AIN'T NO LAW AGAINST BLAMIN' A CHINAMAN:

Kaiser Wilhelm II did not originate the term "Yellow Peril," but after his "Hun speech" of 1900, he became forever synonymous with it. The German monarch was addressing soldiers who were shipping off to China to help put down the Boxer Rebellion, and what he said was so crass--even for the notoriously half-witted, insecure, and capricious heir--that the Prussian foreign office's official transcript of the speech omitted its most "diplomatically embarrassing" paragraph. "Just as a thousand years ago the Huns under their King Attila made a name for themselves, one that even today makes them seem mighty in history and legend," the kaiser had said, "may the name German be affirmed by you in such a way in China that no Chinese will ever again dare to look cross-eyed at a German."

One hundred and twenty years later, partisans of Donald Trump--like the kaiser, a "bad-tempered, distractable doofus" who inherited an increasingly precipitous empire--are turning to Yellow Peril rhetoric to rally support for their regime as it faces an existential crisis. The coronavirus pandemic has rapidly emerged as the excuse everyone has been looking for to start a conflict with China--a trend that's disturbingly spreading beyond Republican politics.

The strategy, such as it is, began early, with Trump congratulating himself for a late-January ban on travel to the United States from China--long after the virus had already arrived stateside, probably from Europe--and his subsequent insistence on calling the contagion "the Chinese virus" or "Wuhan virus," a telling emphasis on the crisis's origins over any White House actions against its spread. But in recent weeks, Republican Party hawks have taken the racist football and run with it.

Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, another folksy war addict cut from nineteenth-century Prussian cloth, has pivoted from his perennial demands for a U.S.-Iran confrontation to issue new demands for a U.S.-China confrontation, citing what he calls Beijing's "malign, deliberate actions to send the virus around the world." He was referring to the theory, increasingly popular on the right, that a government-run laboratory in Wuhan developed the deadly virus as a biological warfare agent. There is no evidence that the virus was released from a lab there, intentionally or otherwise. But Cotton's rampage continued this week, when he proposed a law to bar Chinese students from obtaining visas to study science in America. "If Chinese students want to come here and study Shakespeare and the Federalist Papers, that's what they need to learn from America," Cotton said Sunday, apparently forgetting that Stratford-upon-Avon is not in the United States. "They don't need to learn quantum computing and artificial intelligence from America."

Cotton has plenty of wingnut company. Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, a "post-liberal" whose main achievement thus far has been to reintroduce anti-Semitic coding to mainstream conservative political messaging, is spearheading the party's move to allow Americans impacted by the coronavirus to sue the Chinese Communists "to learn the full extent of the damage the CCP has inflicted on the world." Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who reaches for any fruit that hangs low enough, rolled out a proposal Tuesday to bar the Pentagon from cooperating on productions with Hollywood studios that create edited versions of their films to placate Chinese censors. "The SCRIPT Act will serve as a wake-up call by forcing Hollywood studios to choose between the assistance they need from the American government and the dollars they want from China," Cruz said in a press release that would fill up any right-wing-buzzword bingo card.

WHICH RULES THAT OUT:

OUR BEST SELVES:

In the days after the World Trade Center fell, it wasn't just the police, hospitals, and firefighters who came forward to help, it was normal citizens who often put themselves at risk to help other people out. An equities trader named Sandler O'Neill helped rescue a dozen people and then went back to save more. A tour guide at the Pentagon helped victims outside, and then went back in the burning building to help more. We find these kinds of behaviors in every disaster.

During this pandemic, we see the same thing. Some acts are small and thoughtful, such as putting encouraging signs in windows. Others have made games out of window signs, putting up rainbows for children on walks to count. Some show support for health care and other frontline workers, applauding or banging on pots on their balconies and at windows in a nightly ritual. Others are helping in more substantial ways. In the United Kingdom, over half a million people signed up to be a National Health Volunteer, supporting the most vulnerable people, who have to stay home.

John Drury, a professor of social psychology at the University of Sussex, England, who studies people's behavior in disasters, has seen these acts of kindness in his own neighborhood over the past month. He and his neighbors set up a WhatsApp group to help one another with shopping. "I think that translates across the country and probably across the world," Drury says. "People are seeing themselves as an us, a new kind of we, based on the situation that we all find ourselves in. You've got this idea of common fate, which motivates our care and concern for others."

AN EXCELLENT FIRST STEP:

Returning to a Paris dominated by cars after lockdown ends is "out of the question," according to the city's mayor, Anne Hidalgo. Speaking Tuesday at a special session of the Paris City Council on transitioning after France's national lockdown eases on May 11, Hidalgo was emphatic about maintaining the anti-pollution and anti-congestion measures introduced during her tenure, even as cities rethink transportation policies to avoid Covid-19 transmission.

"I say in all firmness that it is out of the question that we allow ourselves to be invaded by cars, and by pollution," she said. "It will make the health crisis worse. Pollution is already in itself a health crisis and a danger -- and pollution joined up with coronavirus is a particularly dangerous cocktail. So it's out of the question to think that arriving in the heart of the city by car is any sort of solution, when it could actually aggravate the situation."

BUENOS DIAS ARE HERE AGAIN:

[President Biden] will have to reinstate some kind of legal status for Dreamers--even if the Supreme Court upholds the Trump administration's efforts to scrap DACA (Deferred Action Against Childhood Arrivals)--if not their parents.

The "Muslim" travel ban will end even if some coronavirus-related travel restrictions remain.

Trump cut America's refugee quota from 110,000 under Obama to 18,000, and he isn't even meeting that number because of the impossible vetting standards he has implemented. Those will end and the program will be restored. Ditto for asylum. Trump's Remain in Mexico policy that pays Mexico to warehouse Central American migrants while their asylum claims are heard in America is a scandal and will end.

Trump's public charge rule will be rolled back. The rule would deny green cards to legal immigrants or in other ways prevent them from upgrading their immigration status if they are below an income threshold and likely to collect public benefits.

With respect to employment-based immigration, it is telling that even in the 60-day immigration pause that Trump imposed in the wake of the pandemic exempted H-2A visas that American agriculture needs to hire migrant workers. Why? Because without this labor the country's food supply chains would come to a grinding halt. And if Trump realizes that America needs these folks, there is no way that Biden won't. This is especially the case if his post-pandemic welfare push creates even greater disincentives for Americans to take on backbreaking, low-paying jobs. So America can't afford to turn away low-skilled workers.

One of the weirdest things about the Trump administration has been its animus against high-skilled H-1B immigrants. Miller has left no stone unturned to assault this program. This is the exact opposite of the consensus in the conservative policy establishment--which generally opposes low-skilled immigration because of its alleged deleterious fiscal impact but supports high-skilled immigration because it helps keep America's global technological edge and has a positive fiscal impact. Given this conservative consensus and the massive demand from Democrats' Silicon Valley backers for foreign techies, there is no way that a Biden presidency does not give high priority to unraveling all the red tape Miller has dispensed.

IT'S JUST A RACIST DODGE:

U.S. intelligence agencies are resisting pressure from the Trump administration to blame China for the coronavirus outbreak due to a lack of hard evidence, The New York Times reports. Senior Trump administration officials have reportedly pushed spy agencies to look for evidence to support the dubious theory that the virus outbreak began in a laboratory in the city of Wuhan. But the agencies have reportedly seen no evidence of a link to any lab, and scientists believe it's overwhelmingly likely that that the virus leapt from animal to human in a nonlaboratory setting.

DASVIDANYA:

►Missing formal complaint. Reade told The Times she filed a written complaint against Biden with the Senate personnel office. But The Times could not find any complaint. When The Times asked Reade for a copy of the complaint, she said she did not have it. Yet she maintained and provided a copy of her 1993 Senate employment records.

It is odd that Reade kept a copy of her employment records but did not keep a copy of a complaint documenting criminal conduct by a man whose improprieties changed "the trajectory" of her life. It's equally odd The Times was unable to find a copy of the alleged Senate complaint. 

►Memory lapse. Reade has said that she cannot remember the date, time or exact location of the alleged assault, except that it occurred in a "semiprivate" area in corridors connecting Senate buildings. After I left the Justice Department, I was appointed by the federal court in Los Angeles to represent indigent defendants. The first thing that comes to mind from my defense attorney perspective is that Reade's amnesia about specifics makes it impossible for Biden to go through records and prove he could not have committed the assault, because he was somewhere else at the time. 

For instance, if Reade alleged Biden assaulted her on the afternoon of June 3, 1993, Biden might be able to prove he was on the Senate floor or at the dentist. Her memory lapses could easily be perceived as bulletproofing a false allegation.  

►The lie about losing her job. Reade told The Union that Biden wanted her to serve drinks at an event. After she refused, "she felt pushed out and left Biden's employ," the newspaper said last April. But Reade claimed this month in her Times interview that after she filed a sexual harassment complaint with the Senate personnel office, she faced retaliation and was fired by Biden's chief of staff.

Leaving a job after refusing to serve drinks at a Biden fundraiser is vastly different than being fired as retaliation for filing a sexual harassment complaint with the Senate. The disparity raises questions about Reade's credibility and account of events. 

►Compliments for Biden. In the 1990s, Biden worked to pass the Violence Against Women Act. In 2017, on multiple occasions, Reade retweeted or "liked" praise for Biden and his work combating sexual assault. In the same year, Reade tweeted other compliments of Biden, including: "My old boss speaks truth. Listen." It is bizarre that Reade would publicly laud Biden for combating the very thing she would later accuse him of doing to her. 

►Rejecting Biden, embracing Sanders. By this January, Reade was all in for presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. Her unwavering support was accompanied by an unbridled attack on Biden. In an article on Medium, Reade referred to Biden as "the blue version of Trump." Reade also pushed a Sanders/Elizabeth Warren ticket, while complaining that the Democratic National Committee was trying to "shove" Biden "down Democrat voters throats." 

Despite her effusive 2017 praise for Biden's efforts on behalf of women, after pledging her support to Sanders, Reade turned on Biden and contradicted all she said before. She claimed that her decision to publicly accuse Biden of inappropriately touching her was due to "the hypocrisy that Biden is supposed to be the champion of women's rights."

►Love of Russia and Putin. During 2017 when Reade was praising Biden, she was condemning Russian leader Vladimir Putin's efforts to hijack American democracy in the 2016 election. This changed in November 2018, when Reade trashed the United States as a country of "hypocrisy and imperialism" and "not a democracy at all but a corporate autocracy." 

Reade's distaste for America closely tracked her new infatuation with Russia and Putin. She referred to Putin as a "genius" with an athletic prowess that "is intoxicating to American women." Then there's this gem: "President Putin has an alluring combination of strength with gentleness. His sensuous image projects his love for life, the embodiment of grace while facing adversity."

In March 2019, Reade essentially dismissed the idea of Russian interference in the 2016 American presidential election as hype. She said she loved Russia and her Russian relatives -- and "like most women across the world, I like President Putin ... a lot, his shirt on or shirt off." 

TOTALLY NOT A DEATH CULT:

The Covid-19 pandemic amplifies political feelings around healthcare, race, and class that have been growing on the right over the last decade. Recall the Tea Party's origins during the Great Recession. The movement emerged and quickly grew first in response to the election of a black president and then that president's proposed healthcare plan, as protesters mobbed townhalls across the summer of 2009, loudly declaiming against any form of socialized medical coverage. Those two animating features of the movement--antiblack racism and opposition to the Affordable Care Act--defined a movement that in essence chose investments in whiteness over the assurance of at least some semblance of healthcare.

This was followed in the 2016 election by a Republican candidate who surged among voters who had high levels of racial resentment, strong feelings of political powerlessness, and growing economic anxiety (regardless of income level). Donald Trump, who titled his campaign memoir Crippled America, reveled in such terms as "disgust," "weakness," "losing," and "pathetic" to describe the country. He poked at the vulnerability of whites like a finger in a wound all while demonizing Latinos, immigrants, Muslims, black protesters, and foreign rivals. All of this set the stage for how the right would come to respond to the current pandemic.

The rhetorical oppositions of work to welfare, self-reliance to dependence, individual to the state, citizen to foreigner--oppositions animated by race, gender, and class--run deep in American political culture. All are reflected in the politics of the pandemic right now, making for a grim political vision of American freedom.

In a basic way, this vision of freedom is conveyed by the defiance of guidelines to stop the spread of the virus. It isn't just the protesters. The dozen or so Republicans in the House of Representatives refusing to wear masks when called to vote on the latest coronavirus relief bill performed precisely that kind of political theater for their constituents. It is meant as a tough-guy taunt, to show their own robustness and the weakness of their opponents. But it also reveals something more pathological. The risky behavior demonstrates vitality precisely because it tempts fate, suggestive of Freud's death drive, which he described as a force "whose function is to assure that the organism shall follow its own path to death."

There is now a well-documented relationship between whiteness, status, and morbidity. As Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton have demonstrated in their research over the last few years, there have been long-term increases in "deaths of despair"--overdoses, suicides, alcohol-related fatalities--among middle-aged whites without college degrees. There is much yet to be understood about reasons for this phenomenon, but a sense of the declining status of whiteness appears tightly connected to collective self-harm. It is difficult not to think about this while watching mostly middle-aged white protesters demand the right to sacrifice their lives instead of joining others to demand greater protections for frontline workers, increased payments to keep workers at home, rent and mortgage moratoria, debt cancellation, federal money for states and municipalities, and more.

THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:

"They broke with the previous trends in crime fiction," Henning Mankell wrote in an introduction to the 2006 English edition of "Roseanna". His own Inspector Kurt Wallander series would owe much to Beck three decades later.

Sjöwall was "the giant on whose shoulders the titans of modern Scandi crime fiction stand," Britain's Daily Telegraph wrote in 2015, in a story headlined "The couple who invented Nordic Noir".

Both committed Marxists, they went beyond crime fiction, breaking new ground by carrying out a forensic examination of the failings of Swedish society. The modern themes they tackled included paedophilia, serial killers, the sex industry and suicide.

"Through the eyes of Martin Beck and his colleagues, they held a mirror up to Swedish society at a time when the ideals of the welfare state were beginning to buckle under the realities of everyday life," Scottish crime writer Val McDermid wrote in the introduction to the 2006 edition of "The Man Who Went Up In Smoke".

LIBERTY IS NOT FREEDOM:

The plaintiffs in the case claimed that the "mandatory quarantine," along with interstate travel restrictions listed in an earlier version of the order, violated their rights to both procedural due process and substantive due process.

"But those liberty interests are, and always have been, subject to society's interests--society being our fellow residents," said Court of Claims Judge Christopher M. Murray.

"They--our fellow residents--have an interest to remain unharmed by a highly communicable and deadly virus, and since the state entered the Union in 1837, it has had the broad power to act for the public health of the entire state when faced with a public crisis."

...AND CHEAPER...:

For the first time wind energy became Ireland's leading source of electricity for a full quarter, beating out natural gas for the first three months of 2020, when it accounted for 43.8% of demand compared to natural gas's 41.8%.

According to figures published this week by the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI), the country's wind energy sector generated 3,390GWh of electricity over the first three months of 2020, equivalent to the power demand of 737,000 Irish homes.

ROUGH DRAFT:

And it gets even worse. Reade now edited her blog post that originally said "But this is not a story about sexual misconduct; it is a story about abuse of power."

It now reads: "But this is not only a story about sexual misconduct; it is a story about abuse of power." pic.twitter.com/9IhjwqpzKA

— Ms. Krassenstein (@HKrassenstein) April 29, 2020

THE DISCIPLINE OF DEMOCRACY:

Brazil's Bolsonaro withdraws name of family friend as top cop https://t.co/WtJ1F9tFQH pic.twitter.com/1RZxGgUp3g

— Reuters (@Reuters) April 29, 2020

DONALD'S BAT CAVE:

The project was run by a U.S. nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance. For more than a decade, the group has been sending teams to China to trap bats, collect samples of their blood, saliva and feces, and then check those samples for new coronaviruses that could spark the next global pandemic. The idea is to identify locations that need to be monitored, come up with strategies to prevent spillover of the virus into human populations and get a jump on creating vaccines and treatments. Already the project has identified hundreds of coronaviruses, including one very similar to the virus behind the current outbreak. [...]

Daszak says the China bat sampling project has already racked up quite a number of successes. The team and its collaborators at the Wuhan Institute of Virology have collected about 15,000 samples from bats. From these they have already identified about 400 wholly new coronaviruses. About 50 of those fall into a category that caused the 2002 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, and, now, the COVID-19 pandemic.

The researchers were also able to demonstrate that at least some of the new bat coronaviruses they have found are capable of infecting a human cell in a petri dish. Then the team sampled the blood of people in China who live near various bat caves. They found evidence that for some time now, these bat coronaviruses have been spilling over into the human population.

"Our work has shown that between 1 [million] and 7 million people a year are exposed in rural China and rural Southeast Asia to these viruses," says Daszak.

"It really gives us a forward look at what could be coming down the pike."

Indeed, once the current pandemic began, the Wuhan Institute researchers on the project were able to consult their library of bat coronaviruses. They found an extremely close match.

All this work makes EcoHealth Alliance a "major player" in the field, says Garry, the microbiologist at Tulane. "These are notable papers that people will be citing going forward."

SOW THE WINDBAG, REAP THE WHIRLWIND:

New - In private call with activists, Sen. David Perdue offers a stark warning about 2020, saying Dems could take Georgia and flip Senate. He gives a grim assessment of what Dem control looks like - amid fears of D takeover. Latest on landscape w/@arogDC. https://t.co/keUwTeZ02S

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) April 29, 2020

IT'S NOT TOTALLY DONALD'S FAULT:

The public and media spotlight has therefore fallen on American's state governors. Those who have embraced their roles as crisis managers on the front lines of the pandemic have mostly seen their public approval increase as a result. As chair of the National Governors Association, Larry Hogan has been a prominent voice among the state leaders. In both his words and actions, he has illuminated the sharp contrast between Trump's approach to the pandemic and that of the activist governors, Republicans and Democrats alike.

Above all, Hogan has relied on science and expertise to inform his decision-making.. In the second week of February-when Trump was claiming that there were only a dozen cases of infections in the country and predicted that soon "it miraculously goes away"-a prudent Hogan convened a meeting of two dozen governors with members of the White House coronavirus task force including Dr. Anthony Fauci and Center for Disease Control and Prevention director Robert Redfield. Hogan returned to Maryland and worked with the Democratic-controlled state legislature to fund emergency preparations for combating the virus, including increased hospital bed capacity. 

In early March, when Trump was telling reporters "Just stay calm, it will go away," Hogan created a state coronavirus response team drawing on epidemiologists and public health doctors from Johns Hopkins University, the University of Maryland, and other state institutions. On March 12, when there were still only a handful of recorded cases in the state and no virus-related fatalities, Hogan followed the experts' recommendation and made Maryland the second state in the nation (after Ohio) to close public schools. While Trump has belittled expertise, Hogan has emphasized that "I've been listening to the scientists and the doctors."

At the same time that Trump has used his high-visibility press briefings to air personal grievances, deflect blame, and criticize the media, Hogan has used his platform to advocate for the needs of the revenue-starved states and has effectively communicated the severity of the crisis to the public. While Trump has seized upon the crisis as an opportunity for partisan warfare, Hogan has insisted that "now is not the time for partisan politics" and worked with governors of both parties, cooperated with Democrats in the state legislature, and coordinated a regional response with the Democratic governor of Virginia and mayor of Washington, DC. 

While Trump's response to the pandemic has been chaotic and full of unsupported assertions, Hogan has tried to project steadiness, truthfulness, and informed decision-making.

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

THE lEFT IS THE rIGHT:

SMALL "c", BIG "C":

I put the case that there is a small "c" conservatism that denotes an aversion to change, and the desire to hold on to familiar things and ways for the comfort and security they bring. There is also a large "C" Conservatism that denotes a political tradition rather than a character trait. 

That political tradition does not oppose all change, but is against attempts to impose deliberate change to remake society into a preconceived order. Instead it wants such change as takes place to be spontaneous and organic, the product of people interacting, and perhaps reacting to changing circumstances. It opposes utopian attempts to make society correspond with one dreamed-up in theory, as opposed to one that develops naturally in practice. 

What the political tradition of Conservatism seeks to conserve is not any given state of society, but rather the process by which society changes. It seeks to conserve a process, not an outcome. Crucially, I pointed out that Conservatives seek not only to preserve that spontaneity, but to restore it if it has been lost. This brings Margaret Thatcher into their ranks. She managed to restore a degree of spontaneity that had been lost by decades of state controls and central direction. 

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

In a major ruling, a 10th Circuit panel (consisting of 2 judges, as a third judge on the panel had passed away), a Tenth Circuit panel has held that a Kansas anti-voting law championed by former Secretary of State Kris Kobach violated both the Constitution's equal protection clause and was preempted by the federal motor-voter law. The law at issue required those who wished to register to vote in Kansas to provide documentary proof of citizenship--such as a birth certificate or naturalization certificate--in order to register to vote. Until the ACLU secured a preliminary injunction against this law, about 30,000 people had their voter registrations suspended and were not allowed to vote in Kansas elections.

I wrote about the trial in this case (then called Fish v. Kobach and now Fish v. Schwab on appeal) in my book, Election Meltdown. I called the case the most important voting trial of the 21st century so far because it was the chance for those like Kobach who claim that voter fraud is a major problem in the United States to prove that in a court of law under the rules of evidence. As I detail in the book, Kobach's proof was woefully inadequate and his expert witnesses embarassingly bad. Kobach was later sanctioned for how he ran the trial and for misleading the ACLU about the contents of a document he had given to President Trump.

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

Americans who received a stimulus check from the federal government also are getting something else in the mail: a letter from President Donald Trump.

A one-page letter from Trump started arriving over the weekend in the mailboxes of millions of Americans who received stimulus payments of up to $1,200 under a new law designed to help the economy recover from the fallout of the coronavirus pandemic.

DONALD WHO?:

Seven weeks ago, I went on @allinwithchris and told @chrislhayes that -- given Trump's weak leadership -- we were headed to an "Articles of Confederation" response to this crisis. Well..... https://t.co/X04ya2Q0kP

— Ronald Klain (@RonaldKlain) April 28, 2020

SIMPLE COLLUSION:

Weeks after Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel in the Russia investigation, Roger Stone, a confidant of President Donald Trump, reassured WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in a Twitter message that if prosecutors came after him, "I will bring down the entire house of cards," according to FBI documents made public Tuesday.

The records reveal the extent of communications between Stone and Assange, whose anti-secrecy website published Democratic emails hacked by Russians during the 2016 presidential election, and underscore efforts by Trump allies to gain insight about the release of information they expected would embarrass Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton.

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

In a new book out this month, a Republican member of Congress offers one of the most brutal and surgical eviscerations of President Trump's leadership style that has been put to print.

"The problem with today's society is that it is swelling with the wrong role models," he writes. "Abandoning traditional heroes for new and exciting villains who represent self-indulgence, loud-mouthed commentary, angry fist-shaking activism, or insulting spitfire politics."

This is, he says, infecting our entire society, which "has grown out of control often at the expense of logic, decency, and virtue." We now "mock virtue without considering how its abandonment accelerates our moral decay" and "don a mantle of fragility, of anger, of childishness, and are utterly shameless in doing so."

"A culture characterized by self-pity, indulgence, outrage, and resentment is a culture that falls apart," he argues.

On Earth 2, this may have been the launching pad for a courageous and ambitious primary campaign that stands up for virtue in the face of our fragile, angry, childish, shameless, self-indulgent, loud-mouthed, insulting, self-pitying, and resentful president.

Here on Earth 1, the book is called Fortitude and its author is Rep. Dan Crenshaw, one of the most visible defenders of Donald Trump.

SONGS OF THE NORTHMEN:

If Finnish composers are doomed to live in the shadow of Sibelius, it would be equally true to say that composers from Estonia can hardly hope to escape living in the shadow of the great Arvo Pärt, whose minimalist masterpieces, such as Spiegel im Spiegel and Cantus in Memorium Benjamin Britten, are among the most popular works of the past half century. And what is true of the fate of contemporary Estonian composers is equally true of those composers who preceded Part's rise to fame. Take, for example, Cyrillus Kreek (1889-1962), whose own considerable reputation has been at least partially eclipsed by the waxing of Part's presence on the world stage. The best of his work is still performed regularly, however, not least of which are his settings of the Psalms of David, especially his Onnis on inimene (Blessed is the Man), composed in 1923, which interweaves the traditions of Orthodox chant with suggestive elements of Estonian folk music and Western choral influences.

For our final stop on this musical tour of the lands of the North, we'll wing our way across the Baltic and over Scandinavia, crossing the frozen waters of the Norwegian Sea and following the latitudinal line of the Arctic Circle until we come to Iceland.

Known for its scenic beauty, it would be fair to say that Iceland's cultural impact rests on the lingering legacy of its Bards, especially Snorri Sturluson, and the heroic sagas they wove about the history of the Norsemen. It would also be fair to say that Iceland is not known for its significant contribution to the canon of classical music. This being so, it seems apt that we should end with three Icelandic composers who present three very different views of the cosmos and the meaning of life. Let's begin with the youngest, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, born in 1977 and winner in 2012 of the Nordic Council Music Prize, who wrote Pann Heilaga Kross (On the Holy Cross), a haunting meditation on the Crucifixion which is almost elvish in its etherial sensuality. In stark contrast, Haflidi Hallgrimsson's Veröld fláa sýnir sig (The Deceitful World Shows Itself), composed in 1988, seems almost to be a hymn to despair, or, at the least, a desolate cri de coeur: "The deceitful world shows itself, / foretelling harsh times. / Most of the blades of grass on this / earth, big and small, sting me." And then, finally, we have Jón Nordal's Smávinir fagrir (Beautiful Tiny Friends), as different in mood and spirit from Hallgrimsson's lament as is hope from despair. Written in 1940, when the composer was only sixteen-years-old, it is full of the overflowing spirit of romance which is the domain of youth. Enraptured by the presence of beauty and blissfully oblivious of the far-off echoes of the world war which was raging as he wrote, he thanks the Lord for the beauty of his "tiny friends", the dandelions and the buttercups: "Poor buttercup, do you see me? / Sleep peacefully and cover yourself, / slow comes the rest in the dewy night, / dream of the light, sleep tight!" Aptly enough, the music that the teenager composed to augment these delicate words is a lilting lullaby, as pure as crystal and as diaphanous as silk.

ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

Hardman's account of her partial recovery from her breakdown, is a considerably more interesting and accomplished book than a simple wallow in the details of her ordeal. The title is easily misread. Rather than either a social history of the NHS or an autobiographical account of what befell her, Hardman instead examines the healing powers of nature and the great outdoors, arguing that their therapeutic powers can contribute immeasurably both to our mental and physical health. It is deeply unfortunate timing that the book is being published at a moment when her readers are largely confined to their homes for their own health and safety, but the central message will outlast any pandemic.

Hardman is a precise, lucid writer, never afraid to offer well-argued opinion but always careful to delineate it from factual reporting. She writes, "It is only recently that society, and even the medical establishment, has started to acknowledge that our physical health and our mental health aren't as separate as we assumed." To those who grew up knowing the maxim "mens sana in corpore sano" -- "a healthy mind in a healthy body" -- this may not be the revelation that Hardman presents it as, but at a time when enlightened GPs prescribe birdwatching and long walks alongside pills and psychological treatment, a greater belief in the natural, as well as national, health service will ultimately do Britain a substantial amount of good.

The sainted NHS itself does not emerge from Hardman's book with particular credit, especially when it comes to mental health care, which she regards as underfunded and loaded with stigma. One professor describes a phenomenon known as "diagnosis creep", which can lead to otherwise healthy patients being medicated because they feel justifiable anxiety or depression about a circumstance such as a bereavement, or indeed a national disaster that confines them to their homes for months.

As the NHS's national mental health director puts it, "drugs and therapy alone cannot bring about healing", although one has to hope that we never end up in the absurd situation that some other societies have arrived at, where an ever-growing number of "assistance animals" are said to be invaluable to their owners' mental health, although Hardman makes a convincing case for therapy dogs.

The unwell can be helped in less zoological ways. Hardman was a keen gardener even as a child ("I was unusual in knowing the common and Latin names of most garden plants by sight") and views it as a straightforward way of keeping oneself occupied and happy. She runs long distances and swims in freezing seas and rivers, relishing the necessary endorphin release of the "runner's high". In the case of swimming, "the most powerful antidepressant I have ever encountered", she plunges into water in the depths of winter even as she tacitly acknowledges that there is a masochistic element to how far she pushes herself. Better to cause some physical damage, which will swiftly heal, than endure mental distress, which could last indefinitely.

Natural Health Service is rich in interesting and unusual details. Birdwatching is considered a useful way of distracting oneself; twitching, a more specialised pursuit requiring a near-obsessive interest in the travels of particular birds, is not.

nATIONALISM IS NOT cONSERVATIVE:

What is left of the American conservatism tradition has, he argues, "acquired a reputation as both noxious and intellectually disreputable". It's hard not to see Bacevich's point. Take a look at the agenda for CPAC, the annual conservative gathering that has become a festival of shockjockerry and Trump worship. Or consider the ideological gymnastics many on the right are willing to perform to keep up with the president's political whims. This is the motley crew from which Bacevich (right) claims to be doing the reclaiming.

Bacevich says American Conservatism is representative of only the "best" conservative writing of the twentieth century according to his own prejudices. Those prejudices include hostility to much of US foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. Bacevich, who is president of the anti-intervention Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, was even mentioned by Politico as a left-field choice for Secretary of Defense in some (extremely premature) speculation about a Bernie Sanders cabinet.

Hence his otherwise puzzling decision to exclude neoconservatives from the anthology, something he signposts in the introduction, claiming that, while they "for a time made a considerable impact on the national conversation and even arguably on US foreign policy, they were never genuinely conservative".  Confusingly, Bacevich goes on to break his own rule by including an essay by Irving Kristol, the "godfather of neoconservatism".

Elsewhere, he is ecumenical enough to include liberals like New Republic founder Walter Lippmann, free-range libertarians like Murray Rothbard, and writers who eschew easy categorisation like Wendell Berry and Joan Didion. The volume is richer for these contributions, and for casting a net beyond the limits of "movement" conservatism. But the exclusion of neoconservative authors is churlish, and will leave readers with an incomplete picture of conservative thought on the American right.

That the anthology is steered by Bacevich's conservatism, rather than anything more broadly representative, is clear from the first sentence: "The modern American conservative tradition -- roughly dating from the dawn of the twentieth century -- emerged in reaction to modernity itself." The choice of starting point is eccentric given that conservatism as a self-conscious and organised movement in the United States is very much a postwar phenomenon.

eVANGELICALS AREN'T:

...AND CHEAPER...:

 

Great Britain has run for a new record of 18 days, six hours and 15 minutes without burning coal to generate electricity - and counting - as the coronavirus lockdown cuts demand by nearly 20%.

This combination means CO2 emissions from the country's electricity system have been cut by a third during the coal-free stretch relative to the same period last year, Carbon Brief analysis shows.

THEY'RE TRYING TO SAVE THE LAST RACIST:

[T]here are also far-right conspiracy theorists, white supremacists like Proud Boys and citizens' militia members at these protests. The exact number of each group that attends these protests is unknown, since police have not traditionally monitored these groups, but signs and symbols of far right groups have been seen at many of these protests across the country.

These protests risk spreading the virus and have disrupted traffic, potentially delaying ambulances. But as researchers of street gangs' and far-right groups' violence and recruitment, we believe these protests may become a way right-wingers expand the spread of anti-Semitic rhetoric and militant racism.

Proud Boys, and many other far-right activists, don't typically focus their concern on whether stores and businesses are open. They're usually more concerned about pro-white, pro-male rhetoric. They're attending these rallies as part of their longstanding search for any opportunity to make extremist groups look mainstream - and because they are always looking for potential recruits to further their cause.

While not all far-right groups agree on everything, many of them now subscribe to the idea that Western government is corrupt and its demise needs to be accelerated through a race war.

For far-right groups, almost any interaction is an opportunity to connect with people with social or economic insecurities or their children. [...]

President Donald Trump, a favorite of far-right activists, has tweeted encouragement to the protesters.

WHY DONALD CAN NEVER WIN:

DONALD/VLAD:

A CALL TO PRAYER:

It had been a month or so since I heard a droning baseball player interview on my car radio. It's a media ritual that hauls out certain pre- or post-game tropes with aplomb and a reliable repetition almost soothing to the ear. By accident on Saturday, I hit the MLB Radio tab on the satellite radio in my Volkswagen. There was the drone. It was former Detroit Tigers pitcher Ryan Carpenter being questioned by the host. Carpenter was in Taiwan, where the Chinese Professional Baseball League had been playing its opening week of games inside empty stadiums. I was driving to a somewhat distant wine store just for the heck of it, having spent 60 hours a week behind the wheel of a taxi for most of the past decade, and since the taxis have been parked for a month now, I needed to feel some mileage. And there on that radio was the ballplayer drone. And as I gleaned the fact that Carpenter is now a pitcher for the Rakuten Monkeys of the CPBL, I was also pleased to learn that the league's games were being streamed live, online. Suddenly the drone became a call to prayer.

WE RICHLY DESERVE THE COMING DRUBBING:

Along time ago in a galaxy far, far away Republican elites claimed that they didn't like Donald Trump very much. They didn't support him in the primary. Many said or implied that they wouldn't vote for him in the general election.

But at some point each one of them reasoned that the right thing to do was to don the MAGA hat in order to ensure that Trump made good on the policy priorities they most valued.

They acknowledged the trade-off.  Trump would make them eat some shit sandwiches with the tweets and the corruption and the protectionism and the race baiting. But they'd get theirs. This was the genesis of the "But Gorsuch" meme.

At the time, some of us asked . . . are you sure you know what's in this sandwich?

Today that's now clear.

More than 39,000 Americans are dead from a pandemic that was ignored while the president was vainly consumed with the state of the stock market and keeping the numbers down. We are confronted daily with a president utterly incapable of truthfully explaining the stakes, or calling the nation to shared sacrifice, or even merely striking a tone that allows for communal grieving.

That elite Republicans have endorsed this horrifying display of tragic mismanagement lays bare what Trump has taken from each person who made this deal, how much of their soul he has sucked from their body.

It's striking how little they actually got out of the bargain. 

But what's even more striking is that, instead of being angered at their having been being suckered by Trump, or ashamed of it, Republicans decided to accept--and even to celebrate--the parts of Trumpism that they had once regarded as the regrettable price of the exchange.

Look what he has made them give. 

BEFITTING:

It's hard to exaggerate how musically isolated Iceland was before the 20th century. While music flourished in mainland Europe, widespread poverty and the sheer difficulty of survival in the remote Danish colony left little time or money for pursuing the arts. While Bach's majestic Toccata and Fugue in D minor made church windows rattle in Germany, it was still one hundred years before the first organ was installed in Iceland. Decades later, as opera singers battled it out in six-part counterpoint in Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, Icelanders were singing in unison (occasionally in two parts) in country churches. Still later, while Beethoven premiered his 9th symphony and its famous Ode to Joy with a massive orchestra and choir, Icelandic fishermen were lucky if they had a three-string fiddle (langspil), to while away the evenings in their turf houses.

For hundreds of years, little changed. But in the 19th century, as Iceland's independence movement started gaining momentum, so did its musical potential. In 1874, King Christian IX of Denmark visited the island as it marked the 1,000th anniversary of its settlement. He came with a Danish brass band in his retinue. It's hard to imagine what the locals thought of the sound of the loud, blaring instruments, but perhaps easier to imagine how they saw the musical entourage: as a symbol of the King's status, and of Denmark's nationhood, advancement, and superiority over the little island colony.

The band's performance enthralled two brothers, Jónas and Helgi Helgason, so completely they decided to travel to Denmark to study music the following year. Upon their return, they formed a brass sextet, which held its debut concert in 1876.

It was the first public concert in Iceland - held nearly 50 years after Beethoven's death.

Just like the springs of its climate, Iceland's musical spring started late and warmed up slowly. Around the turn of the century, a handful of Icelanders went abroad to study music, forming small ensembles or teaching others upon their return. Foreign musicians also brought a glimpse of music's possibilities to the island. One of them was Danish violinist Oscar Johansen, who moved to Reykjavík in 1910, where he proceeded to teach violin and perform in Hótel Ísland regularly for years. While Iceland declared its sovereignty in 1918, the occasion was sombre - on the heels of a volcanic eruption and Spanish flu epidemic, most of its population was still thinking of little else than survival.

