Synology today added a new NAS to its lineup: "DiskStation DS1520+," with five bays. It also has two NVMe PCIe SSD slots for cache. From a report: "Featuring the Intel Celeron Processor J4125, DS1520+ provides a performance boost that sees a 126 percent increase in website responsiveness and a 19.8 percent increase in compute-tasks. The DS1520+ provides dual M.2 2280 NVMe SSD cache slots, along with four 1GbE network ports. DS1520+ comes equipped with five bays that support HDDs and SSDs of up to 16TB. If the need for storage grows, users can expand their DS1520+ using Synology expansion units (purchased separately), giving users a maximum raw capacity of 240TB," says Synology. It's priced at $700, but BetaNews, which has listed the full specs and other details, says Amazon is already selling it at $650.
Joe Biden embraces his wife Jill Biden after his 2020 DNC acceptance speech on August 20. | Win McNamee/Getty Images
The DNC’s best argument in the time of coronavirus: Joe Biden, unlike Donald Trump, is a decent man.
The defining moment of the 2020 Democratic National Convention was neither a slickly produced policy video nor a speech from a former president. Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s address, arguably the best oration of his long career, wasn’t it either.
Instead, it was a testimonial from a 13-year-old boy from New Hampshire named Brayden Harrington.
Harrington, like Biden, has a stutter. The two met at a CNN town hall in Concord this February, where Harrington told the candidate about his difficulty with speech. After the event, Biden met with the boy backstage. He talked to Harrington about techniques for managing the stutter, like practicing in front of a mirror. He gave Harrington a copy of his speech from the night, which had markings designed to help get the words out — markings Harrington used in crafting his DNC comments.
Harrington explained to millions of people how much Biden’s support mattered.
“I’m just trying to be a kid,” he said. “And in a short amount of time, Joe Biden made me feel more confident about something that’s bothered me my whole life. Joe Biden cared. Imagine what he could do for all of us.”
The underlying message was clear. Joe Biden is the kind of man who takes time out of his day to help a person with a disability. President Donald Trump is the kind of man who uses his platform to mock one.
Throughout the convention, the Democrats spotlighted stories like Harrington’s — of Biden going out of his way to treat ordinary Americans with kindness and decency.
There was the Delaware rabbi who remembers Biden showing up at a woman’s memorial prayer service in 2006 because she had donated $18 to each of his Senate campaigns going back to 1972.
There was the campaign intern who introduced his grandmother to Biden, leading to Biden delaying a CNN interview so he could speak to the elderly woman for a half hour.
And there was the New York security guard, Jacquelyn Brittany, who bonded with the candidate during a short elevator ride. “In the short time I spent with Joe Biden, I could tell he really saw me. That he actually cared. That my life meant something to him,” she said. At the DNC Brittany formally nominated Biden for the presidency.
It’s typical for parties to try to humanize their candidates at conventions. But the 2020 DNC’s decision to feature story after story of Biden’s extraordinary personal kindness went beyond the norm — elevating character and decency to the level of an overarching campaign theme akin to the urgent need for a better coronavirus response.
The Trump-Biden contrast is one of cruelty versus kindness
Adam Serwer’s short 2018 essay in the Atlantic, “The Cruelty Is the Point,” is one of the defining texts of the Trump era. Serwer argues that the essential core of Trumpism is taking pleasure in inflicting pain on members of outgroups — immigrants, racial minorities, and anyone else who doesn’t fit in Trump’s 1950s vision of what a great America looks like.
“His only fundamental belief is that the United States is the birthright of straight, white, Christian men, and his only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty,” Serwer writes:
It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear: immigrants, black voters, feminists, and treasonous white men who empathize with any of those who would steal their birthright. The president’s ability to execute that cruelty through word and deed makes them euphoric. It makes them feel good, it makes them feel proud, it makes them feel happy, it makes them feel united. And as long as he makes them feel that way, they will let him get away with anything, no matter what it costs them.
Trump’s vision, a vicious struggle between those who have historically had power and those who had not, has electoral power in a world where an all-consuming culture war dominates our public debate. It depends on galvanizing his most vicious supporters through displays of validating cruelty, and depressing voters who might otherwise vote Democratic. It thrives by making people hate each other.
Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images
Trump at a campaign rally in Yuma, Arizona, on August 18.
But in 2020, the culture war isn’t America’s biggest problem: the coronavirus is. Over 170,000 Americans are dead, from all walks of life. This is a shared crisis — one that affects communities unevenly, but affects all of them nonetheless.
In this crisis, Trump’s viciousness — the narcissism and meanness that powers his cruelty-driven politics — is not a political asset. At a time where Americans are suffering, relying on help from the federal government to stay healthy and financially secure, they look to the White House and see an oligarch who’s never been able to even feign concern for their problems. A June 2020 poll from Fox News found that only 37 percent of Americans believe Trump “cares about people like you.” 57 percent said he does not.
Biden’s personal kindness offers an off-ramp.
When you hear about Joe Biden’s fundamental decency, you imagine a world where we aren’t constantly hearing about the latest outrage from the White House — a world where a man who genuinely cares about ordinary people isn’t mocking Americans, but doing his best to protect them. He’s the kind of man your kids can look up to and your ailing parents can count on for support. Joe Biden has lost a wife, a daughter, and a son — and felt pain that has gifted him with empathy. He’s offered to personally speak with every American who lost a loved one to the coronavirus.
Biden’s politics are not mine. During the primary, I was skeptical that he was the best candidate to take on Trump in November. But I didn’t grasp the extent to which Covid-19 would remake our political landscape.
In a world of mass suffering, the median American voter seems to want someone who promises stability — an end to the violent chaos of the Trump era. What’s more, there seem to be some important blocs of voters — educated suburbanites, most notably — who find Trump’s culture war cruelty actively repellant. Biden’s peculiar blend of reasonably progressive politics and impeccably moderate credentials is well-suited to capitalize on this.
But the bedrock on which all of this rests, the fundamental appeal of Biden’s candidacy in this time, is that he’s not Trump.
I don’t just mean this tautologically — that he is literally another warm body. That’s a big part of it, but it’s not the whole thing.
Rather, it’s that Biden’s political persona is the opposite of Donald Trump’s.
For Trump, the purpose of politics is cruelty — to validate his supporters, and his supporters alone, by hurting the people they hate. For Biden, the purpose of politics is caring — to use the mechanisms of self-government to help the ordinary people that he, clearly, cares so much about. That’s what the Democrats wanted to convey about Joe Biden, how they wanted to define him over the course of these last four days.
The kindness was the point.
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President Donald Trump’s son, Donald Jr., and other MAGA cultists took to Twitter to criticize Democratic nominee Joe Biden for using a teleprompter during his DNC speech — which earned rave reviews, even from Fox News.
If you can read a Teleprompter you should be able to take questions from a real journalist without having to have them give them to you before hand. Just saying.
“If you can read a Teleprompter you should be able to take questions from a real journalist without having to have them give them to you before hand (SIC). Just saying,” Trump Jr. wrote.
The Dems are acting like “Slow Joe” Biden deserves an award for being able to read a teleprompter without screwing up. Like “oh, that proves he’s Presidential. He was able to read through the entire speech. How remarkable” #HorribleBoringUninspiringDullLifelessConvention
Trump pastor Darrell Scott was one of many who joined the teleprompter attack: “The Dems are acting like ‘Slow Joe’ Biden deserves an award for being able to read a teleprompter without screwing up. Like ‘oh, that proves he’s Presidential. He was able to read through the entire speech. How remarkable’ #HorribleBoringUninspiringDullLifelessConvention.”
Anti-Trump Twitter responded by pointing out that the president himself has struggled mightily over the years when it comes to reading from teleprompters, including when he recently mispronounced both “Yosemite” and “Thailand.” As of Friday morning, “teleprompter” was trending.
Biden delivers a stunningly good speech using a teleprompter. The Right is rabid.
Trump can’t make his way through several complete sentences even using a teleprompter. The right thinks he’s Superman.
Thing is, @realDonaldTrump can't even read from a teleprompter without fucking up. He can't pronounce even basic words.
But keep pushing this Biden/Teleprompter thing. We'll just pull up all the videos of Trump coming off like a moron while reading from a Teleprompter. https://t.co/YesBw1PCQq
Gotta laugh at Trumpers ripping Biden for reading off a teleprompter when their guy sounds like a 1st grader reading while pointing with his finger word by word.
Why don’t you tell folks what your dad does before he has to read from a teleprompter, Scrump. You know snorting crushed Adderall before you have to read in public isn’t normal right? Your father hides his dyslexia and drug addiction. @realDonaldTrumphttps://t.co/o14PvNITOA
Since the #MAGA crowd seems to think that Biden deserves no credit for reading from a teleprompter, let's take a look at @realDonaldTrump trying to read from one. It's usually a disaster. The dude can't readhttps://t.co/RHEySgqQjt
You could hear the stutter in Brayden’s lungs, all those heavy inhalations, his search for sounds that wouldn’t come. The 13-year-old stared into a stationary camera and told the world about his problem, the affliction he shares with 3 million Americans, one of whom is now the Democratic nominee for president.
“Without Joe Biden, I wouldn’t be talking with you today,” Brayden began. A big smile revealed braces. “About a few … months ago I met him in New Hampshire. He told me that we were members of the same club: Wuh-w-we … sssssss … sssssstutter.”
