Has your world ever turned upside-down? It would happen every day if you stay fixed to the stars. Most time-lapse videos of the night sky show the stars and sky moving above a steady Earth. Here, however, the camera has been forced to rotate so that the stars remain fixed, and the Earth rotates around them. The movie, with each hour is compressed to a second, dramatically demonstrates the daily rotation of the Earth, called diurnal motion. The video begins by showing an open field in Namibia, Africa, on a clear day, last year. Shadows shift as the Earth turns, the shadow of the Earth rises into the sky, the Belt of Venus momentarily appears, and then day turns into night. The majestic band of our Milky Way Galaxy stretches across the night sky, while sunlight-reflecting, Earth-orbiting satellites zoom by. In the night sky, you can even spot the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. The video shows a sky visible from Earth's Southern Hemisphere, but a similar video could be made for every middle latitude on our blue planet. via NASA https://ift.tt/2NPRnHv
Donald Trump not wearing a mask in the East Room of the White House on June 26, 2020 in Washington, DC.Drew Angerer/Getty Images
On Monday afternoon, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell opened the week’s session by imploring “each family, each small business, each employer, and all levels of government to apply common sense” to combat the spread of the coronavirus, which has reasserted itself at record levels of cases over the past week. Then he got more specific.
“To name just one example,” he said, “We must have no stigma, none, about wearing masks when we leave our homes and come near other people. Wearing simple face coverings is not about protecting ourselves, it is about protecting everyone we encounter.”
This was not the message the American right had been sharing and rallying around for the past month, as resistance to mask-wearing became one more heated skirmish in the Trump-era political strife. But Republicans are shook as the virus spreads across the South and the Sun Belt. The soaring rate of cases in Florida, Texas, and Arizona, especially, over the last week has prompted these Republican officials to emphasize in their messaging that covering one’s face is not a sign of weakness, succumbing to an alarmist left, or expressing disapproval of Donald Trump. Everyone must do it.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio said last week that everyone should “wear a damn mask.” And Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander, the sane (and, relatedly, retiring) chairman of the Senate HELP Committee, called for the depoliticization of mask usage during a Wednesday hearing with Anthony Fauci. “Unfortunately,” Alexander said, “this simple lifesaving practice has become part of a political debate that says: If you’re for Trump, you don’t wear a mask. If you’re against Trump, you do.”
The Trumpier House Republican conference has come on board, too. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said Monday that “every Republican has a responsibility” to wear a mask. The partisan battles about whether members need to wear masks in hearings appear to be coming to an end, too. After House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, chairman of the select committee overseeing the coronavirus response, said that he would no longer recognize members who weren’t wearing masks, his counterpart, House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, said that his caucus would comply with the requirement: “It’s not a big deal.” The No. 3 House Republican, Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, did her part, too, tweeting a photo of her father, the former vice president, wearing a mask alongside the hashtag “#realmenwearmasks.”
In Georgia, Gov. Brian Kemp, another Trumpster who was one of the earliest governors to begin reopening his state, embarked on a statewide “wear a mask” tour ahead of the holiday weekend. Even Fox News hosts have begun admitting that wearing a mask does not necessarily make you a coward, and may even have scientific merit in safeguarding against the spread of a respiratory death virus.
“I was in the epicenter of this. I went to my grocery store every week. Guess what? They wore masks. Nobody at my grocery store, thank God, got coronavirus,” Sean Hannity said Monday. “I think they work. And I said — especially if I wear a mask and it opens up baseball, concerts, NFL football — I’d rather wear the mask and go to the game to protect Grandma, Grandpa, Mom and Dad and watch the ballgame.” Fox and Friends host Steve Doocy—the most powerful media voice in America, given that his show airs during President Trump’s peak morning tweeting hours—offered characteristically corny, but uncharacteristically well-meaning, advice: “’MAGA’ should now stand for ‘Masks Are Great Again.’ Let me give you some marketing advice right there.”
Republicans are even beginning to concede that the party’s partial national convention in Jacksonville may not happen as Trump has conceived of it (with no restrictions whatsoever, to own the timid remote-conventioneering Democrats). This contingency may seem obvious to anyone who looks at a coronavirus outbreak map and sees Jacksonville as the de facto capital of the present hellscape. But the thought of not allowing Trump his re-nomination festival was once unspeakable.
“Senator Scott has been vocal that if the convention happens in Florida, attendees should wear masks and social distance whenever possible,” a spokesman for Florida Sen. Rick Scott said Wednesday. “He has confidence that [RNC] Chairwoman [Ronna] McDaniel will make the right decision for the Party.”
The Republican apparatus is trying to untie a knot largely of its own making. Many played footsie with anti-lockdown protesters, and indulged the general right-wing paranoia about liberals overhyping the pandemic to tank the economy and Trump’s presidency. The pace at which leaders “re-opened America” became a front on the culture war, and then mask-wearing did too. And then the outbreak moved to red states.
But to successfully untie that knot, or to eliminate the “stigma” of which McConnell spoke, Republican leaders recognize that they have to convince the one prominent Republican leader whose position on the subject we have not mentioned. And the target of their public-relations push to wear a mask is as much President Trump as it is their constituents or viewers. “I think that if the president wore one,” Doocy said, “it would just set a good example. He’d be a good role model. I don’t see any downside to the president wearing a mask in public.” Alexander made a similar suggestion at the Senate hearing.
“I have suggested the president should occasionally wear a mask even though there are not many occasions when it is necessary for him to do so,” Alexander said. “The president has millions of admirers. They would follow his lead. It would help end this political debate. The stakes are too high for it to continue.”
Kayleigh McEnany, the president’s press secretary, was asked about Alexander’s comments at Tuesday’s press briefing. “The president has said he has no problems with masks”—well, he has suggested that people might get coronavirus by fidgeting with their masks—“that he encourages people to make whatever decision is best for their safety and to follow what their local jurisdictions say,” McEnany said. “And the president is the most tested man in America. It’s his decision whether to wear a mask.” The Republican leadership in America has moved its position to Wear a dan mask. The Republican leader in America, though, is stuck on, It’s up to you.
Trump has worn a mask once, during a visit to a Ford factory, and he tried to prevent any photos from being taken of him wearing it. (He was not successful.) He is afraid that people will make fun of how he looks in a mask, since he so gleefully made fun of how Joe Biden looked in a mask. He is afraid he will look “weak.” And since he sees everything as either a political statement for or against him, he, too, might see mask-wearing as a political statement against him. It’s not that he’s being unhelpful, or idle, in fellow Republicans’ push to eliminate the mask stigma. He, personally, believes that masks are stigmatic. It will take more than a few Senate speeches or cable news clips to sway him.
from Slate Magazine https://ift.tt/3f0E833
via IFTTT
Copy your ad-free feed link below to load into your player:
Episode Notes
On the Gist, there is no question these men needed to breathe.
In the interview, Maria Konnikova is back for “Is That Bullshit?” She and Mike discuss the scientific preprints published on Covid-19 and call out the credible and those rife with misinformation. How can you trust them? Maria’s newest book called The Biggest Bluff, is already a New York Times bestseller.
David Lloyd George, Britain’s Prime Minister, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando , Italian Council President, Georges Clémenceau, French council President, and Woodrow Wilson, United States President in Paris on Jan. 19, 1919.-/Getty Images
In 1919, the pioneering newspaper editor and civil rights activist Monroe Trotter obtained papers to work as a cook on a ship sailing from the United States to France. After the ship docked, he learned that crewmembers were not permitted to disembark, so he snuck off and arrived in Paris “ragged and hungry and in need of funds,” he would write later.
This was not his first choice as a mode of transportation. Trotter had requested permission from the State Department to travel to the Paris Peace Conference following the end of World War I, to represent the African-American community. But he was denied a visa.
Trotter and Wilson had a history. In 1914, Trotter had led a group of Black activists, all of whom had supported Wilson’s elections, to a meeting with the president where they expressed disappointment with his support for segregation. After Wilson gave a patronizing lecture about how Black Americans would be better off not competing against whites, Trotter told Wilson he risked losing Black voters, at which point the president angrily ended the meeting.
But five years later, after Wilson had sent U.S. troops into World War I in order to, as he put it, “make the world safe for democracy,” and had spoken eloquently about his desire to see “equality among nations”, Trotter sensed an opportunity. He felt that the peace conference, “with its talk of democracy and self-determination,” could “provide a stage from which to tell the world about the plight of the blacks in the United States,” he wrote.