Yet despite these hardships, or perhaps because of them, the will to assert their nationhood grew stronger among Icelanders. And from these early days, patriotic occasions did not fail to include music. In 1930, when a festival was organised to mark the 1,000th anniversary of the founding of Alþingi, it was decided that a musical spectacle would be the main attraction. Original compositions were commissioned for the occasion, both for orchestra and choir. Dr. Franz Mixa, an Austrian conductor, was brought from abroad to prepare the orchestra, and Danish musicians hired to support the ensemble. Composer Páll Ísólfsson, who conducted at the event, described it as "a spring thaw across the country, turning it green." The performance convinced Icelanders that to be a nation, they must have music that befits one.

PURITAN NATION:

What's happening: Despite nearly 20% saying they had been furloughed, laid off or otherwise separated from their job, the most popular answer among survey respondents was to sock their money away, with 38% saying they put it into savings.

Why it matters: Economists have worried that one major effect of the coronavirus pandemic could be that Americans become more conscious of their savings and cut back on spending.

...AND CHEAPER...:

IRENA's renewables outlook analyses the current rate of renewable energy deployment and the rate required to meet global climate goals. If the necessary acceleration of renewables construction happened, the economic gains for the world economy would be vast. IRENA finds that global GDP could grow by 2.4% more by mid-century than under current energy projections. The cumulative economic benefit between now and 2050 would total $98 trillion, far exceeding the initial costs of the investments.

There would be an employment boom too, with 42 million renewables jobs globally by 2050, four times more than today. Energy jobs overall would reach 100 million by 2050, about 40 million more than today, showing there are more jobs in a renewables future than a fossil fuel one. 

The crisis has underscored the importance of resilient supply chains for essential goods, such as food and energy. Fortunately the UK renewables sector has held up remarkably well. Turbine factories in Hull and on the Isle of Wight have adapted their working practices to safely remain open, as has the cable factory in Hartlepool. New wind turbines, enabled by government-backed contracts, continue to be built. And in our electricity grid, renewables have continued to play a key role powering the nation as it works from home, with solar setting a new generation record just last week.

The UK must maintain this momentum through the recovery, as well as making our domestic supply chain even more resilient. In the first instance, we need to ensure a pipeline of new renewables projects. That means proceeding with planned clean energy auctions for offshore wind and the more established technologies, onshore wind and solar. Promising new technologies like floating offshore wind should be eligible to bid for government-backed contracts too, which could bring 'green-collar' jobs to new parts of the UK such as South Wales. These economic wins do not require government support, which is attractive at a time when our fiscal resources are so depleted.

RED TEAMING:

Red teamers would have likely deemed the depth of talent in position players and starting pitchers on both teams as roughly equal, or perhaps given a slight edge to Houston. And in examining the disparity in bullpens - during the regular season, Astros relief pitchers allowed the second-fewest runs in baseball while the Nationals 'pen surrendered a whopping two runs per game more than the Astros - they would have asked several simple questions. The first is, could the Nationals mitigate that vulnerability and, if so, what difference would it make? As it turns out, the answer to that question was hiding in plain sight. During the first three rounds of the playoffs, the Nationals deputized members of their elite starting pitching staff four times, all but eliminating their middle-inning bullpen vulnerabilities.

The second question that red teamers would have likely asked is related to the baseball equivalent of military "readiness." In wargaming, the quality of a potential adversary is judged by many factors, including training and preparedness against a skilled enemy. And this is where things start to get interesting. A close examination of the teams' regular-season schedules reveals a wide disparity. The Astros, who won 107 games, played 99 against teams with losing records and just 63 against teams who won more than they lost. The Nationals played 96 games against teams .500 or better and only 66 against teams with losing records. In short, one team's win total was juiced by the baseball equivalent of facing third-world military forces; the other's was suppressed by routinely competing against well-trained NATO allies.

The Astros won 73 percent of the games they played against losing teams, but just 55 percent against winning teams. The Nationals won 68 percent of their games against losing teams and went 48-48 against teams .500 or better. The Nationals won 93 games during the regular season, but based on the difference between their runs scored and runs allowed, known as their Pythagorean expectation, the Nats should have won 95 games, a more-than-respectable result in the National League East, a far stronger division than the Astros' home in the American League West. The NL East had perhaps the best pitching in baseball last year, headlined by the likes of the Mets' Jacob deGrom and Noah Syndergaard, the Phillies' Aaron Nola, and the Braves' Mike Soroka. The Nationals entered the World Series having repeatedly faced some of the best starting pitchers in baseball.

Red teamers would no doubt have looked closely at the skill level of the Astros' opponents and wondered: What if the Nationals had played that same schedule? The answer is revealing. If the Nats had played the same number of games against losing teams as the Astros, based on their season-long performance, their win total would jump from 93 games to 98. And if the Astros had played 96 games against teams .500 or better, as had the Nats, their wins would have dropped from 107 to 100. The difference between the two would have been virtually imperceptible.

Analysts red-teaming the World Series would have noticed something else that could be classified under "readiness." During the regular season, the Astros seldom -- if ever -- faced starting pitchers as good as the Nationals' duo of Strasburg and Scherzer. The baseball analyst Eno Sarris ranks Scherzer as the major leagues' fourth-best starting pitcher, and Strasburg as No. 6. Meanwhile, the best pitcher in the American League West who is not an Astro, according to Sarris's rankings, is Frankie Montas of the Oakland Athletics, judged the 24th-best starting pitcher in MLB and the division's lone top-30 starting pitcher outside Houston. Good pitching stopped good hitting: Washington's aces effectively shut down the powerful Astro offense during the four games the Nationals won in Houston.

Several years ago, Vince Gennaro, the president of the Society for American Baseball Research, introduced the idea that one useful predictor of how batters might fare in postseason play is how they performed against top-flight pitchers during the regular season. During the 2019 regular season, the Astros faced starting pitchers ranked in the top 30 on Sarris's list 19 times, scoring an average of just under four runs per 9 innings. The Nationals faced top 30 pitchers a total of 31 times and scored an average of 4.35 runs per game. Against top-flight pitchers during the season, the Nats offense was more productive, even though they faced elite pitchers far more often -- including eight games in September as they battled for a playoff spot. The Astros faced no top-30 pitchers after Aug. 27.

WITH ONE KEY DIFFERENCE:

So all in all, I would say the corroboration issue is a tie. Reade has witnesses who claim more contemporaneous disclosure, but they are either anonymous or not necessarily reliable and with a close personal connection to Reade; Ford has named witnesses claiming disclosure after 30+ years, and while Keyser's statements do not disprove her account, they certainly complicate things.

Here are a few other areas in which the two can be compared.

Plausibility of the alleged offense. Here, I think the Kavanaugh allegation is much more credible. Two very drunk teenage boys jumping a girl at a party in an isolated upstairs room? Quite possible, though not necessarily with the intent Ford has claimed (more on that later). A U.S. Senator sexually assaulting an aide -- pushing her against the wall, putting his hand under her skirt, and pushing his fingers inside her vagina -- in a supposedly secluded area of a public hallway in the Senate office building, steps away from where (according to Reade's account) she had just seen him talking to another person? And all this at a time of heightened attention to sexual harassment, when another Senator, Robert Packwood (R-Oregon) was embroiled in a sexual misconduct scandal involving staffers and lobbyists? Much more unlikely.

Accuser's conduct toward the accused, post-alleged incident. Reade has, on at least two occasions, written warmly about Biden (in a 2009 article about being a victim of domestic abuse and in a 2017 tweet) and has retweeted many more favorable tweets about him. This is not a situation in which she may have had to humor an abuser to protect her career or livelihood. Ford, who has never had any personal connection to Kavanaugh after high school, obviously has no such issues. This is not dispositive (while Reade claims that her high opinion of Biden was shattered after the assault, it may be that she struggled to hold on to her prior idealized image of Biden as a champion of women's rights). But it does detract from the plausibility of Reade's account.

Personal record of the accused. Interestingly, both Kavanaugh and Biden have had a very pro-woman image in their public lives. Biden has been a major advocate for laws and policies to protect women from domestic violence and sexual assault (whether those laws and policies were always good is another matter). Kavanaugh is a man with a long reputation of championing women in the legal profession and has often talked about his mother, pioneering female judge Martha Kavanaugh, as his role model. During his confirmation hearing he pledged to hire all-female law clerks (and made good on that pledge, making women the majority of Supreme Court clerks for the first time in history).

Unfortunately, as we know from past experience, advocacy for women's rights is not incompatible with sexual predation. Packwood, a socially progressive Republican, was also known as a supporter of feminist causes.

What about personal background? It seems fairly clear that young Kavanaugh was sometimes a rowdy drunk. However, there is nothing in his known history to suggest a propensity for attempted rape. A former Yale classmate, Deborah Ramirez, has claimed that he exposed himself and encouraged her to touch his penis at a drunken dorm-room party at Yale, letting her believe that she was touching a fake penis. Ramirez's story is an extremely murky one. She came forward in 2018, as The New Yorker reported, after "six days of carefully assessing her memories" until she felt confident enough to name Kavanaugh. Some other classmates vaguely recall hearing about such an incident but not about Kavanaugh as the culprit. Kavanaugh's former roommate Kenneth Appold has said that he distinctly remembers hearing the story from an eyewitness with a mention of Kavanaugh's name; but attempts to get further corroboration have failed, and Appold's story seems to have shifted over time. Ultimately, the Ramirez story has to be judged inconclusive.

Biden has a notorious history of being "handsy": squeezing women's (and girls') shoulders, arms or hands, hugging, kissing foreheads, cheeks and hair, and so on -- captured in dozens of "Creepy Uncle Joe" memes. Last year, eight women, including Reade, came forward to say that he had touched them in ways that made them uncomfortable. None of these incidents were alleged to have a sexual component. (Indeed, some have pointed out that Biden's caught-on-camera handsiness extends to males.) Some of the accusers have explicitly acknowledged that Biden's intent was to make a warm, supportive gesture.

WHEN RACISM TRUMPS MEDICINE:

The National Institutes of Health on Friday told EcoHealth Alliance, the study's sponsor for the past five years, that all future funding was cut. The agency also demanded that the New York-based research nonprofit stop spending the $369,819 remaining from its 2020 grant, according to emails obtained by POLITICO. [...]

Meanwhile, the NIH's strategic plan for studying the novel coronavirus, released Thursday, lays out four key priorities -- including understanding its origin and transmission, in line with the EcoHealth alliance's broader investigation of bat coronaviruses. 

AND ALL THE GOP $ WILL NEED TO GO TO TX:

OHIO
Biden 45% (+1)
Trump 44%@BaldwinWallace/@oaklandu/@ohionorthern 4/20-25

— Political Polls (@Politics_Polls) April 27, 2020

THE ORANGE CEILING:

In a contest without a third-party contender, Biden's margin jumps to 10 points, 50% to 40%.

THE GROWN-UP PARTY:

New York has delivered a major blow to Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) continued push for Democratic power.

Democrats on the New York state Board of Elections decided Monday to cancel the party's presidential primary, which had already been pushed from April back to June 23 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. That leaves Sanders without a chance to grab any delegates in the state, despite his insistence on staying on the ballot to secure more standing within the party.

Sanders suspended his 2020 run last month and endorsed former Vice President Joe Biden, but still wanted his supporters to vote for him so his delegates could "exert significant influence over the party platform and other functions" at the Democratic National Convention. But Doug Kellner, one of the two Democratic commissioners on the elections board in New York, concluded Sanders' suspension "ended the real context for the primary election."

IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSTATE DEFLATIONARY PRESSURES:

THE ORANGE CEILING:

An average of recent national surveys compiled by Real Clear Politics showed Biden, who served as vice president under former President Barack Obama, ahead of Trump by an average of nearly 6 points. Overall, Biden is backed by an average of 48.3 percent of voters while the president is supported by just 42.4 percent.

Meanwhile, Biden also leads Trump in the battleground states of Wisconsin, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Arizona. Trump still appears to have a slim advantage in North Carolina, but the most recent poll conducted in the state actually showed Biden ahead by 1 point as well.

WHAT REPUBLICAN CONGRESS?:

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled the federal government owes health insurers massive payments from an Obamacare program shielding them from financial risks after the companies accused Washington of reneging on its funding promises.

The 8-1 decision could open the floodgates for federal cash to the insurance industry. Insurers who accused the government of a "bait and switch" claimed they're owed $12 billion from the Affordable Care Act program.

The case concerned a temporary fund in the health care law intended as a buffer for health plans who had sicker customers than expected in the newly overhauled insurance marketplaces. Obamacare's drafters hoped the program would be funded by industry, but health plans quickly racked up losses when the marketplaces opened in 2014. The next year, Republican lawmakers approved the first in a series of annual appropriations riders barring HHS from using taxpayer dollars to bankroll the program, known as risk corridors.

The high court agreed with insurers that the congressional spending restrictions didn't release the government from its original promise to fund the Obamacare program. The court said Congress had created "a rare money-mandating obligation" that later appropriations language couldn't repeal.

JUST BAN CARS:

Atlanta's "Action Plan for Safer Streets" is perhaps the most significant example of the scooter craze actually influencing policy and infrastructure in American cities, but it's not the only one. Scooter companies--buoyed by their fees, data, and millions of new two-wheeled street users--have begun to push cities, especially those that have historically had few cyclists, to rethink their auto-centric street designs. Indianapolis has earmarked the fees it charges scooter companies to build safe "neighborways" for bikes and scooters, and activists in Nashville have used scooter data to make a stronger case for bike lane expansions along popular corridors, to name just two more examples.

Scooter-sharing companies already faced an uncertain future before the coronavirus pandemic, and now that future is in great jeopardy, with most companies suspending service in the U.S.  But no matter what happens going forward, this two-year experiment has clearly demonstrated the demand for micromobility--human-size, often electrically boosted vehicles--in a wide variety of American cities. Scooters have also proven to be a powerful symbol, illustrating the geometry and physics at the root of the nation's transportation problems--for those who are willing to look.

Scooters are a lot of things to a lot of people, but everyone can agree they're popular. In 2018, the first year they were widely available, shared, dockless scooters provided 38.5 million trips in America, more than the nation's much-longer-established docked bike-share systems like CitiBike. All indications suggest that number should be higher for 2019. Atlanta saw more than 3 million rides in the first nine months of 2019. Austin, Texas, saw 5 million rides in a 15-month period between 2018 and 2019. Los Angeles sees about 1 million scooter and dockless bike rides per month. A single company, Lime, which operates fleets of scooters and bikes around the world, announced its 100 millionth ride in September 2019.

All those rides translate to a lot more riders on two wheels--and not only in coastal cities with vibrant cycling cultures. "You have basically double the number of citizens saying, 'Where's my damn bike lane?' " said Regina Clewlow, CEO of Populus, a micromobility data platform, extrapolating from a 2018 report. "I think cities are hearing that." And their constituents might be giving them more leeway to act on road safety improvements that have historically been a hard sell to the car-owning public. Even if only a handful of scooter riders become bike lane advocates, plenty more will at the very least understand their utility firsthand. (It has become commonly accepted that bike lanes are the best place for scooters to ride). Even drivers who might otherwise resent bike lanes are forced to acknowledge that they're actually being used, and are thankful that the pesky scooters are being kept out of their way.

SINOPHOBES IN SEASON:

Reports of anti-Asian violence and harassment abound, and right-wing websites, subreddits, and message boards are full of conspiracy theories and racist tropes targeting the Chinese. Incidents like those documented here, here, and here, point to a resurgence of "yellow peril" racism and remind us of the peculiar power of Orientalism to make Asians easy targets of racist conspiracy theories by casting us as forever foreign in our tastes, interests, and loyalties. President Trump's insistence on calling Covid-19 "Chinese," whether intended as a deflection or red meat for his base, appears to be playing an important, even definitive role here, legitimating racist right-wing conspiracy theories, and giving white nationalists permission. That permission is amplified by federal government inaction in the face of community demands to address reports of hate crimes. [...]

Steven Gardiner of Political Research Associates, a 40-year-old nonprofit strategy and research center that is monitoring how anti-Chinese resentment is blending with anti-globalism and anti-Semitism, sums up the current situation: "The racist right is both inciting its followers and engaging in a bigoted call-and-response with the Trump administration.... Provocateurs like Anne Coulter are consolidating every Sinophobic slur into Covid-19 currency for right-wing media consumers, while more sober seeming outlets like American Renaissance are waxing nostalgic for the Chinese Exclusion Act with unmasked white nationalism."

This kind of bait-and-switch--in which targets of popular bigotry are used as proxies for less easily assailed scapegoats--is a tried and true tactic of the right. And it's facilitated by a failure of vigilance against racism and other bigotries, both as social ills and as antidemocratic ideologies. Asian Americans and Jews are both easy targets in the contemporary US context, because the racism we are subjected to isn't regarded as important, politically meaningful, or sexy media fodder. We think of racism only in terms of harm to "the most vulnerable." We focus mainly on the most corrosive effects in terms of poverty--shortened life expectancies, mass incarceration, unemployment, etc.--which have the effect of making racism appear to be a "them" issue to mainstream white voters and not an "us" crisis of democracy, eroding our ability to see across traditional divides to our shared interest in supporting an equitable welfare state that provides, among other things, robust public health infrastructure. It is only when racism directed at soft targets like Jews and Asians takes on a certain lurid quality--when it gets exaggerated by racial terrorists--that we consider it important enough for serious consideration by the media and the general public.

MULTI-AMERICAS:

The California roadmap is the latest in a long line of policies practically and symbolically distancing the Golden State from the rest of the country. California has long been the only state granted the right to maintain its own auto emissions standards. Since 2017 it has prevented state employees from traveling on official business to other states that, in the evaluation of its Attorney General, maintain legal "discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression." California is a self-declared "sanctuary state" limiting the degree to which state and local law enforcement may cooperate with federal immigration officials. In 2019 it began covering certain illegal immigrants in its state Medicaid program, and this year created a state-based coronavirus relief fund specifically for residents who are in the country unlawfully.

There is no doubt that California is both very peculiar and very large. Yet neither quality lends it the status of a nation, nor does it make California a state in the international legal sense of the term. Nonetheless one day it could become so, and the coronavirus pandemic is creating novel opportunities for California to travel down just such a path.

The state already has the political infrastructure to begin entertaining independence. In 2015 a set of quixotic activists formed the California National Party dedicated to the proposition that Californians deserve their own country. The next year a parallel organization, Yes California, formed to support an independence referendum for the state. Both the California National Party and Yes California are self-consciously modeled after the Scottish National Party (SNP) and the organization Yes Scotland that spearheaded the campaign for Scottish independence in 2014. 

Like their California emulators, the SNP was once little more than a fringe player in Scottish politics and for decades Scottish independence was considered a crackpot idea. All that changed in the 1980s and 1990s under eighteen consecutive years of Conservative Party rule in the United Kingdom. While England voted for Margaret Thatcher and her successor John Major, Scotland kept voting Labour. The partisan divide between the two countries grew so large that by the end of this long Tory era in 1997, not a single Conservative Member of Parliament remained in Scotland. As SNP members are continually fond of saying--both back then and under David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson―Scotland repeatedly got governments it didn't vote for. In the eyes of Scottish nationalists, the only way out is secession.

Californians can make a similar appeal. The state's Electoral College votes haven't gone to a Republican in over thirty years. Republicans haven't controlled a house of the California state legislature in twenty-four years and there hasn't been a single Republican elected to statewide office in California in ten years. Yet since 2000 Republicans have controlled the Presidency and the U.S. Senate 60 percent of the time and the U.S. House of Representatives 70 percent of the time. For eight of the past twenty years there has even been a Republican trifecta--simultaneous control of the White House and both houses of Congress. While Donald Trump won 46 percent of the national popular vote in 2016, he received a mere 32 percent in California, the third lowest proportion of any state in the country. The day after the election #Calexit became a leading social media hashtag. When campaigning for governor in 2018, Gavin Newsom told voters they were selecting the next "head of the resistance" to the President.

THE PROBLEM IS TAXING INCOME AT ALL:

In late February, Arkansas became the latest state to institute a so-called "convenience of the employer" test. In doing so, it joined states like Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Nebraska, and New York.

The concept of a "convenience of the employer" test is as elegantly simple as it is insultingly illogical. New York, for example, requires employees whose office is located in New York but who work remotely for any period of time to prove that such remote work could not have been performed in their office. If the remote work could have been done in the employee's New York office, the state treats it as work performed in New York for tax purposes.

Of course, there are very few reasons why a remote worker absolutely has to work remotely. Most do so because of the convenience of spending time with family, to make living situations outside of major urban centers feasible, or to avoid lengthy commutes (such as the notorious one into New York City, for example). Remote work subject to "convenience of the employer" tests, therefore, usually incurs tax liability in the state with the test.

The taxpayer falling afoul of this rule may be surprised to discover that they are liable for income taxes to two states for their period of remote work, as the state where the work was actuallyperformed will claim income taxes as well. As a result, these rules can cause unsuspecting taxpayers to get caught between two aggressive tax departments.

Taxpayers who moved to a state with no income tax to do remote work can also find that income taxes follow them nonetheless. The case that led to Arkansas's adoption of a "convenience of the employer" test involved an employee that worked in Arkansas before moving to Washington State (a state with no income tax) to do the same work remotely. Because of Arkansas's "convenience of the employer" test, this employee found that, despite living on the other side of the country, Arkansas still demanded taxes on their income.

WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST:

KKKOTTON:

Cotton railed against Chinese students coming to colleges in the United States to receive an education on Fox News Sunday, arguing that they ultimately return to China and "compete for our jobs" and steal innovative U.S. ideas. He said Chinese students shouldn't be allowed to study sciences in American colleges and universities as punishment...

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

We don't have enough tests for Covid-19 in the U.S. President Donald Trump spent weeks minimizing the threat and still makes comments that undermine his own administration's public-health efforts. Congress has not supplied sufficient funding for relief efforts, and left town without making provision to vote remotely if needed. Some politicians have shown culpable ignorance about the epidemic, while others have overreacted in self-defeating ways.

Americans have a lot of legitimate complaints about the response to the coronavirus. The complaints are worth voicing. Criticism of mistakes can lead to fixing them, or at least preventing their recurrence. (Granted, an opinion columnist has a vested interest in saying that.)

But our justified discontents should not obscure everything for which we should be grateful. In some quarters, there is a mood of bitter disappointment in America. The journalist Julia Ioffe took it as an indictment of our country when we took the lead in confirmed coronavirus cases. Anne Applebaum drew an unflattering contrast between our shutdown of international flights and China's sending aid to Italy: "Who is the superpower?" George Packer wrote an essay in the Atlantic claiming that the epidemic reveals that the U.S. is "a failed state."

All of this is overwrought. International comparisons of confirmed cases tell us little, considering that they don't account for population size, lying governments or discrepancies in detection. The Chinese regime charged suffering European countries high rates for faulty test kits and protective masks, and it bears a lot of the responsibility for the epidemic's having started in the first place. Its standing in Europe has fallen, not risen. Packer dwells so long on the deficiencies of Trump and the Republican Party as to make it sound as though all it will take for us to stop being a failed state is for a few people in the Midwest to vote differently this fall than they did in 2016.

The truth is that for all our mistakes, we are not handling the epidemic in markedly worse fashion than other developed countries.

NEVER GET BETWEEN THELMA AND THE CLIFF:

Joe Biden seems to be inching closer to the White House by simply sitting at home. Although much of the nation has barely heard from the presumptive Democratic nominee since early March, President Donald Trump is struggling to maintain his legitimacy after asking his aides on Thursday whether zapping people with light or injecting them with disinfectants could cure Covid-19. The comments prompted even Fox News anchors to tell their viewers: don't try this at home.

The situation is bleak for the GOP. Republicans are worried about a devastating election in November that might leave Democrats in control of the White House and both chambers of Congress. After a temporary spike in his approval ratings when the crisis started for many Americans, the President's numbers have dropped.

Every day, the nation is exposed to a commander-in-chief who is pressing the gas pedal in a runaway car without control of the wheel.

DONALD, LAST OF HIS TRIBE:

Slavery was a monstrous evil. Yet generations of Americans grew up in communities that accepted it, defended it, and even celebrated it. How many abolitionist arguments did a child of the antebellum South ever hear? If they heard abolitionist arguments, did they hear them portrayed fairly, accurately, and sympathetically? 

Putting aside the power of argument, did the witness of their own eyes and ears--the brutality that was plainly before them--provide them with sufficient cause to say, "No. I shall not defend such evil"? 

Let's put the question differently. Looking realistically at human nature, at the tidal forces of tribe and history, and the immense fallibility of our own hearts, how would each of us answer this question: "If everyone around me is wrong, would I have the wisdom and courage to know and do what's right?"

My Sunday newsletter last week--arguing that Trump-supporting white Evangelicals had abandoned the character test for candidates and were now even abandoning even the expectation of competence--sparked an immense amount of discussion, debate, and even more than a little bit of anger. Some of that anger centered around my repeated use of the term "white Evangelical." Why racialize religious Trump support?

I used the term to be precise and fair. If we want to talk about religious Trump support, we are talking about a distinct American community--not all Evangelicals, but white Evangelicals. I linked to polling showing that most other Evangelicals oppose Trump, even if they have the same theological beliefs as their white brothers and sisters. The disparity is so great, that it raises the question--when speaking of white Evangelical support for Trump, is the truly operative word "white" or "Evangelical"?

I've been thinking a great deal about the incredibly powerful pull of tribe over truth. I just last week finished the final edits of my new book, called Divided We Fall. The theme of the book is simple--our national divisions are growing so great that we cannot take for granted our continued national unity. I spend an extended amount of time talking about a sociological reality that is ripping our nation to shreds--the law of group polarization.

The concept comes from a Cass Sunstein academic paper, published all the way back in 1999. Surveying the relevant social science, Sunstein said, "[I]n a striking empirical regularity, deliberation tends to move groups, and the individuals who compose them, toward a more extreme point in the direction indicated by their own predeliberation judgments."

In plain English, this means that when like-minded people gather, their views get more extreme. Our arguments reinforce one another to such an extent that the entire group will sometimes become more extreme than the most extreme person at the start of the deliberation. Think of it like this--when gun rights advocates (or gun control activists) gather, do they tend to leave the meeting doubting their positions or redoubled in their commitment to advocacy? How many people leave a good Bible study loving Jesus less? 

It's a nonpartisan, human phenomenon, and what's so seductive about it is the fact that we can't perceive the sheer tribalism because it's accompanied by deliberation--by discussion and thought. We fool ourselves into believing our ideas or our intellects are in control when it is often our identity or our history. 

 Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) voted to uphold President Trump's declaration of a "national emergency" to divert money from the military for a border wall that Congress refused to fund. Doing so ran counter to many of the principles he espoused not long ago as a self-identified "constitutional conservative," specifically his outspoken calls for checking the power of the executive branch. Now, it's paying political dividends.

Sasse refused to vote for Trump in the 2016 general election, comparing him to white supremacist David Duke and announcing that he'd write Mike Pence's name in on his ballot. Now he says he'll support the Republican ticket in 2020 and effusively praises the president's judicial nominations. Last night at 9:23 p.m. Eastern, Trump returned the favor, tweeting that "Ben has my Complete and Total Endorsement!"

"Ben Sasse has done a wonderful job representing the people of Nebraska," the president wrote. "He is great with our Vets, the Military, and your very important Second Amendment. Strong on Crime and the Border..."

For Sasse, the past several months have represented something akin to surrender in the war for the soul of modern conservatism. More significant than his voting record is the evolution in Sasse's tone about Trump and his increasingly long periods of silence. He's gone to apparent pains not to be perceived as a Never Trumper or to become a face of the Republican resistance, mostly by flying below the radar and not speaking out against the president on Fox News. His once prolific personal Twitter account has been dark since May. He rarely engages with reporters seeking comment on the story of the day in the corridors of the Capitol.

During the first year of the Trump presidency, Sasse was often snarky about Trump's apostasies. His office has released fewer such statements to the press over time, increasingly avoiding the president by name unless it's a compliment. Last year, Sasse blasted Trump's tariffs as "dumb." Back home during the August recess, he was quoted by small-town papers speaking in a more cautious and measured way about the trade war. Sasse also didn't speak out after Trump tried to bring the Taliban to Camp David on the eve of the 9/11 anniversary, for example, nor as the president fired fellow hawk John Bolton.

Instead of critiquing Trump, Sasse has trained his ire on Nancy Pelosi.

THERE IS NO AFGHANISTAN:

In the document, power was centralized in the hands of an "Amir ul-Momineen," or leader of the faithful. This supreme leader was the head of state and had ultimate authority. This was Mullah Omar, the Taliban's spiritual leader and founder.

The constitution did not describe how such a leader would be selected or for how long he could serve. But it said the supreme leader must be male and a Sunni Muslim.

An Islamic council, handpicked by the supreme leader, would serve as the legislature and implement laws and policy. The government, headed by the head of the council of ministers -- a quasi-prime ministerial position -- would report to the Islamic council.

Under the constitution, Sunni Islam was to be the official state religion, even though some 15 percent of the population are Shi'ite Muslims.

The document stated that no law could be contrary to Islamic Shari'a law.

The constitution granted freedom of expression, women's education, and the right of a fair trial, but all within the limits of the Taliban's strict interpretation of Shari'a law.

It is unclear how the document shaped the Taliban's draconian laws and brutal policies during its Islamic Emirate, the official name of the Taliban regime that ruled Afghanistan from 1996-2001.

The Taliban banned TV and music, forced men to pray and grow beards, forced women to cover themselves from head to toe, and prevented women and girls from working or going to school. The Taliban amputated the hands of thieves, publicly flogged people for drinking alcohol, and stoned to death those who engaged in adultery. Executions were common.

Andrew Watkins, a senior analyst for Afghanistan at the International Crisis Group, said the draft constitution reflects the "Taliban's intensely religious roots" and reveals the importance placed on a "centralized authority" for a group that was "founded on a mission of restoring order to the country."

The document was littered with contradictions and was never ratified.[...]

Analysts said the Taliban's great ambiguity on key issues reflects the divisions within the group.

The Taliban's political leadership based in Pakistan is believed to be more open to an accommodation in assuming power under a peace deal.

Meanwhile, hard-line military commanders on the battlefield in Afghanistan are reluctant to budge on their demands for a full restoration of the Islamic Emirate.

"There is a cocktail of views among the Taliban on power and governance," said Javid Ahmad, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Atlantic Council.

"More than anything, Taliban leaders need an intra-Taliban dialogue to settle their conflicting views about a future Afghan state," Ahmad added.

There are also intense differences among the Afghan political elite.

Pashtuns, the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan, generally support a centralized state that guarantees their control of the government. But non-Pashtuns, which constitute a majority of the population, believe too much power of the state is left in the hands of one individual, and support decentralization because it would enshrine a more inclusive and equitable distribution of power.

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

 Like anyone with access to classified information, he signed a prepublication-review agreement. Each government agency that allowed Bolton access to its information--and, in the case of a national-security adviser, that would have been virtually all of them--has the right to review his manuscript and to excise purportedly improper disclosures. Bolton left the government on bad terms with Trump, and it looks like the Administration may be taking revenge through the review process. Charles Cooper, Bolton's lawyer, has already complained about how the Administration is delaying and revising Bolton's book, and his publication date has already slipped from March to May. But there's no guarantee that the review process will even be finished by May, either. (Cooper and a spokeswoman for Simon & Schuster declined to comment.) [...]

[I]f he had testified, most of his story would already be out in the open, and the Administration would have no grounds to claim that it was still classified since he had already revealed it in testimony to Congress. In other words, by ducking public testimony, Bolton protected the commercial value of his book, but he left himself at the mercy of the prepublication-review process. That may turn out to have been a bad bet.

DIDN'T GIVE AWAY HIS BEST RIM SHOT:

He was hired by Stevie Wonder as his live drummer and came into the orbit of Motown Records, who later employed him as a bandleader. His group Bohannon & The Motown Sound backed numerous label stars on tour, including Marvin Gaye, the Four Tops, the Temptations, and Diana Ross and the Supremes ("I've never been to heaven, but I bet that's pretty close," Bohannon once said of the latter).

After Motown moved to Los Angeles, he stayed in the label's first home of Detroit and started a solo career, beginning with 1973 album Stop & Go, and eventually released 19 studio albums by the end of the 1980s. He struggled to cross over in the US pop market - only one of his singles reached the Top 100 - but he became a mainstay in the disco boom of the mid-1970s onwards with tracks like Let's Start the Dance.

He had three Top 40 hits in the UK: South African Man, Foot Stompin' Music and Disco Stomp, the latter reaching No 6 in 1975.

He became a cult favourite among his fellow musicians, with Tom Tom Club respectfully chanting his name over and over in their hit Genius of Love; artists including Mary J Blige, Jay-Z, Justin Timberlake and Snoop Dogg have all sampled his tracks. He is seen as helping to pioneer the "four-four" beat that powered disco and later house and techno, and the octave-jumping groove of Me and the Gang became the core of Paul Johnson's house hit Get Get Down, a UK No 5 hit in 1999.

TOTALLY NOT A CULT:

Wait, what did Bill Gates do? https://t.co/cnZbdh2gwX

— Chris Cillizza (@CillizzaCNN) April 26, 2020

LAUGHINGSTOCK:

https://t.co/h3mecmxN8p

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) April 26, 2020

THANKS, DONALD!:

A newly released poll shows that 69 percent of registered voters support Medicare for All, a plan which would create a national health insurance plan available for all Americans.

The poll also showed 46 percent of Republican voters supporting Medicare for All alongside 88 percent of Democrats and 68 percent of Independents.[...]

The coronavirus epidemic has raised awareness about flaws in the American health insurance system as many people who lost their jobs due to stay-at-home and social distancing measures also lost their health insurance. Without insurance, many Americans fear getting sick or injured because of the potentially devastating financial impact it could have.

Tying insurance to employment also burdens businesses with healthcare and insurance administration costs that can be expensive and time-consuming, according to The Wall Street Journal. Employment-based insurance also reduces wages and increases overhead as insurance premiums and deductibles continue to rise, according to the New York Times.

LULA'S CELL IS AVAILABLE:

Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro suffered the heaviest blow to his presidency so far as his popular justice minister quit on Friday and accused him of potentially criminal meddling in law enforcement, adding to the turmoil of a government struggling to confront a fast-growing coronavirus outbreak.

Sergio Moro, who won broad public support for jailing corrupt politicians and businessmen as a judge, said he was resigning because Bolsonaro fired federal police chief Mauricio Valeixo for personal and political reasons.

The shocking exit and allegations from the so-called 'super minister' were a hammer blow for Bolsonaro, whose popularity had already slumped for downplaying the pandemic that has killed more than 3,600 Brazilians and shows signs of worsening.

IF VLAD WAS DESIGNING HIS PERFECT PRESIDENT...:

THANKS, DONALD!:

This is bad...

"Spike in NYC residents ingesting householder cleaners: Poison Control Center" - New York Daily News https://t.co/lpfLPg2s49

— S.E. Cupp (@secupp) April 25, 2020

DONALD WHO?:

CRASS IN POCKET:

THANKS, DONALD!:

The Food and Drug Administration warned consumers Friday against taking malaria drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19 outside a hospital or formal clinical trial setting after "serious" poisoning and deaths were reported. 

The agency said it became aware of reports of "serious heart rhythm problems" in patients with the virus who were treated with the malaria drugs, often in combination with antibiotic azithromycin, commonly known as a Z-Pak. It also warned physicians against prescribing the drugs to treat the coronavirus outside of a hospital.

"Hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine can cause abnormal heart rhythms such as QT interval prolongation and a dangerously rapid heart rate called ventricular tachycardia," the agency wrote in the notice. "We will continue to investigate risks associated with the use of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine for COVID-19 and communicate publicly when we have more information.′

FORGET CLIMATE CHANGE...:

Early environmentalism in the 1970s helped focus societies on priorities such as polluted rivers - the Cuyahoga River in the United States famously caught fire in 1969 - and fouled air, with soot and smog killing millions.

Here, we have made great strides. Most bodies of water in rich countries are much cleaner, since we are prosperous enough to clean up our domestic messes. In the U.S., for instance, a recent comprehensive study showed that "water pollution concentrations have fallen substantially" over the past 50 years. And a stunning 3.8 billion people around the world have gained access to clean drinking water since 1970.

Air pollution, the world's biggest environmental killer, has seen even greater improvements. Outdoor air pollution has declined dramatically in rich countries, due in no small measure to attention from 1970's Earth Day and subsequent actions such as the landmark U.S. Clean Air Act later that year.

For the world's poor, the most deadly air pollution is indoors. Almost three billion of the world's poorest people still cook and keep warm with dirty fuels such as dung, cardboard and wood, and the World Health Organization estimates the effects are equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes each day.

