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tiffanyfaye · 3 years

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A Overview of the History of Witchcraft and Wicca

by Tiffany Faye 7/2/2021

While trying to determine Wicca's origins may be difficult, it is much easier that figuring out when or even where Witchcraft stared. Some say that witchcraft has been around since the beginning of man, with the

earliest recorded record of a witch was in the Bible, 1 Samuel, who was believed to be written between 931 BC and 721 BC. The word "witchcraft" comes from Old English word "wiccecraeft" with wicce meaning someone who practice sorcery or magick and creaft meaning a type of craft or skill. Other European languages have words with similar meanings; like sorcellerie in French, hexerei in German, stregoneria in Italian, and brujeria in Spanish. Despite these words being lumped together because of a common meaning, none of them translate the same or have the same connotations.

Many people will question if witches are real or not. Well, are they? I guess it depends on the definition used for the word. If you are referring to the witches you see in movies, books, video games, and other entertainment media, then no, those kinds of witches, unfortunately, do not exist. Now, if you are referring to the wise women and men, or the medicine men/women from ancient civilizations that worked with certain energies, or magick, for healing, divination, and other purposes, then yes, those kinds of witches do exist. Practitioners of the old ways worked with the moon, deities, herbs, animals, and practiced many forms divination and healing.

Then, the European Witch Trials happened from the 14th to 18th centuries. Some small groups still retained their old religions and practices today, but most of it has been lost, wiped away by the introduction of Christianity, much like it has done with other practices and cultures they did not agree or understand with. I know that may have upset some people, but it is the truth, and I am only saying this for education purposes. Most of the facts of what we know from the European Witch Trials are common misconceptions. Millions of people were not executed like many believe, the most that were accused of witchcraft and then executed for it was around 80,000. Around 80% of those executed were women and most of them were not actually witches. Women, and sometimes men, that did not confirm to their society’s standards were often the ones accused. Most of the recorded confessions of "consorting with the devil" and "performing black magick" happened while being tortured. The presence of "witch doctors" during this time is also highly exaggerated since any type of magick, even the helpful kind that helped those "affected by witchcraft" was still looked at as bad or evil. One of the main starting points of the European Witch Trials was due to the publication of "Malleus Maleficarum," or "The Hammer of Witches." This book was written by two German Dominicans in 1486. It called witchcraft "heresy" and was essentially a guide to help people identify, hunt, and interrogate a witch. This book went "viral" throughout Europe, and it eventually became the basis for both Christians and Protestants that had "Witch problems" in their community.

The New World started to be colonized in 1565 and Witches were said to arrive with the other Protestants. There were witch hunts all throughout the colonies but the most well-known one is, of course, the Salem Witch Trials. The Salem Witch Trials took place in 1692 and was point when witch hysteria in Europe started to die down, but also increase in the colonies. Young girls and women

started to suffer from fits, body contortions, and incontrollable screaming which is now believed to be caused by a fungus that causes spasms and delusions. This of course had to be the work of witches and by the end of the trials 150 people were accused of witchcraft and 18, 6 of which were men, were executed for their "heinous acts." In 1730, Benjamin Franklin wrote an article that was published in the Pennsylvania Gazette. In it, it said that the witchcraft accusations were basically ridiculous. Soon after, the witch mania died down and laws were eventually passed to help protect those of being wrongly accused.

In 1952, a book was published by Margert Murray called "The Witch Cult in Western Europe." While many do not believe her claims, they are what most of Modern Wiccan and Neo-Paganism is based off and as such she is called the grandmother of Modern Wicca. In this book, she claims that Witchcraft was a universal and organized religion is pre-Christian Europe that came from a race of small people, called Fairies, in early Britian. These ancient witches worshipped a Moon Goddess and a Horned Good. The Moon Goddess was named Diana, the Queen of Witches, and Murray called this religion the Dianic Cult. While it is named after the female aspect, this religion was a dominated by the male deity and this, combined with a horned God, Christians would claim it was their Satan, hence the accusations of "devil worship." The witches of this religion celebrated sabbats and esbats, worked with the earth, and would organize themselves into covens of 13.

Most of the claims are a part of most modern Pagan and Wiccan practice but most traditions of Wicca can also be traced back to Gardnerian Wicca. Gardnerian Wicca was developed by Gerald Gardner and based off Allister Crowley's teachings and practices. In 1914, Allister had proposed a new religion in 1914 that would pull aspects from old pagan traditions, such as worshipping the earth and nature, and celebrating the solstices and equinoxes. Wicca is a modern-day, nature based pagan religion with rituals and practices vary from different people, covens, and traditions. While there is difference between most Pagan and Wiccan traditions, most observe the Witches Sabbats, are ditheistic meaning they have 2 deities, normally a god and goddess (Moon Goddess and Horned God), and they also work with nature. The God and goddess represent the balance of feminine and masculine, light and dark in the world. Most traditions also follow an ethical code that is some variation or like the Wiccan Rede's, "as it harms none, do as ye will." Some other common practices and beliefs in most traditions are reincarnation and karma, some type of spiritual or energy healing, and self-help practices. Witchcraft, whether practiced by a pagan or a more specific tradition like Wicca, is considered a modern interpretation of pre-Christian traditions and some traditions claim their practices are from the Old Craft, or Old Way.

Wicca and Paganism was introduced in Britian in the 60's and started to spread to other European Countries and America in the 70's. When it hit America, it eventually went from a magic-based pagan discipline to a nature-based spiritual movement with environmentalism and feminism, which in turn, ended up influencing Wicca in England. The feministic tones started to increase in the late 70's and 80's with the emergence of Dianic Wicca, a tradition of matriarchal lunar worship. Wicca eventually became an official religion in the U.S, in 1986 in the Dettmer v. Landon case.

Witchcraft is portrayed as an evil and mythical practice and people often think of witches as villains. While it is hard to pin-point the origins of old pagan religions, it is even harder figuring out Witchcraft’s origins. Wicca's emergence has changed some people’s perceptions of witches and witchcraft and men can also identify as witches now. It has always been seen as a blasphemous practice full of devil worship, but Wicca is also still a new concept for many people, and many other still do not know of its existence. I truly feel that it is important that everyone knows what being a witch means, regardless of if they practice the craft or not. People will look at Witchcraft in a more positive viewpoint if they understand it and that is what I want to achieve with writing these blogs. While I do want to create a community for Witches, Wiccan, and Pagans to connect, I also want to shed light on our practices and help end the stigma.

I really hope you enjoyed this post today. While it is a long read, writing this was especially important to me. Catch us tomorrow for our Feature Friday post where we tell you about an item from our shop and you give you a DIY guide to make it yourself!

Sources:

History.com Editors, March 23, 2018, "Wicca," History.com, https://www.history.com/topics/religion/wicca

Pinigis, Emil, March 2, 2020, Pittchcraft: The True History of Wicca and Witchcraft, PittNews.com, https://pittnews.com/article/155891/blogs/pittchcraft-the-true-history-of-wicca-and-witchcraft/

Smith, Diane, 2021, Looking Witches and Wiccan in History, Dummies.com, https://www.dummies.com/religion/paganism/looking-for-witches-and-wiccans-in-history/

Lewis, Ioan M., March 23, 2021, "Witchcraft," Britannica.com, https://www.britannica.com/topic/witchcraft

History.com Editors, September 12, 2017, History of Witches, History.com, https://www.history.com/topics/folklore/history-of-witches

#history of witchcraft #history of wicca #salem witch trials #european witch trials #margaret murray #gerald gardner #Allister crowley #the lost fae's market #the lost fae's path

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annazverina · 3 years

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2020 Letter to the World

In 2015, I began writing annual Letters to the World to reflect on what I learned during the year. I shared my first one publicly in 2018, and since then I discuss certain topics that were relevant during the year and what they taught me. Enjoy.

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I typically don’t start writing my annual Letter to the World until October or November at the earliest, but this year has already been a huge whirlwind for the entire world. I started writing this in April and edited it until the day it was posted. At that point, we had been in isolation for a month. A few weeks later, yet another revolution sparked within the United States. As soon as the riots and protests started, I knew this would be the hardest letter I’ve ever written.

This year I will discuss coronavirus, racism, social media, and the importance of face to face communication.

Around the time I finished writing last year’s letter, a new illness was taking over Wuhan, China. This new, mysterious strain of coronavirus was infecting people left and right. But like any other American, I didn’t worry about it, though I kept track of it on Twitter. I remember the time when there were only 600 cases, and it hadn’t spread outside of Wuhan yet. Man, those were the days. It’s amazing how much the world changed within a month, a week, and a few days.

A month before isolation, my friends and I drove down to San Antonio for the TMEA convention. Tens of thousands of music educators in the same building. At that same time, San Antonio had its first cases of COVID-19. Less than a month later, SXSW was cancelled. That’s when I realized that this was becoming a big deal. The same day the WHO declared the pandemic, my university announced it was moving to online instruction for what would eventually be the rest 2020. My first day of quarantine was 14 March. I began vlogging occasionally to document the experience.

I barely left the house during quarantine. For the first five months, the only reasons I left were to go walking, move out of the dorm, or to pick up food. My family took a trip to Colorado right before I left for school, which was our first time eating at a restaurant in 150 days. None of my family or our friends officially tested positive. At school, my roommate did, which led to a two week isolation for me. It really bothered me that those who could stay home weren’t. I get that the United States was founded with freedom in mind (even though we’re not free yet), but I don’t understand why people weren’t willing to give up a little bit of freedom and wear a piece of cloth on their face. Sometimes, you have to give up freedom for the sake of the big picture. I learned that many Americans don’t understand that. The United States shut down too late and reopened too early. Those above us care too much about money. The economy is important, but so are people. Human lives matter, including Black lives.

We all know what happened.

Every January in elementary school, we learned about the Civil Rights Movement. However, they did not mention that racism was still an ongoing problem. They implied that it was a thing of the past. God, I wish it was. I don’t think it ever will be, but the things we can do to eliminate it as much as possible are promoting anti-racism and teaching those who come after us that no matter where someone comes from, they can’t form any opinions about them until they know what’s in their heart.

That entire week after the murder was very overwhelming. It made me wonder what kind of families racist people grew up in to think that it’s okay to not be good to everyone. I live my life with one thing in mind all the time: be good to myself and others. And I think everyone else, regardless of socioeconomic background, race, religion, whatever, should do the same. And we must teach those who come after to follow those footsteps.

There was never a class in school dedicated to being good citizens. They just yelled at the students doing bad things to stop, but never explained why it was bad, nor did they tell them how to be better. Common human decency is something that should be taught K-12, and I honestly think it’s more important than STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math). We cannot force the students to rely on their parents for something like this, because some parents are uneducated, some are not good people, some suck at parenting, and way too many children in the world don’t even have parents. Schools are the ones that need to teach kids how to be good… all the way through.

WE MUST BE THE CHANGE. Those currently in power appear to not be doing anything, so those who want change must RISE UP. For us civilians, signing petitions and donating is great, and being good, like I mentioned above, is also something we should do. We must change our behavior for the better. We cannot rely on other people to do stuff for us. We must do it ourselves. Change is not a process that can happen over night. So far it’s taken decades/centuries of work, but someday we will be there. Even if we don’t live to see it, the work we do now will help our future descendants.

After George Floyd’s murder and the explosion of social media, I was super overwhelmed with everything I was reading. I decided to take the month of June off of Twitter, and man, I’m glad I did. Social media in general is a toxic place to be, and cutting out Twitter and Facebook was healthy for me. In terms of toxicity, Twitter and Facebook, in my opinion, are the worst platforms. On Twitter, it’s hard to control what you see in your feed. Most of the tweets in my feed are from people I don’t follow. They’re tweets I never signed up to see, and they flood my feed with posts that sometimes feel like propaganda. Sometimes I feel like celebrities are worshipped like a deity. I often feel like I’m not allowed to have my own personal beliefs on Twitter, rather I have to conform to what the loudmouthed users believe. If I don’t, I’m racist, misogynistic, homophobic, etc. Facebook is similar, but most of the people I follow are my friends or family, so I can’t unfollow them.

Surprisingly, I like Instagram. Reposting is very uncommon, and posting more than once a day is unofficially considered spam, therefore people have to put all their politics into one single post, which I can scroll past and never see again. You never see posts from people you don’t follow, (except for the occasional advert) and overall I think people use it mostly to share photos of their lives. Most of the flaws that come from Instagram are the people who use it, but it’s easy to avoid them.

My brother shared some statistics with me recently. Only about 10 percent of Twitter users tweet on a normal basis. About 40 percent of people in the United States have a Twitter account. With that in mind, theoretically, the loud mouthed Twitter users only make up about 4 percent of the U.S. population. Or… something like that. I don’t know how accurate these statistics are, nor do I know where my brother got them from. Regardless, social media does not represent everyone in the world. Not even close.

The nice thing about living in a world of social media is being able to keep in touch with friends and family while quarantined. This whole quarantine process made me ever so grateful for face to face meetings. Some people believe no one will ever want to work again once everything ends. That’s not true. I think most people like working. Being able to leave the house every day and do something, even if it’s something you don’t like, is what keeps us sane. When it came time to return to school, I was initially really mad due to COVID. I ended up being okay with it. My school did a fantastic job at keeping COVID cases down for the entire semester (we only had an average of 20 cases a week, compared to some schools who had hundreds). Not only that, but I was able to see my family away from home again. Even though we wore masks and social distanced most of the time, things felt somewhat normal.

If you are the kind of person who could care less if you see your friends and coworkers in person, don’t forget that most people don’t feel that way. It’s hard to have group conversations on Zoom. You certainly can’t have a party where multiple conversations happen. Don’t assume everyone feels the same way about something. Let people have their social gatherings when it’s acceptable again, and don’t belittle people who feel different from you.