That last word—the S-word—took the air out of American living rooms tonight.
It’s one thing to wake up every morning with a neurological disability and face your classmates. It’s another to address a national audience when you know what’s going to happen—that a particular letter or sound is coming down the line, that it’ll all fall apart.
You probably first noticed Brayden’s disfluency on the w and s sounds. Purse your lips and say we as you read this sentence. Do you feel that tension around your mouth? That contraction of your jaw? Now say the word stutter, but hold the s for a few seconds before getting to the t. Do you feel that pressure? That twinge in your chest? Odds are you’re lucky, and you could finish those words on demand. Now imagine you can’t. Imagine it’s not just w and s, but j and l and m and at least a dozen more. The h sound is notoriously difficult, as in here—the thing you’re required to say each morning at the start of school. Many stutterers have trouble with b, as in Biden. Or Brayden.
Consider the emotional maturity it takes at Brayden’s age to talk about his personal struggle—especially when that personal struggle is talking, when it’s hard to talk at all, when it hurts to speak.
Like Biden’s, Brayden’s eyes drifted from the camera when he began to stutter. As kids, most stutterers develop a habit of looking down at the floor during a segment of severe disfluency. This is partly a manifestation of shame that comes over time; after a while, you don’t want to meet the eyes of the person giving you the look, that subtle recoil. You don’t want their pity. But Brayden never hung his head. His stutters and blocks were mild on the broad spectrum of stuttering. But that’s not the point. Brayden’s fluency, or disfluency, is not what you or I or any viewer tonight should judge him on.
He stood up and delivered his speech, and stuttered through it, and said all the words he wanted to say. He told a powerful story in just over two minutes, which is more than some other DNC speakers can claim.
Biden stuttered tonight too, but that’s not the point either. Countless pundits swooped across cable-news airwaves and Twitter, instantly declaring this the best speech of Biden’s campaign, if not his career. He mostly said the same things he’s been saying all along: that America is lost and he believes it can be found. His message was more hopeful and unifying than the one Barack Obama delivered the night before. Biden wasn’t speaking to an arena of thousands, as he’d long dreamed of doing, but he still captured what Richard Ben Cramer dubbed “the connect.” Like Brayden, he faced the pain of the moment and told Americans the truth.
I interviewed Biden almost exactly a year ago. I stuttered like hell through every question, sweating through my suit, dropping my head, jerking my neck, looking far less composed than Brayden looked this evening. As I left Biden’s office that afternoon, I don’t know if I ever thought he’d be up there tonight. As I’m writing this, I don’t know if I believe he’ll win the election. I just can’t stop thinking about Brayden’s triumph.
It was pretty damn good, and Biden definitely benefited from majorly lowered expectations. As long as he didn't forget his name or be super proud of identifying an elephant, he was gonna exceed what the GOP has been saying.
Joe Biden appeared on a stage, not in Milwaukee, but in Wilmington, Delaware, to accept the Democratic nomination for president of the United States. But if the convention was constrained by the disaster that’s resulted from Donald Trump’s malignant neglect of the COVID-19 crisis, there was nothing small about Biden’s speech.
In a long career, Joe Biden has delivered many speeches, but none of them were a match for what he did on Thursday evening. By turns, Biden was moving, uplifting, honest, forthright, and forceful in his calling out of the disaster that is Trump. Expectations among pundits seem to have been set on the idea that Biden would spend his time calmly going through a list of plans. That didn’t happen. Biden did present his vision for the nation, including spending time on health care, jobs, college costs, and addressing climate change. But he also went straight at the “darkness” cast over the nation by Trump.
Trump’s supporters have been telling everyone that Biden’s speech would be terrible. Pundits have been telling everyone that Biden’s speech would be workmanlike. But Joe Biden showed everyone that he could deliver an extraordinary speech, one that will be remembered. One that will make a difference.
Anyone who had been listening to Trump or Trump’s cadre of Republican trolls had to be watching in expectation that Biden would fumble and fuddle his way through the evening. After all, to listen to Trump, Biden can barely get through a sentence. Those people were very, very disappointed tonight.
Everyone else was carried away by a speech that mingled a call for hope, unity, and progress, with an unabashed confrontation with Trump’s lies and Trump’s failures. In particular, Biden went straight to Trump’s deliberate mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic and the momentous cost in both lives and jobs.
“The current president has cloaked America in darkness for much too long. Too much anger. Too much fear. Too much division.
Here and now, I give you my word: If you entrust me with the presidency, I will draw on the best of us not the worst. I will be an ally of the light not of the darkness. It's time for us, for We the People, to come together.”
Biden claimed his spot as a “proud Democrat” as he accepted the party’s nomination, and then said something that will definitely not pass the lips of Donald Trump next week.
“While I will be a Democratic candidate, I will be an American president. I will work as hard for those who didn't support me as I will for those who did. That's the job of a president. To represent all of us, not just our base or our party. This is not a partisan moment. This must be an American moment.
It's a moment that calls for hope and light and love. Hope for our futures, light to see our way forward, and love for one another.”
But just because Biden repeatedly returned to the power inherent in love and unity, doesn’t mean he shied away from either confronting the darkness or diminishing the challenge ahead. He called back to the challenges faced by FDR, comparing that time with today, and declared the urgent necessity of winning this, not for Joe Biden, but for the nation.
”Winning it for those communities who have known the injustice of the ‘knee on the neck.’ For all the young people who have known only an America of rising inequity and shrinking opportunity. They deserve to experience America's promise in full.”
And in what may have been the heart of the speech, Biden spoke to the difficulty of this moment, and the demands now laying on the nation.
“America is at an inflection point. A time of real peril, but of extraordinary possibilities. We can choose the path of becoming angrier, less hopeful, and more divided. A path of shadow and suspicion.
Or we can choose a different path, and together, take this chance to heal, to be reborn, to unite. A path of hope and light. This is a life-changing election that will determine America's future for a very long time. Character is on the ballot. Compassion is on the ballot. Decency, science, democracy. They are all on the ballot.”
Biden went into the damage that Trump has done in how he has failed to face the COVID-19 pandemic, reeling off the numbers of infected and dead and saying, clearly and honestly that response is “By far the worst performance of any nation on Earth.” He went on to warn that, should Trump remain in power, things will only continue to get worse as he ignores science and attacks the Affordable Care Act while rewarding billionaires with even more tax breaks.
“What we know about this president is if he's given four more years he will be what he's been the last four years. A president who takes no responsibility, refuses to lead, blames others, cozies up to dictators, and fans the flames of hate and division.
He will wake up every day believing the job is all about him. Never about you. Is that the America you want for you, your family, your children?”
And Biden made it clear there was a choice of a “a different America … one that is generous and strong. Selfless and humble.”
He promised that his first actions would be dedicated to getting COVID-19 under control, including declaring a national mask mandate, stating correctly that schools and businesses can never go back to normal while the pandemic rages on.
“The tragedy of where we are today is it didn't have to be this bad. Just look around. It's not this bad in Canada. Or Europe. Or Japan. Or almost anywhere else in the world. The president keeps telling us the virus is going to disappear. He keeps waiting for a miracle. Well, I have news for him, no miracle is coming.”
Biden promised that schools, business, and all Americans would have the tests they need, the equipment they need, and vaccines that were both safe and fairly distributed. And in a statement that absolutely will not be joined by Trump …
“We'll have a national mandate to wear a mask—not as a burden, but to protect each other. It's a patriotic duty. In short, I will do what we should have done from the very beginning.
With that, Biden delivered the moment of the speech most likely to be repeated on the morning news—and most likely to cause a Twitter breakdown in the White House.
”Our current president has failed in his most basic duty to this nation. He failed to protect us. He failed to protect America. And, my fellow Americans, that is unforgivable.”
Biden again took the opportunity to do what he’s done so many times, to empathize with Americans who have lost loved ones in this crisis. And he showed how his own losses in life had been shaped into purpose—to deliver people the kind of government that doesn’t just empathize, but act.
At multiple points in the speech, Biden returned to the idea that restoring the economy isn’t just about jobs, it’s about “dignity” and understanding the importance of showing everyone respect.
“That's why my economic plan is all about jobs, dignity, respect, and community. Together, we can, and we will, rebuild our economy. And when we do, we'll not only build it back, we'll build it back better.”
For those waiting for Biden to tick the boxes of policy, he moved swiftly through meeting the long stalled need for improved infrastructure, tying it to the need for good jobs and for meeting issues like ensuring that every community has clean water. He touched on health care, saying again that he wants to build on the Affordable Care Act. He moved onto college, to say that costs should be lowered and students shouldn’t emerge burdened by debt. He talked to making child care accessible for parents who need to return to work, and making home care available for the elderly who want to remain in their homes with dignity.
And he talked to climate change, not just as a crisis but as “an enormous opportunity. An opportunity for America to lead the world in clean energy and create millions of new good-paying jobs in the process.” To pay for this, Biden didn’t shy away from saying that he would end Trump’s $1.3 trillion giveaway to billionaires and corporations, and instead look for a tax code that rewards work over wealth. Biden also promised that Social Security will remain “a sacred obligation, a sacred promise made.”
Biden also addressed the need to bring the energy of the young people driving the current moment into the party and use their voice to fight “economic injustice, racial injustice, environmental injustice.”