But since 1970, the death risk across the world from indoor air pollution has been cut by more than half.

Despite the amazing progress, both indoor and outdoor air pollution still kill seven million people each year. At least two billion people still use drinking water sources contaminated by feces. So, for the next 50 years, we still have our work cut out for us. Things are far better, but they are still not okay.

REPUBLICAN LIBERTY:

Herbert Spencer's starting premise, as stated time and again in Social Statics, is, "Every man has freedom to do as he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man" (p. 95). He argues that whether the starting point is a belief in God and God's purpose for man, or whether we rely, instead, on our reason and reflection on the nature and desire of any and all men, the conclusion that we can readily reach is that the purpose of all of us is wanting the achievement of happiness. Which one of us as normal human beings do not want to be happy?

But the pursuit of happiness, he says, requires the exercise of our mental and physical faculties, and to do so, each of us must be at liberty to decide upon the ends that may move us closer to that happiness and the best means as we see them to try to approach that end. Only individuals possessing the greatest latitude to act as they peacefully wish can ever have the chance to fulfill some aspect of that element in our human make-up that cries out to be happier than we may be. 

If each of us is to have the freedom to pursue that happiness, this requires seeing a boundary beyond which anyone of us may not go, and that is an abridgement of every other individual's right and liberty to do the same. This demands, as Spencer says, "that each man shall have the greatest freedom compatible with the like freedom of all others" (pp. 75-76). Or as Spencer more clearly explains his view of man in society:

Liberty of action being the first essential to exercise of faculties, and therefore the first essential of happiness; and the liberty of each limited by the like liberty of all being the form which this first essential assumes when applied to many instead of to one, it follows that this liberty of each, limited by the like liberty of all, is the rule of conformity with which society must be organized. Freedom being the prerequisite to normal life for the individual, equal freedom becomes the prerequisite to normal life in society. And . . . this law of equal freedom is the primary law of right relationships between man and man . . .(p.79)

From this starting point, Spencer proceeds to explain the how and the why of each individual's right to his life and personal liberty, to his right to private property peacefully acquired in a setting of respecting each's equal freedom, and how this includes the right of free association and exchange for mutual betterment and pursuit of happiness in a way that violates the equal freedom of none, and improves the chances of each. 

DO LESS:

Vinay Prasad on Cancer Drugs, Medical Ethics, and Malignant https://t.co/3xUjGKENYC A spectacularly good listen on how the "War on Cancer" is essentially a war on ourselves.

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) April 24, 2020

THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

Consider how he describes presidential authority. At a recent press briefing, he suggested that he could order states to reopen businesses. "The federal government has absolute power ... I have the absolute right to do if I want to." He has often made similar claims, including his assertion that he has an "absolute right" to seek foreign investigations of American political figures-an offense that triggered the first article of his impeachment. 

Absolute power was precisely what the Founders sought to avoid. The word "absolute" appears three times in the Declaration, always to proclaim what the patriots were fighting against: "absolute Despotism," "absolute Tyranny," and "absolute rule." 

Trump's threat to adjourn Congress calls to mind the Declaration's charge that George III had "dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people."

To prevent anyone from gaining absolute power, the Constitution included elaborate checks on the government and provided that all officials would be accountable for their actions. Alexander Hamilton wrote that a British monarch "is the absolute master of his own conduct in the exercise of his office," whereas in a republic, "every magistrate ought to be personally responsible for his behavior in office."

A UNIVERSAL PROGRAM IS PERFECTLY CONSISTENT WITH REPUBLICAN LIBERTY:

All the way back in 1968, William F. Buckley Jr. published a little book called Gratitude. Subtitled "Reflections On What We Owe To Our Country," the book was Buckley's attempt to propose a Switzerland-style national-service program for America's youth, born out of his concern that the younger generation lacked responsibility and patriotism. No doubt fully aware of the controversy that his proposal would ignite among many of his fellow travelers on the political right, Buckley wrote:

The conviction of some conservatives that the state can't have a genuine, non-predatory interest in the cultivation of virtue strikes me as an anarchical accretion in modern conservative thought, something that grew from too humorless a reading of such spirited individualists as Albert Jay Nock and H.L. Mencken. . . . National service, if transformed merely into a state bureaucracy with huge powers of intimidation, is not only to be avoided, but to be fought. But we can open our minds to something other than a statist program, or one that lodges in the state the kind of power conservatives have been taught, at great historical expense, to husband for social uses.

So conscious was Buckley of the ire that his argument would provoke from the libertarian faction of the conservative coalition, he wrote an entire chapter entitled "Anticipating the Libertarian Argument." Despite his support for free markets, he begrudgingly acknowledged the limitations of economic liberty. "The deep wellsprings of patriotism are fed by other forces, and these do not leave fingerprints in the market," he wrote. "They must be investigated by the use of entirely different instruments."

This is similar to a view that many of the more market-skeptical Burkean traditionalists have expressed in contemporary intra-conservative debates: the idea that the state has a vested interest in protecting and even proactively nurturing our civic institutions, placing some aspects of our cultural inheritance beyond the reach of the creative destruction that is inherent to any dynamic liberal society. It's a view that stems from a particular concern for what Buckley called "connections between the individual and the community beyond those that relate either to the state or to the marketplace."

IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSTATE DEFLATIONARY PRESSURES:

Not so long ago, the prevailing thinking in industry was that the lowest-cost manufacturing was large, mass manufacturing in low-labor-cost countries like China. At the time, in the early 2000s, only Fortune 500 companies and major research universities had access to 3D printers. The machines were massive, expensive tools used to rapidly prototype parts and products.

More than a decade ago, the patents expired on the first type of 3D printing, and a professor in Britain had the intriguing idea of making a 3D printer that could print itself. He started the RepRap project - short for self-replicating rapid prototyper - and released the designs with open-source licenses on the web. The designs spread like wildfire and were quickly hacked and improved upon by thousands of engineers and hobbyists all over the world.

Many of these makers started their own companies to produce variants of these 3D printers, and people can now buy a 3D printer for US$250 to $550. Today's 3D printers are full-fledged additive manufacturing robots, which build products one layer at a time. Additive manufacturing is infiltrating many industries.

TOTALLY NOT A CULT:

In mid-April 2020, it appeared, a new movement was rising to express frustration with the restrictions and uncertain endpoint to the pandemic, and the economic toll the lockdown has caused.

In the space of several days, there were protests in a dozen states, ranging from a crowd of more than 2,000 who gathered in Olympia, Washington, to several dozen in Annapolis, Maryland.

The available evidence suggests that the demonstrations were organized by paid political operatives using Facebook and new websites to encourage conservatives to protest in specific places against specific governors who had imposed strong public health restrictions on economic activity. This context indicates that one real intention of the protests was to create the illusion of an organic movement that had arisen to object to the restrictions. Evidence is to the contrary: Polling shows that just 12% of Americans think their local restrictions have gone too far - and 26% think they don't go far enough.

Sparked by citizen inquiries first posted on Reddit, independent investigative reporter Brian Krebs has confirmed that most of the web domains that had been registered around the idea of "reopening" the economy belonged to a very small number of people. He used a cybersecurity search tool to search for "any and all domains registered in the past month that begin with "reopen" and end in ".com." He found that many of them were created on the same day.

He found that many of these websites, whose registration records you can see yourself at Whois.com, were owned by anti-gun-control groups that are run by the same family of brothers that organized the demonstrations through Facebook groups they run.

Several others of the "reopen" websites were registered with addresses or phone numbers used by longstanding conservative enterprises like Freedom Works. A surprising number belonged to an activist who told Mother Jones that he registered the domains to keep conservatives from using them to counter the recommendation of public health officials.

IT'S EVEN EASIER TO DO NOTHING FROM HOME:

​In our nation's capital region, DC and its suburbs, the divide is especially pronounced. Just before DC's mayor and Virginia's governor issued stay-at-home orders, practically all businesses had already shut down voluntarily. But I ventured out to the city one day and was surprised by what I saw: while the professionals had disappeared--the lobbyists and think-tankers and journalists and other non-essential workers--groundskeepers and maintenance staff were out in force, as many of them or even more than usual, tending to decorative greenery and the facades of the professionals' buildings. I took the Metro, the DC subway, back home, and noticed that two things had changed. The trains were less crowded than normal but actually more crowded than they had been a week earlier: this was because the Metro system was running fewer trains, which logically enough meant that people who still had to go to work were packed onto the few that were still running. Those people who still had to go to work, or to use the Metro for other reasons, were not the white professional commuters, but mostly black and Hispanic service workers: maintenance men and others.

​But if COVID-19 is so dangerous that people with six-figure incomes can't go to work, why is it any less dangerous for non-whites who earn less than half as much? Why the hell were ferns still being planted outside ritzy office buildings? These workers were lucky to still have jobs, but their ongoing labor was a sign of just how selectively serious the professional classes really is about the disease. They get angry if anyone from their own class, or anyone in red-state America, doesn't stay home and quiver to the appropriate wavelength of fear. But they evidently don't think anything of people in the classes below them, not only the ones who are out of work but the ones who are still working just to keep up the appearances that are so beloved to the professional class. (God forbid some gray slab of masonry, steel, and glass should lack a fern or two to remind us that we're all truly eco-sensitive.)

​Since the shelter-in-place orders came into effect, I've seen the same thing in the suburbs where I live. Groundskeepers are out with leaf blowers and lawn-mowers, while professionals don't exit their apartments until it's time to take the poodle out for a poop or to go for a jog and spread sweat and heavy breathing around the community. (But that's professional-class sweat, so it's germ-free.) The whole thing is a transparent farce: either progressive professional types don't believe their own hype, and are simply indulging in a bit of harmless (for them) disaster fantasy, or they are morally far worse than the mild skeptics and conservatives who call for more than just the hedge-trimmers to go back to work.

You can either believe that things are safe enough for cautious professionals to work, as well as the groundsmen, or you can believe that things are so dangerous that no lawn-mowing or leaf-blowing should take place.

THE TRUMP BRAND (profanity alert):

ALL THE BATTLEGROUNDS ARE RED:

 His campaign's internal polling shows that the president's initial bump in managing the virus has dissipated, according to a person familiar with the results. An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released over the weekend revealed that voters thought Biden would do a better job than Trump in managing the virus by a 9-point margin, and new surveys show Trump trailing Biden in Florida, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Alarm about Trump's standing is trickling to down-ballot races. A Fox News poll released earlier this week showed the GOP candidate trailing 13 percentage points in the Michigan Senate race, a contest the party has been targeting aggressively.

"Historically, it is important for the president to be competitive in battleground states not just for his own race, but to enable an environment that is strong enough for statewide and down-ballot candidates to have the footing they need to run successful campaigns," said Nick Everhart, a veteran Republican strategist.

YEAH, BUT IT'S SCIENCE!:

On Tuesday, Dan Baldassarre, an assistant professor at the State University of New York at Oswego, announced that his research paper answering "What's the Deal with Birds?" had been published in the Scientific Journal of Research & Reviews. It breaks down three different types of birds by their weirdness, though its actual purpose isn't really about birds at all.

Right off the bat, Baldassarre's article is a gem. "Birds are very strange," it declares, but "the relative weirdness of birds as opposed to other animals is yet untested." "I looked at three different birds: a woodpecker, a parrot, and a penguin," which were "animals that I knew for sure were birds, and no other things like bugs and bats," Baldassarre explains. The article continues in a similar vein, complete with a weirdness matrix diagram. 

TROUBLE IS HIS BUSINESS:

The strange thing, for me, is that people whose sunk costs are not nearly as great as those of Marian Keech's followers will often exhibit precisely the same tenacity in the face of evidence that questions, or might reasonably cause them to question, their preferred narrative.

I suspect, but do not know, that the informational triage required by our hypersaturated media ecosystem--by the overcrowding of what Matt Crawford has called the "informational commons"--makes us more resistant to changing our minds than our ancestors were. (Despite the popular conception of those who have gone before us as narrow, rigid, stubborn.) In their superb book Intellectual Virtues, Robert Roberts and Jay Wood describe the virtue of intellectual firmness, which lies between the opposed vices of rigidity and flaccidity. I can't imagine a better question for me to ask myself in our strange moment than this: How, in this moment, may I achieve genuine intellectual firmness? 

After some reflection on that question, I have decided to adopt a new hero: Ross Macdonald's fictional detective, Lew Archer. My shelter-in-place reading has shifted from tales of horror to the Library of America's three-volume collection of Macdonald's Archer novels, and reading so many of these novels in sequence has me noting certain themes. (One, unrelated to this essay, is that Archer gets knocked on the head a lot, usually by pistols, sometimes by blackjacks. How he doesn't develop CTE is beyond me.) The chief of these themes is this: At some point in each novel, Archer has acquired sufficient evidence to have a clear, sometimes an utterly compelling, sense of who has committed the crime or crimes he is investigating--and then he doesn't stop looking. That's the key. No matter how compelling the narrative he has developed, no matter how neatly the ducks are lining up in their row, he continues to investigate. And then, detective novels being what they are, at some point he acquires new evidence that sends the ducks scattering. That is to say, Archer holds his narrative firmly but not rigidly; he has the perseverance to acquire new information and the humility and honesty to alter his understanding of events in light of the new information he has acquired. 

Lew Archer, I say, should be the hero of our time. I plead with you: Be like Archer. 

THE LOSING OF WWI:

SOUNDS LIKE SOMEBODY BOUGHT STOCK IN TIDE PODS:

The medical community has slammed  President Donald Trump after he suggested injecting people with disinfectant could treat coronavirus. 

During yesterday's White House press briefing, citing new research delivered by senior Homeland Security science and technology advisor William Bryan, the president said it 'would be interesting' to see if mainlining disinfectant into the lungs could eradicate the pathogen.    

Pulmonologist and disease specialist Dr Vin Gupta warned the public on NBC News that Trump's idea could lead to death. 

'This notion of injecting or ingesting any type of cleansing product into the body is irresponsible and it's dangerous,' he said. 

SUPER ON BRAND:

The man President Donald Trump just named to speak for the Health Department accused George Soros and the Rothschild family of seeking to exploit the pandemic for control and to advance their agendas. [...]

On March 15, Caputo responded to a far-right figure, Jack Prosobiec, who wondered on Twitter why George Soros, the liberal philanthropist was ready to give to his favored political causes but not to efforts to combat the coronavirus.

"Are you kidding? Soros's political agenda REQUIRES a pandemic," Caputo said. Soros has given tens of millions of dollars to coronavirus relief.

On March 27, Caputo tweeted a photo of Soros captioned "The real virus behind everything," and added skulls and crossbones.

PEZ WOULD BE BETTER:

In this randomized controlled trial, the researchers recruited 237 hospitalized COVID-19 patients; 158 were treated with remdesivir, and 79 received a placebo. (The study initially aimed to enroll 463 patients, but the researchers could not find enough recruits.) The abstract reports that "remdesivir use was not associated with a difference in time to clinical improvement and mortality at 28 days." In fact, while it's not a statistically significant difference, the mortality rate for patients treated with remdesivir was slightly higher than the rate in the placebo cohort--13.9 percent rather than 12.8 percent.

SUPER ON BRAND:

BAN CARS PERMANENTLY:

WHERE'S GENERAL RENO WHEN WE NEED HER:

A rally Monday in Augusta, the state capital of Maine, was organized in part by Larry Lockman, a white nationalist former state lawmaker who in 2017 warned that proposed immigrant welcome centers were tantamount to a "war on whites." 

According to Maine-based journalist Nathan Bernard, Lockman helped coordinate Monday's anti-shutdown event on the "Mainers Against Excessive Quarantine" Facebook page, where he encouraged attendees to show up to the rally wearing MAGA gear. "This is about the loss of our civil rights and its impact on our businesses and religion," he wrote in one post. 

Bernard reported seeing Lockman coordinating a group of unmasked protesters at the rally Monday.

In Columbus, Ohio, two men were photographed at an anti-shutdown protest holding up an anti-Semitic sign depicting Jews as rats, calling them "the real plague." The Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism believes one of the men belongs to the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement. 

According to the ADL, this individual was photographed at a 2019 white power rally with Timothy Wilson, who was killed by federal agents last month during an attempted arrest over his alleged plot to bomb a Missouri hospital during the pandemic in order to attract attention to his white supremacist views. 

A "Reopen Florida" protest scheduled for this weekend in Miami was organized by a leader of the neo-fascist street gang The Proud Boys, the Miami New Times reported this week. 

Enrique Tarrio, a longtime Proud Boy, admitted to the New Times that he'd organized the rally, which he's advertised as being "against the Democrat-driven unconstitutional lockdown."

Members of the Proud Boys -- a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate group originally founded by bigot Gavin McInnes -- have deep ties to a host of white nationalist and militia groups, and are best known for violently attacking their political opponents. 

Proud Boys have also been spotted at anti-shutdown protests in Colorado, Nevada, Ohio and Michigan. At the rally in Lansing, Michigan, Proud Boys were allegedly among the attendees blocking ambulances from being able to reach a hospital. 

Also in Michigan -- as noted by reporter Jason Wilson in The Guardian -- were members of the Michigan Liberty Militia, whose Facebook page Wilson notes "features pictures of firearms, warnings of civil war, celebrations of Norse paganism and memes ultimately sourced from white nationalist groups like Patriot Front."

SHE'S A REPUBLICAN APPOINTEE:

Justice Elena Kagan shocked the world on Monday when she joined a dissent by Justice Samuel Alito that would've made Robert Bork proud. In Ramos v. Louisiana, Alito contested the Supreme Court's 6-3 decision striking down split verdicts, which allow conviction by a nonunanimous jury. Kagan, a Barack Obama appointee, typically sides with the court's liberal wing on civil rights and criminal law. Yet here she was, joining a reactionary dissent defending an unjust practice rooted in bigotry. Civil libertarians were understandably disappointed, baffled, angry, skeptical, and saddened.

Kagan's vote in Ramos really shouldn't have come as a surprise: The justice crosses ideological lines in divided decisions more frequently than any of her liberal colleagues do. She's also a pragmatist with a fierce commitment to precedent who will follow her principles even when they lead to an outcome she dislikes. 

FL IS IN THE BAG; TX IS THE BATTLEGROUND:

Joe Biden is ahead in another poll surveying Florida voters, a potential problem for President Trump's reelection campaign.

Biden, the presumptive 2020 Democratic presidential nominee, notches up 46% support in Florida to Trump's 42%, according to a Quinnipiac University poll published Wednesday.

Florida's 29 Electoral College votes are critical to Trump's efforts to secure the 270 he needs to reclaim the White House in November.

Yet in Quinnipiac's survey, Biden has an edge over Trump with independents, who could swing the contest. The two-term vice president draws 44% of the group, while the incumbent attracts 37%. Biden also has an advantage on Trump when it comes to voters older than 65, winning the demographic 52% to 42%. In 2016, Trump dominated the age bracket with 57% to then-Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton's 40%.

NEVER IN PLAY:

President Trump's approval rating is not the only big-picture national indicator that has not changed much over the course of his presidency.

The national House generic ballot has also been very consistent for the three-plus years he's been in the White House.

Democrats have led almost every single one of the nearly 400 House generic ballot national polls released since Trump took office, as compiled in the 2018 and 2020 RealClearPolitics averages.

The lion's share of these polls, about 310, were released during the 2018 cycle, while close to 90 have come out in this cycle. Because the House is less of a focus in this year's presidential election cycle, it's natural that the generic ballot question is being asked less.

The wording from different pollsters varies, but the generic ballot question usually asks whether a respondent plans to vote for a Democrat or a Republican in their local House of Representatives election.

Out of 309 polls included in the 2018 database, 305 showed Democratic leads; three were tied and another showed a Republican lead of one point. Out of 88 polls this cycle, 87 have shown a Democratic lead, and one has shown a tie. The current RealClearPolitics average shows a Democratic lead of 7.4 points, almost exactly the same as its final average in 2018.

According to FiveThirtyEight's averages in both 2018 and 2020, the Democratic lead has been in the mid-to-high single digits for almost all of the last three years (the site's 2018 average dates back to April 2017).

THERE'S A REASON THE rIGHT BLAMES UPPITY BORROWERS...:

One conservative economist blamed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for making it possible for lenders to make "sloppy loans" since they "knew those mortgages could be bundled into securities and sold" to the two quasi-governmental entities. This stance is a popular one among conservatives, but it ignores a rush into housing that was global in nature, and that took place in countries where there was no Fannie or Freddie. After that, it's worth pointing out that housing soared in England even though the mortgage interest deduction was jettisoned there back in the 1980s. Housing boomed in Canada even though it's long been very difficult for borrowers to access home loans there.

Furthermore, the argument ignores the simple truth that a substantial majority of those allegedly "sloppy loans" performed. As Blackstone co-founder Stephen Schwarzman pointed out in his excellent new book, What It Takes, mortgage loan performance was over 90%. That it was is and was a statement of the obvious. Banks, precisely because they're not equity lenders, must issue loans that will be paid back.

They were in trouble not because the loans were generally sloppy, but because even a small percentage of bad loans can render a bank insolvent. Furthermore, it rates stress that even without Fannie and Freddie, demand for bundled mortgages was already extraordinarily high; as in even if Fannie and Freddie hadn't been size buyers of these securities, demand for them well outstripped supply as is. They were seen as safe. Banks and investment banks had lots of exposure to them precisely because they were seen as safe. John Paulson's billions are today evidence of just how safe they were seen to be. It only took a brief change in the perception about loans that largely performed for Paulson to make his fortune. 

WHAT VIRUS?:

TOTALLY NOT A DEATH CULT:

Watching Sean Hannity is worse than smoking three packs a day https://t.co/xArAjLvWt4 via @MotherJones

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) April 22, 2020

THE ORANGE CEILING:

The latest survey from Reuters and Ipsos, which was conducted from April 15 to 21, showed that 47 percent of registered voters backed Biden while just 39 percent said they'd support Trump in the presidential election. 

IT'S ENTIRELY ARBITRARY:

Doing "whatever it takes" to save the global economy from the coronavirus pandemic is going to cost a lot of money. The U.S. government alone is spending a few trillion dollars, and the Federal Reserve is creating another few trillion dollars to keep the financial system from collapsing. A custom Bloomberg index measuring M2 figures for 12 major economies including the U.S., China, euro zone and Japan shows their aggregate money supply had already more than doubled to $80 trillion from before the 2008-2009 financial crisis. 

These numbers are so large that they no longer have any meaning; they are simply abstractions. It's been some time since people thought about the concept of money and its purpose. The broad idea is that money has value, but that value is not arbitrary. 

THE GREEN NEW DEAL LACKS ANBITION:

It would be nice to think that the federal Liberal Party could share a similar vision. But whether clouded by the interests of ideologues or donors, or the fossil fuel industry, the federal Coalition won't contemplate the idea that a renewables based grid could be made to work. Like a petulant child struggling with Lego blocks, it can't imagine what the finished product might be.

South Australia is happy to show them, Having closed down its coal plant in 2016, and supported the introduction of the country's first big battery in 2017, the state has arguably the country's most reliable grid, and in the last six months one of the cheapest on the wholesale market. And it is producing well in excess of 50 per cent of its electricity consumption from wind and solar.

Pretty soon, it might be providing the equivalent of close to 100 per cent of its electricity consumption from variable renewables, even allowing for the times when the wind don't blow and the sun don't shine.

The state Liberal government aims to reach "net 100 per cent renewables" - effectively producing the annual equivalent of its consumption with wind and solar, and using a new link to NSW to help it export the excess, and import when needed - by around 2030.

WITCH HUNTS ARE A FUNCTION OF WITCHES:

In all of Attorney General Barr's statements--both written and verbal--during his release of the Mueller report, he studiously avoided mentioning the fact that Russian interference was designed to support Trump. In addition, both Barr and Trump's enablers in the media have suggested that the assessment was the result of bias against the president and that the Steele dossier was incorporated into its findings. The goal has been to lay all of those failures at the feet of Brennan and claim that his intentions were to take down Donald Trump.

On Tuesday, the Senate Intelligence Committee released the fourth volume of their bipartisan investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. This one focused on the intelligence community assessment, dropping a bombshell on every one of those accusations. Here are some of the key findings:

* The Committee found the ICA presents a coherent and well-constructed intelligence basis for the case of unprecedented Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

* In all the interviews of those who drafted and prepared the ICA, the Committee heard consistently that analysts were under no politically motivated pressure to reach specific conclusions.

* The Committee found that the ICA provides a proper representation of the intelligence collected by CIA, NSA, and FBI on Russian interference in 2016, and this body of evidence supports the substance and judgments of the ICA.

* The Committee found that the information provided by Christopher Steele to FBI was not used in the body of the ICA or to support any of its analytic judgments. However, a summary of this material was included in Annex A as a compromise to FBI's insistence that the information was responsive to the presidential tasking.

It is hard to imagine a more thorough debunking of the insinuations we've heard from Barr and Trump's media enablers. The Republican Senators who signed on to this report include Richard Burr, James Risch, Marco Rubio, Susan Collins, Roy Blunt, Tom Cotton, John Cornyn, and Ben Sasse, making claims that it was a partisan smear job completely untenable.

JUST DATA:

Sundquist's Sports VTS QBSIM is a VR football training prototype that prioritizes quarterback instruction. It builds animated visuals like those used in flight simulators. Strivr, another VR device founded by former Stanford kicker Derek Belch, already counts eight NFL teams -- including the Arizona Cardinals and Pittsburgh Steelers -- among its clients. Then there's Catapult Sports, whose technology is used by 30 NFL teams and a few hundred collegiate programs. Strivr and Catapult Sports record practice footage, primarily from the quarterback pocket, that later transports players onto the field in VR. Carson Palmer, Drew Brees, Case Keenum and others have praised VR training.

"The guys who really excel are the guys who develop all facets of the game, including their cognitive abilities and decision-making," says Michael Casale, Strivr's chief science officer. "Most guys just don't show up to the NFL with that ... So who are the guys who are really willing to learn, how quickly will they learn, etc.? ... Those are things we can uniquely measure in VR." [...]

The technology could help teams gain insights they don't currently have about quarterbacks. "This is a way to get all that information," says CBS college football analyst and former UCLA head coach Rick Neuheisel. "You'd be astounded at how many coaches and players are out there that are still fooling people as to what they really know."

Coaches who taste success usually become fearful of disrupting a winning formula, says Sundquist. Then there's paranoia. Pac-12 and Power 5 college programs didn't embrace Strivr initially, worried the company might leak their playbooks to Stanford, where Strivr started. That changed once quarterbacks spoke out about the benefits of VR. "I am all in on this," Arizona Cardinals QB Carson Palmer has said about Strivr.

These VR tools don't tell teams exactly how quarterbacks will react on the field. Catapult Sports realized QBs were reading defenses and moving through progressions more quickly in VR than on the practice field. Eye-tracking software told them why. "In real life, after I look at the linebacker and I look at the safety, I have to look down at the center," says Ted Ellikson, product owner at Catapult. "We realized in VR, nobody had to look down and catch the ball."

Here lies Sports VTS's innovation: It puts the ball in the quarterback's hands and demands they throw it and move their feet. OptiTrack cameras, used recently in Disney's The Lion King, surround the player, following his movements and the flight of the ball in real life.

You can measure against any defense imaginable, to understand a quarterback's true operating system. Can your QB find weaknesses in quarters coverage? What about Cover-2? A partnership with Pro Football Focus allows Sports VTS software to use PFF data from past NFL games. Test your quarterback against the New England Patriots defense in a two-minute drill or face the Seattle Seahawks Legion of Boom. Or insert a player into a scenario designed to confuse him.

"All that's not subjective, it's just data," says Mike Wagle, CEO of Sports VTS.

THE HEROES BEHIND THE MASKS:

It was her scheduled day off from the intensive care unit at a hospital in Phoenix, where she takes care of patients who have contracted COVID-19.

She found out that morning that a rally was planned at the Arizona Capitol building. People weary of schools and businesses across the state being closed because of the new coronavirus were going to call for closures to be lifted and the state to be reopened.

Lauren Leander texted a few nurses she knew, seeing if anyone wanted to join her there.

Leander had seen photos of medical workers at similar rallies in other states, their presence serving as a counterweight to calls to reopen businesses. She was inspired to do the same at the rally in her home state on Monday.

"That was the kind of action we could take against something like this," Leander said.

She would spend the next few hours standing silent, her facial expressions partly hidden behind her medical mask. Her body standing rigid in surgical scrubs.

Leander said she heard a stream of insults from rallygoers. People accused her of being an actor. Or, if a real nurse, one who performed dentistry. Or performed abortions.

WE NEED THEM MORE THAN THEY NEED US:

Faced with a shortage of manpower as a result of the closure of its borders, Italy is looking to legalise the status of 200,000 migrants who live in the country illegally.

The agricultural sector is particularly badly affected by a shortage of labour after 300,000 seasonal workers were stranded outside the country, the majority were due to arrive from Eastern Europe.

Immigrants make up about 17 percent of the U.S. labor force, but they are not evenly distributed across all sectors. They disproportionately work in service jobs - including as health care workers in hospitals and assisted living facilities - as well as construction, agriculture, and meat processing. The jobs they occupy are often low-paid but essential.

Most immigrant workers have legal status, but in some jobs, undocumented workers make up a significant portion of the work force. And in this pandemic, those workers are especially crucial to putting food on our tables, risking their lives in appallingly unsafe conditions so that we can continue to eat. Outbreaks at meat processing plants in Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, and elsewhere threaten to disrupt the supply of meat nationwide. Does President Trump seriously believe that Americans will be lining up to take jobs on poultry processing or hog butchering lines, standing shoulder to shoulder with each other on cement floors slick with blood and viscera for 8 to 12 hours a day? When summer comes, will Americans take to the lettuce and tomato fields to bend over, harvesting our vegetables under the 95-degree sun? With unemployment compensation available, would you? [...]

While most immigrants work in the service economy, a 2018 study by the Brookings Institution indicates that nearly a third of our STEM workers and students are also immigrants or the children of immigrants. When researchers find a vaccine or treatment for COVID-19, we shouldn't be surprised that an immigrant or first generation American will be on the team, or even leading it.

In the meantime, the orderlies, nurses, and doctors caring for patients in hospitals around the country are increasingly likely to be foreign born, with immigrants accounting for almost a third of physicians and nearly 40 percent of health aid workers, according to a study by the Migration Policy Institute. This is no time for President Trump to be riling up his base when immigrants are literally risking their lives to save us all.

GIVEN HOW UNPOPULAR THE TOP OF THE TICKET IS...:

Arizona Republican Representative Shawnna Bolick may be kept off the ballot during the next election because of a lawsuit which claims Bolick listed the address of a UPS Store as her primary residence on her nomination petitions. Because she swore the information was true under penalty of perjury, her address listing on the forms may have made Bolick ineligible to run. [...]

Arizona's Democrats have not had control of the House of Representatives since 1966. That could change if incumbent Bolick is removed from the ballot. Currently, there are 31 Republicans and 29 Democrats in the state House.

If one Democrat wins a seat in the House, that would put the House at an even split between parties. If two Democrats win seats, then the Democrats would gain the majority.

NO ONE JUST HATES MEXICANS:

Reporting out Monday shed new light on the fact that millions of U.S. citizens are not eligible to receive coronavirus stimulus checks because of who they married.

This large group, as the Los Angeles Times reported, is made of American citizens who file taxes jointly with a spouse who uses an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number--an identification the IRS issues to workers who don't have a Social Security Number.

Those with ITINs include those who are undocumented and those who may be in the legalization process.

The block means that not only will the adult in the mixed status home not be eligible for their $1,200 check but the household itself will also not receive a $500 per child payment that was part of the CARES Act, bringing further economic woes to taxpayers as the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic continues.

A RACE OR A RELIGION?:

Our internal conflict is currently focused on the last bastion of consensus in Israeli society: a Jewish and democratic state. The one constant that used to bring together both sides of the Israeli political map in agreement no longer does. The right and the left in Israel have shifted towards the extremes. The right, led by Netanyahu, is pushing for a Jewish state in which democracy is subservient to nationalism. The left has adopted a progressive belief system that would set us on the path to becoming a bi-national state. Our political system is herding us towards a modern-day Judgment of Solomon. It forces us into a false binary surrounding our identity - are we nationalists or liberals? Jews or democrats? If we answer the questions - if we take one of the sides - we lose our way. Without the backbone of our country, those citizens and their children who serve in the IDF, who work and pay taxes, and whose cultural heritage is Jewish but also liberal, the State of Israel will surrender the social cohesion that underpins our national economy and security. Centrism is the only idea capable of preventing this disintegration.

WELL, HE IS TRYING TO KILL THEM:

Typically during a crisis, leaders try to build as much bipartisan goodwill as possible to hedge against the inevitable recriminations to come. Trump, by contrast, relishes in embracing polarizing positions that only divide voters and make his political recovery all the more difficult in the future. By turning the coronavirus crisis into a partisan issue so quickly, Trump ensures that he's on the losing side of the debate.

Just look at the numbers. Even as small protests against stay-at-home orders have percolated in several states, public polling shows minimal opposition to statewide restrictions. A new Yahoo News/YouGov poll found that just 22 percent of Americans supported the protests, with only 36 percent of Republicans in agreement. Far from agreeing with the president's Twitter demands to "liberate" states with stay-at-home orders, they agree with his administration's more cautious guidance.

This week's NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that 58 percent of Americans worry that the country will move too quickly to loosen regulations, compared to just 32 percent of those who worry the country will take too long to reopen. Democrats were overwhelmingly worried about the risks of opening too soon, with 77 percent taking the health-first position and only 19 percent expressing more concern about the economy. Republicans were more closely divided, with 48 percent worried more about the economy against 39 percent more worried about the coronavirus. (A sizable majority of independents sided with the Democrats on the issue.)

This isn't polling that would typically lead a president to lean into an antigovernment message that ignores the guidance of White House health experts, as some of his political advisers are reportedly advocating. His mixed messaging is confusing his own supporters. And it's emboldening several red-state governors to reopen their states prematurely, raising the risk of a future outbreak that could set the president's efforts back.

Going against the tide of public opinion carries serious political consequences. This column has pointed out the downward trajectory of Trump's approval ratings as he struggles to demonstrate competence in this crisis while failing to offer clarity about the path forward. But he risks doing greater damage by going against the interests of his own voters.

For a preview on how things could get worse for the president, look at the evolving political views of seniors, one of Trump's most supportive constituencies in the previous election. They are also the most concerned about the coronavirus, given they have a much greater risk of dying if they become infected.

The latest Morning Consult poll found that 65-and-older voters prioritized defeating the coronavirus over healing the economy by nearly a 6-to-1 ratio. And over the past month, they've become the group most disenchanted with Trump's handling of the crisis. In mid-March, seniors were more supportive of Trump than any other age group (plus-19 net approval). Now, their net approval of the president has dropped 20 points and is lower than any age group outside of the youngest Americans.

Texas Lt. Gov Dan Patrick doubled down on controversial comments he has made about the coronavirus pandemic, telling Fox News on Monday that Americans had to "take some risks" in reopening the economy.

Patrick was heavily criticized last month after he suggested in an interview with Fox News' Tucker Carlson that he and other senior citizens might be willing to die to save the economy.

TOTALLY NOT A CULT:

The anti-malaria drug flogged over and over again by President Donald Trump as a coronavirus treatment didn't help veterans who got it, according to a new government-funded study.

The research, which has not yet been peer-reviewed but was backed by the National Institutes of Health and the University of Virginia, is the latest evidence that hydroxychloroquine is not the magic bullet that Trump and his allies suggested it was.

"In this study, we found no evidence that use of hydroxychloroquine, either with or without azithromycin, reduced the risk of mechanical ventilation in patients hospitalized with Covid-19," the authors wrote.

In fact, the analysis of data from 368 patients at veterans hospitals found 28 percent of those who got it died--compared to 11 percent who received the standard treatment without the drug. And 22 percent of the patients who got hydroxychloroquine plus the antibiotic azithromycin died.

THE BOY WHO CRIED, "WETBACK!":

AT A MINIMUM...:

The real problem for both left- and right-antioriginalists is that the U.S. Constitution is difficult to amend without a fair degree of consensus that it should be changed. So people who want to change the Constitution seek easier routes by which they might change the meaning of the Constitution without wasting their time advocating for a constitutional amendment. [...]

The constitutional amendment process imposes non-trivial transaction costs on purpose. So the temptation exists to take a quicker path and use majoritarian successes to appoint judges who will change the Constitution by misusing the judicial power to interpret legal texts, and passing off their personal political views as binding constitutional and statutory law.

