better." "Consumer isn't the right word," he said, correcting himself. "Reach the parishioner better." Facebook's involvement with churches has been intense: For months Facebook developers met weekly with Hillsong and explored what the church would look like on Facebook and what apps they might create for financial giving, video capability or livestreaming. When it came time for Hillsong's grand opening in June, the church issued a news release saying it was "partnering with Facebook" and began streaming its services exclusively on the platform. Beyond that, Mr. Collier could not share many specifics — he had signed a nondisclosure agreement... "Together we are discovering what the future of the church could be on Facebook..." [Facebook] has been cultivating partnerships with a wide range of faith communities over the past few years, from individual congregations to large denominations, like the Assemblies of God and the Church of God in Christ. Now, after the coronavirus pandemic pushed religious groups to explore new ways to operate, Facebook sees even greater strategic opportunity to draw highly engaged users onto its platform. The company aims to become the virtual home for religious community, and wants churches, mosques, synagogues and others to embed their religious life into its platform, from hosting worship services and socializing more casually to soliciting money. It is developing new products, including audio and prayer sharing, aimed at faith groups... The partnerships reveal how Big Tech and religion are converging far beyond simply moving services to the internet. Facebook is shaping the future of religious experience itself, as it has done for political and social life... The collaborations raise not only practical questions, but also philosophical and moral ones... There are privacy worries too, as people share some of their most intimate life details with their spiritual communities. The potential for Facebook to gather valuable user information creates "enormous" concerns, said Sarah Lane Ritchie, a lecturer in theology and science at the University of Edinburgh... "Corporations are not worried about moral codes," she said. "I don't think we know yet all the ways in which this marriage between Big Tech and the church will play out." Last month Facebook held a summit "which resembled a religious service," the Times reports, at which Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said churches were a natural fit for Facebook "because fundamentally both are about connection." But the article also notes the 6-million member Church of God in Christ "received early access to several of Facebook's monetization features," testing paid subscriptions for exclusive church content, as well as real-time donations during services. But "Leaders decided against a third feature: advertisements during video streams."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Just last week, the Texas Senate passed legislation ending all requirements that public schools in Texas teach about women’s suffrage and the civil rights movement in social studies classes. Texas children will no longer need to be bothered with learning about Susan B. Anthony, Cesar Chavez, or Martin Luther King Jr., whose “I Have a Dream" speech and “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” would no longer be required curriculum. 

Just in case you were dense enough to believe that this wasn’t overt racism, Texas senators took it a step further. On Wednesday, July 21, they voted to pass a bill that would remove a requirement for public school teachers to teach that the Ku Klux Klan is "morally wrong." So if a teacher wants to have a group of fifth graders justify the Klan’s treatment of Black people—now they can have at it. (BTW, that’s not a hypothetical. That actually happened in South Carolina.)

I vividly recall in my little racist middle school that a student was allowed to give a speech on the benefits of the KKK. He focused on an event where Klansmen were watching the Southern border to catch migrants, which he argued actually helped Black people. It was awful, but there were no minorities in my classroom to hear it. When we complained, we were told to shut up. It bothered me for quite some time, but I keep telling myself that was the early ‘80s. Things are better now, right?

I’m wondering if that little twerp grew up to be a Texas legislator. 

When this latest bill passed, the lieutenant governor stated that it would make certain that critical race theory isn’t taught in Texas. However, the Senate-passed bill removes almost all mentions of people of color and women, as well as the requirement that white supremacy and the groups that support them, like the KK, are morally wrong.  

This isn’t about critical race theory, which—by the way—does NOT teach that the U.S. is evil. These legislative efforts have absolutely nothing to do with refusing to teach the consequences of slavery and racism on American history. Instead, racist legislators are using the threat of the 1619 Project as an excuse to purge all civil rights and women’s suffrage curriculum out of the classrooms, and turn the clock back in schools to the pre-civil rights era.

It’s maddening, racist, and just plain wrong. The only thing stopping the bill from becoming law right now is the fact that several brave Texas Democrats flew to Washington to save their citizen’s voting rights. None of these awful bills can become law as long as there is no quorum. Unfortunately, it’s only a matter of time before they have to come back. 

All we can do at this point is call these racist legislators out loudly—again and again and again. And help turn Texas blue in ‘22!  