“I hear their voices and if you listen, you can hear them too. And whether it's the existential threat posed by climate change, the daily fear of being gunned down in school, or the inability to get started in their first job — it will be the work of the next president to restore the promise of America to everyone. “
As he was addressing this point, Biden moved on to praise Kamala Harris and the role he expects her to play as vice president.
“She is a powerful voice for this nation. Her story is the American story. She knows about all the obstacles thrown in the way of so many in our country. Women, Black women, Black Americans, South Asian Americans, immigrants, the left-out and left-behind. But she's overcome every obstacle she's ever faced.”
Biden headed into the home stretch of his speech returning to the love he’s found in his family, and the love he feels for the nation. Beau Biden had been remembered at multiple points in the evening, and Joe Biden did so again, but he didn’t shy away from talking about his love for Hunter or Ashley and speaking to their importance in his life.
But Biden wasn’t done drawing the line between himself and Trump. He recalled that this was the third anniversary of the events in Charlottesville, calling Trump’s defense of white supremacists and neo-Nazis the moment that he decided that he could not avoid running.
Coming back from that darkness, Biden recalled what he described as one of the most important conversations he’s had while running for president.
“I met with six-year old Gianna Floyd, a day before her Daddy George Floyd was laid to rest. She is incredibly brave. I’ll never forget. When I leaned down to speak with her, she looked into my eyes and said ‘Daddy, changed the world.’
Her words burrowed deep into my heart. Maybe George Floyd's murder was the breaking point.
Maybe John Lewis' passing the inspiration. However it has come to be, America is ready to in John's words, to lay down ‘the heavy burdens of hate at last’ and to do the hard work of rooting out our systemic racism.”
Biden delivered not just a great speech, and not just the speech he needed to give to make fools of those who have claimed he wasn’t up to the moment. He delivered the speech the nation needed to hear; a speech filled with optimism, without turning away from realism. A speech that recognized that we are a people in darkness, searching for the light.
“With passion and purpose, let us begin—you and I together, one nation, under God —united in our love for America and united in our love for each other.
For love is more powerful than hate. Hope is more powerful than fear. Light is more powerful than dark. This is our moment. This is our mission.
May history be able to say that the end of this chapter of American darkness began here tonight as love and hope and light joined in the battle for the soul of the nation.”
If you didn’t see it, watch it now. Because every moment cut out of this summary was just as important as the ones left in. Anyone who watched this speech is sure about one thing: Joe Biden is ready.
Yeah the cylons would have wiped out the humans much easier lol
"A simulated F-16 Viper fighter jet with an artificial intelligence-driven 'pilot' went undefeated in five rounds of mock air combat against an actual top Air Force fighter jockey today," reports The Drive in an update to a story shared by Slashdot reader schwit1. From the report: The event was the culmination of an effort that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) began last year as an adjacent project to the larger Air Combat Evolution (ACE) program, which is focused on exploring how artificial intelligence and machine learning may help automate various aspects of air-to-air combat. Heron Systems, a company with just 30 employees, had beaten out Aurora Flight Sciences, EpiSys Science, Georgia Tech Research Institute, Lockheed Martin, Perspecta Labs, PhysicsAI, and SoarTech to claim the top spot in the last of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) AlphaDogfight Trials. This three-day event had started on Aug. 18, 2020.
On the first day, all eight teams had spared against five different types of simulated adversaries that Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) had developed. This included one dubbed a "zombie," with a flight profile similar to a cruise missile or a large drone, as well as ones that performed like fighter jets, such as the F-16 Viper, or heavy bombers, according to Air Force Magazine. On Aug. 19, the teams 'flew' against each other, whittling down the number of competitors to four finalists -- Aurora Flight Sciences, Heron Systems, Lockheed Martin, and PhysicsAI -- who moved on to the last phase. Those four remaining teams then battled each other in semi-finals earlier today.
Lockheed Martin beat Physics AI, while Heron Systems defeated Aurora Flight Sciences. Heron Systems pulled out a major upset over number two ranked Lockheed Martin before going on to face the actual human F-16 pilot, a Weapons School instructor pilot with the callsign Banger, in simulated combat. This tournament was the third and final trial in a series of events that started in November 2019. That initial trial involved teams flying simulated F-15 Eagle fighter jets, while the second one, which took place in January of this year, shifted to using the F-16 as the representative aircraft. The teams taking part in the competition this week again used digital representations of the Viper. It's not entirely clear how the outcome of this tournament may now impact the larger Air Combat Evolution (ACE) program directly. DARPA has said in the past that it hopes the event will at least "energize and expand a base of AI developers" for ACE.
AT&T and T-Mobile are fighting a Federal Communications Commission plan to require drive tests that would verify whether the mobile carriers' coverage claims are accurate.
The carriers' objections came in response to the FCC seeking comment on a plan to improve the nation's inadequate broadband maps. Besides submitting more accurate coverage maps, the FCC plan would require carriers to do a statistically significant amount of drive testing.
"In order to help verify the accuracy of mobile providers' submitted coverage maps, we propose that carriers submit evidence of network performance based on a sample of on-the-ground tests that is statistically appropriate for the area tested," the FCC proposal issued in July 2020 said.
When U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) isn’t conducting raids or offering weapons training to individuals on how to arrest immigrants, it is treating immigrants in its detention centers wrongfully. In another incident of violating religious rights and plain human indecency, advocates and lawyers are demanding that ICE stop feeding Muslim detainees pork. Last year, agents allegedly fed a man only pork sandwiches while he was in their custody, despite knowing his religion restricted him from eating pork. In a similar case, attorneys representing Muslim detainees at the Krome Service Processing Center in Miami-Dade County are demanding federal agents stop forcing Muslims in custody to choose between eating rotten meals or pork-based options.
In partnership with civil rights organizations Muslim Advocates and Americans for Immigrant Justice, attorneys from King & Spalding LLP sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and ICE with their request Wednesday. According to the letter, ICE officials have allegedly been forcing Muslim detainees to choose between eating rotten halal meat or pork sausage, pork ribs, and other pork-based ingredients. The letter demands that ICE and DHS officials immediately provide non-rotten, edible food that does not violate one’s faith. Advocates noted that the pre-plated expired food has caused detainees to suffer stomach pain, vomiting, and diarrhea amongst other health issues. Despite this ICE continues to ignore their pleas.
Photos of expired food labels dating back to August 2017 were provided to advocates for meals served in December 2017. According to the letter, immigrant detainees repeatedly notified both ICE staff and the facility chaplain of the conditions, only to be ignored. In one incident, a detainee’s request for assistance was dismissed by the chaplain, who replied: “It is what it is.” This response and ICE’s inability to correct the ongoing issue proves the facility’s intent to serve rotten and expired foods to Muslim detainees.
According to the letter, pre-plated pork-based meals have been served to detainees at the Florida detention center since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, despite awareness of faith-based diets. Advocates noted that while the process of how food is being served has changed amid the pandemic to prevent the spread of COVID-19, serving “pre-plated meals [that] unambiguously include pork” is unacceptable.
While Krome ICE officials have been serving rotten food to immigrants since 2017, prior to the pandemic detainees had the opportunity to select their own meals from the cafeteria. This allowed them to avoid pork-based and expired foods. Muslims are left with three choices amid the pandemic: eat meals containing pork, eat meals that are rotten, or eat nothing at all.
“Consequently, 2-3 times a week, Muslim detainees at Krome are forced to choose between faith and food. There is no reason, even in a pandemic, that Muslim detainees cannot receive unexpired, unspoiled halal meals, or, at the very least, pre-plated meals that do not require them to consume pork,” the complaint says.
Ultimately, ICE is forcing immigrants to choose between following religious beliefs or caring for their health, in addition to other penalties that may be enforced for not following orders from federal agents. “ICE’s persistent pattern and practice of providing pork and spoiled halal meals to Muslim detainees at Krome imposes a substantial burden on those detainees’ religious exercise, because it improperly forces those detainees to choose between engaging in conduct that seriously violates their religious beliefs or face a serious penalty,” the letter read.
This isn’t just a humanitarian issue but an issue with the law. According to the letter, “by habitually serving Muslim detainees pork and spoiled, expired, and cold halal meals, ICE officers at Krome have violated Muslim detainees’ rights under the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.” Both federal and state law require agents to respect religious practices, whether or not one is detained. And it’s not like ICE agents were unaware of this issue, as Muslim detainees repeatedly complained.
But of course, this isn't the first time that ICE has infringed on someone’s religious rights, and not even in the state of Florida. Muslim Advocates and Americans for Immigrant Justice filed a lawsuit on behalf of five Somali Muslim immigrants held by ICE in Florida’s Glades County Detention Center (GCDC). The staff not only refused to provide these immigrants faith-compliant food but denied them the right to pray. ICE’s consistent failure to take any remedial action toward agents that abuse their power reveals their obvious xenophobia. Daily Kos previously reported that despite thousands of documented incidents of ICE facilities not complying with detention standards, ICE only imposed financial penalties on two occasions.
It is impossible to list all of ICE’s humanitarian issues in one story. The agency has consistently neglected to grant basic human rights to its detainees, including providing adequate living spaces and basic health care. Since its inception, it has consistently terrorized immigrants and communities of color, with no regard to even the ages of its victims. ICE must be abolished.