There is a cost, however, in reading texts, particularly legal texts, with intentional dishonesty. Doing so debases the language, it debases our political and legal life, and no matter how well-intended, it debases the reader himself or herself. Passing off a convenient faux-interpretation with a wink and a smirk is a short-term remedy with a long-term cost to political culture. It is ultimately a broad form of political corruption. As Howard Gillman put it, "Non-originalism, or some notion of the 'living Constitution,' encourages judges to keep the Constitution relevant for contemporary concerns and purposes but runs the risk that this will lead them to enforce a version of the fundamental law that was never formally authorized by the people."

GO ALL THE WAY:

Dvořák was fascinated by New York, but he found it no place to live, and had some difficulty completing his major projects there. Just when he was getting ready to find some way to return to Europe, his student, Josef Kovařík, convinced him to come for a while to the little town of Spillville, Iowa, instead, promising its woods and people would remind him of home. Dvořák accepted the offer with excitement and soon packed his family onto a train (he loved trains) out west. Within days of arriving in Iowa in 1893, two of his most beautiful works, the American Quartet and Quintet, spilled out of him. It was here also that he refined and titled his freshly completed symphony, From the New World.

For Dvořák, music and home came into the world as twins, and, where one was found, the other was not far behind. He was famous in Europe for writing music evocative of bohemia, but he was not a sentimentalist. His music, especially the music he made in America, dealt with the joy of home, but equally with the universal human feelings of loneliness, estrangement, and longing for a place to fit in. These feelings came especially alive during his summer in the Midwest, and through his journey to Iowa that year, we can learn something about the nature of that fundamental longing and about music's power to console it. Ultimately, for Dvořák, music was a way of knitting our souls back together with the world and the God who first composed it.

One of the first things that struck Dvořák about Iowa was its emptiness. If he had come looking for the cheerfulness of home, what he found was this expanse of prairie, this sea of grass and grain that went on forever. "It is wild here," he said, "and sometimes very sad." In the bigness of it all, he felt further from home than ever, but, when taken with a closer view - when chatting with the people, when playing organ at St. Wenceslaus, when walking in the fields in the early morning - he felt restored by a deep belonging. Iowa had for him that immense nostalgia, sad and hopeful all at once, when the familiar and the alien mingle, as when we revisit the childhood streets where our friends are no more, or when we return all alone to the site of some joyful memory.

But Dvořák quickly made friends here; the town was populated almost entirely by other Czechs, immigrants who came from the "poorest of the poor" in the old country. If he was struck by the lonesomeness of the place, he soon found also the welcome that he had come in search of. He was delighted by Father Bily, the parish priest, and by all the wonderful "granddads and grannies."

When asked about his training in music, Dvořák said that he had studied with the "birds, flowers, myself, and God."

He felt welcomed by the countryside, too. To him, the sounds of nature were God's revelation of himself to man, and, as a composer, his place was to transcribe and transfigure those sounds. Dvořák himself was of poor peasant origins, and when asked about his training in music, he said that he had studied with the "birds, flowers, myself, and God."

CEMENT MIXER:

Even now, as I pour through various prog and jazz albums, I'm always on the lookout for Brubeck's influences.  

As a case in point, Pat Metheny's latest, From This Place--arguably this jazz master's best--reflects widely and deeply the compositional structure of Brubeck's best album, 1964's Time Changes. The resemblance is simply too obvious to ignore. Even the theme is critical. Brubeck's album was inspired by a short story involving two cellmates and a crust of bread. The religious essence of the album is blatant, with Brubeck trying to find that which ties all humans together, regardless of ethnicity or race. It is, for all intents and purposes, a meditation on human decency and divine agency. Metheny's latest calls us to be the best we can expect of ourselves as Americans.

In 2012, when Brubeck died around Christmas time of that year, I vowed that I would one day write a biography of him.  Despite preliminary research and reading, I've really not dived into this project, but Brubeck remains a profound part of my life, nonetheless. 

Two stories from Brubeck's own life mean everything to me.

First, at Ronald Reagan's last summit with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, held in Moscow in 1988, the Reagan administration insisted that Dave Brubeck represent America as her greatest cultural achievement. Brubeck's producer, Russell Gloyd, recognized this grand achievement for what it was. "You have to put this in perspective," he argued. "There was Perestroika, the whole awakening of the Soviet Union, the whole concept of what was taking place at that time in world history. This was the first time there was hope of a real chance for an understanding between the East and the West," he continued. "For Dave to be the representative artist meant everything to everyone who was close to us."

The atmosphere was tense. Reagan was exhausted from his trip, Gorbachev's security was worried about assassination plots, and it was a ridiculously hot and humid day in Moscow. "I walked in thinking that this was the hardest room Dave had ever had to work in his life," claims Gloyd. After a number of lackluster diplomatic niceties in the stuffy room, Brubeck walked up to the piano, sat down, and started playing "Take the 'A' Train."

"It brought down the house," Gloyd reports. "People were up and cheering. I'll never forget Bob Dole--he looked like a little kid. He had his one good hand raised above his head like he was at a football game. He'd turn around, and there was a Soviet general, loaded with medals, doing the same thing! They looked at each other like, 'You like Brubeck? I like Brubeck! We like Brubeck." It was, Gloyd notes, "the greatest single twenty-minute set in his life." The Cold War became much less frigid that day.

Second, though he came from a Presbyterian family, Brubeck converted to Roman Catholicism as an adult. "I never had belonged to any church. I was never baptized before," Brubeck remembered. "I was the only son in the family who wasn't baptized a Presbyterian. It was just an oversight." To be certain, religious music--from the African-American community as well as from the white/European community--had always intrigued and influenced him. He wrote liturgical-jazz pieces about Easter, Christmas, and Martin Luther King. 

Though he had written a number of albums and pieces on religious themes, the greatest expression of his Christianity came when Our Sunday Visitor (headquartered in Huntington, Indiana) commissioned Brubeck to write a Mass. He, in very Brubeck fashion, entitled it, To Hope! A Celebration, and performed it--with Gloyd conducting--at Washington National Cathedral. The premier music review website, Allmusic, writes of it:

This stunning work incorporates jazz interludes into the hypnotic Responsorial "The Peace of Jerusalem" and "Alleluia," a particularly challenging section for the choir. The vocal soloists are impressive; tenor Mark Bleeke's feature "While He Was At Supper" is especially moving. The overall effect of this beautiful work is absolutely stunning; it resists being labeled in any one category, it is simply great music.

Fundamentally optimistic about the human experience, Brubeck had said in a commencement address in 1982: "What is really important in the community, in the worst of times, is often music. It's the cement for the community that holds it together, and the thing that gives it hope."

HE HATES THEM BECAUSE THEY ARE AMERICAN, NOT BECAUSE THEY'RE PRO-CHINA:

[T]here is evidence that local officials attempted to cover up the early outbreak, and the WHO director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has stood by his endorsement of China's heavy-handed tactics. As with decisions to honour Turkey's president, Recep Erdogan, and former Zimbabwean ruler Robert Mugabe, Tedros' stance has been roundly criticised. In his defence, it does seem to stem from a genuine desire to win engagement in order to deliver his mandate of achieving health for all.

Interestingly, President Trump was one of the few world leaders who seemed to agree that China was doing a good job, praising the government's "hard work and transparency" in January and commending Xi Jinping's handling of the mounting pandemic in a string of further comments during February.

Trump had two other aims in mind when he pulled the rug from under the WHO's feet. In the short term, most pundits agree that Trump's main motivation for cutting WHO funding was to deflect blame from his own bungled handling of COVID-19 on home soil. His approval ratings are at an all-time low and the US now has more cases of coronavirus than any other country.

In the longer term, withdrawing from multilateral partnerships aligns with Trump's zero-sum worldview. As with Nato, the World Trade Organization and virtually every other international body, Trump feels that the US is getting a bad deal from its WHO contribution. And he bristles at the thought of foreign nations exploiting American generosity.

Former presidents have worked to develop, maintain and promote an Anglophone, dollar-backed international world order built on American values of capitalism, liberalism, democracy, integration and the transparent rule of law. This has fostered an unprecedented era of peace, stability, international cooperation and integration of markets (as well as massive socioeconomic inequality) - projecting American soft power and allowing national firms to enter formerly closed markets.

In Trump's view, his predecessors were chumps...

WORK > JOBS:

Almost three full weeks have passed since my father received a work call. Every morning he would wake up and do the activities he routinely carried out prior to heading out for work: eating breakfast, reading the newspaper, and smoking an early cigarette in our backyard garden. Once lunchtime rolled around, he would step out of the house in his plain work clothes, with his tools in hand, and stay out until it was time for dinner. It was obvious that no work was required of him but yet he flawlessly conducted himself in this detailed manner every day. I asked myself: why does he maintain this daily habit? Why pretend to work if no work is to be done?

For many individuals, work is merely a means to obtain the necessary funds to pay the mortgage, buy the groceries, and allow one's kids to receive a decent education. Some will find that their earthly vocations give an indescribable sense of purpose and meaning that no leisurely activity could provide. The blood that gushes forth from one's hands by aggressively working a tool, the sweat that seeps from one's body by the intense labor and the outdoor heat, or the salty tears flowing down one's cheek from the pain of the arduous work bring a satisfaction to the human soul unique to our own. In light of my father's habits, I began to question the relationship between man and his labor: does man simply work to provide the means to live for his household or does he engage in work for its own sake?

Pope Leo XIII, in his encyclical Rerum Novarum, wrote, "To labor is to exert oneself for the sake of procuring what is necessary for the various purposes of life, and chief of all for self-preservation." He explains that man, as an active agent of the economy, works first and foremost to provide food for his family, a roof over the house, and earn the wages that he is owed to essentially survive as this is "a law of nature, which it is wrong to disobey."

YOU ALWAYS BOIL DOWN TO THAT 15%...:

Of the 1,000 people surveyed over that three-day period, just 10 percent said they favored an end to social distancing. The vast majority of respondents--86 percent--said the measures in place should remain that way or should be strengthened.

The survey also found that those who are protesting social distancing and stay-at-home orders do not represent the majority of President Trump's supporters, either. Of the respondents who voted for the president in 2016, only 17 percent said the measures should be rolled back.

THEY AREN'T ACTUALLY UNDECIDED:

A poll designed to test President Trump's vulnerabilities on foreign policy finds that 56% of voters in 12 battleground states believe he has made America less respected in the world, compared to 31% who say America is now more respected.

AND REPLACE THE REVENUE WITH CONSUMPTION TAXES:

The best economic idea we've heard in response to the coronavirus crisis is a payroll-tax suspension. President Trump restated his support for it at a recent press briefing, and for good reason: It would reward work and production rather than the growth of government. Republicans should rally around the idea as the centerpiece of their next economic revival plan.

The plan we recommend would cancel all payroll-tax collections from May 1 to the end of the year. This would suspend the Social Security and Medicare tax, known as FICA, which takes 7.65% from a worker's paycheck, with another 7.65% paid by employers, up to $137,700 of income. Self-employed Americans, usually socked with the full 15.3% payroll tax, would also find relief.

Every worker in America would get a substantial pay raise for the remainder of the year, but because the tax is regressive, lowest-wage workers would be helped the most. The majority of low- and middle-income workers pay more payroll tax than income tax. Even minimum-wage workers would see a nice boost in their paychecks while their employers would pay less too.

By reducing employer payroll costs, this plan would encourage firms to start hiring. Several economic studies document what common sense would tell us: Lowering the tax on employment leads to more of it. Because the tax relief would be temporary, businesses would gain an incentive to hurry up and hire right away, or as soon as their work resumes. There is no time to waste: The U.S. needs to put perhaps 20 million people back to work.

This would help firms without picking winners and losers. Unlike almost every other "stimulus" plan--to bail out airlines, banks, Boeing, energy companies and the rest--suspending the payroll tax provides an equal benefit to every company in America.

Also important is its ease of implementation. By simply not taking some $800 billion from the businesses and workers on Main Street, this plan cuts out the bureaucratic middlemen who plague spending programs. 

BRAZIL'S TRAGEDY:

When Paulo Guedes, Brazil's University of Chicago-schooled economy minister arrived at his desk in January of 2019, he came with an aggressive market-friendly vision for re-founding Latin America's biggest economy. His plan, cheered by captains of finance and industry: Slash the federal bureaucracy, hurl down trade barriers, curb the nation's fiscal eating disorder and sell everything. Brazil's state owned companies? "Runaway children who are now addicted to drugs," he quipped. All those public sector employees? "Parasites."

The coronavirus has torn up Guedes's textbook assignment. A rare economic liberal in a hemisphere of dirigistes, he is now the warden of a nearly $100 billion bailout, one of the biggest rescue operations in the emerging markets. The big state is even bigger. Those truant public institutions and their civil servants are all that stands between Brazil and the economic ventilator.

The overgrown government savings bank that Guedes grudgingly spared from the state company auction bloc, Caixa Economica Federal, is rolling out emergency aid to at least 54 million working poor, jobless and underemployed Brazilians. The mission of identifying and parsing eligible recipients and crunching the numbers has fallen to Dataprev, the social security data processing company that Guedes had been grooming for privatization.

Socialized medicine would give any self-respecting capitalist warrior apoplexy. And yet no one needed to tell Guedes that Brazil's best hope for healing the stricken in the accelerating Covid-19 contagion is bolstering the Universal Health System, or SUS, which treats anyone without charge. "Without SUS, we'd be in a ditch. It's a Brazilian benchmark," said Adriana Dupita of Bloomberg Economics. "There's no way you can fight this, no matter what your ideology."

YOU MEAN THOSE GUN GOOBERS AREN'T THE MAJORITY?:

A survey of 600 Michiganians found 57% approved of the Democratic governor's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic compared with 37% of respondents who disapproved. The finding came after more than 4,000 protesters descended on Lansing and the Capitol to protect Whitmer's tightened stay-home order that was extended through April 30.

By contrast, 44% of those polled approved of Trump's handling of the COVID-19 crisis while 50% disapproved.

SOME FUN AX-GRINDING GOING ON HERE:

Here's how that breaks down: Six justices (Gorsuch, Thomas, Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, Kavanaugh, agreed with the Court's bottom line conclusion, but Justice Gorsuch's opinion is only joined in its entirety by three justices (Gorsuch, Ginsburg). Justice Alito's dissent was joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kagan, in part.

Justice Thomas wrote separately because he wanted to "make clear that this right applies against the States through the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, not the Due Process Clause." Historically, the Court has incorporated rights against the states through the Due Process Clause. Many academics think this is an error, and Justice Thomas has long indicated he does as well.

One issue dividing justices in Ramos is the treatment of precedent, as the decision overturned Apodaca v. Oregon, a 1972 decision upholding the constitutionality of nonunanimous criminal convictions in state court. Both Justices Sotomayor and Kavanaugh wrote separately to discuss the reasons for overturning Apodaca. (Sotomayor also wanted to note the "racially biased origins" of laws allowing nonunanimous juries to convict people of criminal offenses.)

Justice Alito's dissent stressed the importance of stare decisis. This issue also likely explains the Court's lineup here, as Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kagan are the Court's most vocal defenders of upholding precedent (though not always in the same cases). Justice Kagan has become particularly vocal in her defense of stare decisis, so it's also no surprise that she does not join the portion of Alito's dissent that explains why, in his view, the argument for overturning Apodaca was not as strong as the argument to overturn precedents in other recent cases.

EVERY MAN A TIGER KING:

Fringe right-wingers have also been fear-mongering around impending martial law, or that lockdowns are the first sign of fascist control. The Pentagon has tried to stay ahead of some of these conspiracies. Last month, they set up a dedicated "rumor control" page on the Department of Homeland Security website to debunk or explain conspiracies through answering FAQs like, "Is FEMA deploying the Military?", "Is FEMA seizing medical supplies" or "Is DHS deploying the national guard."

Still, protesters across the country brought out signs that likened lockdown measures to fascism. At the #OperationGridlock protest in Michigan last week, some protesters had signs that compared Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to Adolf Hitler.

Anti-vaxxers have also played a central role drumming up distrust and confusion around coronavirus. Bizarre claims about 5G causing COVID-19, or that evil government forces (or Bill Gates) will use the crisis as an excuse to launch a mass-vaccination campaign, have made their way from the fringes. A pair of anti-vaxxers were also behind the viral #FireFauci hashtag, calling on Trump to get rid of top infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci and replace him with Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, a conspiracy theorist known for peddling unscientific remedies.

At a protest in Austin, Texas on Saturday, which was organized by Infowars host Owen Shroyer, people chanted "Fire Fauci." One woman held a sign saying "Make Texas great again! Please open everything!" according to the New York Times. Her seven-year-old daughter held a sign saying "Bill gates can keep his poison -- I'm homeschooled! No Mandatory vaccines."

THANKS, DONALD!:

ALL THE BATTLEGROUNDS ARE RED:

Republicans currently hold a 53-47 majority, and Democrats would need to net three seats to win control of the chamber if they also win the White House -- or four seats if Donald Trump wins reelection. The Senate map this year features far more Republican seats, but the vast majority are in states Trump won easily in 2016. Democrats are only targeting two states he lost four years ago, the same number of Trump-state Democratic incumbents up this year.

The most important states remain Arizona, Colorado, North Carolina and Maine, four races where Democratic challengers outraised incumbent GOP senators in the first quarter of this year. These contests underscore just how costly the battle for the Senate will be: Super PACs in both parties have already reserved nearly $130 million for TV ads in these states, plus an emerging battleground in Iowa, to lay the foundation for the fall campaign.

Republicans have offensive targets in Alabama and Michigan, two seats that could help them preserve their control of the chamber even if they lose seats elsewhere. But Democrats have also recruited strong challengers in a string of red states that could come into play, including Montana, Kansas and a special election in Georgia, helping them potentially expand their path back to the majority.

MAKE IT PERMANENT:

U.S. oil prices tumbled to their lowest level in more than 20 years on Monday, with crude storage facilities filling rapidly as the coronavirus pandemic continues to crush demand.

YOU MEAN LIFTING TARIFFS IS GOOD ECONOMICS?:

The U.S. will allow companies to defer paying tariffs on many imported goods for 90 days, a move aimed at freeing up cash for pandemic-hit employers while leaving punitive measures against China and other nations intact.

"This will protect American jobs and help these businesses get through this time," Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a statement.

...AND CHEAPER...:

The modelled 100% renewables scenario would result in lower per unit energy costs which show that achieving climate neutrality by 2050 is more cost-effective compared to lower levels of ambition, with cumulative costs of achieving a 100% renewable energy system by 2050 working out as 6% lower than the cost of inadequate action resulting in only 62% renewable generation.

NO ONE WILL MISS CARS:

De Blasio and many other civic leaders are trying to enforce the 6-foot line by restricting access to places where people get together: dog parks, basketball courts, playgrounds, beaches, hiking trails, and the like. The problem with curtailing the supply of open space, though, is that it doesn't reduce demand. People still need to go outside, some to work, others to play, all to keep their sanity intact. Now, though, the demand comes chiefly from people on foot, rather than in vehicles.

In that shift, urbanists see a chance to save city dwellers not just from the sweep of a pandemic, but from the auto-centric culture that has dominated urban life for decades. They want to prioritize the movement of people--pedestrians, cyclists, transit users, and their ilk--over cars. This isn't just opportunism, a shot at grabbing street space while most cars are parked. A range of tactics long demanded by urbanists can make life outside more pleasant and practical amidst the Covid-19 pandemic. And depending on how much life goes back to "normal" once the pandemic has passed, the moves could change cities for the better, and for the long term.

One easy, obvious option is disabling the buttons that pedestrians use to summon a "Walk" sign to cross the street. Advocates of pedestrian-friendly roads have long lambasted these "beg buttons" for making driving the default mode of transportation: no push, no walk signal. Now, public health officials see the devices as potential conveyors of the coronavirus. Several cities in Australia and New Zealand have rejiggered traffic signal cycles to include walk signals, no push needed. So has Berkeley, California. "That's a good example of an easy and sustainable thing cities can do," says Tabitha Combs, who studies transportation planning and policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. By turning them off, cities are tacitly admitting that the buttons aren't meant to make intersections safer for pedestrians, but to keep cars moving as much as possible. "They've let the cat out of the bag that it's something they can do," Combs says.

The bigger move is closing streets to vehicles, so people have more room to walk around or exercise. Bogota, Colombia; Calgary, Canada; Denver, Colorado; St Paul, Minnesota; Cologne, Germany and other cities have blocked off stretches of road in recent weeks. Friday, Oakland said it will close 10 percent of its street network--74 miles worth--to vehicle traffic. Others, like Vancouver, have booted cars from roads in parks. Closing streets, though, demands resources, including materials to indicate cars are no longer welcome and people to enforce the new regime.

NO ONE WILL MISS OFFICES:

The reassuring data comes from RescueTime, a time management tool that monitors how you spend every minute of time on your computer so you can better optimize your day. At least that's what it does in normal times. In the current crisis, the app is all a powerful source of data on exactly what remote workers are doing all day. 

The company recently sifted through this treasure trove of information and delivered happy news about our productivity while working from home. 

Here's the bottom line finding via the company's blog: "According to our data, knowledge workers, software developers, and IT professionals are all more productive when they work from home. This was true both at small and medium businesses and large companies (over 500 employees)."

What exactly does RescueTime mean by more productive? "Remote workers had a four percent increase in average daily time spent on their core work and an 18 percent decrease in time spent on communication," the company reports. Over a year that adds up to 58 more hours spent on core work. 

Add the time saved on communication to time clawed back from commuting, and workers save at least three hours a day when they go remote. That's great news for managers, but employees are probably pretty excited about that shift too (at least if there wasn't a pandemic going on). 

THANKS, MADAME SPEAKER!:

The agreement also would include $75 billion for hospitals and $25 billion for testing, which have been major Democratic demands. Some of the money in the small business program would be directed specifically to rural and minority businesses, according to people familiar with the plan who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe it.

"We want to make sure that it's reaching all of America's small businesses," Pelosi said on ABC. "And we also want to make sure that it's operating in a community where our police and fire, our health care workers, our doctors, nurses, our teachers, are being compensated for and not fired. And that's why we're asking for the additional funds in the package, as well as for hospitals so that we can do testing, testing, testing."

SO MUCH WINNING!:

The Grand Island area -- by far Nebraska's biggest coronavirus hot spot -- now has rates of illness comparable to some of the hardest-hit states in the country.

Not only does surrounding Hall County now have more cases than any county in Nebraska, its per capita case rate is almost 12 times that of Douglas County and more than 25 times that of Lancaster County, a World-Herald analysis found.

The Hall County rate is also now about equal to that of Louisiana, which ranks among the top states nationally in both cases and deaths. It's also higher than the per capita rate in Michigan, a state that has been in such a significant state-ordered lockdown because of the virus that it has spawned public protests.

And as eye-popping as such numbers are, Grand Island, Nebraska's third-largest metro area, is still likely weeks away from its peak of cases and deaths. The sixth death in the local three-county health district was reported Thursday.

"Our expectation is that every day we will see large numbers of new cases and every day we will see a number of deaths," Central District Health Department Director Teresa Anderson said Thursday. "If we take our lessons from what's been happening in other parts of the country, I'm going to say the writing is on the wall."

Despite such numbers, Gov. Pete Ricketts continued to say Thursday that the state's response to the coronavirus pandemic is working.

EITHER/OR:

Something else happened on April 15--Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, the presumptive next president of the Southern Baptist Convention, and a man I respect a great deal--spoke from the midst of a ruined economy, soaring death rates, and presidential blundering and said . . . four more years. He declared not only that he'd support Donald Trump in 2020, but that he'll almost certainly support Republican presidential candidates the rest of his life. Mohler focused on the classic culture war issues--marriage, sexuality, constitutional interpretation, and abortion. He expressed the belief that the "partisan divide had become so great" and Democrats had "swerved so far to the left" on those key issues that he can't imagine ever voting for a Democratic president. He also claimed that Trump has been "more consistent in pro-life decisions" and consistent in the quality of his judicial nominations than "any president of the United States of any party."

As he made clear in the video, Mohler has not always supported Trump. In 2016, he was consistent with his denomination's clear and unequivocal statement about the importance of moral character in public officials. He has now decisively changed course.

In 1998--during Bill Clinton's second term--the Southern Baptist Convention declared that "tolerance of serious wrong by leaders sears the conscience of the culture, spawns unrestrained immorality and lawlessness in the society, and surely results in God's judgment" and therefore urged "all Americans to embrace and act on the conviction that character does count in public office, and to elect those officials and candidates who, although imperfect, demonstrate consistent honesty, moral purity and the highest character."

Mohler so clearly recognized the applicability of those words that he said, "If I were to support, much less endorse Donald Trump for president, I would actually have to go back and apologize to former President Bill Clinton." I do wonder if Mohler will apologize. He absolutely should.

Look, I know that for now I've lost the character argument. It's well-established that a great number of white Evangelicals didn't truly believe the words they wrote, endorsed, and argued in 1998 and for 18 years until the 2016 election. Oh sure, they thought they believed those words. If someone challenged their convictions with a lie detector test, they would have passed with flying colors. 

(By the way, I use the term "white Evangelicals" because that's Trump's core political constituency. That's the base that gave him 81 percent support in 2016. The rest of the Evangelical community leans Democratic.)

When C.S. Lewis said "courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of very virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality," he was speaking an important truth. We may think we possess an array of virtues and beliefs, but we don't really know who we are or what we believe until those virtues and beliefs are put to the test. There is many a man who goes to war thinking himself brave, until the bullets fly. There is many a man who thinks himself faithful to his wife, until the flirtation starts.

There were many men who thought character counted, until a commitment to character contained a real political cost. But that's the obvious point. I've made it countless times before today. White Evangelicals, however, have shrugged it off. "Binary choice," they say. "Lesser of two evils," they say--even though those concepts appeared nowhere in the grand moral announcements of the past.

Many millions of Trump-supporting white Evangelicals no longer care about character (though a surprising number are still remarkably unaware of his flaws). That much is clear. But the story now grows darker still. As they've abandoned political character tests, they're also rejecting any meaningful concern for presidential competence. 

ON THE OTHER HAND...:

Mentions of coronavirus-related Bill Gates conspiracy theories have exploded on social media and TV: They were mentioned 1.2 million times in the last two months, according to data provided to the New York Times by the media intelligence firm Zignal Labs.

Those conspiracy theories have spread from fringe right-wing conspiracy theorists, like Alex Jones, to conservative pundits like Fox News host Laura Ingraham. "Digitally tracking Americans' every move has been a dream of the globalists for years," Ingraham tweeted in early April. "This health crisis is the perfect vehicle for them to push this."

The commentary was attached to another tweet, which linked to an article about Bill Gates on a conspiracy theory website that cites an answer Gates gave during a Reddit AMA earlier this year. Gates spoke of a hypothetical "digital certificate" that would certify if people were vaccinated from coronavirus. 

According to the piece, "The inevitable mass vaccination campaign to eradicate COVID-19 would be the perfect opportunity to introduce a worldwide digital ID. This system would store a wealth of information about each individual (including vaccination history) and would be used to grant access to rights and services."

It baselessly claimed that Gates -- alongside other rich and powerful people -- is using the coronavirus pandemic as a means of instilling a worldwide caste system based on a digital ID.

Ingraham's followers understood the message: "I will not take a #BillGatesVaccine," one responded.

Former Trump staffer Roger Stone, who was sentenced to 40 months in federal prison earlier this year, was more direct than Ingraham. "Whether Bill Gates played some role in the creation and spread of this virus is open for vigorous debate," Stone said in a radio interview, according to a New York Post report. "I have conservative friends who say it's ridiculous and others say absolutely."

THE ACCELERATOR:

Even as the U.S. and Europe begin discussing how to reopen businesses, company leaders themselves say the coronavirus has jolted them into thinking about more permanent changes in how we all work--shifts that will last much longer than this crisis and could forever reconfigure the entire notion of offices.

In interviews this week, executives at global companies say COVID-19 has hurled them at warp speed into a future that they had envisioned unfolding slowly over many years. And to their astonishment, their online-only operations have worked well--raising the possibility of continuing much of the lockdown's online-first work that has dominated since early March.

"We're trying things in 24 hours, and then just rolling it out," David Kenny, CEO of the global data analytics company Nielsen, says. "I hate this pandemic. But the velocity of experimenting with new things, I love that. I think some of that will stay."

WHAT WERE THE ODDS...:

There is not, as of writing, any medication which has been shown in controlled trials to significantly hasten recovery from covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus that's become a global pandemic. Last week, there were nonetheless some new developments on that front. One drug seems to show signs of promise. Another has seen red flags raised.

The one that's raised hopes isn't the one that President Trump has been hyping.

Again: it is not the case that we have new, incontrovertible proof of a drug's efficacy. But news of a trial demonstrating some benefit for covid-19 patients from the anti-viral drug remdesivir helped push the stock market higher on Friday. A report from the National Institutes of Health further suggested that the drug had halted the progression of covid-19 -- at least in monkeys.

For the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine, the news was less positive. There's still no demonstrated evidence that improvements after taking the drug are causal. A number of controlled studies in fact failed to demonstrate evidence that hydroxychloroquine or a related drug, chloroquine, had an effect on the disease. A New York family blames the drug for causing their mother's heart attack -- an unproven claim but one in line with concerns about use of the drug. The CIA even warned its employees about using the drug due to the possibility of "sudden cardiac death."

CITIES WERE A MISTAKE:

Dr. Ben Locwin of Portsmouth, an infectious disease expert, said it's population density, rather than raw population numbers, that drives the risk of the virus exploding in any community.

"Just because you have 10 times more people doesn't mean you get 10 times more virus. The population density is driving this inevitability," said Locwin, whose resume includes time as a senior consultant to the Centers for Disease Control. "It's all about so much high-rise living, people stacked up, all sharing volumes of air, touching the same doorknobs.

"There is, generally speaking, a lot more space and air volume in New Hampshire," said Locwin.

That's the first point Sununu and State Epidemiologist Dr. Benjamin Chan turn to when pressed why they think New Hampshire's incidence of disease has been lower.

"Areas like Boston, you have an apartment building, close confined coffee shops, everyday living and workplace environments that can be very dangerous, and that makes it very difficult to mitigate the spread," Sununu said.

But congestion alone doesn't tell the story.

Boston lies in Suffolk County, which doesn't have the state's most COVID-19 cases, according to its Department of Public Health.

The largest number is in Middlesex County, which includes most of the Merrimack Valley, just south of the New Hampshire border, to Cambridge, just north of Boston.

Essex County, from Lawrence to Gloucester on the coast and north to the state line, and Norfolk County, from Quincy south of Boston to the foot of Cape Cod, each have almost three times as many COVID-19 cases as all of New Hampshire.

State officials said contact by New Hampshire residents working or visiting south and then coming home is a major reason New Hampshire's southeastern border counties, Hillsborough and Rockingham, have 74% of New Hampshire's COVID-19 cases.

Two weeks ago the state installed signs on the interstates telling out-of-state residents who come to stay in New Hampshire that they must quarantine for 14 days before venturing out. "It's not complicated. If you're passing through, fine, but if you intend to stay for a while, we need you to self-quarantine," Sununu said.

It's also why cases from community spread have surpassed travel-related cases and contact with someone infected as the leading cause of COVID-19 in New Hampshire.

"I think we are still seeing a lot of community transmission taking place here in venues like liquor stores, grocery stores and other retail places. People who are asymptomatic, they are going to the liquor, grocery stores, not wearing masks and spreading the virus," said Dr. Rich DiPentima, a 30-year health executive with two stints at the New Hampshire Division of Public Health, including one as chief of communicable disease epidemiology.

Over his long career, DiPentima, 75, helped fight swine flu in the 1970s, AIDS in the 1980s and the SARS outbreak in 2002-04.

"The biggest risk factor for almost any untoward health event is poverty, and we are seeing that nationally as well," DiPentima said.

"If you are poor, you have fewer resources and access to what it takes to remain healthy during an outbreak. It's that simple."

According to 2019 U.S. Census department numbers, Massachusetts had the 25th-lowest poverty rate, at 10.4%.

That same year, New Hampshire's poverty rate was the nation's lowest at 7.7%.

THE ORANGE CEILING:

The latest wave of national polling underscores the challenges that the president faces. All the surveys show Trump losing ground from a brief uptick at the beginning of the crisis, with his popularity dipping most noticeably among independents.

The latest Morning Consult tracking poll, conducted between April 10-12, shows Trump's overall approval rating slumping to 43 percent, with 53 percent disapproving. His approval on the coronavirus crisis slipped to 45 percent, down 8 points since it peaked in mid-March. He's now underwater with independents, a reversal from last month.

The new Navigator Research tracking survey, a Democratic polling initiative, found similar findings: Support for Trump's handling of the crisis hit its lowest level since the disease began spreading in the U.S., with 46 percent approving and 50 percent disapproving. Deeper inside the poll lies another cause for alarm for Team Trump: Right now, a majority of Americans still approve of his handling of the economy, including a plurality of independents. But that number probably has nowhere to go but down: If the economic downturn worsens, Americans are likely to take out their dissatisfaction on the president.

And the Republican consulting firm Firehouse Strategies, whose surveys have generally been favorable to the president, had more sober news. Its poll from April 4-10 found Trump trailing Biden by 10 points (53 to 43 percent) among registered voters. All of this month's national polls testing Trump against Biden have found the president stuck between 39 and 44 percent of the vote.

Trump's latest performance in battleground states isn't any better. In traditionally Republican Arizona, a must-win state for Trump, he trails Biden 52 to 43 percent in a new OH/Predictive Insights poll. He's down by 6 points to Biden in Florida, in an April University of North Florida survey, despite his generally sunny track record in the state. Biden led Trump in a trifecta of Michigan polls conducted in March. According to the RealClearPolitics statewide polling averages, Biden is ahead in every swing state.

Even Wisconsin, one of Trump's strongest battlegrounds on the map, isn't looking like a safe bet for Republicans. This week, Jill Karofsky, the liberal candidate for the state Supreme Court, handily defeated conservative justice Dan Kelly by a 10-point margin in a contest that served as a proxy for competing partisan passions. Trump endorsed Kelly, while Republicans opposed delaying the election this month in hopes of capitalizing on lower turnout during the pandemic. Those tactics backfired in a big way.

UP THE RESISTANCE:

.

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker organized secret flights bringing millions of masks and gloves to the state from China on charter jets in an effort to bypass potential Trump administration efforts to seize the products, The Chicago Sun-Times reported.

Two invoices from the state revealed $888,275 purchases for "aircraft charter flight to Shanghai, China for COVID-19 response," according to the newspaper.

The state has reportedly spent $174 million on coronavirus-related purchases, such as ventilators, personal protective equipment, and hand sanitizer.

The Sun-Times cited a source familiar with the purchases, who said the details were kept secret "because we've heard reports of Trump trying to take PPE in China and when it gets to the United States."

The chief executive of a MA hospital, outbid for PPE by the feds multiple times, cut a deal, paid extra, hired the trucks -- and then was interrogated by the FBI and had to get his Congressperson to intervene to keep DHS from heisting the shipment.https://t.co/zsgCjNOZ0N pic.twitter.com/Wgcf5u0WCY

— Maryn McKenna (@marynmck) April 18, 2020

WHEN YOU'VE ALREADY BLAMED WOMEN, JEWS, AND THE CHINESE...

"I would say that there could be a difference," Trump said during his daily coronavirus press conference. "And we'll have to see what will happen. Because I've seen a great disparity in this country."

"They go after Christian churches but they don't tend to go after mosques," he said.

THE TRUMP BRAND:

Paul O'Neill, Former Treasury Secretary and Alcoa CEO, Dies at 84 https://t.co/0JKRFAoo3M via @WSJ We should honor him by instituting O'Neill Accounts https://t.co/N7IgEW0krU

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) April 18, 2020

ISIS HAVING BEEN DEALT WITH, ON TO ASSAD:

Two senior regime officers were killed in an attack on a military vehicle near the town of Herak in the restive southern Syrian province of Daraa, in the latest in a series of attacks on regime soldiers.

The officers were from the regime's 52nd brigade, and were identified by the "Hauran Independent Media Activists' Group" as Colonel Hamid Makhlouf, the leader of the brigade, and Colonel Mahmoud Habib, the brigade's planning officer.

On Thursday armed men attacked a military vehicle belonging to Assad regime forces on the road between the towns of Izraa and Busra al-Harir, killing three soldiers and injuring a number of others, the Syrian news website Zaman al-Wasl reported.

The militants used light and medium weapons in the attack and escaped afterwards, according to Zaman al-Wasl.

AN ANTI-SEMITISM/ISLAMOPHOBIA TWO-FER!:

A George Soros-backed Muslim group, which cohosts a conference that in recent years drew speakers who called homosexuality a "disease" and defended terrorist groups, announced its endorsement of Joe Biden for president.

