James.galbraith

A new injectable form of PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) from ViiV Healthcare administered every two months has been shown to be 69 percent more effective at averting HIV infection than Gilead’s widely-used oral antiretroviral drug Truvada, according to its manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline.

An independent monitoring board halted a drug trial among men who have sex with men early after the drug was found to be effective, Reuters reports: “Kimberly Smith, ViiV’s head of research, said a long-acting injection was a better route of administer because users have shown to struggle with a strict routine of daily pills, heightening the infection risk. … GSK, which is trailing Gilead in the HIV treatment market, will speak to drug regulators about a possible approval of cabotegravir based on the prevention trial, a spokesman said.”

PMLive reports: “For ViiV – a joint venture majority-owned by GlaxoSmithKline – the study is a big boost to its ambitions for cabotegravir, an HIV integrase inhibitor that it hopes could provide long-term HIV therapy with a single injection, avoiding treatment compliance issues with daily oral drugs such as skipped doses.”

The post Injectable Long-Acting PrEP Shown to Be 69 Percent More Effective at Averting HIV Infection Than Truvada appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Former Vice President Joe Biden at a Democratic presidential debate. | Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

A majority of Americans, especially Democrats, support legalization. Biden doesn’t.

Former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, still opposes federal marijuana legalization — putting him at odds not just with the majority of Democrats but also Americans overall.

In debates, in his criminal justice reform plan, and in his “Plan for Black America,” Biden has said he supports the federal decriminalization of marijuana, which would maintain fines but do away with prison or jail time for possession. But he remains opposed to full legalization, which would remove all penalties and, typically, allow sales for recreational purposes.

The position is more reform-friendly than that of President Donald Trump, who opposes both legalization and decriminalization. But it’s still out-of-step with the views of US voters, especially Democrats.

Based on surveys by Gallup and the Pew Research Center, roughly two-thirds of US adults support marijuana legalization. Support for legalization has increased steadily over the years, up from about 12 percent when Gallup first started polling on the question in 1969.

Courtesy of Gallup

When US adults are asked about their support for marijuana legalization in greater detail, only 8 percent say it shouldn’t be legal at all, according to Pew; 59 percent say it should be legal for medical and recreational use, while 32 percent say it should be legal for medical use only.

Democrats are even more in favor of legalization, with average support of 78 percent across four generations, according to Gallup and Pew’s surveys, though a majority of Republicans also support it. Based on Pew’s findings, every generation of Democrats surveyed support marijuana legalization.

In other words, Biden is out of step not just with other Democrats, but also a majority of Democrats in his own generation.

The Biden campaign did not respond on the record to Vox’s request for comment.

Supporters of legalization argue it eliminates the harms of marijuana prohibition: the hundreds of thousands of arrests around the US, the racial disparities behind those arrests, and the billions of dollars that flow from the black market for illicit marijuana to drug cartels that then use the money for violent operations around the world. All of this, legalization advocates say, outweigh any potential downsides — such as increased cannabis use — that may come with legalization.

Opponents, however, claim legalization will enable a huge marijuana industry that would market the drug irresponsibly. They point to America’s experiences with the alcohol and tobacco industries in particular, which have built their financial empires in large part on some of the heaviest consumers of their products. This could result in more people using pot, even if it leads to negative health consequences.

Throughout the primary campaign, other Democratic candidates took far more aggressive positions on marijuana reform. Before he joined the presidential race, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) released a marijuana legalization plan, which would not only legalize marijuana at the federal level but also encourage states to legalize it. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) released a detailed plan to legalize and regulate marijuana — at 4:20 pm, because humor is alive and well.

In fact, Biden was alone among the top-polling Democratic campaigns in his opposition to federal marijuana legalization. Biden’s position led to a particularly colorful exchange at the Democratic debate in November — at which Booker, commenting on Biden saying he opposes federal legalization, remarked, “I thought you might’ve been high when you said it.”

But despite the support for legalization among Democrats and Americans overall, the issue, apparently, wasn’t a major priority for Democratic voters during the primary. Biden still walked away with the most delegates to became the presumptive nominee.

With a coronavirus pandemic and recession still underway, perhaps Biden is hoping the same will hold up in the general election too.

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Support Vox’s explanatory journalism

Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar meets with other Trump administration officials in the Roosevelt Room at the White House. | Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post/Getty Images

Sunday, Azar also spoke in optimistic terms about the country reopening.

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar spoke in optimistic terms about quickly reopening the US economy on CNN Sunday. And he did so while downplaying the severity of the coronavirus fatality rate nationally, seeming to suggest that demographics — rather than policy choices — are behind confirmed US coronavirus-related deaths approaching 90,000.

But his positive gloss on the administration’s coronavirus response appears to be at odds with recent polling indicating that an overwhelming majority of Americans — including those who have lost their jobs or taken pay cuts due to stay-at-home measures — are concerned that states will lift social distancing restrictions too quickly.

In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Azar said, “Thanks to the president’s historic response efforts here .... we are in a position to be able to reopen now.”

“We have got to get this economy and our people out and about, working, going to school again, because there are serious health consequences to what we’ve been going through,” he said.

However, his confidence about a swift return to normalcy — and the ability of state and local leaders to oversee that process competently — is not shared by most of the American public. A Pew Research Center poll taken from April 25 to May 5 (with a 1.4 percentage point margin of error) shows that 68 percent of all adults are concerned state governments will lift stay-at-home restrictions too quickly.

Strikingly, even among people who have been laid off or have taken a pay cut, the percentage of people with that concern is identical — 68 percent — which indicates concerns about the virus are serious even among those facing direct economic consequences from the coronavirus-spurred recession. (Among those who had not been laid off or taken a pay cut, the percentage concerned was one point higher: 69 percent.)

These results also suggest it’s not just government shutdowns of businesses that are keeping people home and away from businesses, but fear of the virus itself.

Azar also answered questions from Tapper about the fatality rate in an eyebrow-raising manner, suggesting that communities of color are a key reason that the US has the highest number of reported casualties from coronavirus in the world.

When Tapper initially asked Azar to explain why the virus is “worse for us than it is for anyone else,” referring to the number of Americans who are dead, Azar first responded by pointing out that the US’s mortality rate as a percentage of reported cases was not exceptionally high.

But when Tapper pressed him further, and emphasized that the overall number of deaths in the US is the highest in the world, Azar said this could be explained by ethnic demographics.

“Unfortunately the American population is a very diverse, and, it is, it is a population with significant unhealthy comorbidities that do make many individuals in our communities, in particular African American, minority communities, particularly at risk here, because of significant underlying disease, health disparities, and disease comorbidities,” Azar said.

“That is an unfortunate legacy in our health care system that we certainly do need to address,” Azar added.

Azar is right that public health inequities are contributing to disproportionate casualties among communities of color. But pointing to that as the primary reason the US has surpassed every other country in the world in terms of coronavirus-related deaths is a troubling dodge: it seems to imply that racial minorities are to blame for their deaths rather than the federal government.

The more immediate and larger explanation for the US’s exceptional number of deaths is the disorganized and anti-scientific response by the federal government to the pandemic.

But even setting that aside, the fact that many communities of color do have worse health outcomes is a function of longstanding socioeconomic marginalization and uneven access to nutrition, health care, and a healthy environment. In other words, Azar’s formulation could be flipped: it’s not people of color driving up America’s casualties, but America that is driving up people of color’s casualties.

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Support Vox’s explanatory journalism

Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

Make Democratic voters too angry, and they might just flock to the polls.

If you’re concerned about the current state of editorial cartooning, consider supporting my work on my Patreon Page for as little as $1 a month, or you can just buy me a coffee. You can also buy some merchandise like T-shirts with my cartoons on them here .

Incidentally, I use Redbubble for my t-shirts and other merch. Last week, I uploaded this cartoon (below) to my collection, because it was very popular and I thought it would make a good t-shirt. 

Less than 24 hours later, I received this email from Redbubble:

Hi Nick, We’re sorry, but we had to remove some of your artwork from the Redbubble marketplace because it may contain material that violates someone’s rights. We identified this material in your artwork based on guidance provided to us by the owner of those rights. More information: Rights holder: Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. Subject matter: Donald J. Trump for President Affected artwork:  The Trump Cult: https://www.redbubble.com/people/andertoon2/works/48156343-the-trump-cult What you can do next:

1. Do nothing Your artwork will not be reinstated, and you may not upload it again. In most cases, this brings the matter to a close.