Senate Republicans are getting in on the "protect the Postal Service" game, but their latest move definitely calls into question their intentions in doing so. Sen. Ron "Genius" Johnson of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee has scheduled a hearing for Friday with Postmaster General Louis DeJoy before the House votes on the Postal Service on Saturday and grills DeJoy on Monday. What Johnson wants him to testify about, according to Washington Post sources, is the Postal Service’s "vote-by-mail financial requirements."
More to the point, Johnson "is expected to press DeJoy on whether the Postal Service truly needs the $25 billion in emergency funding that the House has pushed." Guess what answer Johnson is trying to get the day before House Democrats are scheduled to vote on a bill that includes $25 billion in emergency funding for the Postal Service as well as forcing resumption of services to their pre-coronavirus levels, including restoring mailboxes and sorting machines. Johnson's entire purpose appears to be to set up the House Democrats by "proving" that the Postal Service doesn't need that money.
The White House says now that they would be willing to go as far as $10 billion for the service, and it has $15 billion in cash on hand, the Postal Service has said. There's another $10 billion, with strings attached, that it can obtain in a Treasury loan. So boom, Johnson will say, there's $35 billion! What's the problem? Johnson has unlikely thought ahead to the fact that there will also be Democrats asking questions, and that the inevitable follow-up question is why, then, is DeJoy saying that all of these cuts he's making—weeks before a critical election in which the pandemic will force many to vote-by-mail—are because the Postal Service doesn't have money?
The other part that Johnson might not have entirely thought out is that Sen. Kamala Harris is on his committee, and Sen. Kamala Harris is a very good interrogator in these things. Since DeJoy is going to be sitting in the hot seat, he's going to be open to questions about exactly how he got this job considering he has absolutely zero professional experience with the Postal Service and since he has given more than $2 million to the Trump campaign and other Republicans since 2016.
The ranking member of the committee, Sen. Gary Peters from Michigan, pushed for this hearing to have DeJoy "answer urgent questions about @USPS postal delivery delays harming Michiganders & Americans." In a statement over the weekend, Peters said: "It is imperative that Mr. DeJoy publicly and comprehensively testify about changes and planned changes taking place at the U.S. Postal Service, since the Postal Service is a public institution that both serves and belongs to every person in our nation." Democrats aren't likely to be the only members of the committee who have pointed questions about these services changes.
Republican Sens. Cory Gardner, Susan Collins, and Steve Daines—all facing stiff reelection challenges this cycle—along with Sen. Roy Blunt have all spoken out about the delays. Sen. Rob Portman sent his own letter to DeJoy, "calling on the @USPS to ensure the timely & accurate delivery of election-related materials in #Ohio." Portman is also on the committee.
Thus, Johnson's plan to have a "nothing to see here" hearing might just not work out so well for him. It will just be a warm up for what he's facing Monday, when House Democrats like Rep. Katie Porter are sharpening their knives questions.
Every day since Postmaster General Louis DeJoy claimed on Tuesday that he would suspend the policies that have hamstrung mail delivery has brought fresh news proving his statement was nothing more than a cheap PR stunt.
After news surfaced Wednesday that U.S. Postal Service (USPS) employees were still actively dismantling mail sorting machines, USPS headquarters followed up with an edict forbidding postal workers across the country from reassembling and reconnecting those sorting machines, according to VICE.
"Please message out to your respective Maintenance Managers tonight. They are not to reconnect / reinstall machines that have previously been disconnected without approval from HQ Maintenance, no matter what direction they are getting from their plant manager," wrote Kevin Couch, director of maintenance operations, in an email. "Please have them flow that request through you then on to me for a direction."
VICE reports the email was forwarded to individual maintenance managers nationwide with a single sentence: "We are not to reconnect any machines that have previously been disconnected."
On Wednesday alone, reporters found evidence of sorting machines in Iowa and Michigan that were either recently dismantled or were being actively dismantled at that time. It's impossible to tell how many other mail sorting machines were in the process of being incapacitated, not to mention how many more will be. The sorting machines serve as critical infrastructure to help postal workers process high volumes of mail.
The high-level emails, which were originally obtained by Motherboard, served as further evidence that DeJoy has no intention of ending his sabotage of mail balloting ahead of the election, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said following a phone call with him.
Voters in some states such as Alaska are also finding out that postal workers have been prohibited from serving as witnesses to certify mail-in ballots, according to a new rule change implemented over the summer.
Some Alaska voters are getting quite a surprise when they take their absentee ballots to the post office to get them certified and mailed in a timely fashion.
Even though U.S. Postal Service employees had previously been allowed to certify ballots as witnesses, a nationwide rule change now renders them unable to do so, according to the Anchorage Daily News.
"I went to the post office to mail my absentee ballot and even tho it says very clearly on the instructions that postal officials can sign your witness affidavit, the folks working the counter downtown said they were not allowed," tweeted Sheli DeLaney. "Why?"
Good question. Alaska along with several other states require absentee ballots to be signed by a witness who verifies the ballot was completed by that voter. The rule change is yet more evidence of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s efforts to sabotage mail balloting heading into the final months of the election. In this case, the little noticed alteration was made this summer and will make voting by mail particularly difficult for voters in rural areas who are more likely to mail their ballots.
Alaska Division of Elections Director Gail Fenumiai sent a letter to the Postal Service inquiring about the change and seeking "a copy of the official postal regulation," which was apparently news to her.
The response came from product management specialist Daniel Bentley: “Postal Employees are prohibited from serving as witnesses in their official capacity while on duty, due in part to the potential operational impacts. The Postal Service does not prohibit an employee from serving as a witness in their personal capacity off-duty, if they so choose."
Good news—the Postal Service isn't handcuffing postal employees in their off hours, just while they're on the clock.
Also, James Boxrud, a Postal Service spokesman for the western United States, said, “My understanding is this is a national thing that went out. It’s not just Alaska.”
Great, Boxrud sounds well versed too. He provided the Daily News with a training slide given to clerks in July that said, “Some state laws specifically authorize Postal Service employees to provide a witness signature on ballot envelopes. However, performing this function is not within the scope of a postal employee’s duties and is not required by the Postal Service’s regulations.”
Can’t imagine what other discoveries are waiting in the wings, courtesy of DeJoy.
Former White House chief strategist and CEO of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign Steve Bannon has been indicted on one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering. The indictment is in conjunction with “We Build the Wall,” a private organization supposedly raising donations to build Donald Trump’s wall along the southern border. Also indicted were We Build the Wall frontman Brian Kolfage, serial fraudster Andrew Badolato, and real estate broker Timothy Shea.
All four are charged with defrauding Trump supporters by using interest in Trump’s wall to “raise millions of dollars, under the false pretense that all of that money would be spent on construction.” Kolfage, who had stated he would not be paid “a penny” for We Build the Wall, secretly pocketed hundreds of thousands with the help of Bannon, Badolato, and Shea.
A representative from the U. S. Attorney’s office states that Steve Bannon has been taken into custody. Unfortunately, there don’t seem to be any pictures currently available.
Bannon built Cambridge Analytica and Facebook’s advertising tools into what the Mueller report described as “information warfare” and was described by Bannon himself as a “psychological warfare mindfuck tool” that used social media data to manipulate the public and tools like Facebook’s to focus messages of hate on specific audiences. That effort also included using these tools to both suppress American votes and support Vladimir Putin.
At We Build the Wall, Bannon and his associates took what they had learned during the Trump campaign and engaged in the creation of “sham invoices and accounts to launder donations and cover up their crimes, showing no regard for the law or the truth.” Hundreds of thousands of dollars went directly to Bannon, which he used to cover a fraction of his vast personal debts.
The group ultimately produced little in the way of actual wall. But the flood of money from racist wall-supporters did buy Kolfage lots of nice stuff while he was accusing the National Butterfly Center of running a “rampant sex trade.”
Starting in approximately December 2018, BRIAN KOLFAGE, STEPHEN BANNON, ANDREW BADOLATO, and TIMOTHY SHEA, and others, orchestrated a scheme to defraud hundreds of thousands of donors, including donors in the Southern District of New York, in connection with an online crowdfunding campaign ultimately known as “We Build The Wall” that raised more than $25 million to build a wall along the southern border of the United States. In particular, to induce donors to donate to the campaign, KOLFAGE repeatedly and falsely assured the public that he would “not take a penny in salary or compensation” and that “100% of the funds raised . . . will be used in the execution of our mission and purpose” because, as BANNON publicly stated, “we’re a volunteer organization.”
From the moment he delivered the keynote address at the Democratic convention in 2004, there was no doubt that Barack Obama was one of the great orators of the age. Since then, he has demonstrated again and again that instinctive grace, sterling purity of purpose, and unmatched ability to build a ladder of language that invited everyone to climb up. Two decades of that eloquence makes it difficult to single out any one speech by President Obama as “the best.”
But no speech he ever delivered was more passionate, more direct, or more consequential than the one he delivered on Wednesday night. Sixteen years after that first speech introduced Obama to the nation, he came back to save that nation. It wasn’t an extremely lengthy speech. It wasn’t a speech that was filled with metaphor or concepts. It was not saddled with baroque turns of phrase or elaborate metaphors. It was pure. It was honest. It was simple in the best possible way. It was a genuine “clarion call” to elect Joe Biden and push back the threat of Donald Trump. And on that single topic, it was twenty minutes of fire.
The speech began modestly, as great things do, with a brief civics lesson about the writing of the Constitution and the role that the presidency plays as the one office that is elected by all the people of the 50 states. But it was when Obama moved into how Donald Trump has filled that role that simplicity turned into a honest measure of the man now occupying the White House.