"Thanks to a breakthrough in RNA manipulation, crop scientists have developed new potato and rice varieties with higher yields and increased drought tolerance," reports UPI: By inserting a gene responsible for production of a protein called FTO, scientists produced bigger rice and potato plants with more expansive root systems. In experiments, the plants' longer roots improved their drought resistance. Test results — detailed Thursday in the journal Nature Biotechnology — showed the RNA-manipulated plants also improved their rate of photosynthesis, boost yields by as much as 50 percent... In the lab, the manipulated rice plants grew at three times their normal rate. In the field, the rice plants increased their mass by 50 percent. They also sprouted longer roots, increased their photosynthesis rate and produced larger yields. When they repeated the experiments with potato plants, the researchers got similar results, suggesting the new gene manipulation method could be used to bolster a variety of crops. The researchers hope this could help crops survive climate change, and even prevent forests from being cleared for food production, according to the article. And one of the study's co-authors adds "This really provides the possibility of engineering plants to potentially improve the ecosystem as global warming proceeds."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One thing you can be absolutely certain of when it comes to Republicans: It’s never, ever their fault.

When the nation’s economy collapsed in 2007-2008 as a result of the subprime lending bubble, leading to the worst financial crisis (at the time) since the Great Depression, was it the Republicans’ fault? “Oh no, it was the fault of all those poor, feckless homeowners who took out loans they couldn’t afford! “ When that same colossally incompetent Bush administration blew its response to Hurricane Katrina, putting an Arabian horseshow “czar” in charge of the nation’s emergency relief management and wiping out an entire American city as a result, was that the Republicans’ fault? “Oh no, it was the fault of the city’s Black mayor!”

And when a unified, systematic, collective effort by Donald Trump and the Republican Party to minimize the worst global pandemic to strike this country in over a century led to a huge percentage of Americans refusing to accept a vaccine, was that the Republicans’ fault? When the entire right-wing media apparatus devoted the last year and a half to pooh-poohing the virus, belittling masks, and rejecting social distancing measures, and then denying the efficacy of vaccines; when they allowed ridiculous conspiracy theories to flourish in the face of dire medical warnings, leading to dismal vaccination rates in GOP-dominated states; and when millions of Republican voters who paid attention to all that propaganda now find themselves under siege by a new variant of the same virus, spreading like wildfire among these same vaccine “skeptics,” might that possibly have been Republicans’ fault? 

No. It’s—get this—White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki’s fault! And more than that, it’s Joe Biden’s fault!

As reported by The New York Times, Republicans everywhere are now flailing mightily in an effort to point their fingers to blame the new surge in delta variant COVID-19 infections on anything and anyone except themselves. As Jonathan Weisman and Sheryl Gay Stolberg write, “Amid a widening partisan divide over coronavirus vaccination, most Republicans have either stoked or ignored the flood of misinformation reaching their constituents and instead focused their message about the vaccine on disparaging President Biden, characterizing his drive to inoculate Americans as politically motivated and heavy-handed.”

Meanwhile, the highly contagious delta variant of the virus is disproportionately hitting the least-vaccinated, most Republican states with a vengeance. As reported by Business Insider:

[T]the variant isn't hitting all states equally. Delta cases have risen primarily in states with low vaccination rates, which for the most part are heavily Republican — "red" states such as Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri, and Wyoming. Overall, these states have seen higher upticks in daily cases and hospitalizations than "blue" states that voted Democratic in the 2020 election.

Let’s be clear on something: Variants to the COVID-19 virus are caused by allowing the virus to continue spreading among the unvaccinated, giving it more time and opportunity to mutate. The more unvaccinated people there are, the better the chance of a variant developing and spreading. That’s what led to this delta variant that’s now ravaging the vaccine-refusing Republican population in this country. In simpler terms, Republican intransigence and political pandering created and abetted the conditions that led to the spread of the delta variant and encouraged an environment that allowed it to flourish. And now that it’s disproportionately killing “their” people, in red-leaning states, Republican elected officials are desperately seeking—once again—to avoid the blame.

From the Times’ Weisman and Stolberg:

On Tuesday, Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 House Republican who said he had received his first Pfizer vaccine shot only on Sunday, blamed the hesitance on Mr. Biden and his criticism of Donald J. Trump’s vaccine drive last year. Senator Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama, said skeptics would not get their shots until “this administration acknowledges the efforts of the last one.”

And Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas pointed the finger at the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, and the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci.

“Every time Jen Psaki opens her mouth or Dr. Fauci opens his mouth,” he said, “10,000 more people say I’m never going to take the vaccine.”

What crap. Rep. Scalise waits until July 2021 to get a vaccine and blames that … on Biden? Hey Steve, Trump and his wife got their vaccinations in January! What, you didn’t know that? What kind of “representative” are you?