Over the past century, “Wilsonian” has become a shorthand in U.S. foreign policy debates for the desire to use American power and influence to promote democracy and human rights around the world. Trotter was certainly not the last to note the irony that this principle is associated with a president who sought to deny democracy and human rights to many of his own citizens. Now, this contradiction has led to a reconsideration of Wilson’s legacy: On Saturday, Princeton University—where Wilson attended and later served as president—announced that it was taking his name off the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, one of the country’s most prominent public policy schools. Other institutions around the country named after the 28th president are also considering a name change, prompted by the current public reckoning over America’s racist history.
Wilson was undoubtedly a racist—even by the standards of his time. His administration resegregated several federal agencies; he wrote sympathetically about the Ku Klux Klan; and he described southern Black people as an “ignorant and inferior race,” who couldn’t be trusted with political power.
At the same time, his advocacy of “self-determination” unintentionally inspired people fighting colonialism and European imperialism around the world. However, this is less a contradiction than an example of the unintended effects of American foreign-policy rhetoric.
In 1917, shortly after the United States entered World War I, Wilson gave his “Peace Without Victory” speech calling for an “organized, common peace” among a “community of nations” rather than “a victor’s terms imposed upon the vanquished.” The speech has been called the first “penetrating critique of European imperialism” by a major state leader. The following year, he issued his famous 14 points, calling for a “free, open-minded and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determination all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined.” As Henry Kissinger put it, this was a message to European powers that “the international system should be based not on the balance of power but on ethnic self-determination.”
As the Harvard historian Erez Manela writes in his book, The Wilsonian Moment, Wilson was “hailed around the world as the prophet of a new era in world affairs.” His remarks were widely reprinted in newspapers around the world and a number of anticolonialist movements “adopted Wilson’s rhetoric of self-determination and the equality of nations to formulate their demands and justify their aspirations, both because they found his language appealing and more importantly, because they believed it would be effective in advancing their cause.”
This included Egypt, where the media reported extensively on Wilson’s statements and hoped that he would pressure the British government to withdraw their troops from the country; India, where the language of self-determination was taken up enthusiastically by pro-independence politicians, and China, where one journalist wrote that Wilson was “the best qualified statesman to assume the role of champion of human rights generally and of the rights of China in particular.”
As I write in more detail in my book, Invisible Countries, by denying political legitimacy to territorial empires, Wilson helped set in motion the wave of decolonization that, several decades later, would redraw the map of the world.
Manela relates the story of Nguyen Tat Thanh, a 28-year-old kitchen assistant and budding political activist in Paris who tried to present a petition to world leaders at the conference and sought an audience with Wilson to plead his country’s case for independence from France. Wilson never answered the request. The man who would later be known as Ho Chi Minh abandoned Wilson for Lenin and communism a short time later.
Does this mean that Wilson was more enlightened than his contemporary critics give him credit for? Not quite. Wilson almost certainly didn’t intend to empower anticolonial revolutions. When he spoke about self-determination and “consent of the governed”, he was referring to non-independent European nations like Poland and Czechoslovakia. Wilson was no less a racist in his foreign policy views than he was at home. He defended America’s recently acquired colonial holdings in the Philippines, arguing that “the consent of the Filipinos and the consent of the American colonists to government, for example, are two radically different things.” His secretary of state, Robert Lansing, wrote that self-determination clearly did not apply to “races, peoples, or communities whose state of barbarism or ignorance deprive them of the capacity to choose intelligently their political affiliations.” Despite his admirers in Egypt and India, he believed the U.S. should follow in the tradition of the British by helping “less civilized” peoples achieve the “habit of law and obedience.”
Wilson was also something of a pioneer when it came to “regime change” wars, deploying U.S. troops to Mexico in 1914 to overthrow the government of Victoriano Huerta; and later deploying U.S. marines to Haiti to protect U.S. business interests. Many of Wilson’s global admirers in 1919 came to be disappointed by his failure to apply the doctrine of self-determination universally, and it would take another three decades and another World War, for the collapse of Europe’s global empires to begin in earnest.
As for Trotter, he received widespread attention from the French press, but his petitions for American racism to be addressed at the conference were ignored by Wilson and the other delegates.
Wilson is hardly the last American politician whose lofty rhetoric raised expectations among beleaguered people around the world that he had no intention of fulfilling. Nor is he the only leader whose inspiring talk of freedom and democracy abroad was undermined by his policies back home. Perhaps leaving his name off an institution educating the country’s future leaders and diplomats will start to break that habit.
from Slate Magazine https://ift.tt/2Zpv5Sr
via IFTTT
These pigs are from a swine farm in Colombia, and they were photographed during the swine flu outbreak. Scientists are researching another virus with ‘pandemic potential’ that pigs spread to humans.RAUL ARBOLEDA/Getty Images
There’s a new virus that could cause a pandemic. That’s according to a paper published this week, andmuchmediacoverage which strike varying levels of alarm. Researchers found the virus, which is a variation of 2009’s swine flu, by testing pigs with nasal swabs in a program designed to keep an eye on new viruses from the animals. They also found antibodies against the virus in 10 percent of 338 folks who work with pigs that they took blood samples from. Now, the virus is being referred to as having “pandemic potential.” What, exactly does that mean? We are here to explain.
Are we going to be in a second pandemic? During this pandemic?
There is no law against it, but probably not. For one thing, G4 EA H1N1 as it’s called, isn’t all that new. The survey of viruses in pigs ran from 2011-2018, because science takes time (when it doesn’t involve an ongoing global pandemic) the paper is just coming out now. “There’s no evidence that G4 is circulating in humans, despite five years of extensive exposure,” noted Carl T. Bergstrom, a biologist at the University of Washington, on Twitter. “That’s the key context to keep in mind.” That is, while it might be hoping from pigs to humans, it doesn’t appear to be hopping from humans to humans. Also: there’s also no evidence that it makes people sick.
So G4 is nothing?
No, that’s not true either. It’s important for scientists to be keeping an eye on potential viruses, particularly ones that could turn into a pandemic. Though the stories are “not describing an immediate threat to the general public,” as Bergstrom notes, the fact that this disease is spreading from pigs to human is important to epidemiologists. It’s a version of H1N1, which did spread very easily, and we wouldn’t be immune to it if it did. “We need to be worried about any disease with the potential to spread human to human,” Li-Min Huang, an infectious disease expert in Taiwan told the New York Times. The “we” there is only you and me only insofar as we should support politicians who support pandemic preparedness, and fund scientific research in general. We don’t need to worry about this virus’ potential to make us sick right now—or even soon—though. “‘Pandemic potential’ needs to emphasize the ‘potential’ part,” tweeted Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia.
So it might be nothing?
Right. Maybe it is nothing. Maybe it does mutate and starts spreading among humans but it turns out to be easy to include in the annual flu vaccine, Bergstrom notes, which changes year to year. Maybe, just maybe, it mutates and starts spreading between humans and is not easy to vaccinate against. Obviously, everyone in the entire world has very good reason to be on high alert toward this option, but it doesn’t make it any more likely.
One more thing: it’s easy to say that the current worry over the virus is due to clickbait headlines and journalism that is forced to run on an advertising model, as Bergstrom suggested. And, yes, the Daily Mailcould be more nuanced in its copy (if you think that, make sure to pay for your news). But also, conveying risk is just really, really hard, and we’re currently all primed to pick up on the work “pandemic” and start screaming. Sort of a natural response given the circumstances, honestly.
Sorry, I’m still not over the time you saidnot to worryabout the coronavirus that is currently absolutely destroying the fabric of our society, as well as taking an unbearable number of lives.
It’s painful to look back at that early coverage, but in January, it was true that it seemed unlikely that SARS-CoV-2 would be spreading around the globe the way it is now. We only now know how deeply unprepared the U.S. was to test people (or do much of anything), how easily people without symptoms can spread the virus, and how much these circumstances have changed our lives. It was always possible, but it was never inevitable. There’s also just some luck (hellish dice rolling?) involved in how bad a virus is; the original SARs ended up petering out for reasons that are still a little unclear.
Am I supposed to find that comforting?
Honestly, it’s probably better if we all realize that we should be less lax about the risk of these types of things. Virus concern is something we probably would do well to live with for the rest of our lives. That’s not to say that each of us is doing something productive when we panick about each virus that could maybe (maybe maybe maybe) wreak global havoc, but because as a society, we could probably benefit from a bit more preparedness overall. Investing in everything from handwashing to stockpiling ventilators could serve us well in a variety of scenarios, from regular flu season all the way up to another global pandemic. “We should prepare for ANY kind of emerging influenza pandemic,” tweeted Rassmusen.