“I never expected that my successor would embrace my vision or continue my policies. I did hope, for the sake of our country, that Donald Trump might show some interest in taking the job seriously; that he might come to feel the weight of the office and discover some reverence for the democracy that had been placed in his care.
But he never did. For close to four years now, he's shown no interest in putting in the work; no interest in finding common ground; no interest in using the awesome power of his office to help anyone but himself and his friends; no interest in treating the presidency as anything but one more reality show that he can use to get the attention he craves.
Donald Trump hasn't grown into the job because he can't. And the consequences of that failure are severe. 170,000 Americans dead. Millions of jobs gone while those at the top take in more than ever. Our worst impulses unleashed, our proud reputation around the world badly diminished, and our democratic institutions threatened like never before.”
It’s difficult to even provide outtakes from the speech, because it is such a well-constructed speech. It builds on itself, driving that through line, making the impact of each paragraph not just lean on what was said before, but provide a step for what comes next.
When President Obama turned from Trump to Joe Biden, he was equally effective in making the case for his friend and colleague. And if the end of that segment drove home the idea that Biden is the Anti-Trump, that’s because he is.
“That empathy, that decency, the belief that everybody counts -- that's who Joe is.” ...
“For eight years, Joe was the last one in the room whenever I faced a big decision. He made me a better president—and he's got the character and the experience to make us a better country.”
This succinct summation of Biden was followed by a equally uncomplicated measure of Kamala Harris. From there, President Obama moved directly into talking about the practical steps that Biden and Harris would take to restore the nation, brush back Trump’s destructive efforts, and create a better future.
“Joe and Kamala will restore our standing in the world—and as we've learned from this pandemic, that matters. Joe knows the world, and the world knows him. He knows that our true strength comes from setting an example the world wants to follow. A nation that stands with democracy, not dictators. A nation that can inspire and mobilize others to overcome threats like climate change, terrorism, poverty, and disease.”
The intensity of the speech did not lag in its final third. Instead President Obama made clear the unmatched stakes of the election, and the need for everyone to be not just a spectator, but a participant in saving the nation.
“Democracy was never meant to be transactional—you give me your vote; I make everything better. It requires an active and informed citizenry. So I am also asking you to believe in your own ability—to embrace your own responsibility as citizens -- to make sure that the basic tenets of our democracy endure.
Because that's what at stake right now. Our democracy.”
For this final section of the speech, it wasn’t President’ Obama’s voice that thundered, so much as his words. He referenced John Lewis, noted the reasons that some have lost hope, or faith, with the nation, and returned again to the stakes of what will happen in just over two months.
“They know they can't win you over with their policies. So they're hoping to make it as hard as possible for you to vote, and to convince you that your vote doesn't matter. That's how they win.” … “That's how a democracy withers, until it's no democracy at all. We can't let that happen. Do not let them take away your power. Don't let them take away your democracy. Make a plan right now for how you're going to get involved and vote. Do it as early as you can and tell your family and friends how they can vote too.”
Commentators on Wednesday evening fanned themselves and pearl-clutched over the idea that President Obama had “attacked” his successor and used language that was “unprecedented.” Of course, to do so they ignored the fact that Donald Trump has attacked Barack Obama almost daily, leveling charges at him that are baseless, racist, and childish. That Trump has never delivered his false charges in the way that Obama did on in this speech is simple enough—Donald Trump hasn't because he can't.
He doesn’t have President Obama’s honesty, his skill, his intelligence, his pure gravitas. And just because the speech was focused on the danger of Donald Trump, doesn’t mean that President Obama did not offer us that ladder to climb up to a better nation.
“To the young people who led us this summer, telling us we need to be better—in so many ways, you are this country's dreams fulfilled. Earlier generations had to be persuaded that everyone has equal worth. For you, it's a given—a conviction. And what I want you to know is that for all its messiness and frustrations, your system of self-government can be harnessed to help you realize those convictions.
You can give our democracy new meaning. You can take it to a better place. You're the missing ingredient—the ones who will decide whether or not America becomes the country that fully lives up to its creed.”
It’ll be for historians to determine if the statements made from Philadelphia were President Barack Obama’s best speech. For everyone watching last night, and everyone reading today, the only certainty that we need to do is listen … and get to work.
Jesus fucking christ. Need some actual adults and to get these idiots out of office.
This article is a collaboration between The Atlantic and InvestigateWest.
On August 14, 2018, Joshua Novacheck, a 30-year-old research engineer for the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory, was presenting the most important study of his nascent career. He couldn’t have known it yet, but things were about to go very wrong.
At a gathering of experts and policy makers in Lawrence, Kansas, Novacheck was sharing the results of the Interconnections Seam Study, better known as Seams. The Seams study demonstrated that stronger connections between the U.S. power system’s massive eastern and western power grids would accelerate the growth of wind and solar energy—hugely reducing American reliance on coal, the fuel contributing the most to climate change, and saving consumers billions. It was an elegant solution to a complicated problem.
Democrats in Congress have recently cited NREL’s work to argue for billions in grid upgrades and sweeping policy changes. But a study like Seams was politically dangerous territory for a federally funded lab while coal-industry advocates—and climate-change deniers—reign in the White House. The Trump administration has a long history of protecting coal companies, and unfortunately for Novacheck, a representative was sitting in the audience during the talk: Catherine “Katie” Jereza, then a deputy assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Electricity.
Jereza fired off an email to DOE headquarters—before Novacheck had even finished speaking, according to sources who viewed the email—raising an alarm about Seams’ anti-coal findings. That email ignited an internal firestorm. According to interviews with five current and former DOE and NREL sources, supported by more than 900 pages of documents and emails obtained by InvestigateWest through Freedom of Information Act requests and by additional documentation from industry sources, Trump officials would ultimately block Seams from seeing the light of day. And in doing so, they would set back America’s efforts to slow climate change.
A nearly impermeable electrical “seam” divides America’s eastern and western power grids. These giant pools of alternating current on either side of the Rockies contain a total of 950 gigawatts of power generation by thousands of power plants. (A third grid serves Texas.) But only a little over one gigawatt can cross between them. Western-grid power plants in Colorado send bulk power more than 1,000 miles away to California, for example, but merely a trickle across the seam to its next-door neighbor Nebraska. That separation raises power costs, and makes it hard to share growing surpluses of environmentally friendly wind and solar power. And years of neglect have left the grids—and the few connections between them—overloaded and ill-prepared to transition to highly variable renewable energy.
The East-West seam divides cities, time zones, and energy resources (NREL)
The Seams study set out to determine whether uniting America’s big grids would pay. Seven aging converter stations presently mediate the meager power flows across the East-West seam. Should power companies simply rebuild these electrical “stitches,” or should they upgrade to longer or stronger links? Seams’ working hypothesis had been that upgrading might create a more reliable, sustainable, and affordable U.S. power system. The study’s results bore that hypothesis out.
But Jereza’s email put the study in trouble: Her concern reached the top ranks at NREL and DOE, according to an August 22, 2018, email from NREL project leader, Aaron Bloom, to top researchers and planners at U.S. power companies and grid operators. “There was some significant political blowback at the most senior levels of DOE as a result,” Bloom wrote. “We hit a political trigger point.” Bloom noted that the email had reached Dan Brouillette, who was second in command to then–Secretary of Energy Rick Perry at the time, and has since taken over his position.
The fallout was swift: The lab grounded Bloom and Novacheck, prohibiting them from presenting the Seams results or even discussing the study outside NREL. At the end of 2018, Bloom left NREL for the private sector. Dale Osborn, a retired grid-planning expert and a key adviser to Seams, says Bloom thought his career was over at NREL. “He told me, ‘I’ll never get a decent project again,’” Osborn recalls.
And the $1.6 million study itself disappeared. NREL yanked the completed findings from its website and deleted power-flow visualizations from its YouTube channel. An NREL document shows that Bloom and Novacheck expected to submit an article to a top grid-engineering journal within six weeks after the Kansas event. That paper remains blocked two years later.
Withholding NREL’s grid research is an example of what experts such as Arjun Krishnaswami, a policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, calls the “deep politicization” of DOE and its national labs under Donald Trump. At a moment when Europe, China, and others are racing ahead with advanced long-distance energy-transmission technologies, grid experts say that technology has gone nowhere in the United States—thanks to a failure of leadership in Washington.
A few weeks before the Kansas summit, things were looking good for the Seams study. On July 26, 2018, Bloom was center stage at a grid symposium in Iowa, releasing the study’s findings. In invitations to the event, the transmission enhancements Seams described had been billed as a “trillion-dollar economic event.” Bloom was on fire, speaking on his feet without notes for nearly two hours. “We’ve been imagining cleaner, bigger modern grids for about 40 years,” Bloom expounded, “and now is the time to make it happen.”
Bloom showed off his team’s sophisticated methodology using high-resolution video simulations. One simulation showed a hypothetical heat wave in August 2038, causing air conditioners to drive up power demand. As the rising sun swept across the U.S., yellow circles representing solar plants expanded. Surplus power from solar plants in the West flooded eastward, limiting the need for pricier and dirtier midwestern coal power. And as the sun set, the Midwest’s expansive wind farms began to spin, sending power westward and minimizing use of the West’s coal- and gas-fired generators.