Everyone must do the right thing… all the time. Even when no one is watching. It’s our job to develop the habit of being good to ourselves and to others regardless. If we do that, we’ll be able to go back to a normal-ish life sooner. Lin-Manuel Miranda called America a “great unfinished symphony” in Hamilton. America, you great unfinished symphony, we still have unfinished business to take care of. The change we need won’t come tomorrow. The amount of work we have before we reach the double bar line will take generations to get to. We cannot allow a repeat sign. We must start today. May 2021 be a year of healing.

#2020 #just reflecting #reflections #fandom #lams #destiel #phan #johnlock #important #healing #beautiful #covid #fuck covid #blacklivesmatter #acceptance #respect #quarantine #zoom #2021

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dansnaturepictures · 4 years

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10 of my standout species seen during the lockdown so far

Last week I said on Twitter the Chiffchaff would be my bird of the lockdown so far, its a topic I had been thinking of writing a post on for a few weeks and today I decided to do it. So in this post are 10 of the bird, butterfly and dragonfly species that have kept my spirits up most during lockdown and been species the enjoyment of seeing either from my house or on a daily exercise walk has given me something positive to focus on and given me a lot of energy. I have seen some great mammal and other species throughout lockdown so far its just it was actually quite hard to pick 10 which shows how lucky I’ve been to still see things with some obvious names missing out so I settled on five birds, four butterflies and one dragonfly.

I have to say nine of these photos were taken by me since 23rd March when the British lockdown was announced but the one of the Swallow isn’t its one from 2017 but its a species I felt was crucial enough to include in this post I just didn’t manage to photograph it yet this year when seeing it. So all of these photos and the wildlife in them, except for the Swallow one, were seen and taken by me either from my home or during a once permitted daily exercise walk. Those from outside the house were taken whilst maintaining a two metre gap at least from everyone else in line with government social distancing guidelines at all times. I took certain routes within walks to take me safely to areas I was more likely to see the relevant species in some cases, but in none of the scenarios where any of these nine pictures were taken did I wait large amounts of time for the species to emerge or anything. As these photos and sightings as all are right now for me are a bonus that I’ve been lucky to get alongside exercising once a day out the house so are things I simply see as I’m walking along. So below are the ten species and a bit about them, its in no particular order after the Chiffchaff.

Chiffchaff

Like I said my bird of the lockdown so far, thanks to hearing them almost constantly and seeing them on local daily exercise walks at Lakeside Country Park. Its been a joy to get to see and hear these wonderful warblers and its just acted as a bird I could get so excited about during walks in the week whilst working from home especially this spring. I took the first picture in this photoset of one in late March at Lakeside.

Great Crested Grebe

What’s stood out for birds during the lockdown especially is the obviously lesser range of my 30 favourite birds I can see with restrictions in place, so the commoner members of that group have really stepped up as such and been birds I can feel the ultimate forms of excitement about. Buzzard was so close to making the list but in the end its Great Crested Grebe that’s been the star of my favourite birds lately and always promised to be. Its been a pleasure to see them at Lakeside a stronghold for them on my walks so much and see them in immense numbers as they’ve played a key part in my breeding ground observations and continuous story in a way during my Lakeside walks which has really given me something big to focus on. I took the second picture in this photoset of one the week before last at Lakeside.

Swallow

As I said the photo is at Martin’s Haven in Pembrokeshire, Wales which I took in 2017 the third of the ones I took in this photoset but a handful of Swallow sightings now have really stood out lately. I have genuine fears that every month now could be my first since November 2015 which I didn’t get at least one bird year tick in, that couldn’t be less important in the grand scheme of things of course! But I had in my head Swallow and Swift (which I haven’t yet) that I can see from home and very locally were on their way here as lockdown started and sure enough on a local River Itchen walk in early April I was so thrilled to see a Swallow dart over. It definitely was a big moment to make me happy and I’ve seen them again on local walks since.

Common Tern

Following on nicely from the Swallow, Common Tern a bird I would easily see on the coast or Blashford Lakes this time of year normally was thrown into doubt as a species I may see this year. But I had in my head I had seen one over Lakeside once years ago. I had an amazing moment in the right place at the right time one lunch time on an exercise walk there were after tweeting about one from last year during the morning I walked along and saw the one in the fourth picture in this photoset sat there. All was not lost, I had used my local patch to get a tern into my year at least and it felt like a fantastic moment among the happiest I’ve been of late.

Magpie

Finally for the birds, by the very nature of what the lockdown is its annoying I couldn’t sneak a garden bird in. However this is the next best thing as one that flies in and around and lands beside and behind the garden visible from my room and I see in great numbers on Lakeside daily exercise walks. The crows as a family is one I’ve come to explore, photograph and get to love more than ever these past few weeks with the Magpie at the forefront of that. I took the fifth picture in this photoset of one from my room last week.

Orange Tip

Onto the butterflies and one of my favourites, the Orange Tip I doubted I would see this year but I was proved wrong after seeing them on many local exercise walks and I really found the true value of my patch with how many I have seen over Lakeside as I mentioned on Friday. An exceptional species that always raises my spirits its been an honour to see so many this spring as I did last year. I took the sixth picture in this photoset of one at Lakeside on Friday.

Green Hairstreak

I wasn’t really thinking I’d definitely see this butterfly either but at walks at Magdalen Hill and Farley Mount I’ve had stunning views of them which has stood out. Especially my first of the year at Magdalen Hill, in April my earliest ever sighting of one in a year the one in the seventh picture in this photoset. This picture took me by storm a bit one of my favourite ever butterfly pictures to take for quality, and definitely best with my new macro lens every butterfly picture produced with it so far has been since March 23rd so its been a big story of the lockdown for me getting to use my new macro lens on the subjects it was most intended for the butterflies in lots of great sunshine and hot weather so this heads up that as such. This photo achieved a big thing for me as I finalised and revealed by 2021 wildlife photos calendar over the last week made from my photos from May 2019-until now and among some big photos that I’ve had a long time to get to like of mine it made the calendar less than a week after being taken.

Grizzled Skipper

A butterfly I hoped we could catch up with on a daily exercise walk still quite a rare one and we did, at Farley Mount last weekend where I took the eighth picture in this photoset one of my best moments with a butterfly so far this year on a strong day for seeing them.

Pearl-bordered Fritillary

The same old story as with the other butterflies, would I see it or not in 2020? I was thrilled I managed to see a few on a daily exercise walk yesterday a key butterfly for me every year that I did not miss. The ninth picture in this photoset from yesterday a great memory of it.

Broad-bodied Chaser

These spring days have seen me see my first damselfly and dragonfly of the year, Large Red Damselfly and this. Seeing a few of this dragonfly yesterday I took the tenth picture in this photoset of it is a standout moment so far during lockdown flashing forward to those summer days ahead where hopefully we’ll continue to all be in this together (but apart as needed) and work to move out (as possible) of this dark period in all of our lives.

#species #broad-bodied chaser #peal-bordered fritillary #orange tip #grizzled skipper #green hairstreak #magpie #common tern #swallow #chiffchaff #great crested grebe #wildlife #photography #nature #uk #lockdown

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xtruss · 3 years

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Why Taliban Should Thank US Not Only for Billions’ Worth of Weapons, But Also for Nuclear Pakistan

— Ekaterina Blinova | Sputnik | September 8, 2021

The Taliban* have managed to lay their hands on billions’ worth of sophisticated Western-made weapons amid the hurried retreat of the Afghan National Army. However, a broader problem cited by American and European military specialists and policymakers is that the Afghan insurgent group may also gain access to military nuclear technologies.

Col. Richard Kemp, a former British commander, on 16 August raised the red flag over the possibility of Taliban elements one day seizing nuclear materials and technology from Pakistan. These concerns were also shared by former National Security Adviser John Bolton in his 23 August op-ed for The Washington Post. The next day, a group of American lawmakers sent a letter to Joe Biden asking the president: "Do you have a plan to ensure that Afghanistan, under Taliban occupation, will never acquire a nuclear weapon?"

How US Turned Blind Eye to Pakistan's Nuclear Arms Programme

While the possibility that the Taliban could get access to Pakistani nukes has triggered serious concerns in the US and Europe, American politicians have shied away from discussing how Islamabad emerged as a nuclear power. While Bolton has specifically lambasted Pakistan for "recklessly" pursuing nuclear weapons for decades, newly released documents suggest Washington knew about Islamabad's nuclear bid, but did nothing to stop it.

In mid-August 2021, Pakistani President Arif Alvi revealed that the country had developed a "nuclear deterrent" by 1981, long before its 1998 underground atomic tests. In the aftermath of Alvi's remarks, the National Security Archive, a Washington-based non-profit archival institution, released a series of documents shedding light on the US handling of the Pakistan nuclear problem.

A Pakistani-made Shaheen-III missile, that is capable of carrying nuclear warheads, is on display during a military parade in Islamabad, Pakistan, Friday, March 23, 2018. AP Photo / Anjum Naveed

A US memo dated 28 March 1978 provides the earliest known indication of Washington's recognition of Pakistan's uranium enrichment programme. In June 1978, the CIA document suggested that Pakistan would "probably… be capable of assembling a nuclear device in the early 1980s", adding that the country "will not have a credible nuclear weapons option until at least the mid-1980s".

However, in January 1979, US State Department officials admitted that Islamabad was “moving more rapidly toward acquisition of nuclear capability than we had earlier estimated", having learned that Pakistan had initiated a uranium enrichment programme using gas centrifuge technology.

The 18 January 1979 State Department memo specifically cited the 1976 Symington Amendment which banned US economic and military assistance to countries illegally transferring or acquiring nuclear enrichment technology. While the memo highlighted that Washington must persuade Pakistan to nix its enrichment and reprocessing programme, it noted that "termination of aid [to Pakistan] would further complicate our position in the turbulent Persian Gulf region" and "would not contribute to achievement of our non-proliferation objectives". As a result, the Jimmy Carter administration turned a blind eye to Pakistan's nuclear development as well as transfer of materials and technologies to Pakistanis by other state and non-state players. I

President Jimmy Carter, claiming success for his human rights policies, is applauded by aides Zbigniew Brzezinski and Anne Wexler in Washington, Dec. 6, 1978. AP Photo / Harvey Georges

The reason behind Washington's unusually soft approach to Islamabad at the time was because the Cold War-era US leadership regarded Pakistan as a bulwark against the Soviet Union and India, the USSR's regional ally, says Bharat Karnad, a national security expert and emeritus professor of National Security Studies at New Delhi's Centre for Policy Research.

"In 1979, Pakistan gained significance as a frontline state, and permitted the US Central Intelligence Agency to join with Pakistan army’s Inter-Services Intelligence to fund and mobilise the Afghan Mujahideen against the Soviet occupation troops in Afghanistan", remarks Karnad.”

It is unclear when the CIA actually learned about Islamabad's nuclear programme. However, the first signs of Islamabad's bid to build atomic weapons emerged in the mid-1960s, when Prime Minister of Pakistan Zulfikar Ali Bhutto pledged that the nation would prefer "to eat grass and leaves for a thousand years" in order to create its own nuclear bomb rather than see neighbouring India get one. India's subsequent decision to kick off a nuclear project in 1967 and Islamabad's loss of East Pakistan in 1971's Bangladesh Liberation War prompted Pakistan to accelerate its efforts.

Afghan mujahideen prepare a rocket attack on the government troops in Shaga, Eastern Nangarhar province, on January 15, 1989 during the Afghan Civil War opposing the Islamic Unity of Afghanistan Mujahideen and the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA) supported by Soviet Union. AFP 2021

The National Security Archive notes that it was Abdul Qadeer Khan, a Belgian-educated metallurgist, who played a crucial role in building Pakistan's enrichment facilities. The engineer had stolen major elements of gas centrifuge technology when he worked in the Netherlands at the uranium firm Urenco in the 1970s. However, the CIA asked the Netherlands in 1975 not to prosecute Khan when he came under suspicion, according to ex-Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers. The intelligence agency explained that they wanted "to follow and watch Khan to get more information", according to Lubbers. Still, there are still many unknowns with regard to the CIA's efforts to trace Khan's activities, since the intelligence "has declassified next to nothing" concerning the issue, according to the National Security Archive. When the non-profit filed a FOIA for documents from 1978 concerning A. Q. Khan and Pakistani nuclear enrichment activities, the agency took "a neither confirm-nor-deny position that it had any such records".

Karnad does not rule out that the CIA was aware of Islamabad's secret nuclear weapons programme. According to him, the US did not prevent the transfer of atomic technologies to Pakistan because they apparently sought to reshuffle "a military balance on the subcontinent" vis-à-vis the USSR and pro-Soviet India, which conducted its first nuclear weapons test in 1974.

"America’s longstanding nonproliferation ideals were consigned to the dust heap", Karnad notes. "When international affairs are conducted without moral or policy scruples or inhibitions of any kind, then this is the kind of 'end of the world' scenario the world has to end up reasonably contemplating.”

Could Taliban Get Access to Pakistan's Nukes?

Meanwhile, the probability of the Taliban getting access to Islamabad's nuclear secrets and stockpiles has prompted a heated debate among international observers.

"For me that is absolutely out of the question for many solid reasons that Taliban get hold of Pakistan's nuclear material", argues Abdullah Khan, director of the Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies. "For what reason would they need nuclear weapons? At the moment for the Taliban the major issue is governance.”

However, one cannot be one hundred percent sure that the Taliban would never get access to Pakistani nuclear weapons technologies, believes Dr Michele Groppi, teaching fellow of Challenges to the International Order at the Defence Studies Department, King's College London.

"We have to keep an eye on it", he says. "But I don't think this prospect is particularly worrisome in the short run. In the longer term, however, we have to see".

