“Dead Skunk in The Middle of The Road” – Page 69

A ‘megadrought’ in California is expected to lead to water shortages for production of everything from avocados to almonds, and could cause prices to rise

Business Insider

A ‘megadrought’ in California is expected to lead to water shortages for production of everything from avocados to almonds, and could cause prices to rise

Grace Kay June 4, 2021

California is facing its worst drought in four years.
As water levels continue to fall, farmers have left large portions of their fields unseeded.
The state’s $50 billion agriculture industry supplies over 25% of the nation’s food.

A megadrought in California is threatening to push food prices even higher.

The state is already facing its worst water shortage in four years and the its driest season has only just begun, according to data from the National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS).

As water levels continue to fall, farmers and ranchers will be unable to maintain key crops and feed livestock. As of Tuesday, nearly 75% of California was classified as in “extreme drought,” meaning the land does not have adequate water supplies to sustain agriculture and wildlife, according to the NIDIS.

While farmers have come to expect and prepare for droughts, this year has already been much hotter and drier than previous ones. Scorching California weather is drying up reservoirs, as well as the Sierra Nevada snowpack that helps supply them. The reservoirs are 50% lower than they should be in June, Jay Lund, co-director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California-Davis, told Associated Press.

The farmer’s plight could make products like almonds, avocados, and milk more expensive for shoppers as farmers struggle to produce crops of the state’s top exports. California produces over 25% of the nation’s food supply. California agriculture is a nearly $50 billion industry and is known for producing over 400 key commodities, according to the California Department of Food and Agriculture.

Dave Kranz, a California Farm Bureau spokesperson, told Insider it’s too soon to tell whether the drought will have a significant impact on grocery prices, but it is sure to be a “catastrophic” year for farmers. He said he’s already seen several farmers scaling back their crops and prioritizing ones that rely less on water supplies.

“A lot of factors play into the prices people see at stores,” Kranz said. “The payment that farmers receive for their crops is a very small portion of the price shoppers pay. Most of it comes from transportation, packaging, and marketing.”

The last time the state faced a drought of this magnitude, experts said shoppers could expect prices to rise about 3% and predicted the Californian agriculture industry could be handicapped for years, Gannett reported. During the 2014 drought, experts told CNBC prices for top California exports like avocados, berries, broccoli, grapes, and lettuce could rise anywhere from 17 to 62 cents, depending on the product.

Any potential price increases do not occur immediately or all at once. They are often felt long after the drought has already wreaked havoc on local farm crops, Annemarie Kuhns, a member of the Agriculture Department’s Economic Research Service, told the Des Moines Register in 2015.

“It takes time before the effects are seen at the retail level,” Kuhns said. “Once you see drought conditions start to improve you’ll see these effects further down the road.”

Droughts are nothing new for California farmers, who use conservation practices that reduce water runoff and allow moisture to enter the soil. Farmers also focus on crops that require less water, though about 40% of the 24.6 million acres of farmland in California require irrigation, Reuters reported. Many farmers told the publication that they are planning to leave large portions of their land unseeded due to this year’s drought.

The farms are allocated some water from the state, but this year the California Department of Water Resources reduced farmers and growers to 5% of their expected water allocation in March. Last month, Chris Scheuring, California Farm Bureau senior counsel, said it appears the state will soon not be able to deliver even at the 5% level.

“It’s one of those existential years in California, when we’ve got an extreme drought and farmers are going to be hurting all over the place,” Scheuring said. “Some folks may be able to default to groundwater, but it’s going to be a very, very tough year for farmers.”

Farmers can purchase supplemental water if they can find it, but it comes at a hefty price. Supplemental water was priced at $1,500 to $2,000 per acre-foot in mid-May, according to a report from California Farm Bureau.

During the state’s last drought, which ended in 2016, the agriculture industry lost roughly $3.8 billion, according to National Geographic. NIDIS analysts said in their last report that the outlook for this year is “grim.”

The California water shortage and potential for a dip in food exports from the state pile onto a growing supply chain crisis precipitated by COVID-19 shutdowns. California dairy products, almonds, grapes, lettuce, and avocados won’t be the only products in short supply in the coming months. Imported goods like olive oil and cheese are also facing shortages, while meats, including hot dogs, bacon, and chicken have become increasingly valuable.

After judge overturns California assault weapons ban, state officials vow to fight back

By Alex Wigglesworth and Thomas Curwen June 5, 2021

Police photos of assault rifles and handguns are displayed during a news conference

Families of mass shooting victims, gun control advocates and California officials condemned a federal judge’s decision to overturn California’s 30-year-old ban on assault weapons, largely because of the manner in which he justified his ruling.

In declaring the ban unconstitutional late Friday, U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez compared the AR-15 semiautomatic rifle to a Swiss Army knife, calling it “good for both home and battle.”

Benitez, who was nominated by former President George W. Bush and serves in the Southern District of California, issued a permanent injunction against the law’s enforcement but stayed it for 30 days to give the state a chance to appeal.

California is one of seven states, plus Washington, D.C., that ban assault weapons, according to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

In his 94-page ruling, Benitez wrote that it was unlawful for California to prohibit its citizens from possessing weapons permitted in most other states and allowed by the U.S. Supreme Court. Advocates for the right to bear arms hailed the ruling.

“This is by far the most fact-intensive, detailed judicial opinion on this issue ever,” said Dave Kopel, an adjunct professor of constitutional law at the University of Denver and adjunct scholar at libertarian think tank the Cato Institute.

State Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta called the decision “fundamentally flawed” and said he would appeal.