“This is a bold new world that we’re seeing,” Bloom told the Iowa conference. Indeed, the 20- to nearly 35-gigawatt flows he presented—at times exceeding New York State’s peak power consumption on the hottest day of the year—are far beyond what America’s existing grids can handle. But Seams presented a path to that future.
Grid operation was simulated for 2024 to 2038 because the simulated equipment would take several years to build—and would serve for decades. At the request of the study’s technical-review committee, the core Seams scenario assumed a “carbon policy” under which power plants would be charged an increasing penalty for the carbon dioxide they released. The industry experts on the committee saw this as a rational way to test the system under higher levels of solar and wind deployment, according to NREL documents and emails.
As expected, the simulations showed that exchanging power across the Rockies enables generators on either side to serve a wider area, reducing the number of plants required, and trims operation of the remaining fossil-fueled generators. And they demonstrated that the resulting savings in fuel and equipment more than pay for the added transmission. The benefits were particularly dramatic for the carbon-price scenario. It would eliminate up to 35 megatons of CO2 emissions a year by 2038—equivalent to the current annual carbon emissions from U.S. natural-gas production and distribution. And it would return about $2.50 or more for every $1 invested in transmission.
The design that delivered the largest cost reduction linked up transmission lines to form a new transcontinental network: a “supergrid.” Seams simulated a 7,500-mile supergrid that would ship bulk power around the U.S.—a network reaching from Washington State to Florida. Even in the study’s less-ambitious scenario, the supergrid was saving consumers $3.6 billion a year by 2038.
But there was a problem: Improving the energy grid would reduce America’s reliance on coal. According to NREL’s simulations, coal-fired power plants would shut down en masse over the coming decades, and they would drop even faster with upgraded transmission. That proved to be a very inconvenient finding.
On the campaign trail, Trump’s promises to revive “clean, beautiful coal” spoke to both the blue-collar and anti-regulatory elements of his political base. After his election, he filled his administration with coal-industry veterans, withdrew from the Paris climate-change agreement, and rolled back coal regulations. Yet coal plants kept closing. In fact, coal shutdowns have accelerated during the Trump administration compared with Obama’s. Then-Secretary Perry was under pressure to stem the bleeding in America’s struggling coal industry, and his strategy was to frame coal plants as the grid’s protector against extreme weather, cyberattacks, and other emergencies. Things weren’t going well. That January, the federal commission that regulates power and gas markets unanimously shot down Perry’s proposal to subsidize coal plants, as well as nuclear generators.
Enhanced grid resilience was a likely outcome of the Seams expansions. That’s easy to see from high-profile disasters where gaps in transmission led to otherwise avoidable blackouts. During Japan’s post-tsunami grid meltdown in 2011, mighty generators around Osaka were unable to fill in for the troubled nuclear power plants northeast of Tokyo. And experts say power plants across the U.S. could be helping power California avoid heat wave-induced blackouts right now, if the U.S. power system was more interconnected. But Perry prioritized securing resilience by protecting coal and nuclear power plants, which store months of fuel on-site.
Trump officials were already seeking tighter control over all analysis from the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, which oversees NREL. In May 2018, EERE circulated an “enhanced” list of “Tier 1” topics requiring political sign-off before researchers could publish their findings, according to documents and emails obtained through a FOIA request and a lawsuit filed by the Center for Biological Diversity. Tier 1 topics included anything related to grid reliability or “projections of entire energy sectors,” such as fossil fuels or renewable energy. NREL emails show that Seams was under scrutiny as early as June 2018. Novacheck wrote in one email that Seams’ results were “extremely sensitive” and that the researchers were “not allowed to show any results without direct DOE approval.”
Seams escalated into a major political problem after the Iowa and Kansas presentations. Career DOE employees had approved those talks but had not alerted EERE’s political appointees; expanded disclosure requirements were supposed to exempt conference talks. Still, when DOE higher-ups had seen the newscoveragefromIowa, they complained to Cathy Tripodi, then the acting assistant administrator running EERE. Insiders say she was livid.
Less than three weeks later came Jereza’s email alert during the Kansas presentation. Jereza zeroed in on Seams’ use of carbon pricing, according to insiders interviewed by InvestigateWest. They say the angst over carbon pricing in the Seams study was baseless. “It didn’t advocate anything. It just said, ‘If this is the scenario we’re dealing with … then this is what happens,’” one former DOE official says. But the political danger arising from Kansas was immediately grasped by Tom Sloan, the state representative who organized the seminar. Sloan sought to assuage Jereza after Novacheck’s presentation. He also emailed Novacheck with some advice: “It is not good when one works hard and the results are immediately dismissed because they are not politically correct.”
Sloan, now retired, says the concern from Trump appointees such as Jereza went beyond the carbon tax. “The administration was committed to helping the coal industry,” he says. And Seams showed that, with or without a carbon price, coal power would be adversely affected by a better grid. “The impact on coal is going to be there if you allow low-cost, renewable power to move,” Sloan says.
After Jereza threw her red flag, Tripodi ordered a clampdown on Seams, insiders say. She delegated implementation to Alex Fitzsimmons, then EERE’s 28-year-old chief of staff and chief policy adviser, who had previously worked with fossil-fuel-minded energy think tanks associated with the billionaire oil refiner and GOP mega-donor Charles Koch. Three months before he moved to DOE, Fitzsimmons was quoted as saying that coal-plant shutdowns and anti-pipeline protests threaten lives because fossil fuels keep the heat on during extreme cold snaps.
Fitzsimmons called Martin Keller, NREL’s lab director, and Seams was swiftly locked down. NREL had a $406 million budget in 2018, mostly through EERE. But it was in a precarious situation under the Trump team, which had repeatedly proposed cutting more than half of EERE’s funding. Seams was expendable, because its funding made up less than a quarter of 1 percent of NREL’s budget. “Keller is very smart and politically astute and doesn’t want to piss off the administration,” a former DOE official speculates. “He’s going to figure out that he can slow that one study down and keep everybody happy.”
Keller, Jereza, Tripodi, and Fitzsimmons all declined to comment after repeated requests from InvestigateWest. In an email sent yesterday, a DOE spokeswoman reiterated the agency's earlier statements, saying that Seams is "still under review" at NREL and that it "will be released upon completion."
The political footprint on Seams can be seen in the final report drafted by Bloom and his collaborators. Bloom shared version 14 of the paper at the Iowa conference, but a week after the Kansas talk, the drafts underwent a process of editorial ping-pong between Bloom and Novacheck, NREL leaders, and DOE officials. DOE heavily redacted documents it released through FOIA, but drafts obtained separately by InvestigateWest show how the edits evolved from August to November 2018.
Wordsmithing and euphemisms replaced direct references to carbon. The study’s higher-renewables “carbon policy” scenario, for instance, became a “VG,” or variable-generation, scenario—a reference to wind- and solar-power output that shifts with the weather. The “carbon price” became an “emissions price.” Other elements simply vanished, such as a statement that CO2 emissions were projected to drop to 30 percent of their 2024 levels by 2038. The phrase “coal plants were retired” similarly disappeared, along with colorful bar charts that had shown how Seams’ added transmission shrank coal’s share of power generation to a thin black line.
By the time the editorial exchanges ended in early November, the corrections appeared to be stretching the authors’ comfort zone. After the Kansas conference, emails show that Bloom was instructed not to share drafts beyond NREL. But he ran what would be the final draft by Jay Caspary, a co-author and the Southwest Power Pool’s research and development director. Elements of that final draft concerned the authors, according to a November 7 email from Bloom to Douglas Arent, an NREL lab director: “I reviewed these edits with Jay Caspary, we can live with this revision, but there are some caveats.” In his same-day response, Arent focused instead on further appeasing NREL’s political minders: “Here are my suggested refinements to hopefully avoid DOE ‘over reactions.’”
Over the next year, the administration promoted Fitzsimmons to deputy assistant secretary, and Tripodi stepped up to head the department’s Office of Policy. Jereza left for the industry-affiliated Electric Power Research Institute, where she is now a vice president. The Seams study, in contrast, went nowhere. Its final report remains unpublished.
Nearly a year after Arent’s November 7 reply—the last substantive discussion of Seams in the FOIA documents—a group of grid experts publicly called out the DOE at a transmission conference, saying that Seams was completed and that DOE had “bottled” it up. DOE communications staff insisted that the study was ongoing. A statement issued in September 2019 asserts, “DOE career staff reviewed preliminary results and saw an opportunity to strengthen the study by expanding the project to model and analyze additional scenarios.” DOE suggested that Seams would be released in 2022.
An NREL media-relations person responded to InvestigateWest’s queries to NREL officials, providing a statement “on behalf of the laboratory” that parroted DOE’s. NREL’s statement added only that “all information that is currently available” on Seams is on the project’s website. The site claims that more than 30 industry organizations “are helping guide” the study via the technical-review committee. Caspary, that panel’s co-chair, says it has not met in more than two years.
According to Susan Tierney, a former assistant secretary of energy who chairs NREL’s External Advisory Council, national labs have operated with considerable independence in the past: “There was an understanding that the labs have a duty to perform quality research. I was not familiar with situations where there was an editorial thumb on the scale.”