But if the Taliban were to gain access to nuclear arms, this could "really angered China", Groppi believes. According to him, the Afghan insurgents are not interested in upsetting Beijing, at least for now, since they expect that the People's Republic will invest in Afghanistan. Furthermore, the Taliban leadership has already signalled its willingness to participate in the China-led Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

Listen to this by birth “Boak Bollocks, Braindead, Disgraced and World’s Deadliest War Monger John Bolton” in this video clip. He thinks that Pakistan’s ‘Nuclear Weapons’ are scattered on the streets and TALIBAN will get them freely and they destroy the whole World. WTF? This idiot definitely carries his brain in his “Incurable Cancerous Swelled Scrotums.”

"Vis-à-vis Pakistan, the issue is not about the weapons but the increasing radicalisation of the society", deems Shreyas Deshmukh, research associate with the National Security Program at the Delhi Policy Group, a think tank in New Delhi, India. "Today we can see there is major support coming from lower and middle class of the Pakistani society for the Taliban, and it was there in the late 1990s as well. Therefore the fear of not only the Taliban but any extremist elements getting their hands on nuclear material from Pakistan is real." Here ‘Hypocrite Shreyas Deshmukh’ didn’t talk about the Saffron terrorism of Hindutva, RSS and so many others Hindu Terrorist Groups in India who are actively overwhelmed extremist Indian government and terrorizes the neighboring countries. Uranium was stolen and security of nuclear sites were breached many times.

Here is another idiot on Twitter: John Sipher@john_sipher! While I want to say “you reap what you sow,” a radical takeover in Pakistan (like in Afghanistan) would be a disaster that would draw us in completely. It’s six times the size, has a massive army and nuclear weapons. We cannot turn away. This idiot needs to put attention to his own filthy backyard. He should put his efforts to stop those fascists who are destroying America and America has more than 5000 Nuclear Weapons in his backyard. Pakistan is much more smarter than the United States who smartly kicked US ass in Afghanistan. He should ask current and past ‘Generals and Presidents’ as well.

Deshmukh notes that Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP)*, a terrorist group located on the Afghan-Pakistan border which helped the Taliban to fight against Afghan government forces, carried out several attacks between 2008 and 2015, targeting Pakistani security infrastructures "including a major attack on Mehran Naval Air Base which also holds nuclear assets". Here again ‘Hypocrite Deshmukh’ didn’t want to open his bloody diarrheal mouth about “FASCIST HINDU EXTREMISTS: RSS, SANKPARIVAR, VISHVA HINDU PARISATH, SHIVE SHENA AND THE WORLD’S MOST WANTED FASCIST CRIMINAL PRIME MINISTER NARENDRA MODI.”

"Nuclear deterrence in general is holding not because of the number of weapons but fear of the escalation ladder which cannot be controlled and end up in unimaginable consequences", he says. "Therefore, lone terrorist attacks like on Mehran base also increase the probability of nuclear terrorism".

In addition to this, Afghanistan lies between four declared nuclear states, the Indian scholar emphasises, suggesting that "if the instability persists in [the Central Asian state] it can be a hub for the black market for nuclear materials". NOPE! It wouldn’t be “THE CENTRAL ASIAN STATE,” it would be the “INDIA, THE RAPES CAPITAL OF THE WORLD” whose nuclear sites were breached many times in the past and URANIUM was stolen. Therefore “RANDIAN Shreyas Deshmukh” needs to STFO.

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architectnews · 3 years

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Remembering New York City architecture of my youth

Moynihan Train Hall New York Building, SOM NYC Architecture Photos

In the age of the coronavirus, remembering the New York City architecture of my youth

Jan 5, 2021

Moynihan Train Hall New York City

In the age of the coronavirus, remembering the New York City architecture of my youth

Joel Solkoff’s Column Vol. VII, Number 3.

Thursday May 6, 2021.Rural Williamsport, Pennsylvania, US, population 28,186. {New York City’s population 8.4 million. Distance between them 192 miles}

Today’s column describes a one-day trip I took took on a battery-powered wheelchair on Tuesday February 16th from a nursing home in the New York City Borough of Queens where– the day before– I received the second dose of the Pfizer vacinne to a cab to Manhattan’s glorious new Moynihan Train Hall. Then, after a lenthy train ride to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania’s capitol city, a one hour and 20 minute automobile ride to home. To Williamsport, my home. Now the new U.S. office of e-architect.com

US Office e-architect – 800 West Fourth Street Williamsport Pennsylvania 17701 Phone 570-772-4909 or 272-230-5805 [email protected] photo by Joel Solkoff

On the surface, there might not seem to be a parallel between a huge new train station in the largest city in the US and a luxury hotel in a little town in north central Pennsylvania. But for 1863 and the richest man in the world Peter Herdic.

Peter Herdic built a $250 thousand luxury hotel where e-architect now has our US office. The $250 thousand Herdic spent is astonishing in current dollars. Williamsport architect Anthony Visco Jr. who helped save the Herdic luxury hotel from extinction in the 1990s told me “This was a time when a single family home cost $500.”

In 1863, the unwritten rule when building a luxury hotel in the middle of nowhere designed to attract rich Edith Wharton-style rich folks from New York City is to have a train station in your back yard. That is what Herdic did.

Herdic arranged for the Pennsylvania Railroad to construct an elegant train station next to the five acre hotel and sculptured grounds.The rich flocked here from New York City in a gloroius ride on their private elegant railroad cars.

e-architect’s office is now on the ground floor where large urns supplied railroad workers with coffee. From the window, I see Anthony Visco Jr.’s design for a Victorian train station complex now an historical landmark. The Peter Herdic Transportation Museum. Behind the station is a railroad car used by one of the 19th Century rich.

Because of the US’s post World War II assault on passenger train service begun in the 1950s and 1960s by autombile advocates, Williamsport no longer has passenger service. This railroad car sits outside our window going nowhere.

Abandoned railroad car in Williamsport Pennsylvania USA:

Photo by Joel Solkoff

New York City’s 1963 shameful attack on train service

In the 1960s and 1970s, the powerful New York City urban planner Robert Moses played a significant role in creating a destructive automobiles at any price society which we find ourselves in today at our peril. Robert Caro, the Pultizer Prize historian known best for his landmark series on President Lyndon Baines Johnson wrote a biography of Robert Moses. Wikipedia: “After working for many years as a reporter, Caro wrote The Power Broker(1974), a biography of New York urban planner Robert Moses, which was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the hundred greatest nonfiction books of the twentieth century.”

In 1963 as part of an especially shameful act, the New York powers that be began the complete demolition of McKim Mead & White’s astonishingly beautiful 1914 train station shown here:

1914 New York City Penn Station building interior: McKim Mead &White’s much admired 1914 New York City Penn Station. Photo courtesy McKim Mead & White Collection New York Historical Society

The New York Historical Society observed, “Unfortunately, the Pennsylvania Railroad optioned the air rights for the station in the 1950s, which meant the above ground portions of the structure would be demolished to make room for an office and sports complex. Many New Yorkers and architecture fans were outraged, but in 1963 the building was demolished.”

In October of 1963, the New York Times published the following:

“Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves. Even when we had Penn Station, we couldn’t afford to keep it clean. We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tinhorn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed.”

My disability perspective

I am a paraplegic. During the past 25 years, I have gotten around on a battery-powered wheelchair. A scooter. In future columns I will be describing in detail how the scooter (and indeed the mobility device class) has become a critical architectural tool. It would be best when designing for the disabled, for the the architect to ride around in a scooter.

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The difference bertween great architecture and appreicating it in an excellent photograph ilike this one is hard to define. Define magic. If you want magic, nothing can delight like visiting in person as I did this beautifully designed architectural achievement. This waiting room had been the location of the automatic mail sorting machines for what was then the City’s postal headquarters. Turns out that back in 1982, when I was speechwriter to President Ronald Reagan’s excellent Postmaster General Preston Robert Tisch that I visited the sorting machines here. That was before mail volume dropped dramatically and the Farley Post Office provided New York with the opportunity, as the Moynihan Train Hall has done, to make up for the sin of demolishing the McKim Mead & White Penn Station. Lucas Blair Simpson © Skidmore Owings and Merrill (SOM). For permission to publish, thank you Clarissa Sorenson, public relations SOM

New York City’s new train station is wonderful

Check you have proof you were vaccinated for the coronavirus, book a flight to LaGuardia ( if you are lucky; Kennedy if not). Both airports are in the Borough of Queens (a too often neglected New York City borough which architects might bnefit from a visit).

Take a cab across Queens to the Moynihan Train Hall, the largest train station in the Western Hemisphere, located in mid-town Manhattan between Eighth and Ninth Avenues; 31st and 33rd Streets. Down the street is the Empire State Building, now beautifully restored by Frank Prial, Jr. at Beyer Blinder Belle. In the 1950s my father had a shabby office at the decaying Empire State Building.

The Moynihan Train Hall is located in this building the James A. Farley Post Office. Farley was President Franklin D Roosevelt (FDR) Postmaster General back in the Depression when it was an extremely powerful position. Wikipedia: “The James A. Farley Building is a mixed-use structure [in addition to the Moynihan Train Hall the building includes what is now a very reduced-size post office] in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, which formerly served as the city’s main United States Postal Service (USPS) branch. Designed by McKim, Mead & White in the Beaux-Arts style, the structure was built between 1911 and 1914, with an annex constructed between 1932 and 1935. The Farley Building…faces Pennsylvania Station and Madison Square Garden to the east.”

Photo courtesy Wikipedia A. Farley Building – Wikipedia

Naming a glorious McKim, Mead & White Beaux Art gem after Farley appropriately honors both the architecture firm and Farley. Now the building is appropriately renamed after one of the most intriguing and important political figures in the post World War II US. More on Moynihan and architecture in future columns.

Moynihan was extremely friendly to architects. When he worked as a political appointee in President John Kennedy’s administration, Moynihan convinced President Kennedy to sign an executive order to give non-traditional architects (I.e.you my readers) the ability to design to end too often drab federal office buildings

Wikipedia (with thanks for the photo): “Daniel Patrick “Pat” Moynihan (March 16, 1927 – March 26, 2003) was an American politician, sociologist, and diplomat. A member of the Democratic Party, he represented New York in the United States Senate and served as an adviser to Republican U.S. President Richard Nixon.”

Amtrak, the US’s provider of passenger train service, writes about Moynihan being the visionary who 25 years ago suggested that this be done.After Moynihan’s death, the late senator’s fascinating daughter Maura worked tirelessly to make her father’s vision real. One architect in a position to know asserted Maura’s contribution to the hall was critical.

”Welcome to Moynihan Train Hall. Amtrak and LIRR [the Long Island Rail Road] have a new home in New York City. A visionary project – a generation in the making – championed by Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, Moynihan Train Hall is the city’s newest grand civic icon. The $1.6 billion project transforms the 100+ year-old James A. Farley Post Office Building into a modern, world-class transit hub – an idea first proposed by the late United States Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan more than a quarter-century ago.”

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My visit to the Moynihan Train Hall returned me to the neighborhood I have known since I was three years old

One of my earliest memories is seeing at age three the McKim Mead & White 1914 Penn Station in the same location as the architectural abomination that is the 1963 Penn Station today. [Curiously, Penn Station, across the street from Moynihan Train Hall continues—as has been the case since the 1960s—to provide access to trains accessible only underground. Penn Station has no waiting room where passengers can see the light of day. Wheel chair access is dreadful. Penn Station should be shut down.]

In 1950 my mother took me to Florida, then a divorce capital, by train. I wanted to live with my father, not my mother.My memory, reinforced by summer train rides from Miami to see Dad in wonderful New York–a joy to visit in the 1950s and early 1960s–,-is of the station waiting room and the view of beautiful light from the City outside.

The Moynihan Train Hall re-captures that memory. This is the photograph I took of the Moynihan waiting room on February 16th after arriving directly by cab from the Regal Heights Nursing Home in Queens where I was a patient for three weeks:

Photo by Joel Solkoff

Used a battery powered wheelchair to visit the Moynihan Train Hall

As a 73 year old paraplegic for 25 years, I have been able to get from here to there and back using a battery powered wheelchair (scooter). My scooter has a 20 plus mile range before a charge is required. This means I can go– or so it seems– nearly anywhere on a single charge. During my six weeks in New York first at Memorial Sloan Kettring Center (which should have but doesn’t bathrooms accessible to the disabled) and the nursing home, I used the Amigo Travel Scooter (built in Michigan) for locomotion.

Your columnist at the Regal Heights Nursing Home in Queens on the day that I was released to a cab that took me to The Moynihan Train Hall. Photo by a member of the nursing home staff who gave me permission to use.

This is what the capsible scooter looked like when I drove it from nursing home to cab.

Photo by Frank Rasole, Jr., my excellent health aide and assistant

This is what the collapsed scooter looked like when the taxi driver arrived at the Moynihan Train Hall and removed it from his trunk

This is the inaccessible entrance at one end of the Moynihan Train Hall I feared. Beautiful isn’t it?

Photo by Joel Solkoff

This is the excellent grand wheelchair friendly entrance at the othher end of the Moynihan Train Hall I never dreamed possible

Photo by Joel Solkoff

Once again this is the entrance from the taxi to the train station—riding upon a network of hidden ramps that made it possible for me to ride directly from the cab to the waiting room of Moynihan Train Hall.

Photo by Joel Solkoff

Joel’s Column will return with more on the Moynihan Train Hall & SOM, the firm that brilliantly designed it

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Global architects note: Infrastructure reform will help your bottom line

Infrastructure reform, after decades of neglect, is likely to take place and provide architects with commissions. President Biden’s bill would cost $2.2 trillion. The President’s approach expands the definition of infrastructure to include, for example, $300 billion for public housing and the necessity to upgrade housing so it is disability friendly.