“There is no sound basis in law, fact, or common sense for equating assault rifles with Swiss Army knives — especially on Gun Violence Awareness Day and after the recent shootings in our own California communities,” Bonta said in a statement.

Last month, a gunman opened fire at a light rail yard in San Jose, killing nine co-workers and dying of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Officials said he was armed with three semiautomatic 9-millimeter handguns and 32 high-capacity magazines loaded with additional ammunition.

AR-15s have been used in some of the nation’s deadliest mass shootings, including the attack at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub that killed 49 people in 2016, and one in Las Vegas that killed 58 people in 2017.

“I can assure you — if a Swiss Army knife was used at Pulse, we would have had a birthday party for my best friend last week,” Brandon Wolf, who survived the Florida attack, wrote on Twitter. “Not a vigil.”

Kris Brown, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said the ruling made her do a double-take.

“I have two daughters, and they read dystopian fiction, like the ‘Hunger Games,’ and it was kind of like that,” she said. “It can’t be real. Nobody, ever, who is a thinking human being with a heartbeat, could possibly liken a Swiss Army knife to an AR-15.”

In response to several mass shootings on his watch, President Biden announced in April that his administration would take steps toward greater gun regulation.

They include a proposal to require background checks for self-assembled firearms — so-called ghost guns — and a law that would allow family members or law enforcement agencies to request a court order to take guns away from a person who is a danger to themselves or others. Nineteen states, including California, have already passed such laws.

“Today’s decision is a direct threat to public safety and the lives of innocent Californians, period,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said Friday in a statement. “The fact that this judge compared the AR-15 — a weapon of war that’s used on the battlefield — to a Swiss Army knife completely undermines the credibility of this decision and is a slap in the face to the families who’ve lost loved ones to this weapon.”

The ruling came in response to a lawsuit filed in August 2019 by pro-gun groups, including the San Diego County Gun Owners Political Action Committee, California Gun Rights Foundation, Second Amendment Foundation and Firearms Policy Coalition.

The plaintiffs also included three San Diego County men who said they own legal rifles or pistols and want to use high-capacity magazines in them but can’t, because doing so would turn them into illegal assault weapons under California statutes.

In cases in which the government seeks to limit people’s constitutional rights, such as those guaranteed by the 2nd Amendment, the government has the burden of proving the limitation is helping to advance an important public interest, like reducing mass shootings, Kopel said.

“You’re essentially weighing how much of a burden you are inflicting on law-abiding people versus how much you are reducing whatever problem you’re trying to deal with,” he said. In this case, he said, the judge found that “we’re not getting any reduction in mass shootings, and it’s imposing quite a severe burden on innocent people, like people who want to have these types of firearms for protection in the home.”

Other legal experts found the judge’s reasoning less compelling.

“The judge in this case, in declaring the ban on assault weapons to be a failed policy experiment and therefore unconstitutional, was engaging in his own policy judgment,” said Susan Estrich, professor at the USC Gould School of Law. “His very reasoning undercuts his own conclusion.”

California became the first state to ban the sale of assault weapons in 1989 in response to a shooting at a Stockton elementary school that left five students dead. The ban, signed into law by Republican Gov. George Deukmejian, has been updated multiple times since then to expand the definition of what is considered an assault weapon.

Each time, those who owned the firearms before they were prohibited were required to register them. There are an estimated 185,569 such weapons registered with the state, Benitez said.

In response to the ban soon after it was enacted, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals found the 2nd Amendment applied only as a limitation on the federal government, not state governments, Kopel said.

But in 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling saying the 2nd Amendment applies to cities and states, which helped pave the way for this decision, he said.

In the current case, the state attorney general’s office argued that assault weapons are more dangerous than other firearms and are disproportionately used in crimes and mass shootings. Similar restrictions have previously been upheld by six other federal district and appeals courts, the state argued.

But the judge said the firearms targeted by the ban are most commonly used for legal purposes.

“This case is not about extraordinary weapons lying at the outer limits of 2nd Amendment protection,” he wrote. “The banned ‘assault weapons’ are not bazookas, howitzers, or machine guns.”

“In California, murder by knife occurs seven times more often than murder by rifle,” he added.

The state is also appealing two other rulings by Benitez: one from 2017 that overturns a ban on buying and selling magazines that hold more than 10 bullets, and another from April of last year that blocks a 2019 law requiring background checks to buy ammunition.

In the case of the assault weapons ban, the decision will almost certainly be stayed beyond 30 days, pending an appeal to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, and there’s an excellent chance the court will issue a reversal, given its liberal tendencies, Estrich said.

“Ultimately,” she said, “the question may be whether the United States Supreme Court, with its new conservative appointees, sees this as an opportunity to dig into assault weapons bans.”

That could imperil gun control laws that are on the books across the country, Brown said.

“The Supreme Court overturning these kinds of laws that are designed to promote public safety has huge negative implications, not only for assault weapons bans but for every public safety law that we have ever crafted to regulate guns, including the Brady law.” she said, referring to the 1994 requirement that firearm purchasers undergo federal background checks.

“So yes, I’m very concerned about it.”

Opinion: Republican senators managed to outdo themselves in cowardice

Washington Post

Opinion: Republican senators managed to outdo themselves in cowardice

Opinion by George T. Conway III, Contributing columnist June 2, 2021

Image without a caption — Supporters of President Donald Trump fight with members of law enforcement at a door the supporters broke open as they storm the Capitol in Washington on Jan. 6. (Leah Millis/Reuters).