I can’t believe we’re not out of this current pandemic and we already have to worry about another one.
It almost feels like it almost ought to be a relief to worry about something else, even a different virus, instead of the same fucking thing, but, yeah, pretty unbelievable!
from Slate Magazine https://ift.tt/3dOLqVQ
via IFTTT
NASA has selected 409 technology proposals for the first phase of funding from the agency’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) program.
June 30, 2020
from NASA https://ift.tt/2VyjcbG
via IFTTT
US President Donald Trump walks with Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and US National Security advisor, Robert O’Brien on May 8, 2020.MANDEL NGAN/Getty Images
It’s not yet clear if or when President Trump heard or read the intelligence report that Russia was paying bounties to Taliban militias for killing U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. But whichever version of the story is true, he and his senior advisers come off looking very bad—immoral, vaguely traitorous, astoundingly incompetent, or all three.
The most hideous version of the story is that Trump heard the report—it is well established that the finding was included in the President’s daily intelligence briefing sometime in February—and, apparently, didn’t care.
A somewhat less heinous, but still appalling, variation is that Trump asked Russian President Vladimir Putin if the report was true, Putin denied it, and Trump took Putin’s word over that of his own spy services. (The two did talk on the phone at least five times in the weeks after the intelligence report.) This wouldn’t be unprecedented. Trump believed Putin when he denied interfering in the 2016 presidential election—and that meant believing the accused over the unanimous verdict of the entire U.S. intelligence community. Since there was reportedly at least one dissenting view of the intel about Russian bounty, Trump may have been even more likely to dismiss the finding.
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany told reporters that Trump hadn’t been briefed because there was “no consensus within the intelligence community on these allegations.” This is nonsense. Few intelligence findings are 100 percent sure things; many include dissenting footnotes; some inspire lengthy minority reports. But if the subject affects national security in some big or urgent way (and Russia plotting to pay Taliban to kill U.S. troops would meet that criterion), the president would be notified.
There is another possibility, which would reflect the dysfunctional chaos reported in several accounts and memoirs of the Trump White House. The U.S. intelligence chiefs have learned that it does them no good—it only wrecks their influence, which they might need in a real crisis—to tell Trump news that he doesn’t want to hear. In January, they wriggled out of their annual briefing to Congress on worldwide threats, so they wouldn’t have to appear on TV disagreeing with Trump. Their reluctance made sense. At the previous year’s hearing, the chiefs testified that Iran was abiding by the nuclear deal, that North Korea would never give up its nuclear weapons, that ISIS continued to stoke violence in Iraq and Syria, and that Russian hackers still posed a threat to America’s elections—as a result of which Dan Coats, the national intelligence director at the time, was fired.
Since then, Trump’s national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, has often opened interagency meetings by passing around printouts of Trump’s latest tweets on the subjects under discussion. The message is clear: the group’s purpose is not to offer professional advice to the president, but rather to justify and implement Trump’s prejudices.
The New York Times, which first reported this story, noted that the intelligence about Russian bounty payments was mentioned in the written version of the president’s daily briefing. A former senior CIA official and a former senior White House official affirmed to me that intelligence chiefs would have discussed an issue of this magnitude with the national security adviser during one of their weekly meetings—and that, afterward, if not before, it would have been included in the president’s briefing.
However, it is well known that Trump rarely reads this document and relies instead on an orally delivered summary. It is possible, then, that the briefers duly noted the intelligence about Russia in the written document—so that, if the facts were ever publicized, they could show that they’d informed the president—but skipped over it in the oral presentation, to avoid arousing his wrath.
Finally, it is possible that Trump was told about the bounty payment in the oral and written versions of the briefing—and the fact just hop-skipped in and out of his brain. John Bolton’s recent memoir and Carl Bernstein’s CNN story about Trump’s phone calls with world leaders provide ample anecdotes suggesting that the president has the attention span of a fruit fly, that he flits from one subject to another with abandon, and that, during briefings, including intelligence briefings, he often does more talking than the briefer. Those who talk more than listen often forget what they are told.
So, on one level, the question to ask—and many in Congress, including some Republicans, are asking it—is the old saw from the Watergate inquiry: What did the president know, and when did he know it? But on another level, the answer is almost irrelevant. We have a president who either doesn’t know or doesn’t care what’s happening in the world—and a gaggle of senior advisers whose main job is to comply with his whims and cover up his inadequacies.
And all the other leaders in the world know it. That’s the peril we face, as a nation, for as long as Trump is still in power.
from Slate Magazine https://ift.tt/38grCKb
via IFTTT
No joking, he’s going to take their money.Joshua Roberts/Getty Images
It seems Joe Biden has changed how he talks to donors about raising their taxes. He’s gotten blunter, and a lot less apologetic.
During the primary, when he was still vying for the Democratic nomination against left-wing opponents like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, the former veep initially pitched himself as the calming moderate who wouldn’t rock anybody’s super-yacht too terribly. At a June 2019 fundraiser at New York’s Carlyle Hotel, Biden told told the crowdthat, unlike his opponents, he didn’t want to “demonize” the rich. “You’re not the other,“ he said. “I need you very badly.” Biden also seemed to reassure the crowd that, while did plan to raise taxes—“you all know in your gut what has to be done”—he wasn’t exactly looking to soak anybody. “Nobody has to be punished,” he said. “No one’s standard of living would change. Nothing would fundamentally change.”
At a moment when Warren was campaigning on an unprecedented wealth tax and Sanders was inveighing daily against the billionaire class, Biden’s pleading remarks read like a parody of a Democratic establishment politician prostrating himself before his bundlers. This made the actual tax plan he released in the winter a bit of a shock. While less far-reaching than some of his opponents’ proposals, it was still extremely ambitious—raising some $4 trillion over a decade, and reducing the after-tax incomes of the top 0.1 percent by 23 percent in its first year, according to the Tax Policy Center. (Hillary Clinton’s 2016 plan, by comparison, only raised $1.4 trillion.) The plan undid much of the Trump tax cuts for the wealthy, and pushed the corporate rate back up to 28 percent from its current 21 percent. It took direct aim at the investor class by taxing capital gains as normal income for high earners and ending stepped-up basis at death, which allows rich heirs to avoid paying taxes on assets they inherit. It even slapped Social Security taxes on wages over $400,000. As Paul Waldman wrote for the Washington Post: “In fact, it’s so liberal — in very good ways — that when he was vice president it would have been considered radical, certainly too much for Barack Obama to have signed into law, or in some cases even suggested.” The ideological center of the Democratic party had moved, and Biden was shifting with it.
And so too, it seems, has his language with donors. During a digital fundraiser Monday that raised $2 million, Biden avoided his old obsequiousness and said flatly that, no malarkey, he planned to jack up his backers’ taxes. “I’m going to get rid of the bulk of Trump’s $2 trillion tax cut,” Biden said, “and a lot of you may not like that but I’m going to close loopholes like capital gains and stepped-up basis.”
This feels a bit like it’s of a piece with Biden’s broader post-primary “pivot to the left,” which my colleague Ben Mathis-Lilley wrote about in May. As is the case with his tax plan, Biden’s platform has always been more progressive than his detractors gave him credit for. But since securing the nomination, the candidate is embarking on the electoral equivalent of a reverse commute: Where most politicians try to win over partisans during the primary and moderate themselves to court swing voters before November, he won an ideologically charged primary by rhetorically presenting himself as a throwback centrist, but has spent much of the general trying to win over skeptical, young progressives. Meanwhile, the entire economy has collapsed amid a plague and as a result, Biden reportedly senses that the crisis has opened the opportunity for an FDR-sized presidency. The fact that he’s leveling with donors, rather than genuflecting to them, suggests that maybe he’s really ready to make the most of it.
from Slate Magazine https://ift.tt/2Znpyfb
via IFTTT
Donald Trump at the White House on June 26.Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images
After the New York Times reported Friday that Donald Trump had ignored warnings that a Russian military intelligence unit may have paid bounties for killing American troops in Afghanistan, the White House claimed that the president had never been told about the alleged scheme. According to a Monday New York Times article, though, information about the bounties was included in the “President’s Daily Brief,” a summary of foreign-affairs and national-security information, on Feb. 27.