2. Get more information (Links to FAQs) 3. Dispute the removal (More links) Thank you, The Redbubble Marketplace Integrity Team

“Integrity team??”

Naturally, I disputed the removal. I can only surmise that the Trump campaign is suggesting that the “MAGA” hats are a Trademark violation. This, of course, is absurd. The First Amendment and Supreme Court case law clearly protects Trademark and and/or Copyright “infringements” if it the material in question is being satirized. 

It has been six days, and I have gotten no response from Redbubble. Given how quickly my work was detected and taken down, it is clear that the Trump campaign has some aggressive techniques for spotting this kind of content and attempting to take it down. 

This raises some troubling issues. The Trump campaign appears to be aggressively and successfully suppressing content on commercial sites that it doesn’t like, and some of them are apparently rolling over pretty quickly. 

--Nick Anderson

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The SD Association announced today that SD cards are about to get faster than ever, thanks to the SD 8.0 Specification. From a report: With SD Express technology, which is based on NVMe and PCIe, you will eventually be able to buy an SD card with speeds nearing 4GB/s! "SD Express uses the well-known PCIe 4.0 specification and the latest NVMe specification (up to version 1.4) defined by PCI-SIG and NVM Express, respectively. SD 8.0 specification provides two transfer speed options for SD Express memory cards. The two transfer speeds are accomplished by supporting either PCIe 3.0 x2 or PCIe 4.0 x1 architectures with up to ~2GB/s and with PCIe 4.0 x2 technology with up to 4GB/s. SD Express cards offering PCIe 4.0 x1 architecture use the same form factor as defined for SD 7.0 specification cards with a second row of pins to deliver transfer speeds up to 2 GB/s. SD Express cards supporting dual PCIe lanes (PCIe 3.0 x2 or PCIe 4.0 x2 technologies) have three rows of pins," said the SD Association.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Remember that electric car project that Dyson finally cancelled in October? It would've had a top speed of 125 miles per hour, going from 0 to 60 in 4.8 seconds, and "would have been able to go 600 miles on a single charge," reports Digital Trends, citing Sir Dyson's new interview with the Sunday Times: In comparison, Tesla's Model S is rated with a 391-mile range, while the Model X, which more closely resembles Dyson's vehicle, is rated with a 351-mile range, according to Tesla's website. The feat would have been made possible through Dyson's solid-state batteries, which would be able to endure "a freezing February night, on the naughty side of 70 mph on the motorway, with the heater on and the radio at full blast" without any decline in performance. Sir Dyson, who also revealed that the electric SUV's dashboard "floats in front of your face like a hologram," confirmed that he was able to drive a prototype in a screened-off compound. However, each sale of the vehicle would have needed to make at least £150,000, or about $181,000, to break even, a figure that was too high for a company that only had experience in home appliances. The article points out that Sir Dyson is open to bringing their solid-state battery technology to other carmakers, "so electric vehicles with a 600-mile range is still a possibility in the future."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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There's a potentially terrible backstory to Trump's firing of another inspector general.

Briefly interrupting ever-bleaker pandemic news, we momentarily turn our attention to Wall Street, which has been clamoring for a hasty economic reopening regardless of expert advice to the contrary. A new ProPublica investigation examines whistleblower charges that some of the largest banks in the world have been "engaged in a systemic fraud" to inflate the value of commercial mortgages bundled into securities then sold to other investors.

If that sounds like precisely the sort of industry-wide fraud that led to the 2008 financial near-collapse, except that bundled residential mortgages have now been replaced with bundled commercial ones—you're right. We may be witnessing the seeds of the Great Recession Part II, hastened along this time by the pandemic that is threatening the entire world's commercial sectors even without banks playing Investment Jenga behind everyone's back.

ProPublica examined loans bundled into commercial mortgage-backed securities, or CMBS, after industry expert John Flynn filed a whistleblower complaint alleging the past profits of businesses included in those securities are being revised significantly upward, by the banks, when the loans are bundled off to be sold somewhere else. This would make the loans appear to be less risky than they were under the old numbers, and in ways that investors purchasing the bundles would not be particularly likely to suss out.

ProPublica found evidence that the whistleblower's claims are founded. A business with a net income of $1,101,207 in 2016 was claimed in a new CMBS to have had income of $1,352,353 for the same year. A loan for a trailer park, when bundled, was declared to have expenses "about a third lower" in past years than the business itself had reported during those years, boosting its income by nearly 30%. The investigators examined six loans, and found similar patterns in each.

The defenses by the banks ProPublica contacted do not inspire confidence, and boil down to "yes, we changed the accounting without disclosing that because yolo."

The next question is how big a problem this might be. Whistleblower Flynn says he was able to identify thousands of similar bundled loans, totaling about $150 billion in inflated value. For comparison, investors' total purchases of CMBS tally to about $592 billion.

Surprising nobody, the whistleblower report charges Wells Fargo and Deutsche Bank as among the biggest offenders—lending further credence to those that suspect both companies are, at this point, irreparably corrupt. And surprising nobody, the "reforms" enacted in the last financial crisis were supposed to help prevent industry-wide toxins like this from reoccurring; they proved too weak from the beginning, and have been steadily weakened more in the years since.

So that is the bad news. The worse news, is, of course, that the ongoing pandemic is now stressing commercial properties to an extent not witnessed in a century; there are going to be waves of commercial bankruptcies due to the pandemic regardless of shelter-in-place orders, as consumers drastically change their behavior in attempts to Not Die. The packaging of less desirable commercial loans into inflated-value investment vehicles seems a good way to compound the problem in ways nearly identical to those seen in the 2008 financial catastrophe: Investors discover that the bundles they have been selling each other have considerably fewer magic beans than advertised, highly leveraged institutions collapse, and the government is again asked to step in to save Wall Street from being wiped off the map by its own bets.

Already, the Federal Reserve and Trump administration has been working to "stabilize" these CBMS. What we don't know is whether it will work. Or how pricey it might get. And note that Wall Street has been extremely antsy to get the commercial economy jump-started again, even after the Trump administration botched every week of preparation time the lockdown gave us; that eagerness is not likely to be forgotten.

So add that to the pile, when you're sitting at home wondering whether there's still something else 2020 can throw at us. There's a near-100% chance that this Republican president will end his term of office in the same way the last Republican president did: handing off, to his Democratic replacement, a world "investment" economy that has been systemically looted and now stands in ruin, needing massive government intervention so as to attempt to protect every other economic sector from that potential collapse.

Oh, and a pandemic as well. Also a pandemic.

On Saturday, The New York Times reported what we probably should have presumed all along: It was Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo who "urged" Donald Trump to fire the State Department's inspector general, continuing the widespread purge of government officials responsible for oversight of the impeached president and his team of corrupt incompetents.

The official non-reason Trump gave for firing inspector general Steve Linick was that Trump had "lost confidence" in him, the same catch-all Trump has used to dispense with all other watchdogs who investigated, or merely raised questions about, illegal acts by Trump's team. While the White House seems uninterested in giving any more plausible rationale for the firing than Trump's ever-vocal gut, it does appear Mike Pompeo had a specific reason why he might have wanted his department's watchdog out: Linick had been asked to investigate charges that Pompeo had been corruptly using a State Department employee to run personal errands for himself and his wife.

Mike Pompeo has remained steadfastly loyal to Trump. He was identified as a key player in Trump's withholding of congressionally earmarked military funds to Ukraine in an attempt to force that nation's government into crafting materials to help him smear his presumed election opponent, and defied congressional demands for testimony. He is quite definitely the sort of person who would use government resources to have personal favors done, and would not be the first, second or sixth of Trump's cabinet appointees to be credibly identified as doing so. He is certainly, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the sort to sabotage government investigations into such wrongdoing.

House Democrats are already vowing investigation into Linick's firing; there is no plausible rationale for Trump firing inspectors general across government, immediately after his impeachment, other than as a government-wide attempt to block all remaining oversight into his team's actions. Senate Republicans, as usual, are using Trump's action to either reaffirm their loyalty to Trump over the rule of law or to reaffirm their commitment to saying Trump probably oughtn't break laws while doing not a damn thing in response.

The eternally dumb Sen. Ron Johnson, proven a traitor to his own oath and nation during impeachment, as well as both before and after it, suggested that he was comfortable with the firing because Linick had not been sufficiently helpful in assisting Senate Republicans with an unidentified Senate investigation almost certainly pertaining to continued election-year efforts to smear Trump opponent Joe Biden.