But under Trump, political appointees have made unprecedented moves to regulate how science is conducted, according to a historical analysis and warning by experts in science and the law in the journal Science. And other scientific studies—especially those related to climate change—have been similarly slow-walked or buried. One of them was a DOE-commissioned study on grid resiliency, completed in April 2018. Michael Webber, an energy expert at the University of Texas at Austin and the study’s leader, notes that his conclusion—that increased transmission, not just fuel-storing generators, helps grids respond to extreme events—conflicted with statements made by DOE leaders. “I never got a message from anybody saying ‘Please do a study that concludes coal is magical,’ so there was never direct pressure on me for that. But I could sort of read the winds,” Webber says.
In the case of Seams, DOE’s interference has had a real and practical impact. Caspary says he has been waiting for access to Seams’ simulation tools to do follow-up studies for the Southwest Power Pool. There’s a growing backlog of wind and solar projects seeking to use the Pool’s lines.
And by labeling the study incomplete and blocking its publication, DOE has diminished the credibility of Seams’ findings. One power-sector trade journal, noting what it called “a lot of hype” after the Iowa meeting, said Seams wasn’t even a study: “It actually was a slide deck describing some future real study.”
That loss of credibility hinders the chances of jump-starting large-scale power-grid planning in the United States. The power-industry expert Peter Fox-Penner, who runs the Boston University Institute for Sustainable Energy, says the U.S. is falling behind other major economies when it comes to creating the big grid links that make a transition to renewable energy possible. As Fox-Penner writes in his 2020 book, Power After Carbon: Building a Clean, Resilient Grid, “Without better integrated planning, we can’t even guess at the amount of transmission we need and where and how it should be built. Europe, Australia, and other countries are starting to get a good handle on these questions while the United States lags well behind.” The International Energy Agency has estimated that China’s growing interregional transmission could save its consumers and industries $9 billion a year.
Meanwhile, the nationwide report on grid congestion that DOE is required by law to update every three years—a crucial component of grid planning—is two years behind schedule. (DOE’s website still anticipates a 2019 update to the Obama administration’s 2015 study.)
And there are more signs of trouble at NREL, where two more grid-modeling studies are now missing in action. Tierney says the three studies were planned as a trifecta: Seams was the prelude; a North American–wide study adding in Texas, Mexico, and Canada was the main event; and an analysis of electrifying energy demands primarily met by coal, gas, and petroleum would be the closer. The last study's final phase explores how U.S. grids could supply extra power to replace fossil fuels, face the same political sensitivities as Seams, and has yet to surface. Tierney says NREL told her last year that it was “awaiting sign-off” at DOE.
NREL’s continental-scale study, meanwhile, is far behind schedule. Until early July, the North American Renewable Integration Study’s project website was still promising final results last year. NREL now says results could be out later this year, but a Canadian official tells InvestigateWest that 2020 is unlikely. Osborn, the retired power planner, is a member of the study’s technical-review committee and speculates that NREL officials put it on hold in hopes of a more receptive administration come 2021.
If NREL researchers are able to work unencumbered by political concerns and release Seams in its entirety, it could help point the U.S. toward a greener future, in which a robust economy runs on renewable energy. But for now, Seams is demonstrating an unintended finding—that when administrations stick their hands into scientific research, politically inconvenient truths are in peril.
Support for this story was provided by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
Enlarge / The African wave train has swung into motion for 2020. (credit: NOAA)
This Atlantic hurricane season has set all kinds of records. Most notably, we have already run through the "K" name, with Tropical Storm Kyle forming on August 14 off the coast of the Carolinas. This beat the earliest ever "K" storm, the highly memorable Katrina in 2005, by 10 days.
For all of the names being thrown about, however, most of these systems have been "fish storms," remaining out to sea. And only two have developed into hurricanes, Hanna and Isaias, and neither of these progressed beyond Category 1 status. Scientists use a metric called Accumulated Cyclone Energy to measure the overall activity of a season, factoring in duration and intensity of storms. By this standard, 2020 has been quite active, but not extremely so.
But now we're coming to the heart of the Atlantic hurricane season, which tends to ramp up in late August. This is when the tropical region between Africa and the Caribbean Sea typically reaches its most favorable for development with warm seas and fair winds. This allows for a "train" of storms to develop as atmospheric waves move off the western coast of Africa.
Enlarge / MIT scientists think the corona discharge known as "St. Elmo's fire" could help reduce the risk of aircraft being struck by lightning during thunderstorms. (credit: Anton Petrus/Getty Images)
The electrical phenomenon known as St. Elmo's fire manifests during strong thunderstorms as a flash of blue light, usually at the tips of electrically conductive structures like cell phone towers, telephone poles, and ship masts—which is how it got its name, in honor of the patron saint of sailors, St. Erasmus of Formia. On the ground, St. Elmo's fire glows more brightly in windy conditions because the wind helps further electrify the surrounding air.
But MIT scientists have discovered that wind has the opposite effect on ungrounded structures such as airplane wings and turbine blades, according to a recent paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres. They discovered this while investigating the possibility of using St. Elmo's fire to control the electrical charge of an aircraft, thereby helping protect it from lightning strikes.
St. Elmo's fire is not a form of lightning; it's essentially a continuous electric spark known as a corona discharge, like the glow of a neon sign. The friction that builds up in storm clouds gives rise to an electric field extending to the ground. If it's strong enough, the friction breaks apart surrounding air molecules, ionizing the air to produce a plasma (charged gas). All the excess electrons knock the plasma molecules into an excited state, which then emit photons to produce that telltale glow. The color of the glow depends on the type of gas being ionized. Since Earth's atmosphere is primarily made up of nitrogen and oxygen, the glow takes on a blue or violet hue.
President Donald Trump took to Twitter on Thursday morning to whine about the social media platform’s trending topics, which included “Trump Meltdown” and “Obama Was Better At Everything.”
Nope, #TrumpMeltdown is trending because you are freaking out, seeing what’s coming. You’re scared and pathetic. #ObamaWasBetterAtEverything is trending because — it’s just true.
You are a massive failure, and a danger, as the speakers at #DNC2020 have explained.
— Michelangelo Signorile, subscribe to my newsletter (@MSignorile) August 20, 2020
“It’s never a real Twitter Trending. It’s Twitter Executive’s Choice. Only negative on Republican voices, especially mine!” Trump wrote.
After a lifetime of trolling others, Trump appears to be the one who is seriously triggered tonight, repeatedly tweeting in ALL CAPS in response to speeches from Obama and Kamala Harris at the DNC. https://t.co/qRmMHVB0fw
“Trump meltdown” and similar topics were trending in the wake of the president’s all-caps rants in response to speeches by President Barack Obama and vice presidential nominee Sen. Kamala Harris during the Democratic National Convention on Wednesday night.
More below.
Seems like someone is a little upset that Triggered and #TrumpMeltdown are trending this morning after his ALL CAPS freakout last night. It would be a shame if we kept it going….. pic.twitter.com/pWNV5yhTxv
He consistently shows America his cards on exactly how weak he is in his pathetic CAPS-LOCK tweets. It must be devastating to be that insecure, and weak. #TriggeredTrump#TrumpMeltdown
If COVID-19 is a hoax, why do you need rubber gloves?
That’s one of several questions we have for the unidentified racist Karen shown above, who donned dish-washing mitts while she used scissors to remove tape blocking the entrance to a playground at San Francisco’s Dolores Park on Sunday.
After Andres Patino, an outreach worker for the city’s Recs & Park Department, began filming the woman, she unleashed an epic rant.
“This is an unconstitutional, unlawful taking of public property,” she said of the playground, which is closed due to the coronavirus pandemic, as she walked toward Patino.
“Please do not approach me with the scissors,” Patino responded.
“I’m not chasing you, you dumb sheep,” the woman said. “Go to the hospital, and tell them to put you on a ventilator. They’ll kill you with a ventilator, like they’re doing thousands of others. Don’t you dare shut this park. We paid for this park. You don’t get to take our property. We paid for it, you little nigres. Go back to wherever the hell you came from, and stop trying to steal the property we paid for. Go back to wherever you came from. This is our property. You don’t get take it.”
Patino later wrote above his video on Facebook: “Working at the time, I felt like I needed to reel back my response to her hateful rant. However, for my own sake (even if this never reaches her), I want to let her and the other racist Karen’s in SF know that regardless of what they say, this is my home. Your bigotry is neither needed, wanted, or accepted here. If you can’t accept the beauty that comes from the great diversity that makes up SF culture, you might as well pack up your bags, hop back on the MayFlower, go back from wherever your racist ideologies come from, and return your land back to the indigenous people from whom it was stolen from. No one else should have to deal with your behavior here in SF or anywhere else. Even in our liberal city of San Francisco this is happening, and it’s up to us to say, “No Karen, BYE!!”
At Wednesday’s White House press briefing, Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany was asked about recent statements by Trump that the only way Democrats will in is if the election is rigged.
Asked a reporter: “Is the president saying if he doesn’t win this election — that he will not accept the results unless he wins?”
“The president has always said he’ll see what happens and make a determination in the aftermath. It’s the same thing he said last election.”
Reporter: "Is the President saying if he doesn't win this election that he will not accept the results unless he wins?"
Kayleigh McEnany: "The President has always said he'll see what happens and make a determination in the aftermath." pic.twitter.com/iH606u3V38
On Aug. 19, 2020, at 11 AM PST, the FBI tweeted out a message that just included an attachment with the title: “Protocols of Learned Elders of Zion.” That’s pretty much all this story needs to say. But in case you don’t know what the significance of this is, it is somewhat similar to—though not the same as—tweeting out Mein Kampf with just a link to a PDF of the book by Adolf Hitler. As a little sidenote: The prick who tweeted this out forgot the “the” in front of “learned,” because like most bigots, details and the execution of ideas are not their strong suits.