Republican senators have managed to outdo themselves in cowardice — which is quite a feat.

Last week’s Senate vote blocking a national commission to investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol was even more appalling than either of the Senate’s impeachment trial acquittals of former president Donald Trump.

With few exceptions, Senate Republicans shirked their duties at both trials, despite the oaths they took to defend the Constitution, and, in an impeachment trial, to “do impartial justice.” These derelictions were especially apparent in the first impeachment trial. Faced with overwhelming evidence that Trump had used his official powers to try to coerce a foreign nation into aiding his reelection campaign, all but one Republican (Utah’s Mitt Romney) voted to acquit him, even as the senators refused to call witnesses.

They betrayed their oaths again in February, when 43 of the 50 Republican senators voted to acquit Trump of inciting the insurrection, even though he had largely committed his high crime openly, on television and Twitter, and even though the senators themselves were among the victims.

They acquitted him even though they surely recognized, as their own leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell (Ky.), blisteringly said on the floor on Feb. 13 after voting to acquit, that Trump had engaged in a “disgraceful — disgraceful — dereliction of duty.” Rather than “do his job,” McConnell said, Trump “watched television happily — happily — as the chaos unfolded,” hoping “to either overturn the voters’ decision or else torch our institutions on the way out.”

Trump breached his duties in both cases, and Senate Republicans thus failed to carry out theirs. But at least then the senators had excuses, however feeble.

With the first impeachment, they faced the momentous decision of whether to remove a president from office — something that has never been done. You can’t blame anyone for feeling trepidation at such a prospect.

The second time around, most claimed they couldn’t convict a former president, even though he had been impeached while in office for acts committed while in office. Constitutional text and history refute that proposition, but you could at least understand one underlying motivation: The usual sanction for an impeachment conviction is removal. Trump was already gone, posed no further threat of committing official abuse, had just lost an election by 7 million votes and stood as unpopular as ever. So, at least the theory went, why bother convicting him just to formally disqualify him from ever holding federal offices to which he’d never be elected?

Those may not have been great excuses, but at least the Republicans had them.

There was no excuse — none — for what they did last week.

They weren’t being asked to remove anyone from office; they weren’t being asked to pass judgment of any sort. They were merely being asked to allow a bipartisan commission to look into what happened on, and led to, Jan. 6.

Even worse: They actually weren’t voting on whether to create a commission; they were voting on cloture — on whether even to allow a vote on the issue. Using the filibuster, a Republican minority refused to allow a majority (which would have included seven Republicans) to hold that vote.

And they did so out of raw political fear, this time without fig leaves. McConnell’s own leadership colleague, minority whip Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), actually admitted that Republicans feared that the commission’s findings “could be weaponized politically and drug into next year,” a midterm election year.

As for McConnell, he pulled out all the stops. Virtually echoing British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s notorious call to partisanship in the decisive 1940 parliamentary debate over his handling of Nazi aggression — “I have friends in the House” — McConnell shamelessly asked his colleagues to kill the commission bill as “a personal favor” to him.

With that, the Republicans’ policy of appeasing Trump prevailed once again. But if Republicans are worried about what would happen if the public learned more of the truth about Jan. 6, they have only themselves to blame.

After all, they were the ones who acquitted Trump in the first impeachment trial and let him remain in office. They were the ones who stood mute before Jan. 6 as Trump propagated the “big lie” after the election. They were the ones who left open the horrifying prospect of letting Trump hold office again. They are the ones who continue to wish his wrongs away.

They quiver in fear of the man who cost them the presidency and both houses of Congress. As they continue to quake, the “big lie’s” cancer upon democracy grows, with spurious election audits in pursuit of fantasies of fraud, and with some insanely claiming — reportedly including Trump himself — that he’ll be “reinstated” in due course.

Four years of Trump have led to the Republican Party becoming a threat to democracy, a declining sect dominated by crackpots, charlatans and cowards. Of these, it’s the cowards, including the senators who killed last week’s legislation, who bear the most blame.

American democracy is about to show if it can save itself

CNN

American democracy is about to show if it can save itself

Analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN June 2, 2021

(CNN)American democracy — under a relentless, multi-front assault from pro-Donald Trump Republicans — is about to show whether it is strong enough to save itself.

Such a premise would have been considered absurd through much of history. But since Trump left office after destroying the tradition of peaceful transfers of power in a failed attempt to steal the 2020 election, it has become clear that his insurrectionism was only the first battle in a longer political war as his allies tout ridiculous fantasies about returning him to power to applause and online acclaim.

The mechanisms of American institutions that barely survived Trump’s attempt to illegally stay in power are still being manipulated by Republicans to make the country less democratic. The GOP’s efforts to stack the electoral decks are staggeringly broad. From Georgia to Arizona and Florida and in many other states, Republicans are mobilizing behind efforts to shorten voting hours, crack down on early and mail-in balloting and to throw out legitimate ballots — all under a banner of election security.

While Trump may be banned from Twitter, he sends out daily statements pulsating with lies and incitement that percolate among supporters on social media. The ex-President’s planned resumption of rallies next month will bring that anti-democratic stream of falsehood to a wider audience.

And in the US Senate, Republicans will use filibuster rules — which critics see as the antithesis of democracy — to thwart Democratic legislation that seeks to combat all those efforts.

President Joe Biden, who is in the White House because American democratic guardrails stood firm after his victory last November, raised the alarm on Tuesday after another bout of the GOP flexing its anti-democratic muscles. Just as Republicans are using the institutions to damage democracy, Biden and Democrats are targeting new laws that they believe would preserve it.