Emgage, which bills itself as the largest Muslim PAC in the country, on Thursday announced it would switch its endorsement from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) to Biden. The group cited Biden's promises to end President Donald Trump's travel bans, increase the refugee admissions cap, and overhaul the immigration system. Biden said he was "honored" to receive the endorsement.

Emgage has collaborated with a Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated group on events that in recent years attracted speakers who openly opposed LGBT rights and supported terror groups. Last year, Emgage became an official cohost of Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) conferences. ISNA was previously revealed to be part of the Muslim Brotherhood network--though it claims it is no longer associated with the group.

THIS IS WHY WE SHOULD REGIME CHANGE CHINA:

Crackdown on protest never stops even during the outbreak of #WuhanVirus. At least 12 prominent democrats and ex--/lawmaker have been arrested this morning: Martin Lee, Jimmy Lai, Albert Ho, Raphael Wong, @loktinau Au Nok Hin, Lee Cheuk Yan, Leung Kwok Hung, Jimmy Sham...... pic.twitter.com/rDdn1jYnAR

— Joshua Wong 黃之鋒 😷 (@joshuawongcf) April 18, 2020

RATES ARE USORIOUS:

As we all know from the most basic of basic economics, artificially low prices made artificial by government command invariably lead to scarcity. Reducing what's absurd to the absurd, Los Angeles Mayor Garcetti could surely decree Ferraris cheap in Los Angeles, Mayor de Blasio could decree apartment rents cheap in New York, but it's not as though the markets would comply. Assuming the declaration of artificially cheap Ferraris and Manhattan apartments, the lightning quick result would be scarcity of both. That the previous sentence is a statement of the obvious brings new meaning to obvious.

To which some will say central banks just "print money," and they can make the money "easy" by doing so. Yes they can, but the same economic truths apply. Once again no one borrows money; rather they borrow what money can be exchanged for. Implicit in Rivelle's thesis is that market actors aren't just stupid, but they're monumentally so.

Indeed, Rivelle's analysis presumes that those who produce and own real resources (think again computer printers, office buildings, etc.) are just rushing to exchange those resources for paper easily produced by central banks, and loaned out for next to nothing. No. Not very likely. 

Looking at the above in reverse, do those who borrow "money" do so blind to what it can be exchanged for? As in do they aggressively borrow dollars, thus setting themselves up for principal and interest (however low) payments, even though they know the money isn't exchangeable for the real goods, services and labor that are the only reason to borrow?

Back to reality, all money flows are a signal that goods, services and labor are being exchanged. Meaning money is never cheap. No doubt money is periodically devalued by monetary authorities, the U.S. Treasury the miscreant stateside, but this just means the devalued medium is used less to faciliate exchange, or it's used in exchange for exceedingly fewer goods and services. Markets always speak, and they always reject attempts at "easy" anything.

Rivelle notes that interest rates have been low.  Yes, so true.  But not because of the Fed. The central bank is a follower. 

Interest rates for some businesses also haven't been low for decades because the sky is blue, or because financiers have been feeling generous; rather they've been low because production has been abundant.

IT'S NOT PARANOIA; HE'S GOING TO PRISON:

"I don't know where you are taking us," hissed Shas Chairman and Interior Minister Aryeh Deri to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a harsh conversation they recently conducted.  [...]

 Deri is perhaps Netanyahu's most important ally in forming the right-wing bloc; this platform had fiercely protected Netanyahu in the course of the elections and after them. But this time, to his surprise, Deri found Netanyahu insisting over and over about tightening the coalition agreement even more -- adding more and more conditions -- so that the High Court would be unable to disqualify him from serving as deputy prime minister (in the second period, when Gantz should serve as premier). Even Deri learned that despite his personal closeness to the prime minister, he was unable to bring down Netanyahu's walls of paranoia.

AIM HIGH:

The Spring 2020 issue of Popular Science includes a first-person account from I-Min Lee, an epidemiologist at the Harvard University School of Public Health who published a study last year challenging the oft-repeated 10,000-steps-a-day "rule."

As the story goes, Lee was part of a competition at Harvard a few years back in which various teams tried to accumulate as many steps as possible. Most participants were struggling to hit the 10,000-step benchmark, so, with years of exercise study under her belt, Lee decided to do a little digging. She looked into the etymology of the mandate first, and uncovered that a Japanese watch company called Yamasa Clock had originally disseminated the 10,000-step goal way  back in the late 1960s -- and with dubious reasoning. A section of the Japanese character sequence for "10,000" faintly resembles a guy out for a brisk stroll: 万.

Lee decided to bring some much-needed science to the debate, and commissioned a study assessing step volume and intensity with all-cause mortality in older woman. Her research, which can be accessed here, followed nearly 17,000 women with a mean age of 72, and deduced that women who averaged 4,400 steps a day had lower mortality rates than those who averaged 2,700 steps a day. The main takeaway? A blanket "10,000 steps or bust" approach is counterproductive; based on age, gender and lifestyle, a far smaller number can still have positive impacts on longevity.

DONALD'S PLOT TO KILL HIS OWN VOTERS:

In the days before the parade, Philadelphia officials distributed 20,000 flyers urging citizens to cover their mouths when they coughed or sneezed. "If the people are careless," Krusen was quoted as saying in the Phil­a­del­phia Even­ing Bul­le­tin the day of the parade, "thousands of cases may develop and the epidemic may get beyond control." That same article reported that 118 people in the city had been diagnosed with the virus. But still he permitted the parade to proceed. On the 28th, a snaking line of Boy Scouts, marching bands, women's auxiliaries, and troops 2 miles long wound its way up Broad Street. War­planes flew overhead as an enormous, tightly packed crowd of 200,000 cheered. Within three days, every bed in Phil­a­del­phia's 31 hospitals was occupied. Within a week, 45,000 citizens were infected and the entire city had shut down.

It was too late. By the second week in November, 12,000 Phila­del­phians were dead, and the phrase "bodies stacked like cordwood" had become commonplace among the survivors. "It was an apocalyptic scene," said Davis. "In some cases, public-health nurses would be walking into tenements and finding whole families dead." Bodies piled up on sidewalks after the city morgue, capable of holding only 36 people, was overwhelmed. Within six months, 16,000 were dead, and 500,000 Phil­a­del­phians had fallen ill with the flu. Mean­while, unsubstantiated rumors circulated among the frightened populace that the Germans had unleashed the flu on U.S. soil via spies who'd arrived on U-boats.

TAX THE EXTERNALITIES:

FORCED BACK UPON WHAT MATTERS:

We need badly to maintain our trust in the present strategy and coming cure, but terror loosens the senses, and sometimes it feels like we are fruitlessly blundering in the dark, with no end in sight. Our situation, we are told, is "unprecedented." There is no real timeline. Stay inside the house, half-blind, mad with hope.

In these circumstances, there is something seductive about organised religion. ONS statistics show that the overall number of people who identify as religious in the UK is declining, but if you've had a faith-based upbringing--and many have--flirting with the idea can feel reassuringly like a return to something. Those who grow up with faith comment on the ease of slipping back into its rituals, falling prey to its charms - you know the psalms, the songs, even a whiff of incense transports you back to a time when you weren't locked in the house, frantically googling 'what constitutes dry cough?' Now that many places of worship are live-streaming their masses I'm suddenly spoiled for choice, a sort of ecclesiastical Tinder: Durham Cathedral, St Mary of the Angels, maybe even the Papal mass, as a treat. If you are isolated there is something soothing in the notion that you sit and chant and kneel in unison with thousands of others, alone but together, bound by something huge and shared.

One of the biggest challenges people face in quarantine is the lack of structure--the sense that we're all drifting through an endless Wednesday. The devout don't have this problem. Heeding the salat, the five calls to prayer, will certainly break up the day. The shabbat marks the weekend. Regardless of creed, organised religion can provide comfort and structure in a time when people sorely need both. The National Secular Society recently rammed its foot into its mouth complaining that religious staff are recognised as key workers--failing to grasp that religion answers an emotional need, and that in a time of crisis that need will reach a fever pitch. Not to mention the rising demand for their services at lonely, socially distanced funerals, where the family will grieve via Zoom. This is one of the failings of aggressive atheism; in dismissing faith as 'illogical' or trivial, its adherents totally miss the point that everything that makes life living--friends and family, bad contemporary art, pastries, kissing--are all ultimately pointless and irrational but they sustain us, keep us charging forwards.

ANOTHER OF THE MOST WELCOME CHANGES THE PANDEMIC COULD FORCE:

Stores are shuttering all over the United States, and many of those still open are balking at cash. Shoppers are switching orders to Amazon and Walmart.com. Many restaurants that have stayed open won't take cash, and operate without any contact at all, requiring customers to pay first online.

What once seemed like the oldest, most reliable way of paying now seems fraught: A physical object changing hands, bringing people closer than 6 feet, covered in who knows what.

"Do I want to grab the thing that you were just holding in your hand? No," says Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff, who has advocated for a less-cash society, and predicts the crisis "is absolutely going to drive people to prefer credit and debit to cash."

IS THERE NOTHING ILHAN OMAR WON'T STOOP TO?:

Kimberly Guilfoyle and Lara Trump will be working for President Donald Trump's reelection campaign, and are reportedly being paid $180,000 a year.

BINGE-WORTHY:

Nobody will ever accuse Harry Bosch of being a teddy bear. The longtime Los Angeles police detective, central to Michael Connelly's nearly two-dozen crime novels, is kind of a prick. To say he doesn't suffer fools gladly is a ridiculous understatement; he doesn't suffer fools gladly or even grumpily.

Connelly's books are peppered with moments when Bosch barks out a criticism of a police colleague or even superior. Bosch gets away with this because he's usually right. The patrol officer who opened a car's trunk damn well should have been wearing latex gloves. The partner should have been more concerned with a case than his side hustle. The lieutenant should have stood up for his charges.

The relative thorniness of the main character is part of what makes Bosch, the Amazon Prime Video series--the sixth season begins streaming on April 17--kind of fascinating. The show's Bosch is a jerk but agreeably so. He's not effusive even with his daughter, Maddie, or significant others. But he's open and vulnerable to those closest to him, in a Bosch sort of way. He keeps other cops at arm's length, but usually only until he figures out their motives. For god's sake, he rescues and adopts a dog in the fifth season.

Don't mistakenly think Bosch, as played by Deadwood alum Titus Welliver, has gone soft, however. He might call people "brother" but he's still fairly prickly.

...AND CHEAPER...:

Rhodium analyzed hourly electricity data from the Energy Information Administration to conclude that wind and solar generated more electricity than coal for several days over the past week.

"That's never happened before," said Trevor Houser, a partner at the firm.

Flashback: A decade ago, coal powered nearly 50% of America's electricity, by far the largest share.

The one-two punch of cheap, cleaner-burning natural gas and tougher environmental regulations during the Obama administration pushed coal far from its traditional perch as America's top power source.

Two factors are driving coal's relative demise now compared to other power sources.

Existing wind and solar plants have fixed costs and no marginal cost, which means they "generally get priority" when deciding which types of plants to run, Houser said.

IT WON'T BALANCE VIRUS DEATHS...:

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

As in seasons past, much of the show's comedy comes from David and his unfortunate interlocutors arguing about what the appropriate standard of behavior is in a given situation: When is it OK to ask someone's weight? Should a pregnant woman jog? Can the same dish be used to feed humans and dogs?

This intense focus on seemingly minor everyday questions of propriety makes the show as insightful as it is funny. David, like the rest of us, has to interact with a world full of people who are often selfish or annoying (or find him so). Making it all work is an informal set of rules that everyone either quietly agrees to follow or flouts at the risk of social stigma.

WILSON, AND THE DAMAGE DONE:

The Great War may have brought about the end of the imperial era for some, but victory has always been deafening to the victorious. While the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires were dismantled in a fervor of nationalism, Britain and France saw opportunities for imperial expansion.

They reneged on promises of freedom made to secure wartime alliances; and from Middle East, historian Elizabeth F. Thompson writes in How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs, they took democracy itself. The liberal-nationalist movement and the constitutional monarchy it supported failed because of that betrayal, and the great hope for Arab democracy remains elusive.

The Ottomans ruled the Middle East for centuries but declined after the Napoleonic Wars. European nations entered the power vacuum: Britain and France wrestled over Egypt. Former vassals also rose up against Istanbul, where a nationalist revolution in the early 20th century promised revival but led to tragedies instead.

Turkey joined the Central Powers in the Great War. The opposing countries, including Britain and France, encouraged Ottoman subjects to rebel against Istanbul. An Arab rebel army joined forces with a British intelligence officer, seeding the story we know as Lawrence of Arabia.

The Arab leader of that rebel army was Prince Faisal, who was sent to the Ottoman court in Istanbul by his father but returned disillusioned by miscarriages of justice, including the genocide of Armenians led by the Turkish government.

In Arab lands, Ottoman mismanagement led to famine and executions of Arab leaders who spoke out against the rulers. Faisal orchestrated a wartime alliance with the British governor of Egypt against the Ottomans, expecting that Britain would support the Arab right to self-rule after the war.

Even before the fighting had ended, however, the Arabs, British, and French, who had established colonial interests along the Mediterranean coast, began to vie over postwar spoils. This is where Thompson begins her story: with Faisal rushing to take control of the strategic and historic city of Damascus, which was the cultural and political heart of the Arab world.

Once Faisal captured the Syrian city, a broad coalition of nationalist and Islamist leaders banded together to support a constitutional monarchy. In March 1920, they formed the Syrian Arab Congress and created a liberal democratic Arab state. The Syrian Arab Congress brought together Shia and Sunni Muslims and conceived of a pan-Arab state that stretched from the Mediterranean coast -- which became Lebanon -- to Damascus and all the way to Baghdad and Persia.

But these valiant efforts failed in the face of British betrayal, French ambition, and American ambivalence. 

THE ABSOLUTISTS:

What is happening on the American intellectual scene? In Washington and New York, it is increasingly common to hear people say they are enemies of neoliberalism. They think liberal democracy is insufficient. They are in favour of government intervention in the economy, sceptical of free-trade deals and long to demolish what they call "zombie Reaganism". 

These people are not Bernie Sanders supporters. In fact, they are not on the left at all. They are Catholic professors, or writers for US conservative magazines. They run tech companies in California or work for Republican senators on Capitol Hill. Meet the new American right. 

If you would like to find yourself a place in the vanguard of American conservatism these days, you can choose from a widening panoply of neologisms to describe yourself: national conservative, integralist, traditionalist, post-liberal, you might even be welcome if you are a Marxist. Anything just so long as you're not a libertarian. 

The once dominant intellectual lodestars of the US right - Friedrich Hayek, John Locke, Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand and Adam Smith - are out. The ideas of Carl Schmitt, James Burnham, Michel Houellebecq and Christopher Lasch are in. Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville are barely clinging on. What happened? 

One explanation for the American right's leftward turn lies with Catholic opinion. Resentment was already building among US Catholic conservatives by the time of Donald Trump's election in 2016. From around 2013, as Pope Francis appeared to be compromising on certain social issues, such as acceptance of homosexuality, Catholics began to suspect the grand bargain of the American conservative movement since the 1950s - free markets combined with social conservatism - was heavily tilted in favour of the former. They saw a Republican Party guided less by religion than by money: money which seemed little disposed to advocate on behalf of their beliefs. They saw themselves as foot-soldiers in a culture war their party seemed content to lose. Even worse: for the privilege of fighting, they had been obliged not to think too hard about what Catholic social teaching might have to say on issues such healthcare, for fear of offending the jealous god of the free market. 

A demonstration of this anger came in 2018, when University of Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen published a provocatively titled book, Why Liberalism Failed. By "liberalism", Deneen did not mean the American progressivism embodied by Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, but the entire liberal project, from the 17th-century philosopher John Locke to the postwar theorist John Rawls. By replacing old commitments to community, religion or tradition with pure self-interest, Deneen said, liberalism atomised citizens, rendering them helpless, nihilistic and alone. 

The book quickly became a touchstone for conservative discussions in the US about liberalism. Instead of a threat to American liberal democracy, perhaps Trump was merely the latest symptom of a defect the liberal project had contracted at birth - the rage emanating from communities hollowed out by a corrosive liberalism. 

As a balm for these social ills, Deneen advocated retreat from national politics into the enclaves of small, rural communities, echoing other writers on the American right, such as Rod Dreher, a senior editor at the American Conservative. But more recently, Deneen has taken an interest in populism, hobnobbing with the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán in November 2019 and proposing a politics of "aristopopulism" - the notion, borrowed from the 16th-century Florentine philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli, that friction between the masses and the elite is the best way to ensure that neither class dominates the other, and that material inequality remains at a moderate level. 

Deneenism, however, came up against a fiercer and more eccentric assortment of right-wing monks and bloggers who march under the banner of "integralism". The integralists demand that the constitutional separation between church and state be smashed, so that the state may defer to the church on spiritual matters. The state's reach, argue integralists, should be combined with Catholic teaching on social issues: "Medicare for all, abortion for none."

The high priest of the integralist movement is the 51-year-old Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule. Though Vermeule agrees with Deneen's diagnosis of liberal malady, his proposed remedy is not Benedictine retreat but Constantinian takeover. A leading expert on the American administrative state, he knows it is a staggeringly powerful tool, capable of swaying the actions of millions. He believes it would only take a few loyalists, well enough placed within the national bureaucracy, to steer the whole hulking contraption in the general direction of the summum bonum. 

As a liberal ideology it has almost everything that could be desired. It starts with free and equal individuals none of whom have any claim of jurisdiction over others: this is a characteristic and essential assumption of the proponents of a liberal as opposed to a feudal or patriarchal or absolutist state.  It acknowledges that these individuals are self-interested and contentious enough to need a powerful state to keep them in order, but it avoids the Hobbesian conclusion that the state must have absolute and irrevocable power: it does this by attributing to men a moral capacity to discover and generally stay within a natural law which forbids harming others: this too is essential to the liberal case, and of course is flattering and agreeable. Moreover, Locke makes a unique and ingenious case for a natural right of unlimited private property, with which society and government are not entitled to interfere: no-one, before or since, has come near his skill in moving from a limited and equal to an unlimited and unequal property right by invoking rationality and consent.

The confluence of his main lines of argument about government and about property right provides an eminently usable ideological underpinning for the modern liberal capitalist state.

THE natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but to have only the law of nature for his rule. The liberty of man, in society, is to be under no other legislative power, but that established, by consent, in the commonwealth; nor under the dominion of any will, or restraint of any law, but what that legislative shall enact, according to the trust put in it. Freedom then is not what Sir Robert Filmer tells us, Observations, A. 55. a liberty for every one to do what he lists, to live as he pleases, and not to be tied by any laws: but freedom of men under government is, to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power erected in it...

Free men are aware of the imperfection inherent in human affairs, and they are willing to fight and die for that which is not perfect. They know that basic human problems can have no final solutions, that our freedom, justice, equality, etc. are far from absolute, and that the good life is compounded of half measures, compromises, lesser evils, and gropings toward the perfect.  The rejection of approximations and the insistence on absolutes are the manifestation of a nihilism that loathes freedom, tolerance, and equity.  

WAIT, THE ADMINISTRATION LIED?:

Talking to the press at the Pentagon after he announced his decision to relieve Crozier of his command, Modly accused the captain of sending the letter out "over non-secure, unclassified email." He said that the captain should not have sent a "blast-out email to anybody who he knows about the situation."

The former acting Navy secretary added the email was "copied to 20 or 30 other people."

Asked specifically if Crozier was being "relieved because he CC'd too many people," Modly replied, "To me, that demonstrated extremely poor judgment in the middle of a crisis."

But the email, to which the captain's four-page letter was attached, appears to have been sent to only 10 people in total, The Washington Post, which obtained a copy of the email, reported Thursday.

It was sent to Crozier's immediate boss, Rear Adm. Stuart Baker, US Pacific Fleet commander Adm. John Aquilino, and Vice Adm. DeWolfe Miller, who oversees all Pacific naval air forces. Crozier, according to The Post, then copied the message to just seven other people, all of whom were fellow US Navy captains.

WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST NOW:

IN ALL FAIRNESS...:

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

On Wednesday, a crowd of right-wing nuts -- complete with their oversized but underworked utility vehicles, Confederate flags, guns and other such overcompensation accoutrements -- descended on the State Capitol in Lansing, Michigan, to whine about the temporary pause to dinners at Applebee's and accidental brushfires at gender-reveal parties. The deep fear of emasculation driving the protest was not particularly subtle at this protest, as the crowd chanted "Lock her up" at Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat who is accused of no other crime other than making deeply insecure men fuss about a woman in power.  

The ostensible purpose of the protests was to pressure Whitmer to relax some of the restrictions on businesses and movement under the coronavirus lockdown. In reality, of course, this is happening because a bunch of Fox News-loving Trump supporters have been poisoned by propaganda that has convinced them the coronavirus is overblown or a hoax, all being spread by the libs to destroy Trump's chances at re-election.

Well, that, and the fact that they're a bunch of sexists who hate having a female governor, which goes a long way toward explaining why the Michigan protest was bigger than others in Ohio or North Carolina, whose governors are male. 

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

HATING THE AMERICA THAT IS:

Adrian Vermeule's recent essay in the Atlantic sketches an alternative to originalism, which today is the dominant theory of constitutional interpretation amongst conservatives and the one associated with the Supreme Court justice after whom my law school is named. In its place, Vermeule proposes a "common good" paternalism that candidly enforces conservative principles about hierarchy, solidarity, and personal morality.

As provocative as this is, Vermeule nevertheless pulls his punches. Rather than arguing that conservatives should reject originalism, he might have argued that they must do so if they wish to advance a morally compelling argument. For originalism, after all, is simply another form of legal positivism, the doctrine that places a Chinese Wall between what is and what ought to be the law. Originalists are the children of John Austin (1790-1859), the English legal philosopher who defined the law as the sovereign's command backed by force. As a utilitarian, Austin thought that laws might serve the principle of utility or not, that is, they might be good or bad, but in either case they're still laws if enacted by the King-in-Parliament.

As a form of legal positivism, therefore, it makes no sense to say that courts should follow originalist principles, unless the alternative is expected to make things worse. And that is what originalism comes down to. Its plausibility as a rule that deserves to be followed rests on a rejection of its principal alternative--the left-liberal egalitarianism and libertarianism that informs much of our constitutional law--and an assertion that those are the only choices before us.

As such, originalism is necessarily a political creed that seeks to hide its politics. But as Karl Llewellyn noted, covert tools are never reliable tools. When the hidden motives are exposed, the originalist can be ridiculed as insincere, and that is what liberals have done in exposing his biases.

AS LONG AS WE'RE CARING ABOUT PUBLIC HEALTH...:

The astounding impact of pollution on health was confirmed this year by a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine that examined particulate air pollution in 652 cities across the globe. It found that particulate pollution was associated with increases in cardiovascular and respiratory mortality and in overall mortality. Other studies have linked pollution to ailments ranging from diabetes to kidney dysfunction. Not only is pollution the leading environmental cause of disease, it is also connected to climate change and the health of the planet. The Lancet Commission estimated that the annual economic costs of pollution are $4.6 trillion globally.

New research also suggests that people living in areas with poorer air quality may be more susceptible to the impacts of Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.

Yet the pollution problem largely remains neglected by policymakers, funding organizations, and the media. Globally, the pollution agenda draws only a fraction of the hundreds of millions of dollars of annual funding that goes towards other public health threats like HIV/AIDS and malaria, pointed out Richard Fuller, a co-author of the Lancet report and president of the pollution-focused nonprofit Pure Earth. Why isn't pollution on our radar?

Part of the answer is that environmental regulations in the U.S. and other wealthy nations have already led to some progress. Following publication of the Lancet report, Philip Landrigan, a co-author and physician-epidemiologist at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, explained, "I was a medical intern at Cleveland Metropolitan General Hospital in the late 1960s. You couldn't see down the length of the corridor from the steel mills' air pollution. You don't see pollution like that in Cleveland anymore. But you see it in New Delhi."

Another factor is that the pollution problem is complicated and insidious. We tend to pay attention to it only in a crisis, such as when drinking water in Flint, Michigan was discovered to be tainted with lead and other pollutants. "The Flint water crisis captured people's attention as something that was important and unacceptable," said Gary Adamkiewicz, an assistant professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. "It showed gaps in public policy, revealed which communities had power and a voice, and how these things can go unnoticed without proper testing."

The Lancet Commission estimated that the annual economic costs of pollution are $4.6 trillion globally.

But even when no health emergency dominates local and national headlines, pollution continues to threaten our well-being. Polluted water leads to diarrheal diseases and other infections in the gastrointestinal tract. Soil polluted with toxic chemicals leads to heart disease, stroke, and brain injury in developing children. Polluted air leads not only to asthma, lung cancer, and diabetes, but also to low birthweight in infants. There are even cognitive effects: Recent studies have found that chess players make more mistakes in more polluted environments and that high levels of air pollution are linked to higher rates of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and dementia.

A September 2019 study published in Nature Communications examined the placentas of 28 new mothers and found that soot-like black carbon had accumulated on the fetal side of the placental walls, suggesting that particulate air pollution can directly affect a developing fetus. A recent study of expectant mothers in Boston showed that women exposed to higher levels of air pollution during pregnancy birthed newborns with lower fetal heart rate variability, indicating poorer cardiovascular health.

CONSIDER THE ALTERNATIVE...:

To many on the left, President Donald Trump has been a manifest disaster in guiding America through the current pandemic.

But Maria Romero most definitely would beg to differ.

"The man is not a magician, but he's doing everything he can. ... He believes in America and he believes in Americans," says Ms. Romero, who lost her job at a car dealership outside of Chicago two weeks ago because of COVID-19.

She tunes into President Trump's coronavirus briefings every evening, saying they make her feel reassured and hopeful.

"I could be bitter, I could say, 'This is President Trump's fault' - but it's not," she says. "Things were wonderful [before COVID-19]. He did it once, he'll do it again. I trust him."

As the United States navigates a spring season like no other, with much of its population sheltering at home and the economy frozen, President Trump's core supporters - call them "superfans" - remain staunchly behind a chief executive they believe was Making America Great Again before a pandemic unexpectedly upset his plans.

BESIDES, IT'S DISPROPORTIONATELY KILLING BLACKS!:

A new poll finds that nearly half of frequent Fox News viewers say that the official count of U.S. COVID-19 deaths is inflated https://t.co/4DXth6dcFN

— Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) April 15, 2020

ALL MEN:

On this day in 1963 Martin Luther King, Jr. writes the open Letter from Birmingham Jail.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

"I have tried to make it clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends."

— Matthew Dowd (@matthewjdowd) April 16, 2020

SELF-EXPLANATORY:

AND THEN NORMAL LIFE RESUMES:

We didn't know it yet, but that week--the week of Leslie Cheung's death--was the point of maximum hysteria and fear. In early April, while we were betting on the number of new cases and wondering about the extent of the coverup, Hong Kong passed its inflection point, with the number of new infections sinking below that of cleared cases. As April turned to May, and warmer days commenced, we looked around and realized that we were still alive.

What had actually happened? In retrospect, it seems likely that several factors converged. We had all effectively self-quarantined (or, in the case of my wife and daughters, actually departed). Schools had been closed for more than a month. Everyone in the city had been wearing surgical masks, without exception; on television, even government officials appeared in scrubs and full protective gear.

The medical system had adapted, too. Prior to sars, some hospitals had become lax, relying on antibiotics for infection control instead of maintaining disinfection as a steady state. What worked against sars, I wrote later, in my book about the outbreak, "China Syndrome," were "Florence Nightingale-style proscriptions: protective layers of masks, goggles, gloves, galoshes, and gowns. Sealed wards. Quarantine. Ventilation. This was not Nobel Prize-winning medicine. Yet it was effective." Modern hospital systems aren't accustomed to swarms of critical respiratory cases. But Hong Kong's hospitals, after becoming overwhelmed, had adjusted.

At the time, it also seemed to us that the weather played a role. Hong Kong in April has an average temperature in the seventies, and by May it is in the eighties. And yet our containment efforts were so robust that the virus's inflection point came before any seasonal trends, if they existed, could show themselves in full.

The end of sars was accompanied by a curious combination of hope and fatigue. We had been living indoors, secluded, behind masks, for so long that at some point it had become normal--even boring. I can remember the first time I saw someone wearing a mask, at the start of the outbreak: I had been taking my three-year-old daughter for a walk around Victoria Peak, and she had pointed him out. But I can't remember when I first saw someone without one, or when I myself decided to leave mine at home. I suppose that, one day, I must have woken up, got dressed, reached for the N95 as usual, and then thought, Is this really necessary?

The government didn't tell us to go out--and, in any case, it couldn't have legislated away our fear. Instead, some internal calculation seemed to show that the benefits of living our lives newly outweighed the risks of catching sars. I know as I write this that it sounds ridiculous, but it felt as though the virus itself had grown weaker--as though it had been wounded. It seemed like a miasma had lifted from the city.

My family members came back from their exile. Restaurants reopened. The viral spell broke; Hong Kong seemed to wake from a fever dream. There were magical spring days when the sun flooded Victoria Harbor. We talked, in person. The virus had reduced everyone's life to a binary--you either had it or you didn't. Now, there seemed to be seven million different stories.

One day, I found myself sitting in a steamy chicken-and-rice place full of other customers. Oh, I thought. This is what life is.

THERE IS NO CONFLICT:

The anti-quarantine stance is driven by a powerful American impulse. Our country's story has been told to us primarily in terms of freedom: who has it, who doesn't, how we got it, how some of us had to fight for it for far too long, how some of us are still fighting for it, and even how we define it. Individual liberty isn't just one of our chief national values -- it can sometimes seem like the only principle we collectively share across the political spectrum. It's difficult to think of a song about America that doesn't include the word "freedom."

"Stay at home" orders are rooted in another, somewhat less-lauded virtue: community. We are staying home -- those of us who can -- not just because we don't want to risk contracting the virus, but also because we don't want to risk spreading the virus to others. We're looking out for the collective good. We don't necessarily have training for this. Our national stories and culture don't often highlight the merits of taking care of each other, though E pluribus unum is a notable exception. We fancy ourselves rugged individualists, and some of us even make heroes of fictional characters like John Galt, the Ayn Rand protagonist who went on strike against the very notion of collective obligations.

And yet the collective good exists. Without it, we might not have volunteer fire departments, public hospitals, or even book clubs. We are healthier, safer, and happier when we work together to create things we couldn't on our own. For all our love of rugged individualism, very few of us move to the country to live off-grid. We need freedom, but we also need each other. It isn't always easy to find the right balance, but in some circumstances -- like during a global pandemic -- we have to accept limits on our own lives so that others might benefit.

PLENTY OF BLAME TO GO AROUND:

Presenting only one side of an argument "doesn't mean that your premises are false or irrelevant," the philosopher Peter Suber wrote, "only that they are incomplete." By that standard President Trump's defenders--and some of his critics, too--have made only partial attempts to identify culprits for the extent of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States. Trump's defenders point their fingers at China's dictator, Xi Jinping, whose regime censored information about the virus, including about its transmissibility, thereby immensely worsening the pandemic. Meanwhile, some of Trump's critics single him out for downplaying the pathogen's threat to Americans, even as the consensus of public health experts and the horror stories out of Wuhan and then Lombardy made it untenable to do so.

Both groups are right. Trump's negligence, willful ignorance, and devotion to his public image--recall that he said "I don't take responsibility at all" for the U.S. testing shortage--undoubtedly has cost American lives. So, too, has Xi's drawing of the Chinese Communist Party line and censoring or "disappearing" prominent figures who don't toe it.

The cases against both world leaders are damning--and ultimately not in tension with one another. Rather, they are complementary parts of a lesson: that blame for the U.S. contagion is owed not necessarily to a man but a method. That method is "authoritarianism," a term that may strike American ears as unobjectionable for Xi but exaggerated for Trump, since he isn't peremptorily locking up his political enemies or otherwise curtailing Americans' freedoms. But as the world has witnessed, both pure autocracy and the relatively diluted rule of a strongman--Trump, who called alarm about the coronavirus a "hoax," who continues to bully governors and reporters, and who claimed on Monday that state and local governments "can't do anything without the approval of the president"--result in calamity.

15 times Trump praised China as coronavirus was spreading across the globe https://t.co/sKPUVAh2j3

— Charlie Sykes (@SykesCharlie) April 16, 2020

THE UNFORHEARD:

Lee Konitz was part of one of the most celebrate recordings in jazz history. In 1949 and 1950, he played with the Miles Davis Nonet a trio of sessions that would that would become Davis' 1957 album Birth of the Cool. Konitz was the last surviving musician who played in those sessions.

But 60 years after those historic recordings were made, Konitz sat in his Upper West Side living room and dismissed Birth of the Cool as merely written music, with incidental solos, having little to do with what he saw as the heart of jazz: improvisation.

"'Improvisary' means 'unforheard' -- unforeseen -- I don't know what the Latin word for 'heard' is, but it's something like that," Konitz said. "And that's a question that I ask the so-called improvisers: How much of what you're improvising is really pre-planned? The idea that the music is full of surprises."

DONALD CHOSE A LOUSY SVENGALI:

Less than a month ago, when Russia had suffered just one death from COVID-19, a state television presenter introduced a guest dressed in green and wearing spiky headgear. "So, when did you first arrive in Moscow?" the presenter asked, referring to the actor as the "coronavirus bug."

The broadcast -- a bizarre blend of dark humor and public health information -- aired on March 21 when there were just 253 confirmed cases of coronavirus infections in the country and just days after the Kremlin had assured Russians that the virus was "under control."

A month on, the joking has stopped, and the Kremlin's tone is very different.

I DON'T THINK THAT WORD MEANS WHAT YOU THINK IT MEANS:

When a state or nation has large agricultural, manufacturing, and tech sectors, as California does, it does not have to rely on foreign entities to save it in times of emergency. This makes the state an outstanding model for a self-sustaining and nationalist economy. The benefits of economic independence are becoming even clearer during this crisis.

California has benefitted from having the greatest manufacturing capacity of any state. Governor Newsom has secured a supply of over two hundred million masks a month, from both non-profits and California-based manufacturer BYD North America. Meanwhile, the federal government is currently working to secure a supply of six hundred million masks for the entire country. A significant amount of personal protective equipment (PPE) and ventilators come from California, even as California has comparatively fewer cases.

Silicon Valley has also come to the rescue during the crisis. Facebook has built an open-source page for COVID-19 medical supplies, Tesla is using its California factories to build ventilators, and a company has even created rings which monitor medical workers for coronavirus symptoms.

On top of all this, California is the top-producing agricultural state in the nation. Two-thirds of all US fruits and a third of all vegetables come from the state. California ranchers and farmers are not only feeding a majority of their own state but large portions of others as well.

ALL THE BATTLEGROUNDS ARE RED:

U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham's Democratic challenger Jaime Harrison outraised the incumbent Republican for the first time in the race over the initial three months of 2020, setting a South Carolina campaign fundraising record in the process.

THE UR'S APPROVAL NEVER MATTERED:

Montana Chief District Judge Brian Morris ruled Wednesday that the construction permit obtained by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (COE) for a section of the Keystone XL Pipeline was invalid on the grounds that allowing the construction could potentially harm the environment.

According to the ruling, the COE failed to properly ascertain the effect of the pipeline on the surrounding areas including waterways, communities and animals in the areas. This decision invalidates Nationwide Permit 12, which allows the COE to build pipelines across waterways nationwide.

THE TRUMP BRAND:

The Confederate flags are a nice touch because they were also a bunch of losers who died fighting for something stupid.#michiganshutdown pic.twitter.com/xRpx5bcBte

— Jefferson Ornithopter (@TimInTheIce) April 15, 2020

A BALLOT WITHOUT HILLARY OR MAVERICK:

A new poll released Wednesday by OH Predictive Insights had some very good news for Arizona Democrats: the party's likely senate nominee, former astronaut Mark Kelly, leads Republican Sen. Martha McSally by nine points. And better still, Kelly is over the fifty-percent threshold for the second consecutive poll.

Or maybe it's not exactly news. Kelly has led the last nine polls of the race, according to Real Clear Politics tracker, dating back to last August. If you want to find a survey that showed McSally in the lead, you'd have to go all the way back to last May--when this same pollster had her up by one. The Arizona race is technically a special-election to permanently fill the seat held by the interim Repbulican Sen. Jon Kyl, who was appointed to fill the vacancy left by the late Sen. John McCain. (This is confusing, but: McSally lost her 2018 Senate bid to Democratic Kyrsten Sinema in the race to succeed a different retiring Republican, Sen. Jeff Flake, but Republican Gov. Doug Ducey appointed her nonetheless to replace Kyl.) If Democrats are going to take back control of the Senate, they will need to flip at least three Republican seats (four, if you expect Alabama Sen. Doug Jones to lose; five, if they don't win the White House). Right now, Kelly is looking like their safest bet.