What makes it different is that it is even more insidious to promote, without context or explanation, something from the “archives” that is infamously fabricated. The Protocols of Learned Elders of Zion is the document created by anti-Semites and used by subsequent anti-Semites to promote the conspiracy theory that Jewish folks around the world have a secret plan to control the world. (Seriously.) And it’s an old document, and we all know that old documents can feel very important to different groups of people at different times, for different reasons. And there’s more to this than just the forged anti-Semitic documents.
Sometimes called “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and sometimes with “the Learned” in front of “Elders,” the document was sold to many in the public as “the confidential minutes of a Jewish conclave convened in the last years of the nineteenth century.” It was a complete hoax created by the Russian czar’s secret police force at the time. It has been called “the most notorious political forgery of modern times.”
The documents were translated into German, French, English, and other European languages and disseminated around the world at the beginning of the 20th century. One of the conceits was that Jews were planning to use socialism and liberalism in order to subvert Christian civilization. Sound familiar? Sound like the entirety of the Republican manifesto?
The spurious character of the Protocols was first revealed in 1921 by Philip Graves of The Times (London), who demonstrated their obvious resemblance to a satire on Napoleon III by the French lawyer Maurice Joly, published in 1864 and entitled Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu (“Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu”). Subsequent investigation, particularly by the Russian historian Vladimir Burtsev, revealed that the Protocols were forgeriescompounded by officials of the Russian secret police out of the satire of Joly, a fantastic novel (Biarritz) by Hermann Goedsche (1868), and other sources.
The FBI’s link includes letters to J. Edgar Hoover and the like that were supposedly from American citizens throughout the years sending on the document to the FBI with the hope that it would be investigated. Once again, it is important to note that without any context, the FBI account is doing exactly what its original forgers were hoping: Passing it on as real.
But there’s more. The account then tweeted out archive information on Rex Tugwell. Tugwell was “one of the five original members of President Roosevelt’s “Brains Trust,” a group that heavily influenced the development of the New Deal.” Here’s a quote from Tugwell: “[W]e were confronted with a choice between an orderly revolution—a peaceful and rapid departure from past concepts—and a violent and disorderly overthrow of the whole capitalistic structure … the [New Deal] effort is not to destroy our institutions, but to save them from the poison of unlimited greed, and to turn the results of common effort toward more general benefits. Enlarged incomes for common people, greater leisure, security from risk – these are the items of the present program.”
Preceding the zero-context Protocols of Zion bullshit tweet, the FBI tweeted out archives on MOVE. You know what move is? That was May 13, 1985, when police dropped a makeshift bomb on a Black liberation compound in Philadelphia, obliterating an entire neighborhood and killing more than a dozen Black Americans. Sort of reminds me of far-right pipe bombs, seemingly supported by local and federal law enforcement teams looking the other way in Portland, OR.
There have been a ton of responses to this strange and sad social media account move.
And sadly, though predictably, the racist, QAnon, anti-Semite, Holocaust-is-a-hoax crowd has come like flies to shit. All one can do is get out the vote.
Racism has long proven to be as deadly as it is disheartening, and a new study published Monday indicates that newborn babies aren’t exempt from the dire effects of the long-practiced hatred. Black babies are more likely to die when white doctors are in charge of their care than when Black doctors care for them, researchers wrote in the study. And in fact, “Black infants experience inferior health outcomes regardless of who is treating them,” due to other racial disparities affecting their mothers.
The new findings simply point to what experts have long indicated, whether in regard to education or crime prevention: Black people, and in this case, Black newborns have different needs that other Black people are often better suited to meet.
“Findings suggest that when Black newborns are cared for by Black physicians, the mortality penalty they suffer, as compared with White infants, is halved,” researchers wrote in the study. “Strikingly, these effects appear to manifest more strongly in more complicated cases, and when hospitals deliver more Black newborns.”
Researchers attribute those different needs “to social risk factors and cumulative racial and socioeconomic disadvantages of Black pregnant women.” They wrote: “To the extent that physicians of a social outgroup are more likely to be aware of the challenges and issues that arise when treating their group (...), it stands to reason that these physicians may be more equipped to treat patients with complex needs.”
The study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is based on 1.8 million hospital birth records from 1992 to 2015 in Florida. The findings seem to align with research the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published last year that shows Black babies are two times more likely than white babies to die before turning 1 year old, despite the mother’s income or education level. “The reasons behind these disparities range from increased rates of eclampsia and preeclampsia during pregnancy to preterm delivery, to social determinants like socioeconomic inequality and racial bias,” authors of the new study wrote, citing other research.
”These results underscore the need for research into drivers of differences between high- and low-performing physicians, and why Black physicians systemically outperform their colleagues when caring for Black newborns,” researchers wrote.
It’s an alarming need when considering just how many aspiring Black doctors have been shut out of the medical field. Only 5% of doctors identify as Black compared to 56% who identify as white, 17% who identify as Asian, and just less than 6% who identify as Latino, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.
”Financial constraints, insufficient exposure to medicine as a career, little encouragement at home and in schools, lack of role models, and negative peer pressure may contribute to racial disparities in the physician workforce for African Americans,” researchers said in another study published in the Journal of the National Medical Association. “Exposure at a young age to role models and to medicine as a profession might increase the number of African American physicians.”
Dr. Arthur James, a Black man and a retired obstetrician and gynecologist, told The Guardianracial concordance is “an important and often overlooked potential contributor to improved birth outcomes.” James was contracted to care for uninsured patients in eastern Michigan in the 1980s, when Black babies were five times more likely to die than white babies, according to The Guardian.
“As black physicians, we attended the same churches, barbershops, beauty salons, our children attended the same schools …” he said. “This sense of community cultivates an entirely different level of relationship and accountability. The feeling that your provider genuinely cared for you is important … and, in my opinion, is more easily realized when racial concordance and genuine relationship is present.”
Enlarge / The Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan in China's central Hubei province on April 17, 2020. (credit: Getty | Hector Retamal)
A New York-based nonprofit that has worked for decades to better understand and prevent the type of coronavirus pandemic now engulfing the world was abruptly stripped of its federal research funding in April. The White House specifically directed the National Institutes of Health to cancel the multimillion-dollar research grant after President Donald Trump promoted an unfounded conspiracy theory that the pandemic coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, was released from a lab in Wuhan, China—a lab that collaborates with the nonprofit.
Now, the NIH has told the nonprofit, EcoHealth Alliance, that it may have its funding back—if it collects and hands over materials and information about the Chinese lab, which is part of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
In a July 8 letter seen by The Wall Street Journal, the NIH laid out a list of seven criteria EcoHealth Alliance must fulfill in order to regain its peer-reviewed funding. The list includes:
Then maybe you should have done more screening before you retained them as contractors...
In a podcast interview Wednesday, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi rejected the notion his company is capable of employing all of its drivers in California, as a state judge has ordered it to do so [and comply with AB5, the state law that makes it more difficult for companies to use independent contractors]. The Verge reports: "We can't go out and hire 50,000 people overnight," Khosrowshahi said on the Pivot School podcast hosted by Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway. "Everything that we have built is based on this platform that... brings people who want transportation or delivery together. You can't flip that overnight." [T]he companies claim they would need to shut down operations in California completely in order to retool their businesses to comply with the law. Khosrowshahi said the shutdown likely wouldn't be permanent. "It'll take time but we're going to figure out a way to be in California," he said. "We want to be in California."
Khosrowshahi confirmed reports that Uber was looking into other models, like a franchise-style system in which the company would license its brand to fleet operators in California. "There's a black car service that we have that's based on fleets," he said. "And we are trying to figure out exactly what we do going forward." Regardless, Khosrowshahi said that Uber's response would be to limit the number of drivers allowed on its platform and to raise prices for customers after it eventually relaunches in the state. He predicted that upwards of 80 percent of those drivers who only log onto the app for 5-10 a week would no longer be able to earn on the platform. Trip prices in dense urban centers like San Francisco will go up around 20 percent, he said, while rates would be even higher in smaller, less dense cities.
Uber's critics note that there is nothing stopping Uber from continuing to provide drivers with the flexibility to set their own schedules under AB5. But the company rejects this notion, arguing that no company in California or elsewhere lets employees set their own hours. Uber has proposed a "third way" through the ballot measure it's supporting in California called Proposition 22. The measure would allow the company to sidestep AB5 and go on classifying drivers as independent contractors, while also providing some added benefits like a minimum wage and access to health insurance. Along with Lyft and DoorDash, it has committed to spend over $100 million, while union-backed driver groups only have around $866,000 to lobby against it.
SmartAboutThings writes: Microsoft released Flight Simulator 2020 but many people who bought it online are having problems downloading it, installing it, or simply running the new game. Some users simply didn't get to download the game even if they tried several times to do so. When the download was finally complete, they received an error while trying to install it. Even if some users also got through the installation, they faced another problem: the game freezes at the starting screen. Microsoft didn't present a solution yet but Windowsreport.com wrote first about these problems and offered some workarounds and possible solutions.
Joe Biden embraces his wife Jill Biden after his 2020 DNC acceptance speech on August 20. | Win McNamee/Getty Images
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