Biden tasked Vice President Kamala Harris with leading an effort to protect the right to vote. “This sacred right is under assault with incredible intensity like I’ve never seen … with an intensity of aggressiveness we’ve not seen in a long, long time,” Biden said in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The President was marking the 100th anniversary of a massacre of Black Americans, a scar on US history that he implicitly placed in the wider struggle of generations to perfect US democracy.

But time is short to reverse democratic rollbacks by Republicans that are already causing fears that GOP officials could overturn future elections if their candidates are rejected in a majority vote. Trump tried to do exactly this with his unsuccessful pressure on local officials to steal the 2020 election in Georgia. The GOP capture of the House in 2022 midterm elections could make such a stolen election scenario a real threat in 2024.

“By the time we get to the 2024 election, my fear is that election will be sent to the House of Representatives to decide if there are disputed electors,” Daniel Ziblatt, a Harvard professor and co-author of the book “How Democracies Die,” told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “The Lead.”

“You could very well imagine a situation where the 2020 and the 2021 January crisis was a dress rehearsal for what’s to come in 2024.”

Tough path for new laws

As Democrats try to prevent that happening, the Senate will shortly consider sweeping voting rights laws designed to establish national standards on issues like early voting, and to restore protections for Black voters removed by the Supreme Court and GOP legislators.

A preview of that battle in Washington is currently playing out around the nation in the country’s statehouses, most recently in Texas.

Democratic state lawmakers in the Lone Star State walked out of their chamber over the weekend to deprive their Republican colleagues of a quorum needed to pass a restrictive voting bill built on Trump’s Big Lie of election fraud.

But Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, is vowing to call lawmakers back in a special session to pass the legislation and threatening to halt their pay over the walkout. He collected his reward on Tuesday with a reelection endorsement from the former President.

The two voting rights bills in the US Senate face an unpromising future, since Republicans are vowing to halt what they are branding a Democratic power grab. Several Democratic senators, including West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema, would have to drop their firm opposition to abolishing or amending supermajority filibuster rules for the bills to pass.

For the second time in a week Tuesday, Biden — who preaches national unity and bipartisanship and has treated Manchin with kid gloves — flashed irritation about the limitations of deadlocked Washington politics. Last week he held up a list of GOP senators who voted against his Covid-19 rescue law but claimed credit for some of its provisions among their constituents. In Tulsa, the President aimed an apparent swipe at Sinema and Manchin.

“I hear all the folks on TV saying, ‘Why doesn’t Biden get this done?’ Well, because Biden only has a majority of effectively four votes in the House and a tie in the Senate, with two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends,” he said.

‘A hell of a lot of work’

It is not clear, given these apparently cemented political realities, exactly how Harris can turn back the tide of challenges to democracy. She could bring more visibility to the cause and perhaps help to organize popular opposition to restrictive voting bills. And she could be a powerful galvanizing force for Democratic turnout in 2022 that could make an end run around some new laws.

But the entrenched reality of Republican power in many states and the obstructive mechanism of the Senate makes progress difficult. Harris may be able to test whether there is scope for a reworking of bills like the For the People Act to attract the support of more lawmakers. But there is concern even among some Democrats that the legislation is too broad, including as it relates to campaign finance regulations. It is highly unlikely she can persuade Republicans to vote for a measure that would reverse many state-level efforts to fortify their chances against demographic changes that threaten to consign White, conservative, religious Americans to permanent minority status.

The vice president is however promising to devote energy to a task that Biden said on Tuesday would “take a hell of a lot of work.”

In a statement sent first to CNN, Harris said she would “work with voting rights organizations, community organizations, and the private sector to help strengthen and uplift efforts on voting rights nationwide. And we will also work with members of Congress to help advance these bills.”

A second bill — The John Lewis Voting Rights Act, also passed by the House of Representatives — is awaiting Senate action. The measure would restore a requirement for states with a record of racial discrimination in elections to submit changes to electoral laws to the federal government for review. The protections were gutted by a 2013 Supreme Court ruling that opened the way for a raft of current efforts to prejudice the rights of minority voters.

A troubling coup allusion

While the GOP seeks to tilt elections, some of its members are pressing ahead with a whitewash of the 2020 contest.

Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, adding to the growing blanket of denial around Trump’s Capitol insurrection on January 6, says he’s conducting his own investigation to create an “accurate historical record” after voting against a bipartisan, independent probe into the outrage that would have done just that.

The Republican filibuster blockade against the commission was a transparent attempt to protect Trump from further damaging revelations, after the ex-President all but ordered GOP leaders in the Senate and House to oppose it.

But the attempt to pervert American democratic freedoms is not limited to elected Republicans. Former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn indicated over the weekend the US needed a coup like the one in Myanmar.

The Southeast Asian nation has been ruled by a paranoid and brutal military junta for much of the last 60 years. In its most recent coup, it moved to thwart a tentative path towards full democracy and the military has opened fire on hundreds of peaceful protesters and detained many more in inhumane prisons where torture is rife.

Flynn later tried to walk back his comments, but the lack of any condemnation by senior Republican figures of his actions reflects a party wherein extremism is tolerated and therefore grows.

Asked how worried he was about American democracy on a scale of 1-to-10, Ziblatt replied, “Eight,” and pointed out that Trump had never been supported by a majority of Americans. But he also explained to Tapper why the current raft of anti-democratic actions in US institutions by Republicans was so concerning.

“As long as the majority can speak, democracy is safe,” Ziblatt said.