And Sen. Marshall blames this new COVID-19 variant scourge on Anthony Fauci? Someone who spent the entire pandemic trying to convince people to wear masks and get the vaccines when they became available? And Psaki is somehow contributing to this by encouraging people, at every opportunity over the past five months, to get vaccinated?

Newly elected wingnut Sen. Tuberville says that Republicans won’t get vaccinated until Biden “acknowledges the efforts” Trump supposedly made. What efforts, exactly? The “efforts” that resulted in literally hundreds of thousands of needless deaths, as a result of a year’s worth of COVID-19 disinformation by Trump and the Republican Party?

You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me. This variant and its spread is your fault, Republicans. You created it, you fostered it, you encouraged it, and the people dying as a result of it are dying because of you.

No one else: you. 

As the Times article notes, the Kaiser Family Foundation reports that 86% of Democrats had received their first shots as of the end of June, compared with 52% of Republicans. Why? Because of this kind of garbage that the GOP has been peddling:

Some elected Republicans are the ones spreading the falsehoods. Representative Jason Smith of Missouri, a Senate candidate, warned on Twitter of “KGB-style” agents knocking on the doors of unvaccinated Americans — a reference to Mr. Biden’s door-to-door vaccine outreach campaign.

And check out the fearmongering that Missouri’s insurrectionist-loving Republican senator has been spewing:

“Beijing-style surveillance,” huh? No wonder Republicans aren’t getting their vaccines! Better dead than Red, right?

Now we see Trump mouthpieces like Sean Hannity and other Fox News anchors who spent the pandemic denying the seriousness of the virus suddenly coming out as super pro-vaccine. It’s a little too late for redemption, boys, particularly as your primetime colleagues Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham still seem to regard vaccine disinformation as critical to their careers.

Republicans walked straight into a buzzsaw with their eyes wide open. They cannot say it’s anyone’s fault but their own.

They certainly shouldn’t try to blame Democrats for their lethal choices. It’s just insulting.

Any Republican who wants to be taken seriously these days knows where they have to be on specific issues. They have to support the Big Lie. They have to stand tough against the idea that the government should play any role in protecting citizens. And they need to make a lot of very, very bad predictions.

As HuffPost reminds us, Ted Cruz paused from complaining about Democratic governors trying to keep people alive, and made a bold call about what America would see in the near future. “If it ends up that Biden wins in November—I hope he doesn’t, I don’t think he will—but if he does, I guarantee you the week after the election, suddenly all those Democratic governors, all those Democratic mayors will say everything’s magically better.”

So, that may look bad. But really, puts Cruz soundly in the party of TFG who said:

• “It will go away.” (3/6/2020)
• “It’s going to go away.” (3/12/2020)
• “It will go away, and we’re going to have a great victory.” (3/30/2020)
• “It’s going to go away, hopefully at the end of the month. And, if not, hopefully it will be soon after that.” (3/31/2020)
• “I didn’t say a date. I said ‘it’s going away,’ and it is going away.” (4/5/2020)
• “It’ll go away—at some point, it’ll go away.” (5/15/2020)
• “I will be right eventually. I said, ‘It's going to disappear.’ I'll say it again.” (4/19/2020)
• “It's going to go away.” (8/30/2020)
• “It's going to disappear; it is disappearing.” (10/10/2020)
• “It is going away; it’s rounding the turn.” (10/24/2020)

Funny thing about those dates. It seems like after the election, someone really did stop talking about COVID-19. It was the guy who never cared. 

Cruz wasn’t the only one making the prediction that COVID-19 would suddenly fade from view after the election. As Forbes reported back in May 2020, Eric Trump had already made the claim that “After November 3 coronavirus will magically all of a sudden go away and disappear and everybody will be able to reopen." Which almost makes it seem like Eric might have been miserable about predicting the virus, but pretty good in seeing how Nov. 3 was going to turn out. 

And of course, himself also said “Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid. A plane goes down. Five hundred people dead, they don't talk about it. Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid. By the way, on November 4, you won't hear about it anymore," Which almost makes it seem like TFG also knew what … but no, surely not.

That claim that the virus would magically vanish after the election was another way of downplaying the pandemic and passing the whole thing off as a kind of fraud. What the right was maintaining was that the whole reaction to COVID-19 was exaggerated simply to sway voters in the election. It wasn’t a theory that made sense—but it’s not as if anything on the right has to meet high standards. However, it was a prediction that cost lives.

As the Idaho Statesmen notes, some people were foolish enough to take Republicans seriously. "Before I came down with the virus, I was one of those jackasses who thought the virus would disappear the day after the election. I was one of those conspiracy theorists,” said a 63-year-old man from Boise. Instead, he now gets a lifetime of requiring supplemental oxygen after COVID-19 caused long-term damage.