The fact that the warning was in the president’s briefing does not necessarily disprove the White House claim that the president didn’t know about it, however. Trump has long been known to ignore the President’s Daily Brief because he doesn’t like to read (seriously). Sometimes people try to tell him what it says, but they can’t force him to process the information. So the White House’s plea of ignorance is somewhat plausible, if not, like, good for the country.
What was Trump doing on Feb. 27 instead of reading the brief? According to the transcript of a White House Black History Month event held that Thursday, his attention was mainly occupied by the idea that he hadn’t gotten enough credit for preventing a coronavirus outbreak in the United States. “We have a situation with the virus. We’ve done a great job. The press won’t give us credit for it,” he said, describing the United States’ response to the threat as an “incredible achievement” on which his administration was “doing incredibly,” “doing great,” had done an “incredible job” and a “fantastic job,” and was “prepared like we never have been prepared.” At the time, there were 15 known cases of the virus in the country, a number which he predicted “will soon be down to three or four.” (There have been an additional 2.59 million COVID-19 cases reported in the U.S. since this prediction.) Said Trump: “It’s going to disappear. One day—it’s like a miracle—it will disappear.”
On the ostensible topic of the day, Trump said that “nobody has done more for Black people than I have” and praised himself for passing a criminal justice reform bill. The event also included minutes-long digressions about the media’s alleged failure to report on the impressive size of his rally audiences, the media’s alleged failure to report on Joe Biden’s verbal gaffes, and CNN commentator Van Jones’ failure to thank him by name for supporting the reform bill during a TV appearance. The complaint about Jones lasted more than three minutes and went on for 633 words.
The Black history event, and a subsequent reception, were the only activities listed on Trump’s public schedule for Feb. 27 besides morning “pool call time,” which is the White House’s term of art for periods in which the president isn’t doing any tangible work, and the 2:30 p.m. intelligence briefing at which, according to the White House, he did not absorb any intelligence about the alleged Russian bounties.
Later, on Twitter, Trump focused his attention on amplifying Fox Business host Trish Regan’s criticism of CNN’s coronavirus coverage:
Regan “parted ways” from Fox in March after having repeatedly described the virus as a minimally threatening problem that liberal politicians and media figures were overhyping because they wanted to ruin the stock market and damage Trump’s reputation.
And that was it, one day out of the 1,258 and counting since Trump took office. Who knows what he was or wasn’t being briefed about on all the others? Not him!
from Slate Magazine https://ift.tt/31vznKJ
via IFTTT
Last year, I met a very interesting man at an association convention. After the day’s business, we spent several hours talking in the bar and exchanged contact info. He is married (I am divorced), so I ruled him out as a love interest from the start. He travels frequently on business with one or two visits to my city each month. Whenever he was in town, we went out for dinner and sometimes the theater or a ball game. We grew to be very good friends. One of his trips coincided with my daughter’s wedding, so I invited him to the wedding and to stay at my house (I had other out-of-town guests also). He met my family and friends and got along with everyone.
One day, he called to say he would be in a nearby city for a Friday meeting and would like to visit me over the weekend so we could take in some of the touristy things he never gets to do when he’s here on business. I agreed, but I was stunned when, the first night, he suggested we have sex. He has always described his 15-year marriage as incredibly happy and said that finding such a wonderful woman after years of failed relationships was a dream he had almost given up on. I met his wife while on vacation in their city, and she is indeed wonderful, and they have three sweet, lovely children. I told him he did not strike me as the kind of man who would cheat on his wife, and he insisted that he never has but that he has fallen in love with me. I told him I do not get involved with married men and sex was out of the question. He didn’t persist and the weekend went well, with no further mention of sex.
The next month, he showed up at my house unannounced and uninvited to surprise me for my birthday. He wanted to take me to dinner at my favorite restaurant and was miffed that I already had plans to go there with another friend. I agreed he could stay over and the next day come to the birthday party my family was holding for me. During the days he was visiting, we had a wonderful time, but each of the nights, we argued about having sex. I admitted that if he were not married, I would definitely be interested, but he is married, so I’m not! He started questioning me about all of my male friends (some married, some single) and if I was having sex with any of them (I’m not) or if I ever had (except for my ex, I hadn’t), and then said he didn’t believe me, as he claimed he’s seen them all look at me with love and longing. He questioned my relationship with my ex because we vacation together and insisted we must be having sex even though he knows my ex is gay, which is why we got divorced. This was a side of him I had never seen, and I found it unsettling. The last night he actually came into my room and into my bed and started kissing and fondling me, trying to coax me to have sex. I told him to get out, and the next morning told him we could remain friends as long as he stopped pestering me for sex. I also told him he could no longer stay at my house.
We didn’t see each other after that for two months, although we emailed about business and social things. Then one day he called to say that he had suggested to his wife that they open up their marriage, and that she did not object. Although the reason I don’t get involved with married men is that I don’t want to be part of lies and deception, I am not sure how I feel about it if the wife is OK with it. How does a couple protect the privacy of their relationship when one of them is also involved with someone else and they all know each other? What if she thinks she’d be OK with it but then she isn’t and it destroys their marriage? Or what if once my heart is engaged, he calls it off because it’s endangering their marriage and I am the one who gets hurt? And is it any of my business to know if she also has another partner? If the only other person he is sleeping with is his wife and she’s not sleeping with anyone else, I would feel safe not using condoms (I’m post-menopause and have been abstinent for several years), but not if she’s also having sex outside their marriage. But that seems like a very personal question to ask. I also am wondering if he is telling the truth about her feelings or just making it up so I’ll have sex with him. I hate to think he would be so deceptive, but his behavior when it comes to sex is much different than the trusty friend with whom I have exchanged memories, dreams and confidences.
This entire question has been on hold since the pandemic and I have thought about it, worried about it, but also fantasized about it for three months. We’ve stayed in touch by email (not phone, another thing that makes me wonder if he’s not really gotten his wife’s consent), and I agreed to give him an answer when he’ll be here again on business in July. I feel like saying yes, but I just can’t think that this will work well. Perhaps I am just behind the times, but the whole situation feels strange and wrong. I had never imagined I would do something like this but I am excited about the prospect if my doubts could be settled. What should I do to ensure I make the right decision? And do I have the right to insist that I hear directly from his wife that she consents and does not blame me for any of this?
—Not the Other Woman
Dear NTOW,
Strange and wrong is right—a correct reading of the situation you’re in. End this connection as soon as possible.
First this guy tries to have sex with you when it absolutely isn’t appropriate. Then he surprises you and seems put out that you have birthday plans and tries to have sex with you again. Then he grills you about who you might be having sex with, and tries to have sex with you again in a pretty physical manner. It doesn’t matter whether his wife is OK with or even aware of the marriage now being open—this guy is not the guy.
If you felt like you could trust this guy—which you don’t, because you can’t—you wouldn’t feel the need to confirm their openness with his wife. Even then, it would be OK to ask if you wanted to. It’s kind of an awkward conversation, but it’s reasonable to want. In case you ever find yourself in a less concerning version of this situation, yes, it’s possible that the wife would be unable to realize her true feelings until a sexual act outside the couple occurred and then would need to immediately change her boundaries. It’s also possible this would summon romantic feelings inside you that would have to be navigated somehow. There are ways to deal with this in a healthy non-monogamous situation—which, again, this isn’t.
In that hypothetical, it is absolutely everyone’s business who everyone else is having sex with, for exactly the reason you bring it up—safer sex measures and harm reduction. You can’t make an informed choice without all the information, which includes the risks his other partners are taking. So you need to know what his other partners are doing and what kinds of protection they’re using. It’s also reasonable to ask how often they all get screened for STIs.
But really, please, not this guy.
Dear How to Do It,
I’ve been dating my boyfriend for about eight months, and we started off having good sex, including oral. Oral sex is the way I am most likely to have an orgasm, but it can take me a while, sometimes between 30 to 45 minutes. He’s been doing it less frequently recently, and I asked him about it. He said he hadn’t wanted to tell me this because he didn’t want me to feel bad, but since I asked, he told me that it hurts his mouth to go down on me. He said that for a week or two afterward his tongue is sore, specifically the muscle on the underside of his tongue. I didn’t know what to say to this because I’ve never heard a guy say this before. I mean, I know it’s not an easy task, and I’ve felt guilty that it takes so long when he does it. I don’t want to make him do something that’s going to hurt him, but I was surprised that it would really make his tongue sore for that long. Is this a common issue? Do you think that means that this is just off the table forever?
