Democrats have been trying to pass a law that would require political campaigns to report any offers from foreign nationals to make campaign donations or to coordinate with a campaign. But Republicans keep blocking it, even though the law would apply to both Democrats and Republicans.
So expect even more foreign interference with the upcoming election.
I could sure use some good news. And lucky for us, there is some!
The news today is completely dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic, Black Lives Matter, and the upcoming election. But there are other important stories, and in one of them — global warming and climate change — we have very good news. You might have missed it because it isn’t some big event that is newsworthy, it is a gradual thing, but nonetheless significant.
An article in Forbes magazine surveys the current impressive rise in renewable energy. While we are completely distracted by other things, the cost of technologies like solar and wind have become not just practical, but the least expensive ways to generate energy. It is cheaper to build renewable capacity, and cheaper to operate them. It is no longer cost effective to burn fossil fuels to generate electricity.
How much cheaper is solar? Enough that Singapore is building a huge solar array in Western Australia, and sending the power home over a 3,800-kilometer submarine cable. That project alone, which will be the largest solar farm in the world, will generate one-fifth of their energy needs. And an even bigger project in Australia is in the works, which combines solar and wind power. “The idea is to change Australia’s place within the global energy map and to transition from exporting mainly coal and natural gas to being a leader in clean energy.”
And literally, the sky’s the limit. If we could fill the Sahara Desert with windmills and solar panels, we could meet the energy needs of the entire world. This clean, non-polluting electricity would put the brakes on global warming as it replaces coal, natural gas, and even nuclear power.
In the United States, solar is already the most important source of energy, ahead of gas or wind, despite the tariffs imposed by its ignorant president on imported solar panels.
Note the “ignorant president” — pretty strong for a business journal like Forbes. And the same article was also published in Medium, where the author changed “ignorant” to “idiot”.
Enough about the future, what’s happening with renewable energy right now?
Renewable energy is already the cheapest and most logical way to produce energy without the need for subsidies. By introducing hydroelectric and geothermal energy into the equation, in addition to solar and wind energy, Costa Rica has already managed to go for 300 days in a row without burning fossil fuels to generate electricity. Portugal has managed four days with only renewable energy, the UK, a thousand hours without burning coal.
All the studies agree that not only that we must stop building and operating fossil fuel power plants, but that we have already built too many and that the fuel needed to supply them will now remain under the ground. The need to make this transition is becoming more urgent every day. Germany has already announced the closure of all its 84 coal-powered plants and India has canceled plans to build any more due to the plummeting cost of solar energy: with every day that passes, action in this regard is more important and more strategic. Only countries that act in time and update their generation policies can hope to win a place on the new global energy map.
New ways to store electrical power, such as lithium-air batteries, will mean that electricity will be available when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing. In addition, it can make electric cars with a 1000 mile range practical.
Solar power is easily decentralized; for example, solar panels are already a popular addition to homes and small businesses. Large businesses can install solar panels over their parking lots, which also provides shade. The side benefit is that this reduces the need for a huge power grid.
On this day, the day after the US Independence Day, it is good to listen to words that were spoken by the great Frederick Douglass on July 5, 1852, less than a decade before the start of the Civil War. In this video from NPR, excerpts of his speech are read by 5 of his young descendants, and at the end, are also interpreted by them.
Here is a transcript of the original speech.
Newsweek published an article Friday titled “How Trump could Lose the Election — And Still Remain President“. It is an opinion piece, but was written by two fairly high-powered people (a former US senator, and the person who founded CNBC and MSNBC, the former CEO of TiVo, and is an editor-at-large for Newsweek, among other things).
They give a fairly detailed roadmap of what and how this could happen, and even give evidence that Donald Trump and Bill Barr have already taken steps that would facilitate this plot. It is fairly complex, so if you are curious you should read the article.
They also talk about the few ways this plot can be foiled:
And by the way, Happy Independence Day. Let’s not just hope we can keep our democracy, but actually fight to hold onto it.
I’m concerned about voter registration in Mississippi. The blacks are having lots of events for voter registration. People in Mississippi have to get involved, too.
— Mississippi election commissioner Gail Welch.
How can Black Lives Matter, if they aren’t people?
And speaking of black lives, here’s a July 1 tweet from former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain, about President Trump’s July 4th celebration at Mt. Rushmore:
Masks will not be mandatory for the event, which will be attended by President Trump. PEOPLE ARE FED UP!
On July 2, less than 24 hours later, Cain was hospitalized with COVID-19. Not surprisingly, a photo shows Cain at President Trump’s rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma and he is not wearing a face mask.
Q: Why is the guy in the red shirt not wearing a mask?
A: Because he’s a Republican.
If you are not a Star Trek fan, you might not get this joke. Read this about Redshirts, and how it is their job to get killed.