The Republican version would narrow the definition of infrastructure to roads, trains, planes and wi/fi at a cost of $900 billion. My member of Congress Republican Rep.Fred Keller is a sponsor.

Whichever bill passes, Williamsport in isolated Lycoming County, the physically largest county in the state, requires passenger train service. As with so much of the country train service would open up our community to economic expansion. Here in a town with a large percntage of low income elderly. it would provide us with access to health care still badly needed to control the pandemic.

Sounding often like an urban planner, here is Secretary of Transportation Peter Buttigieg who has become the Administration’s leader for its expanded infrastructue plan:

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My editors beckon: “All right, stop writing, Joel.”

Isabelle Lomholt and Adrian Welch, Editors at e-architect:

One last look before I leave. Plus here is our editor Isabelle’s report when the Moynihan Train Hall opened January 5, 2021

photo: Lucas Blair Simpson © SOM

“Designed by SOM, the Moynihan Train Hall completely reimagines the travel experience at the busiest transportation hub in the Western Hemisphere, and evokes the architectural heritage of New York’s original Pennsylvania Station.”

In the age of the coronavirus, remembering the New York City architecture of my youth article from Joel Solkoff Moynihan Train Hall Architects: SOM photo © Lucas Blair Simpson | Aaron Fedor © SOM Moynihan Train Hall Location: New York City, USA

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Contemporary New York Buildings Manhattan Architectural Designs – chronological list New York City Architecture Tours by e-architect New York Architecture News Il Makiage pavilion Design: Zaha Hadid Architects photograph : Paul Warchol Il Makiage pavilion by Zaha Hadid 45 Park Place, Tribeca, Lower Manhattan Design: SOMA Architects ; AOR: Ismael Leyva rendering : Williams New York 45 Park Place Tower New York Skyscraper Buildings Pier 40 Hudson River Apartments Design: DFA images courtesy of architects Pier 40 Building 432 Park Avenue Skyscraper Design: Rafael Viñoly Architects image © dbox for CIM Group & Macklowe Properties 432 Park Avenue Tower New York New York Architecture New York Architects Offices Comments for the Remembering New York City architecture of my youth page welcome

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yhwhrulz · 3 years

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orbemnews · 3 years

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The 12 months the Fed Modified Endlessly WASHINGTON — As Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, rang in 2020 in Florida, the place he was celebrating his son’s wedding ceremony, his work life gave the impression to be getting into a interval of relative calm. President Trump’s public assaults on the central financial institution had eased up after 18 months of regular criticism, and the commerce struggle with China gave the impression to be cooling, brightening the outlook for markets and the economic system. But the earliest indicators of a brand new — and much more harmful — disaster had been surfacing some 8,000 miles away. The novel coronavirus had been detected in Wuhan, China. Mr. Powell and his colleagues had been about to face a few of the most attempting months in Fed historical past. By mid-March, as markets had been crashing, the Fed had minimize rates of interest to close zero to guard the economic system. By March 23, to avert a full-blown monetary disaster, the Fed had rolled out almost its total 2008 menu of emergency mortgage applications, whereas teaming up with the Treasury Division to announce applications that had by no means been tried — together with plans to help lending to small and medium-size companies and purchase company debt. In early April, it tacked on a plan to get credit score flowing to states. “We crossed a number of purple traces that had not been crossed earlier than,” Mr. Powell stated at an occasion in Could. The Fed’s job in regular occasions is to assist the economic system function at an excellent keel — to maintain costs secure and jobs plentiful. Its sweeping pandemic response pushed its powers into new territory. The central financial institution restored calm to markets and helped maintain credit score obtainable to customers and companies. It additionally led Republicans to attempt to restrict the huge device set of the politically impartial and unelected establishment. The Fed’s emergency mortgage applications turned a sticking level within the negotiations over the authorities spending package deal Congress accepted this week. However even amid the backlash, the Fed’s work in salvaging a pandemic-stricken economic system stays unfinished, with thousands and thousands of individuals out of jobs and companies struggling. The Fed is prone to maintain charges at all-time low for years, guided by a brand new method to setting financial coverage adopted this summer time that goals for barely increased inflation and assessments how low unemployment can fall. And the Fed’s extraordinary actions in 2020 weren’t aimed solely at maintaining credit score flowing. Mr. Powell and different high Fed officers pushed for extra authorities spending to assist companies and households, an uncharacteristically daring stance for an establishment that tries mightily to keep away from politics. Because the Fed took a extra expansive view of its mission, it weighed in on local weather change, racial fairness and different points its leaders had usually averted. “We’ve typically relegated racial fairness, inequality, local weather change to easily social points,” Mary C. Daly, president of the Federal Reserve Financial institution of San Francisco, stated in an interview. “That’s a mistake. They’re financial points.” In Washington, reactions to the Fed’s greater function have been swift and divided. Democrats need the Fed to do extra, portraying the eye to climate-related monetary dangers as a welcome step however only a starting. They’ve additionally pushed the Fed to make use of its emergency lending powers to funnel low cost credit score to state and native governments and small companies. Republicans have labored to limit the Fed to make sure that the function it has performed on this pandemic doesn’t outlast the disaster. Patrick J. Toomey, a Republican senator from Pennsylvania, spearheaded the trouble to insert language into the aid package deal that might have pressured future Fed emergency lending applications to stay to soothing Wall Avenue as a substitute of attempting to additionally instantly help Primary Avenue, because the Fed has completed within the present downturn. Republicans fear that the Fed might use its energy to help partisan targets — by invoking its regulatory energy over banks, as an illustration, to deal with oil and gasoline corporations as monetary dangers, or by propping up financially troubled municipal governments. “Fiscal and social coverage is the rightful realm of the people who find themselves accountable to the American individuals, and that’s us, that’s Congress,” Mr. Toomey, who might be the following banking committee chairman and thus certainly one of Mr. Powell’s most necessary overseers, stated final week from the Senate ground. Mr. Toomey’s proposal was watered down throughout congressional negotiations, clearing the way in which for a broader aid deal: Congress barred the central financial institution from re-establishing the precise amenities utilized in 2020, however it didn’t minimize off its energy to assist states and corporations sooner or later. Up to date Dec. 27, 2020, 3:56 p.m. ET Democrats stated the brand new language was restricted sufficient that the Fed might nonetheless purchase municipal bonds or make enterprise loans through emergency powers; Mr. Toomey informed The New York Occasions that doing so would require congressional approval. The divide advised that the scope of the Fed’s powers might stay a degree of debate. As Mr. Powell, 67, faces stress from all sides in 2021, he might discover himself auditioning for his personal job. His time period expires in early 2022, which signifies that President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. will select whether or not to renominate him. Mr. Powell, a Republican who was made a Fed governor by President Barack Obama and elevated to his present place by Mr. Trump, has but to say publicly whether or not he desires to be reappointed. His probabilities might be affected by the Fed’s coronavirus disaster response, which has been credited as early and swift. Mr. Powell was at Group of 20 conferences in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in late February when it started to grow to be clear to him that the coronavirus was unlikely to stay regionally remoted. He checked in along with his colleagues in Washington to see what emergency powers the central financial institution and Treasury Division had at their disposal. By the point his 14-hour-flight landed at Dulles Worldwide Airport on Monday, Feb. 24, shares had been plummeting. He opened his telephone to quite a few missed calls and emails. From that time, the central financial institution’s response kicked into gear. That Friday, the twenty eighth — the identical day Mr. Trump referred to as worries in regards to the coronavirus a “new hoax” unfold by Democrats — Mr. Powell issued a press release conveying the Fed’s concern. On March 3, the following Tuesday, the Fed made its first emergency charge minimize for the reason that international monetary disaster 12 years earlier, the primary of many steps the Fed would take to avert a catastrophic market meltdown. Some analysts warned that the Fed’s rush to accommodate the economic system with decrease rates of interest could be poorly focused. What might rates of interest do within the face of a pandemic? Quite a bit, it seems in hindsight. The Fed’s charge cuts set the stage for a refinancing increase and, extra not too long ago, a rush to purchase homes. The choice of Penny Achina, a first-time residence purchaser simply outdoors Houston, exhibits how Fed coverage can cascade by the economic system. After enthusiastic about shopping for a home for 4 years, Ms. Achina, a 31-year-old medical technologist, took the leap in 2020. “I stated — it’s both you sink otherwise you swim, and the rates of interest actually enticed me,” she stated, and he or she is ready to shut subsequent week. With 3 p.c down, she was accepted for a 2.5 p.c rate of interest on a 30-year mortgage. When individuals like Ms. Achina purchase homes, they typically then spend cash on new couches and fridges to fill them. Larger shopper demand prompts companies, additionally attracted by low charges, to borrow cash to spend money on tools to supply extra. The central financial institution’s rescue might but have unwanted effects. Whereas most economists imagine that runaway inflation is unlikely, a minority warn that value will increase, which have been quiescent for years, might be kindled by enormous authorities spending and a post-pandemic financial surge. Policymakers have been looking forward to indicators of monetary extra as their instruments have helped shares soar and corporations to subject debt at a surprising tempo. Jobs stay the Fed’s largest problem. Whereas low charges are serving to many employed individuals like Ms. Achina, thousands and thousands of others are out of labor. Decrease-wage employees, ladies and minorities have been notably prone to lose their livelihoods. The Fed’s low charges and bond purchases could do little to instantly assist individuals who hire, personal few shares and discover their jobs eradicated. Many economists say the $900 billion help package deal handed on Monday will should be adopted by extra. A few of its key provisions, corresponding to prolonged jobless advantages, will expire earlier than spring. “We have now a troublesome interval to get by,” Loretta Mester, president of the Federal Reserve Financial institution of Cleveland, stated Friday, stating that companies and households will want assist in the following few months as coronavirus instances swell earlier than vaccines are broadly distributed. Even after the restoration takes maintain, the Fed is prone to be gradual to carry rates of interest — and that’s when these left behind within the pandemic could really feel the extra widespread advantages of its insurance policies. If its insurance policies work, the Fed might pave the way in which for the type of secure, inclusive progress that was taking maintain initially of 2020. Mr. Powell has repeatedly referred to as job losses “heartbreaking” and has pledged to make use of the Fed’s powers to attempt to restore the job market to its former energy. “We’re considering that this might be one other lengthy growth,” he stated at a information convention in mid-December, as he vowed to spice up the economic system “till the growth is properly down the tracks.” Supply hyperlink #changed #Fed #Year

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New Post has been published on https://techcrunchapp.com/pence-reinvents-trumps-presidency-on-a-disorienting-nightof-crises-cnn/

Pence reinvents Trump's presidency on a disorienting night of crises - CNN

Already, there are doubts whether the President’s big acceptance speech and a fireworks display Thursday at the White House in front of a pandemic-defying crowd of more than 1,000 people will be appropriate given what forecasters say are “unsurvivable” conditions facing those in the path of Hurricane Laura.

The RNC has had some effective moments — especially in highlighting the stories of regular Americans from lobstermen to farmers who say they have benefited from Trump’s economic policies. Democrats may have missed an opportunity in not doing more to highlight such inspiring stories.

But for the third night in a row the convention offered a vision of a far different country than the one currently staggering through a cataclysmic year. It was a tale of a resurgent economy, a deadly virus defeated and a benevolent and wise President who was a champion of Black Americans, an empathetic counselor of professional women and a guardian of constitutional values worthy of mention in the same breath as the Founders.

Yet when it came to it, Pence — the second most senior member of an administration that says it has done more for Black Americans than Democrats such as President Barack Obama, former vice president Joe Biden and his running mate Sen. Kamala Harris — didn’t even mention the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Wisconsin, instead tossing Kenosha, Wisconsin, into a list of places ravaged by violence without referencing the tragedies that brought protesters into the street. And there wasn’t even a passing reference to the countless other similar incidents that have left African Americans despairing — encounters with police that on Wednesday triggered an athletes revolt started by NBA players who boycotted playoff games.

Pence didn’t note that a 17-year-old suspected of killing two people and injuring a third in Kenosha overnight was a pro-police supporter of the President who posted video on TikTok from a Trump rally in Des Moines in January. The shootings came a night after the RNC highlighted a St. Louis couple who brandished guns at Black Lives Matter protesters outside their home.

When asked about the link between the suspect and the Trump rally in Des Moines earlier on Wednesday, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway said the White House is “not responsible for the private conduct of people who go to rallies.”

Trump supporter or not, the suspect will be held accountable by a legal process. But the incident is sure to spark more debate about the extent to which the demagogic approach the President has taken towards racial tension and violence influences the actions of impressionable individuals at a volatile moment.

In another odd twist, shortly after Pence insisted that “we will have law and order on the streets of America,” he recognized the sister of Dave Patrick Underwood, an officer of the Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Protective Service who he said “was shot and killed during the riots in Oakland, California.”

In fact, a US attorney says the suspect in that case is allegedly tied to the extremist Boogaloo movement, a loosely knit group of heavily armed, anti-government extremists.

A platitude on race

Pence, speaking at the Baltimore fort where an 1814 battle with the British inspired “The Star Spangled Banner,” chose to put the blame for unrest on the Democrats, while divorcing the protests from their cause.

“Last week, Joe Biden didn’t say one word about the violence and chaos engulfing cities across this country,” Pence said. “Let me be clear: the violence must stop — whether in Minneapolis, Portland or Kenosha.”

“We will always stand with those who stand on the thin blue line and we are not going to defund the police, not now, not ever,” he added, driving home the administration’s hardline law enforcement message.

Pence also offered a platitude but no answers for Black Americans — failing to address the historic discrimination they have faced from law enforcement played out over and over in agonizing cellphone videos, and that helped spark a national reckoning on race earlier this summer after the death of Minnesota man George Floyd who stopped breathing with a police officer’s knee on his neck.