“I think the thing we have to worry about is that the institutions are being manipulated in a way to try to create a much more uneven playing field and that would be very dangerous.”

If the Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis is true, expect a political earthquake

The Guardian

If the Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis is true, expect a political earthquake

Thomas Fra June 1, 2021

There was a time when the Covid pandemic seemed to confirm so many of our assumptions. It cast down the people we regarded as villains. It raised up those we thought were heroes. It prospered people who could shift easily to working from home even as it problematized the lives of those Trump voters living in the old economy.

Like all plagues, Covid often felt like the hand of God on earth, scourging the people for their sins against higher learning and visibly sorting the righteous from the unmasked wicked. “Respect science,” admonished our yard signs. And lo!, Covid came and forced us to do so, elevating our scientists to the highest seats of social authority, from where they banned assembly, commerce, and all the rest.

We cast blame so innocently in those days. We scolded at will. We knew who was right and we shook our heads to behold those in the wrong playing in their swimming pools and on the beach. It made perfect sense to us that Donald Trump, a politician we despised, could not grasp the situation, that he suggested people inject bleach, and that he was personally responsible for more than one super-spreading event. Reality itself punished leaders like him who refused to bow to expertise. The prestige news media even figured out a way to blame the worst death tolls on a system of organized ignorance they called “populism.”

In reaction to the fool Trump, liberalism made a cult out of the hierarchy of credentialed achievement in general

But these days the consensus doesn’t consense quite as well as it used to. Now the media is filled with disturbing stories suggesting that Covid might have come — not from “populism” at all, but from a laboratory screw-up in Wuhan, China. You can feel the moral convulsions beginning as the question sets in: What if science itself is in some way culpable for all this?

I am no expert on epidemics. Like everyone else I know, I spent the pandemic doing as I was told. A few months ago I even tried to talk a Fox News viewer out of believing in the lab-leak theory of Covid’s origins. The reason I did that is because the newspapers I read and the TV shows I watched had assured me on many occasions that the lab-leak theory wasn’t true, that it was a racist conspiracy theory, that only deluded Trumpists believed it, that it got infinite pants-on-fire ratings from the fact-checkers, and because (despite all my cynicism) I am the sort who has always trusted the mainstream news media.

My own complacency on the matter was dynamited by the lab-leak essay that ran in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists earlier this month; a few weeks later everyone from Doctor Fauci to President Biden is acknowledging that the lab-accident hypothesis might have some merit. We don’t know the real answer yet, and we probably will never know, but this is the moment to anticipate what such a finding might ultimately mean. What if this crazy story turns out to be true?

The answer is that this is the kind of thing that could obliterate the faith of millions. The last global disaster, the financial crisis of 2008, smashed people’s trust in the institutions of capitalism, in the myths of free trade and the New Economy, and eventually in the elites who ran both American political parties.

In the years since (and for complicated reasons), liberal leaders have labored to remake themselves into defenders of professional rectitude and established legitimacy in nearly every field. In reaction to the fool Trump, liberalism made a sort of cult out of science, expertise, the university system, executive-branch “norms,” the “intelligence community,” the State Department, NGOs, the legacy news media, and the hierarchy of credentialed achievement in general.

Now here we are in the waning days of Disastrous Global Crisis #2. Covid is of course worse by many orders of magnitude than the mortgage meltdown — it has killed millions and ruined lives and disrupted the world economy far more extensively. Should it turn out that scientists and experts and NGOs, etc. are villains rather than heroes of this story, we may very well see the expert-worshiping values of modern liberalism go up in a fireball of public anger.

Consider the details of the story as we have learned them in the last few weeks:

• Lab leaks happen. They aren’t the result of conspiracies: “a lab accident is an accident,” as Nathan Robinson points out; they happen all the time, in this country and in others, and people die from them.

• There is evidence that the lab in question, which studies bat coronaviruses, may have been conducting what is called “gain of function” research, a dangerous innovation in which diseases are deliberately made more virulent. By the way, right-wingers didn’t dream up “gain of function”: all the cool virologists have been doing it (in this country and in others) even as the squares have been warning against it for years.

• There are strong hints that some of the bat-virus research at the Wuhan lab was funded in part by the American national-medical establishment — which is to say, the lab-leak hypothesis doesn’t implicate China alone.

• There seem to have been astonishing conflicts of interest among the people assigned to get to the bottom of it all, and (as we know from Enron and the housing bubble) conflicts of interest are always what trip up the well-credentialed professionals whom liberals insist we must all heed, honor, and obey.

• The news media, in its zealous policing of the boundaries of the permissible, insisted that Russiagate was ever so true but that the lab-leak hypothesis was false false false, and woe unto anyone who dared disagree. Reporters gulped down whatever line was most flattering to the experts they were quoting and then insisted that it was 100% right and absolutely incontrovertible — that anything else was only unhinged Trumpist folly, that democracy dies when unbelievers get to speak, and so on.

• The social media monopolies actually censored posts about the lab-leak hypothesis. Of course they did! Because we’re at war with misinformation, you know, and people need to be brought back to the true and correct faith — as agreed upon by experts.

“Let us pray, now, for science,” intoned a New York Times columnist back at the beginning of the Covid pandemic. The title of his article laid down the foundational faith of Trump-era liberalism: “Coronavirus is What You Get When You Ignore Science.”