Which is it?
What’s just as damning is that Trump keeps changing his story. First he claimed he was never briefed. Then he claimed that in the briefing (which he says he never had) there was no consensus as to the validity of the report. Now he’s claiming the report is a hoax and fake news, to make Republicans look bad. Never mind that these are all self-contradictory.
And right now, nobody needs to make things up to make Republicans look bad.
Why do some people refuse to wear masks?
A few people actually cannot wear a mask, for various reasons. I read a post from a person who said they could not wear a mask, and they would get nasty looks and shaming the few times that they dared to venture out.
If you cannot wear a mask, I would suggest trying a face shield. There are face shields that attach to glasses, or to a hat, and other variations. One of those should work since they don’t even touch your face. And there is evidence that face shields might be more effective than masks.
I see other comments from people who basically say “there aren’t very many cases where I live, so I don’t need to wear a mask”. Unfortunately, these people are making a huge mistake. They are thinking linearly, while contagious diseases have exponential growth. The absolute number of cases doesn’t really matter. What matters is the growth R0 (R-naught), how many people (on average) get infected from an infected person. If R0 is greater than one, the number of cases will increase exponentially, if less than one then the disease will eventually die out.
A closely related number is the doubling time, which is how long does it take for the number of infected people to double. At one point in a province of China, the doubling time of COVID-19 was 1.4 days. And New York state had a doubling time of around 2 days for over a week.
Unfortunately, humans are notoriously bad at understanding exponential growth. There is a famous story about the person who invented chess for their king. The king loves the game so much that he asks the inventor what they want as a gift. The inventor replies that the king should put one grain of wheat on the first square of the chessboard, then two grains on the second square, and continue doubling until the last square. The king finds this a modest request so he agrees. However, the king doesn’t understand exponential growth, because the wheat required is 2,000 times the entire world production of wheat. Just starting with a single tiny grain.
Back to COVID-19, even if you have a small number of cases or deaths, if you do not reduce R0 (the number of people you infect) below 1, eventually everyone will get the disease. Wearing a mask (or a face shield) absolutely reduces the number of people you infect. Social distancing does too. Self quarantine does even better. So the choice is yours. Wear a mask now or endure another shutdown later. Or worse.
The result of the US not taking simple precautions is obvious. The US has 4% of the world population, but over a quarter (25%) of all the deaths and over a quarter of the cases in the world. We have more active cases than the next half a dozen countries put together (Brazil, Russia, India, UK, Spain, and Peru). We spend more on health care than any other country, but we can’t seem to stop one disease, even though other countries (including Australia, Canada, China, Japan, Italy, New Zealand, South Korea, Morocco, Thailand, Rwanda, Uruguay, and others) are doing it. We are currently failing.
And things are getting worse. On July 1, new reported cases of COVID-19 was 52,788, the largest single day total ever. Dr. Anthony Fauci already testified to Congress that we are heading toward 100,000 new cases a day if we don’t do something to stop it.
The seven day averages (which are better indicators than the daily numbers) are just as bad. The seven-day average of new confirmed cases is the highest it has ever been, topping 50,000 cases for the first time. And a whopping 45 states have seven-day averages of new infections higher than the previous week. At this rate, we will almost certainly have to close down the country again.
So what did Donald Trump do? He went on Fox News and said:
I think we’re gonna be very good with the coronavirus. I think that at some point that’s going to sort of just disappear, I hope.
Notice that he is now couching his words with “I think”, “I hope”, and “sort of”. Well, I think he knows he is lying. I hope he cares that people will die because of his words. But I sort of doubt it.
Are you tired of the government telling you what you have to wear?
This is a satire on the “Face Mask Exempt Card” that is circulating on the internet (which is complete bunk).
UPDATE: Now someone created a new (fake) card, that reverses the (also fake) “Face Mask Exempt Card”. Notice that they changed FTBA to be “Freedom To Be Alive” and the phone numbers to the CDC.
This is a true story about Joe Biden (who is devout Catholic), told by Rabbi Michael Beals of Delaware:
It was about 16 years ago, and I was a young rabbi, brand-new to Delaware, on my way to lead a shiva minyan — a worship service following a death of a Jewish person. I was from California. Back then, I didn’t know Claymont, Delaware from Scranton, Pennsylvania.
Quick bit of background: When someone passes away in the Jewish faith, we observe seven days of mourning, called shiva. We gather a group of ten Jewish adults together to say the Mourners’ Kaddish. It usually happens in a person’s home — somewhere intimate.
In this case, the deceased individual — her name was Mrs. Greenhouse, of blessed memory — had not been a person of means. She had lived in rent-controlled senior housing in a tall high-rise building off of Namaans Road. Her apartment was too small to fit everyone into, so we conducted our worship service in the building’s communal laundry room, in the basement of the high-rise.