But there's another pretty big election in Arizona this fall--the presidential race, where 11 electoral votes are up for grabs. That's one more than Wisconsin. And the news on that front is, if anything, even more encouraging for Democrats. There have been 13 head-to-head polls between Joe Biden and President Donald Trump in Arizona over the last 14 months, and Trump has led just one of them--by two points in December. In the same OH Predictive Insights survey, Biden also led his opponent by nine points, and was likewise above the 50-percent threshold.

SHOULDN'T HAVE TAKEN A PANDEMIC:

As the nation's economy and health-care system struggle to adjust to the pandemic, more and more states are reexamining some of their oldest occupational and business regulations--rules that, while couched as protecting consumers, do far more to limit competition. And for those of us who have long questioned the supposed benefits of these policies, their erosion is welcome, even if the pandemic that caused it is not.

Right now, of course, much of the attention is correctly focused on barriers to work in the health-care industry. Yet here, where the state's interest in promoting public health and safety is undoubtedly highest, we are seeing some of the most sweeping reforms in decades. While some states have ordered their occupational licensing boards to speed up the licensure of new health-care practitioners, others--such as Indiana--are granting immediate licensing reciprocity to any practitioner licensed in any state. Even Florida, which has long jealously guarded its occupational licensing regime to prevent semi-retired snowbirds from poaching on the locals' turf, has gotten in on the act, allowing out-of-state health-care providers to practice telemedicine in the state without a license.

Besides these major changes, states have also begun enacting more modest, but no less welcome, changes to regulations that needlessly stand between doctors and the patients who might benefit from their services. Illinois has waived licensure fees for retired medical practitioners who wish to resume practice. Oklahoma and Massachusetts have eliminated restrictions that required doctors to have a preexisting doctor-patient relationship before they could offer telemedicine services. And Florida--no doubt recognizing the stress we're all under--has waived the requirement of a physical examination before a doctor may issue a certification for the medical use of marijuana.

But occupational licenses aren't the only long-established healthcare regulations being reconsidered. Also being reexamined are state certificate-of-need, or CON, laws. A product of 1970s-era economic regulation, CON laws require healthcare providers to prove that new services are "needed" before they may purchase certain large equipment, open new or expanded facilities, or--as is critically needed now--offer home health-care services. Often, these laws give an effective veto power to existing medical providers, allowing them to torpedo new competition for their own benefit.

THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

As recently as 2018, the region's scientists had relatively little cachet. According to the Wellcome Global Monitor, based on a Gallup poll surveying more than 140 countries, a quarter of South Americans said they had little or no trust in doctors and nurses, making them almost as skeptical as respondents from Central Africa, the least trusting region. Fewer than 7 in 10 said they would look to health professionals for medical advice, outdone only by Middle Easterners (65%). No region had less confidence in hospitals and clinics: 37% of those surveyed compared with the world average of 19%.

Fortunately, as the coronavirus sweeps the region, the skepticism appears to be losing traction. To judge by the two-kilometer line of cars stretching before my neighborhood health clinic late last month, even the storied anti-vaccine movement is on the retreat: 8.7.million elderly Brazilians took seasonal flu shots during the opening week of the vaccination drive, double the number of the 20-day 2019 campaign. While a few hardcore science deniers still howl, Rio de Janeiro state authorities and bishops held an Easter light show projecting the city's postcard Christ the Redeemer monument dressed in a lab coat and stethoscope.

Mandetta, a pediatric orthopedist, has seen his approval ratings soar to 76% as he leads Brazil's fight against the outbreak; another survey found that 87% of Brazilians approved of the country's health professionals. Mandetta's daily press briefings alongside the health ministry's top officials have become obligatory national viewing. Not so the public performances by President Jair Bolsonaro, who has seethed as his minister consistently outshone him. (Hence his 42% disapproval rating, compared with 29% in February.) Only a counteroffensive by Bolsonaro's inner circle of military men and level-headed legislators reportedly dissuaded him from sacking Mandetta mid-crisis. For now, at least: A leader who takes his management cues from Donald Trump is unlikely to let some tropical Anthony Fauci keep taking the bows.

The stakes are especially dire for Brazil, where illness is accelerating -- officially, more than 23,700 stricken and 1,355 dead from Covid-19. (Independent studies say the real case load may be 12 times greater.) Although scientists have clawed back credibility from the corona-denialists, those gains will be threatened unless national leaders put more money into public hospitals, scale up mass clinical testing and increase the supply of ventilators and emergency health equipment. Getting Brazil's quack-in-chief to follow that prescription is another matter.

Moreover, Bolsonaro is not the only leader in a bubble. His Mexican counterpart, left-wing populist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, blithely ignored the country's epidemiologists until the outbreak started to take off. Now the health minister has taken center stage -- an encouraging if unstated nod to the growing regional consensus that only hard science and proper health protocols can beat the outbreak.

DONALD WHO?:

The Trump administration's attempt to strongarm South Korea into a large increase in spending on the basing of U.S. troops has failed:

Trump, they say, already rejected what was probably Seoul's best offer ahead of its mid-April parliamentary elections - an increase of at least 13% from the previous accord, two of the officials said.

That offer and decision to reject it by the U.S. president, the details of which have not been previously reported, leaves the United States and South Korea at an impasse, even as outbreaks of the coronavirus threaten to undermine U.S.-South Korean military readiness for any potential conflict with North Korea.

The impasse described in the report is the latest example of how the Trump administration's inflexible maximalism always leads to diplomatic failure.

HOW'S DONALD'S MENTOR DOING?:

Moscow is heading for a coronavirus outbreak similar to the one which has devastated New York, a leading Russian virologist has warned.

The worrying prediction comes as pictures emerged of 18 new coronavirus hospitals being built by Russia to cope with the pandemic.

Moscow currently has 11,0513 registered cases out of 21,102 across Russia.

There have been 198 confirmed Covid-19 deaths recorded in Russia, with 88 in Moscow alone.

Beijing has urged Moscow to 'get a grip' on infections since most of China's new cases have been imported from Russia.

Professor Sergei Netesov, of Novosibirsk State University, warned that Moscow is facing a major crisis comparable to that in New York where there have been 10,000 deaths.

WHERE'S HILLARY WHEN WE NEED HER?:

Looking for examples of true leadership in a crisis? From Iceland to Taiwan and from Germany to New Zealand, women are stepping up to show the world how to manage a messy patch for our human family. Add in Finland, Iceland and Denmark, and this pandemic is revealing that women have what it takes when the heat rises in our Houses of State. Many will say these are small countries, or islands, or other exceptions. But Germany is large and leading, and the UK is an island with very different outcomes. These leaders are gifting us an attractive alternative way of wielding power.

NOTHING TO OFFER BUT HATE:

On Monday morning I had a delivery to my apartment from the nearby off-licence - or liquor store, as they say over here.

And I put a jokey picture on Twitter of a bottle of gin and eight bottles of tonic, with the caption that at least I had the next week sorted.

After leaving the White House Briefing Room on Monday evening following a marathon two-hour 24-minute press conference, I felt I could have knocked off the whole lot in one sitting.

This has been the most dizzying, jaw-dropping, eyeball-popping, head-spinning news conference I have ever attended. And I was at Bill Clinton's news conference in 1998 when he faced the press for the first time over his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

I was at this president's first White House gathering when he called me "another beauty". I was in Helsinki when he had his first news conference with Vladimir Putin, and seemed to prefer to believe the Russian leader over his own security and intelligence chiefs on interference in the 2016 election.

I was in Vietnam when Mr Trump gave a news conference after his talks with Kim Jong-un had unceremoniously collapsed. So I've sat in on some corkers.

What made last night's encounter unique was the context. And secondly, this was, if you like, a distillation - all the talk of gin, I think, forced me to use that word - in one news conference of what three and a half years of Donald Trump has been like to cover.

There are more than 23,000 Americans dead because of coronavirus and more than half a million infected - and remember that, in early March, Donald Trump was saying there were a handful of cases, but that would soon be down to zero.

Yet Donald Trump walked into the briefing room with scores to settle with the media. This wasn't about the dead, the desperately sick, the people fearful of catching the virus. This was about him. And more particularly his profound sense of grievance that the media has been critical of his handling of Covid-19.

ALL THE BATTLEGROUNDS ARE RED:

Karma being the bitch Goddess that she is, Republican-backed conservative supreme court justice Dan Kelly was defeated by his liberal challenger in Wisconsin. And it was not even close.

That election was, of course, the reason the state's GOP insisted on holding the election last Tuesday, despite pleas from health officials to postpone the vote or shift to mail-in ballots. The images of long lines of voters in make-shift masks--contrasted with Republican assembly speaker Robin Vos in full PPE insisting that voting was "incredibly safe"--were instantly iconic.

State Republicans wagered that the horrifically bad optics would be worth it, if they could just save Kelly's seat.

They failed in spectacular fashion.

When they finally got around to counting the votes from last week's pandemic election, Kelly's liberal challenger Jill Karofsky beat him by more than 10 percentage points--which translates to more than 120,000 votes. It was a blowout in a state that has become notorious for its close elections. Despite their efforts to make voting as difficult as possible, Republicans were overwhelmed by a tsunami of mail-in votes. [...]

As Reid Epstein noted in the New York Times, "Wisconsin's map on Monday night looked like a dream general election result for former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic nominee--stronger than typical for Democrats in the suburbs and a respectable showing among the state's blue-collar white voters in rural counties."

WAIT'LL THE VIRUS RAMPS UP:

For Lukoil PJSC's billionaire shareholder, Leonid Fedun, Russia's decision to sign up to the OPEC+ oil deal was akin to its signing of the 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which dragged the country out of the First World War. Both were humiliating, but necessary, he implied. The alternative was far worse.

Back in early March, Russia, with its strong foreign currency reserves and low-cost producers, had expected to ride out the misery of tumbling crude prices. Unable to extend an existing output reduction deal with its fellow oil exporters, it spied an opportunity to squeeze out those seen by Moscow as free riders: namely, the U.S. shale producers who benefited from others' production restraint, only to flood the market with supply.

In the end, though, the damage inflicted by the coronavirus lockdowns on oil demand was too great.

WIT'LL TX IS WITHIN THE MARGIN OF ERROR:

NEW OH/Predictive Insights poll in ARIZONA: Biden 52, Trump 43.

Folks, if Biden wins Arizona (and holds Michigan and Pennsylvania), Wisconsin won't matter.https://t.co/00lECJ5Vag

— Josh Kraushaar (@HotlineJosh) April 14, 2020

ALL SUCCESSFUL FASCISTS ARE CAPITALISTS:

The concern for workers' rights is surely the forgotten element in far-Right ideology. In the first instance, far-Right ideas can bloom in those who consider themselves wronged or ignored by their political leaders. Early fascists latched on to low-paid workers, war veterans and others who felt betrayed by a system that gave them nothing in return for their sacrifices. As historian Samuel Moyn writes in Not Enough (2018): 'It is no accident that the inventor of the still most widely used measure of national inequality, Italian statistician Corrado Gini, was a Fascist.'

Gini wasn't just any fascist, either; he was the author of the paper: 'The Scientific Basis of Fascism' (1927). Yet, surely, national inequality is an obsession of the Left rather than the Right? In the end, what is the difference between fascist and Left-wing ideas? According to Oswald Mosley - the leader of the British Union of Fascists from 1932 to 1940 - the British Labour Party was pursuing policies of 'international socialism', while fascism's aim was 'national socialism'.

Mosley might have been wrong to regard mature fascism as a form of socialism. But he was right about its origins. Early Italian fascism broke from socialism only on the grounds of nationalism. The Italian dictator Benito Mussolini proposed giving women the vote, lowering the voting age to 18, introducing an eight-hour workday, worker participation in industrial management, heavy progressive capital tax and the partial confiscation of war profits. Of course, he also advocated extreme nationalism and Italian expansionism, but the pro-worker aspects of his programme are striking.

In Germany, as early as 1920, Hitler set out his 25-point manifesto for the Nazi Party, of which points 11 to 15 concern workers' rights:

11. That all unearned income, and all income that does not arise from work, be abolished.

12. Since every war imposes on the people fearful sacrifices in blood and treasure, all personal profit arising from the war must be regarded as treason to the people. We therefore demand the total confiscation of all war profits.

13. We demand the nationalisation of all trusts.

14. We demand profit-sharing in large industries.

15. We demand a generous increase in old-age pensions.

Connoisseurs will spot the antisemitic notes - 'unearned income' and 'war profits' - but, on the face of it, these points could have been taken from the manifesto of the German communists.

Mosley, who fell out with the socialists over their compromises with big business and what he perceived as the weakening of their principles, quipped: 'The Socialists wore red ties until they faded pink after the last Labour Government.' He added, in terms with which it is hard to quibble: 'Real freedom means good wages, short hours, security in employment, good houses, opportunity for leisure and recreation with family and friends.'

Mussolini and Mosley are a reminder that espousing a concern for workers' rights is not, in itself, a protection against authoritarianism. In the United Kingdom today, there is a growing belief that it was the Labour Party's failure to embrace nationalist policies - thought to be favoured by its traditional voters - that led to its humiliating electoral defeat in 2019. There's also the conviction, shared by some of the less thoughtful activists, that as long as they remain supportive of trade unions and retain pro-poor policies, their Left-wing credentials will remain intact, even if they embrace crude nationalism. But this terrain needs to be navigated very carefully indeed.

In practice, fascism's initial championing of the rights of workers came to little. But, especially in Germany, fascists relentlessly pursued their second goal of creating a racially pure state. The nation, said the Nazis, was being ruined by traitors and parasites, and it was essential that purity be restored by any means necessary. And, of course, the traitors were the communists and the parasites were the Jews.

The idea of the need to restore national purity is common to all fascisms. As the American political scientist and historian Robert Paxton wrote in The Anatomy of Fascism (2004): 'Fascisms seek out in each national culture those themes that are best capable of mobilising a mass movement of regeneration, unification, and purity, directed against liberal individualism and constitutionalism and against Leftist class struggle.' This allows a person 'the gratification of submerging oneself in a wave of shared feelings'.

In fascist literature, we see repeated a language of enemies, traitors, parasites and foreigners, and the dehumanising metaphors of pigs, dogs, rats and cockroaches, accompanied by the readiness for violent action by paramilitary and extrajudicial forces. A mob in coloured shirts exudes an aura of organised - yet brutal - force, even when those assembled have no training and little individual muscle. In the 1930s, nationalist parties around the world dressed not just in black and brown, but also in blue, green, grey, orange, silver and khaki and, not to be forgotten, the more elaborate white outfit of the American white-supremacist group the Ku Klux Klan.

As the British philosopher Brian Barry remarked in the 1980s, Anglo-American academia and liberal intellectual circles have had a difficult time with nationalism, regarding it as 'inimical to civilised values'. Yet, this has left a gap that has been exploited by ruthless opportunists, as made evident in the 2016 Brexit vote. The Leave campaign claimed a monopoly on British values. Fringe elements of the campaign were openly racist. Even members of parliament and parts of the press joined in the hostility to immigrants and foreign residents, with all the unpleasant imagery of 'swarms' or 'floods' of refugees and low-paid workers at the UK's doors.

In response, many on the Left have adopted an unashamedly pro-immigrant stance. But some Left-wing and centre-Right politicians have taken a different tack, attempting to capture nationalist sentiment without resorting to discriminatory or racist language, attitudes or policies.

The terms 'progressive patriotism' and 'liberal nationalism' have been used to try to capture this type of view. But what does it stand for? There are a number of ways to explain a distinction between 'bad' and 'good' nationalism. Bad nationalism, in the Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre's words, is 'a mindless loyalty to one's own particular nation'. Good nationalism, or what MacIntyre calls patriotism, is a matter of valuing the achievements and merits of one's country, both because they are achievements and merits, and because they are ours.

THE BLAXODUS IS EXTREMELY WELL HIDDEN:

Biden is already highly popular with black voters, according to the poll of 800 black voters conducted for BlackPAC, a progressive-leaning advocacy group. But 55 percent of African-American voters said they would be more excited to turn out or vote for Biden if he picked a black woman to join his ticket, the poll showed. Another 27 percent said the pick made no difference because they'd stick with Biden.

Only 7 percent said they would still vote for Donald Trump, who is deeply unpopular with black voters despite the president's outreach to them.

ALL THE BATTLEGROUNDS ARE RED:

Joe Biden's resurgence to become the Democrats' presumptive nominee is opening new paths to defeat President Trump, swing-state polls show.

The big picture: If Biden can keep his current leads over Trump in general-election matchups, it could create opportunities for pickups of three big states -- Florida, Arizona and North Carolina.

That's without hurting Dems' chances to take back Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, the key wins that sent Trump to the White House in 2016.

The Real Clear Politics national polling average shows that either Biden (+5.9%) or Sanders (+4.2%) would have been positioned to defeat Trump if the election were held today...

Democrats have long hoped to transform the stubbornly red state. Though it was overshadowed by Beto O'Rourke's narrow loss to Republican Sen. Ted Cruz two years ago, Democrats flipped 14 seats combined in the GOP-controlled state House and state Senate, plus two congressional districts.

While the pandemic is exceedingly unlikely to swing the biggest contests in 2020, more than a dozen Texas politicians and strategists told POLITICO that fallout from the virus could hasten the state's drift away from Republicans spurred by demographic shifts in burgeoning areas repelled by President Donald Trump.

The economic impact threatens to hurt down-ticket Republicans, who for decades have hitched their fortunes to a robust economy. Democrats are targeting seven U.S. House seats and defending two, mostly in the suburbs of the largest cities: Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Austin, El Paso and Fort Worth. Winning the state House is not out of the question for Democrats. They need to flip nine seats and are targeting districts that O'Rourke carried two years ago to get there.

In an interview, O'Rourke said Republicans' handling of the coronavirus -- and the huge economic and health toll the coronavirus is taking on Texas -- have altered the political dynamics in the state.

"We have yet to feel the full brunt of this pandemic in Texas," O'Rourke said. He rebuked Republican Gov. Greg Abbott for what he described as a feeble confrontation of the virus, praised local Democratic leaders and said the disparity would resonate with Texans in the fall.

"That's really going to affect a lot of what you see in November up the ballot -- we've got 38 Electoral College votes on the line for [Joe] Biden or Trump and down the ballot for these statehouse races. ... People are horrified at Republican leadership right now."

BEATS "WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS":

You can't tell the story of New York rock 'n roll without including The Strokes -- arguably the biggest guitar band of the 21st century. So, it's only natural that they wrote a song about one of New York's baseball teams, too.

During a YouTube listening party where the five band members discussed the new record, "The New Abnormal," frontman Julian Casablancas revealed the story behind the album's closer, "Ode to the Mets."

The singer -- who called the Mets the "team of my youth!" -- admitted that he wrote it while waiting for the subway following a particularly tough loss. (Casablancas said it was perhaps after an NLCS Game 7, but we're guessing it was the 2016 Wild Card Game that saw the Giants shut out New York, 3-0, rather than the Mets' NLCS loss in 2006.) [...]

Drummer Fabrizio Moretti, echoing the kind of self-deprecation Mets fans are famous for, said the song was about "something that you set your heart to and you love unconditionally, but continues to disappoint you."

THE BATTLEGROUND IS TX:

Liberal challenger Jill Karofsky has won a 10-year term to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, defeating Trump-backed conservative incumbent Dan Kelly, according to our partners at DecisionDesk. As of Monday evening, Karofsky had raked in roughly 53 percent of the vote to Kelly's 47 percent, when the race was called.

...AND CHEAPER...:

Scientists at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in the US have set a new world record solar energy conversion efficiency, producing an innovative solar cell that converts light into electricity with almost 50 per cent efficiency. [...]

The researchers believe the new technique could provide a pathway for producing solar cells with even higher efficiencies that are ideally suited for use in concentrated solar power devices.

BUILD THE WALL...AROUND THE PRAM HIGHER:

A toddler threw a self-pitying tantrum on live television on Monday night. Unfortunately he was 73 years old, wearing a long red tie and running the world's most powerful country.

Donald Trump, starved of campaign rallies, Mar-a-Lago weekends and golf, and goaded by a bombshell newspaper report, couldn't take it any more. Years of accreted grievance and resentment towards the media came gushing out in a torrent. He ranted, he raved, he melted down and he blew up the internet with one of the most jaw-dropping performances of his presidency.

AND YOU THOUGHT SCHOOL WAS CLOSED:

In a heated press conference inside the White House on Monday evening, Trump claimed that his office holds 'absolute power' over the shutdowns prompted by the novel coronavirus outbreak - hours after Cuomo and eight other Democratic governors unveiled a pact to work together to co-ordinate the reopenings of their respective states.

'When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total,' Trump told reporters in response to the announcement, declining to specify where his authority to overrule states resides when pressed by DailyMail.com. Instead, he reiterated: 'The federal government has absolute power.'

But Trump's claims of total authority were quickly refuted by Cuomo, who slammed president for what he perceived to be an 'abrogation of the Constitution'.

'Mr. Trump offered no legal or constitutional basis to back up his claim to exclusive authority to reopen society,' Cuomo told MSNBC. 'Why he [Trump] would even go there, I have no idea.

'The constitution says we don't have a king. To say I have total authority over the country because I'm the president, it's absolute, that is a king. We didn't have a king, we didn't have king George Washington, we had President George Washington.'

WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?:

IN ALL FAIRNESS, NO ONE THINKS HE UNDERSTANDS THE CONSTIUTION:

TRUMP on possibility states won't want to relax social distancing as quick he would like: "The president of the United States calls the shots ... it's a decision for the president ... they can't do anything without the approval of the president." pic.twitter.com/a9f73Z8G3N

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 13, 2020

THE GOVERNOR HAS WRECKED ALL THE PROGRESS HE'D MADE SINCE BEING ELECTED:

This is Florida's Surgeon General being removed from a #COVID19 briefing by @GovRonDeSantis staff right after saying we'll need to social distance until there is a vaccine. https://t.co/3pBOV7dMP5 pic.twitter.com/czp7dTqfdT

— Kevin Cate (@KevinCate) April 13, 2020

IMAGINE BEING SO UNCERTAIN OF YOUR FAITH...:

In his last known in-person service on March 22, Bishop Gerald O. Glenn got his congregation at Richmond's New Deliverance Evangelistic Church to stand to prove how many were there despite warnings against gatherings of more than 10 people.

"I firmly believe that God is larger than this dreaded virus. You can quote me on that," he said, repeating it a second time to claps, saying that "people are healed" in his church.

THE FLOOR IS 20%:

An April 10-12 survey of 1,987 registered voters found 49 percent disapprove and 45 percent approve of the president's COVID-19 response, marking a drop of 5 percentage points in his net approval, the share who approve minus those who disapprove, in the course of a week and an 18-point drop since a mid-March peak in evaluations of his handling of the pandemic.

Only 27% of Americans said they think the US is doing a better job at containing coronavirus than other developed countries, a new Insider poll found, and about one in five said the US is "much worse" at containing coronavirus than other developed countries. 

Overall, about 46% of Americans think the US is doing worse than other developed countries in fighting the virus. 

THE WISDOM OF THE MARKET:

DONALD WHO?:

JUST THE NAME RECOGNITION FOR MOST MUST BE MINISCULE:

Respondents gave Fauci an average score of 3.96 out of 5 for trustworthiness -- up slightly from 3.84 last time in late March. Fully 44% of respondents rated him five-out-of-five, and a further 24% gave him a 4 of 5.

Cuomo received an average score of 3.31 out of 5, also up slightly from the last poll. Just shy of half -- 46% -- gave Cuomo a 4 or 5 on communication. 

Global-health Ambassador Deborah Birx, the response coordinator of the coronavirus task force, got a score of 3.21 out of 5.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom got an average score of 3.15 out of 5.

Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar was rated 3.03 out of 5

Former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive 2020 Democratic nominee, got an average score of 2.69 out of 5, down slightly from March.

Vice President Mike Pence was rated a 2.67 out of 5 on average for trustworthiness. While about a third of respondents gave Pence a 4 or 5, another third gave him a 1 of 5. 

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin is no longer the lowest score last time, even though his rating of 2.51 out of 5 is down from March by a hair. 

President Donald Trump scored 2.48 out of 5 on average, also down very slightly from March, when he rated 2.56.

The poll's newest entry, White House Senior Adviser Jared Kushner, saw the lowest score at 2.35 out of 5.

HYPOCRISY ALERT:

PHANTOM OF THE PEDRERA:

DUDE, NO ONE NEEDS YOU TO TELL US:

Joe Biden lashed out at President Trump for 'making excuses' in an op-ed in the New York Times detailing how he would handle the coroanvirus pandemic as president. 

'We are now several months into this crisis, and still this administration has not squarely faced up to the "original sin" in it's failed response - the failure to test,' Biden pointed out in the editorial, which ran Sunday. 

IF YOU CAN KEEP IT:

When Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, it created a powerful new federal agency charged with policing the financial sector. A brainchild of then-Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was supposed to safeguard the interests of American consumers by implementing and enforcing a wide array of federal regulations.

The CFPB was also designed to be independent. The agency was placed in the hands of a single director appointed by the president to a five-year term. Despite wielding many executive branch-like powers, the director of the CFPB does not answer to the White House and may only be removed by the president for "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance."

In other words, the director may not be fired for purely political reasons. What that means in practice is that if CFPB inventor Elizabeth Warren were elected president while a Donald Trump appointee stands at the agency's helm, Warren would be blocked from naming her own preferred CFPB director until the Trump appointee's term had expired.

That unique organizational structure has raised constitutional questions. How is it consistent with the separation of powers to have a quasi-executive agency run by a lone federal official who is essentially untouchable by the head of the executive branch? Is the CFPB effectively a fourth branch of government unto itself?

The U.S. Supreme Court tackled those very issues in March when it heard oral arguments in Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

ALL FUN AND GAMES UNTIL THE LAUGHINGSTOCK HAS TO GOVERN (profanity alert):

If you were to write a playbook for how not to prevent a public-health crisis, you would study the work of the Trump administration in the first three months of 2020. The Trump White House, through some combination of ignorance, arrogance, and incompetence, failed to heed the warnings of its own experts. It failed to listen to the projections of one of its own economic advisers. It failed to take seriously what has become the worst pandemic since the 1918 flu and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. And when the White House finally awoke to the seriousness of COVID-19, the response it mustered managed to contain all the worst traits of this presidency. Trump and his closest aides have ignored scientists, enlisted family members and TV personalities and corporate profiteers for help, and disregarded every protocol for how to communicate during a pandemic while spewing misinformation and lies.

There was confusion in the response from the start. In January, Trump picked HHS Secretary Alex Azar II, the former president of pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, to lead his new Coronavirus Task Force. The problem was, there was already a senior official at HHS whose job was coordinating the federal government's response to a nationwide pandemic, Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response Robert Kadlec.

In late February, after it was clear that the virus had spread widely throughout the U.S., Trump reshuffled his task force. He replaced Azar with Vice President Mike Pence as the leader of the task force, and added Dr. Deborah Birx, the State Department's global AIDS director and an infectious-disease expert, who joined Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as the group's scientific experts. But Trump also appointed administration loyalists like right-wing extremist Ken Cuccinelli and Seema Verma, the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and a vocal critic of the Affordable Care Act.

Like so many things in Trumpland, the work of the task force has gotten mired in petty politics and internal turf wars. A "shadow" task force emerged, led by Jared Kushner. Officially, Kushner's team of McKinsey consultants, financiers, and old buddies from his New York business days was meant to coordinate collaboration between the government and the private sector. But it soon devolved into a typical Trump boondoggle. A company Kushner had once invested in, Oscar Health, was tapped to build a government website that would speed up testing (the site was later scrapped). Kushner turned to his brother Josh's father-in-law, Kurt Kloss, who was a doctor, for recommendations on how to deal with the crisis. That led to Kloss -- the father of supermodel Karlie Kloss, Josh's wife -- posting on a Facebook group for emergency-room doctors that he was looking for smart ideas and had a "direct channel to [the] person now in charge at [the] White House."

Federal agencies that normally play a central role in disaster-response efforts have found themselves left out of the action. Pete Gaynor, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told Congress that his agency wasn't invited to join the president's Coronavirus Task Force until the week of March 16th -- six weeks after the task force was created.

Other federal employees involved in the response effort have had to respond to different and sometimes competing requests and directives from Pence's task force and Kushner's task force. "All of those roles and responsibilities should be relatively well-established," says one public-health official who's dealt with the White House. "I've heard that people in HHS will get direction from Kushner's team that directly contradicts what they're getting from the White House task force, and then trying to deconflict those becomes a huge problem."

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) says he and his staff spent a week trying to understand the Trump administration's strategy for directing the production and distribution of critical medical supplies amidst the crisis; Murphy's conclusion, as he put it in a tweet, was that Trump's plan was "a total, complete, absolute clusterf**k." When Murphy asked the White House for a call with the federal agency leading the effort to get private companies to manufacture and distribute medical supplies, he expected to be connected with FEMA, which typically handles this kind of work in a crisis, or Peter Navarro, the newly appointed national Defense Production Act policy coordinator. Instead, he was told to call the Department of Defense. "I walked away from that conversation scratching my head, like, 'Who's in charge?' " Murphy tells Rolling Stone. "DOD clearly has expertise, but it seems completely unclear whether the White House is in charge, DOD is in charge, FEMA is in charge, or HHS is in charge."

The Trump administration's reflexive bias against science and facts expertise couldn't be more clearer than in the sidelining of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the crown jewel of the country's public-health system. Dr. Robert Redfield, the CDC's director, sits on the Coronavirus Task Force and has participated in closed-door meetings, but he has appeared at only a few of the dozens of press briefings held by the task force. Trump trashed the agency on Twitter in mid-March ("inadequate and slow"), and the CDC has since taken a back seat to other federal agencies in communicating with the public.

"I'm worried that the CDC is not front and center now," Dr. Tom Frieden, who served as CDC director from 2009 to 2017, tells Rolling Stone. "In every other public-health emergency in this country since the CDC was founded nearly 75 years ago, it has had a leading role. The CDC is the best source of information on COVID-19." Frieden adds, "Fighting coronavirus without CDC is like fighting with one hand behind your back."

Adding to the confusion, the White House has made crucial pledges and then failed to meet them. In early March, Pence vowed that more than a million tests would be ready within days. Azar followed that up by saying there would be "up to 4 million tests" available by the middle of March. Yet by March 31st, there had been just more than 1 million tests conducted.

Nowhere is the chaos of Trump's coronavirus response more clear than in the White House's bungled efforts to help meet the demand for desperately needed medical supplies. 

THE ONLY EXISTENTIAL THREAT IS INTERNAL:

Israel locked down mainly ultra-Orthodox Jewish areas of Jerusalem on Sunday to try to contain the spread of the coronavirus from the densely populated neighbourhoods where the infection rate is high.

The entry and exit restrictions, enforced by police roadblocks, were imposed on the same day that a government order for the wearing of masks in public went into effect throughout the country.

Residents of the restricted neighbourhoods in Jerusalem can still shop close to home for essentials. Synagogues have been closed to try to stem infections, as they have been across the country.

The neighbourhoods are home to large families living in close quarters. Compliance with social-distancing guidelines has been spotty.

PANOPTICONSERVATISM:

Last week, Apple and Google announced an interesting partnership. Both companies will build technology into their mobile operating systems that will allow for large scale contact tracing. It's a pretty big deal for two reasons: The first is that the two companies are fierce rivals, but are working together to solve a problem that affects all of us. Second, it might actually work since the two companies power almost all mobile devices worldwide.

People understandably start to get nervous when they start to hear that their mobile phones could be used for any kind of tracing, especially if you're not sure what that means. The basic concept is that you would be able to download an app that would ping off other mobile phones that you come into proximity with. 

If you were to later test positive for Covid-19, you could indicate as much on the app, which would then notify the owners of the other devices you came in contact with that they were potentially exposed.

Most experts agree that contact-tracing is one of the most important factors to "re-opening" society. That's because it will allow new cases to be isolated while pinpointing others who might have been exposed early enough that the spread can be limited. 

THERE'S A RICH TEXT TO BE WRITTEN ABOUT A MUGGLE REVOLT AGAINST THE WIZARDS:

The wizarding world in Harry Potter is not a harmonious society invaded by evil from the outside; we soon learn that it is a society already full of injustice. Wizarding rule looks natural to the wizards, but Rowling leaves no doubt that it is not. Wizards forbid non-humans to carry wands, drive Centaurs from their lands, abuse their House-elves, and shun werewolves. Many are suspicious of Muggle-borns.

Of course, the main story is not one of moral ambiguities. Gryffindors know evil when they see it. But the good guys are not completely off the hook here: Sirius is a bully to his House-elf, and the main characters themselves respond differently to oppressive institutions. Ron has himself been raised with some of the ideological biases of the wizarding class - House-elves are natural slaves, and goblins are not to be trusted. Hermione, more woke, explicitly calls him out on these opinions, saying that "it's people like you [...] who prop up rotten and unjust systems" (GoF 106).

Nor is this a mere side-motif or parody. For one, the story time and again invokes the racism of the bad guys as a plot point: crucial blows to the dark side are dealt by creatures they deem beneath their attention. Harry's natural inclusive attitude is a strength closely wound up with the virtues of love and loyalty that he embodies; it is why he can win in spite of Voldemort having more magical knowledge and power.

Second, it is not just Hermione who believes in connections between different forms of oppression. When Voldemort rises to power, all pre-existing fault lines come into sharper view. There is a class that can opt out of the struggle, and it is the class already in power: all wizard-born wizards (except Harry). The death eaters' terror lands on those groups and creatures that had been marginalized and stigmatized before - it just becomes worse:

"'It doesn't matter', said Harry [...] 'This isn't about wizards versus goblins or any other sort of magical creature -'

Griphook gave a nasty laugh.

'But it is, it is about precisely that! As the Dark Lord becomes ever more powerful, your race is set still more firmly above mine! Gringotts falls under wizarding rule, house-elves are slaughtered, and who amongst the wand-carriers protests?'" (DH 395)

Rhetorical strategies wizards use to justify oppression and exclusion often resonate with mechanisms familiar to our own world. The bigots in the book usually spout recognizably right-wing language, glorifying strength and self-interest ('Magic is Might'), or appealing to the natural order. A movie line, where a minister working for Voldemort promises to "restore this temple of tolerance to its former glory", sums up well the political dimension of the final book of the series. The English Wizarding world, Rowling shows, is a society that has not shaken off the darkest pages of its history; whose leaders willfully refuse to believe that the roots of this darkness persist; and which is all the more vulnerable for it. It is ripe for the taking.

I am aware that Harry Potter is not a textbook of political science. I also think, however, that the moves Voldemort happens to make in order to gain power were put there by an author with a good sense of where the vulnerabilities of our own societies lay. I mean playing on the perceived self-interests of a dominant caste that feels it is being unduly restrained in its exploitation of the less powerful. Rowling 'warned' us, in the early 2000s, that a narcissistic, cruel and petty bully could hijack the system by manipulating the resentment of a significant reactionary minority.

But indeed, it is not the main story. The story of Harry and Voldemort is not political, but moral, existential. It is about how self-love and fear of death can shut you off from humanity, and turn you to evil; and how altruism, empathy, self-sacrifice and love can keep you grounded, can attach you to other people and thereby help you to face death.

"Dumbledore says it's our fault"

It is here that we find another, more subtle aspect to the cultural politics of the series. In a gigantic literary parable like this, moral categories easily slide into natural categories. What I mean is this: the Harry Potter series is a story first. The world is malleable to this story, and Rowling is often willing to compromise on the internal logic of the magic system if by doing so she can add a layer of meaning to a character. She does what the story needs. But in order for the story to get off the ground, some things have to be true about the magical world not metaphorically, but literally. Dementors literally feed on happiness. Killing literally rips the soul apart.

In the magical world, virtues and values draw their force not just from human assent, but from objects - mirrors know what your deepest desires are, and hats and swords know whether you are worthy of them. There is a conservative streak to such naturalism: the reification of aspects of our lived experience into magical creatures and objects elevates some social facts to natural facts (-in-the-narrative), and not others. A mother's sacrifice provided real magical protection; a father's sacrifice did not.