—How Many Licks
Dear How Many Licks,
A week or two? If he’s really in pain for a week or more after giving oral sex, I really think he ought to call his primary care physician. Muscle soreness makes sense if he isn’t used to using those muscles, but it shouldn’t take more than a week to recover from. If he’s rounding up, and it’s more like a few days, disregard that. But if he isn’t, I want to make sure there isn’t something more serious going on.
If not, your boyfriend can do tongue-strengthening exercises. In fact, practicing oral sex is probably the best way for him to build up those muscles. You’ll want to prioritize strength building over orgasms in the short term, with him paying close attention to tongue fatigue and stopping when he starts to get sore.
He also might be doing the kitchen-sink thing: Sometimes we pull out all of our combination moves at the beginning of oral sex, when both parties would be better served by a long build up and a touch of tease. Of course if he’s hammering away at you with his tongue on full speed, he’s going to exhaust himself.
Can digital stimulation be incorporated to give his mouth breaks? That might help with his stamina. And toys. There are all sorts of sex toys on the market, some of which are designed to—and occasionally succeed at—mimicking oral sex. Try a few and see if anything strikes your fancy.
Get the How to Do It Newsletter
Sex advice from Stoya and Rich, plus letter follow-ups, delivered weekly.
Dear How to Do It,
I’m a 45-year-old woman married to my husband of 17 years. Our sex life is the pits. Really the pits! I have recently been chatting with someone from my past who admitted to having a crush on me from high school, and I him. It’s been at least five months of continuous chatting, and it has hit the point of intimacy. For years I have felt uninterested in sex, mainly because of the bad sex with my husband, and now all I can think of is making that leap and cheat on my husband with my crush, who’s in an open marriage. I love my husband—he’s a great guy and father—but I am not sexually into him. Do I go for the plunge and see or stay away?
—Angela and Jordan
Dear Angela and Jordan,
Please don’t have sex with this crush behind your husband’s back. Your husband deserves honest, forthright communication from you. Go to him and have a serious talk. Pick a time when you’re both in a good headspace—well fed, sober, calm—and start with why you’re still married to him. “You’re a great guy. A wonderful father. I love you and I love having you in my life.” Then lay it out: “You might have noticed I’ve been uninterested in sex for years.” See how he responds. If he opens up about his own feelings on sex, listen. You can also ask him directly. If he prompts you for more, dive in: “I want to open up our relationship.” Give him space to process this and sort through his reactions.
This conversation might not all happen in one afternoon. It might take a few conversations over the course of a few weeks. Your husband might be open to opening up, or he might want to keep things closed. He might need time to think through everything.
I encourage you to think long and hard about what you’ll decide if your husband won’t open the marriage. Will you continue having mediocre to awful sex with him? Will you cheat? You might have different feelings when the conversation is actually happening—but thinking through the possible outcomes and how you’ll respond can save you an impulsive misstep in the moment.
Dear How to Do It,
I am a person with a vagina, and while I enjoy a variety of sex, the only way I can orgasm is through oral. I have a great partner—he’s generous and skilled, no problem there. But one thing often makes me self-conscious and gets in the way: toilet paper. For some reason, most TP (especially “soft” varieties) seems to leave behind tiny, shredded bits on my labia, no matter how gently I wipe, leaving me unable to comfortably engage in spontaneous sex with my partner. Nobody wants to find little TP wads down there. I usually have to run off to the bathroom to check myself first, interrupting an otherwise playful moment. Is this normal? Should I try moisturizing my labia? Is it a just a TP engineering issue? I can’t be the only person with genitals who has this problem.
—TP Trouble
Dear TP Trouble,
I have experienced this phenomenon. And yes, the soft varieties are the most prolific pillers.
A warning about wet wipes: The chemicals can irritate your vulva and labia, making long-term or consistent use unsustainable.
Shower daily, obviously. When you pee, experiment with leaning forward, backward, relaxing your butt muscle, and tightening them, to see what reduces the amount of pee splash in the first place. Then dab, not wipe. We say wiping when we teach toilet hygiene, but wet labia really need more of a dabbing motion.
When you take your underwear off before sex, you can use your gusset to give yourself a quick wipe between the lips. Just be careful not to press too hard—fabric burn on delicate vulvar tissue is probably worse than the wet wipes.
You can also talk directly with your partner about this: “Hey, have you ever noticed crumbs of toilet paper in my labia?” and “Does that bother you? Do you feel comfortable telling me if they’re there so I can rectify the situation?” And then you can just segue into playful oral, confident in the knowledge that he’ll let you know if you need a rinse.
—Stoya
More How to Do It
I grew up in a home open-minded about sex, as opposed to my husband, who grew up very Christian and conservative. I was his first and only sexual experience until recently. I gave him a “hall pass” so he could experience human sexuality without the cloud of shame he was brought up with. He’s had a few really good experiences and recently not so great ones. Basically, he’s experiencing the highs and lows everyone goes through in their teens and 20s, but in his mid-40s. Then I asked to venture out myself because … hey, it’s fun! He flipped out on me. He’s a very black-and-white kind of thinker, and part of the “hall pass” was never contingent on me going out. He now feels obligated to reciprocate and said he would never have agreed to it if he had known that. He had an emotional meltdown when I went out on a dinner date with a potential partner. I decided to just let his pass run out, but I hate how this happened. How do I get past this?
from Slate Magazine https://ift.tt/2Vz0kJD
via IFTTT
In the third episode of Liz Garbus’ miniseries I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, based on the life and work of the late crime writer Michelle McNamara, McNamara’s editor at HarperCollins, Jennifer Barth, makes that inevitable comparison book people resort to when citing true-crime writing that “transcends the genre”: Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. While authors have produced plenty of genuinely literary true-crime books since Capote published his celebrated 1966 “nonfiction novel,” the true-crime docuseries format has been far less blessed with artful standouts. I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, which bears the same title as McNamara’s posthumously published 2018 book of the same title, proves that it can be done.
I’ll Be Gone in the Dark (the book) recounts McNamara’s dogged investigation of a series of unsolved crimes that terrorized communities in California in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Beginning with prowling, peeping, and burglaries in the town of Visalia, the perpetrator then moved on to committing dozens of home-invasion rapes, mostly in and around Sacramento, and then 12 murders in the south. It was not until 2001 that DNA evidence revealed that the rapes and murders had been committed by the same person. And it was only this week, on Monday, that the man finally arrested for those crimes, Joseph DeAngelo, pleaded guilty to 13 counts of murder and confirmed that he was also responsible for the Visalia crimes.
Sign Up for the Slate Culture Newsletter
The best of movies, TV, books, music, and more, delivered to your inbox three times a week.
McNamara herself never lived to see him caught. She died of heart failure in her sleep in 2016. Her husband, the comedian Patton Oswalt, collaborated with McNamara’s research partner, Paul Haynes, and crime writer Billy Jensen to complete I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, her only book. It’s a moody, complex work built around a lacuna, what McNamara called “a supreme blankness,” that she felt leant the man she named the Golden State Killer an almost mythic power. But that absence also gave McNamara the opportunity to focus on the victims of his crimes and the communities he haunted. She brilliantly captured the blend of idyll and isolation that defined suburban California in the aftermath of the ’60s, a milieu in which the killer was deeply embedded. At Barth’s insistence, McNamara wove her own history through the book, from her childhood fascination with the unsolved murder of a neighbor to her own experiences being sexually harassed.
Garbus doesn’t so much re-create as expand on the twilight potency of McNamara’s book. In a particularly effective motif, the miniseries features brief cutaways to clips from the 1954 horror film Creature From the Black Lagoon, a favorite of McNamara’s and Oswalt’s. Sometimes the lurking, spying creature appears while a voice-over describes the killer stalking potential victims, and at other times it represents something less material: the way the case possessed McNamara, luring her away from happy times with her husband and daughter, sucking her into vortexes of nightmares and paranoia. Both became particularly bad after she and Haynes succeeded in obtaining “the Motherlode,” an enormous cache of investigative documentation, from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, including horrific crime scene photos. An autopsy revealed that McNamara died as a result of complications from prescription drug use, the extent of which nobody knew but herself. “There must have been days,” Oswalt says in an interview in the documentary, “where she thought, ‘I’ll take Adderall in the morning and take Xanax or Vicodin to get to sleep, because this is for a bigger purpose than me.’ ”
Garbus doesn’t so much re-create as expand on the twilight potency of McNamara’sbook.