“We don’t have to choose between supporting law enforcement and standing with African American neighbors to improve the quality of life in our cities and towns,” Pence said.

Conventions are about playing to the base. And there is no doubt that many Americans will prefer the Trump-Pence vision of a strong law and order response to unrest to Biden’s support of protesters who see systemic racism in law enforcement.

But that doesn’t mean that what Pence said on Thursday night was a fair representation of the truth. And for all the hagiography directed towards the President, the convention has provided few genuine answers on how either crisis would get better if Trump wins another four years.

It might be argued that the most significant political developments in the country on Wednesday came not at the RNC — but in the room where NBA players met in their bio-secure bubble in Florida and decided to launch a protest that is threatening the league’s season. It already looks like one of the most significant civil rights statements by athletes in many years, following on from Colin Kaepernick’s taking a knee protests.

The boycott drew a sharp new line in the presidential campaign.

Biden made a strong statement of support for NBA players — athletes who the President has said he will not watch because of their activism on racial justice.

“This moment demands moral leadership. And these players answered by standing up, speaking out, and using their platform for good,” Biden tweeted. “Now is not the time for silence.”

Obama, who last week warned in a Democratic National Convention speech that Trump represented an existential threat to American democracy, also offered his support.

“I commend the players on the @Bucks for standing up for what they believe in, coaches like @DocRivers, and the @NBA and @WNBA for setting an example,” Obama tweeted. “It’s going to take all our institutions to stand up for our values.”

Trump has seized on athlete protests as ammunition in his wider culture war arguments that has seen him defend the Confederate flag and statues of southern Civil War generals that warn that American history and heritage are under attack.

A viral whitewash

Pence, who heads the White House’s coronavirus task force, tried to recast the President’s haphazard response to the pandemic as string of heroic feats as he suggested that Biden has shown a defeatist attitude toward the virus.

In a whitewashing of the President’s negligence and cavalier approach to containing the virus in February and early March, Pence argued that Trump’s move to block foreign nationals from China from entering the country in late January saved “untold lives” and “bought us time to launch the greatest national mobilization since World War II.”

In reality Trump wasted precious time in February — when scientists and epidemiologists were calling on the federal government to ramp up a robust testing and tracing program — by insisting that governors should chart the course for each state. His restrictions on travel from China, which Pence exaggerated Wednesday night, came too late to make a major difference in case numbers in the view of many medical experts. Many of the cases that fueled spread of the virus were later traced to Europe before Trump instituted a travel ban in March.

Though governors begged the federal government to help by providing funding for testing and using the Defense Production Act to produce more personal protective equipment, Trump repeatedly delayed those moves and never put forward a coherent national strategy to stop the virus.

But Pence claimed Wednesday night that the federal government has now “coordinated the delivery of billions of pieces of personal protective equipment” and then made a stunning promise that a coronavirus vaccine will come later this year. Most experts believe a vaccine won’t be ready until 2021 at the earliest.

“Last week, Joe Biden said ‘no miracle is coming,'” Pence said Wednesday night at Fort McHenry. “What Joe doesn’t seem to understand is that America is a nation of miracles and we’re on track to have the world’s first safe, effective coronavirus vaccine by the end of this year.”

After three nights when Trump’s allies have cast the President as a heroic figure who would be unrecognizable to many Americans, he will face the voters to make his own case for reelection Thursday night.

#crises #disorienting #night #pence #presidency #reinvents #trump #Politics

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bountyofbeads · 4 years

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Restarting America Means People Will Die. So When Do We Do It? https://nyti.ms/3edDpvi

Restarting America Means People Will Die. So When Do We Do It?

Five thinkers weigh moral choices in a crisis.

By The New York Times Magazine | Published April 10, 2020 Updated 3:11 p.m. ET | Posted April 10, 2020 |

The politics of the coronavirus have made it seem indecent to talk about the future. As President Trump has flirted with reopening America quickly — saying in late March that he’d like to see “packed churches” on Easter and returning to the theme days ago with “we cannot let this continue” — public-health experts have felt compelled to call out the dangers. Many Americans have responded by rejecting as monstrous the whole idea of any trade-off between saving lives and saving the economy. And in the near term, it’s true that those two goals align: For the sake of both, it’s imperative to keep businesses shuttered and people in their homes as much as possible.

In the longer run, though, it’s important to acknowledge that a trade-off will emerge — and become more urgent in the coming months, as the economy slides deeper into recession. The staggering toll of unemployment has reached more than 16 million in just the last three weeks. There will be difficult compromises between doing everything possible to save lives from Covid-19 and preventing other life-threatening, or -altering, harms.

When can we ethically bring people back to work and school and begin to resume the usual rhythms of American life? We brought together by video conference five different kinds of experts to talk about the principles and values that will determine the choices we make at that future point. One of them, the bioethicist Zeke Emanuel, led a group from the Center for American Progress that earlier this month presented a plan to end the coronavirus crisis. First, the group said, the country needs a national stay-at-home policy through mid-May. (Eight governors still haven’t issued such orders statewide.) In the intervening weeks, testing would have to ramp up to test everyone who has a fever, or lives with someone who tests positive for Covid-19. Contact-tracing — identifying and notifying people who have been in proximity to someone infected — would become comprehensive. People who have the virus or a fever, or those in proximity to them, would be isolated. There would also be testing of a representative sample in every county, to determine the rate of infection in the population, as well as mapping and alerts to inform the public about the location of Covid-19 cases.

If these efforts are successfully put in place, Emanuel hopes the current restrictions could begin to ease in June. At that point — or later, if the necessary steps have not been taken — we will need to rethink how we manage risk, recognizing trade-offs among various harms and benefits. That’s what the panel discussed.

THE PANELISTS

The Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II is president of the nonprofit organization Repairers of the Breach and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for a Moral Revival, which is holding a digital Mass Poor People’s Assembly and March on Washington on June 20.

Anne Case is an emeritus professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University and co-author, with Angus Deaton, of the recent book “Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism.”

Zeke Emanuel is vice provost for global initiatives and director of the Healthcare Transformation Institute at the University of Pennsylvania; host of a new podcast about coronavirus, “Making the Call”; and author of the forthcoming book “Which Country Has the World’s Best Health Care?”

Vanita Gupta is president and chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and former head of the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

Peter Singer is a bioethics professor at Princeton, author of “The Life You Can Save” and founder of the charity of the same name.

Emily Bazelon, a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, moderated the discussion, which has been edited and condensed for clarity.

What Are the Trade-Offs of Reopening the Economy in the Near Future?

Emily Bazelon: Zeke, how are we doing on reaching your goal of beginning to partly reopen in June?

Zeke Emanuel: I’m not wildly optimistic, would be my answer. We still don’t have a consistent shelter-in-place policy nationally; there are too many exceptions allowed in different states. We haven’t normalized things like wearing masks outside. We need infrastructure for testing in real time, so you don’t get results 5 or 6 or 7 days later. We need real contact tracing that uses technology so that you can do it very rapidly. Getting the ball rolling on this, I’m concerned about.

Bazelon: If we have to restart the economy step by step, not all at once, does that mean deciding whether a workplace can do social distancing safely?

Emanuel: Yes, restarting the economy has to be done in stages, and it does have to start with more physical distancing at a work site that allows people who are at lower risk to come back. Certain kinds of construction, or manufacturing or offices, in which you can maintain six-foot distances are more reasonable to start sooner. Larger gatherings — conferences, concerts, sporting events — when people say they’re going to reschedule this conference or graduation event for October 2020, I have no idea how they think that’s a plausible possibility. I think those things will be the last to return. Realistically we’re talking fall 2021 at the earliest.

Restaurants where you can space tables out, maybe sooner. In Hong Kong, Singapore and other places, we’re seeing resurgences when they open up and allow more activity. It’s going to be this roller coaster, up and down. The question is: When it goes up, can we do better testing and contact tracing so that we can focus on particular people and isolate them and not have to reimpose shelter-in-place for everyone as we did before?

Anne Case: The idea that tables could be spread far enough apart that it would be safe to open restaurants — maybe that’ll happen in many cities, but it seems highly unlikely that sector will bounce back, which means there are all these service workers who are not going to find work in the sector they were working in. Losing that for 18 months, that’s enormous. Eventually, when the time comes for people to go back to work, I worry that some large fraction of working-class people won’t have work to go back to.

Peter Singer: If we’re thinking of a year to 18 months of this kind of lockdown, then we really do need to think about the consequences other than in terms of deaths from Covid-19. I think the consequences are horrific, in terms of unemployment in particular, which has been shown to have a very serious effect on well-being, and particularly for poorer people. Are we really going to be able to continue an assistance package to all of those people for 18 months?

That’s a question each country will have to answer. Maybe some of the affluent countries can, but we have a lot of poor countries that just have no possibility of providing that kind of assistance for their poor people. That’s where we’ll get into saying, Yes, people will die if we open up, but the consequences of not opening up are so severe that maybe we’ve got to do it anyway. If we keep it locked down, then more younger people are going to die because they’re basically not going to get enough to eat or other basics. So, those trade-offs will come out differently in different countries.

The Rev. William Barber: Even when we take the rich countries, poor people know from history that every time there is some great struggle, whether it’s the Great War, or the Spanish flu, or the recession of 2008, they are hit the hardest.

The United States has a whole lot of wounds from decades of racist policies and the criminalization of the poor. In 2011, Columbia did a study that we’ve updated: At least 250,000 people die every year from poverty in America. Now, in a pandemic, that’s an open fissure.

Washington made a terrible mistake by passing a $2 trillion bill without providing for a living wage or including all workers in the promise of sick leave or providing for free treatment for this illness. Millions of people won’t even get the $1,200 checks, for example if they are undocumented.

It’s almost as if some people think they can put a fence around the groups they left out. But the more people you have caught in the gaps — people who don’t have a home to stay in, or who have to go to work even if they’re sick — the more it keeps the virus alive. If you don’t address poverty, you can’t stop the virus, and you can’t reopen the economy.

Vanita Gupta: Even now we’re making trade-offs. We should be more honest about it. Many of the folks we call essential are low-wage workers, and we depend on them to keep grocery stores and pharmacies open. To a degree, the decisions about reopening in the future are about whether we’re comfortable with the professional classes becoming part of the trade-off by going back to their offices. And the pandemic highlights the divide between workers with paid sick leave and without. Only 47 percent of private-sector workers in the bottom quarter for wages have paid sick leave, compared with 90 percent in the top quarter, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Covid-19 is further revealing the country’s profound inequality and structural racism.

Bazelon: The economist and philosopher Amartya Sen recently pointed out to me that the presence of disease kills people, and the absence of livelihood also kills people.

Case: It’s true that poor people, on average, die younger than well-off people. But their death rate hasn’t precisely tracked the unemployment rate. It’s the long-term decline in jobs for people without a bachelor’s degree that has increased mortality among working-class people, by leading to drug overdose, suicide and alcoholism-related deaths. This is a process that has been going on for 50 years, since the 1970s. That’s the main finding of my work with my husband, the economist Angus Deaton.

That said, we also found something counterintuitive — fewer people die during recessions than in boom times. During boom times, more people die in motor-vehicle accidents and on construction sites. There’s more pollution, which is bad for infants and young children. And the elderly get less care. So all of those groups, but especially the young and old, are better protected during recessions than they are during boom times.

It’s hard to predict the future based on the 20th century. But fewer people died during the Great Depression in the 1930s than during the boom years of the 1920s. And during the Great Recession of 2008-9, a third of the people in Spain and Greece were unemployed, but their mortality rates fell.

Emanuel: But Anne, this is going to be a different kind of recession, right?

Case: Probably, yes. We don’t know.

Emanuel: Well, I would say we do know in two important ways. First, we’re going to be separated from each other by this physical distancing. We still have no idea what that will wreak for human beings, as a social species.

Second, this recession is wiping out huge swaths of types of employment. Yes, some of these service industries will eventually come back. But they are wiped out for a lot of people who were in them. And so I do think the sort of negative consequences — deaths from drugs, alcohol, suicide — that you’ve identified in your book, “Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism,” may in fact come back to haunt us. Previous research might not be able to get at this, and I truly worry about it.

Case: I agree with that. Two points, though. Some of the things that reduce mortality are happening in this recession. One being less pollution, which protects children, and another being fewer motor-vehicle accidents.

But as you say, isolation is a risk factor. Community is lost, people breaking bread together. If you can’t go to church because your church is closed, if you’re in recovery and you can’t go to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, if you can’t go see your parents and get some solace from them, then yes, I think that that kind of isolation puts people at higher risk for drugs and alcohol and suicide. But the risk of death from Covid-19 is larger than someone dying from the use of alcohol or drugs. There are now around 50,000 suicides in the United States each year. Pit that against how many lives we can save by keeping social distancing longer, and I think I’d weigh in favor of social distancing.

When people are unemployed for more than six months and knocked off their life path, yes, it’s very harmful, but it takes a long time to die a death of despair. It’s long term, over years, largely because of the social effects — the difficulty of having a stable home life and the loss of ties to your community. We might see it in the mortality figures in five years. At some point we consider those longer-term consequences, but it’s a very tricky balance to strike.

Gupta: When we talk about the impacts of the recession, who will be first to be hired back, and who will be last? Not everyone will experience the recovery evenly. After the 2008 financial crisis, home-ownership rates bounced back for most people, but not for African-Americans. Their home-ownership rates were as low in 2015 as they were when the Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968.

Singer: Can I just get on the record that we’re talking about affluent countries? Because the consequences of economic recessions in low-income countries are quite different. In India, for example, it has been reported that the lockdown has forced many of the country’s 120 million migrant workers to return to their homes, and with public transport shut down, some of them are walking hundreds of kilometers with no food or water other than what kind people along the way give them. When they do get home, many will have no income.