The less dumb Sen. Chuck Grassley, also a traitor to his own oath and nation for the same multi-year patterns of behavior, issued the now bog-standard sternly worded statement noting that Congress requires explicit written reasons for such a firing, and that he will continue to be slightly huffy about that until the precise moment somebody asks him to take an actual action upon which he will fold like an origami swan.

Sen. Mitt Romney, alone in his impeachment opinion that perhaps if top administration officials are doing crimes it would behoove the Senate to at least momentary feign an interest in acting as check against such acts, gave a similar statement. Trump’s actions are a “threat to accountable democracy,” Romney warned, without suggesting he would engage in even the smallest of acts to combat that threat.

So the answer is no. No, it does not appear that the Republican Senate is willing to take any action as Trump continues his purge of those who have been investigating, or who have merely been charged with watching over, his team's continued pattern of grossly unethical and/or criminal acts.

It is likely that Grassley and other Republican concern-bearers will take no actions to support House efforts to call witnesses and probe the reasons for the firings, much less engage in such probes themselves. The party has made it absolutely clear that Trump and his allies are allowed to use government for their personal gain, and are allowed to sabotage any government effort or fire any government employee necessary in order to obtain that gain. They betrayed their country unforgivably in refusing to even conduct a trial or hear from direct witnesses, during impeachment; the play now will be to allow Trump to commit any number of further crimes, rather than conducting oversight between now and November. Trump's corrupt acts will not disappear then, whether or wins or loses, but for Johnson, Grassley and the others, putting off judgment day is paramount. Even if it is only temporary, it is now a party necessity.

As this country approaches its 10th week of coping with the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become clear that what is driving state efforts to reopen businesses and other public gathering places is not any realistic analysis of the public health consequences. Rather, these misguided rushes to reopen reflect a political imperative pushed by the Republican Party at the urging of their corporate and business donors, who are concerned most of all about the economic damage they face if public health is prioritized.

Most Republican (and a few Democratic) governors are knowingly risking the lives of their own citizens by permitting businesses to reopen on a broader scale, and Donald Trump relentlessly repeats the reopening mantra and continues to minimize the danger to Americans on a near-daily basis, all to protect corporations and the wealthy.

And corporations are ready: Advertisers are already beginning to shift their focus from acknowledging and accommodating the stifled conditions during the “lockdown” phase (“in these uncertain times”) and are now beginning to emphasize the promise of reopening to a nation of frustrated would-be consumers.

Larissa Faw, writing for Media Post Agency Daily—a trade publication of the advertising industry—refers to a noticeable shift in Pinterest searches in the last few weeks. She concludes that corporate advertising should now be geared toward emphasizing a “return to normalcy” since that’s what consumers now want more than anything.

After passing through ”triage/informational” and “empathy/relevance,” stages, consumers are now eager for optimism and escapism content...Over the last two weeks, these types of searches have been steadily rising, and are likely to continue for the next few weeks. The final stage is recovery/rebound, when things return back to “normal.”

Politicians, corporations, and advertisers all recognize that the desire of Americans to “get back to normal” is overwhelming. Most Americans have no historical memory of a crisis like this and are not hardwired to cope with an extensive period where our social mobility is curtailed. Nor are we mentally equipped to comprehend a public health emergency with essentially no end in sight. This is true no matter how grave the danger might be. Our brains keep telling us “there has to be an end,” even if there isn’t one.

This leads to magical thinking, which Republicans—who again are governed primarily by corporate interests—are only too eager to exploit. The prospect of reopening businesses promises the “return to normal” that Americans crave. But in the context of this pandemic, the cold, hard truth is that the threat of the contagion that led to “social distancing” in the first place has not abated at all. Absolutely nothing fundamental has changed. The threat remains dire and very, very deadly.

Dr. Yaneer Bar-Yam is an expert on pandemics and advises the WHO Global Outbreak and Alert Response Network on Ebola eradication. He is the founding president of End Coronavirus, a joint initiative between scientists from the New England Complex Systems Insitute (NECSI), Harvard, UCLA, and MIT, as well as business and community leaders, in the effort to contain and mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic. Bar-Yam published a CNN article Wednesday with the bold headline ”Don’t Let Governors Fool You About Reopening.” He emphasizes how dangerous these efforts to “reopen” actually are.

Bar-Yam’s language is unequivocal: These early reopenings are a mistake—a huge one.

Many governors are opening up their states as part of the White House effort to reopen the country. But as a pandemic expert who has been warning about diseases like Covid-19 for nearly 15 years, my message to Americans is simple: save yourselves, your families and your communities by staying at home and ignoring your governor's "ludicrous" policies.

Not only will opening businesses at this time fail to restore economic well-being—the premature efforts now being implemented across the country will likely “cause the disease to escalate and lead to prolonged economic hardship.” This conclusion is based not only on the immediate impact of resurgent infections to businesses, but the impact on travel and even on global trade likely to ensue as other countries react to that resurgence in the U.S. We already see this occurring as some countries who have more successfully addressed the pandemic prepare for their own “reopenings” by pointedly excluding travelers from the U.S. 

In March, Dr. Bar-Yam had previously recommended a five-week national lockdown in the U.S. as a sufficient window of opportunity to allow time for massive testing and to curb infection rates. Of course, the dysfunctional response of the federal government over the past two months has long rendered that prospect moot, which Bar-Yam acknowledges. He believes that despite the miserable federal response, the trend towards reopening now will only make a bad situation far, far worse.

Now, I and many others are issuing another warning: the decisions of some US governors to prematurely ease social distancing is a disastrous mistake and citizens need to ignore them. Our research -- and common sense -- show that lifting social restrictions will lead to an explosion of Covid-19 cases and cause countless more deaths. The correct way to relax restrictions is to start with parts of a state that are Covid-free for 14 days and allow only essential travel to those parts of the state with 14-day quarantines for inbound travelers.  

Despite his expertise, there are some questionable figures cited within Bar-Yam’s article. He has concluded that based on the most recent data coming from Johns Hopkins University, the global fatality rate of COVID-19—including out-of hospital “excess deaths”—could be as high as 6.8%, which is a considerably higher percentage than most authorities have posited. However, he correctly emphasizes that all reopening states have a critical mass of those currently infected,  which “could see new outbreaks in the coming days and weeks.” We are already seeing this occur to some extent in Germany and South Korea as outbreaks have spiked even as each country has begun to reopen, as well as in several individual U.S. states that have done so.

[W]ithout extreme preventive measures, we've seen how coronavirus infections doubled every two to three days at one point in different areas -- which equated to about a tenfold increase per week. That means that a state with 1,000 new cases could have well over 100,000 more in two weeks, if social distancing is loosened.

Bar-Yam also does not believe that measures to enforce “social distancing” in such reopened businesses as restaurants and malls will be particularly effective. His emphasis has been, and continues to be, to maintain the lockdowns (as difficult as they are) until testing capacity is sufficient, and he urges Americans to resist pressure to participate at all in these reopening attempts.

My plea to everyone who lives in states that are reopening is simple: Recognize that your leaders have made a terrible decision. Don't be fooled that it's safe to return to work, go to the barber shop or have a sit-down meal in a restaurant. Protect yourself, your family and your community. Choosing to protect those you love is a heroic act.

Finally, Bar-Yam offers some practical suggestions to stem the spread of this pandemic.

Instead of venturing out for leisure or work, safely volunteer, taking all precautions if you go outside. Work with your local community organizations to ensure your neighbors have access to homemade cloth masks. Help organize transportation to testing sites for anyone who shows symptoms. Work with your community leaders to identify locations, such as hotels or dormitories, where infected individuals can isolate so they don't infect relatives and housemates. Partner with your local health authorities to organize monitoring teams to safely go door to door, identifying neighbors with symptoms who need isolation space and support.

It doesn’t take a crystal ball to come to the same conclusions that Dr. Bar-Yam urges here. One of the most remarkable aspects of Tuesday’s Senate testimony by Drs. Fauci, Redfield, and others was the fact that none of these medical experts offered much in the way of hope. Beyond some vague promises of increased testing ability in the fall, and the promise of a vaccine some day far in the future, there was nothing in their testimony to provide any type of real reassurance.