As in her wrenching dramatic adaptation of Robert Kolker’s Lost Girls, an account of the unsuccessful search for the Long Island serial killer, who murdered 10 to 16 people and hid their bodies on the island’s south shore, Garbus focuses on ripples of damage that spread from a single violent event. The series (episodes of which were directed by Elizabeth Wolff, Myles Kane, and Josh Koury, as well as Garbus), interviews several survivors of DeAngelo’s more than 50 rapes. One, attacked at the age of 15 while playing the piano at home, was scolded by her father for even discussing the attack with a friend; in addition to the trauma of the assault, this drove a wedge between her parents and herself. The husband of a murdered woman lived under a cloud of suspicion for 20 years until DNA analysis revealed that his wife had been killed by a serial murderer. The daughter of another murder victim must live with the fact that her last interaction with her mother was a terrible argument.
All of the rape victims suffered unpredictable and lasting harm. One recalls her own reluctance to cry during interviews with the police. (The text of the crime report describes her as being “cool.”) Then she burst into tears at the death of Elvis Presley and then, 40 years later, at the announcement of DeAngelo’s arrest. In a particularly piercing series of interviews with Gay and Bob Hardwick, who were attacked during the Sacramento phase of the killer’s criminal history, Gay recalls the insensitivity of investigators, who treated her desire to cover herself as an intrusive meddling with the evidence. During this period, the killer would break into a home where a couple was sleeping, force the woman to tie up her male partner, then place a stack of dishes on the man’s body, threatening to kill the woman if he heard the dishes rattle. While Gay calmly recounts the assault, the camera cuts often to Bob’s face, on which his pain and fear at not being able to help her appears as raw as it would if the attack had happened the previous week. Later, at a gathering of survivors, the Hardwicks realize that, of all the people present, they are the only couple to remain together after being assaulted. It seems a minor miracle.
There are occasional moments of lightness too. The day when Haynes and McNamara rented two black SUVs to pick up the Motherlode at the sheriff’s office, well aware that officials could change their minds about allowing civilians to access this trove of information, is larkishly re-created as a scene from a heist movie, with Haynes in aviator shades and black high-tops. The documentarians use voicemail messages and texts between Oswalt and McNamara superimposed over tracking shots along suburban hallways or through the windows of moving cars to convey a sense of the mundane but indispensable teamwork of a contemporary marriage. As the deadline for her book looms, he texts that he sees her engaging in some of the same procrastination habits he’d found himself resorting to while writing his own book. “I keep the gas tanks full. My eye is on the laundry,” he writes. “Shower and bedtime at night, soccer on the weekend. It will get done, all of it. These next 54 hours? All you need to do is wake up in the morning, have your coffee and cereal, and write your pages.” These details might seem superfluous, but as many of the series’ interview subjects observe, the killer seemed possessed by a desire to desecrate and ruin the domestic solidarity of couples like Oswalt and McNamara.
DeAngelo’s arrest came just after the miniseries’ first day of shooting, Nancy Abraham, the co-head of HBO’s documentary and family programming, told the New York Times. The filmmakers were able to secure interviews that will fascinate close followers of the case. DeAngelo’s one-time fiancée—several victims recall him calling out her name during bizarre sobbing fits—describes the controlling and ultimately frightening behavior that led her to break up with him. DeAngelo’s nephew recounts stories his mother told him about the abuse DeAngelo and his siblings endured as children. A cousin, a much younger woman, professed complete bafflement and a “broken” heart after learning that her kindly “Uncle Joe”—who took her in for two years after she’d suffered her own sexual trauma and attempted suicide—had inflicted this unimaginable pain on so many strangers.
DeAngelo’s name was not on McNamara’s suspect list, or anyone else’s. He was tracked down using a public DNA database. Arguably, the attention McNamara’s high-profile coverage brought to the case spurred the continuing investigation, and she did make some astute educated guesses about the perpetrator’s background, such as the likelihood that he came from a military family. But most of her efforts, however creative and insightful, played no part in DeAngelo’s apprehension. This is a chastening realization that casts a shadow over the personal cost that “citizen detectives” (as the documentary identifies them) such as McNamara have paid in hunting the Golden State Killer where he never could have been found. At times McNamara herself wrote of the unsettling similarities between her zeal to capture the murderer and the killer’s own stalking behavior. But as the six sensitive, intelligent hours of this miniseries prove, McNamara was motivated by a desire for justice and a cherishing of the ordinary happiness that DeAngelo only wanted to destroy. There is no comparison.
from Slate Magazine https://ift.tt/2Zn3nG6
via IFTTT
Supreme Court Justices John Roberts, Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh attend the State of the Union on February 5, 2019.Pool/Getty Images
On Tuesday, in a sweeping 5–4 decision, the Supreme Court forced a majority of states to fund private religious schools in a ruling compels millions of U.S. taxpayers to subsidize Christian education—even if financing another religion violates their own beliefs. Incredibly, this maximalist decision did not go far enough for two conservative justices who would apparently let states establish an official religion. In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor described the majority’s decision as “perverse.” That may be an understatement: Its decision is the culmination of a years-long assault on secular governance and augurs even more radical rulings down the road.
The basis for Tuesday’s decision in Espinoza v. Montana originated in a creative scheme devised by the Montana legislature to fund sectarian schools. The Montana constitution contains a “no-aid” provision that bars the state from providing public funds to religious institutions, as do 37 other state constitutions. To work around this rule, the legislature granted tax credits to residents who donate money to Big Sky Scholarships, which pays for students to attend private schools, both secular and sectarian. (Montana’s demographics ensure that the only sectarian schools that participate are Christian.) In other words, residents get money from the state when they help children obtain a private education, including religious indoctrination. In 2018, the Montana Supreme Court found that this program violated the state constitution’s no-aid clause. But instead of excluding sectarian schools, the court struck down the whole scheme for all private education.
Chief Justice John Roberts revived Montana’s tax credit scheme on Monday in a convoluted opinion that announces a startling new constitutional principle: Once a state funds private education, “it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious.” Twenty-nine states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico all provide tax credits or vouchers to families that send their children to private schools. Under Espinoza, they must now extend these programs to private religious schools.
The upshot: Taxpayers in most of the country will soon start funding overtly religious education—including the indoctrination of children into a faith that might clash with their own conscience. For example, multiple schools that participate in Montana’s scholarship program inculcate students with a virulent anti-LGBTQ ideology that compares homosexuality to bestiality and incest. But many Montanans of faith believe LGBTQ people deserve respect and equality because they are made in the image of God. What does the Supreme Court have to say to Montanans who do not wish to fundreligious indoctrination that contradicts their own beliefs? In short, too bad: Your rights just don’t matter as much. This decision flips the First Amendment on its head. The amendment’s free exercise clause protects religious liberty, while its establishment clause commands that the government make no law “respecting an establishment of religion.” Just 18 years ago in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, a bare majority of the Supreme Court ruled that, under the establishment clause, states were allowed to fund private schools through vouchers or tax credits, over vigorous dissents from the four liberal justices. Now the court has declared that, under the free exercise clause, most states are compelled to fund private religious schools. The conservative majority has revolutionized church-state law in record time.
The conservative majority has revolutionized church-state law in recordtime.
How did the court chart this catastrophic course? The barrier between church and state took a hit when five justices permitted state financing of sectarian schools in Zelman. It nearly collapsed when the court expanded religious institutions’ access to taxpayer money in 2017’s Trinity Lutheran v. Comer, which held that states cannot deny public benefits to religious institutions because they are religious. The court claimed to find this dangerous rule in the First Amendment’s free exercise clause—even though, as Sotomayor pointed out in her searing dissent, separating church and state does not limit anyone’s ability to exercise their religion. She closed with a warning: “In the end, the soundness of today’s decision may matter less than what it might enable tomorrow.”
Tomorrow has arrived, and it is as absurd as Sotomayor predicted. Roberts’ majority opinion follows Trinity Lutheran to its logical, outrageous conclusion: A state violates free exercise, the chief justice wrote, when it “discriminate[s] against schools” based on “the religious character of the school.” The government, Roberts explained, has no compelling interest in preserving the separation of church and state beyond what the First Amendment requires. Nor does the government have any interest in protecting taxpayers’ right not to fund religious exercise that infringes upon their own beliefs. “[W]e do not see how the no-aid provision promotes religious freedom,” the chief justice wrote tersely.
Perhaps Roberts can’t see it, but James Madison certainly could. As Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in dissent, Madison famously opposed a Virginia bill that would have taxed residents to support teachers of “the Christian Religion,” condemning it as “a signal of persecution” that violates religious liberty. Montana’s Christians-schools-only program illustrates how states that fund religion wind up funding the faith shared by a majority of residents. Breyer, quoting Madison, noted that state funding of a particular religion may “destroy that moderation and harmony” between different faiths that is a hallmark of America’s religious tolerance.