Diversity in the wizarding world has an objective element. With the exception of the distinction between wizard- and Muggle-born wizards, which is consistently presented as false and baseless by all reliable characters, stereotypes in the magical world often extend to different species. This means that the magical world presents a much more genuine challenge to political solidarity than does the human world: elves, trolls and giants have intelligence and language, but they also seem different from humans. In some cases, they are less intelligent - if you overload giants with information, they will, as Hagrid puts it, "kill yeh jus' to simplify things" (OP 380). In some cases, as with the centaurs, their classification as creatures with "near-human intelligence"  (OP 665) seems to be another instrument of oppression. The giants' reputation for aggression can be read as a fault of the social system as much as it can be read into their nature:

"They're not made ter live bunched up together like tha'. Dumbledore says it's our fault, it was the wizards who forced 'em to go an' made 'em live a good long way from us an' they had no choice bu' ter stick together fer their own protection." (OP 378)

The politics of diversity in Harry Potter is complicated, and its translation to the real world is problematic. Rowling seems to present a world in which, though many beliefs held by the ruling class are self-serving and based on misinformation, there may also be natural differences between groups. These differences, however, do not determine what the social order ought to look like. Ways of dealing with differences are contested, and even Dumbledore was once tempted by the idea that wizards had a natural right to rule. Harry, on the other hand, does not see werewolves, goblins or elves, but sees every individual as a potential friend. The books present this attitude as the right one, but also as an exceptional one.

NOT SO SECRET AGENT:

A former staff assistant to Joe Biden, Tara Reade, has accused the former vice president of sexually assaulting her when she worked in his Senate office from December 1992 to August 1993. Biden's campaign says the allegation is false and a New York Times investigation found no corroboration outside of two friends she told in 1993 and 2008.

The Times spoke with both of Reade's friends, seven other women who accused Biden of inappropriate (but not sexual) touching last year, and several people who worked in Biden's office at the time, including two interns Reade supervised. The newspaper tried and failed to locate a complaint Reade said she had filed with the Senate. "No other allegation about sexual assault surfaced in the course of reporting, nor did any former Biden staff members corroborate any details of Ms. Reade's allegation," reporters Lisa Lerer and Sydney Ember wrote. "The Times found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Biden."

LET'S GO TO THE VIDEOTAPE!:

Navarro interrupted: "Well, let me push back a little bit."

"If an intelligence agency said 'a global pandemic could happen,' I'm sure they've been saying that for decades," Navarro said. "And nobody took them seriously. Why? Well, black swans are hard to sell. And this was the 500-year flood."

"You can line up every president since then and say, 'Why didn't you think this can happen again?' But that's not productive right now," Navarro added. "Have that episode and I challenge you -- show me the '60 Minutes' episode a year ago, two years ago, or during the Obama administration, during the Bush administration that said 'Hey a global pandemic is coming. You gotta do X, Y, and Z. And by the way, we would shut down the entire global economy to fight it.'"

"Show me that episode, then you'll have some credence in terms of attacking the Trump administration for not being prepared," Navarro said.

"I guarantee you we did," Whitaker responded.

CBS then immediately played numerous clips of their past coverage of deadly diseases in the last 15 years, a segment that also included an appearance of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the current director of the US's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

"Right now, if we had an explosion of an H5N1, we would not be prepared for that," Fauci said in 2005, in reference to the avian flu.

HIS LIPS WERE MOVING:

"We're in great shape with ventilators," Trump said on Friday. "We're in great shape with protective clothing. We have additional plane loads coming in but we're not getting any calls from governors at this moment... We're getting very few calls from governors or anybody else."

Hogan said that Trump's words were "not quite accurate."

"I get calls from governors every single day," Hogan replied. "We've had 12 calls now with every single governor in America, eight of which the president and/or vice president was on the call with us."

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

CIA employees have been privately warned against taking an anti-malaria drug hailed by Donald Trump as a 'game changer' in the war on coronavirus.

Sudden death is one of the suspected side effects of hydroxychloroquine, according to the intelligence agency in a memo to its workforce posted online.

Despite a lack of medical evidence, the President has heavily promoted the drug as a possible treatment for Covid-19, which has killed 23,675 and infected 588,421 in the United States. 

...AND CHEAPER...:

Renewable energy hit what may be a record level of renewable energy on grid demand in the early afternoon on Easter Saturday, when the combined output of rooftop solar, large scale wind and solar and hydro power accounted for 50.4 per cent of net load.

The 50 per cent share of renewables - which even the federal Coalition government now conceded will be an "annual average" by 2030, rather than a figure reached during a point in time - was attained just after noon on Easter Saturday, traditionally a time of low demand, and perhaps more so given the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.

KILLING WOLVERINES:

THE ORANGE CEILING:

President Donald Trump's approval rating has slumped to a six-month low of 43 percent as the coronavirus crisis drags into its third month.

A total of 56 percent of voters disapprove of Trump's job performance in office, according to a Friday Rasmussen Reports poll of 500 likely voters.

Those latest numbers include 30 percent of likely voters who strongly approve of Trump's job in office and 44 percent who strong disapprove, resulting in a presidential approval index rating of -14.

THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

Donald Trump's coronavirus wartime orders repeatedly have managed to contradict himself and just about every governor, mayor and medical officer over these long weeks of disease and lockdown. And they have created another conflict front this week: health coverage in a time of emergency for the uninsured.

What the rest of his government and private insurers were preparing was a special enrollment in the Obamacare exchanges to handle the 20 million who have been kicked off the Affordable Care Act and, now, for the millions who are losing their jobs -- and therefore their employer-paid health care.

But doing anything under the name of Obamacare must have been so noxious to Trump that instead he is making this a new direct government payment. In other words, rather than push some of the cost of coronavirus treatments, not tests, to private insurers, he intends to cover the costs under money from the recently passed aid bill as if the uninsured were enrolled fully in state Medicaid programs.

Someone at the White House should call Bernie Sanders. Isn't this Medicare for All? The difference is that it won't use the name Obama anywhere.

SEEMS LIKE A GOOD TIME FOR ONE...:

 Israel's president on Sunday turned down a request from Blue and White party leader Benny Gantz for a two-week extension to form a new coalition government.

The announcement by President Reuven Rivlin means that Gantz and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have a midnight deadline on Monday night to reach a power-sharing deal. If they fail, the country could be forced into a fourth consecutive election in just over a year.

GMO V. HUNGER:

Across Asia, Africa and Latin America, rice is a staple, both culturally and practically. A Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimate found that more than 16 percent of all the calories consumed in the world come from rice. But it's also deeply susceptible to climate change: Rice doesn't like higher temperatures, and some estimates have found that crop yields could fall 40 percent by 2100 if nothing is done. Plus, rice yields actually need to increase to offset expected population growth and rapid urbanization of the world, which changes global priorities for land use.

Luckily, Jane Langdale is doing something.

Faced with the destruction climate change is certain to wreak on the world, some of us hide under our beds composing poems about the apocalypse. Others try to make sure that, even if the climate does shift, vulnerable people -- and, crucially, their food sources -- are protected.

Langdale, a professor of plant development at Oxford University, is the coordinator for the C4 Rice Project, a global push to make sure rice remains a viable crop through a very specific scientific process. Simply put: Plants absorb carbon dioxide. About 95 percent of plant species, including rice, extract the carbon from those molecules via a process known as C3. But about 3 percent of species, including maize and sorghum, do it through a different process known as C4. Plants that use the C4 process are more resistant to extreme heat and drought. So Langdale's project is attempting to turn rice into one of those plants.

"What we're trying to do, given that crops are going to be growing in the future in conditions with less water and higher temperatures, is to try and convert rice from using the ancestral C3 pathway," she says. Doing that could double the plant's water efficiency and yield.

"The headline is that it should contribute in a big way to food security to many of the most vulnerable people on the planet," explains Julian Hibberd, another scientist working on the C4 rice project.

OF MASKS AND HOODS:

On March 13, the Centers for Disease Control hadn't yet recommended that everyone wear masks. Most of the people wearing them on the streets -- in Chinatown but also all over the city -- were Asian immigrants, who probably already knew that it was safer to wear a mask because you could be asymptomatic. But from a xenophobe's perspective, the face mask seemed to implicate foreigners as agents of diseases. The masks depersonalized their faces, making the stereotypically "inscrutable" Asian face even more inscrutable, effacing even their age and gender, while also telegraphing that the Asian wearer was mute and therefore incapable of talking back if aggressed. I was afraid for the Chinese immigrants I encountered on the street. I wanted to take them aside and tell them it was safer not to wear one because the equipment that protected them -- and others -- only made them more vulnerable to attack.

I started bookmarking tweets and news reports of racist incidents. [...]

I never would have thought that the word "Chink" would have a resurgence in 2020. The word was supposed to be as outdated as those sinister little Chinamen saltshakers I saw in thrift shops. It still thrived among bottom feeders on the internet, but I hadn't heard it directed at me since I was in my 20s. But now I was encountering that word every time I read about an anti-Asian incident or hearing about its use from friends. I couldn't process the fact that Americans were hurling that slur at us so openly and with such raw hate. In the past, I had a habit of minimizing anti-Asian racism because it had been drilled into me early on that racism against Asians didn't exist. Anytime that I raised concerns about a racial comment, I was told that it wasn't racial. Anytime I brought up an anti-Asian incident, a white person interjected that it was a distraction from the more important issue (and there was always a more important issue). I've been conditioned to think my second-class citizenry was low on the scale of oppression and therefore not worth bringing up even though every single Asian-American I know has stories of being emasculated, fetishized, humiliated, underpaid, fired or demoted because of our racial identities.

After President Trump called Covid-19 the "Chinese virus" in March, the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council said more than 650 incidents of discrimination directed against Asian-Americans were reported to a website it helps maintain in one week alone. Even after seeing that number, I wondered if anti-Asian racism would be taken seriously. On Twitter, when the novelist R.O. Kwon talked about the surge, an in-law asked doubtfully, "Is it really happening?" Do the reports have to rise to 1,000 a week? 2,000? How many is enough so that the hate will be seen?

Since the coronavirus, what has been happening is a different strain of anti-Asian racism than the kind to which I'm accustomed. Not the kind in which we are invisible or we're seen as efficient cyborgs. Racism never disappears but adapts to new circumstances when old strains rise from the dark vaults of American history. The recent rise carries the stench of late-19th-century xenophobia. In 1882, the government passed a federal law that banned Chinese laborers from entering the U.S. because of fears they were taking jobs away from whites. They were portrayed as a "degraded" race, a contagion that would stain the morals of white Americans. If black and indigenous people were systematically enslaved, killed and dispossessed of property, the Chinese were excluded from the U.S. altogether, an immigration ban that was essentially a form of global segregation. Chinese immigrants remaining in cities were segregated into squalid quarters. The scholar Joan B. Trauner writes that whites were repulsed by San Francisco's Chinatown with "its foul and disgusting vapors" and health officials blamed the enclave for spreading every epidemic. One physician said at the time: "The Chinese were the focus of Caucasian animosities, and they were made responsible for mishaps in general. A destructive earthquake would probably be charged to their account."

The anti-Chinese campaign was widespread, reaching less densely populated areas as well, where Chinese immigrants were afraid to leave their homes because they would be assaulted, even shot at. In 1885, in what is now Tacoma, Wash., white people terrorized the Chinese community by setting fire to their businesses. The xenophobia culminated in a riot in which a white mob drove 300 Chinese immigrants out of their homes. "Using clubs, poles and pistols," writes the historian Beth Lew-Williams, the mob chased the weeping immigrants out of town in a freezing rain.

"I'm afraid to leave my home not because of coronavirus," my Asian friends say, half in jest, "but because I don't want to be a victim of a hate crime." It doesn't matter if our families hail from Thailand, Burma or the Philippines. Racism is indiscriminate, carpet bombing groups that bear the slightest resemblance to one another. We don't have coronavirus. We are coronavirus.

THE WAGES OF COMMUNISM IS DEATH:

There is authoritative and compelling evidence -- including a study from the University of Southampton -- that if interventions in China had been conducted three weeks earlier, transmission of COVID-19 could have been reduced by 95 percent.

For 40 days, President Xi Jinping's CPC concealed, destroyed, falsified, and fabricated information about the rampant spread of COVID-19 through its state-sanctioned massive surveillance and suppression of data; its misrepresentation of information; its silencing and criminalizing of its dissent; and its disappearance of its whistleblowers.

In late December 2019, Dr. Ai Fen, director of the Emergency Department at the Central Hospital of Wuhan -- "The Whistle-Giver" -- disseminated information about COVID-19 to several doctors, one of whom was Dr. Li Wenliang, and eight of whom were later arrested. Dr. Ai has recently disappeared.

Dr. Ai also detailed efforts to silence her in a story titled, "The one who supplied the whistle," published in China's People (Renwu) magazine in March. The article has since been removed.

On January 1, 2020, Dr. Li Wenliang -- the "hero" and "awakener" -- was reprimanded for spreading rumors, and was summoned to sign a statement accusing him of making false statements that disturbed the public order. Seven other people were arrested on similar charges. Their fate is still unknown.

On January 4, 2020, Dr. Ho Pak Leung -- president of the University of Hong Kong's Centre for Infection -- indicated that it was highly probable that COVID-19 spread from human-to-human, and urged the implementation of a strict monitoring system.

For weeks, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission declared that preliminary investigations did not show any clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.

On January 14, 2020, the WHO reaffirmed China's statement, and on January 22, 2020, Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus praised the CPC's handling of the outbreak, commending China's Minister of Health for his cooperation, and President Xi and Premier Li for their invaluable leadership and intervention.

On January 23, 2020, Chinese authorities announced their first steps to quarantine Wuhan. By then, it was too late. Millions of people had already visited Wuhan and left during the Chinese New Year, and a significant number of Chinese citizens had traveled overseas as asymptomatic carriers.

On February 23, 2020, Ren Zhiqiang -- former real estate tycoon and longstanding critic of the CPC -- wrote in an essay that he "saw not an emperor standing there exhibiting his 'new clothes,' but a clown stripped naked who insisted he continue being emperor." He spoke of a "crisis of governance" and the strict limits on free speech, which had magnified the COVID-19 epidemic. He has also gone missing, and it has recently been reported that the CPC has opened an investigation against him.

The world would have been more prepared and able to combat COVID-19 had it not been for President Xi's authoritarian regime's widespread and systematic pattern of sanitizing the massive domestic repression of its people.

COMMUNALITY, NOT CEREMONY:

Ehrman, author or editor of 30 books on the religious environment of the period, turns to the historical record, supplemented by modern statistics, to peg the Christian population of the empire at 30 million by 400 CE. This may seem like an astounding advance in numbers, but Ehrman calmly delineates the sound statistical case that Christianity enjoyed a "steady and plausible rate of growth" to embrace half the empire's population.

Still, Rome, in the first four centuries CE, was swarming with religions, including many so-called Mystery cults centered on the worship of gods violently done to death, only to rise again later. (At least one of these, as Apuleius [c.120-170 CE] describes in his picaresque narrative, The Golden Ass, involves a ritual wherein the initiate undergoes a displaced though superficially bloody recreation of the god's death and resurrection.)

So what accounts for Christianity's preeminent success in drawing converts? Ehrman suggests two factors, both related, from this reviewer's perspective, to a convert's need for felt community. In the first place, Roman religions -- whether cults worshipping luminaries from the "classical" pantheon, or regional/local/household gods or figures from the Mysteries -- made no claims on a devotee's select loyalty. He or she could simultaneously worship gods or goddesses of any flavor, from any cult.

Christian practice, on the other hand, was exclusivist: The devotee had to worship only the (tripartite) Christian god and reject all others. (We risk a disorienting leap into the banal by pointing out that modern branding research has demonstrated the appeal of membership in a shared and exclusive community. Know any Apple fans?)

A second, and perhaps more telling, point: The practice of Roman Christianity extended well beyond the "cultic" nature of other religions of the day. When their pagan counterparts took part in rituals, it was one-and-done: this was the extent of their religious exercise (and spiritual obligations).

For their part, Christians prized loving community as lived in a world that was an extension of the ritual space. They gathered in non-ceremonial contexts, shared good fortune, helped indigent members, and perhaps provided rudimentary healthcare.

In short, one could argue (although Ehrman stops short of asserting this) that they walked the talk ascribed to Jesus and promulgated by his most-inspired advance man.

THERE'S NOTHING MORE TERRIFYING THAN MORAL CONSISTENCY:

Thomas Jefferson, for instance, was "disloyal and duplicitous" and a "supporter (of) the violent newspapers of the time" says Harvard Law professor Ben Heineman. It turns out Jefferson was more orchestrator than supporter. Jefferson's biographer and historian Jon Meacham explains in Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power that Jefferson once recruited editor Philip Freneau to start the newspaper the National Gazette, with the purpose of assailing his political enemies without having to attach his own name to such attacks--a leap beyond the acceptable practice at the time of writing under a pseudonym. What's more, Jefferson used that newspaper to also attack the policies of the very administration he was serving as Washington's Secretary of State. Jefferson even subsidized Freneau's National Gazette salary by hiring him as a translator for the State Department; meaning Washington's administration was paying the salary of the very man attacking them. Meacham notes that Jefferson was "dishonest about his support of Philip Freneau...preferring to mislead Washington rather than force a confrontation over the Republican attacks on the first president." In time Washington grew to loath the National Gazette and referred to its editor as "that rascal Freneau."

James Madison was every bit as guilty of the Freneau subterfuge as was Jefferson. Madison was Jefferson's closest political ally and the two exchanged countless coded letters discussing and plotting against their political rivals. Though Washington had once been very close with Madison, he eventually regarded him "as little more than a pawn of Jefferson," according to the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association. Madison's biographer and Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman says that "Washington believed that Madison had betrayed him" over policy differences concerning a treaty the Washington administration had entered into with Great Britain. As was the case with Jefferson, Madison's betrayal of Washington originally played out behind Washington's back. Feldman notes that despite his close relationship with the president, "Madison declined to tell Washington directly what he thought" about the treaty. Instead, Madison quietly campaigned against the treaty and later excoriated it before the House of Representatives. Soon after, "the relationship between (Washington and Madison) was at an end...all personal contact between the two of them ceased." Feldman adds: "Madison was never invited to Mount Vernon again."

Even the venerable George Washington himself could be two-faced, despite once claiming "that no man should ever charge me justly with deception." Washington's close friend, the Marquis de Lafayette, was an ardent abolitionist and, along with others, frequently lobbied Washington to join their cause. Washington, a slave owner himself, usually told Lafayette what he wanted to hear, at one point even committing: "I shall be happy to join you in so laudable a work" of "the emancipation of the black people of this country from the state of bondage in which they are held." But Washington's actions proved otherwise. Washington biographer and historian Ron Chernow notes in Washington: A Life the measures Washington secretly took to keep his slaves in bondage. For instance, upon learning that a new Pennsylvania statute would automatically free any slaves who resided in the state for six consecutive months, Washington devised a plan to have any slaves staying there with he or Mrs. Washington to cross the state line in time to ensure "the clock was reset, and another six months (would need) to elapse before they could demand their freedom." Chernow explains that "to keep the adult slaves in bondage, Washington resorted to various ruses so they would not know why they were being sent home temporarily." Chernow calls such "scheming" behavior "duplicitous" and "conniving" and notes that "such devious tactics ran counter to Washington's professed abhorrence of slavery, not to mention his storied honesty."

Adams, on the other hand, never behaved that way because he lived according to his convictions. He said what he meant and he meant what he said and his friends and colleagues both loved and hated him for it. Benjamin Franklin once said that Adams was "always an honest man, often a great one, but sometimes absolutely mad."

THE MORAL OBLIGATION TO CHANGE THE REGIME:

"GOOD KNOWIN' HE'S OUT THERE" (profanity alert)

At the very end of the film the narrator, a cowboy with a strong southern drawl played by Sam Elliot, meets the Dude again at the usual bowling alley. The whole adventure, or misadventure, it now seems, has been a case of much ado about nothing, with two major exceptions: Donny's death, tragically, and the news that "there's a little Lebowski on the way." The Dude doesn't even know this, and probably will never be told, nor will he ever inquire: by now, we know the character well enough. But he's back in fine spirits, preparing for the bowling tournament finals, serene and smiling. That is the true nature of the Dude. The narrator says: "Take it easy, Dude--I know that you will." And the Dude replies, "Yeah, man. Well, you know, the Dude abides."

 

And that is that: the Dude abides. In the face of adversity and the virulence of the whole world the Dude, of all people, is level-headed, tolerant, and consistently non-violent. He never punches back; the concept of revenge doesn't seem to inhabit his mind. What is more, he seems implicitly to make allowances for a lot of overaggressive people, out there, who will act like very hostile lunatics. "It's good knowin' he's out there, the Dude, takin' her easy for all us sinners," finally comments the narrator after the Dude has left.

 

There are many pacifists in the world--until their patience is severely tested, or their rights blatantly usurped. There are also people persuaded that peace is the natural state for mankind. It's a beautiful idea that unfortunately doesn't correspond to reality. Even Buddhism allows for "the lesser evil" to avert "a greater evil." History reads like a tragic litany of wanton aggression and invasion. Peace seems to be the exception, war the rule. The ancient Roman playwright Plautus summarized human nature with "Homo homini lupus"--man wolf to the man. Too many beings on this planet thrive on the death of others, from microbes to predators. To presume that mankind is a brotherhood of, say, angels, is misguided. Even trees kill one another in a type of chemical warfare called allelopathy. In his youth, the Dude tried to change the world, with a manifesto, no less, occupying Berkley, and so on. Eventually he realized that it was hopeless. But that didn't make him become bitter, or angry, or revengeful. Nor does he lead by example, as the cliché would go. He doesn't do, he is. Even when provoked, he harms no one. He cares little about money and is, in essence, a sensible, honest man with the kind of patience and tolerance that belongs to the spiritually gifted. He doesn't preach; now in the wisdom of his maturity, he never would; he just abides. With more people like him, the world would improve markedly.

NO JANE JARVIS, BUT...:

If you grew up in the Boston area, you may have had heard this riddle: Who's the only person in history to play for the Red Sox, Celtics and Bruins in the same season?

Answer: 1970s Fenway Park and Boston Garden organist John Kiley.

While Josh Kantor can't make that same claim, the current Fenway Park organist is making a name for himself anyhow by continuing to play on in the midst of the pandemic even though the ballpark is closed. With the baseball season on hold and many people quarantining within their homes, Kantor decided he would try streaming a 30-minute organ concert from behind the Yamaha Electone at his home on Facebook.

Originally intended to be a one-off show, the "7th-Inning Stretch" has become a daily fixture at 3 p.m. with Kantor playing classic tunes as well as requests from viewers which are relayed to him by his wife Mary Eaton. It's a treat for fans to watch the 47-year-old show off the musical chops that have brought him on tours with members of Blondie, the Young Fresh Fellows and R.E.M. as well as led him to be called onstage to play with Wilco.

AT A MINIMUM...:

Al-Zahar stressed the necessity to work to free the prisoners, noting that Hamas wants a balanced exchange deal that achieves its ultimate goal to release the captured and to prevent the occupation from achieving gains at the expense of the Palestinian prisoners.

He continued: "Now the occupation can find mediators more than before. However, we do not want this file to be used as a bargaining chip by any of the Israeli parties in the course of the formation of the new government at the expense of others, nor manipulated by the occupation Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in an attempt to rise in popularity at the expense of the prisoners."

Al-Zahar asserted that Hamas is requiring a certain degree of urgency in handling the issue in order to achieve the principle goal of releasing the prisoners, adding: "We aspire for having our prisoners back home, and we are willing to pay the required cost for their return by releasing the Israeli detainees and the soldiers' corpses, or other things at our disposition (at the disposition of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades)."

He continued: "We are waiting for the occupation to take positive steps, and once we make sure that good intentions are being established on the ground, we will announce it."

Al-Zahar indicated: "It is logical to study the occupation's proposal, and whether the Israeli side is serious enough to convince us to engage with this file. On the other hand, we need to examine the general circumstances and the degree of its suitability, and our terms if we decided to proceed with the deal, taking into account the detainees with the utmost priority, including the sick and the elderly, as well as the names and the means at our disposal to conclude the exchange deal."

TAX WHAT YOU DON'T WANT:

[O]ne of the hardest hit sectors in the U.S. is the energy sector as it experiences the double blows of the Chinese coronavirus and the flooding of the oil market by Russia and Saudi Arabia, a move that has driven oil prices down while those nations fight for market share with the United States. So while demand is down, prices are also down.

To add to this problematic situation, small and large U.S. refineries are getting punished under an unrealistic Renewable Fuel Standard mandate. So in the middle of an economic downturn, as our energy sector is under tremendous stress, we are continuing the madness of unnecessary regulations on a key aspect of our economy (one that should also be considered a national security issue). These RFS mandates imposed on this core industry in America impose a heavy cost of RFS compliance credits (RINs) that is then draining cash from American-owned businesses at a time when draining cash can, and actually may, lead to bankruptcy.

How did we even get to this point? The RFS goes back to the 1970s when Americans were worried about running out of gasoline. Mario Loyola wrote in The Atlantic on Nov. 23, 2019, "With experts warning that the world was quickly running out of oil, the shocks of '73 and '79 led President Jimmy Carter to call for wartime-style rationing of fuel and other draconian measures to avoid a 'national catastrophe.'" This fear resulted in a corn subsidy and not much more. Then in 2005, the Energy Policy Act mandated renewable fuels be blended with gasoline.  According to a 2019 report from The Heritage Foundation, "to wean America off of its alleged dependence on foreign oil, President George W. Bush signed" legislation which "mandated that fuel suppliers blend renewable fuels into America's gasoline supply." The law didn't really do that but instead increased the blend of renewable fuels each year and set ridiculous targets.

IT BEGINS WITH MISUNDERSTANDING REPUBLICAN LIBERTY:

The thing that has come to exemplify everything that's wrong with modernity for this crowd, as you well know, is Drag Queen Story Hour. Tell us what those words mean and then give me the Frenchian position on it.

Drag Queen Story Hour is a small movement of drag queens and friends of drag queens who will host, in public libraries scattered around this country, small gatherings of people who will listen to a drag queen read a children's book. Children come to Drag Queen Story Hour. They see the drag queens and they interact with the drag queens. It's come to symbolize the advance of the sexual revolution and, particularly, the way that the sexual revolution touches the lives of children. So the argument that was made was that classical liberalism is inadequate to address the threat of Drag Queen Story Hour, and that Drag Queen Story Hour is the product of liberty unrestrained. This is what happens when people are given too much liberty: Drag queens read books to kids.

My argument about this was really pretty simple. I don't like Drag Queen Story Hour. I would not take my children to Drag Queen Story Hour. But I don't have to go to Drag Queen Story Hour, and unless they violate anti-obscenity or indecency statutes or otherwise applicable and constitutionally appropriate laws, they enjoy all the protections of the First Amendment that everybody else enjoys. In fact, that open access to the use of public facilities has been a boon to social conservative groups like Christian organizations. There are thousands of churches that conduct worship services in empty classrooms and gymnasiums and cafeterias across this country, who have access to library facilities and other public buildings. They utilize those to say and preach and teach things that the common good conservatives would very much like and very much endorse. And you cannot have a legal system that allows the government to dictate which preferred viewpoint gets access to its facilities. If you embrace such a system, you're not going to like the outcome.

The idea is that if conservatives can stop Drag Queen Story Hour from happening at the library, then why can't progressives stop--

They can and will stop church services, Bible studies, Tea Party meetings, GOP gatherings. I mean, once you lift the [requirement of] viewpoint neutrality in access to public facilities, you lift it. It's gone. And you better be in charge of everything, or you're going to see your preferred viewpoint locked out of the public square.

Now, that's a pragmatic response. I tend to think that liberty has independent value. A lot of [common good conservatives] think there is no independent value in liberty unless liberty is used for virtue. But I think the protection of liberty is a common good.

It's true, though, that people on the left increasingly are trying to use the power of the state to impose their values on conservatives.

Oh, sure.

So why isn't it true that at some point you have to fight fire with fire?

The fact of the matter is that we have systems in place that protect individual liberty increasingly effectively. This is something a lot of people miss. People who just started following politics recently tend to think that religious liberty is under unprecedented siege, when the reality is religious liberty has more protections right now from government interference than it has had in the last 25 years. People tend to think that free speech is under unprecedented attack, when right now people are more free from the threat of government censorship than they have been perhaps anytime in the whole history of the United States of America. There is an enormous advance of legal protection from censorship from the government over the last 25-30 years that is completely underappreciated.

What we face now isn't so much the government imposing its values but private actors using the power that they have, whether financial or cultural, to try to crowd out competing voices from the public square. That would be, for example, when the Oscars doesn't let Kevin Hart be a host. That's one private entity telling a private citizen he can't host their gathering. I am concerned about the culture of censorship that exists in a lot of these private actions. But it's just a fundamentally different thing from the formal censorship that happens at the point of the government's bayonet.

THE CORPSE AT EVERY FUNERAL:

Health experts, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director and sometime guest expert at Trump's daily pressers, have consistently pointed out that hydroxychloroquine has not been proven to be safe or effective against COVID-19. But that's not stopping Trump -- or the conservative media universe that props up his presidency -- from continuing to push the drug. And while reports this week showed the president has a small financial interest in the medicine, Trump has something even more precious to gain than money by promoting hydroxychloroquine: the puffing up of his power and authority through the continued undermining of expert knowledge and dissenting voices.

No doubt, Trump's financial stake in hydroxychloroquine, however small, has surely played some part in his actions. This is a man, after all, who once stole $7 from his charity to pay for his son's Boy Scouts fee.

In plain daylight, Trump has funneled millions of public dollars to his coffers while president, an ongoing violation of the Constitution and a direct assault on the public trust. As both candidate and president, Trump has regularly used the public limelight to shill everything from his line of steaks and winery to his golf resorts and properties. Rather than a national security hawk who has kept America safe, Trump is a smarmy hawker of shoddy products, some of which may threaten the safety of Americans. From the start, Trump understood that the presidency could be a cash cow for himself, and he'll never let the Constitution -- or American lives -- stand in the way of raking in millions.

Yet Trump also covets power and has an insatiable need for public adoration that has been curtailed by the momentary pause on his public rallies. Clearly out of his depth when it comes to understanding the virus, Trump has latched onto hydroxychloroquine as a way of keeping himself at the center of the story. Like an ignored child who settles for his parents' negative attention by acting out, Trump knows he can keep the spotlight on him by continuing to recklessly promote hydroxychloroquine, something reporters are right to press him on. And all of it has the added benefit of undercutting the actual experts in the room, a move essential to Trump's constant pitch that his gut instinct is superior to expert knowledge.

HOLIDAY:

As Saturday turns into Easter Sunday this weekend, there will be music playing. Though that is true of every night, somewhere in the world, on this night it will be special. At 11pm UK time, BBC Radio 3 will commence playing in full Max Richter's Sleep, an eight-hour-long 2015 work intended as a "lullaby for a frenetic world" and a reflection of the state of dreaming. Radio stations across Europe and North America will also play the work in simulcast. Listeners around the globe, most of whom are physically distanced from loved ones during the coronavirus pandemic, will all be listening to the same music.

Richter's Sleep could not be more fitting for this moment. It is profoundly slow and meditative, scored with piano, strings and electronics. It was released in 2015 as an album -- with named tracks that flow into one another continuously -- to both critical acclaim and widespread popularity, reaching No 1 in the US Billboard Classical charts, and garnering attention for its extraordinary length. "The piece has its roots in my sense at the time that we were all getting a little bit data saturated," Richter tells me over the phone from his home in Oxfordshire, where he is self-isolating with his family. "Life was moving very much on to the screen, into the virtual space -- and that space is a 24/7 space. So I wanted to try to make a piece which could function as a holiday from that, a pause."

NOTHING BUT TIME:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that one can save time travelling only two hours from one point to another using modern technology like trains and planes, instead of spending eight hours walking. While this holds up mathematically, not being allowed to use public transportation reminds me that the opposite is equally true: time passes more slowly when I decrease my speed of travel by walking. Life feels long. 

When you are in a car driving towards a mountain, with small pools, slopes, rocks, moss and trees zooming past on all sides, life is curtailed; it gets shorter. You don't notice the wind, the scents, the weather, or the shifting light. Your feet don't get sore. Everything becomes one big blur.

And it isn't only time that grows smaller as one's pace increases. Your sense of space does too. Suddenly you find yourself at the foot of the mountain. Even your sense of distance has been stunted. Having travelled far, you may be tempted to feel like you've experienced quite a bit. But I doubt that's true.

When you have to walk along the same route, however--spending an entire day instead of a half-hour, breathing more easily, listening, feeling the ground beneath your feet, exerting yourself--the day becomes something else entirely. Little by little, the mountain looms up before you and your surroundings seem to grow larger. Becoming acquainted with these surroundings takes time. It's like building a friendship. The mountain up ahead, which slowly changes as you draw closer, feels like an intimate friend by the time you've arrived. Your eyes, ears, nose, shoulders, stomach and legs speak to the mountain, and the mountain replies. Time stretches out, independent of minutes and hours. 

And this is precisely the secret held by all those who go by foot: life is prolonged when you walk. Walking expands time rather than collapses it.

WET WORK:

In the spring of 2013, a deadly coronavirus began to spread across the United States. Within a year it had reached 32 states, sweeping through dense populations that lacked immunity to the new pathogen. Though researchers scrambled to curb the disease, by the following spring, the epidemic claimed some 8 million lives--all of them pigs.

The pathogen responsible, Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea Virus (PEDv), poses no danger to humans. But among its hosts, pigs, the virus ravages their bodies with severe gastrointestinal disease. The 2013 outbreak killed an estimated 10 percent of the nation's pigs in a matter of months. Struggling to make ends meet with limited supplies, pork producers pushed their prices to record highs as farmers nursed the dying and sick--most of which were newborn piglets--by the thousands.

"It was extremely devastating," says Don Davidson, a veterinarian with the Ohio-based food company Cooper Farms. "The losses were huge. Months later ... you could just see there weren't as many pigs in market."

By summer of 2014, the diarrheal disease had mostly petered out, partly because of a combination of increased diagnostic efforts and the growing immunity of the nation's pig population. But perhaps the biggest factor in ending the epidemic was behavioral: a near-universal ramp-up in farms' attention to cleaning, disinfection and isolation, says Michaela Trudeau, an animal coronavirus researcher at the University of Minnesota. These enhanced biosecurity measures "are one set of things we turn to over and over again to keep our pigs safe," she says.

As the world battles another dangerous coronavirus, the human pathogen SARS-CoV-2, similar lessons could prove valuable once again. People aren't pigs, and SARS-CoV-2--a respiratory virus--does not cause the same illness as PEDv. But this new coronavirus is vulnerable to many of the tactics that brought its predecessors to heel. In both cases, "it comes down to cooperation," Trudeau says. "The more people [working to] contain it, the better off we'll be."

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

VOA Director Amanda Bennett offered a full-throated defense of her agency in a lengthy statement issued Friday.

"One of the big differences between publicly-funded independent media, like the Voice of America, and state-controlled media is that we are free to show all sides of an issue and are actually mandated to do so by law as stated in the VOA Charter signed by President Gerald Ford in 1976," Bennett wrote on VOA's website. "We are thoroughly covering China's disinformation and misinformation in English and Mandarin and at the same time reporting factually -- as we always do in all 47 of our broadcast languages -- on other events in China."

Bennett added that VOA has "literally carried hundreds of stories on China's response and narrative," linking to nearly two dozen articles from recent weeks. Moreover, she added, "data from the graphic cited in the White House press release was drawn from Johns Hopkins, which is used throughout the world."

DONALD'S 42% CEILING:

Some of the trial heat breakdowns look funky. For e.g. among voters under 35, Monmouth has Biden and Trump dead even at 44-44% while CNN has Biden up 62-31%.

A good reminder to use averages, to the extent possible, when drawing big conclusions. https://t.co/RxzaG6g9Dx

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) April 10, 2020

ALL WET:

First, though, a distinction that too many journalists and politicians miss, and which is important to get right as people debate the possible closure of these markets. Wet market is a Singapore and Hong Kong English term that is now being applied to a wide variety of food markets around the developing world, even though many of the markets look like the fresh produce and meat markets in Italy and France. In fact, wet markets tend to fall into three categories: those that carry wildlife, dead or alive; those that carry more common live animals, such as poultry and/or seafood; and those that carry no live animals at all. So calling for a ban on all wet markets based on the Wuhan wet market, which purportedly sold live wildlife, is like banning all pet ownership based on what goes down in Tiger King.