In fact, the only voices recommending reopening seem to be those of persons with no health expertise whatsoever, those with a political agenda, or those whose political constraints compel them. Tuesday’s Senate testimony was also remarkable for the guarded, reluctant tone put forth, even by reputable physicians such as Fauci. It was frankly impossible to watch that testimony without feeling that something very critical was being omitted from the overall picture out of sheer political expediency.

In a perfect world, that would give us all the information we need. The public health consequences of this pandemic remain dire, a fact that has been aggravated immeasurably by a dysfunctional federal response. The interests of Donald Trump and other Republicans pushing for rapid reopening are not the same interests motivating Americans who simply long for the restrictive shutdowns to end. If there is one takeaway from Bar-Yam’s article, it should be that the political leaders agitating for reopening don’t know any more than we do what the consequences will be, but they’re willing to risk American lives to find out.

As the circumstances surrounding COVID-19 pandemic progress, the strategies of the forces leading the protests around the ensuing lockdowns appear to be evolving with them. Mass protests of the kind that have been organized in state capitals and large cities around the nation—mostly featuring motley crews of armed “Patriot” militiamen, “Boogaloo Bois” itching for a violent civil war, anti-vaccination fanatics, QAnon cultists, and a variety of conspiracy theorists, mingled with smatterings of ordinary businessmen put out of work—may be becoming too risky even for skeptics.

So now they’re diversifying their tactics, with an emphasis on smaller gatherings—primarily to “defend” small businesses that seek to defy lockdown orders and reopen. So the armed militiamen and other “ReOpen” protesters are now showing up on the streets outside taverns, tattoo parlors, hair salons, barber shops, and restaurants, claiming the governors’ orders ordering them to close are “unconstitutional.”

“Rather than a shift in strategies, the ‘ReOpen’ protest groups are expanding their arsenal of tactics to dangerously and prematurely bring an end to COVID-19 stay-at-home directives,” Devin Burghart of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, which has been monitoring the protests, told Daily Kos. “What started with ‘gridlock’ vehicle protests quickly shifted to armed rallies, followed by armed defiance by militia-backed business owners, even as more states are relaxing their restrictions.”

Mass rallies have proved problematic. After more than 70 people in Wisconsin were found to have been infected with the novel coronavirus in the wake of having attended “a mass event”—roughly two weeks after a similar anti-lockdown protest at the state Capitol in Madison—the protest scene in that state has declined sharply. Currently, no further large protests in Madison are in the works.

Thursday’s anti-lockdown protest in Lansing, Mich., turned out to be a complete bust, with only a couple hundred showing up to march in the rain. Other protests are still being planned around the nation, but there are fewer of them than two weeks ago, when they could be found occurring in nearly every state under lockdown.

However, smaller protests aimed at “defending” reopening businesses from law enforcement are starting to become more common:

In Ecton County, Texas, the sheriff and his deputies have been inundated with death threats following the arrests May 3 of six men who were brandishing their weapons outside an Odessa tavern that had opened illegally, ostensibly protecting its “free speech rights.” The groups that organized the original protest outside the tavern later protested outside the sheriff’s office and a home they believe is his residence. In Michigan, militiamen stood guard outside an Owosso barbershop that defied Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s lockdown orders by reopening, part of a protest event. The event’s primary organizer was a real estate agent from the Grand Rapids area named Ryan Kelly, who told The Washington Post that he invited members of a local militia to the protests in Lansing as “security.” One militiaman told WILX: "If we have enough people to block entry and people are willing to be arrested, then we'll do that.” In the East Texas town of Shepherd, armed militiamen led by a man named Philip Archibald—many of them wearing the Hawaiian shirts that are the uniform of so-called “Boogaloo Bois”—showed up to patrol outside Crash N Burn Tattoos, which had announced it too was reopening in defiance of state lockdown orders. Archibald led armed patrols outside a handful of other Texas businesses as they reopened illegally. “It’s not for looks,” one of his cohorts told The New York Times. “We’re willing to die.” In Wickenburg, Ariz., protesters—many of them on motorcycles—turned up outside of the Horseshoe Café and other businesses in town that decided to defy Gov. Dough Ducey’s lockdown orders. “You got to stand up for what you believe in,” the café’s owner said. “This is America, this isn’t a communist country.”

Violent rhetoric has abounded at all these events, with ominous undertones. “We go out there because we want peace, but we prepare for war,” one of the Odessa militiamen told The New York Times. “I hope this never happens, but at some point guns are going to have to cease to be a show of force and be a response to force,” he said.

IREHR has been monitoring the lockdown protests around the nation, in large part because so many of them have primarily served as platforms for right-wing extremists to indulge in fear- and hate-mongering. Despite the virus’ lethal effects, it has seen the protests growing in intensity and number.

“Militia-backed business rebellion has grabbed the spotlight for the moment and is likely to remain a popular tactic, at least until the next round of mass rallies scheduled for Memorial Day weekend,” Burghart told Daily Kos.

According to IREHR’s count, the leading states in numbers of lockdown protests have been California, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Washington, and Texas. The protests are primarily organized by Facebook groups. The site currently has 513 such groups on its platform, with a total of 1.9 million members.

“Judging by the way many of these groups have started changing their names, one thing is certain: many in this nascent network of far-right COVID-19 protest groups are already thinking about how to remain visible and politically relevant in a post-reopen world,” Burghart said.

An anonymous reader quotes Reuters: A California state panel on Friday rejected a request from Elon Musk's SpaceX for $655,500 in state job and training funds, citing the chief executive's recent threats to move Tesla, the electric carmaker that he also runs, out of the state... Five members of California's Employment Training Panel voted to reject the proposal and two voted for it, with one member absent, after discussing Musk's tweets on Tesla's reopening and media reports of layoffs at SpaceX's Hawthorne, California headquarters in recent years. "In my opinion, given the recent threats of the CEO to leave the state of California, and everything else we've discussed today, this proposal does not rise to the level for me to feel secure in supporting it," said Gretchen Newsom, a panel member and the political director of an IBEW electrical workers union local... Though a small amount of money, the funding was opposed by organized labor groups. Tesla and SpaceX are both nonunion shops... SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Trump during a press briefing at the White House on April 4. | Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images

He is “flooding the zone with shit.” And it’s working.

We’ve been introduced to a new conspiracy theory this week: “Obamagate.”

There’s no point in unpacking this theory here because it’s bullshit and everyone knows it. (If you need an explainer, my Vox colleague Jen Kirby has you covered.) But for the sake of a reference point, here’s the simplest version possible: “Deep state” holdovers from the Obama administration allegedly spearheaded the prosecution of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn as part of a broader scheme to undermine the Trump presidency.

I really don’t want to offer any more details because, again, this is a bullshit story. (Trump, despite promoting it endlessly, couldn’t even explain it when asked by a reporter.)

The important thing here is not that this theory is false. The important thing is that we’re talking about it at all, and we’re only talking about it because the president wants us to talk about it. Talking about this non-story means we’re talking less about, say, the nearly 85,000 Americans who have died so far from the coronavirus or the impending recession.

Watching the media pounce on this story like greyhounds chasing mechanical rabbits has been painful, but also deeply familiar. It’s a pattern we’ve seen unfold countless times. The president unleashes a tweetstorm, millions of people retweet it, right-wing media boosts the signal, and then mainstream media outlets cover it, often breathlessly.

Consider this Axios tweet stating that “Biden’s presence on the list could turn it into an election year issue, though the document itself does not show any evidence of wrongdoing.” But Biden’s name on a document is only an election issue if the press treats it like one. And if the “document itself does not show any evidence of wrongdoing,” why the hell are we talking about it? Again, we’re talking about it because Trump talked about it and now it’s a legitimized “story.”

This is the latest example of zone-flooding, a phenomenon I described at length back in February. The strategy was best articulated (in America, at least) by Steve Bannon, the former head of Breitbart News and chief strategist for Donald Trump, who in 2018 reportedly said: “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

This is a new form of propaganda tailored to the digital age and it works not by creating a consensus around any particular narrative but by muddying the waters so that consensus isn’t possible. And it’s all the more difficult because even the most scrupulous, well-intentioned coverage can easily fall into the trap of flooding the zone.

My concern in February was that zone-flooding had created a media environment in which the facts of Trump’s impeachment trial would be utterly meaningless. No matter how the trial played out, no matter what was uncovered, no single version of the truth would be accepted. And that, sadly, is how it played out.

With Obamagate, we’re entering a new cycle of flooding the zone, in which it’s increasingly obvious that Trump’s strategy will be to keep throwing into the media ecosystem stories designed to divert attention away from his record.