This extreme outcome was not enough for Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Samuel Alito. Thomas, joined by Gorsuch, asserted that the very concept of separating church and state “communicates a message that religion is dangerous and in need of policing, which in turn has the effect of tilting society in favor of devaluing religion.” According to Thomas, enforcing church-state separation amounts to “religious hostility,” and must end immediately. The justice reached this conclusion by reiterating his conviction that the First Amendment’s establishment clause was “likely” designed to preserve states’ ability to establish official religions.
In his own separate opinion, Alito attacked the “no-aid” clauses in 38 state constitutions, including Montana’s. He claimed that these provisions were motivated by anti-Catholic animus, and it is true that nativists supported them in the 19th century. But Alito omitted the fact that advocates for universal education also encouraged these provisions for perfectly legitimate reasons before nativists rallied around them. And he waved away the fact that Montana readopted its no-aid clause in 1972 for the express purpose of shielding religion from state entanglement. Alito will not let inconvenient facts stand in the way of his campaign to invalidate 38 states’ constitutional guarantees against state subsidization of religion.
If there is any silver lining to Roberts’ opinion, it is that he did not adopt Thomas, Gorsuch, or Alito’s radical positions. At least, not yet. The only limiting principle Roberts lays out is that states “need not subsidize private education” in the first place—so, in theory, states can abolish public funding of private schools entirely to avoid funding religious ones. But that’s what the Montana Supreme Court did here, yet Roberts condemned its decision as “discrimination against religious schools.” If a legislature tries to end a voucher program in light of Espinoza, the Supreme Court’s conservatives could easily find more proof of anti-religious “discrimination” and force it to revive the program. Having gutted protections against the establishment of religion, the majority is limited only by its own sense of what it can get away with.
from Slate Magazine https://ift.tt/3gji9od
via IFTTT
If you’re bored by the idea of spending yet more time locked down in your home, let science writer Emily Anthes convince you that it’s at least an interesting place to be. Her new book The Great Indoors explores all manner of things that happen between walls, from the microscopic creatures that live in shower heads to the reasons it’s healthy for bedrooms to have windows. The book tours the research and design behind other indoor spaces outside the home, too, from the dimensions of operating rooms, to the seating plans of offices to features of hypothetical outposts on Mars. It’s hard to read the book without constantly thinking about how everything relates back to the coronavirus. How spaces can be configured to facilitate or reduce human contact—and what playing with that does to our happiness, productivity, and health—is a big theme. (Plus, doesn’t Mars sound nice right now?)
Anthes describes herself as an “unapologetically indoorsy” person who has been working from home since before the pandemic. I talked to her about what we can all be doing to improve our indoor spaces, and the very weird timing of her book. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Shannon Palus: What does the indoor space where you work look like?
Emily Anthes: I work in my living room, sitting on my couch which is extremely non-ergonomic, but it’s habit.
What I like about this workspace is I have a lot of natural light, and over the course of reporting the book, I became extremely convinced about the power of plants. I have steadily converted my living room into a small jungle. I have, probably, 20 plants in here of various types and sizes. I find it calming and restful to be surrounded by greenery. When people ask me what they can do to improve their indoor space, which a lot of people are doing these days, the number one recommendation I make is plants.
What does research say about the power of plants?
We know that they are really good stress relievers. They seem to have cognitive benefits. People who are surrounded by greenery tend to have longer attention spans, and focus better. Kids who go to school in classrooms that are surrounded by nature tend to have better test scores. They have healing effects; patients who are hospitalized and have a view that looks out to greenery or some sort of natural scenery tend to use fewer painkillers. Plants can really have a powerful effect on all sorts of aspects of our functioning. They don’t even have to be real plants. Artificial plants can have the same benefits. So do even things like photographs of nature, or, some studies suggest, nature sounds, like the rustling of trees, a babbling brook, or birdsong, can have some of the same benefits of bringing a real plant into your home.
How could an artificial plant be helpful?
There are a couple of different theories about why greenery is beneficial. They’re probably operating in concert, there’s no definitive explanation. One is the biophilia hypothesis, which posits that because we evolved surrounded by plants and greenery we have an innate affinity for them. They make us feel restful and calm; the subsequent benefits come from that stress reduction. There’s a similar but slightly different theory known as the attention restoration theory. That holds that nature and plants engender what’s called a soft fascination. They’re engaging, and interesting, but it doesn’t take a lot of cognitive work to look at a plant. It gives your brain a break. Then there have been some mechanistic studies that have come out more recently that look at how walking in a forest seems to actually boost the immune system, you can quantify the changes in immune cells. There do seem to be some real physiological changes happening, but there’s still a lot to learn about how it’s all playing out.
One claim you see a lot is that plants will be good for your air. In theory, that is true. Plants can absorb certain air pollutants. But in practice the studies show that you would have to have a basically impossible density in your home for it to make a difference. Numerous plants per square foot to even begin to make a dent in the air quality.
One thing you wrote about where the science is not there isprobiotic sprayfor homes. Can you talk about that?
The promise is you can spray this good bacteria around your home, and that will boost your immune system. The science is not even close to there yet. Even studies of oral probiotics have been disappointing. Even if we discovered what effective probiotics were, one of the scientists told me, it seems unlikely that the best way to take a vitamin would be to spray it around your room and walk through the cloud.
If you were doing reporting for the book now, during the pandemic, what would you be exploring more?
There’s been a lot of focus now on how can we stay connected with friends and family, how can we set up all these remote social events. There’s not as much attention paid to our need for privacy and personal space, which is a fundamental need we have, and can be hard to achieve when you’re sharing a tiny apartment with another person 24/7. I’m interested to see if there are time-tested, evidence-based ways to carve out personal space even when the total amount of indoor space is not huge. We’ve seen problems related to this in outer space, or Antarctic bases, where people are stuck with the same crew day in and day out for months. We know that there can be irritability and depression as a result of not having enough personal space.
“There’s not as much attention paid to our need for privacy and personal space, which is a fundamental need wehave.”— Emily Anthes
Is there anything that you’ve done to create more private space for yourself during the pandemic?
I was thinking about what one of the researchers who has studied simulated space missions told me, which is that privacy isn’t just visual privacy. It isn’t just closing yourself behind a door. There’s olfactory privacy, and auditory privacy. Inspired by that, I’ve been doing things like sitting on the same couch as my boyfriend, but we both have headphones on and are listening to our own music or podcasts. It’s the smallest thing, but it creates a sense of refuge, a little way in which you can create your own world when you don’t have your own space to work with.
What’s it been like promoting a book right now?
I think most authors who have books out right now would say it’s been strange. I feel like it’s been particularly strange for this book because it’s been so unexpectedly timely. This is not a news hook that I ever would have asked for. If I could snap my fingers and make the pandemic go away, I would do that in a heartbeat. I do think one of the slight silver linings is a lot of people are thinking about their indoor environments more and paying more attention to them. Covid-19 is essentially a disease of the indoors, it’s being spread almost entirely indoors. I think there is an opening here if we want to take it, if we want to really think through how we can make healthier indoor environments. That includes environments that protect us from Covid-19, but it goes a lot farther than that.
from Slate Magazine https://ift.tt/2Zimgda
via IFTTT
It’s been loud in New York City. Fireworks complaints have already reached past 10,000 for the first half of the year, up from barely 50 total in the first half of 2019. Residents of some neighborhoods are rattled, and others have proffered hazy conspiracies about police involvement. Mayor Bill De Blasio has pledged a “huge sting operation” to go after suppliers, and Gov. Andrew Cuomo, not to be outdone, said Monday that he would get the New York State Police involved to cut off fireworks from New York’s more pyrotechnic neighbors in Pennsylvania.
These nightly displays have been called “mysterious”inmultipleoutlets, but they’re not really. On a balcony at a friend’s house in Brooklyn last weekend, we chatted as fireworks crackled all around us. Some too close for comfort. He pointed to the building just behind his, and told me he’s seen teenagers setting them off. “Those kids are fine,” he said, telling me they stop around 9 p.m. “It’s those guys who go all night,” pointing down the block.
Aymann Ismail
I spent the next few hours roaming the streets, trying to pinpoint various fireworks’ launch spots. All consumer fireworks are illegal in New York City—even sparklers—but they weren’t hard to find. Every few minutes, another burst shot into the sky. People outside gazed and smiled. Many people were enjoying it—unless they were trying to sleep.