Case: Yes, I was talking just about the richer countries.

Singer: We need to think about this in the context of the well-being of the community as a whole. Even if what Anne says about the recession is right, we are currently impoverishing the economy, which means we are reducing our capacity in the long term to provide exactly those things that people are talking about that we need — better health care services, better social-security arrangements to make sure that people aren’t in poverty. There are victims in the future, after the pandemic, who will bear these costs.

The economic costs we incur now will spill over, in terms of loss of lives, loss of quality of life, and loss of well-being.

I think that we’re losing sight of the extent to which that’s already happening. And we need to really consider that trade-off.

I think the assumption, and it has been an assumption in this discussion, that we have to do everything to reduce the number of deaths, is not really the right assumption. Because at some point we are willing to trade off loss of life against loss of quality of life. No government puts every dollar it spends into saving lives. And we can’t really keep everything locked down until there won’t be any more deaths. So I think that’s something that needs to come into this discussion. How do we assess the overall cost to everybody in terms of loss of quality of life, loss of well-being, as well as the fact that lives are being lost?

Barber: You know, as a pastor, I live with death. What I struggle with is not that people are going to die. I struggle with the history, in this country, of deaths not counting equally. Of saying it doesn’t really count the same if First Nations people die off. Or poor people. Or black people. Even during slavery, certain slaves were expendable, because slave masters took out life-insurance policies on them. Now I’m hearing numbers that 40 percent of those dying in Michigan are African-American even though they represent 14 percent of the state population, and that in Louisiana, 70 percent who have died are African-Americans even though they are one third of the state.

Much of that traces back to the structural inequities that make people more susceptible to this sickness — the lack of health care and a living wage. The virus exists on top of the underlying vulnerabilities, and those exist without major outcry. That’s what troubles me: the way we accept in this country the death of 700 people a day from the effects of poverty, without the virus.

What Parts of the Economy Can Reopen First?

Bazelon: Let’s talk about the choice to open school in the fall if the pandemic is suppressed but could come back. While young people can get very sick from Covid-19, it’s older people who are dying disproportionately from this virus.

I worry about the kids who are out of school. This is also an aspect of the pandemic that hits poor families hardest. Fewer low-income students can access online learning, which is likely to lead to an increased achievement gap based on class. As we consider how to reopen in stages, in June or beyond, how should we balance the interests of kids, who are at relatively low risk from the virus, and older adults, who are at higher risk?

Emanuel: Actually, I think one of the ways we could start reopening is figuring out how young people can go to summer school and to camp. My reading of the data is that only a tiny percentage of deaths are occurring under the age of 30. It’s not zero, but it’s pretty damn close. And the achievement gap is a real concern, as is depriving kids of all their social activity. What does it mean to teach a first grader online? I’m not sure how possible that really is in the long run.

So then you say, All right, maybe we’ve got a pool of kids who can actually go to camp or summer school. Give low-income kids all the help they would need to access those programs. Everyone would have to opt in: counselors, teachers, administrators and parents on behalf of their kids, knowing that the kids could get coronavirus and bring it home and infect them. But I think that’s a possible way of unlocking parts of the economy and addressing some of the inequality we’ve been talking about.

Then in the fall, we try to add the universities. Again, the staff members and the professors would have to opt in. For some, even many of them, the risk may be too high.

Gupta: When we talk about potentially having young people return, or having geographic pockets return to normal, how does that even work? How do you have tiers of people, with some re-entering while others do not, when the goal is to keep flattening the curve?

Emanuel: Of course, look, there are all sorts of issues. You’re going to have to transport these kids. Who’s going to transport them? That’s why I think the participating adults have to opt in. In my dreams, camps with a lot of teenage counselors. But you still need administrators, food service workers and drivers. It’s a big rigmarole. On the other hand, it’s a rigmarole we have the infrastructure for. We have a camp system like no other country. And for the fall, we have schools.

I don’t know how else we’re going to do it, frankly. You can’t just flip a switch and open the whole of society up. It’s just not going to work. It’s too much. The virus will definitely flare back to the worst levels. So I think you are going to have to do segments. Again, this requires testing and tracking, so you reduce the risk of the infection spreading, even if it doesn’t come down to zero.

Bazelon: Should we make reopening school the highest priority, even though there are going to be trade-offs, and maybe some increase in deaths?

Emanuel: Well, I think as long as teachers can opt in and administrators can opt in and parents can opt in. Maybe I’m crazy, but I think a lot of parents would consider it and be willing to run some risk to themselves.

Singer: I think that’s not crazy at all. I think it makes a lot of sense, for a number of reasons. One, it’s offering people choices. Hopefully they’ll be informed in making those choices, but I do think that people can make their own trade-offs and that many parents will think it’s incredibly important that their children go back to school. Maybe it will also enable them to go on with other things because they’re not looking after children at home.

When people look at the number of deaths from coronavirus and they say, You know, this is comparable to the Vietnam War, well, the Vietnam War killed mostly younger people. This is killing mostly older people. I think that’s really relevant. I think we want to take into account the number of life years lost — not just the number of lives lost.

The average age of death from Covid in Italy is 79½. So you do have to ask the question: How many years of life were lost? Especially when you consider that many of the people who have died had underlying medical conditions. The economist Paul Frijters roughly estimates that Italians lost perhaps an average of three years of life. And that’s very different from a younger person losing 40 years of life or 60 years of life.

Of course, young people who go to camp or school won’t take risks only for themselves. They may infect their parents or their grandparents, say, in my own category — I’m in the 70-plus age group, so I’m at high risk. But you know, by summer or fall, grandparents may be prepared to say, OK, I think it’s really important that my kids don’t miss out on their education. And that would be a reason for saying the lockdown should not continue for very long in the total state that it’s in in many places.

Bazelon: The lieutenant governor of Texas was criticized a few weeks ago when he said on Fox News that a lot of grandparents, himself included, would be willing to take risks to save the economy. Was the problem that he presented a false choice, because he spoke so prematurely?

Emanuel: Yes. With Covid, remember, even though 80 percent of the deaths are people over 65, if you’ve got a large number of deaths, there are still going to be a large number of people in the prime of life, age 30 to 59, who die.

Let me be clear: The kind of shift to reopening we’re talking about can happen only once we have a lot of other infrastructure that makes the public-health side of the equation work well. So that’s the way I think about it. If in June we’re in the same place we are today — we can’t get testing, we can’t do contact tracing, we haven’t put that infrastructure in place — then you are not opening up in June.

Barber: The problem with the lieutenant governor was not that he was premature. It was that he had no standing to talk about who should sacrifice themselves, because he has promoted many policies before this that were already causing so many deaths. As a Republican in Texas, he refused to expand Medicaid. Texas has the most people without health insurance in the country.

I used to say, I’m willing to put my life on the line so that my children can be better. I understand the concept. But we have to be very careful, because there are people who will pick up what you’re saying and use it to revive social Darwinism. We have folks — they prove it every day by their policy decisions — who do not mind certain people dying as long as it’s hidden, it’s out of the way.

Bazelon: Zeke, you’re the author of a 2014 article in The Atlantic called “Why I Hope To Die At 75.” You argued that living too long leaves us in a state of decline, which “may not be worse than death but is nonetheless deprived.” I realize you’re not imposing your feeling about age on other people, but how does it inform your thinking about the pandemic?

Emanuel: Well, you know, “I hope to die at 75” is a personal preference, not a policy proposal. But I think that’s a different issue than what risk I am willing to personally take with getting infected with the coronavirus, and how we ought to think about other people taking those risks. I can take all sorts of different kinds of risks as long as I don’t impose them on other people.

I am a big believer in using life-years saved, rather than just number of deaths avoided, as the goal, especially when you’re forced to choose between two people and you have only one ventilator. In talking to lots to audiences, I’ve presented them with a choice not about the coronavirus, but about who gets a liver transplant. The scenario is: I have one liver and three people; one’s older, one’s a young adult, one’s a young child. Who gets it? Often, no one in the audience will give it to the old person. Or maybe one out of 100. I’ve presented this in the United States, China and scores of other countries. The responses are always the same — most people say the young adult gets the liver, and a smaller number opt for the young child.

How Will the Pandemic Change America?

Bazelon: We’ve talked about the importance of contact tracing in the next phase of fighting the virus, as a means of reducing social distancing. South Korea and Singapore, which have had much better success than the United States in suppressing the virus, have used cellphone data to pinpoint exactly where people with the virus are, and then warn other people, if they’ve been in proximity to those people. For privacy advocates, this is kind of terrifying. Do we trust American public-health authorities with these kinds of surveillance tools?

Gupta: I think that most people, in order to preserve public health in the midst of this pandemic, are willing to give up a lot of privacy. The government has, rightfully, some extensive powers to deal with contagious diseases. In some cases, those powers could override individual rights. I think it would be foolish for us to not leverage technology to help us during the pandemic, and the public-health community has said contact-tracing is critical.

But we have to make sure that when we are through this crisis that our country isn’t transformed into a place we don’t want to live. There are some nefarious things that we have to look out for. This administration has been preying on immigrants and people of color. There are a lot of reasons to be very concerned about this data getting into the government’s hands permanently, for law-enforcement tracking. And there are for-profit companies seeking to create a market of surveillance and exploit the moment to do this.

So there have to be guard rails. We have to ensure the data is used only for contact-tracing for Covid, not for any other purpose. It must be deleted after a set number of days. And we should have an independent commission, with civil libertarians on it, overseeing all of this. We should think about it the way we think about census data: Since the 1940s, we’ve passed strong laws to make sure that its information can’t be shared with law enforcement or other government agencies.

Case: Are you optimistic that those guardrails will be written into law?

Gupta: Well, privacy is actually an area of the law that has bipartisan support, brings the libertarians together with the progressives. So I think it’s possible. But the sense of urgency that I hear from public-health officials about the need for contact-tracing, and the need for mass testing — do we have time to put the guard rails in place? I don’t know. Congress could do it if there’s political will.

Emanuel: In the Center for American Progress plan, we proposed an independent group to put the sources of data for tracking together. And the data has to be destroyed after 45 days, so that you don’t have a situation where, for example, Facebook is helping with this, and Facebook is going to retain that data, and then they know who’s Covid-positive and know who’s not.

Bazelon: In the next phase, whenever it begins, people who have had the virus and recovered will presumably have some kind of immunity. We don’t know for how long, but even if it’s not permanent, the history of other viruses suggests it could exist for the time it takes to develop a vaccine. Britain and Italy are already talking about issuing immunity certificates, or passports, which would allow people to go back to work and to school. You can see the value of being in this category. Is this a beneficial and necessary step? Do you have any concerns about it?

Singer: The obvious concern is that some people will deliberately go out and get the virus, because they’ll assume that they will be OK. And then they will get this very valuable document that will enable them to work when other people can’t. And so will people be spreading the virus more — will they be imposing risks on themselves that maybe aren’t prudent for them healthwise? Can we just leave those choices to them? I’m not quite sure how that will work. On the other hand, it’s hard to see other ways of opening up the economy without doing something like that.

Emanuel: I do think we’re going to end up with an immunity passport, probably an electronic one. Because we would love to have teachers who we know are Covid-immune. We would love to have people working in the hospital, or in nursing homes, who we know are Covid-immune.

Even if you look at the conservative models that the president and the White House Coronavirus Task Force are putting out, they’re talking about 10 to 20 million Americans being infected, and therefore most likely being immune for some amount of time. That is a very powerful cohort that you don’t want just sitting at home on the sidelines, if you can restart parts of the economy with them. And it seems to me inevitable.

Now, Peter raises a good point about immunity passports. Are people then going to become deliberately infected? For some people, that might be a risk they’re willing to take. We know people can do stupid things and not weigh the risks properly, but I think it would be worse to have 20 million people who could be productive and helpful and not put them to work getting the economy going.

Look, one of the most important things about a pandemic that we have yet to have, except in the medical community, is a strong shared sense of purpose. Now, in the medical community, it’s obvious what you’re doing: You’re sacrificing every day on the front lines, caring for patients. There are lots of other people who are very willing to do their part, and they are, like grocery-store employees who are packing and selling or delivering food.

But we haven’t had the national leadership that gives everyone a purpose. If we did, I think it would make a lot of what we have to do much easier to manage. I think people are going to be willing to do lots of things — like physical distancing, like wearing masks, like caring for other people — that we have yet to see fully realized. As the British showed during World War II, deprivation can be endured for a long time if you have that sense of shared higher purpose.

Case: If people perceive themselves as being at war together against the virus, that could be really protective against suicide. Suicides went down in America during World War I and World War II. The idea that we had a purpose seemed to help people.

At the state level, governors like Andrew Cuomo in New York have gotten people to think they’re all in this together. It would be really good to see that at the national level — and we haven’t yet.

Gupta: I worry that it’s going to take a lot more death or direct deprivation, in parts of the country that are currently feeling the effects less, before people are really able to feel the sense of kind of national purpose and mobilization.

Case: One thing that this epidemic may do, and this would be just a sliver of a silver lining, is cause fundamental change in our health care industry. We spend twice as much per capita on health care as most of the rich countries in the world, and our outcomes are often worse, which means we waste a lot of money. And that money is coming out of the wages of regular people, since we use our employment system to fund health care.

Now there are people who are going to face tens of thousands of dollars of medical bills for having been put on a ventilator. There are predictions that health-insurance premiums could rise by as much as 40 percent. I think something is going to break. And when it breaks, we may think about real reform.

Bazelon: If you imagine the pandemic as a bridge to changing the health care industry or strengthening the social safety net, how does that happen? Are you thinking about something like how the Great Depression produced the New Deal?