Obamagate proves the media hasn’t adapted

The goal of zone-flooding is simple: introduce bullshit stories into the information bloodstream, sit back while the media feverishly covers them (from all sides), and then exploit the chaos that results from the subsequent fog of disinformation.

It’s an approach that thrives on conventional journalistic norms around objectivity and fairness. The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent, a sharp observer of this process, explained it well in a recent piece. His point, like mine, is that reporting on deliberately misleading stories in ostensibly objective ways serves only to reward the bad-faith actors spreading the nonsense in the first place.

The AP, for example, ran an article with the headline: “Flynn case boosts Trump’s bid to undo Russia probe narrative.” The word “boosts” appears neutral, but it isn’t. The Flynn case is a nothingburger and doesn’t inherently boost anything. But saying it does, even in such an impartial fashion, is self-fulfilling. At the very least, it cements the impression that there’s something here when, in fact, there isn’t.

This is a subtle but instructive example. As with Axios, there’s an air of objectivity. But here, as elsewhere, the act of communicating the “information” has the effect of normalizing it. To cover something is always to dignify it, to deem it worthy of rebuttal. And in the end, all it does is propel a false conversation on false terms to the great delight of the purveyors of the misinformation.

Thus, the zone is flooded with shit.

The press, admittedly, has a difficult job to do, especially in this information landscape. But that’s the thing: The landscape has changed. The digital media ecosystem overwhelms people with information. Some of that information is true, some of it is false, and much of it is deliberately diversionary. Trying to cover every crazy story, every batshit claim, is a fool’s errand. The end result of so much noise is what I’ve called “manufactured nihilism,” a situation in which people are so skeptical about the possibility of truth that they give up the search.

And the zone-flooders, like Trump, maintain an enormous advantage because they’re not seeking to persuade anyone of anything. They don’t even need to have a strong case — Obamagate is so obviously flimsy. They just need to be shameless enough and relentless enough to spread an obviously flimsy non-story. And they just have to introduce enough doubt to ensure that people won’t mobilize around a coherent narrative.

In a world with weakened gatekeepers, where no one can control the flow of information, this is remarkably effective. Here’s how I distilled it in February:

The role of “gatekeeping” institutions has also changed significantly. Before the internet and social media, most people got their news from a handful of newspapers and TV networks. These institutions functioned like referees, calling out lies, fact-checking claims, and so on. And they had the ability to control the flow of information and set the terms of the conversation.

Today, gatekeepers still matter in terms of setting a baseline for political knowledge, but there’s much more competition for clicks and audiences, and that alters the incentives for what’s declared newsworthy in the first place. At the same time, traditional media outlets remain committed to a set of norms that are ill adapted to the modern environment.

So now we find ourselves engaged in an endless game of whack-a-mole, debunking and explaining one false claim after another. And false claims, if they’re repeated enough, become more plausible the more often they’re shared, something psychologists have called the “illusory truth” effect.

The media, then, is caught in a loop. Trump — or one of his supporters — says something we all know is absurd and false. The rest of the right-wing media and members of the GOP establishment add to the cacophony. And then we dignify the absurdity with coverage that treats it as worthy of rebuke. And in the process, we amplify the false narrative we’re debunking and flood the zone with more and more shit. That leaves people confused and exhausted, unable to discern fact from fiction and inclined to disengage altogether or, even worse, retreat further into partisan bubbles.

The press has always sought to conquer lies by exposing them. But that doesn’t work anymore. There is too much misinformation, too many claims to refute, too many competing narratives. And because the decision to cover something is almost always a decision to amplify it, the root problem is our very concept of “news” — what counts and what doesn’t.

We still haven’t fully reckoned with the 2016 election and the incessant coverage of Hillary Clinton’s emails. That was another bullshit story elevated by journalists who felt it was their duty to “objectively” report it. That impulse for fairness and proportionality might have tipped the election — in any case, it was hugely consequential. And the whole saga demonstrates how even the attempt to disprove a false or exaggerated claim can contribute to zone-flooding.

My critique, to be as clear as possible, is of journalism, not journalists. Most reporters are doing their best to cover the news as it unfolds in real time, and they’re doing it the way it’s always been done. The problem is that the old model of journalism — often called “the view from nowhere” approach — has been hacked, and we simply haven’t adapted to it.

Obamagate is another example of this systemic failure. Here we have — and I can’t say this enough — a complete non-scandal. There’s no “there” there. It’s pure misinformation. But we’re still talking about it. And I’m writing this piece about it. This is a massive problem. Even though I’m trying to point up a flaw in our system, I’m still somehow participating in the mess I’m hoping to clean up. This is the paradox we’re all up against.

The diagnosis is always easier than the cure, and I don’t have any solutions. The prevailing norms of journalism and the political economy of media are driving these dynamics. But we should see Obamagate for what it is: Trump’s reelection strategy for November and the latest test of our hackable media system.

And if the past few days are any indication, we’re screwed.

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President Donald Trump has removed State Department Inspector General Steve Linick and replaced him with an ally of Vice President Mike Pence — the latest in a series of moves against independent government watchdogs in recent months.

Trump informed Congress of his intent to oust Linick, a Justice Department veteran appointed to the role in 2013 by then President Barack Obama, in a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Friday night.

The president said he "no longer" had the "fullest confidence" in Linick and promised to send the Senate a nominee "who has my confidence and who meets the appropriate qualifications." The executive branch is required to notify Congress 30 days ahead of time if it intends to remove an inspector general.

Trump's move infuriated Democrats who say he's trying to circumvent oversight of his administration, undermining the ability of other branches to hold him accountable. The move follows Trump's anger at being impeached, but it also comes as the White House struggles to combat the coronavirus pandemic just months before the presidential election.

“The president’s late-night, weekend firing of the State Department inspector general has accelerated his dangerous pattern of retaliation against the patriotic public servants charged with conducting oversight on behalf of the American people," Pelosi said in an statement. "Inspector General Linick was punished for honorably performing his duty to protect the Constitution and our national security, as required by the law and by his oath."

Rep. Eliot L. Engel (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, called Linick's dismissal an "outrageous act of a president trying to protect one of his most loyal supporters, the secretary of State, from accountability."

Engel claimed: "I have learned that the Office of the Inspector General had opened an investigation into Secretary Pompeo. Mr. Linick’s firing amid such a probe strongly suggests that this is an unlawful act of retaliation."

A Democratic congressional aide said Linick had launched an investigation into Pompeo’s alleged misuse of a political appointee to perform personal tasks for him and Mrs. Pompeo. The State Department did not respond to an inquiry about the allegation.

Linick played a minor role in the House of Representatives' impeachment proceedings against Trump, ferrying a trove of documents to lawmakers that had been provided to the State Department by Rudy Giuliani, the president's personal lawyer.

A State Department spokesperson said that Amb. Stephen Akard, a former career Foreign Service officer, "will now lead the Office of the Inspector General at the State Department" in an acting capacity.

Akard had in 2017 been nominated to serve as the director general of the Foreign Service, a high-ranking human resources role.

That nomination upset veteran U.S. diplomats, who said Akard lacked the long tenure of service usually required for such a prestigious position. The American Academy of Diplomacy even wrote an unusual letter opposing his nomination.

Akard's nomination as director general was eventually withdrawn, but he was later tapped for a different role, leading the Office of Foreign Missions, for which he was confirmed in September 2019.

Before joining the Trump administration, Akard was chief of staff for the Indiana Economic Development Corporation under then-governor Pence.

Linick is well-respected at the State Department, and his office stays busy, regularly churning out a range of inspections, audits and other types of reports.

His departure is likely to further deepen morale problems that have festered at State since the start of the Trump administration, when many career diplomats found themselves shunted aside and cast as a “deep state” bent on undermining Trump.

Two of Linick’s most-read reports over the past year involved alleged retaliation by Trump political appointees against career employees.

Sen. Bob Menendez (D-New Jersey), the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called Linick's ouster "shameful."

"Another late Friday night attack on independence, accountability, and career officials," Menendez tweeted. "At this point, the president's paralyzing fear of any oversight is undeniable."

Trump has removed a number of federal watchdogs in the last few months, including Health and Human Services Inspector General Christi Grimm, who issued a report critical of the administration's response to the coronavirus pandemic; and the intelligence community’s inspector general, Michael Atkinson, whose handling of a whistleblower report ultimately led to Trump’s impeachment.