We assembled the 10 elders together, and it was in this most humble of places that I began to lead kaddish.
Toward the end of the service, a door at the back of the laundry room opened; who walks in but Sen. Joe Biden, head lowered, all by himself.
I nearly dropped my prayer book in shock.
Senator Biden stood quietly in the back of the room for the duration of the service. At the close of the kaddish, I walked over to him and asked the same question that must have been on everyone else’s mind: “Sen. Biden — what are you doing here?”
He said to me: “Back in 1972, when I first ran for Senate, Mrs. Greenhouse gave $18 to my first campaign. Because that’s what she could afford. And every six years, when I’d run for reelection, she’d give another $18. She did it her whole life. I’m here to show my respect and gratitude.”
Now, the number 18 is significant in the Jewish faith — its numbers spell out the Hebrew word chai, as in “to life, to life, l’chayim!” But it’s also a humble amount. Joe Biden knew that. And he respected that.
There were no news outlets at our service that day — no Jewish reporters or important dignitaries. Just a few elderly mourners in a basement laundry room. Joe Biden didn’t come to that service for political gain. He came to that service because he has character.
I have long noticed a disturbing pattern in Donald Trump’s behavior — he often accuses others of doing bad things of which he himself is guilty. And he does it even if we don’t yet know that he is doing those bad things. Maybe it is his way of getting ahead of a story, so that he can try to use whataboutism if his misdeeds become publicly known.
So when Trump started accusing Barack Obama of treason for completely specious reasons, I got suspicious.
Then Trump doubled down by accusing Obama of “Obamagate”… without ever even explaining what that was.
But on Friday, the other shoe dropped. Unfortunately, the main articles about this are behind paywalls, but here is a good review of what happened from historian Heather Cox Richardson (starting in the second paragraph).
In summary, Donald Trump and quite a few members of his administration were briefed in March that Russia was paying Afghan militants to kill American soldiers. Potential responses were discussed, but the White House never did anything, and Congress was never informed (which they should have been).
Instead, after the briefing our commander-in-chief continued to kiss up to the Russians:
Treason is the only crime defined by the US Constitution, and the definition includes giving Aid and Comfort to our enemies. A country that pays people to kill our soldiers is definitely an enemy, and Trump explicitly gave the Russians actual aid, and is providing them comfort.
So while Trump’s accusations of treason against others are baseless, there is strong evidence that he committed treason himself.
On Sunday, in response Trump started tweeting in his typical blunderbuss fashion, claiming that he was never briefed about this (unlikely), calling the story from the NY Times “fake news” (while not disputing any of the information in it), asserting that “nobody’s been tougher on Russia than the Trump Administration” (which is patently false), and trying to shift the story by asking “Where’s Hunter?” (a reference to Joe Biden’s son, who was on the board of a Ukrainian company — a “fake news” story that has nothing to do with this one and which has been completely debunked).
I’m really glad to see Jon Stewart put into words something that I’ve always felt about Joe Biden, but didn’t know how to express.
A safe, effective, inexpensive solution to end the coronavirus pandemic. What could go wrong?
I guess I’m just lucky. I live in a state where masks are required to be worn in public. Even better, I live in a county where people are conscientious and typically wear their masks. When I go hiking in one of the forested parks nearby, I don’t wear my mask all the time, but there is a little dance that happens. When someone approaches from the opposite direction, we both put on our masks before we pass each other. And if we stop to chat, we stay significantly more than 6 feet apart (even though we are outdoors).
It is just the polite thing to do. And it works. Right now in my county we have had a total of 7 deaths due to COVID-19. That comes out to 0.002% of the population. And the majority of those deaths happened in nursing homes (something that we are trying to work on).
But we still wear our masks and practice safe distancing. We’ve had more than our share of protests, but even the protesters here wear masks and try to keep their distance, and so far those mass gatherings have not been a significant source of disease spread.
Older (or more vulnerable) people are especially careful. And neighbors send out messages offering to help them by picking up groceries, medications, and other essentials. Other neighbors share fresh vegetables from their gardens.
The state of Missouri decided to “reopen for business” even though the number of cases is increasing. In fact, they are now setting record highs for new cases of COVID-19. At a press briefing on Tuesday, the Republican governor was asked if he “felt guilty” for relaxing restrictions in the state during a coronavirus spike. He said “no”.
I don’t know that any one person is responsible for that no more than anybody else standing out here in this hallway. Do I feel guilty because we have car accidents, and people die every day? No, I don’t feel guilty about that. Each person that gets in those situations, things happen like that in life, they do.
There are so many things wrong with this:
If he wants to compare the pandemic to car accidents, why is he ignoring all of these comparisons? I guess it is because even though Republicans claim to be the party of personal responsibility, they don’t seem to think that applies to themselves.
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