Case: Well, the Gilded Age eventually did lead to the Progressive Era. Inequality in income and wealth were as high then as they are now, but the time was ripe for legal changes limiting corporate power. It is possible we could see an overwhelming consensus develop that we cannot continue to run health care as we have.

Singer: That’s pretty optimistic, I think. Maybe the Depression brought the New Deal in the United States, but look what it brought in Germany.

Emanuel: Right, in Germany they got Hitler and in Italy, Mussolini, and in Spain, Franco. Economic upsets can produce ugly authoritarian responses.

Singer: We are already seeing authoritarian leaders in Europe using the crisis to strengthen their emergency powers in places like Hungary, for example. So, I think there is a real threat of that in many parts of the world.

Gupta: We’re seeing that in the United States too, with the attorney general seeking emergency powers and then trying to walk that back when he met bipartisan resistance.

Barber: We are clearly seeing some signs that are very dangerous. The way in which we cater to corporations, the spotty-at-best leadership, the evil that is hidden in the $2 trillion deal Congress passed.

But we are reminded in the Easter season that great suffering can be redemptive. It’s not something you plan for, you don’t want it, but if this suffering continues, and people have to see things like they’ve never seen and feel things like they’ve never felt, it may actually push us to the point of recognizing that everybody has a right to live — that if they don’t live, we don’t live.

We have been a hard nation to change. This moment combines the fear of mortality, it combines the fear of losing our money and it combines the fear of losing our community. And those fears, suffered long enough, may just have the impact of creating an antibody that will be a moral revival in this country in which all of us come together.

I have some strange hope that out of all this pain will come a new context in which America, with all of our divisions, with all of our past, will make some decision about how we restart that doesn’t just accept normalcy. This pandemic is saying to us that the old normal would be a waste, that it would dishonor all the people who have died and who have sacrificed to save lives. The old normal would mean that the people we deemed essential workers still lack health care, still lack living wages and sick leave. No. We sent you into battle without armor, so to speak, and you fought for us — now we have to change that.

*********

U.S. Is Nowhere Close to Reopening the Economy, Experts Say

Here’s what economists say the United States needs to start returning to normal amid the coronavirus outbreak — and how the economy can survive in the meantime.

By Jim Tankersley | Published April 6, 2020 | New York Times |Posted April 10, 2020 |

WASHINGTON — How long can we keep this up?

It is still very early in the U.S. effort to snuff a lethal pandemic by shutting down much of the economy. But there is a growing question — from workers, the White House, corporate boardrooms and small businesses on the brink — that hangs over what is essentially a war effort against a virus that has already killed more than 9,000 Americans.

There is no good answer yet, in part because we don’t even have the data needed to formulate one.

Essentially, economists say, there won’t be a fully functioning economy again until people are confident that they can go about their business without a high risk of catching the virus.

“Our ability to reopen the economy ultimately depends on our ability to better understand the spread and risk of the virus,” said Betsey Stevenson, a University of Michigan economist who worked on the White House Council of Economic Advisers under President Barack Obama. “It’s also quite likely that we will need to figure out how to reopen the economy with the virus remaining a threat.”

Public health experts are beginning to make predictions about when coronavirus infection rates will peak. Economists are calculating when the cost of continuing to shutter restaurants, shopping malls and other businesses — a move that has already pushed some 10 million Americans into unemployment, with millions more on the way — will outweigh the savings from further efforts to slow the virus once the infection curve has flattened out.

Government officials are setting competing targets. President Trump has pushed his expected date of reopening the economy to the end of April. “We have to get back to work,” he said in a briefing on Saturday. “We have to open our country again. We don’t want to be doing this for months and months and months. We’re going to open our country again. This country wasn’t meant for this.”

Some governors have set much more conservative targets, like Ralph Northam of Virginia, who canceled the remainder of the school year and imposed a shelter-at-home order through June 10. Other states, like Florida, only recently agreed to shut activity down but have set more aggressive targets — April 30, in the case of the Sunshine State — to restart it.

Those targets are at best mildly informed guesses based on models that contain variables — including how many people have the virus and how effective suppression measures will prove to be. The models cannot yet give us anything close to a precise answer on the big question looming over Americans’ lives and livelihoods.

To determine when to restart activity, said R. Glenn Hubbard, a former top economist under President George W. Bush, “we need more information.”

Interviews with more than a dozen economists, many of whom are veterans of past presidential administrations, reveal broad consensus on the building blocks the economy needs — but does not yet have — to begin the slow process of restoring normalcy in the American economy.

That includes widespread agreement that the United States desperately needs more testing for the virus in order to give policymakers the first key piece of evidence they need to determine how fast the virus is spreading and when it might be safe for people to return to work.

Without more testing, “there’s no way that you could set a time limit on when you could open up the economy,” said Simon Mongey, a University of Chicago economist who is among the authors of a new study that found that rapid deployment of randomized testing for the virus could reduce its health and economic damage.

“It’s going to have to depend on being able to identify people that have the coronavirus, understanding how readily those people can transmit the disease to others and then kind of appropriately isolating people that are contagious,” Mr. Mongey said.

Policymakers will also need better data on how strained hospitals and entire regional health care systems are likely to be if the infection rate flares up and spreads. Ideally, they would sufficiently control the rate to establish so-called contact tracing in order to track — and avoid — the spread of the virus across the country.

Once such levels of detection are established, it is possible that certain workers could begin returning to the job — for example, in areas where the chance of infection is low. Some experts have talked about quickly bringing back workers who contract the virus but recover with little effect. Testing is the best way to identify such workers, who may have had the virus with few or no symptoms and possibly not realized they were ever infected.

While they wait for the infection rate to fall, policymakers will need to provide more support to workers who have lost jobs or hours and to businesses teetering on the brink of failure. That could mean trillions more in small business loans, unemployment benefits and direct payments to individuals, and it could force the government to get creative in deploying money to avoid bottlenecks.

Lisa D. Cook, a Michigan State University economist who worked in the Obama White House, said lawmakers should consider funneling $1,500 a month to individuals through mobile apps like Zelle in order to reach more people, particularly low-income and nonwhite Americans who disproportionately lack traditional bank accounts. Mobile payments, Ms. Cook said, would also make it “easier and faster to make onward payments to family members and friends in need.”

The government’s efforts could prove crucial to maintaining public support for what amounts to a prolonged economic drought. Adam Ozimek, the chief economist at Upwork, said additional money for small business will be crucial throughout the full extent of the crisis — both to prevent a crush of business failures and to keep owners and customers from flouting the national effort to reduce infections.

“I don’t think you can force hundreds of thousands of small business owners to voluntarily shut down and let failure happen to them,” Mr. Ozimek said. “They won’t do it, the public won’t support it, and frankly I don’t think local authorities would stop them.”

Policymakers will also need to give better support and protection to Americans who are putting their own health at risk to keep the essential parts of the economy running, like doctors, nurses, grocery store clerks and package delivery drivers.

Heather Boushey, the president of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, a think tank focused on inequality, said those workers needed to have paid sick leave, adequate health coverage, access to coronavirus tests and affordable care for their children while they worked in order to stay healthy and to protect consumers from further spread of the virus.

“That is the economy at this point, those workers,” Ms. Boushey said. “And their health and safety is imperative to my safety.”

Policymakers will need patience: Restarting activity too quickly could risk a second spike in infections that could deal more damage than the first because it would shake people’s faith in their ability to engage in even limited amounts of shopping, dining or other commerce.

“It’s important not to lift too early,” said Emil Verner, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist who is a co-author of a new study that found that cities that took more aggressive steps to curb the 1918 flu pandemic in the United States emerged with stronger economies than cities that did less. “Because if we lift too early, the pandemic can take hold again. And that itself is very bad for the economy.”

#u.s. news #trump administration #politics #president donald trump #politics and government #trumpism #republican politics #donald trump #us politics

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anovel70 · 5 years

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Belated 2019 goals

This post is four months late, but most of the stuff on here reflects my thoughts from the beginning of the year. I’ll make an updated post later on, now that I’m done with my exam.

So this year, I plan on having a bad year based on my previous post. And it already has been. I've seen a dead deer on the road for 2 days (first day was on 12/31/2018), which should have been a warning. Then, I dislocated my shoulder on 1/6/2019, which was painful. I didn't even plan any of this, and it wasn't a self fulfilling prophecy. It just happened.

This year, I only have three major goals. I've narrowed down the list of things I want to do this year.

work - do good at my job, actuary, investment, do my own taxes and loans, organize my life

social - making friends, find a girl, exercise, looking clean

entertainment - Pokemon, TV, volleyball

Music is no longer important. It's something to do whenever I get bored and want to do it.

Organization falls under work now. By having less major categories, I can be more focused on what really matters: a girl. But first, I like talking about actuaries, so I’m going to explain that first.

For my actuary, I want to pass both MAS I and II this year and Exam 5 next year. For now, I'll focus on MAS I by completing one section of my study guide per week. In each chapter per section, I plan on doing the first 10 study questions, with some leeway to do a little more if there are only 15 questions or less in a chapter. The exam is in April, so I'm constantly running out of time. However, this goal is made easier because I end my gym membership in March, and I won't be playing volleyball much because of my broken arm.

In April, I'll start doing a lot of practice problems. There is a free two day subscription for a full length exam, and a free full length exam available by my publisher. Also, the MAS I has been administered twice already, so I'm planning on doing those exams under exam conditions as well.That's a total of 3 practice exams, and whatever I can get done with the two day subscription. I plan on doing that over the weekend, so I should be able to fit in 4 full length exams, or 3 full length exams plus focused questions on topics I'm not familiar with. Overall, I only spent $90 on study materials, and $450 for the exam.

Then in May, I'll shift my focus to MAS II. I might actually have to buy a printed copy of the study manual, since there are very limited resources for this exam. That may change after the second exam sitting. Its a new exam, and the first sitting was last October. They have exams every six months, with the second sitting in April. For me, the MAS II Exam is in October, which gives me 6 months to study after a break in April after my exam. Then, I'll get started on Exam 5 in November, which is another break. For Exam 5, I definitely want to buy a book because its a gateway exam to all further exams. It'll be the only exam I do in 2020, but it'll be very meaningful.

As for my engineering exam, the earliest I can the the exam is probably October 2021, but I'll have to check if my fired job will help me get one year off my four year requirement. Also, I started this job in December, which means I'll take it two months before I get my required experience. The latest I will take the exam is April 2023. I'll make the phone call to NYS in 2021. It doesn't have to be so soon.

With Runescape, I'm bored of it. The company isn't running well and it just doesn't feel good playing it anymore. I'm sick of the grind, now that I've gotten all 99s. Also, I don't have a good computer that can play it. It's sad to see it go, but I have better things to focus on. Maybe I’ll return in 2020. I’ll do a little bit of Ironman, but I can’t say I have plans and goals for this year.

With Pokemon, I have a monthly plan. I hope to In January, I will claim all my Zeraora codes. Also, I will transfer all my Pokemon from Black to my Bank. In February, I will get Pokemon X from the library and play through it and collect legendaries. In March, I will play through Omega Ruby. In April, I'll be studying hard for my actuary exam, so I'll only try out some RNG on Pokemon Black on some outstanding Pokemon, like those in my entralink, wondercards, and a Ditto. Then in May, I will borrow White from the library, transfer all my Pokemon over to it, then restart Black, then transfer everything back. In June, I will go back to the 7th generation and play through Pokemon Sun from the library. In July, I will focus on Alpha Sapphire. In August, I will do Y. In September, I will complete Ultra Moon again. I have another actuary exam in October, so I'll just do some RNG on my Platinum game Wondercards. In November I'll get a 3ds flashcart and play through Ultra Moon again. In December, I'll get a Gameboy flashcart to transfer some mythical Pokemon.

When borrowing my games, I need to remember the key things: collect all legendaries, form differences, and hidden abilities. Also, since I need to buy Pokemon Bank every year, I'll have to focus on getting the Pokemon I want in Ultra Moon, because I don't plan on renewing. As for the Cosmog, I need to evolve it to Solgaleo in Sun rather than Lunala. I should have a total of 3 Solgaleos at the end of this mess. I need at least 3 of every legendary Pokemon, with an emphasis on those I cannot get in Ultra Moon. Raikou, Ho-oh, Latios, Groudon, Dialga, Heatran, Tornadus, Reshiram, and Xerneas are the main ones. I can get Kartana and Buzzwole in the Sun copy from the library and a Timid Blacephalon by an easy trade on the forums.

So currently, my tasks are to go to work, do actuary stuff, and play Pokemon.

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techcrunchappcom · 4 years

Photo

New Post has been published on http://techcrunchapp.com/why-tom-izzo-and-michigan-state-basketball-might-get-emoni-bates-for-two-years-detroit-free-press/

Why Tom Izzo and Michigan State basketball might get Emoni Bates for two years - Detroit Free Press

Emoni Bates scores 63 points and grabs 21 rebounds in Ypsilanti Lincoln’s double-overtime 108-102 win over Chelsea on Tuesday, Feb. 18, 2020.

Detroit Free Press

Ten years ago, Tom Izzo waited to hear from LeBron James.

The call never came.

Izzo turned down a chance to jump to the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers and instead remained at Michigan State. Less than a month later, James announced on ESPN he would be taking his talents to Miami.

It turned out to be the right move for Izzo.

[ 25 years of ‘Mr. March’: Preorder our updated Tom Izzo book today! ]

And on Monday, he finally landed his generational talent in Emoni Bates.

Emoni Bates committed to Michigan State on ESPN’s SportsCenter show Monday. (Photo: ESPN)

Now, he must wait to see when – and if – that union can happen. And if it does, there is a chance Izzo could have the budding superstar for two years, and not one.