Separately, Trump also notified Congress on Friday of his intent to nominate Eric Soskin, a Justice Department trial counsel who has been involved in some hot-button immigration and civil rights cases, to be inspector general of the Department of Transportation. Soskin has worked in the Justice Department's federal programs division as senior trial counsel for 14 years, according to a White House announcement.

Calvin Scovel retired as DOT inspector general earlier this year, after 13 years in the job.

Andrew Desiderio, Kyle Cheney and Brianna Gurciullo contributed reporting.

Only one state currently meets even the White House’s lax standards for reopening businesses, but a whole lot more states are relaxing their shutdowns in the coming days. A dozen states are set to loosen restrictions between May 15 and 18, which means we can look for new COVID-19 outbreaks one to two weeks later.

Some states are going county by county, with the hardest-hit counties staying shut down while others gradually reopen. And many of the states that are beginning to reopen are maintaining many restrictions, like caps on how many people can be in a newly reopened business. Nonetheless, all of these moves toward a reopening that the state-by-state numbers do not merit brings to mind Dr. Anthony Fauci’s warning to the Senate that reopening too early brings “a real risk that you will trigger an outbreak that you may not be able to control,” and with it, “some suffering and death that could be avoided, but could even set you back on the road to trying to get economic recovery.”

What difference does it make? Well, according to a new study, social distancing can cut the spread of coronavirus cases by up to 9% per day. Without shelter-in-place orders, there could have been 10 times greater spread by April 27, and if you add in other measures like large event bans and school and business closures, the spread could have been 35 times greater. But hey, let’s reopen before the guidelines say it’s safe!

It’s happening in state after state. In Louisiana, some businesses and organizations, including churches, gyms, barbershops and salons, casinos, and theaters can open Friday with 25% occupancy limits. New Mexico, similarly, will allow retail stores, offices, and call centers to open at 25% occupancy, while big box and large retail stores will be capped at 20%. Minnesota will allow 50% occupancy at some businesses starting Monday, even as the state’s hospitalizations are still rising in the state as a whole and some counties are seeing cases double every seven to 14 days.

Some Washington, D.C.-adjacent counties in Virginia and Maryland will remain shut down while other parts of those states begin reopening. In D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser has extended a stay-at-home order through June 8, but that kind of responsible behavior is not the norm in the nation.

We are so screwed.

The hashtag #NOalNuevoCodigoCivil—which means “No to the new civil code”—is currently trending on Puerto Rican social media. Both houses of the Puerto Rican legislature, which are controlled by the conservative ruling political party, have voted to make changes to the country’s civil code after having held no public hearings. The fact that this is taking place during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic has prevented mass demonstrations on the island like the protests we saw last summer, which toppled the reign of former Gov. Ricardo Rosselló.

The changes will almost certainly have a negative impact on a woman’s right to choose, and on the Puerto Rican LBGTQ community. How much of an impact is hard to tell since the amendments have been enacted in secret.  

The only person who can stop this now is Puerto Rico’s unelected governor, Wanda Vázquez Garced. She can refuse to sign it and send it back for revisions, or sign it and risk major opposition from civil rights groups and activists—all during a time when she is running for governor. 

Vázquez Garced, who succeeded to the office in August of 2019 despite massive #WandaRenuncia (Wanda resign) protests, is now going to have to make a calculated decision. If she signs the changes into law, it could negatively impact her chances to remain governor. On the other hand, if she sends it back for more revisions, the vocal evangelical, homophobic, and anti-choice Christian bloc who are supporting the changes will castigate her and diminish her electoral chances.  

Jhoni Jackson, writing for REMEZCLA, breaks down some of the major issues:

For all the changes made since its beginnings several years ago—and it’s been consistently contested throughout this trajectory—the bill, which would replace the original 1930 civil code altogether, has been called a “código Frankenstein” by some. The final version includes amendments made as recently as Monday, when it was approved by the Senate 16-7, with some senators absent. It was approved by the House of Representatives today and is expected to be promptly delivered to Gov. Vázquez, who will either veto or sign the bill into law. The bill in its entirety, as it stands right now, has not been made available to the public. In fact, no public hearings for the civil code have been held since mid-April. It’s been revised “behind the backs of the people” and with a “conservative agenda,” notes Puerto Rico LGBT advocacy nonprofit el Comité Amplio para la Búsqueda de la Equidad.

Some of the most alarming adjustments include changes to the procedure for trans people who want to correct their gender marker on their birth certificate: Rather than replacing the incorrect gender altogether, an annotation will be made, which leaves trans people exposed to discrimination in employment or other situations where their birth certificates may be required. Additionally, the new code implies a judge will have to approve the change in addition to the currently required approval of a doctor.

Marriage has been reworded to specifically refer to “natural persons,” which some say could be interpreted to exclude members of the LGBTQIA+ community. Regulations around surrogacy, which also affects the LGBTQIA community, have also been altered: Financial compensation for the process would be prohibited if the code is signed into law. And, unsurprisingly, the new civil code makes another go at restricting abortion rights—according to pro-choice advocates, at least. The former civil code indicated a child earned legal rights once outside of the womb. The new language is ambiguous, many say, and opens the door to banning abortions altogether by affording legal rights to a fetus.

The lack of transparency has angered opponents of the changes.  

Activists and artists like Puerto Rican star Ricky Martin have been speaking out and pushing back.

Since much of the discussion and reporting about this has been in Spanish, mainland English speakers and mainstream media journalists have not given this disaster in the making much attention. CBS News correspondent David Begnaud is a notable exception. 

Begnaud conducted an interview with InterAmerican University law professor Carlos Ramos Gonzalez, who breaks down the code itself, the criticism and support of it, and its constitutionality before offering his own opinion.

Reactions on Twitter against the amendments have been harsh.

Supporters of the revisions, like Rep. María Milagros Charbonier—nicknamed “Tata”—are also being called out. 

Charbonier, who was elected to the Puerto Rican House of Representatives in 2012, is a staunch religious conservative.

 She is known for her extremely conservative views on marriage, sexuality and religion. A lawyer by profession, she presides over three committees which include the Judiciary Committee and the committees that oversee revisions to the civil and penal codes. She has opposed legislation that decriminalized the use of cannabis for medicinal purposes and that granted protections and rights to people in same-sex relationships. Among the many outlandish statements she has made, she has gone on record saying that pedophilia and bestiality are sexual orientations.

Want to join the fight? Here is an online petition you can sign to oppose the changes. Raise awareness by sharing on your own social media and discuss it in conversation. Remember: Puerto Ricans are our fellow Americans, and they deserve better than a civil code handcrafted by rigid conservatives.

Since he took office, Donald Trump’s hotels and clubs have brought in at least $970,000 in U.S. taxpayer money for room rentals. According to hard-won federal records obtained by The Washington Post, this number does not include “an additional $340,000 in such payments” that they’ve catalogued since March of this year. Considering what we know about this administration, the $970,000 is likely just the tippy top of a truly corrupt iceberg.

The records that the Post looked through show nightly rental rates ranging between $141.66 per night to $650 per night, for at least “950 nights at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J., and 530 nights at the president’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida.” Obviously, this data contradicts claims made by Eric Trump that his father’s business barely charges the government anything.

In October, Eric Trump was reported as saying, “If my father travels, they stay at our properties for free. So everywhere that he goes, if he stays at one of his places, the government actually spends, meaning it saves a fortune because if they were to go to a hotel across the street, they’d be charging them $500 a night, whereas, you know we charge them, like $50.” Considering that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin kept a single room at the D.C. Trump International Hotel that cost tax payers $33,000 alone because “Trump hotel charged the maximum rate that federal agencies were generally allowed to pay in 2017,” Eric Trump’s word is about as worthless as his father’s.

The Post’s new findings don’t necessarily take into account the well over 100 vacations to Trump-owned golf resorts that some have estimated cost the country at least $134,000,000 thus far. But to put the just under $1 million Trump’s businesses has charged the U.S. taxpayer into context, the Post details how former vice president Joe Biden charged $171,600 over six years for his Secret Service detail to rent a cottage. 

Trump’s profiteering is no secret, but the clear conflicts of interest have seemingly made no dent in his supporters’ trust. A part of that is a general disenfranchisement with our corrupt political system. Another part of that is that Trump’s supporters are either too angry and bigoted or too scared and bigoted to make rational decisions anymore. A third part is that they are dumb as shit.