Wet markets overall should not be banned any more than farmers' markets in America. They are more than fresh produce and meat: They are ways for consumers and producers to connect; they are forms of decentralization against governments and large corporations that people grow ever more wary of, whether in China or America. Live wildlife, however, is too risky to remain at wet markets. "The lowest-hanging fruit to lessen the likelihood of future pandemics is to close those markets where we have large congregations of wild species for commercial purposes," Steven Osofsky, a professor of wildlife health and health policy at the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine, said in an interview for the podcast Excelsior. "When we harvest wild animals from all over the world and bring them into markets, let them all mix together, what we're doing is creating the perfect storm. If you're a virus whose goal is to spread, you couldn't really design a better system to aid and abet a pandemic than these wildlife markets, particularly in urban centers in Asia. You have species that never under natural conditions would run into each other, all packed together, bodily fluids mixing, and then people come into the equation. Pathogens are meeting species that they've never met before. That's when we have these opportunities for viral jumps, including the ones that lead to humans and create the situation we're in now."

WHITE SWAN:

"The risk of human pandemic disease remains one of the highest we face," stated the UK government's 2010 national security strategy. The "possible impacts of a future pandemic," it continued, "could be that up to one half of the UK population becomes infected, resulting in between 50,000 and 750,000 deaths in the UK, with corresponding disruption to everyday life."

According to the government's national risk register, published at the same time, a pandemic would lead to "normal life... likely fac[ing] wide social and economic disruption; significant threats to the continuity of essential services; lower production levels; shortages; and distribution difficulties. Individual organisations may suffer from the pandemic's impact on staff absenteeism therefore reducing the services available."

In short, we knew this would happen. Ten years ago, the government's new national security council, led by its first ever national security adviser, Peter Ricketts, placed the risk of a pandemic higher and greater than a military invasion. Why, then, were we not prepared?

"We put it up in lights," recalled Ricketts, when I spoke to him over the phone last week. "But it never got the resourcing because there was always an immediate crisis." And yet, the 2010 strategy was written in the wake of the swine flu pandemic. "That should have been a wake-up call," said Ricketts. "I don't know why more wasn't done. There was always a higher priority than buying more ventilators."

His successor, Mark Lyall Grant, who authored the follow-up strategy in 2015 that also categorised a pandemic as a "tier one" risk, was even blunter, questioning the role of other government departments. "Getting the Treasury to allocate money for contingencies is extremely difficult," he told me. Furthermore, "I don't recall the Department of Health (DoH) arguing that they needed more money to meet this risk."

One reason the Treasury and the DoH might have been reluctant to spend any extra money on dealing with the possibility of a pandemic is because the government repeatedly insisted there was no extra money for anything. The UK's realisation that pandemics were a major risk coincided with the longest period of austerity since the Second World War.

"Our ability to meet these current and future threats depends crucially on tackling the budget deficit," wrote David Cameron and Nick Clegg in the foreword to the 2010 national security strategy. "An economic deficit is also a security deficit." On budgets, "tough choices" would need to be made, they wrote.

THE lEFT AND rIGHT AREN'T VIABLE:

Merkel became chancellor just five years later and after Kohl, is the longest-serving chancellor in the postwar era. Her tenure has been marked by both stability and economic prosperity.

But it was also shaped by various global and domestic crises over time, and Merkel managed to maintain her political footing after each one. 

The 2008 global financial crisis and the subsequent euro debt crisis were major early challenges, but Merkel still managed to steer the CDU/CSU union to reelection in 2013, with the bloc nearly winning a historic outright majority.

Even after her controversial decision to let one million migrants into Germany, during the refugee crisis of 2015, Merkel still managed to get her party re-elected in 2017, despite a backlash that led to the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.

Over time, the party she has led for two decades has weakened electorally and Merkel's long tenure has overseen ever-increasing voter fragmentation, with non-traditional parties like the Greens rising and stalwarts like CDU and center-left SPD falling.

But Merkel herself has managed to stay afloat and ahead of the competition. Though wounded, she remains the most popular politician in the country to this day.

Merkel had pledged that her current chancellorship would be her last. Now, she faces the coronavirus pandemic, which she has referred to as the greatest challenge the country has faced since WWII.

As she crosses the 20-year mark, this could be her biggest test yet. But in this final and critical crisis, Germans are already giving her leadership a boost.  Some 80% of voters were pleased with Merkel's management of the COVID-19 crisis, according to a poll by broadcaster ZDF's Forschungsgruppe Wahlen.

Even her languishing Grand Coalition of CDU/CSU and SPD, which previously had a 28% approval rating, has risen to 37% in the polls. 

AND THE COUNTRY:

In the end, the most influential politician of 2020 may be the one who has been the most silent.

With Bernie Sanders exiting the race and Joe Biden taking on the mantle of presumptive nominee, the man who hovered quietly over the race for more than a year, Barack Obama, will soon return to the political fray.

Obama wanted Sanders to have the day to himself and so he refrained from speaking (or tweeting) publicly on Wednesday. But Obama had always said his role in the primaries would be to unite the party when it's over, and he's been in close contact with both campaigns as the pandemic both froze the race without a clear victor and also made it more obvious that Biden would eventually prevail.

"Over the last few weeks, he's had multiple conversations with candidates, including Sen. Sanders, about how to best position the Democratic Party to win in November," said a source familiar with those calls. "While the content of those conversations remain private, there was always agreement that winning in the fall was paramount."

We've focused so much in recent years on the primitive side of our natures -- the part that responds to tribalism and hatred of out groups. But while those traits are real enough, we didn't achieve great civilizations by suspicion alone. Cooperation and, in Queen Elizabeth's phrase, "fellow feeling" are also part of our nature. Without cooperation, we'd still be wandering the savannah in groups of 15 or 20 with spears in one hand and babies on our backs. Humans are cooperative creatures -- even, at times, selfless ones. In wartime, men throw themselves on grenades to save others. In this time of plague, doctors and nurses willingly put their own lives at risk to save people they don't even know.

Americans are already behaving in cooperative and unifying ways. What they lack is a voice. President Trump is utterly incapable of sounding those notes. When he attempts it, as, for example, when an aide draws up some uplifting rhetoric, he seems to be sounding out the words as if reading another language. He is far more comfortable searching out enemies -- the media, his predecessor, the "deep state," under-appreciative governors, General Motors, and so forth.

Joe Biden, by contrast, is well suited to the unifier role. His strength is a sympathetic understanding of others' pain. His instincts are toward conciliation and cooperation, to the point that Democratic partisans were sometimes dismayed when, earlier in this cycle, he reminisced fondly about "getting things done" with Republicans.

Just now, in the midst of the crisis, Biden lacks an opportunity to voice a unifying message. But that time will come soon. He should seize it. It comes naturally to him. It would remind us of our better angels, and the country is yearning for it.

I GOT IT AT JARED'S...:

President Donald Trump on Thursday said a widespread COVID-19 testing program to assess whether workers can safely return to their workplaces is "never going to happen" in the United States.

IF YOU CAN'T WIN THEIR VOTES, KILL THEM:

[D]rexel University epidemiology and biostatistics professor Usama Bilal told the station that the lack of federal funding will hit the state's poor the most.

"Any time a reduction in accessibility in a health resource happens, it is the most vulnerable populations that suffer," Bilal continued. "People with access to more resources (wealthier, more educated, etc.) tend to have the ability to access those resources through other means (in this case, private testing through referral from the doctor they usually see). Low-income people tend to access health care much more often through urgent care (which isn't being used that much these days in cities like Philadelphia, for fear of the epidemic)."

Valerie Arkoosh, chair of Montgomery County Commissioners office, one of the hardest-hit counties in Philadelphia's suburbs where 1,294 have tested positive and 19 have died, expressed concern in a statement because of the expected surge of cases. "While I'm grateful to have had federal and state support for our successful community-based testing site, I am understandably disappointed that the supplies and the federal contract for lab testing are ending just as we are heading into the surge here in southeastern Pennsylvania," Arkoosh said.

According to CNN, Vice President Mike Pence has been touting public-private partnerships that have "laid the foundation," to fill some of the gaps left behind without federal funds, like drive-thru coronavirus testing sites. But so far only five locations from major retailers are currently offering drive-thru testing. And none are open to the general public.

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden reacted in astonishment to the story late Thursday, writing on Twitter, "I can't believe I have to say this, but we should be expanding the number of testing sites and surging the number of tests -- not reducing them. Testing is key to finding a way out of this crisis."

THE WHOLE ENCHILADA:

For Christians, this is the World Series, the crescendo of the symphony, the climax of the play. This is what we've been sitting on the edge of our seats waiting for all year. But this year: nothing. The game is canceled in its final inning. The horn section left in the middle of the concerto. The theater caught fire in the third act.

As a priest, this feels incredibly unsatisfying. Sure, we'll livestream services. The Word will be proclaimed. But it isn't the same. Something is clearly lost.

And yet, the solid fact remains that Christians do not make Easter through our worship and our calendar. Jesus rose from the dead, and even if it were never acknowledged en masse, it would remain the fixed point around which time itself turns. The truth of the Resurrection is wild and free. It possesses us more than we could ever possess it and rolls on happily with no need of us, never bending to our opinions of it. If the claims of Christianity are true, they are true with or without me. On any given day, my ardent belief or deep skepticism doesn't alter reality one hair's breadth.

Believers and skeptics alike often approach the Christian story as if its chief value is personal, subjective, and self-expressive. We come to faith primarily for how it comforts us or helps us cope or lends a sense of belonging. However subtly, we reduce the Resurrection to a symbol or a metaphor. Easter is merely an inspirational tradition, a celebration of rebirth and new life that calls us to the best version of ourselves and helps give meaning to our lives.

But the actualities that we now face in a global pandemic--the overwhelmed hospitals and morgues, the collapsing global economy, and the terrifying fragility of our lives--ought to put an end to any sentimentality about the Resurrection. To borrow the words of Flannery O'Connor, "If it's a symbol, to hell with it."

THEY'RE LEGIT IN THE BUBBLE!:

CREATIVE DESTRUCTION:

Here, as elsewhere, Covid-19 is worsening a policy problem that long predates the virus. Tying health insurance to employment is now, and always has been, a disaster. It gives bosses too much power over workers, reduces entrepreneurship, saddles businesses with health costs they can't control and insurance problems they don't understand, makes the tax structure more regressive, reduces wages, bloats administrative spending, and drives up costs throughout the system.

NOT JUST SHOWER RINGS?:

"Corals are one of the most efficient organisms at using, capturing and converting light to generate energy, and they do so in extreme environments, where light is highly fluctuating and there's limited space to grow," says first author Daniel Wangpraseurt, a marine scientist at the University of Cambridge, UK.

"Our goal here was to use corals as inspiration to develop more productive techniques for growing microalgae as a form of sustainable energy."

Wangpraseurt teamed up with nanoengineer Shaochen Chen, whose lab at the University of California San Diego in the US can print structures with the speed needed to work with human, animal or algae cells.

The manufactured "corals" consist of cup-shaped, artificial skeletons that support coral-like tissue and are built to capture and scatter light more efficiently than natural corals.

The skeleton is made of a biocompatible polymer gel, called PEGDA, embedded with cellulose nanocrystals. The coral tissue is a gelatin-based polymer hydrogel, called GelMA, mixed with living algae cells and cellulose nanocrystals.

On the surface are tiny cylindrical structures that act as coral tentacles, which increase the surface area for absorbing light.

The researchers say nanocrystals embedded in the skeleton and coral tissue, along with the cup shape, improve light absorption and enable more light to be focused onto algae cells so that they photosynthesise more efficiently.

PANOPTICONSERVATISM:

A threshold question in any Fourth Amendment analysis is whether the government activity is a "search." An activity is a search and thus triggers the Fourth Amendment if it infringes on a reasonable expectation of privacy (the Katz test) or it involves a government trespass (the Jones test). Different forms of disease surveillance could trigger the Fourth Amendment under one or both of these tests. For example, any government surveillance program that required individuals to download an app on their phones might constitute a Fourth Amendment search under the trespass test, since it would interfere in individuals' property interests--that is, to control what is on their devices. By contrast, if the government were to track people's movement by directly surveilling cellphones--for example, though IMSI (international mobile subscriber identity) catchers, which mimic cell towers--that might violate a person's reasonable expectation of privacy.

Things become more complex if the government were to compel third parties--cellphone companies, internet platforms, medical-device makers or health care providers--to turn over data. A long-established carve out to the Katz reasonable-expectation-of-privacy test is the "third-party doctrine": People cannot claim a reasonable expectation of privacy in information they have voluntarily handed over to a third party and that the government subsequently acquires.

Schumer proposes $25,000 'heroes' pay for frontline workers https://t.co/rvYbyCIeQP One guess what the main topic of conversation was on every loading dock I hit today?

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) April 9, 2020

THE TRUMP BRAND:

[T]he medical society that published that French research has issued a statement saying the study "does not meet the Society's expected standard."

Dr. Kevin Tracey, president and CEO of the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research in New York City, gave an even more pointed assessment of the French research.

"The study was a complete failure," he said.

"It was pathetic," added Art Caplan, head of the division of medical ethics at the New York University School of Medicine.

ALWAYS A ROUGH RIDE:

Putting a patient on a ventilator is an extreme step saved for the most-affected patients, who typically already have the highest chance of dying from respiratory failure.

The higher death rate could be a direct result of this, as well as the fact that there are so far no drugs that can help fight the coronavirus.

Some doctors are also concerned that ventilators could actually be further harming certain coronavirus patients as the treatment is always hard on lungs, the AP reported.

Dr. Tiffany Osborn, a critical care specialist at Washington University School of Medicine, told NPR on April 1 that ventilators can actually damage patients' lungs.

"The ventilator itself can do damage to the lung tissue based on how much pressure is required to help oxygen get processed by the lungs," she said.

Dr. Negin Hajizadeh, a pulmonary critical care doctor at New York's Hofstra/Northwell School of Medicine, also told NPR that while ventilators work well for people suffering from diseases like pneumonia, they don't necessarily for coronavirus patients.

She said that most coronavirus patients in her hospital system have ultimately not recovered despite being given a ventilator.

She added that the coronavirus does a lot more damage to the lungs than illnesses like the flu, as "there is fluid and other toxic chemical cytokines, we call them, raging throughout the lung tissue."

Dr. Eddy Fan, an expert on respiratory treatment at Toronto General Hospital, told the AP: "We know that mechanical ventilation is not benign."

"One of the most important findings in the last few decades is that medical ventilation can worsen lung injury -- so we have to be careful how we use it."

IT'LL COME IN WAVES:

Hairstylist "Ah Ping" is back in business now that Wuhan's coronavirus lockdown has been lifted, but his salon has no customers, only empty chairs and lingering fears over a contagion that continues to haunt the city.

Wuhan is waking from its coronavirus nightmare, loosening tight restrictions on movement and business as the global pandemic's launchpad tries to move on.

But full recovery remains hampered by fear of a potential new wave of infections.

Many businesses and all schools are still closed, restaurants aren't allowed dine-in customers, and some neighbourhoods remain sealed off behind barriers.

Residents need to show they have a "healthy" rating on a mandatory phone app to leave their homes, use public transport, or enter most public spaces.

"When people come out, infections will probably rise. I'm really afraid of this," said "Ah Ping", a nickname.

The 43-year-old, who declined to give his full name, also worries about getting his life restarted.

He paid his salon's quarterly rent of 15,000 yuan ($2,100) in full just before Wuhan was locked down on January 23. Now another rental payment is due.

"Isn't that terrible? I paid 15,000 in rent and did no business," he said.

While many other Chinese cities are getting back to near-normal, Wuhan's government has made clear that easing controls poses new perils and that a return to usual life will have to wait.

In some areas, it's been two steps forward, one step back.

THERE IS NO CHINA:

[I]f anybody wants to set the Chinese Communist Party's hair on fire, the easiest way to do that is to say something nice thing about Taiwan.

Taiwan's political status has recently been a sticking point for public health officials who wish to ingratiate themselves with China. Just this morning, the government of Taiwan found itself having to respond to a bizarre rant from the head of the World Health Organization (WHO). This comes less than two weeks after a top WHO official found himself in hot water for hanging up a Skype interview upon being asked about Taiwan and then calling Taiwan "China." Even the academics running the widely used Johns Hopkins COVID-19 tracking website tied themselves in knots last month over Taiwan. (On the website's "country/region/sovereignty" list, only Taiwan is now stuck with the humiliation of an asterisk.) [...]

Some background: In 1972, as part of President Nixon's warming of relations with China, the United States first acknowledged the One China Policy--which holds that Taiwan is part of China. In 1978, President Carter severed formal U.S. ties with its ally Taiwan. The next year, to save the relationship, Congress passed and Carter signed into law the Taiwan Relations Act, which spelled out in more detail the nature of the U.S. relationship with Taiwan: It wouldn't be considered a fully independent, sovereign state, but the U.S. would still maintain a significant relationship with the "governing authorities on Taiwan." To this day, Taiwan and the United States do not have official embassies in each other's countries. As far as we know, the two countries' heads of states have not talked to each other directly since 1978 (Trump was not yet inaugurated at the time of his phone call with Tsai). [...]

There is a "strategic ambiguity" to the U.S. relationship with Taiwan, which is to say that the United States may or may not defend Taiwan if China invades. China cannot be sure that the United States will stay out of a conflict if it invades Taiwan, while Taiwan does not have a guarantee that the United States would intervene if it declares independence. President George W. Bush briefly ended the policy and gave a verbal commitment to Taiwan's defense in April 2001, but within three years, the ambiguous status quo had been restored.

This status quo must change. Its American supporters used to argue that the people of Taiwan identify themselves as Chinese and prefer the One China Policy and the idea of eventual reunification. This argument no longer holds water: The people of Taiwan increasingly identify themselves as Taiwanese, not Chinese. Less than one in ten of them support reunification now or eventually. Tsai's election in 2016 was a turning point in Asian politics, as she was the first candidate from the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party to be elected--although she has moderated her party's stance on the issue.

Alongside Japan, and perhaps even more than Japan, Taiwan has the most pro-U.S. population in Asia. Taiwan's regime is, in fact, the most similar to that of the United States in all of Asia. And Taiwan always scores high marks for freedom and democracy in Freedom House's indexes.

THE HIGH COST OF BEING ANTI-WOKE:

"I was still playing chess with Moses and plenty of sports," Woody Allen tells us of Mia Farrow's adopted son. "He had asked me to be his father, and I thought he was a great kid and agreed. I didn't legally adopt him at that point, but as he'll tell you, I was his father in every substantial way." That's from Allen's recently published Apropos of Nothing, a book as chronologically vague as most showbiz memoirs. Going by what's there, Moses was perhaps seven years old, maybe a little older or younger. Soon-Yi had been his big sister for at least five years. Eventually, as we all know from history, Allen put the moves on Soon-Yi. By that point she'd been the boy's older sister for a decade, and Allen had been his father "for years" (Allen's phrase). In short, Woody Allen decided to f[***] his son's sister.

She was also, of course, Mia Farrow's adopted daughter, and Mia was Woody's girlfriend. The girlfriend found out. Soon-Yi and Woody set up housekeeping together, and Woody tried to get custody of Moses. The boy's sister was set to become... his mother? One might ponder the effects of this on a 14-year-old, or anybody. One might, but Woody doesn't. His book says nothing about that angle. It's been 28 years and the thought never crossed his mind.

WE NEVER RUN OUT OF SWINE HERDS:

Portraying himself as an illiterate pig farmer (he was neither), Thomson barnstormed the Northeast telling rapt audiences things they wanted to hear: that "natural" remedies were superior to toxic "chemical" drugs; that all disease had a single cause, despite its many manifestations; that intuition and divine providence had guided him to botanical panaceas; that corrupt medical elites, blinded by class condescension and education, were persecuting him, a humble, ordinary man, because of the threat his ideas and discoveries posed to their profits.

For decades, Thomson peddled his dubious system of alternative medicine to Americans by playing to their cultural, political, and religious identities. Two centuries later, the era of Thomsonian medicine isn't just a historical curiosity; it continues to provide a playbook for grifters and dissembling politicians peddling pseudoscientific solutions to everything from cancer to Covid-19.

An acquisitive paranoiac with the steely-eyed look of a fundamentalist preacher, Thomson lectured on the same circuit as the Second Great Awakening's theatrical revivalists, one of countless unschooled "people's doctors" as the esteemed orthodox physician Daniel Drake called them. In addition to his lectures, Thomson spread his gospel in his mega bestseller, "New Guide to Health," a catalog of herbs accompanied by anecdotes testifying to their medicinal utility. Credulous readers learned that simple preparations of herbs like cayenne pepper or Lobelia inflata -- also known as "puke weed" -- not only relieved minor complaints like headaches and coughs but also rapidly cured progressive, terminal diseases like cancer. In breathless testimonials and self-aggrandizing anecdotes, Thomson and his followers attested to individuals being cured of dysentery, smallpox, and measles using the Thomsonian system. Between sales of the book, which went through 13 editions, and the "family rights " to buy his patented botanical nostrums, Thomson grew fabulously wealthy.

Though he was dismissed at the time as a dangerous fraud by mainstream physicians, Thomson was nevertheless held in high esteem by millions of Americans, who saw him as an avatar of self-reliance and entrepreneurial ambition. His followers wrote songs, poems, and prayers in homage to him. They congregated in "Friendly Botanic Societies" that more closely resembled churches than scientific seminars. His most zealous supporters, including some state legislators, hailed him alternately as the American Hippocrates or Jesus. That Thomson was regularly accused of killing patients and was even tried for murder once in Massachusetts seemed only to burnish the legend of his persecution and martyrdom."

In retrospect it can be hard to see how Thomson garnered so much influence. None of his botanical remedies were new to medicine, nor were they very effective for treating any serious condition. Yet in some states, such as Ohio and Mississippi, between a third and half of residents were said to have eschewed orthodox medicine in favor of Thomson's patented system. What made the Thomsonian sales pitch so successful was not just its blanket condemnation of the medical establishment, but its populist conception of healing itself. Just as Americans were free to be their own governors, lawyers, and priests, Thomson argued, so too should they be free to act as "their own physician and surgeon." In this view, attempts to enforce state licensure laws or raise standards for medical education and practice were merely assaults on therapeutic choice and medical freedom -- as anti-American as government establishment of religion.

"CHINA WAS MORE WORRIED ABOUT INFORMATION GOING VIRAL THAN THE VIRUS GOING VIRAL":

THEIR BELIEF THAT THE ECONOMY WILL SAVE DONALD IS CUTE:

The right's embrace of hydroxychloroquine points to a larger distrust of elite expertise, even in the midst of a crisis. The president, desperate to stem the damage of an outbreak that he personally exacerbated through negligence and denial, is consulting Fox News hosts and hucksters alongside the country's top experts. Conservative media is following his lead, while also assembling a narrative that can be used to defend the president down the line: that the president's opponents are suppressing a miracle drug in order to damage the country economically and the president politically.

The drug's rapid rise, The Guardian's Julia Carrie Wong wrote, is "a distinctly modern tale of misinformation within a global information ecosystem beset by widespread uncertainty, fear, media fragmentation, and hyper-partisanship." Citing a tiny, flawed study in France, the right has touted hydroxychloroquine as a silver bullet. Fox News has claimed that it has a "100 percent cure rate," even though four of the 42 people treated with the drug in France died.

The hydroxychloroquine phenomenon is the result of a perfect symbiosis between the president and his backers in the media. Trump himself is addicted to magical thinking and quick fixes, such as a wall to stop illegal immigration. The right wing, in turn, has long embraced quack medicine. In 2012, historian Rick Perlstein documented a "strategic alliance of snake-oil vendors and conservative true believers" that stretches back decades. The mailing lists that kicked off the country's postwar turn to the right were a mix of strident conservatism and direct-marketing schemes. In recent years, Ben Carson has hawked "glyconutrients" while Ben Shapiro talks up brain pills that help you focus for 10 hours "with no jitters or crash." The right-wing media is funded by sketchy cures being touted by sketchy merchants and is thus hard-wired to push dubious medical advice.

The right also has a grudge against the scientific experts in academia and government, who are depicted as being part of a liberal ploy. Anything pushed by experts like Fauci must be cover for some sinister progressive effort to remake society.

The fact that many of these figures--Trump, Hannity, and Ingraham foremost among them--spent months downplaying the virus is also driving them to push this unproven drug. The president's repeated claims that the virus was a "hoax" will be a feature of campaign ads all the way to November. By embracing a fringe "cure," conservatives are trying to outflank their critics and depict themselves as being more serious about treating the coronavirus than people who are urging restraint.

Conservatives reacted with outrage when Twitter deleted tweets from Ingraham, Giuliani, and Charlie Kirk advocating for the use of the drug. Hannity and others on the right have tried to make Cuomo and Fauci into villains for withholding a potential lifesaver. For the president and his allies, the coronavirus is akin to a false flag, a deliberate effort by the left to destroy the economy and sink the president's reelection chances. The country could open for business if only the pesky experts and liberals could stop hating the president for one second.

TOTALLY NOT A CULT:

The latest survey by Quinnipiac University found 81 percent of U.S. adults backed a national stay-at-home order, with 17 percent opposing the idea.

Democratic voters and Independents were more likely to support the issuing of such an order, with 95 percent of Democrats and eight-in-ten Independents approving the idea.

Republicans told pollsters that they backed the idea of a national stay-at-home order, with 68 percent supporting the idea and 31 percent saying they would oppose it.

MORE WORRIED ABOUT THE INFORMATION GOING VIRAL THAN THE VIRUS:

That the pandemic occurred is not Trump's fault. The utter unpreparedness of the United States for a pandemic is Trump's fault. The loss of stockpiled respirators to breakage because the federal government let maintenance contracts lapse in 2018 is Trump's fault. The failure to store sufficient protective medical gear in the national arsenal is Trump's fault. That states are bidding against other states for equipment, paying many multiples of the precrisis price for ventilators, is Trump's fault. Air travelers summoned home and forced to stand for hours in dense airport crowds alongside infected people? That was Trump's fault too. Ten weeks of insisting that the coronavirus is a harmless flu that would miraculously go away on its own? Trump's fault again. The refusal of red-state governors to act promptly, the failure to close Florida and Gulf Coast beaches until late March? That fault is more widely shared, but again, responsibility rests with Trump: He could have stopped it, and he did not.

The lying about the coronavirus by hosts on Fox News and conservative talk radio is Trump's fault: They did it to protect him. The false hope of instant cures and nonexistent vaccines is Trump's fault, because he told those lies to cover up his failure to act in time. The severity of the economic crisis is Trump's fault; things would have been less bad if he had acted faster instead of sending out his chief economic adviser and his son Eric to assure Americans that the first stock-market dips were buying opportunities. The firing of a Navy captain for speaking truthfully about the virus's threat to his crew? Trump's fault. The fact that so many key government jobs were either empty or filled by mediocrities? Trump's fault. The insertion of Trump's arrogant and incompetent son-in-law as commander in chief of the national medical supply chain? Trump's fault.

For three years, Trump has blathered and bluffed and bullied his way through an office for which he is utterly inadequate. But sooner or later, every president must face a supreme test, a test that cannot be evaded by blather and bluff and bullying. That test has overwhelmed Trump.

Trump failed. He is failing. He will continue to fail. And Americans are paying for his failures.

SUPER ON-BRAND:

At his Tuesday circus-like press briefing, ostensibly about the coronavirus crisis, a reporter pressed him on his opposition to voting by mail. While he declared categorically that voting by mail is bad, the reporter pointed out that he, in fact, votes by mail.

Trump had no coherent response.

"I think mail-in voting is horrible. It's corrupt!" he said.

"But you voted by mail in Florida's election last month, didn't you?" a reporter asked.

"Sure! I can vote by mail," Trump said, refusing to recognize his contradiction.

"How do you reconcile that?" the reporter responded.

"Because I'm allowed to!" Trump shot back. 

THE 42% CEILING:

New national Quinnipiac poll out today:

Biden 49%
Trump 41%

— Ryan Struyk (@ryanstruyk) April 8, 2020

THE TRUMP BRAND:

Donald Trump says he will 'look at' pardoning Tiger King's Joe Exotic https://t.co/4SHPTuLatd Playing to his base

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) April 9, 2020

BECAUSE THEY DON'T HATE THEMSELVES?:

Matt Grossmann: This week on The Science of Politics, why are black conservatives still Democrats? For the Niskanen Center, I'm Matt Grossmann.

Many African Americans see themselves as conservatives and hold conservative policy opinions. So, why do black voters overwhelmingly identify as Democrats and vote for Democratic candidates? Do Republicans have any chance to increase their black voter support? And what can Democrats do to motivate black turnout? [...]

Matt Grossmann: And Philpot says the diversity in black political thought often doesn't show up in voting.

Tasha Philpot: The most important finding is that there's quite a bit of heterogeneity among black voters that often gets masked when we just look at the outcomes of elections. Elections, ultimately, are binary choices for the republican and the democratic party. And so, you really don't get a sense of what the intensity of the choice is, but if you take a step back and look at black public opinion and all of the elements that go into casting a ballot, you then see that there is quite a bit of difference amongst African Americans in their orientation towards politics.

And I look specifically at ideological orientation and even more specifically towards the placement of African Americans on ... Or their self-identification on the liberal/conservative continuum. And what we see is that there's been a growing number of African Americans willing to self-identify as conservative but unlike the relationship between ideology and party identification among whites, you don't see a corresponding increase in the number of African American self-identifying as republican.

I look at why this is the case and I find that African Americans are conservative along a number of dimensions, particularly when it comes to religion. But alternately, their sense of group identity and black consciousness restricts the extent to which that ideological self-identification gets translated into their party identification.

Matt Grossmann: They also agree that African Americans have become less liberal over time. White says they're now more moderate.

Ismail White: Black conservatism has not risen as much as blacks have become much more moderate in their support since the 1960s on all sorts of issues. I think in the 1960s ... In the book, we demonstrate that about 80% of blacks were supporting issues like government redistribution of wealth and policies such as the need to provide specific assistance directed towards African Americans. Both those things, according to the American National Elections Study, has support among black Americans has decreased significantly. Up to today, it's probably much closer to 50%.

Why has black American's support changed over time? I think the simply answer is that the lives have black Americans have changed significantly over that time. Black Americans are, to some extent, more integrated into American society. They're becoming significantly more economically polarized, as you will see in the book as well. And I think those things have created a different set of incentives for many African Americans. And incentives about ... That sort of pushed them towards supporting more of conservative policies. But again, what we show in the book is that despite that support, it hasn't translated like you would expect into the levels of republican party identification that you would observe among white Americans.

Matt Grossmann: And Philpot says black conservative identification is growing, but hasn't translated politically.

Tasha Philpot: I think part of it is the willingness to self-identify as conservative and to allow for that conservative to mean different things among African Americans, specifically as it relates to religion. African Americans are the most religious group in the United States. It's the ability to articulate that when it comes to whether or not they're going to place themselves on the liberal/conservative continuum and identify as conservative. Why is it growing? Again, I think it's the willingness as well as the same things that grow conservatism among whites.

Typically, you see more affluent whites being more conservative. And so, as there's more heterogeneity in the socioeconomic backgrounds of African Americans, you see a similar rise in conservatism. It's still less than half of African Americans that identify as conservative. We're not talking about the overwhelming number of African Americans, nevertheless.

What that means for the Trump administration? Certainly, we see based on presidential approval ratings that it has not translated into support for the republican party. And a lot of it has to do with the heightened racial tension that we've been experiencing over the last four years. You see a lot of racial rhetoric being used, not just among Donald Trump but other republicans. And of course, the rise in white nationalist groups, neo Nazis, the Klan that have endorsed the republican party and have become tightly aligned with the republican party in the eyes of African Americans, which ultimately would prevent blacks from voting republican even if they agree with the republican party on a number of other dimensions.

AND THEY HAVE SO MUCH TO BE UNDERCONFIDENT ABOUT:

On Monday, CNN's John Berman asked Navarro about the confrontation: "What are your qualifications to weigh in on medicine more than Dr. Anthony Fauci?" Navarro's response: "My qualifications, in terms of looking at the science, is that I'm a social scientist."

It's only fitting that there's a concept from social science -- psychology, specifically -- that helps us understand Navarro's bluster. In a now-famous 1999 paper, Cornell University's David Dunning and Justin Kruger found that people who did poorly on tests of abilities like logic and grammar "grossly overestimated" their own talents in those fields relative to peers. Competent people, by contrast, were less likely to overestimate their own talents. It seemed that the incompetent people knew so little that they were unable to adequately assess how little they knew -- and thus were overconfident.

This phenomenon, known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, may explain Navarro's outburst. There are important differences in this case: Navarro has basic knowledge and expertise -- he has a PhD in economics from Harvard, and actually warned Trump early on about the risks from coronavirus. He is not, however, an expert on medicine, and an economics doctorate doesn't qualify him to give medical assessments over Fauci. But not being an expert also means that you're unable to fully appreciate how little you know -- and perhaps might even make you feel comfortable shouting down a preeminent expert in the field on an issue of vital national importance.

It's not just Navarro, though. The entire Trump administration is an exercise in what happens when people without relevant expertise get to run the world's most powerful government. Nothing makes that clear than its response to the coronavirus.

FORCED INNOVATION:

The world is not likely to see a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2 until next year, and there's still no drug engineered to fight the virus. Studies of the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, which has been touted by President Trump, have not conclusively shown an effect against Covid-19. Plasma transfusions, which deliver antibodies from blood donated by recovered Covid-19 patients, are undergoing trials in a few hospitals, but remain in short supply.

In the meantime, a growing number of pharmaceutical companies are scrambling to roll out what will likely be the first generation of drugs specific to Covid-19.

Like plasma transfusions, these drugs are built on antibodies. But they're delivered in a concentration that aims to be more effective, consistent, and able to be mass-produced. Such drugs are commonplace in treating cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, infectious diseases like Ebola, and other conditions, and represent a $50 billion annual market in the US that includes six of the country's top 15 selling drugs. 

Several companies are preparing to start clinical trials with an antibody-based Covid-19 drug, and several project they could be available by the fall.  

"There's definitely a race to do this," said Tom Moran, director of the Center for Therapeutic Antibody Development at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. "A lot of people believe that this could be a bridge to a vaccine. And monoclonal antibodies are the number-one grossing drugs on the market today, so it's not far-fetched."

Charlotte Figi, the young girl with epilepsy who helped ignite a medical cannabis movement, has died due to coronavirus-related complications, according to a Tuesday Facebook announcement. She was 13 years old and the youngest Colorado resident to die from COVID-19, the Colorado Sun reported.

Like tobacco smoke, marijuana smoke is an irritant to the throat and lungs and can cause a heavy cough during use. It also contains levels of volatile chemicals and tar that are similar to tobacco smoke, raising concerns about risk for cancer and lung disease.

Marijuana smoking is associated with large airway inflammation, increased airway resistance, and lung hyperinflation, and those who smoke marijuana regularly report more symptoms of chronic bronchitis than those who do not smoke. One study found that people who frequently smoke marijuana had more outpatient medical visits for respiratory problems than those who do not smoke. Some case studies have suggested that, because of THC's immune-suppressing effects, smoking marijuana might increase susceptibility to lung infections, such as pneumonia, in people with immune deficiencies; however, a large AIDS cohort study did not confirm such an association. Smoking marijuana may also reduce the respiratory system's immune response, increasing the likelihood of the person acquiring respiratory infections, including pneumonia.

WHAT HARM COULD IT DO?:

"There are side effects to hydroxychloroquine. It causes psychiatric symptoms, cardiac problems & a host of other bad side effects," Dr. Megan L. Ranney, an emergency physician at Brown University, told the New York Times this week. "People certainly have something to lose by taking it indiscriminately" Ranney added that while the drug could be effective, added that she had never seen an elected official talk up a specific drug in the way Trump has with Hydroxychloroquine.

Dr. Michael Ackerman, director of the  Mayo Clinic's Windland Smith Rice Genetic Heart Rhythm Clinic, issued guidance at the end of March stating that several antimalarial drugs being used in coronavirus treatment, including hydroxychloroquine, chloroquine and HIV drugs lopinavir and ritonavir, "all carry a known or possible risk of drug-induced ventricular arrhythmias and sudden cardiac death."

Ackerman told NBC News that it's irresponsible for politicians and even doctors and disease specialists to go on television and talk up the drug without even mentioning the side effects, which are rare, but severe.

A hospital in Nice, France, on Wednesday announced that it had stopped an experimental treatment for coronavirus using hydroxychloroquine on some patients due to a "major risk" to cardiac health.

Multiple Swedish hospitals, meanwhile, stopped a treatment involving chloroquine due to such side effects as cramps, loss of peripheral vision and heart-related issues.

Meanwhile, a study published earlier this week by BioRxiv showed that in mice, there was a severe risk of death when chloroquine (CQ) or hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) was taken in combination with the anti-diabetic drug metformin.