Ten months later, at the end of a scary article about the history of “gain of function” research and its possible role in the still ongoing Covid pandemic, Nicholson Baker wrote as follows: “This may be the great scientific meta-experiment of the 21st century. Could a world full of scientists do all kinds of reckless recombinant things with viral diseases for many years and successfully avoid a serious outbreak? The hypothesis was that, yes, it was doable. The risk was worth taking. There would be no pandemic.”

Except there was. If it does indeed turn out that the lab-leak hypothesis is the right explanation for how it began — that the common people of the world have been forced into a real-life lab experiment, at tremendous cost — there is a moral earthquake on the way.

Because if the hypothesis is right, it will soon start to dawn on people that our mistake was not insufficient reverence for scientists, or inadequate respect for expertise, or not enough censorship on Facebook. It was a failure to think critically about all of the above, to understand that there is no such thing as absolute expertise. Think of all the disasters of recent years: economic neoliberalism, destructive trade policies, the Iraq War, the housing bubble, banks that are “too big to fail,” mortgage-backed securities, the Hillary Clinton campaign of 2016 — all of these disasters brought to you by the total, self-assured unanimity of the highly educated people who are supposed to know what they’re doing, plus the total complacency of the highly educated people who are supposed to be supervising them.

Then again, maybe I am wrong to roll out all this speculation. Maybe the lab-leak hypothesis will be convincingly disproven. I certainly hope it is.

But even if it inches closer to being confirmed, we can guess what the next turn of the narrative will be. It was a “perfect storm,” the experts will say. Who coulda known? And besides (they will say), the origins of the pandemic don’t matter any more. Go back to sleep.

Thomas Frank is a Guardian US columnist. He is the author, most recently, of The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism

Chemicals, pipelines destroying Black communities today. And poor of color are dying.

USA Today

Chemicals, pipelines destroying Black communities today. And poor of color are dying.

The Rev. William J. Barber II May 30, 2021

Along the Mississippi River in Louisiana, land where Black people were once enslaved on plantations is now being poisoned by petrochemical plants that have given the place a new name: Cancer Alley. In the fall of 2019, Robert Taylor told a Poor People’s Campaign gathering there about the toll of watching his family and neighbors die. Taylor’s daughter has a rare disease that her doctor told her she had a 1 in 5 million chance of contracting. She has since learned that three other neighbors are dying of the same disease.

Robert Taylor talks about his family struggles with chemical poisoning. His daughter contracted a rare disease, and so did her neighbors.

Four hundred miles north in Memphis, Tennessee, Black residents invited the Poor People’s Campaign to support their organizing to stop the Byhalia Pipeline. The proposed crude oil pipeline would repeat the systemic racism of the 1970s urban renewal by running the line through Memphis’ African American communities. In this place where Ida B. Wells once challenged the lies used to justify lynching, Black Memphians are again resisting lies that would harm their community.

More than 150 years after slavery was abolished in the United States, descendants of enslaved Americans continue to challenge systemic racism because they experience the ongoing impact of America’s original sin on the very land where it first occurred.

But slavery’s legacy doesn’t stop in those communities.

Neighborhoods of color across the country are hit by industrial waste and air pollution and deprived of green spaces at significantly higher rates than white communities. Poverty, redlining (a practice that segregated housing) and the overwhelming lack of diversity in the environmental space keep the cycle of pollution and community destruction concentrated in Black America.

In fact, whites in America experience 17% less air pollution than they cause. Black people experience 56% more than their consumption causes, according to a 2019 study.

Follow the family lines of the Great Migration to Chicago, Illinois, and Flint, Michigan, and you find African American communities where families can buy unleaded gas but not unleaded water. There, too, welfare-rights unions have joined the Poor People’s Campaign because their members work two and three jobs but still cannot afford a decent home for their families. In recent weeks, our partners on the Southeast side of Chicago won a struggle to keep a processing plant from moving from predominantly white Lincoln Park into their neighborhood.

The Poor People’s Campaign has joined with grassroots movements across the USA to highlight the 140 million Americans who are poor or low-income in the richest nation in the history of the world.

While poverty touches every race, creed and culture, 60% of African Americans are poor or low-income (compared with 33% of white Americans) because the promise of 40 acres and a mule was never fulfilled for the formerly enslaved. Whether you live in St. James Parish, Louisiana, or Flint, Michigan, the nation’s failure to pay reparations continues to echo through the African American community.

Black people have been denied the fruit of our labor through Jim Crow laws, convict leasing and the redlining and urban renewal that have destroyed Black neighborhoods.

Today’s racial wealth gap is clear evidence that reparations are needed.

For generations, an economic system built by white male property owners has consolidated more and more wealth in the hands of a few, leading to income inequality that hurts people of every race.

A tax on that accumulated wealth to repay the descendants of the people who have been systematically abused by this economy would do more than render justice too long denied. It would give Black Americans the opportunity to demonstrate how wealth can be invested in ways that benefit the whole and help us imagine a world where no one needs to live in poverty.

The Rev. William J. Barber II is the president of Repairers of the Breach and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign.

Manchin’s political worldview was put to the test (and it lost)

MSNBC – MaddowBlog

Manchin’s political worldview was put to the test (and it lost)

The vote on the Jan. 6 commission wasn’t just a disappointment for Joe Manchin, it was a vote that shattered his vision for governance.

By Steve Benen May 28, 2021

As Senate Republicans prepared to kill the bipartisan plan for a Jan. 6 commission, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) was seen on the chamber floor having a tense conversation with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). It was obvious to those who saw the discussion that the conservative Democrat was not pleased.

That was understandable. This fight, more than any other in recent memory, put Manchin’s entire political worldview to the test — and it lost.