The American Family Association is calling on PBS to cancel Prideland, the station’s recently announced digital series and one-hour special celebrating LGBT Pride Month.

Prideland, focused on LGBT life in the South, will be hosted by Dyllón Burnside of Pose, who hails from Pensacola, Florida.

“PBS’s decision to partner with Burnside to push the homosexual agenda is an unjust attack on Christianity and a mockery of the Bible and God’s design for human sexuality,” the AFA wrote on its website this week. “Sadly, PBS is proudly promoting a lifestyle that is unhealthy to both the individual who participates in the unnatural sexual behavior and to society as a whole. … In 2020, PBS received $445 million in taxpayer funding. This means you and I are directly paying for PBS to insult our faith and scoff at our God.”

As of Friday, 23,048 people had signed the AFA’s petition, according to the group’s website.

According to a news release on Prideland, the six-part digital series will premiere May 26 on the YouTube channel PBS Voices, followed by weekly episodes through June. A one-hour special will air on PBS on June 12.

Read more and view the full schedule here.

Episode 1: “Out, Proud & Southern: Dyllón Burnside’s Story”
Premieres:Tuesday, May 26 on PBS Voices
Description: Dyllón Burnside begins his journey by setting the stage of the series with his personal story of growing up in Pensacola, Florida. He explores what the South means to him, and why he left after getting fired from his church for coming out. He returns to discover that the South is home to more queer people than any other region in the U.S. with more than one-third of all LGBTQ+ adult Americans live below the Mason Dixon line. He also learns that the region has the most negative LGBTQ+ policies in the country and meets different people fighting for equal rights, starting with Carmarion D. Anderson, HRC Alabama State Director, the first transgender woman of color to hold such a leadership position. 

Episode 2: “An Openly Gay Pastor’s Journey to Acceptance in the Bible Belt”
Premieres: Tuesday, June 2 on PBS Voices
Description: The LGBTQ+ experience is as diverse and varied as the individuals who comprise it. While some still find rejection close to home, others are finding more and more acceptance in communities of origin or those they create. In this episode, Dyllón Burnside introduces viewers to Rob Lowry, an openly gay minister at a small, but mainstream church in Jackson, Mississippi. He was offered the job before the church knew he was gay, but they accepted him with open arms when he told them he would only take the position if he could lead while openly gay. Lowry is creating just that kind of community—open to all who take the command to “love thy neighbor as thy would thyself” to heart and in practice.

Episode 3: “Polyamory, Demisexuality, and Being Transgender in the South”
Premieres: Tuesday, June 9 on PBS Voices
Description: Dyllón Burnside sits down with a group of diverse LGBTQ+ members to learn how to embrace sex positivity and maneuver the modern dating scene. They talk candidly about asexuality, polyamorous relationships and how to manage diverging expectations in the queer community.

Episode 4: “The Heartwarming Story of One of Alabama’s First Same-Sex Adoptions”
Premieres: Tuesday, June 16 on PBS Voices
Description: Dyllón Burnside is invited into the home of a lesbian couple who wouldn’t let anyone or any law get in the way of them getting married and adopting the child of their dreams. He listens to how they’ve overcome the unique challenges of forming a family in the South, and learns what obstacles remain for other LGBTQ+ people in their home state of Alabama.

Episode 5: “Championing LGBTQ+ Healthcare in Mississippi”
Premieres: Tuesday, June 23 on PBS Voices
Description: Dyllón Burnside meets Scott Rodgers, M.D. and Lillian J. Houston, M.D., two doctors who founded the Center for LGBTQ Health at the University of Mississippi Medical Center,  one of the few LGBTQ+ clinics in Mississippi to provide quality healthcare without fear of discrimination. In many parts of the South it’s legal for doctors to deny services to LGBTQ+ people based on their religious beliefs. To make matters worse, the South has the highest concentration of people living with HIV/AIDS in the U.S. These doctors and their team are determined to address these issues head-on.

Episode 6: “The Bakery Battleground: The Mississippi Baker Standing Up For Gay Rights”
Premieres: Tuesday, June 30 on PBS Voices
Description: Dyllón Burnside examines the crucial role of allies in advancing LGBTQ+ rights and how religious beliefs have sometimes been used as a pretext for discrimination. In this episode, he visits Mitchell Moore, a baker in the heart of the Bible Belt who risks his business, Campbell’s Bakery, to take a stand for LGBTQ+ rights.

One-Hour Special: PRIDELAND
Premieres:  Friday, June 12, 9:00-10:00 p.m. ET on PBS
Description:  Follow Dyllón Burnside on a journey across the American South to meet diverse members of the LGBTQ+ community. From a lesbian rodeo champ in Texas to an African American mayor ally in Alabama, he discovers how LGBTQ+ Americans are finding ways to live authentically and with pride in the modern South.

The post Hate Group Demands PBS Cancel LGBT Pride Month Series: ‘An Unjust Attack on Christianity’ appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

The District of Columbia's stay-at-home order ends June 8. House Judiciary Chair Jerry Nadler wants Attorney General William Barr in a witness chair before his committee the following day.

"We expect to see Barr in front of our committee on June 9th — the very next day," Nadler, of New York, told MSNBC Wednesday.

Barr, who has increasingly escalated his war on impartial justice, has kicked testifying to Congress down the road several times. He was finally scheduled to appear before the House Judiciary panel on March 31, but novel coronavirus social distancing measures delayed Barr's appearance once again. The Justice Department still hasn't committed to anything despite the invitation from the committee.

But Nadler raised the prospect of several pressure points if Barr refuses to comply, including yanking Justice Department funding or issuing a subpoena. 

"We're prepared to do whatever we have to do — we will consider all those methods," Nadler said, adding: "We cannot have a situation where the attorney general just thumbs his nose and the administration holds Congress in contempt."

Nadler's comments come on the heels of thousands of former Justice Department officials calling for Barr's resignation following his attempt to drop the case against former Trump national security adviser Mike Flynn. But the Flynn debacle is just the latest in a long line of actions Barr has taken that have clearly been sullied by political bias in favor Trump. Barr undermined the roll out of the Mueller report findings almost from the moment he was confirmed by the GOP-led Senate. Along with intervening in Flynn's case, Barr also tried to secure a lighter sentence for longtime Trump ally Roger Stone. Barr has also created a regime in which Trump is entirely insulated from any kind of congressional oversight. In fact, the Justice Department to this day is trying to keep Mueller's grand jury materials from being turned over to Congress.   

In short, Barr has a lot to answer for, the American people deserve to hear his explanations, and House Democrats shouldn’t hesitate for a second to take whatever steps are necessary to get Barr in that chair. 

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who previously suggested that the elderly people should be willing to die to save the economy, and said “there are more important things than living,” is now calling for fans at sporting events this year despite the coronavirus pandemic.

“Long before I entered politics, I was a TV and radio sportscaster,” Patrick wrote Friday in the Dallas Morning News. “I understand that the fans are as much a part of the game as the players, and there is no reason they can’t attend the games when they begin again. I don’t believe Anthony Fauci should anoint himself as the commissioner of sports and tell the owners, players and fans what to do.”

Patrick went on to suggest various safety measures that could be adopted — including taking fans’ temperatures, requiring them to wear masks, limiting stadium occupancy to 30 percent, closing concessions early, and speeding up zambonis in hockey and instant replays in football.

“If fans are going to attend games this year, they are going to have to give up a little to do so,” Patrick wrote. “These are my ideas, and I welcome input from fans and teams to make my plan even better. Here’s the bottom line — let’s end all this talk about playing in empty stadiums. Let the games begin with fans in the seats.”

On Thursday, two weeks after the state began reopening, Texas reported its highest daily totals thus far for new COVID-19 deaths and cases.

In an interview with the New York Times last month, Fauci suggested that some sports leagues may have to skip this season.

“I would love to be able to have all sports back,” said Fauci, a former star basketball player. “As a health official and a physician and a scientist, I have to say, right now, when you look at the country, we’re not ready for that yet.”

The post Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick: ‘Let The Games Begin With Fans In The Seats’ appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

On Wednesday, Ulster County Health Commissioner Dr. Carol Smith announced that a barber in Kingston, New York, had tested positive for COVID-19. Dr. Smith made this announcement because the barber has been defying the stay-at-home order, illegally providing haircuts to customers over the past few weeks. This means that anyone who came into contact with this barber or got a haircut from this barber is now being urged to contact a physician and seek testing.