I asked someone sitting outside near where I saw some if he knew where they were coming from. He smiled and pointed me to just further down the block. “You won’t miss them,” he said, just as another one went off.
He was right. It was obvious for the huge number of spent fireworks containers and cardboard boxes. There were about 10 people parked outside of an apartment building. One held a long tube firework in his hand and was just about to light it. I quickly told him I’m a journalist and asked if I could take pictures. “It’s a free country,” he said. “Do what you want. So long as you’re not a cop.”
It was a surreal sight. The fireworks they shot looked like the type you’d only see as part of the Macy’s display, which this year won’t look much different than these one-off shows. They went up just enough to clear the six-story buildings and explode. In a city that often feels claustrophobic, everyone was looking up at the sky.
The loud pops and crackles didn’t interrupt the laughing and conversations. After vehicle traffic slowed down, the same guy who posed for pictures walked out into the street and set up a plastic tube to shoot off a big one. He ran to the side of the street, and they all watched as it lit up the night. Some said they had been social distancing, but no one was wearing a mask. “Corona is corny,” one of them said.
Aymann Ismail
An undercover police car did roll through, an all-black car with discreet sirens. No one was fazed: “Is this the part where you come out with your gun?” they asked loud enough for the cops to hear. The car stopped, and for a moment it looked like it might turn into a standoff. But the car slowly pulled away.
“I love this shit. I want to be a demolition man,” a guy said as he shot off another. I asked him where he was getting all of them. He told me they get them from people who bring them in from Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. I asked him if he’d seen the videos of some NYPD officers setting off fireworks. He was aware of the conspiracy theories, but he dismissed them: “They get them from us!” he told me. “Sometimes they’ll come and confiscate them and give them to their kids. I guess they want to have fun too.”
Soon after, another car pulled up. This one parked right in front of the group and popped the trunk. It was full of fireworks. The man was clearly from out of town and was selling them for cash, from $5 to more than $100. He wouldn’t speak to me—he was only there to make a quick sale. The group I’m standing with bought more. One guy pointed to a group further down the block and said “Try them.” He gives them a nod, then pulls away.
The party went on: “Check this out, I’ma shoot two at a time.” I told them I was going to keep walking and find more groups to photograph. One guy invited me back, and said this was nothing compared to what they have planned for July 4.
I found another crew almost immediately. They were very excited: “You came here just in time! We’re about to set off a big one.” The box has a cat on it, with the phrase “SAY WHAT???” on it. This one was going to be big. A younger person in the group couldn’t wait—he set it down right where they were standing. They yelled at him to move it across the street, where it’s safer.
He lit it and ran back across the street, and told me to stand way back: “I don’t want you getting hurt.”
The fireworks banged and the sky lit up. It was all smiles. I showed them the pictures I got, and they were excited. I scrolled through and showed them some of the others from the area. They recognized each other. I asked them if there’s a sense of competition between the groups around Brooklyn. “Nah, we’re just having fun,” he told me. “What else should we be doing?”
Aymann Ismail
from Slate Magazine https://ift.tt/3gaBs2P
via IFTTT
NASA’s Science Mission Directorate will hold a virtual community town hall with Associate Administrator for Science Thomas Zurbuchen and other members of the Science leadership team at 3 p.m. EDT Thursday, July 9, to discuss updates on the agency’s science activities.
June 30, 2020
from NASA https://ift.tt/3eOtGez
via IFTTT
The two kinds of alcohol you need in a pandemic.Kai Schwoerer/Getty Images
On Friday, for the second time in the pandemic, Florida ordered bars to shut down after the state nearly doubled its single-day record for new infections. Officials claim that the spike is largely due to young people frequenting drinking establishments. Texas and California have also imposed a second shutdown of bars in recent days.
Florida thought it was past this. The state instituted its first lockdown order, which included bars, at the beginning of April—and for a while, Florida appeared to have avoided the worst despite its relatively lax efforts to contain the coronavirus. In the first week of June, Gov. Ron DeSantis announced the state would move into phase two of its reopening plan, allowing bars to serve drinks on their premises. “Go enjoy. Have a drink. It’s fine,” DeSantis said at the time. A few weeks later, here we are.
What’s it like to shut down, reopen, and then shut down again? To get a sense of what the pandemic and Florida’s response have meant for the nightlife business, I spoke to Hana Ferguson, the marketing director for the Volstead bar in Jacksonville, Florida. Despite being named after the Prohibition-era Volstead Act and styled like a speakeasy, the bar is very much closed—and like many establishments in Florida, now faces an even more uncertain future.
Aaron Mak: What was it like to close the bar when Florida instituted its first lockdown order in April?
Hana Ferguson: It was pretty tough for us, being in downtown Jacksonville. A lot of our business is lawyers and city officials and other business owners. We really rely on those types of guests to come into our bar. With the shutdown and everyone being mandated to work from home, it really put us in quite a predicament, as far as not being able to serve alcohol inside the bar and trying to find creative ways to keep the bar going during the shutdown. So we had to switch over to to-go cocktails and, under our packaging license, be treated as a liquor store. It helped us get through the first go-around, but just barely.
How did you prepare for reopening?
They announced on June 5 that we could open soon, which was only a few days’ notice. It wasn’t really a lot of time for us to go through and clean the bar and stock all the inventory we had lost—whether it was just by trying to sell it or because a lot of our produce rotted. So we needed to clean the bars, stock the bar, bring up our inventory, and create a new menu. We call it our COVID menu—just a smaller menu offering specific classics and then some cocktails that bartenders had made up.
Even with that reopening, we were only really open for two weeks before we decided to voluntarily shut down for a mandatory employee testing, and then another cleaning. And then the day we were wanting to reopen after all the testing had cleared is when [Florida] announced that we had to close down again.
Why did you decide to voluntarily shut down two weeks after reopening?
We noticed a lot of the bars in Jacksonville were announcing that their employees were testing positive or a customer had tested positive. We didn’t want to take that risk. We thought that it was probably smart to just go ahead and make sure everyone was tested and cleared. Also while we were closed, we just did another thorough clean for the bar, because we didn’t want that to happen to us.
We voluntarily shut down for five days, and then we were planning to reopen this past Friday. But that’s when Florida announced via tweet that we had to shut down again. So this is our third time.
During that brief window while you were open, what sorts of precautions were you taking?
We of course regulated the number of people that came in, but we had never reached a point to where it was outrageously packed inside the bar. Being a speakeasy, we tend to have a more calm, relaxing atmosphere. Our bartenders wore masks the whole time they were working. We had little hand sanitizers spread out through the entire bar for our guests to use when they came in. All of our seating was spread out and scattered. We also continuously cleaned the countertops and all of our tables throughout the evening while we were open.
What was everyone’s reaction to the new order to close everything down again?
It was honestly really frustrating. We were kind of going back and forth. Do we close? What do we do? Because we had only seen it in a tweet. We hadn’t seen an official executive order yet. The second shutdown is only being targeted toward bars. It’s not bars and restaurants. It’s not any other social-gathering place. We’re kind of seen as just the odd ones out in this whole scenario.
What was challenging about closing again?
We still have to pay utilities and still have to pay rent, just everything to keep the bar running as if nothing happened. We’re essentially just losing money every single day that we are closed. During the first shutdown we did receive the PPP loan, but that only can keep us going for so long. And now we’re just back to where we started with losing inventory and revenue.
A lot of our cocktails that we make, especially our signature cocktails, are all either prebatched or require fresh ingredients. All of the fruits, all of the herbs—we had stocked up on everything as we ramped back up to be open again. We had just purchased everything brand new. We’re losing all of that. It’s a lot of work we’re just losing.
What happens now?
We’re trying to figure out different strategies right now as far as how to keep the bar going, but I’m not sure we can keep going like this for much longer. We’re doing to-go cocktails. The other thing is we’re trying to partner with local food vendors as another incentive to encourage people to support local businesses – grab your food to go and grab a drink to go, make it a full meal.
Was it worse to close the first time or the second time?
Oh man. I feel like both times were just as tough. I think with the first shutdown, they waited too long to shut everything down and then opened up too soon. And then they reopened and shut us down a second time but didn’t really give us any time to prepare. If we knew that we were going to be forced to shut down again, maybe that would have stopped us from placing all of these orders and spending all this money on things that we knew would go bad.
from Slate Magazine https://ift.tt/3eMJwX3
via IFTTT