After the vote, the West Virginian expressed his disappointment to reporters.

“Mitch McConnell makes it extremely difficult,” Manchin said. “The commission is something this country needs. There’s no excuse. It’s just pure raw politics. And that’s just so, so disheartening. It really, really is disheartening. I never thought I’d see it up close and personal that politics could trump our country. And I’m going to fight to save this country.”

The senator never explicitly acknowledged the dynamic, but for Manchin, the debate over the commission was not simply a legislative fight; it was a case study for a style of governing.

Indeed, the pieces were in place for Manchin to prove that his approach worked. Most Democrats and Republicans agreed that there was an insurrectionist attack on our seat of government. The parties also agreed on the need for an examination. There were bipartisan negotiations, concessions from both sides, and an eventual compromise agreement.

If Manchin were literally writing a script as to how political disputes should be resolved, it would look exactly like this.

As recently as late last week, the senator assured reporters there was a “very, very good chance” the Senate would pass the bipartisan proposal, adding that he hoped there were at least “10 good, solid patriots” among Senate Republicans.

Manchin didn’t just want to believe this, he needed to believe this. If Republicans rejected a bipartisan compromise, prioritizing politics and electoral strategies over country, then his entire vision of how Congress can operate would be shattered.

We don’t need to change the Senate’s filibuster rules, Manchin tells us, we simply need well-intentioned officials to sit down, talk, listen, compromise, and reach responsible agreements.

It’s an idea with hypothetical appeal. But in practice, a clear majority of Senate Republicans just told the conservative Democrat that his model doesn’t work. The parties reached a consensus, and GOP leaders decided they didn’t much care.

The only responsible way forward is for Manchin to consider the implication of today’s lesson. If 10 Senate Republicans won’t accept a bipartisan plan for a Jan. 6 commission — after they endorsed the idea and accepted Democratic concessions — why in the world would anyone think GOP officials would work in good faith toward a sensible agreement on infrastructure? And voting rights? And immigration? And literally every other meaningful policy dispute under the sun?

Or put another way, now that McConnell and his Republican have discredited Manchin’s preferred model, what is he prepared to replace it with?

‘Sea snot’ is clogging up Turkey’s coasts, suffocating marine life, and devastating fisheries

Business Insider

‘Sea snot’ is clogging up Turkey’s coasts, suffocating marine life, and devastating fisheries

Morgan McFall-Johnsen May 28, 2021

sea snot turkey coast dock harbor sea of marmara

A goopy substance called sea snot has been clogging Turkish coasts in the Sea of Marmara for months.
The mucus has been filling fishing nets, suffocating coral, and killing marine life.
Climate change and fertilizer runoff may be fueling the algae boom that’s behind the sea snot.

Blankets of a goopy, camel-colored substance have been accumulating in the water off Turkey’s coast for months.

The goop, called marine mucilage or “sea snot,” is covering so much of the coastline along the Sea of Marmara that people can no longer fish there. The sea snot formations can get up to 100 feet (30 meters) deep, according to the Turkish news site Cumhuriyet.

The sea snot fills fishing nets and weighs them down – one fisherman told Cumhuriyet that nets have been bursting from the weight of the mucus. A fishery co-op leader said people were barely pulling in a fifth of the fish they hauled at this time last year.

Marine mucilage is a goopy discharge of protein, carbohydrates, and fat from microscopic algae called phytoplankton. The substance was documented in the Sea of Marmara for the first time in 2007, as researchers at Istanbul University reported in 2008.

marine mucilage sea snot underwater ocean

Normally, sea snot is not a problem, but when phytoplankton grow out of control, the goop can overpower marine ecosystems. This can wreak ecological havoc, since the substance can harbor bacteria like E Coli and ensnare or suffocate marine life. Eventually, the snot sinks to the sea floor, where it can blanket coral and suffocate them, too.

Since phytoplankton thrive in warm water, scientists suspect that climate change is fueling the new sea-snot crisis. Runoff from nitrogen- and phosphorous-rich fertilizer and sewage could also be causing an explosion in the phytoplankton population.

“We are experiencing the visible effects of climate change, and adaptation requires an overhaul of our habitual practices. We must initiate a full-scale effort to adapt,” Mustafa Sarı, dean of Bandırma Onyedi Eylül University’s maritime faculty, told The Guardian.

sea snot turkey coast harbor dock mucus marmara

This is the largest accumulation of sea snot yet, according to The Guardian. It began in deep waters during the winter then spread to the coastlines this year. Barış Özalp, a marine biologist at Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University, first noticed it in December but became alarmed once the snot carpets continued to grow through the spring.

“The gravity of the situation set in when I dived for measurements in March and discovered severe mortality in corals,” he told The Guardian.

Thousands of fish have been washing up dead in coastal towns as well, Sarı told The Guardian. The fish could be suffocating because sea snot clogs their gills, or because it depletes the water’s oxygen levels.

“Once the mucilage covers the coasts, it limits the interaction between water and the atmosphere,” Sarı said.

Plague of ravenous, destructive mice tormenting Australians

Associated Press

Plague of ravenous, destructive mice tormenting Australians

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Australia Mice Plague

Mice scurry around stored grain on a farm near Tottenham, Australia on May 19, 2021. Vast tracts of land in Australia’s New South Wales state are being threatened by a mouse plague that the state government describes as “absolutely unprecedented.” Just how many millions of rodents have infested the agricultural plains across the state is guesswork. (AP Photo/Rick Rycroft)

BOGAN GATE, Australia (AP) — At night, the floors of sheds vanish beneath carpets of scampering mice. Ceilings come alive with the sounds of scratching. One family blamed mice chewing electrical wires for their house burning down.