New York State’s nonessential businesses have been put on pause since March 22, when Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed an executive order codifying shelter-in-place requirements. New York has confirmed the most cases of COVID-19, and more than a quarter of the deaths due to COVID-19 seen in the United States since March have taken place there.

Dr. Smith explained that the county had just learned that this barbershop has seemingly been up and running “for weeks,” in a county that currently has 1,533 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 62 confirmed fatalities due to the virus. “As much as we would all like to go out and get a professional haircut, this kind of direct contact has the potential to dramatically spread this virus throughout our community and beyond. I urge anyone who has received a haircut at a Kingston barber in the last several weeks to immediately contact their physician or call our hotline to arrange for a diagnostic test.” Dr. Smith did not release any information concerning whether or not the barbershop in question was practicing any forms of protective measures against the virus during their business hours.

It’s a difficult position for many small businesses, like barbershops. The amount of aid coming to small businesses with fewer than 50 employees, let alone small businesses with fewer than five or 10 employees, has been next to nothing. For many businesses, there’s a desperation that in some cases will lead people to make bad decisions. Some might convince themselves they can figure out a way to safely provide the services they normally provide. In other cases, people will convince themselves that there is nothing at all to worry about. 

If you've been getting owned in Call of Duty: Warzone a lot before you even hit the ground and thought it would be more fun to play if you could use cheats to see other players through walls, you're not alone. From a report: Last month, the developers of the hugely popular game banned more than 70,000 cheaters and promised to combat the game's cheating problem. "We are watching. We have zero tolerance for cheaters," tweeted the official account of Infinity Ward, the game's developer. This week, Infinity Ward rolled out a new, basic security feature which appears to have had the added bonus of locking out many cheaters: two-factor authentication. Infinity Ward announced that new Warzone players on PC will have to use SMS to login to the free version of the game, "as another step to provide an additional layer of security for players." Infinity Ward and Activision did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but cheaters are currently complaining about the effect this simple move has had on them.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Donald Trump on Friday expressed confidence in the rapid coronavirus test used to screen White House staff and visitors, despite the results of a new study suggesting it may miss up to half of infections detected by other tests on the market.

“It’s a great test,” Trump told reporters during a news conference in the Rose Garden focused on vaccine development, referring to the 15-minute test produced by Abbott Laboratories.

“It’s a very quick test, and it can always be very rapidly double-checked if you’re testing positive or negative,” he said. “It can always be double-checked, but it’s a very good test. Very portable. Very quick.”

The president’s remarks came after researchers at New York University found earlier this week that Abbott’s test, run on a machine called ID NOW, did not identify many infections caught by Cepheid’s Xpert Xpress PCR test, which can return results in less than 45 minutes.

The preliminary research, which has not been peer-reviewed, also found that Abbott’s test missed one-third of infections when sample swabs were stored in chemicals meant to preserve samples, and more than 48 percent when sample swabs were kept dry.

Earlier Friday, Dr. Stephen Hahn, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, defended the data used to grant the test’s emergency use authorization as “very robust,” but said his agency regularly explores additional data such as the NYU research to “make revisions to our original decision.”

“In this case, what we’re saying is there are some data to suggest that there may be inaccuracies, false negatives, with the Abbott test. However, there are many users who have contacted us and have not had this problem,” Hahn told “CBS This Morning.”

“So FDA is digging into it, and we’re working with Abbott to actually look at what data are available to get the most up-to-date and accurate information about the test’s performance,” he added.

Hahn also said the FDA continues to recommend the use of Abbott’s test, which is available on the commercial market, but “we want to make sure that providers have the information about the operating characteristics of tests — about what the test does.”

On Thursday, the agency posted a public alert stating that Abbott’s test might return false-negative results which “may need to be confirmed” by other testing methods.

That warning followed Abbott’s move last month to amend its instructions for the test to caution against transporting samples in chemicals, after a study from the Cleveland Clinic found that doing so caused a false-negative rate of up to 15 percent.

Last week, Abbott’s test reported that one of Trump’s personal valets and Katie Miller, Vice President Mike Pence’s press secretary and the wife of White House adviser Stephen Miller, had both tested positive for Covid-19 — prompting Trump and Pence to limit their in-person contact in recent days and Hahn to enter self-quarantine after exposure to Miller.

“She was tested very recently and tested negative. And then today, I guess for some reason she tested positive,” Trump said of Miller at the time, complaining she had “tested positive out of the blue” and arguing that “this is why the whole concept of tests aren’t necessarily great.”

The White House Management Office has since issued a memo requiring West Wing staffers to wear masks or other face coverings at all times in the building, except at their own desks and the majority of staff now undergo daily testing.

Pressed Friday on whether the White House would continue using Abbott’s test in light of the latest research, Hahn said, “We’re providing guidance to the White House regarding this test. We have been on an ongoing basis, and we will continue to do that. That will be a White House decision.”

Public health officials studying the Covid-19 outbreak among members of a Washington choir found numerous ways the virus could have spread, according to a report published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. From a report: Authorities interviewed all 122 members of the Skagit Valley Chorale, which met every Tuesday for 2.5 hours before the outbreak. They focused on two rehearsals held March 3 and March 10 in Mount Vernon, Washington. The report said 53 people were sickened and two died -- and all but one attended both rehearsals. The report said Thirty-three cases were confirmed, the report said, and 20 people had probable infections. There were 61 people at the March 10 rehearsal, including one member who reported having had cold-like symptoms. That person tested positive for Covid-19 and was the first case identified by health authorities, according to the report. That person attended both practices but didn't start showing symptoms until March 7.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amid a raging pandemic, President Donald Trump took time out Friday afternoon to help unveil the new Space Force flag during an Oval Office ceremony — with no one wearing a mask.

As many have previously noted, the Space Force logo looks eerily similar to that of Star Trek’s Starfleet Command.

#BREAKING: President @realDonaldTrump leads first unfurling the flag of the United States Space Force (@SpaceForceDoD).

The flag will stand in the Oval Office alongside other service branch flags. pic.twitter.com/rpReDs5fv5

— The Hill (@thehill) May 15, 2020

During Friday’s event, Trump bragged about a “super-duper missile” being developed by the Space Force that is “17 times faster than what we have now.”

“A Pentagon spokesman was asked about the ‘super-duper missile’ during a subsequent press call and referred reporters back to the White House,” the Hill reports.

“Space is going to be the future, both in terms of defense and offense and so many other things,” Trump said. “And already, from what I’m hearing and based on reports, we’re now the leader in space.”

More below.

"I call it the super duper missile"

Trump explaining how he describes a missile being developed by the Space Force that is travels at a speed 17x faster than current missiles. pic.twitter.com/bFmJj2slIJ

— Brian A. Cahn, MD (@brian_cahn) May 15, 2020

So I guess Melania designed the flag? #SpaceTrek pic.twitter.com/7Wli1AgOQm

— Helen Kennedy (@HelenKennedy) May 15, 2020

it's a ripoff of the Starfleet Command logo from Star Trek https://t.co/C6zVU7tX0w

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 15, 2020

The space force flag was just unveiled.

We have a literal child running this country. pic.twitter.com/umbPHIqoQo

— Joshua Potash (@JoshuaPotash) May 15, 2020

This ludicrous administration prioritized a “wall” and a “space force” over a pandemic response team and now almost 100K Americans are dead. https://t.co/uTkBuYHz9T

— Andrew Wortman (@AmoneyResists) May 15, 2020

The post Trump Unveils Space Force Flag, Brags About ‘Super-Duper Missile’ in Mask-Free Ceremony: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

An anonymous reader shares a report: China is ready to take a series of countermeasures against a US plan to block shipments of semiconductors to Chinese telecom firm Huawei, including putting US companies on an "unreliable entity list," launching investigations and imposing restrictions on US companies such as Apple and suspending the purchase of Boeing airplanes, a source close to the Chinese government told the Global Times. The Trump administration on Friday moved to block shipments of semiconductors to Huawei from global chipmakers. The US Commerce Department said it was amending an export rule and the Entity List to "strategically target Huawei's acquisition of semiconductors that are the direct product of certain US software and technology," according to a statement on its website. "China will take forceful countermeasures to protect its own legitimate rights," if the US moves forward with the plan to bar essential suppliers of chips, including Taiwan-based TSMC, from selling chips to the Chinese tech giant, the source told the Global Times in an exclusive interview.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.