What may be most amazing is that Republicans are still at it. Not only did Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis laugh off a doctor who warned that COVID-19 was likely to make a comeback over the summer, he followed it up by claiming that cases would “just go down” without any need for masks, social distancing, or any action on his part.

But wait. Let’s go back to Cruz and see what else he had to say. “You won’t even have to wait for Biden to be sworn in, said Cruz. “All they’ll need is Election Day and suddenly their willingness to just destroy people’s lives and livelihoods, they will have accomplished their task.”

It’s true that people’s lives and livelihoods are being destroyed. Somewhere over 900,000 Americans have lost their lives to the pandemic. Millions more have been made seriously ill, some with conditions that may last for the rest of their lives. That cost to the economy, and to society, is really immeasurable.

But the cost to Ted Cruz, or any other Republican, for downplaying the pandemic, sneering at attempts to save lives, and insisting that this was all just a political pandemic? Nothing at all.

We're at the front end of what could come to be known as the Great Rights Retraction

On vaccines and voting rights, fear of offending Trump supporters has become too controlling.

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Ed Zitron, CEO of national Media Relations and Public Relations company EZPR, writes about Clubhouse -- a one-year-old social audio app that is valued at $4 billion and is backed by several high-profile investors including A16z and Tiger Global and whose popularity appears to be on a decline: Yes, Clubhouse's vanity metrics say that people are creating "500,000 rooms a day," and they've launched a DM feature, but seriously -- I am asking you, dear reader, do you know a single soul who has spent more than a few minutes on Clubhouse in the last 3 months? If you do, do they spend regular time on the app? [...] Clubhouse is the elephant in the room in venture, and I believe there is a conscious attempt to not discuss it for fear that it proves that the entire conversation around it was hot air. When everyone desperately rushed to say that it was the next big thing, I asked repeatedly what exactly about it was going to be big, or change things. The answer mostly came down to the idea that we don't know what the future looks like, and that people were on the waitlist - which is no longer an excuse. Nick Bilton at Vanity Fair was a rare case of dissent, making a clear warning that this was very much a pandemic app and nothing more -- but many people in venture and tech do not seem to want to discuss it as anything other than "a big social network." The Information questioned whether Clubhouse was the next Foursquare -- a promising company with tons of press that ultimately didn't reach the giddy heights it was "meant to" -- but for the most part, people have remained either indifferent or positive about it. The fact this isn't regularly discussed is both a bad sign for the app and also a sign, in my opinion, of an industry-wide embarrassment. So many people rushed to join Clubhouse, or discuss what's big on Clubhouse, or how Clubhouse was the beginning of a "social audio revolution" because they were afraid they'd miss out on the next TikTok, and I'd argue that the press did a woeful job at actually questioning the format. It feels as if there was an unquestioning conflation between an app being important and an app raising a bunch of money, and though one can say that the simple act of raising makes something important, it's irresponsible and embarrassing to run a single article on Clubhouse without questioning the format itself.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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hmmm

AltMachine shares a report from Interesting Engineering: Government researchers in China unveiled their design for a commercial molten salt nuclear reactor that is expected to be the first in the world to not utilize water for cooling. As the reactor won't need water it can be deployed in desert regions, allowing operators to utilize otherwise desolate spaces in order to provide energy for large populations. The molten salt reactor is powered by liquid thorium instead of uranium. Molten salt reactors are expected to be safer than traditional uranium nuclear reactors, as thorium cools and solidifies quickly in the open air, meaning that a leak would theoretically result in less radiation contamination for the surrounding environment. China expects to build its first commercial molten salt reactor by 2030, and the country's government has long-term plans to build several of the reactors in the deserts of central and western China. China's new system works by allowing thorium to flow through the reactor, enabling a nuclear chain reaction before transferring the heat to a steam generator outside. The thorium is then returned to the reactor, and the cycle repeats. The concept of a nuclear reactor powered by liquid salt instead of uranium was first devised in the 1940s. However, early experiments struggled to find a solution for problems including the corrosion and cracking of pipes used to transport the molten salts. The reactor "could generate up to 100MW" of energy and power about 100,000 homes, according to the report. "The reactor itself will only be 10 feet (3 meters) tall and 8 feet (2.5 meters) wide, though the power plant itself will be larger as it incorporates other equipment including steam turbines."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Will you please accept enormous gobs of federal money to insure your own citizens? Please?

You can't stop them from coming up with ludicrous claims to smear qualified nominees, but you don't have to indulge them.

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