Vast tracts of land in Australia’s New South Wales state are being threatened by a mouse plague that the state government describes as “absolutely unprecedented.” Just how many millions of rodents have infested the agricultural plains across the state is guesswork.

“We’re at a critical point now where if we don’t significantly reduce the number of mice that are in plague proportions by spring, we are facing an absolute economic and social crisis in rural and regional New South Wales,” Agriculture Minister Adam Marshall said this month.

Bruce Barnes said he is taking a gamble by planting crops on his family farm near the central New South Wales town of Bogan Gate.

“We just sow and hope,” he said.

The risk is that the mice will maintain their numbers through the Southern Hemisphere winter and devour the wheat, barley and canola before it can be harvested.

NSW Farmers, the state’s top agricultural association, predicts the plague will wipe more than 1 billion Australian dollars ($775 million) from the value of the winter crop.

The state government has ordered 5,000 liters (1,320 gallons) of the banned poison Bromadiolone from India. The federal government regulator has yet to approve emergency applications to use the poison on the perimeters of crops. Critics fear the poison will kill not only mice but also animals that feed on them. including wedge-tail eagles and family pets.

“We’re having to go down this path because we need something that is super strength, the equivalent of napalm to just blast these mice into oblivion,” Marshall said.

The plague is a cruel blow to farmers in Australia’s most populous state who have been battered by fires, floods and pandemic disruptions in recent years, only to face the new scourge of the introduced house mouse, or Mus musculus.

The same government-commissioned advisers who have helped farmers cope with the drought, fire and floods are returning to help people deal with the stresses of mice.

The worst comes after dark, when millions of mice that had been hiding and dormant during the day become active.

By day, the crisis is less apparent. Patches of road are dotted with squashed mice from the previous night, but birds soon take the carcasses away. Haystacks are disintegrating due to ravenous rodents that have burrowed deep inside. Upending a sheet of scrap metal lying in a paddock will send a dozen mice scurrying. The sidewalks are strewn with dead mice that have eaten poisonous bait.

But a constant, both day and night, is the stench of mice urine and decaying flesh. The smell is people’s greatest gripe.

“You deal with it all day. You’re out baiting, trying your best to manage the situation, then come home and just the stench of dead mice,” said Jason Conn, a fifth generation farmer near Wellington in central New South Wales.

“They’re in the roof cavity of your house. If your house is not well sealed, they’re in bed with you. People are getting bitten in bed,” Conn said. “It doesn’t relent, that’s for sure.”

Colin Tink estimated he drowned 7,500 mice in a single night last week in a trap he set with a cattle feeding bowl full of water at his farm outside Dubbo.

“I thought I might get a couple of hundred. I didn’t think I’d get 7,500,” Tink said.

Barnes said mouse carcasses and excrement in roofs were polluting farmers’ water tanks.

“People are getting sick from the water,” he said.

The mice are already in Barnes’ hay bales. He’s battling them with zinc phosphide baits, the only legal chemical control for mice used in broad-scale agriculture in Australia. He’s hoping that winter frosts will help contain the numbers.

Farmers like Barnes endured four lean years of drought before 2020 brought a good season as well as the worst flooding that some parts of New South Wales have seen in at least 50 years. But the pandemic brought a labor drought. Fruit was left to rot on trees because foreign backpackers who provide the seasonal workforce were absent.

Plagues seemingly appear from nowhere and often vanish just as fast.

Disease and a shortage of food are thought to trigger a dramatic population crash as mice feed on themselves, devouring the sick, weak and their own offspring.

Government researcher Steve Henry, whose agency is developing strategies to reduce the impact of mice on agriculture, said it is too early to predict what damage will occur by spring.

He travels across the state holding community meetings, sometimes twice a day, to discuss the mice problem.

“People are fatigued from dealing with the mice,” Henry said.

Sen. Angus King Introduces Legislation To Go After High-Income “Tax Cheats”

Maine Public Radio

Sen. Angus King Introduces Legislation To Go After High-Income “Tax Cheats”

Mal Leary, Maine Public Radio May 27, 2021

Maine Senator Angus King has introduced legislation that would order the IRS to go after high income tax cheats. The measure would allocate $80 billion over 8 years and bolster audit efforts.

Sen. King says that with the demand for money to invest in the nation’s infrastructure and other economic development programs, the IRS should do more audits of high-income earners and corporations. King told MSNBC on Thursday that tax increases should not be on the table when taxes are being under collected.

“Let’s collect the taxes the tax cheats aren’t paying. The estimates are from a half a trillion to a trillion dollars a year,“ King says.

The measure would direct the IRS to set audit rate goals for high-income individuals, corporations, and estates, and increase the penalties for tax noncompliance on taxpayers who earn more than $2 million a year of taxable income. King says most people pay what they owe, but the rich can afford professional help to avoid paying taxes they owe.

“Unfortunately in the last few years they have been focusing their audits on lower income people, are they cheating on the earned income tax credit where they will collect hundreds of dollars instead of on the high income high roller cheats where they could collect millions of dollars,” King says.

Los Angeles Times

After judge overturns California assault weapons ban, state officials vow to fight back

Republican senators have managed to outdo themselves in cowardice — which is quite a feat.

CNN

American democracy is about to show if it can save itself

Tough path for new laws

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Australia Mice Plague

Maine Public Radio

Sen. Angus King Introduces Legislation To Go After High-Income “Tax Cheats”