Bates’ stunning midday announcement to commit to MSU could eventually be “The Decision” for the Spartans. In two years at Ypsilanti Lincoln, the athletic 6-foot-9 forward has become one of the most heralded high school prospects in the country, perhaps since James skipped college for the NBA nearly two decades ago.

“I’m not sure what the future may hold,” Bates said as he and family members hoisted Spartan hats to their heads, “but as I do know right now, I will be committing to Michigan State University.”

[ Want more MSU news? Download our free mobile app on iPhone and Android! ]

Road ahead

Bates is Izzo’s first commitment for the 2022 class. But a lot can transpire between now and then that will weigh on his decision to head to MSU or go elsewhere.

He could even stick around East Lansing for two years.

Ypsilanti Lincoln’s Emoni Bates drives against Ann Arbor Huron during the first half at EMU’s Convocation Center in Ypsilanti, Tuesday, March 3, 2020. (Photo: Junfu Han, Detroit Free Press)

• The most interesting possibility is Bates could reclassify and forego his senior season in high school to enter college a year early, and join guard Pierre Brooks II as part of the Spartans’ 2021 class. Both Bates and his father, Elgin, told ESPN’s Jeff Borzello they have not made any decision; however, Sports Illustrated’s Michael Rosenberg reported Monday that Bates will indeed reclassify. “After this year it will tell me everything I need to know,” Bates told ESPN. “I can’t decide on that right now. After this year, if it’s too easy, I might – but if not, I’m probably going to play another year.”

His father, who is creating his own prep school, Ypsilanti Prep Aim High, told ESPN: “By the end of his junior year, he will be in position to graduate. We don’t know yet. It’s up to him, it’s a day-by-day thing for him. It might be a decision he decides to make later on.”

[ Windsor: Emoni Bates is a monumental win for MSU, even if he never plays ]

• Bates’ birthday makes any decision to reclassify more about going to college early, not about turning pro.

Experts believed as recently as last year the league would lower its age limit for the draft from 19 to 18 (currently a player must turn 19 during the draft’s calendar year and be one year removed from high school). It has been a hot topic in college and the NBA for the latter part of the 2010s, and many felt Bates would become the first beneficiary of a potential rules change after he turns 18 in 2022.

However, talks about eliminating the “one-and-done” rule went from seemingly a done deal in early 2019 to an impasse during ongoing labor negotiations this winter. ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski in April reported the rules change may not be on the table until 2025 at the earliest now as part of the next collective bargaining agreement.

Bates was born Jan. 28, 2004, meaning he cannot enter the NBA draft until 2023 after he turns 19. Even if he reclassifies, he would not be eligible for the 2022 draft, which could allow him to stay at MSU for two seasons.

Ypsilanti Lincoln’s Emoni Bates (21) walks off the court after the Railsplitters won 72-56 over Howell at MHSAA Division 1 semifinal at the Breslin Center in East Lansing, Friday, March 15, 2019. (Photo: Junfu Han, Detroit Free Press)

• Bates also would not meet the G League’s minimum age requirement of 18 for the 2021-22 season, and would not be eligible for the NBA’s development system draft until the 2022-23 season.

He could opt to not reclassify, play his final two years of high school at his father’s newly created Ypsilanti Prep Academy and then enter the G League. Or Bates could reclassify, play one year at MSU and then test the G League. The G League recently began pulling some high-end players away from colleges – including No. 1 2020 prospect Jalen Greens and former Michigan commit Isaiah Todd – with a boost of $500,000 salaries.

However, Bates told ESPN he would prefer to play college basketball.

“It’s good for certain players. That’s a lot of money,” he said. “I don’t really plan on, I don’t think I’ll do it. It’s good for some people, but I don’t think I’ll head that route.”

• Discussions are urgent and ongoing across the country within the NCAA, state and federal legislatures about athletes being able to financially capitalize on their names, images and likenesses. And a megahyped star on the rise like Bates would be a major test case of a college athlete’s peak value for endorsements.

In May, the Michigan House of Representatives with a 94-13 vote approved a bipartisan plan to allow college athletes to earn compensation on their likeness. Many of those guidelines would take effect before the end of 2022 if the state Senate approves the bill, which would give Bates a chance to financially capitalize on his status as one of the game’s best prospects.

Those laws and rules also could be expedited as a growing number of states are enacting legislation that allow athletes to begin to exert their name, image and likeness rights as soon as next summer.

• Bates could follow the overseas route LaMelo Ball and a handful of other top prospects have taken until becoming eligible for the draft, and earn a sizeable paycheck. It would not expedite Bates’ path to the NBA because of his birthday.

And that also seems like the least likely option given Bates’ strong feelings for Izzo and MSU’s coaching staff.

“I want to say thanks to coach Iz and (assistant coach Mike Garland) for staying with me since I was younger and being there through the process,” Bates said on ESPN. “They’ve been showing love to me since I was in seventh grade, they’ve been recruiting me hard since then. I just know they’re showing that their love is genuine, and they’ve just been there for a long time.

“I’m big on loyalty, and they showed me all the loyalty.”

Coup for two?

Tom Izzo and wife Lupe, right, celebrate Michigan State’s 68-67 win over Duke in the NCAA East Region Final, Sunday, March 31, 2019 at Capital One Arena in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Kirthmon F. Dozier, Detroit Free Press)

Izzo could be rewarded for that persistence – potentially for two years — if Bates doesn’t turn pro.

MSU’s coaches cannot talk about recruits until they sign a letter of intent. But there is no need to when that player is the consensus No. 1 in his class and considered among the best prospects this century.

Bates’ announcement is as big as when Magic Johnson said after winning the 1977 state championship as a senior at Lansing Everett that, “Next year, I will be attending Michigan State University.” That announcement gave Izzo’s mentor, Jud Heathcote, the key piece for the Spartans’ first national championship in 1979, and Johnson left for the NBA after his second season at MSU.

Izzo has had his share of big-time recruits, with Mateen Cleaves’ decision in 1996 the building block for the Spartans’ 2000 national championship. In recent years, Miles Bridges in 2016 and Jaren Jackson Jr. a year later became the Hall of Fame coach’s highest-rated recruits, along with Kelvin Torbert in 2001.

But none compare to Bates, who has been touted as the nation’s best in his age group – and then some – since he was throwing down dunks as a lanky seventh grader.

High school basketball star Emoni Bates looks on during the second half of the Michigan State vs. Maryland game on Saturday, Feb. 15, 2020, at the Breslin Center in East Lansing. (Photo: Nick King/Lansing State Journal)

One of his earliest suitors was Izzo, who spent any chance he could driving to see Lincoln play the past two years. Bates was a frequent visitor to MSU and befriended a number of the Spartans, and Izzo reportedly was the only college coach to contact him at midnight on June 15 – the first moment he could talk to players who finished their sophomore season.

And those years and that late-night phone call paid off at 1:48 p.m. Monday, when Bates beamed as he put on the white hat with the green Spartan logo.

This was not Chris Webber or Jabari Parker, the two players who got away from Izzo that still he regrets. Forget about LeBron, who he admittedly would have loved to coach.

Bates could be Izzo’s Magic and help win him a second national title in the twilight of his coaching career. And maybe, like Magic, he’ll even have two years to do it.

That’s if Izzo’s biggest dream becomes a reality.

Contact Chris Solari: [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @chrissolari. Read more on the Michigan State Spartans and sign up for our Spartans newsletter.

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bountyofbeads · 4 years

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The Trump admin is seeking to delay a Democratic effort to require the Secret Service to disclose how much it spends protecting Trump and his family when they travel — until **after** the 2020 election, WaPo reports.

Mnuchin seeks delay of proposed disclosure of Secret Service spending on presidential travel until after election

By Carol D. Leonnig and David A. Fahrenthold | Published January 08 at 4:46 PM EST | Washington Post | Posted January 08, 2020 |

The Trump administration is seeking to delay a Democratic effort to require the Secret Service to disclose how much it spends protecting President Trump and his family when they travel — until after the 2020 election, according to people familiar with the discussions.

The issue has emerged as a sticking point in recent weeks as Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and key senators have been negotiating draft legislation to move the Secret Service back to his department, its historic home.

Mnuchin has balked at Democratic demands that the bill require the Secret Service to disclose the costs related to the travel of the president and his adult children within 120 days after it is passed, according to people with knowledge of the talks. Mnuchin has agreed to Democrats’ push for a requirement that the Secret Service report its travel expenses but wants such disclosures to begin after the election.

In a statement, the Treasury Department confirmed that Mnuchin has been working with Secret Service Director James Murray and congressional committees on a bill to transfer the Secret Service from the Department of Homeland Security to Treasury, but did not address the dispute about the reporting requirement.

“Conversations about the return of the Secret Service to the Treasury Department are ongoing, and we decline to comment on individual aspects of those conversations,” said a Treasury official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing negotiations.

The administration’s resistance to disclosing how much taxpayer money has been spent on presidential travel has drawn criticism from Democrats, who say the public has a right to know the price of his frequent visits to his resorts in Florida and New Jersey.

During the 2016 campaign, Trump promised to “rarely leave the White House” and cut back on what he called wasteful travel by his predecessor, Barack Obama.

Since taking office, however, Trump has made more than 50 visits to his properties outside the Washington area, according to a tally kept by The Washington Post.

The government spent about $96 million on travel by Obama over eight years, according to documents obtained by the conservative group Judicial Watch. A report by the Government Accountability Office, which serves as the congressional watchdog on federal spending, estimated that Trump’s travel cost $13.6 million in just one month in early 2017. That total included the costs of travel for Secret Service and Defense Department personnel, and the costs of renting space and operating equipment such as boats and planes. If spending continued at that pace, Trump would have exceeded Obama’s total expenses before the end of his first year in office.

The extensive international business travel and vacations of his grown children, with Secret Service agents in tow, as well as the expense the Secret Service incurs to secure numerous Trump properties, have added to the agency’s financial strain, according to its budget requests.

Since their father was elected, Trump’s sons Eric and Donald Jr. have made business trips to overseas locales including Ireland, Scotland, Dubai, Uruguay and India. In 2017, Eric Trump’s visit to a Trump building under construction in Uruguay cost taxpayers $97,000.

But exactly how much the frequent travel of Trump and his family has cost taxpayers is unknown.

A 1976 law allows the president to designate one primary residence outside the White House for the Secret Service to protect full-time. It also requires the agency to report to Congress semiannually the costs of securing that property. The measure did not anticipate a chief executive who regularly visited that one property, as well as multiple others.

The Secret Service has failed or been late in recent years to provide even those limited cost reports. The agency did not file such reports in 2016 or 2017, according to the GAO. It has delayed submitting subsequent reports, filing a recent report in November that was due in March.

Agency officials have cited staff changes as the reason for its failure to submit two years of reports.

The Secret Service did not respond to a question about its required reports. A spokesperson declined to answer questions about its spending on presidential travel, saying the agency does not discuss “protective means and methods.”

The White House has also declined to share information with the GAO about how much it spends to coordinate Trump’s travel. In March 2017, the office sought to tally the cost of Trump’s frequent travel to Mar-a-Lago based on a question from Congress. But for two years, the White House Counsel’s Office failed to answer questions about the costs associated with coordinating travel for the president, according to a GAO report.

Last year, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and other Democratic lawmakers saw an opportunity to push for more transparency and strengthen the reporting law when Mnuchin began seeking bipartisan support for a bill to move the Secret Service, which the Treasury Department said would improve the agency’s ability to carry out its mission.

Originally created by Treasury in 1865 to help stop rampant counterfeiters, the agency was housed there until 2003, when it moved to the new Department of Homeland Security created in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“Secretary Mnuchin came to me last year with a proposal to move the Secret Service to the Treasury Department,” Feinstein said in a statement. “As part of that effort, I proposed that the cost of presidential travel be included for greater transparency, accountability and oversight associated with protection during travel of presidents and their families.”

Feinstein wants the Secret Service to make annual reports of its travel costs, but beginning a few months after Congress authorizes its transfer, according to people familiar with the talks.

But in a Dec. 23 letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Mnuchin said he was strongly opposed to that earlier reporting requirement. Instead, he is seeking an annual report that begins in fiscal year 2021, releasing information in December 2020 at the earliest.

His demand for the delay in reporting is likely to reduce Democratic support for the bill, according to people monitoring Mnuchin’s proposal.

The available records about Trump’s travel provide only snapshots of the costs to the public: The GAO, for instance, found that his first four trips to Mar-a-Lago in 2017 cost the Secret Service about $1.3 million each. (Other agencies also spent money on those trips, bringing the federal government’s total spending to $3.4 million per visit to Mar-a-Lago.)

Trump has made 22 more trips to Mar-a-Lago since then, according to a Post tally. If the Secret Service’s costs remained constant, that would mean more than $28 million in further spending by the Secret Service alone, and $75 million from the government in all — and just on a small fraction of Trump’s total travel.

Another snapshot came in March 2017, as the Secret Service was still adjusting to Trump’s large family and frequent golfing trips. The agency asked Congress to add $60 million to its budget just to handle Trump’s travel, according to internal agency documents reviewed by The Post.

The Secret Service has also disclosed how much it spends on golf carts, to protect Trump and escort him during his golfing outings. These carts — leased from third-party vendors, not Trump himself — have cost the government $588,000 since 2017, according to federal spending data posted online.

The Secret Service spent at least $250,000 at President Trump’s properties in just the first five months of his term, according to records of federal charge card expenditures released last year to a watchdog group, Property of the People. The documents were released two years after they had been requested, and only after the group sued. It is not clear whether some of this spending was also counted in the GAO report.

The records released by the Secret Service last year give very little detail — saying only the date of the purchase, the dollar amount and the kind of Trump property involved. They do not give the reasons for the purchases.

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